Return of the Crimson Guard

She hissed a long breath through her clamped teeth. ‘Hurry, damn you. I'm losing my nerve.’

Possum darted forward. He hugged her to him, slipped his longest stiletto up through her abdominal cavity. She clung to him with that startled look they always get when cold iron pricks the heart.

‘At least you can stab straight,’ she gasped huskily into his ear.

Faces nearby turned to them. ‘The heat,’ Possum said. ‘Poor woman.’ They turned away. He brought his face close to hers. ‘Why?’

The woman's expression relaxed into a kind of wistfulness. ‘There he goes, they will say,’ she whispered. ‘He took Janelle, they will say… but you'll know. You'll know what you have always known,’ she took a shuddering wet breath, ‘… that you are nothing more than… a fraud.’

Possum lowered her to the ground, kneeling over her. Damn the bitch! This was not how things were supposed to go. He stepped away from the body, slipped behind bystanders, edged his way slowly to the opening of the street of Opals. As he went he relaxed his limbs, allowed himself to merge with the crowd streaming from the square. Behind him the meat that had been Janul was being chopped to pieces and those pieces thrown into a fire to be burned to ashes. Ashes that would then be tossed into Unta Bay.

He walked as just another of the crowd, jostled, head down. But all the while he wondered at the iron self- control it would take, when all that mattered was lost and there was nothing left, to somehow turn even one's death into a kind of victory. Could he manage the same when his time came? Denying one's killer everything; even the least satisfaction of a professional challenge. He couldn't imagine it. A fool might dismiss the act as despair but he saw it as defiance. And was the difference so fine as to reside in the eye of the beholder?

He recognized the calloused bare dirty feet walking along beside his and straightened from his musings.

Laseen too was quiet. Her hands were clasped behind her back. He imagined she too was thinking of the dead woman — dead compatriot — Possum corrected himself. And thinking of that, how far back together might the three of them have known each other? Something not to forget, he decided.

Glancing about, he noted the bodyguard now walking with them ahead and behind. A bodyguard selected by me since Pearl's disaster on Malaz took so many.

After a time Laseen nodded to herself as if ending an internal conversation. She cleared her throat. ‘I want you to personally look into a number of recent things that have been troubling me. Domestic disturbances. Reports of strengthened regional voices.’

‘And the disappearances in the Imperial Warren…?’ He'd heard much talk of this from the Claw ranks.

‘No. I'm sending no more into that Abyss.’

‘I believe it's haunted. We know almost nothing of it, truth be told.’

‘It's always been unreliable. It's these rumours from the provinces that trouble me. Is anyone behind all the troubles? Who? Put as many on it as it takes. I must know who it is.’

Possum gave a slight bow of the head. So, internal dissent. Rising graft and perhaps even feuding within the administrative ranks. An emboldened nationalist voice here. A large border raid there. Old tribal animosities rekindled. And the Imperial Warren becoming increasingly dangerous. Connected? By whom? She is worried. She is wondering. Could it be them? After so long? Was it now because she is alone?

Or, Possum considered with an internal sneer, could it simply be plain old boredom on their part?

He stopped because Laseen had slowed and halted. She glanced to him. ‘We once were friends you know,’ she said, almost reflective. ‘That is, I thought we understood each other…’ She looked away, the crow's feet at the corners of her eyes tight.

So why did she do it? Why did she betray you? Is that what you're wondering? Or, what did they know that you do not?

Laseen's jaw line hardened. ‘So. You brought her down. Very good. I didn't think-’

‘That I could?’

Laseen blinked. Her lips drew tight and thin. ‘That she would go so quietly.’

Possum shrugged. ‘I surprised her.’

Her gaze snapped to him, sidelong. Possum refused to acknowledge the attention. Let her imagine what she may. Had she not been his right hand? Was he now not hers? Let her wonder, and consider.

Without a word the Empress moved on. Possum followed.

Atop a wall of Reacher's Square a spiked skull laughed but no one heard.

Ereko and Traveller had left behind the mountains and descended south into the vast leagues of evergreen forest when they met the first brigands. Ereko was not surprised when these men treated with Traveller, for though they were robbers and cutthroats he knew they were still men all the same and so craved company and news of the outside world here in their isolated mountain retreats.

They wore rotting pelts, the remains of smoke-cured leather leggings and shirts, and a mishmash of looted armour fittings and weapons. Pickings, so they appeared to Ereko, were painfully thin here along this desolate pass. To his sensitive nose they stank worse than animals. Traveller crouched at their fire to exchange news.

Ereko kept to the rear, erect, arms crossed. Traveller had told him he loomed much more imposing in this manner. He watched the men eye him up and down impressed, he hoped, by his height — at least twice their squat malnourished measure. But he had walked long enough among humans to know their thoughts; in their shared sly looks he could see them considering that anyone, no matter what their astonishing size or kind, falls down if you put enough holes in them.

‘Late in the season to be coming down from Juorilan,’ said their chief. Grime and grease painted his face nearly black. His beard shone with oil and was shot through with grey. His long black hair was drawn up and tied with a leather thong at the top of his head. ‘Does the Council still claim Jasston, and deny passage to Damos Bay to all?’

‘That is so,’ allowed Traveller.

‘And this one here with you,’ the chieftain pointed the honed knife he played with in Ereko's direction. ‘I have met Thelomen. Even Toblakai. He is not of those. He is far too tall. What is he?’

Traveller glanced back over his shoulder. Ereko saw no humour in the man's dark-blue eyes even though he'd lately been complaining of human ignorance and bigotry. ‘Ask him yourself,’ he answered. ‘He can speak.’

‘Yes?’ The brigand chief raised his chin to Ereko. ‘Well? Who are your people?’

Though Traveller had his back turned, at that particular phrasing of the question Ereko saw him flinch beneath his layered shirts, armour and pelts. Ereko thanked him silently for that gesture of empathy.

‘Cousins. Those you name and I. We are something of cousins.’

The bandit chief grunted, placated. He cut a strip of flesh from a boar's thigh skewered over the fire's embers. ‘And the Malazans? What of them? The traders say they have been as quiet as stones all summer.’

‘That is so. Mare and the Korelans hold them pinned in Fist. There they rot.’

The bandit chief slapped his thigh. ‘Good!’

Ereko kept watch on the woods — was this man delaying while his rabble completed an encirclement? But no one moved through the sparse forest of scrawny spruce and short pine over naked granite. The bandit chief had stepped out to meet them with six men — two of whom appeared to be his own sons. They wanted to kill the both of them, Ereko could see that. How often the chief's eyes went to the slim sword strapped on Traveller's back. But Traveller's assured manner gave them pause. That, and Ereko's size and even taller spear.

‘I say good because we are all descended here by pure blood from the Crimson Guard. Know you that, friend?’

Traveller nodded.

The bandit chief's voice grew louder. He gestured to the woods around. ‘Yes. The Malazans are frightened to come here because the bones of Guardsmen protect these lands. I myself am a descendant of Hap the Elder, a sergeant under Lieutenant Striker. The bones of many Guardsmen litter these northern forests. And there is an ancient legend, you know. A prophecy. A promise that should the Malazans come again the Guardsmen will rise from the dead to destroy them. That is why they have never come back to our lands. They are afraid. We beat them once.’

‘That is true,’ said Traveller. ‘You beat them once.’

‘And you, friend? There are many black men among the Malazans and some among the Korelri as well. But you are no Korelri. You speak the Talian tongue well.’