Return of the Crimson Guard

‘Hide, Oryan. That's your only hope. Now go.’

Visibly struggling with his commands, the old man bowed, arms crossed. The air sighed, shifting, and he was gone. For a moment Mallick thought he could detect a sharp spice scent in the air in the man's passing, but it drifted away before he could identify it. He raised the carafe to pour himself another glass but he found it empty, the blood-red wine pooled on the marble flagging; he threw the carafe aside. The fools! They weren't supposed to come here. What could they hope to — Mallick clasped his hands in front of his face as if praying. Of course! ‘Sennit. Sennit!’

A far door opened, the servant reappeared. ‘Yes, sir?’

‘Ready my carriage. I will travel to the Palace.’

‘Sir?’

‘The Palace, man! The Palace! We have important guests.’

Shimmer set her mailed feet on the stone wharf and paused to offer up a prayer of gratitude to any of the Gods who had had a hand in their deliverance from Mael's Shoals of the Forgotten. Gods! What a trial. Mael, you have made your point! A third of their force lost to thirst, exhaustion, sickness and those monstrous eels. And how long had it taken to bull their way through the maze of becalmed rotting vessels — some still manned by crews driven insane by their torment? Months? A year? Who knew? Time did not run parallel from Realm to Realm or even Warren to Warren. And that the least of the dangers of daring such short-cuts.

Yet against all odds they had returned. Once more the Guard faced its true opponent — the entity they had vowed to see negated. The Imperium. She waved Smoky to her. ‘Activity?’

The mage rubbed the crust of salt and blood from his lips. ‘Negligible,’ he croaked. ‘But he is here.’

He. The mage who overturned all the comparisons of numbers and strategies. Tayschrenn, their old nemesis. Shimmer adjusted the hang of her mail coat; damned loose, she'd lost a lot of weight. She drank a long pull from a skin of water scavenged from the merchantman they'd taken. ‘He's Cowl's worry. It's the Palace for us.’

‘Cowl might not be up to it.’

‘Then Skinner will be.’

Smoky picked at the salt-sores on his forehead, frowned in thought. ‘True.’

‘Blades form up!’ Shimmer called, and she started up the wharf. Greymane came to her side.

‘I'll take possession of some better vessels, and await your return, if you don't mind?’

Shimmer eyed the renegade. Ah! Ex-Malazan, of course. ‘Our return you say?’

The man's glacial-blue eyes shared the humour. ‘If necessary, of course.’

‘Very well. You have command.’

Greymane bowed, waved for a sergeant.

It had been over half a century since Shimmer had last seen Unta. It looked bigger, more prosperous, as befitted the adopted Imperial capital. Stone jetties and a curved sea-wall of fitted blocks now rose where wood and tossed rubbish once served. Many more towers punched high into the air over the sprawling streets, including those of the tallest, the Palace.

They formed into column at the mouth of a main thoroughfare leading to Reacher's Square and the government precincts beyond. She and Skinner led; he ordered the silver dragon banner unfurled. As they marched Shimmer watched the gazes of the citizens who jammed the storefronts and stalls lining the sides of the thoroughfare. She searched their faces hoping to see eager friendliness, even welcome, fearing that she would instead meet hostility and resentment. Yet what she found troubled her even more: open perplexity and confusion. Some even pointed and laughed. One woman called out to ask whether they'd come from Seven Cities. Had none of them any idea who they were? Smoky, at her side, muttered, ‘It's like the goddamned carnival's hit town and we're it.’

‘Perhaps we have outlived ourselves…’ And she felt dismay close even more tightly upon her, for the capital was a much larger city than she remembered. The populace lining the street numbered perhaps more than a hundred thousand and it seemed to her that, should they be roused, they could tear them limb from limb. ‘Cowl?’ she asked of Smoky.

‘Dancing with the Claws. Right now they're holding off. Seems they're curious too.’

Shimmer eyed the armoured back of Skinner who had strode ahead with the standard-bearer, Lazar. ‘As am I, Smoky. As am I.’

Guards bowed and opened every sealed door he met, locks clicked and yielded, and wards parted like thinnest cloth before his questings, until Cowl found himself before the final barrier between himself and the innermost sanctum of Tayschrenn's quarters. He reached out to the door then hesitated; why should he have been invited onward? Was it a trap? Yet his every sense told him the High Mage awaited within — he and none other. Alone. As it should be; he and Tay, duelling once again.

He pushed the door open with a blow that sent it banging from the wall. A bare empty room, lit by open windows, and at its centre wards carved into the very stone of the marble floor and filled with poured and hardened gold and silver filigree in concentric circles surrounding a bowed, cross-legged man, long scraggly hair fallen forward over his face.

‘Greetings, Tay.’

The seated figure did not raise his head. ‘You should not have come, Cowl,’ the man intoned in a rough voice. ‘Yet I knew you could not have stayed away.’

‘Getting all mystical in your old age, I see.’ Cowl walked the edge of the craven wards — these he could pass but they would send him to wherever it was Tayschrenn had taken himself off to, and all indications were it was a place he would not wish to be. While Cowl paced the circle Tayschrenn failed to respond, so, impatient with the man's theatrics — some things never change — Cowl said directly, ‘Will you stand aside?’

‘If you mean, shall I intervene? The answer is no, I shall not.’

Cowl did not bother keeping a smile of victory from his face. ‘Wise move, Tay. All alone now, you would fall to my knives.’

The head rose, greasy lank hair shifting to reveal a haggard strained face, eyes sunken, fevered. ‘Wise?’ the unnerving figure demanded. ‘Do you know the final attainment of absolute power, Cowl?’

‘The final what of what?’

‘Powerlessness, Cowl. Absolute power diffuses into powerlessness.’

Cowl stepped away from the warded figure. ‘Is this some kind of elaborate self-justification for cowardice?’

Tayschrenn continued as if Cowl hadn't spoken, ‘I have stretched myself further than I have ever dared before probing onward ahead into the possibilities of what might come. I have glimpsed things that both terrify and exult. Can you answer this puzzle, Cowl? How can both of these things be?’

Despite his dismissal of this Hermetic side of Warren manipulation, Cowl found himself responding by rote, ‘Because the future holds everything.’

‘Exactly, Cowl. I see that it is possible that you are in fact worthy of the title High Mage. And so, the question then follows, what course of action should I take in the present? Which steps might lead to all that which terrifies, which steps might lead to all that which exults? The answer is of course that I cannot know for certain. Thus I am held back from all choice. Total awareness, my friend, results in paralysis.’ The head sank once more, as if dismissing Cowl, indeed as if dismissing all physical reality.

Cowl relaxed, let his hands fall from the crossed baldrics and belts beneath his cloak. He had weapons invested and aspected that might just reach the man, but what he'd found here was no threat to anyone. It was now clear to him that the twisted Gnostic innards of theurgy had claimed the mind of the most promising mage of his generation.

He turned and left the chamber.

Once Cowl exited the room light shimmered next to the open door revealing a woman with short black hair in ash-hued tunic and trousers and carrying a long slim stave. This she planted with a sharp blow upon the marble flags. ‘He should never have been allowed to get this close.’