'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 sheep pen where a bonfire was built. One by one, mothers were forced to throw their babes and children into the roaring flames. Those women were then raped and, finally, beheaded. Husbands, brothers and fathers were made to watch.
When they alone remained alive, they were systematically dismembered and left, armless and legless, to bleed out among bleating, bloodsplashed sheep.
A scream had been birthed that day in the heart of Ahlrada Ahn, and it had not ceased its desperate, terrible cry. Rhulad's shadow covered the Tiste Edur, no matter how distant that throne and the insane creature seated upon it. And in that shadow roiled a nightmare from which there could be no awakening.
That scream was echoed in his memories of that day, the shrieks wrung from the throats of burning children, the writhing forms in their bundled flames, the fires reflected on the impassive faces of Edur warriors. Even the Letherii had turned away, overcome with horror.
Would that Ahlrada Ahn could have done the same, without losing face.
Instead he stood, one among the many, and revealed nothing of what raged inside. Raged, breaking… everything. Within me, he told himself that night, back in Sepik where the sounds of slaughter continued beyond the room he had found, within me, nothing is left standing. On that night, for the first time ever, he considered taking his own life.
A statement of weakness. The others would have seen it in no other way – they could not afford to – so, not a protest, but a surrender, and they would line up to spit upon his corpse. And warriors like Saur Bathrada and Kholb Harat would draw their knives and crouch down, and with pleasure in their eyes they would disfigure the senseless body.
For these two Edur had grown to love blood and pain, and in that they were not alone.
The king of Sepik was the last to die. He had been made to witness the obliteration of his cherished people. It was said that he was a benign ruler – oh how the Edur despised that statement, as if it was an insult, a grievous, vicious insult. That wretched man collapsing between two warriors who struggled to hold him upright, grasping his grey hair to force his head up, to see. Oh, how he'd shrieked and wailed. Until Tomad Sengar wearied of those cries and ordered the king flung from the tower. And, as he fell, his wail became a sound filled with relief. He looked upon those cobbles, rising fast to meet him, as salvation. And this is our gift. Our only gift.
