Pravalak Rim, who had been guarding their butts with Shoaly and Drawfirst. And pretty soon something less than whispered was dancing through every soldier and she saw weapons being drawn, armour straps tightened, helms adjusted, and finally she grunted. ‘All right, Honey-Hood take me, how I hate saying that-looks like you’ve sniffed it just right-’
‘Just let me prove it-’
‘You’re never prying my legs apart, Honey. Why don’t you get that?’
‘What a miserable attitude,’ the lOth’s sapper complained as he loaded his crossbow. ‘Now Kisswhere, she was-’
‘So tired of your advances, Honey, that she went and blew herself up-and took her sister with her, too. And now here I am wishing I’d been with them in that scull.’ With that she rose and scrabbled over to Nep Furrow.
The old Dal Honese mage lifted one yellowy eye to squint at her, then both eyes opened wide when he saw the sharper she held in each hand. ‘Eggit’way fra meen, tit-woman!’
‘Relax,’ she said, ‘we’re heading into a fight. You got anything left in that bent reed of yours?’
‘Wha’?’
‘Magicks, Nep, magicks-comes from the bleckers in men. Every woman knows that,’ and she winked.
‘You teasin’ tit-woman you! Eggit’way fra meen!’
‘I’m not eggitin’ away from you, Nep, until you bless these two sharpers here.’
‘Bliss ‘em clay balls? Ya mad, tit-woman? Less time I done lhat-’
‘They blew up, aye. Sinter and Kisswhere. Into pieces but nice and quick, right? Listen, it’s my only way to escape Honey’s advances. No, seriously, I want one of your blissin’ curses or cursed blissin’s. Please, Nep-’
‘Eggit’way fra meen!’
Reliko, who was half a hand shorter even than his sergeant;ind therefore, by Toothy’s own assertion, the smallest heavy infantry soldier in the history of the Malazan Empire, grunted upright and drew out his shortsword as he swung his shield into position. He glanced over at Vastly Blank. ‘Time again.’
The oversized Seti warrior, still sitting on the bed of wet moss, looked up. ‘Huh?’
‘Fighting again.’
‘Where?’
‘Us, Vastly. Remember Y’Ghatan?’
‘No.’
‘Well, won’t be like Y’Ghatan. More like yesterday only harder. Remember yesterday?’
Vastly Blank stared a moment longer, then he laughed his slow ha ha ha laugh and said, ‘Yesterday! I remember yesterday!’
‘Then pick up your sword and wipe the mud off it, Vastly. And take your shield-no, not mine, yours, the one on your back. Yes, bring it round. That’s it-no, sword in the other hand. There, perfect. You ready?’
‘Who do I kill?’
‘I’ll show you soon enough.’
‘Good.’
‘Seti should never breed with bhederin, I think.’
‘What?’
‘A joke, Vastly.’
‘Oh. Ha ha ha! Ha.’
‘Let’s go join up with Lookback-we’ll be on point.’
‘Lookback’s on point?’
‘He’s always on point for this kind of thing, Vastly.’
‘Oh. Good.’
‘Drawfirst and Shoaly at our backs, right? Like yesterday.’
‘Right. Reliko, what happened yesterday?’
Strap Mull stepped close to Neiler and they both eyed their corporal, Pravalak Rim, who was just sending Drawfirst and Shoaly up to the other heavies.
The two soldiers spoke in their native Dal Honese. ‘Broke-hearted,’ Strap said.
‘Broker than broke,’ Neiler agreed.
‘Kisswhere, she was lovely’
‘Lovelier than lovely’
‘Like Badan says, though.’
‘Like he says, yes.’
‘And that’s that, is what he says.’
‘I know that, Strap, you don’t need to tell me anything. You think Letheras will be like Y’Ghatan? We didn’t do nothing in Y’Ghatan. And,’ Neiler suddenly added, as if struck by something, ‘we haven’t done nothing here either, have we? Nothing not yet, anyway. If it’s going to be like Y’Ghatan, though-’
‘We’re not even there yet,’ Strap Mull said. ‘Which sword you going to use?’
‘This one.’
‘The one with the broken handle?’
Neller looked down, frowned, then threw the weapon into the bushes and drew out another one. ‘This one. It’s Letherii, was on the cabin wall-’
‘I know. I gave it to you.’
‘You gave it to me because it howls like a wild woman every time I hit something with it.’
‘That’s right, Neller, and that’s why I asked what sword you were going to use.’
‘Now you know.’
‘Now I know so I’m stuffing my ears with moss.’
‘Thought they already were.’
‘I’m adding more. See?’
Corporal Pravalak Rim was a haunted man. Born in a northern province of Gris to poor farmers, he had seen nothing of the world for most of his life, until the day a marine recruiter had come through the nearby village on the very day Pravalak was there with his older brothers, all of whom sneered at the marine on their way to the tavern. But Pravalak himself, well, he had stared in disbelief. His first sight of someone from Dal Hon. She had been big and round and though she was decades older than him and her hair had gone grey he could see how she had been beautiful and indeed, to his eyes, she still was.
Such dark skin. Such dark eyes, and oh, she spied him out and gave him that gleaming smile, before leading him by the hand into a back room of the local gaol and delivering her recruiting pitch sitting on him and rocking with exalted glee until he exploded right into the Mala2an military.
His brothers had expressed their disbelief and were in a panic about how to explain to their ma and da how their youngest son had gone and got himself signed up and lost his virginity to a fifty-year-old demoness in the process-and was, in fact, not coming home at all. But that was their problem, and Pravalak had trundled off in the recruiter’s wagon, one hand firmly snuggled between her ample legs, without a backward look.
That first great love affair had lasted the distance to the next town, where he’d found himself transferred onto a train of about fifty other Grisian farm boys and girls and marching an imperial road down to Unta, and from there out to Malaz Island for training as a marine. But he had not been as heartbroken as he would have thought, for the Malazan forces were crowded for a time with Dal Honese recruits-some mysterious population explosion or political upheaval had triggered an exodus from the savanna and jungles of Dal Hon. And he had soon realized that his worship of midnight skin and midnight eyes did not doom him to abject longing and eternal solitude.
Until he first met Kisswhere, who had but laughed at his attempts, as smooth and honed as they had become by then. And it was this rejection that stole his heart for all time.
Yet what haunted him now was, perhaps surprisingly, not all of that unrequited adoration. It was what he had seen, or maybe but imagined, in that dark night on the river, after the blinding flash of the munitions and the roar that shook the water, that one black-skinned hand, reaching up out of the choppy waves, the spinning swirl of the current awakening once more in the wake of the tumult, parting round the elegant wrist-and then that hand slipped away, or was simply lost to his straining sight, his desperate, anguished search in the grainy darkness-the hand, the skin, the dark, dark skin that so defeated him that night…
Oh, he wanted to die, now. To end his misery. She was gone. Her sister was gone, too-a sister who had drawn
