‘And what is the significance of all this?’ she asked. ‘I thought we were looking for Felisin.’
‘You’re not thinking, lass. Remember Stormy’s tale. And Truth’s. Felisin, Heboric, Kulp and Baudin. We found what was left of Kulp back at Gryllen’s wagon. And this’-his gesture was fierce-‘is Baudin. The damned Talon-though the proof’s not around his neck, alas. Remember their strange skin? Gesler, Stormy, Truth? The same thing happened to Baudin, here.’
‘You called it an infection.’
‘Well, I don’t know what it is. That warren changed them. There’s no telling in what way.’
‘So, we’re left with Felisin and Heboric Light Touch.’
He nodded.
‘Then I feel I should tell you something,’ Lostara continued. ‘It may not be relevant…’
‘Go on, lass.’
She turned to face the hills to the southwest. ‘When we trailed that agent of Sha’ik’s… into those hills-’
‘Kalam Mekhar.’
‘Aye. And we ambushed Sha’ik up at the old temple at the summit-on the trail leading into Raraku-’
‘As you have described.’
She ignored his impatience. ‘We would have seen all this. Thus, the events we’ve just stumbled upon here occurred after our ambush.’
‘Well, yes.’
She sighed and crossed her arms. ‘Felisin and Heboric are with the army of the Apocalpyse, Pearl. In Raraku.’
‘What makes you so certain?’
She shrugged. ‘Where else would they be? Think, man. Felisin’s hatred of the Malazan Empire must be all-consuming. Nor would Heboric hold much love for the empire that imprisoned and condemned him. They were desperate, after Gryllen’s attack. After Baudin and Kulp died. Desperate, and probably hurting.’
He slowly nodded, straightened from his crouch beside the corpse. ‘One thing you’ve never explained to me, Lostara. Why did your ambush fail?’
‘It didn’t. We killed Sha’ik-I would swear to it. A quarrel in the forehead. We could not recover the body because of her guards, who proved too much for our company. We killed her, Pearl.’
‘Then who in Hood’s name is commanding the Apocalypse?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Can you show me this place of ambush?’
‘In the morning, aye. I can take you right there.’ He simply stared at her, even as the sphere of light above them began to waver, then finally vanished with a faint sigh.
His memories had awakened. What had lain within the T’lan Imass, layered, indurated by the countless centuries, was a landscape Onrack could read once more. And so, what he saw before him now… gone were the mesas on the horizon, the wind-sculpted towers of sandstone, the sweeps of windblown sand and white ribbons of ground coral. Gone the gorges, arroyos and dead riverbeds, the planted fields and irrigation ditches. Even the city to the north, on the horizon’s very edge, clinging like a tumour to the vast winding river, became insubstantial, ephemeral to his mind’s eye.
And all that he now saw was as it had been… so very long ago.
The inland sea’s cloudy waves, rolling like the promise of eternity, along a shoreline of gravel that stretched north, unbroken all the way to the mountains that would one day be called the Thalas, and south, down to encompass the remnant now known as the Clatar Sea. Coral reefs revealed their sharkskin spines a sixth of a league beyond the beach, over which wheeled seagulls and long-beaked birds long since extinct.
There were figures walking along the strand. Renig Obar’s clan, come to trade whale ivory and dhenrabi oil from their tundra homelands, and it seemed they had brought the chill winds with them… or perhaps the unseemly weather that had come to these warm climes hinted of something darker. A Jaghut, hidden in some fasthold, stirring the cauldron of Omtose Phellack. Much more of this and the reefs would die, and with them all the creatures that depended on them.
A breath of unease fluttered through the Onrack who was flesh and blood. But he had stepped aside. No longer a bonecaster for his clan-Absin Tholai was far superior in the hidden arts, after all, and more inclined to the hungry ambition necessary among those who followed the Path of Tellann. All too often, Onrack had found his mind drawn to other things.
To raw beauty, such as he saw before him now. He was not one for fighting, for rituals of destruction. He was always reluctant to dance in the deeper recesses of the caves, where the drums pounded and the echoes rolled through flesh and bone as if one was lying in the path of a stampeding herd of ranag-a herd such as the one Onrack had blown onto the cave walls around them. His mouth bitter with spit, charcoal and ochre, the backs of his hands stained where they had blocked the spray from his lips, defining the shapes on the stone. Art was done in solitude, images fashioned without light, on unseen walls, when the rest of the clan slept in the outer caverns. And it was a simple truth, that Onrack had grown skilled in the sorcery of paint out of that desire to be apart, to be alone.