'Well, it's been a rather long list of complaints from you of late, Scillara.'
'No, it's been a short list. I just like repeating myself.'
She watched him sigh, then he shrugged and said, 'We're maybe a week from the coast. I'm beginning to wonder if it was a good thing to take this overland route… through completely unpopulated areas. We're always rationing our food and we're all suffering from that, excepting maybe you and Greyfrog. And we're growing increasingly paranoid, fleeing from every dust-trail and journey-house.' He shook his head. '
Nothing's after us. We're not being hunted. Nobody gives a damn what we're up to or where we're going.'
'What if you're wrong?' Scillara asked. She looped the reins over the saddle horn and began repacking her pipe. His horse misstepped, momentarily jolting her. She winced. 'Some advice for you, Cutter. If you ever get pregnant, don't ride a horse.'
'I'll try to remember that,' he said. 'Anyway, you're right. I might be wrong. But I don't think I am. It's not like we've set a torrid pace, so if hunters were after us, they'd have caught up long ago.'
She had an obvious reply to that, but let it go. 'Have you been looking around, Cutter? As we've travelled? All these weeks in this seeming wasteland?'
'Only as much as I need to, why?'
'Heboric's chosen this path, but it's not by accident. Sure, it's a wasteland now, but it wasn't always one. I've started noticing things, and not just the obvious ones like that ruined city we passed near.
We've been on old roads – loads that were once bigger, level, often raised. Roads from a civilization that's all gone now. And look at that stretch of ground over there,' she pointed southward. 'See the ripples? That's furrowing, old, almost worn away, but when the light lengthens you can start to make it out. It was all once tilled.
Fertile. I've been seeing this for weeks, Cutter. Heboric's track is taking us through the bones of a dead age. Why?'
'Why don't you ask him?'
'I don't want to.'
'Well, since he's right behind us, he's probably listening right now, Scillara.'
'I don't care. I was asking you.'
'Well, I don't know why.'
'I do,' she said.
'Oh. All right, then, why?'
'Heboric likes his nightmares. That's why.'
Cutter met her eyes, then the Daru twisted in his saddle and looked back at Heboric.
Who said nothing.
'Death and dying,' Scillara continued. 'The way we suck the land dry.
The way we squeeze all colour from every scene, even when that scene shows us paradise. And what we do to the land, we also do to each other. We cut each other down. Even Sha'ik's camp had its tiers, its hierarchy, keeping people in their place.'
'You don't have to tell me about that,' Cutter said. 'I lived under something similar, in Darujhistan.'
'I wasn't finished. It's why Bidithal found followers for his cult.
What gave it its strength was the injustice, the unfairness, and the way bastards always seemed to win. You see, Bidithal had been one of those bastards, once. Luxuriating in his power – then the Malazans arrived, and they tore it all apart, and Bidithal found himself on the run, just one more hare fleeing the wolves. For him, well, he wanted it back, all that power, and this new cult he created was for that purpose. The problem was, either he was lucky or a genius, because the idea behind his cult – not the vicious rituals he imposed, but the idea – it struck a nerve. It reached the dispossessed, and that was its brilliance-'
'It wasn't his idea,' Heboric said behind them.
'Then whose was it?' Cutter asked.
'It belongs to the Crippled God. The Chained One. A broken creature, betrayed, wounded, imperfect in the way of street beggars, abandoned urchins, the physically and the morally damaged. And the promise of something better, beyond death itself – the very paradise Scillara spoke of, but one we could not deface. In other words, the dream of a place immune to our natural excesses, to our own depravity, and accordingly, to exist within it is to divest oneself of all those excesses, all those depravities. You just have to die first.'
'Do you feel fear, Heboric?' Scillara asked. 'You describe a very seductive faith.'
'Yes, to both. If, however, its heart is in fact a lie, then we must make the truth a weapon, a weapon that, in the end, must reach for the Crippled God himself. To shy from that final act would be to leave unchallenged the greatest injustice of all, the most profound unfairness, and the deepest betrayal imaginable.'
'If it's a lie,' Scillara said. 'Is it? How do you know?'
'Woman, if absolution is free, then all that we do here and now is meaningless.'
'Well, maybe it is.'
'Then it would not even be a question of justifying anything – justification itself would be irrelevant. You invite anarchy – you invite chaos itself.'
She shook her head. 'No, because there's one force more powerful than all of that.'
'Oh?' Cutter asked. 'What?'
Scillara laughed. 'What I was talking about earlier.' She gestured once more at the ancient signs of tillage. 'Look around, Cutter, look around.'
Iskaral Pust plucked at the thick strands of web covering Mappo Runt's massive chest. 'Get rid of this! Before he wakes up, you damned hag.
You and your damned moon – look, it's going to rain. This is a desert – what's it doing raining? It's all your fault.' He glanced up, smiling evilly. 'She suspects nothing, the miserable cow. Oh I can't wait.' Straightening, he scurried back to the long bamboo stick he'd found – bamboo, for god's sake – and resumed drilling the tiny fixing holes in the base.
Twisted wire eyelets, bound at intervals with wet gut right up to the finely tapered end. A carved and polished wooden spool and half a league's worth of Mogora hair, spun together and felted or something similar, strong enough to reel in anything, including a miserable cow flopping about in the shallows. True, he'd have to wait a year or two, until the little wriggling ones grew to a decent size. Maybe he'd add a few bigger ones – there were those giant catfish he'd seen in that flooded realm, the one with all the monsters padding the shorelines.
Iskaral Pust shivered at the recollection, but a true lover of fishing would understand the lengths an aficionado would go to in the hunt for worthy spawn. Even the extreme necessity of killing demons and such.
Granted, that particular sojourn had been a little hairy. But he'd come back with a string of beauties.
As a child he'd wanted to learn the art of angling, but the women and elders in the tribe weren't interested in that, no, just weirs and collecting pools and nets. That was harvesting, not fishing, but young Iskaral Pust, who'd once run away with a caravan and had seen the sights of Li Heng – for a day and a half, until his great-grandmother had come to retrieve him and drag him screaming like a gutted piglet back to the tribe – well, Iskaral Pust had discovered the perfect expression of creative predation, an expression which was – as everyone knew – the ideal manly endeavour.
Soon, then, and he and his mule would have the ultimate excuse to leave the hoary temple of home. Going fishing, dear. Ah, how he longed to say those words.
'You are an idiot,' Mogora said.
'A clever idiot, woman, and that's a lot more cleverer than you.' He paused, eyeing her, then said, 'Now all I need to do is wait until she's asleep, so I can cut off all her hair – she won't notice, it's not like we have silver mirrors hanging about, is it? I'll mix it all up, the hair from her head, from her ears, from under her arms, from-'
'You think I don't know what you're up to?' Mogora asked, then cackled as only an old woman begotten of hyenas could. 'You are not just an idiot. You're also a fool. And deluded, and immature, and obsessive, and petty, spiteful, patronizing, condescending, defensive, aggressive, ignorant, wilful, inconsistent, contradictory, and you're ugly as well.'
'So what of it?'
