'None. He is yours.'
'I cannot grant him the dignified sacrifice I have in mind for his soldiers. That would leave too bitter a taste in my mouth, I'm afraid.' Korbolo Dom hesitated, then sighed and made a slight gesture with one hand.
A war chief's tulwar flashed behind the High Fist, lifted the man's head clean from his shoulders and sent it spinning. The warhorse bolted in alarm and broke through the ring of soldiers. The beautiful beast galloped down among the unarmed soldiers, carrying its headless burden into their midst. The High Fist's corpse, Duiker saw, rode in the saddle with a grace not matched in life, weaving this way and that before hands reached up to slow the frightened horse, and Pormqual's body slid to one side, falling into waiting arms.
It may have been his imagination, but Duiker thought he could hear the harsh laughter of a god.
There was no shortage of spikes, yet it took a day and a half before the last screaming prisoner was nailed to the last crowded cedar lining Aren Way.
Ten thousand dead and dying Malazans stared down on that wide, exquisitely engineered Imperial road – eyes unseeing or eyes uncomprehending – it made little difference.
Duiker was the last, the rusty iron spikes driven through his wrists and upper arms to hold him in place high on the tree's blood-streaked bole. More spikes were hammered through his ankles and the muscles of his outer thighs.
The pain was unlike anything the historian had ever known before. Yet even worse was the knowledge that that pain would accompany his entire final journey down into eventual unconsciousness, and with it – an added trauma – were the images burned into him: almost forty hours of being driven on foot up Aren Way, watching each and every one of those ten thousand soldiers joined to the mass crucifixion in a chain of suffering stretching over three leagues, each link scores of men and women nailed to every tree, to every available space on those tall, broad trunks.
The historian was well beyond shock when his turn finally came, as the last soldier to close the human chain, and he was dragged to the tree, up the scaffolding, pushed against the ridged bark, arms forced outward, feeling the cold bite of the iron spikes pressed against his skin, and then, when the mallets swung, the explosion of pain that loosed his bowels, leaving him stained and writhing. The greatest pain arrived when the scaffolding dropped from under him, and his full weight fell onto the pinning spikes. Until that moment, he had truly believed he had gone as far into agony as was humanly possible.
He was wrong.
After what seemed like an eternity when the ceaseless shrieking of his sundered flesh had drowned out all else within him, a cool, calm clarity emerged, and thoughts, scattered and wandering, rose into his fading awareness.
The Jaghut ghost . . . why do I think of him now? Of that eternity of grief? What is he to me? What is anyone or anything to me, now? I await Hood's Gate at last – the time for memories, for regrets and comprehensions is past. You must see that now, old
man. Your nameless marine awaits you, and Bult and Corporal List, and Lull and Sulwar and Mincer. Kulp and Heboric, too, most likely. You leave a place of strangers now, and go to a place of companions, of friends.
So claim the priests of Hood.
It's the last gift. I am done with this world, for I am alone in it. Alone.
A ghostly, tusked face rose before his mind's eye, and though he had never before seen it, he knew that the Jaghut had found him. The gravest compassion filled that creature's unhuman eyes, a compassion that Duiker could not understand.
Why grieve, Jaghut? I shall not haunt eternity as you have done. I shall not return to this place, nor suffer again the losses a mortal suffers in life, and in living. Hood is about to bless me, Jaghut – no need to grieve . . .
Those thoughts echoed only a moment longer, as the Jaghut's ravaged face faded and darkness closed in around the historian, closed in until it swallowed him.
And with it, awareness ceased.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Laseen sent Tavore
Rushing across the seas
to clasp Coltaine's hand
And closing her fingers
She held crow-picked bones.
The Sha'ik Uprising
Wu
Kalam threw himself into the shadows at the base of a low, battered wall, then dragged the still-warm corpse half over him. He ducked his head down, then lay still, battling to slow his breathing.
A few moments later, light footfalls sounded on the street's cobbles. A voice hissed an angry halt.
'They pursued,' another hunter whispered. 'And he ambushed them – here. Gods! What kind of man is he?'
A third Claw spoke, a woman. 'He can't be far away—'