Deadhouse Gates

Ahead, the Weasel Clan's riders parted, covering their kin's wild charge straight into the clouds of dust.

Now the mayhem truly begins. For all the glory of Coltaine's charge, ahead lay the river. Wounded soldiers, refugees and Hood knew what else.

The historian snatched what he felt would be his last breath a moment before plunging into the sunlit dust.

His mare splashed water, yet barely slowed. The way before him stretched clear, a swirling, strangely choppy sweep of muddy water. Other riders were barely visible farther ahead, their horses at full gallop. Duiker could feel the unyielding, solid impact his mare's hooves made as they rode on. There was not four and a half feet of river beneath them, but half that. And the hooves struck stone, not mud. He did not understand.

Corporal List appeared alongside the historian, as well as a straggling squad of Crow horsewarriors. One of the Wickans grinned. 'Coltaine's road — his warriors fly like ghosts across the river!'

Various comments the night before returned to Duiker. Tumlit — that nobleman's observations. Reinforced wagons apparently overloaded with wounded. Stone cutters and Engineers. The wagons crossing first and taking most of the night to do so. The wounded were laid atop the stone blocks. The damned Engineers had built a road!

It still seemed impossible, yet the evidence was there beneath him as he rode. Poles had been raised to either side, strung with rope made from Tithansi hair to mark the edges. A little over ten feet wide — what was surrendered in width was made up for with the relative swiftness of crossing the more than four hundred paces to the other side. The ford's depth was no more than two and a third feet now, and had clearly proved manageable for both livestock and refugees.

The dust thinned ahead and the historian realized they were approaching the river's west side. The thunder of sorcery reached him. This battle's far from over. We've temporarily outrun one army, only to charge headlong into another. All this, just to get crushed between two rocks?

They reached the shallows and a moment later rode upslope twenty strides, emerging from the last drifting shrouds of dust.

Duiker shouted in alarm, he and his companions frantically sawing their reins. Directly in front of them was a squad of soldiers — Engineers — who had been running at full speed towards the ford's landing. The sappers now scattered with foul curses, ducking and dodging around the stumbling, skidding horses. One, a solid, mountainous man with a sun-burnished, smooth-shaven, flat face, flung his battered helm off, revealing a bald pate, and threw the iron skullcap at the nearest Wickan rider — missing the warrior's head by scant inches. 'Clear out, you flyblown piles of gizzards! We got work to do!'

'Yeah!' another growled, limping in circles after a hoof had landed full on a foot. 'Go fight or something! We got a plug to pull!'

Ignoring their demands, Duiker spun the mare around to face the ford. Whatever sorcery had held the dust over the water was now gone. The clouds had already drifted fifty paces downstream. And Coltaine's Road was a mass of armed, screaming peasants.

The second sapper who'd spoken now scrambled to a shallow pit overlooking the muddy landing.

'Hold off there, Cuttle!' the big man commanded, his eyes on the surging thousands — the lead elements now in the middle of the crossing. The man anchored his huge hands on his hips, glowering and seemingly unaware of the rapt attention his squad held on him, as well as that from Duiker, List and the half-dozen Wickan horsemen. 'Got to maximize,' the man rumbled. 'Bastard Wickans ain't the only ones who know about timing.'

The horde's vanguard, glittering with weapons, looking like the iron-fanged maw of a giant snake, was three-quarters across. The historian could make out individual faces, the expressions of fear and murderous intent that make up the faces of battle. A glance behind him showed rising columns of smoke and the flash of sorcery, concentrated on the right flank of the Seventh's defensive positions. The faint screeching Semk war cry drifted from that flank, a sound like claws scraping taut skin. A fierce melee was underway at the first earthworks.

'All right, Cuttle,' the big man drawled. 'Yank the hair.'

Duiker swung back to see the sapper in the pit raise both hands, gripping a long, black cord that trailed down into the water. Cuttle's dirt-smeared face twisted into a fierce grimace, his eyes squeezing shut. Then he pulled. The cord went slack.

Nothing happened.

The historian chanced to look the big man's way. He had a finger stuck in each ear, though his eyes remained open and fixed on the river. Realization struck Duiker even as List cried, 'Sir!'

The ground seemed to drop an inch under them. The water on the ford rose up, humped, blurred, the hump seeming to roll with lightning swiftness down the submerged road's length. The peasants on the river simply vanished. Then reappeared a heartbeat later — even as the concussion struck everyone on shore with a wind like a god's fist — in blossoms of red and pink and yellow, fragments of flesh and bone, limbs, hair, tufts of cloth, all lifting higher and higher as the water exploded up and out in a muddy, ghastly mist.

Duiker's mare backstepped, head tossing. The sound had been deafening. The world shivered on all sides. A Wickan rider had tumbled from his saddle and now writhed on the ground, hands held to his ears.

The river began to fall back, horridly churned with bodies and pieces of bodies, steam twisting away on sudden gusts of wind. The giant snake's head was gone. Obliterated. As was another third of its length — all who had been in the water were gone.

Though he now stood close by, the big man's words sounded faint and distant to Duiker's ringing ears as he said, 'Fifty-five cussers — what the Seventh's been hoarding for years. That ford's now a trench. Ha.' Then his satisfied expression drained away. 'Hood's toes, we're back to digging with shovels.'

A hand plucked the historian's sleeve. List leaned close and whispered, 'Where to now, sir?'

The historian looked downstream at the twisting eddies, red-stained and full of human flotsam. For a moment he could not comprehend the corporal's question. Where to? Nowhere that's good, no place where giving pause to slaughter will yield some' thing other than despair.

'Sir?'

'To the melee, Corporal. We see this through.'

The swift arrival of Coltaine and his Crow horsewarriors to strike at the west flank of the Tithansi lancers on this side of the river had turned the tide of battle. As they rode towards the engagement at the earthworks, Duiker and List could see the Tithansi crumbling, exposing the Semk footmen to the mounted Wickan bowmen. Arrows raked through the wild-haired Semk fighters.

At the centre stood the bulk of the Seventh's infantry, holding at bay the frenzied efforts of the Semk, while a hundred paces to the north, the Guran heavy infantry still waited to close with the hated Malazans. Their commander was evidently having second thoughts. Kamist Reloe and his army were trapped — for this battle at least — on the other side of the river. Apart from the battered rearguard marines and the Weasel Clan, Coltaine's force was relatively intact.

Five hundred paces farther west, out on a broad, stony plain, the Weasel Clan pursued remnants of Guran cavalry.

Duiker saw a knot of colour amidst the Seventh, gold and red — Baria Setral and his Red Blades, in the heart of the fighting. The Semk seemed eager to close on the Malazan lapdogs, and were paying in blood for their desire. Nonetheless, Setral's troop looked at no more than half strength — less than twenty men.

'I want to get closer,' Duiker announced.

'Yes, sir,' List said. He pointed. 'That rise there — it'll put us in bow range though, sir.'

'I'll take that risk.'

They rode towards the Seventh. The company standard stood solitary and dust-streaked on a low hill just behind the line. Three grey-haired veterans guarded it — Semk bodies strewn on the slope indicated that the hill had been hotly contested earlier in the day. The veterans had been in the fight, and all bore minor wounds.

As the historian and the corporal rode to their position, Duiker saw that the three men crouched around a fallen comrade. Tears had clawed crooked trails down their dusty cheeks. Arriving, the historian slowly dismounted.

'You've a story here, soldiers,' he said, pitching his voice low to reach through the clangour and shouts of the struggle thirty paces north of them.

One of the veterans glanced up, squinting. 'The old Emperor's historian, by Hood's grin! Saw you in Falar, or