Assail (Malazan Empire, #6)(155)

Two Imass broke ranks to jog onward down the hillside. Silverfox turned an eye on Pran Chole. ‘What is this?’

The mummified mask that was the Bonecaster’s face remained immobile as ever. He extended a stick-thin arm, no more than bone sheathed in leather, towards the camp. ‘You have need of a horse.’

Silverfox thought about that, then tilted her head. Yes, she supposed she did.





CHAPTER XI



THE PRAIRIE WAS one of tall grasses whipped by a chill wind. Tall menhirs leaned drunkenly like a giant’s set of toys tossed and forgotten across the landscape. Why Shimmer found herself here, she had no idea. The sky was clear, a hard frosty blue, with the moon low in the south. Strangely, the moon looked different: larger, and far less mottled. Another bright object also blazed in the day’s sky, something that trailed a long train of fire behind, just as the Visitor had. To the north – if indeed that direction was the north – lay a horizon to horizon wall of snow and deeper azure blue glowing ghostly in the moonlight.

She wondered if this was Hood’s demesne, his Paths, where the dead wander eternally, forever wringing their hands as they bemoan past choices, mistakes and lost opportunities.

As if on cue, a figure rounded one of the nearby markers and approached. He was grey-haired and bearded, in long tattered brown robes that bore scorch marks and a scattering of burn holes across the weave. She recognized Smoky. One of the Crimson Guard dead. What they called their Brethren.

It occurred to her at that moment that in fact the Brethren constituted by far the majority of the Crimson Guard. The chained spirits of their dead, held to the mortal realm by the power of the Vow they swore to K’azz. The Guard, then, could in truth more accurately be regarded as an army of the dead.

Smoky gave her a nod in greeting. ‘Shimmer.’

‘Where are we?’

The mage scratched his chin beneath his scraggly beard. ‘We don’t rightly know. Most of us think it’s the spot we swore the Vow – only how it looked long ago.’ He shrugged. ‘No one knows for certain.’

‘You’re remarkably unconcerned about it all.’

‘I’m dead, ain’t I?’

‘Why am I here?’

He regarded her more closely. ‘Looks to me like you’re making up your mind.’

‘Making up my mind? About what?’

‘About where you belong.’

‘Making up my mind? You mean, about whether I’m dead or not?’

‘Something like that.’

She snorted her impatience. ‘Well … I want to return, of course.’

He shrugged his bony shoulders once more. ‘Yeah. Figured as much. Off you go then.’

‘What? Just like that?’

The old fellow looked annoyed. ‘What do you want? A band to play?’

‘But isn’t this … Hood’s realm?’

He shook his head. ‘No. These are not Hood’s Paths.’

‘So what do I do?’

He waved her off. ‘Just – decide.’

‘Right.’ She decided, then, that she did not belong here. At that moment another figure rounded the rock to regard her from a distance. She immediately recognized his rotund form. His sodden robes. He raised an arm in sad farewell.

She lurched forward, ‘Petal! No …’

But the ground slipped from beneath her feet, her vision dimmed, and she found herself spinning in a way she had no words for. She was suddenly certain she was going to be sick.

She coughed, nearly vomiting, and sucked in a great chestful of cold crisp air.

A man yelped in surprise directly above her and she snapped her eyes open. She was lying on some sort of cot, naked, her arms tied above her head, while a man, similarly naked, sat between her spread legs.

‘Hey, Rosell,’ the fellow called. ‘She ain’t dead after all. Like you said.’

‘Told ya,’ a voice answered from outside her vision.

This fellow leaned over her and slapped her cheek – none too gently. ‘Just warming you up, sweetheart. You’re so cold in there you near shrank my cock.’ He grinned down at her with broken grey teeth. ‘Welcome to Destruction Bay.’

Her answer was to hitch up her legs round his neck, twist her hips, and spin him over the side of the cot to slam his head into the dirt floor with a satisfying snap of his neck. She then brought her legs up over her head and pushed against the wood headboard she was tied to. The board burst. She rose from the frame in time to block a knife-thrust from Rosell, wrap the cord strung between her wrists around his throat, and set her knee against the back of his neck. She pushed there until she began to see black spots in her vision, then she let him fall, limp, and stumbled to her own knees, utterly spent.

After catching her breath, she used the knife to cut the cord. She scavenged trousers, a shirt, and oversized leather shoes from what she could find among the meagre possessions scattered about. She then staggered from the hut’s entrance, a mere hanging rotten blanket, and stepped out with the knife tucked up her sleeve.

She was on a broad mud flat, perhaps a raised floodplain. A clutch of dilapidated huts and shacks lay about. White smoke rose from a few smoke-holes. Great chunks of flat ice dotted a shore of black gravel. She lurched down to the shore. To the south rose the tall ice cliffs of the channel they had just navigated – or failed to navigate. She studied it and was dismayed to see that she was on the south shore. The wrong shore.