The sorceress had found the strength to leave her bed. She now stood at the window, leaning with one hand against the frame for support, and looked down on a street crowded with military wagons. The systematic plunder that quartermasters called “resupply” was well under way. The eviction of nobility and gentry from their familial estates for the stationing of the officer corps, of which she was one, had ended days ago, while the repairing of the outer walls, the refitting of sundered gates, and the clearing of “Moon rain” continued apace.
She was glad she'd missed the river of corpses that must have filled the city streets during the initial phase of clean-up-wagon after wagon groaning beneath the weight of crushed bodies, white flesh seared by fire and slashed by sword, rat-gnawed and raven-pecked-men, women, and children. It was a scene she had witnessed before, and she had no wish ever to see it again.
Now, shock and terror had seeped down and out of sight. Scenes of normality reappeared as farmers and merchants emerged from hiding to meet the needs of occupiers and occupied alike. Malazan healers had swept the city, rooting out the birthing of plague and treating common ailments among all those they touched. No citizen would have been turned from their path. And sentiments began the long, perfectly planned swing.
Soon, Tattersail knew, there'd be the culling of the nobility, a scourge that would raise to the gallows the greediest, least-liked nobles. And the executions would be public. A tried and true procedure that swelled recruitment on a tide of base vengeance-with every hand stained by a righteous glee. A sword in such hands completed the conspiracy and included all players in the hunt for the next victim to the cause-the Empire's cause.
She'd seen it run its course in a hundred such cities. No matter how benign the original rulers, no matter how generous the nobility, the word of Empire, weighted by might, twisted the past into a tyranny of demons. A sad comment on humanity, a bitter lesson made foul by her own role in it.
In her mind returned the faces of the Bridgeburners, a strange counterpoint to the cynicism with which she viewed all around her.
Whiskeyjack, a man pushed to the edge, or, rather, the edge creeping on him on all sides, a crumbling of beliefs, a failing of faiths, leaving as his last claim to humanity his squad, a shrinking handful of the only people that mattered any more. But he held on, and he pushed back-pushed back hard. She liked to think-no, she wanted to believe-he would win out in the end, that he'd live to see his world stripped of the Empire.
Quick Ben and Kalam, seeking to take the responsibility from their sergeant's shoulders. It was their only means of loving the man, though they'd never put it in such terms. In the others, barring Sorry, she saw the same, yet with them there was a desperation that she found endearing, a child-like yearning to relieve Whiskeyjack of everything their grim place had laid upon him.
She responded to them in a way deeper than she'd thought possible, from a core she'd long been convinced was burned out, the ashes scattered in silent lament-a core no mage could afford. Tattersail recognized the danger, but that only made it all the more alluring.
Sorry was another matter, and she found herself avoiding even thinking about that young woman.