to pool over the layered untreated hides. The youth's eyes swelled huge. His breath was hot and panting against Ereko's hand. It felt to him that he held a trembling colt fresh from foaling. ‘The others?’ Ereko asked.
‘One got away.’ His eyes did not leave the youth. The sword point pressed down further, broke the surface of the leather.
‘No. I forbid it.’
‘He'll just come back. He and his friends will shadow us. Wait for their chance. For
‘No. This I will not allow. He is just a child. A child.’
Traveller's eyes flickered then. The fey spell of battle-fury broke, revealing something beneath, something that made Ereko look away, and the man lurched aside. ‘Get him from my sight.’
Ereko whispered, ‘Run now. Don't stop.’ The youth scrambled away, gulping down air, sobs rising in his breaths.
Traveller threw himself on to his bear-pelt cloak. Ereko lay holding himself silent and still as if some enchantment might shatter should he speak or move. In time, the man slept, his breath steadying. Ereko lay awake listening to the night and sensing the mood of this new land. Expectant, it seemed. He wondered whether pain such as he glimpsed in his companion's eyes could ever be healed. Perhaps never. As he should very well know.
Before the new moon he and Traveller topped a hillock to the view of a forested coast, tidal mudflats and the ocean stretching beyond to the western horizon. Some humans, Ereko knew, called this the Explorer's Sea, for so much of it remained to be discovered. Others named it the White Spires Ocean for the islands of floating ice that menaced its mariners. His own people, the Thel Akai, named it Gal-Eresh: The Ice Dancer. ‘What now?’ he asked of Traveller.
Crouched on his haunches, the man took a pine twig from his mouth and shrugged. ‘We follow the coast. Find a settlement.’
‘South, then? We go south?’
‘For now.’ And he started down the forested slope. Ereko followed, sighing his irritation. Oh, Goddess, why did you speak to me of this most difficult of men? Why did you break your silence of centuries to say to me when he appeared dragged out in chains on to the Stormwall:
By that time Ereko had long lost count of his seasons upon the Stormwall. The Korelan winters had come and gone one after the other. The storms unique to the Riders had gathered their ferocity in ice-rafted waves and nimbuses of power that flickered in the night sky as auroras. He came to know that slow stirring of potential just as well as the change of season. The winds would always swing to a steady hard south, south-west pressure that chilled even his bones and left an overnight frost glittering in the morning light on the stone battlements. Snow- flurries blasted the wall during the worst of the storms — and the Riders themselves were never far behind any snow.
Malazan soldiers had been appearing on the wall for some years by then. They came in chains, captured prisoners of war. Their Korelan guards threw them weapons only just before the waves of Riders hit. They acquitted themselves well. The bravest and most cunning turned those weapons upon themselves thereby leaving a portion of the wall unmanned until a replacement could be brought up. Few cowered or wept when the Riders finally appeared cresting waves of ice-skeined ocean to assault the wall, as even some trained Chosen have from time to time. For who could possibly prepare themselves for such a sight as that? A collision of Realms, should certain theurgical scholars be believed. The power-charged impact of alien eldritch sorcery countered purely by brute stubbornness, courage and martial ferocity.
‘Who is that?’ he had asked of his Korelan guards. They answered easily enough as he had stood the wall for longer than some of them had been alive.
‘They say he's a Malazan deserter,’ the guards explained. ‘Caught on a ship trying to run the blockade. The Mare marines say he fought like a tiger so they set fire to the ship beneath him and pushed off. They say he saw reason then. Jumped ship and swam to them. They handed him over to us to stand the wall.’
He watched them drag the man to an empty slot a few hundred yards down the curving curtain wall. The Korelan guards fixed his ankle fetters to the corroded iron rings set into the granite flagging then freed his arms. Ereko studied his own lengths of ankle chain and listened once again for the Enchantress's soft voice. But she was silent. No further guidance would be his.
He resolved to act as soon as a quiet night presented itself. But such a night never came and within weeks the first of the Riders’ storms were upon them and thousands of Korelan soldiery jammed the wall.
They followed the forest's edge south. In the evenings they clambered down to the sand and rock shore to collect shellfish. The first sign of human settlement they met was the fire-blackened and overgrown remains of a fort: a choked trench faced by burned ragged stumps of logs surrounding an open court. The court held a burnt barracks longhouse and the beginnings of a stone and mortar central keep abandoned, or sacked, in mid- construction. They slept wrapped in their pelts in the dry, grass-gnarled court. The fire cast a faint glow upon the vine-shrouded stones of the keep's curving wall.
‘They were here,’ Traveller announced while leaning back on his pelts, his dark brooding gaze on the ruined tower.
Ereko peered up from his share of the fish they'd found trapped in a tide-pool. ‘Who? Who was here?’
The Crimson Guard. Like the old bandit said. This was their work.’
‘When?’
‘More than half a century ago.’
‘You knew them?’
Across the fire the eyes swung to Ereko and he felt a chill such as no human had ever instilled within him. How was it that this man's gaze carried the weight and aching depth of the ancients? Was he deciding just now whether to kill me for my curiosity? Such desolation there within; the gaze reminded him of doomed Togg whom he met once in another forested land — or the beast some call Fanderay — whom he saw last so long ago.
The eyes dropped. ‘Yes. I knew them. This could be Pine Fort, their northernmost outpost on this coast of Stratem. The next settlement would be North Citadel, but that is far to the south and my information is long out of date. I'm hoping to come to a settlement before that.’
‘What happened to them?’
‘You really do not know the story?’
‘Only what the Korelans spoke of. Something about a war in Talian lands to the north.’
‘Yes. A decades-long war. A war of conquest waged by Kellanved across the entire continent. And everywhere his armies marched they found ranks of the Guard opposing them. From Kan to Tali, even out upon the Seti plains, mercenary companies of the Crimson Guard unfurled their silver dragon banner against the sceptre of the invading Malazan armies.
‘Eventually, after decades, the last of their ancestral holds, the D'Avore family fastness in the Fenn Mountains, fell. The Citadel, it was called. Kellanved brought it down with an earthquake. He killed thousands of his own men.’
Traveller fell silent at that, staring into the fire. For some unknown reason he had now opened up and was talking more than all the months they had been together. Ereko waited a time then prompted quietly, ‘I have heard much talk of this emperor. Why did he not use his feared Imass warriors upon the Guard?’
So intent was Traveller upon the fire — reliving old memories? — Ereko believed the man would not answer yet he spoke without stirring. ‘Have you heard of K'azz's vow?’
‘I heard he swore to oppose the Malazans.’
‘That and more. Much more. Eternal opposition enduring until the Empire should fall. It bound them together, those six hundred men and women. Bound them with ties greater than even they suspected, I think. Kellanved ordered the Imass to crush them but the Imass refused.’
This news surprised Ereko. ‘Why should they do that?’ Few things walking the face of the world in this young age terrified him and this army of the undying was one.
‘None know for certain. But I had heard…’ His voice trailed into a thoughtful silence.
‘Yes? What?’
The man scowled, perhaps thinking he had revealed enough. He broke a twig into sections that he then threw upon the embers. ‘I heard that the Imass said only that it would be wrong for them to oppose such a vow. Yet I am
