No-one spoke for a time. Bottle watched his sergeant. Strings was testing the pull on the crossbow, but Bottle could see that he was thinking.
Cuttle said, 'Laseen's pulled 'em in. Close and tight.'
The regard Gesler fixed on the sapper was level, gauging. 'That the rumour, Cuttle?'
'One of 'em. What do I know? Maybe she caught something on the wind.'
'You certainly have,' Strings muttered as he examined the case of quarrels.
'Only that the few veteran companies still on Quon Tali were ordered to Unta and Malaz City.'
Strings finally looked up. 'Malaz City? Why there?'
'The rumour weren't that specific, Sergeant. Just the where, not the why. Anyway, there's something going on.'
'Where'd you catch all this?' Gesler asked.
'That new sergeant, Hellian, from Kartool.'
'The drunk one?'
'That's her.'
'Surprised she noticed anything,' Strings observed. 'What got her shipped out here?'
'That she won't talk about. In the wrong place at the wrong time, I figure, from the way her face twists all sour on the subject. Anyway, she went to Malaz City first, then joined up with the transports at Nap, then on to Unta. She never seems so drunk she can't keep her eyes open.'
'You trying to get your hand on her thigh, Cuttle?'
'A bit too young for me, Fid, but a man could do worse.'
'A bleary-eyed wife,' Smiles said with a snort. 'That's probably the best you could manage, Cuttle.'
'When I was a lad,' the sapper said, reaching out to collect a grenado – a sharper, Bottle noted with alarm as Cuttle began tossing it up in the air and catching it one-handed – 'every time I said something disrespectful of my betters, my father'd take me out back and slap me half-unconscious. Something tells me, Smiles, your da was way too indulgent when it came to his little girl.'
'You just try it, Cuttle, and I'll stick a knife in your eye.'
'If I was your da, Smiles, I'd have long ago killed myself.'
She went pale at that, although no-one else seemed to notice, since their eyes were following the grenado up and down.
'Put it away,' Strings said.
An ironic lifting of the brows, then, smiling, Cuttle returned the sharper to the crate. 'Anyway, it looks like Hellian's got a capable corporal, which tells me she'd held onto good judgement, despite drinking brandy like water.'
Bottle rose. 'Actually, I forgot about her. Where are they camped, Cuttle?'
'Near the rum wagon. But she already knows about the meeting.'
Bottle glanced over at the crate of munitions. 'Oh. Well, I'm going for a walk in the desert.'
'Don't stray too far,' the sergeant said, 'could be some of Leoman's warriors out there.'
'Right.'
A short while later he came within sight of the intended meeting place. Just beyond the collapsed building was an overgrown rubbish heap, misshapen with tufts of yellow grass sprouting from the barrowsized mound. There was no-one in sight. Bottle made his way towards the midden, the sounds of the encampment dwindling behind him. It was late afternoon but the wind remained hot as the breath of a furnace.
Chiselled wall and foundation stones, shattered idols, lengths of splintered wood, animal bones and broken pottery. Bottle clambered up the side, noting the most recent leavings – Malazan-style pottery, black-glazed, squat, fragmented images of the most common motifs:
Dassem Ultor's death outside Y'Ghatan, the Empress on her throne, the First Heroes and the Quon pantheon. The local style, Bottle had seen from the villages they had passed through, was much more elegant, elongated with cream or white glazing on the necks and rims and faded red on the body, adorned with full-toned and realistic images. Bottle paused at seeing one such shard, a body-piece, on which had been painted the Chain of Dogs. He picked it up, wiped dust from the illustrated scene. Part of Coltaine was visible, affixed to the cross of wood, overhead a wild flurry of black crows. Beneath him, dead Wickans and Malazans, and a cattle-dog impaled on a spear. A chill whispered along his spine and he let the shard drop.
Atop the mound, he stood for a time, studying the sprawl of the Malazan army along the road and spilling out to the sides. The occasional rider wending through carrying messages and reports; carrion birds, capemoths and rhizan wheeling overhead like swarming flies.
He so disliked omens.
Drawing off his helm, Bottle wiped sweat from his brow and turned to face the odhan to the south. Once fertile, perhaps, but now a wasteland. Worth fighting for? No, but then, there wasn't much that was. The soldier at your side, maybe – he'd been told that enough times, by old veterans with nothing left but that dubious companionship. Such bonds could only be born of desperation, a closing in of the spirit, down to a manageable but pitiful area containing things and people one could care about. For the rest, pure indifference, twisting on occasion into viciousness.
Gods, what am I doing here?
Stumbling into ways of living didn't seem a worthy path to take.
Barring Cuttle and the sergeant, the squad was made up of people no different from Bottle. Young, eager for a place to stand that didn't feel so isolated and lonely, or filling oneself with bravado to mask the fragile self hiding within. But all that was no surprise. Youth was headlong, even when it felt static, stagnant and stifling. It liked its emotions extreme, doused in fiery spices, enough to burn the throat and set flame to the heart. The future was not consciously rushed into – it was just the place you suddenly ended up in, battered and weary and wondering how in Hood's name you got there. Well. He could see that. He didn't need the echoes of his grandmother's ceaseless advice whispering through his thoughts.
Assuming, of course, that voice belonged to his grandmother. He had begun to suspect otherwise.
Bottle crossed the heap, moved down onto the south side. At the base here the desiccated ground was pitted, revealing much older leavings of rubbish – red-glazed sherds with faded images of chariots and stilted figures wearing ornate headdresses and wielding strange hookbladed weapons. The massive olive-oil jars common to this region retained these old forms, clinging to a mostly forgotten antiquity as if the now lost golden age was any different from the present one.
His grandmother's observations, those ones. She'd had nothing good to say about the Malazan Empire, but even less about the Untan Confederacy, the Li Heng League and all the other despotic rulers of the pre-empire days on Quon Tali. She had been a child through all the Itko Kan-Cawn Por wars, the Seti Tide, the Wickan migrations, the Quon attempt at hegemony. All blood and stupidity, she used to say. All prod and pull. The old with their ambitions and the young with their eager mindless zeal. At least the Emperor put an end to all that – a knife in the back for those grey tyrants and distant wars for the young zealots. It ain't right but nothing ever is. Ain't right, as I said, but better than worst, and I remember the worst.
Now here he was, in the midst of one of those distant wars. Yet there had been no zeal in his motivations. No, something far more pathetic.
Boredom was a poor reason to do anything. Better to hold high some raging brand of righteousness, no matter how misguided and lacking in subtlety.
Cuttle talks of vengeance. But he makes his trying to feed us something too obvious, and we're not swelling with rage like we're supposed to. He couldn't be sure of it, but this army felt lost. At its very core was an empty place, waiting to be filled, and Bottle feared it would wait for ever.
He settled down onto the ground, began a silent series of summonings.
Before long, a handful of lizards scampered across the dusty earth towards him. Two rhizan settled down onto his right thigh, their wings falling still. An arch spider, big as a horse's hoof and the colour of green glass, leapt from a nearby rock and landed light as a feather on his left knee. He studied his array of companions and decided they would do. Gestures, the stroke of fingers, silent commands, and the motley servants hurried off, making one and all towards the sheep pen where the captain would address the sergeants.
It paid to know just how wide Hood's Gate was going to be come the assault.
And then something else was on its way.
