Mael had been careless. It had been that carelessness that the Errant had relied upon. The Elder God so fixed on saving his foolish mortal companion, blundering forward into such a simple trap. A relief to have the meddling bastard out of the way, serving as a kind of counter-balance to the lurid acquisitiveness of Feather Witch, whose disgusting company the Errant had just left.
And now he stood in the dark corridor. Alone.
‘We will have our Mortal Sword,’ she had announced from her perch on the altar that squatted like an island amidst black floodwater. ‘The idiot remains blind and stupid.’
Which idiot would that be, Feather Witch? Our imminent Mortal Sword?
‘I do not understand your sarcasm, Errant. Nothing has gone astray. Our cult grows day by day, among the Letherii slaves, and now the Indebted-’
The disaffected, you mean. And what is it you are promising them, Feather Witch? In my name?
‘The golden age of the past. When you stood ascendant among all other gods. When yours was the worship of all the Letherii. Our glory was long ago, and to that we must return.’
There was never a golden age. Worship of me to the exclusion of all other gods has never existed among the Letherii. The time you speak of was an age of plurality, of tolerance, a culture flowering-
‘Never mind the truth. The past is what I say it is. That is the freedom of teaching the ignorant.’
He had laughed then. The High Priestess stumbles upon a vast wisdom. Yes, gather your disaffected, ignorant fools, then. Fill their heads with the noble glory of a non-existent past, then send them out with their eyes blazing in stupid-but comforting-fervour. And this will begin our new golden age, an exultation in the pleasures of repression and tyrannical control over the lives of everyone. Hail the mighty Errant, the god who brooks no dissent.
‘What you do with your power is up to you. I know what I plan to do with mine.’
Udinaas has rejected you, Feather Witch. You have lost the one you wanted the most.
She had smiled. ‘He will change his mind. You will see. Together, we shall forge a dynasty. He was an Indebted. I need only awaken the greed within him.’
Feather Witch, listen well to your god. To this modest sliver of wisdom. The lives of others are not yours to use. Offer them bliss, yes, but do not be disappointed when they choose misery-
because the misery is theirs, and in deciding to choose someone else’s path or their own, they will choose their own. The Shake have a saying: ‘Open to mem your hand to the shore, watch them walk into the sea.’
‘No wonder they were wiped out.’
Feather Witch-
‘Listen to my wisdom now, Errant. Wisdom the Shake should have heeded. When it comes to using the lives of others, the first thing to take from them is the privilege of choice. Once you have done that, the rest is easy.’
He had found his High Priestess. Indeed. Bless us all.
Chapter Twenty-One
Open to them your hand to the shore, watch them walk into the sea.
Press upon them all they need, see them yearn for all they want.
Gift to them the calm pool of words, watch them draw the sword.
Bless upon them the satiation of peace, see them starve for war.
Grant them darkness and they will lust for light.
Deliver to them death and hear them beg for life.
Beget life and they will murder your kin.
Be as they are and they see you different.
Show wisdom and you are a fool.
The shore gives way to the sea. And the sea, my friends,
Does not dream of you.
– Shake Prayer
Another Hood-damned village, worse than mushrooms after a rain. Proof, if they’d needed it-and they didn’t- that they were drawing ever closer to the capital. Hamlets, villages, towns, traffic on the roads and cart trails, the thundering passage of horses, horns sounding in the distance like the howl of wolves closing in for the kill.
‘Best life there is,’ Fiddler muttered.
‘Sergeant?’
He rolled onto his back and studied his exhausted, cut-up, blood-stained, wild-eyed excuses for soldiers. What were they now? And what, as they stared back at him, were they seeing? Their last hope, and if that isn’t bad news…
He wondered if Gesler and his squad were still alive. They’d been neatly divided the night before by a clever thrust in strength of Edur, bristling with weapons and sniffing the air like the hounds they had become. Edur on their trail, delivering constant pressure, pushing them ever forward, into what Fiddler damn well knew was a wall of soldiers somewhere ahead-no slipping past when that time came. No squeezing north or south either-the Edur bands filled the north a dozen to a copse and not too far away on the south was the wide Lether River grinning like the sun’s own smile. Finally, aye, someone on the other side had got clever, had made the necessary adjustments, had turned this entire invasion into a vast funnel about to drive the Malazans into a meat-grinder.
Well, no fun lasts for ever. After Gesler and his Fifth had been pushed away, there had been sounds of fighting somewhere in that direction. And Fiddler had faced the hard choice between leading his handful of soldiers into a flanking charge to break through and relieve the poor bastards, or staying quiet and hurrying on, east on a southerly tack, right into that waiting maw.
The splitting cracks of sharpers had decided him-suicide running into that, since those sharpers tended to fly every which way, and they meant that Gesler and his squad were running, carving a path through the enemy, and Fiddler and his squad might simply end up stumbling into their wake, in the sudden midst of scores of enraged Edur.
So I left ‘em to it. And the detonations died away, but the screams continued, Hood take me.
Sprawled in the high grasses at the edge of the treeline, his squad. They stank. The glory of the Bonehunters, this taking to the grisliest meaning of that name. Koryk’s curse, aye. Who else? Severed fingers, ears, pierced through and dangling from belts, harness clasps, rawhide ties. His soldiers: one and all degraded into some ghastly blood-licking barely human savages. No real surprise there. It was one thing to go covert-as marines this was, after all, precisely what they had been trained to do. But it had gone on too long, without relief, with the only end in sight nothing other than Hood’s own gate. Fingers and ears, except for Smiles, who’d added to the mix with that which only males could provide. ‘M31 blecker worms,’ she’d said, referring to some offshore mud-dwelling worm native to the Kanese coast. ‘And just like the worms, they start out purple and blue and then after a day or two in the sun they turn grey. Bleckers, Sergeant.’
Didn’t need to lose the path to lose theif minds, that much was obvious. Gods below, look at these fools-how in Hood’s name have we lasted this long?
They’d not seen the captain and her runt of a mage in some time, which didn’t bode well. Still, threads of brown telltale smoke drifting around here and there in the mornings, and the faint sounds of munitions at night. So, at least some of them were still alive. But even those signs were growing scarce, when they should have been, if anything, increasing as things got nastier.
We’ve run out. We’re used up. Bah, listen to me! Starting to sound like Cuttle there. ‘I’m ready to die now, Fid. Happy to, aye. Now that I seen-’
‘Enough of that,’ he snapped.
‘Sergeant?’
‘Stop asking me anything, Bottle. And stop looking at me like I’ve gone mad or something.’
‘You’d better not, Sergeant. Go mad, that is. You’re the only sane one left.’
‘Does that assessment include you?’
Bottle grimaced, then spat out another wad of the grass he’d taken to chewing. Reached for a fresh handful.
