'I am Mathok,' the one on the left said. 'Once of Sha'ik's Army of the Apocalypse.'
'And now?' Paran asked.
A shrug. 'We dwelt in the Holy Desert Raraku, a desert now a sea. We fought as rebels, but the rebellion has ended. We believed. We believe no longer.' He unsheathed his scimitar and flung it onto the ground. '
Do with us as you will.'
Paran settled back in his saddle. He drew a deep breath and released it in a long sigh. 'Mathok,' he said, 'you and your warriors are free to go where you please. I am High Fist Ganoes Paran, and I hereby release you. As you said, the war is over, and I for one am not interested in reparation, nor punishment. Nothing is gained by inflicting yet more atrocities in answer to past ones.'
The grizzled warrior beside Mathok threw a leg over his horse's neck and slipped down to the ground. The impact made him wince and arch his lower back, grimacing, then he hobbled over to his commander's scimitar. Collecting it, he wiped the dust from the blade and the grip, then delivered it back to Mathok.
Paran spoke again: 'You have come from the place of pilgrimage.'
'The City of the Fallen, yes. Do you intend to destroy them, High Fist? They are defenceless.'
'I would speak with their leader.'
'Then you waste your time. She claims she is Sha'ik Reborn. If that is true, then the cult has seen a degradation from which it will never recover. She is fat, poisoned. I barely recognized her. She is indeed fallen. Her followers are sycophants, more interested in orgies and gluttony than anything else. They are disease-scarred and half-mad.
Her High Priest watches her sex acts from behind curtains and masturbates, and in both their energy is unbounded and insatiable.'
'Nonetheless,' Paran said after a moment, 'I sense power there.'
'No doubt,' Mathok replied, leaning to one side and spitting. '
Slaughter them, then, High Fist, and you will rid the world of a new kind of plague.'
'What do you mean?'
'A religion of the maimed and broken. A religion proffering salvation… you just have to die first. I predict the cult will prove highly contagious.'
He's probably right. 'I cannot slaughter innocents, Mathok.'
'Then, one day, the most faithful and zealous among them will slaughter you, High Fist.'
'Perhaps. If so, I will worry about it then. In the meantime, I have other tasks before me.'
'You will speak with Sha'ik Reborn?'
Paran considered, then he shook his head. 'No. As you suggest, there is little point. While I see the possible wisdom of expunging this cult before it gains a foothold, I admit I find the notion reprehensible.'
'Then where, if I may ask, High Fist, will you go now?'
Paran hesitated. Dare I answer? Well, now is as good as later for everyone to hear. 'We turn round, Mathok. The Host marches to Aren.'
'Do you march to war?' the commander asked.
Paran frowned. 'We're an army, Mathok. Eventually, yes, there will be fighting.'
'Will you accept our service, High Fist?'
'What?'
'We are a wandering people,' Mathok explained. 'But we have lost our home. Our families are scattered and no doubt many are dead of plague.
We have nowhere to go, and no-one to fight. If you should reject us now, and free us to go, we shall ride into dissolution. We shall die with our backs covered in straw and sand in our gauntlets. Or warrior will turn upon warrior, and blood will be shed that is without meaning. Accept us into your army, High Fist Ganoes Paran, and we will fight at your side and die with honour.'
'You have no idea where I intend to lead the Host, Mathok.'
The old warrior beside Mathok barked a laugh. 'The wasteland back of camp, or the wasteland few have ever seen before, what's the difference?' He turned to his commander. 'Mathok, my friend, the shamans said this one here killed Poliel. For that alone, I would follow him into the Abyss, so long as he promises us heads to lop off and maybe a woman or two to ride on the way. That's all we're looking for, right, before we dance in a god's lap one last time. Besides, I'm tired of running.'
To all of this, Mathok simply nodded, his gaze fixed on Paran.
Four thousand or so of this continent's finest light cavalry just volunteered, veterans one and all. 'Hurlochel,' he said, 'attach yourself as liaison to Commander Mathok. Commander, you are now a Fist, and Hurlochel will require a written compilation of your officers or potential officers. The Malazan army employs mounted troops in units of fifty, a hundred and three hundred. Adjust your command structure accordingly.'
'It shall be done, High Fist.'
'Fist Rythe Bude, see the Host turned round. And Noto Boil, find me Ormulogun.'
'Again?' the healer asked.
'Go.'
Yes, again. I think I need a new card. I think I'll call it Salvation.
At the moment it is in the House of Chains' sphere of influence. But something tells me it will claw free of that eventually. Such a taint will not last. This card is an Unaligned. In every sense of the word.
Unaligned, and likely destined to be the most dangerous force in the world.
Damn, I wish I was more ruthless. That Sha'ik Reborn, and all her twisted followers – I should ride up there and slaughter them all – which is precisely what Mathok wanted me to do.
To do what he himself couldn't – we're the same in that. In our… weakness.
No wonder I already like the man.
As Hurlochel led his horse alongside Mathok, back up towards the desert warriors on the ridge, the outrider glanced over at the new Fist. 'Sir, when you spoke of Sha'ik Reborn, you said something… about barely recognizing her…'
'I did. She was one of Sha'ik's adopted daughters, in Raraku. Of course, as Leoman and I well knew, even that one was… not as she seemed. Oh, chosen by the Whirlwind Goddess, well enough, but she was not a child of the desert.'
'She wasn't?'
'No, she was Malazan.'
'What?'
The commander's companion grunted and spat. 'Mezla, yes. And the Adjunct never knew – or so we heard. She cut down a helmed, armoured woman. And then walked away. The corpse then vanished. A Mezla killing a Mezla – oh how the gods must have laughed…'
'Or,' said Hurlochel in a low voice, 'wept.' He thought to ask more questions regarding this new Sha'ik Reborn, but a succession of tragic images, variants on that fated duel at Raraku, before the seas rose from the desert, raced through his mind. And so he rode in silence up the slope, beside the warriors, and before long was thoroughly consumed with the necessities of reorganizing Mathok's horse-warriors.
So preoccupied, he did not report his conversation to the High Fist.
Three leagues from the City of the Fallen, Paran turned the Host away, and set them on their path for distant Aren. The road that would take them from Seven Cities.
Never to return.
Saur Bathrada and Kholb Harat had walked into an upland village four leagues inland from the harbour city of Sepik. Leading twenty Edur warriors and forty Letherii marines, they had gathered the enslaved degenerate mixed- bloods, ritually freeing the uncomprehending primitives from their symbolic chains, then chaining them in truth for the march back to the city and the Edur ships. Following this, Saur and Kholb had driven the Sepik humans into a
