Assail (Malazan Empire, #6)(16)

She scanned the water, dark and webbed beneath the chill stars and passing courses of clouds. Her hides, sodden from her thighs, pulled upon her, heavy and clinging. Then darker shapes came emerging from the trough and fall of the waves: ravaged skulls, broken caps of bone and cured leather; the jagged stone tips of spears; the humped shoulders of animal hides. T’lan Imass strode forward from the surf, some dozen or more.

‘They are of the Kerluhm,’ Pran Chole murmured tonelessly. He pushed into the waves.

Though she was dreading it, the news still made her clench her fists and press one to her breast. Gods, no! More of them. Will they not stop coming? Why not others?

Pran Chole raised a hand of bone and cured leathery skin. ‘Greetings, Kerluhm,’ he called. ‘I am Pran Chole of the Kron. We honour you.’

‘I am Othut K’ho,’ one answered. ‘We honour the Kron.’ A ragged cape of sewn animal skins hung from this one’s bare bone shoulders. He turned to Silverfox and lowered himself to one knee in the surf. The others of his band joined him. ‘Summoner,’ he murmured as softly as Pran. ‘We honour you as well.’

She raised a hand for pause. Now, she knew, she had to command when her every instinct urged her to plead. ‘My thanks, Othut. If you honour me I must ask you agree to forestall any action until I have explained fully.’

His battered mien wrinkled up even more as his mostly fleshless brow crinkled. ‘Explain?’ he breathed. His empty sockets edged to the north and he murmured, ‘We are newly reawakened to the world, true. We were caught crossing the Agadal and the ice took us. It seems we slept for ages. And while we slumbered, interned, that river of ice carried us far afield indeed. I awoke on the shore of an unknown sea and freed what companions I could find. Then we heard the Call …’

‘Listen to me, Othut,’ she interjected, speaking with all her power over the roar of the surf. ‘If you honour me you must follow my command. And I command an end to the war, Othut. It is over. No more hostilities. We gather here and I will release you all. Is this understood, Othut? Are you listening?’

The Kerluhm’s rotted head, its tannin-stained skull peeking from behind the mummified flesh, had edged aside to Pran, and it raised a bone-thin arm to point to the north. ‘Is what I sense true?’ it asked, and Silverfox heard the familiar stunned amazement in his words.

Pran answered in a slow firm nod. ‘It is so. And we of the Kron name them beyond the boundary of the Ritual.’

Silverfox stood frozen, fists clenched at her sides, fairly quivering in dread. Now would come the answer, she knew. The T’lan did not dissemble. Nor hide their intent. It would happen now.

‘We Kerluhm,’ Othet answered, his voice even more raw and jagged, ‘do not.’

‘No!’ she cried once more – as she always did – but to no effect. The waves boiled about her as Kron warriors surged through the surface and they and the Kerluhm locked blades that clashed and grated. Pran shifted to stand protectively before her, though never in all the battles played out here on these beaches did one Imass ever move to threaten her.

She fell to her knees, the water at her breast, her face in her hands. Failure! Utter wretched failure once more! The cold waves splashed over her. The surge of bodies fighting around her died away.

‘It is over,’ Pran Chole said unnecessarily. ‘They have fled. My warriors pursue.’

She raised her face. Her tears felt hot on her chilled wet cheeks. ‘Your numbers are diminishing, Pran. Some time soon too many will arrive and you will be overrun. What then?’ she yelled. ‘What then!’

‘You will not be harmed.’

She lunged to her feet. Her wet hides slapped about her, almost pulling her over. She threw up a hand as if to strike his stone-hard face. ‘I do not speak of myself!’ She jabbed a finger to the north. ‘I speak of them! Them! What will happen to all those thousands … so many. A crime beyond imagining, Pran! And you Imass the perpetrators. Mass murderers …’ The enormity of it made her dizzy and she could not continue.

‘Omtose Phellack remains active in the north. It protects them yet.

‘For how long!’ she threw back at him. ‘It is weakening. You know this! In the little time we’ve been here I have felt it weakening.’

To this Pran could only offer the wordless gesture of those who live long enough in the indifferent world: the subtle lift of the shoulders that says, who is to know?

* * *

Fisher Kel Tath found the Bone Peninsula much the same as when he’d left it so very long ago. Which is to say: insular, murderous, and savage. The pocket city-states still jostled and warred amongst themselves seeking supremacy. And each, in its turn, succeeded in grasping a taste of said supremacy only to be dragged down eventually by some new alliance of their neighbours, said alliance then flying apart in the inevitable betrayals and killings. And so it went. On and on. Endlessly repeating itself and none apparently learning a thing from it. Fisher was even more disheartened and disgusted than when he’d fled it all originally.

Yet he’d returned. Drawn not by the steep inlets and forested mountain slopes that so figured in his youth, but by hints from readings in the divinatory Dragons deck, by whispered rumours, and by plain gut instincts that told him that things were about to change here in the lands of Assail, so very ancient and clinging to the old ways of family, clan and blood-feud.