In the spring of 1971, Owen Brand and his family move to the riverside town of Middlecross in a renewed attempt to escape poverty. For twelve-year-old Owen, it’s the opportunity for a new life and an end to his family’s isolation and he quickly falls in with a gang of three local boys and forms a strong bond with Jennifer, the rebellious daughter of a violent, alcoholic father. As summer brings release from school, two figures preside over the boys’ activities: Walter Gribbs, a benign old watchman at the yacht club, and Hogdson Fisk, a vindictive farmer tormented by his past. Then the boys stumble on a body washed up on the riverbank – a discovery whose reverberations will result, as the year comes full circle, in a cataclysm that envelops them all…
 

Re-published in a revised hardback edition for the first time, Steven Erikson first novel, This River Awakens (1998), is a lyrical, tender and disturbing portrayal of a rite of passage that is both harsh and revelatory.
 


Bantam Press (UK)  •  London (2012)  •  hard cover  •  ISBN: 978-0-593067-77-0

Bantam Press (UK)  •  London (2012)  •  trade paper  •  ISBN: 978-0-593067-78-9
 

  ]]> http://www.stevenerikson.com/index.php/this-river-awakens-2012/feed/ 0 http://www.stevenerikson.com/index.php/the-problem-of-karsa-orlong/ http://www.stevenerikson.com/index.php/the-problem-of-karsa-orlong/#comments Tue, 26 Jul 2011 16:57:19 +0000 Rodger Turner http://www.stevenerikson.com/?p=269      To say that, among all the characters portrayed in The Malazan Book of the Fallen, Karsa Orlong has proved the most divisive among readers of the series is probably beyond refute. Discussions arise regarding this character again and again, and as the debate returns in this TOR re-read, the question of my purpose in creating this character could probably be addressed: so I will.

Lancer (US)

     Consider this an essay, then. The problem posed by Karsa and how readers perceive him will, for me, find its answers from a range of angles; from the Fantasy genre itself, to anthropology, history, cultural identity and its features, to the structure of the series (and the novel in question) and, eventually, to the expectations that fantasy readers bring to a fantasy novel. You may note something of an ellipse in that list, but that’s how I think so bear with me.

     Historically within the genre the role of the ‘barbarians’ has roughly split into two morally laden strains. On the one hand they are the ‘dark horde’ threatening civilization; while on the other they are the savage made noble by the absence of civilization. In the matter of Karsa Orlong, we can for the moment disregard the former and concentrate instead on the noble savage trope—such barbarians are purer of spirit, unsullied and uncorrupt; while their justice may be rough, it is still just. One could call it the ‘play-ground wish-fulfillment’ motif, where prowess is bound to fairness and punishment is always righteous. The obvious, almost definitive example of this is R.E.Howard’s Conan, but we can take a more fundamental approach and consider this ‘barbarian’ trope as representing the ‘other,’ but a cleaned-up version intended to invite sympathy. In this invitation there must be a subtle compact between creator and reader, and to list its details can be rather enlightening, so here goes.

     We are not the ‘other,’ and this barbarian’s world is therefore exotic, even as it harkens back to a pre-civilized, Edenic proximity. The barbarian’s world is a harsh one, a true struggle for existence, but this struggle is what hones proper virtues (‘proper’ in the sense of readily agreeable virtues, such as loyalty, courage, integrity, and the value of honest labour). Against this we need an opposing force; in this case ‘civilization,’ characterized by deceit, decadence, conspiracy, and consort with evil forces including tyranny: civilization represents, therefore, the loss of freedom (with slavery the most direct manifestation of that, brutally represented in chains and other forms of imprisonment). In essence, then, we as readers are invited to the side of the ‘other,’ the one standing in opposition to civilization. Yet… we readers are ‘civilized.’ We are, in fact, the decadent products of a culture that has not only accepted the loss of freedom, but in fact codifies that loss to ease our discomfort (taxes, wage-slavery, etc). In this manner, we are offered the ‘escapist’ gift of Fantasy; but implicit in this is the notion that a) we need to escape; and b) that civilization is, at its core, evil.

     [So, is it not ironic that Leo Grin (a great fan of R.E. Howard) attacks modern fantasy as nihilistic? This man's incomprehension of Howard's own nihilism and anarchic rejection of civilization is, simply, jaw-dropping. Amusing digression ends.]

     This brings me (and I can almost hear the groans) to anthropology, although one could approach the notion of the ‘other’ from a whole host of theoretical stances, including mytho-Jungian, sociological, psychological, etc. The point is, the ‘other’ is universal to the human condition: it exists in every culture. I won’t go into too much detail here, since the singular point I want to make is that the notion of the ‘other’ is implicitly arrogant. Most cultures give themselves a collective identity (the ‘us’) and often attribute to themselves a name that means something like ‘the people,’ implying that the ‘others’ are not quite people. This has of course justified all manner of conflict and subjugation, from ancient times to the present. Accordingly, it is not unique to ‘civilization’ per se but to all cultures, regardless of their technological level and social organization. To be the (one and only) ‘people’ is an arrogant assertion: defined in terms of specific habits, behaviours, physical features, language, religion, and so on, but ultimately profoundly conceited in its essential world-view. By this means all manner of atrocity is possible when dealing with the ‘other’ (and all militaries impose psychological ritual to ensure that the soldier sees the enemy as an ‘other’ and therefore less than human and therefore permissible to kill).

     [It's not all grim: the notion of 'us' has essential virtues in collective identity, through the sharing of values, community cohesion, and so on; but it's probably fair to say that the pay-off is not quite a balanced one, given that the inherent weakness of 'us' hints at fundamental flaws in that kind of thinking, even if the notion of 'us' also happens to be necessary for a society to function]

     Barbarian societies can be as arrogant as civilized ones: the only difference is in the expression of that arrogance. At its core it’s all one, and seems to be a characteristic of the human condition (to this day, for all of our efforts at self-identifying ourselves as a global culture, we continue to impose borders, define select privileges, exercise extortion of weaker peoples, and in the rejection of one community (the neighbourhood) we raise countless others, defined by political afiliation, religion, skin colour or whatever).

     There are other implicit judgements to the ‘other.’ Among the Romans the ‘barbaric’ other was not viewed as less-than-human, but in terms of inherent weakness (of their culture). This justified subjugating them, occupying their lands, and enslaving as many of them as was economically possible. The notion of being ‘Roman’ was considered the height of civilized and cultural identity (though it came back to bite their Roman asses). [incidentally, and at the risk of offense, this is what made the teachings of Jesus so revolutionary, as they directly challenged the accepted definitions of self-identity and the institutions of authority in place to maintain them, only to be later co-opted and segmented into rival sects—more us's and more them's—in direct defiance of those very teachings. But one can also argue about the 'us' of believers and the 'them' of non-believers... I sense a vortex ahead so will end digression there]. This Roman stance was the notion of might-as-right and is of course yet another expression of arrogance. Later on, with the (re)-institution of slavery, drawing from Africa, the notion of less-than-human became the dominant ‘justification’ for brutalizing the ‘other.’ One can then turn to the treatment of Jews in Europe, and so on. The point is: history is the study of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and little else.

     So, how does all this relate to Karsa Orlong? Well, as has been noted, there was something of the need to prove that I could sustain a single narrative going on (or so I recall, the sense of being pissed off about something is always short-lived and usually ephemeral, although the answer to it can prove far-reaching, as is certainly the case with Karsa); but obviously more was going on. I wanted to address the fantasy trope of the ‘barbarian’ (from the north, no less, and isn’t it curious how so many heroic barbarians come down from the north?), but do so in recognition of demonstrable truths about warrior-based societies, as expressed in that intractable sense of superiority and its arrogant expression; and in recognizing the implicit ‘invitation’ to the reader (into a civilization-rejecting, civilization-hating barbarian ‘hero’), I wanted to, via a very close and therefore truncated point of view, make it damned uncomfortable in its ‘reality,’ and thereby comment on what I saw (and see) as a fundamentally nihilistic fantasy trope: the pure and noble barbarian. Because, whether recognized or not, that fantasy barbarian hero constitutes a rather backhanded attack on the very civilization that produces people with the leisure time to read (and read escapist literature at that).

     Within the scope of Karsa’s culture, he holds to his code of integrity and honour, even if they are initially friable in their assumptions (but then, so are all of our assumptions about ‘us’ and about the ‘other’). We observe the details of that culture, revealed bit by bit—with plenty of hints as to its flawed beliefs—and with each detail, we as readers are pushed further away from our own civilized sensibilities.

Bantam Press (UK)

     In one sense, consider Karsa’s tale at the opening of House of Chains as a walk back through time, to the world of, say, Beowulf. As much as we find Beowulf entertaining as a poem, and can even admire it, its ‘barbaric’ sensibilities are profoundly alien to us. Here we have a hero (Beowulf) who shows up as a stranger, only to spend an evening bragging about his superiority over all others, before ultimately usurping Hrothgar’s kingdom… if I may humbly ask this: if you saw Karsa Orlong sitting at Hrothgar’s table that night would you feel him out of place?

     The question is: how far from our own sensibilities can we be pushed before it’s too much? Is it his brazen arrogance? Is it the culturally-acceptable rapes? Is it the slaughter of townsfolk, the rejection of Karsa’s companions due to their failures—their weaknesses? Is it his unquenchable self-belief? His need for vengeance? His excessive vows pronounced seemingly without thought? His rejection of civilization? His rejection of enslavement? In other words, where in that Conanesque code of conduct do we reel back a step, shaking our heads?

     One of the areas of serious disturbance among readers is, quite understandably, the rape scenes. There is a counterpoint to these, found later in the novel, that includes Karsa’s very direct answer to it, which while on the surface may seem contradictory to his nature, is in fact anything but. Another area is the use of the word ‘children’ when voicing his exploits of slaughter (but then, if child-slaying is a universal taboo, what does that say about our culture, with its missing children; and what does it say about our foreign policies and/or our fanatic religious beliefs, that see children killed every day; or our notions of wealth, that see entire countries left to starve?).

     Having established this tight, myopic point of view of the ‘classic’ barbarian (reasonable for an isolated people of remote mountain regions)—and structuring the tale empty of overt authorial judgement yet relentless in its detail, one might then expect to see me take the ‘dark horde’ route and offer up civilization as the beacon of virtue and enlightenment. But then… maybe Howard had a point? For all that his nihilistic rejection of civilization, personified in the Hyborian Tales of Conan, is an invitation to despair (like a bullet to the head), it cannot be dismissed out of hand. Civilization has its problems, and even more distressing, there was indeed a kind of freedom in the pre-industrial age that we can only dream of (but how rose-tinted are those dreams, discounting as they do death-in-childbirth, intestinal parasites, disease, disfigurement, starvation, slavery and so on? Just how far into the ‘escapism’ from reality should the Fantasy genre offer up? Oh, and that is the sixty-four dollar question I’m slowly approaching: the expectations of the fantasy readership, but everything in its time…). Accordingly, Karsa’s introduction into civilization is one made in chains—in the stripping away of his ‘barbaric’ freedom. But arrogance is an unruly beast and he will not so easily be tamed, and so the struggle between barbarism and civilization becomes his own personal struggle (even Conan grumbled as much).

     This then is a journey of prejudices under assault.

     No wonder it makes so many people uncomfortable. We may not share Karsa’s prejudices, but we share prejudices. Because this is a fantasy novel and so incorporates adventure, this assault is personified with violence, and there is no need (for Karsa, anyway) to internalize it (Karsa is an outward character, not an inward character—and what you see is what you get and what you get is everything that he is, but that does not make him simple. In fact, he is probably the most complex character in the entire series, and in my recognition of that I saw that his tale could bear the weight of its own trilogy, and so it will).

DAW (US)

     We come at last to the expectation of the fantasy readership, and if you thought I walked a fine line with Karsa, wait till you read what follows. I am not just a writer of fantasy; I am a reader of fantasy, and so I can comfortably stand on both sides of this issue (as can all fantasy writers, barring those who claim to have never read fantasy, and those ones are either dissembling or they truly don’t have a clue). I have already broached the subject of escapism, but that is a universal notion made up of numerous and at times contradictory desires, depending on who you talk to. So it needs elaborating.

     One of the traditional appeals to epic fantasy literature of the ‘dark horde’ variety was its simplification of morality. There was clearly defined good and clearly defined evil. Good was good and evil was reprehensible. We were invited into a world where we knew who the good guys were, we knew who the bad guys were, and we knew that by the end the good guys would win, standing triumphant on the corpses of the bad guys (restless corpses were better, since that invited sequels). This is the child-like, play-ground appeal, and in appealing to the child in us it comforts by virtue of its simplicity; while at the same time its codifies the ‘good’ virtues and the ‘bad’ vices, which could in one sense serve as life-lessons. Accordingly, this kind of fantasy’s engagement with reality was one of reduction, infused with exotic ‘otherness’ to stir the wonder of an imaginative mind. Comforting stuff, affirming stuff—in fact, the very stuff that Leo Grin applauds.

     But that’s ‘epic’ fantasy. It’s not sword and sorcery fantasy: it’s not R.E. Howard (arguably, it’s not JRR either, but I’ll skirt that particular can of worms here). Howard’s barbarian hero promised chaos and destruction—well, he promised to maintain his barbaric virtues even if it took the world down around him (lovingly spoofed in Jakes’ ‘Mention My Name in Atlantis’). And it if did, well, that was a civilized world, wasn’t it, so good riddance. The sword and sorcery form of fantasy literature twisted things, but something of that simplistic, reductionist sensibility still remained. Good was good (if a little hard) and evil was evil. Only the stigmata had changed. The ‘good’ was the purity of the Cimmerian ice fields; the evil was the steamy civilized southlands with their serpent gods and all the rest. It’s escapism of the nihilistic vengeance sort, the fascistic scouring away of corrupting forces (that part Leo liked, so doubt), with the Northern (white-skinned) Man standing triumphant, a freed and happily large-breasted ex-slave wrapped lovingly round one leg, on her knees of course).

     Escapism is seductive, and what it might reveal about us is not always pleasant on reflection: it comes down to the flavours we prefer, the paths we find most inviting to our more fundamental belief systems—whether self-articulated or not, and that alone is enough to make any thinking person shiver.

     Karsa is all of that stripped bare; and in turn he infuriates, shocks, and on occasion makes the jaw drop in disbelief. But he is also the reality of the ‘barbaric’ and so represents an overt rejection of the romanticized, fantasized barbarian trope. Some people don’t like that. Fair enough.

     I come at last to my consideration of audience expectations. Believe me, I did consider them. I always consider them—but consideration does not guarantee a change of mind regarding the course I choose: more often, that consideration demands from me a challenge in exercising subtlety, and this is the nature of subversion as I work it into my novels (and series). Karsa subverts the ‘fantasy’ of the barbarian hero in Fantasy, and he does so because I feel that there is something dangerous in that romanticism, and in that vengeful refutation of civilization. In turn, however, Karsa’s tale also subverts the notion of civilization as virtuous savior and deliverer of enlightenment, because history tells us otherwise.

Tor Books

     So I ended up punching both ways. It’s a damned wonder I didn’t lose everyone after ‘House of Chains’ (or, more accurately, during the reading of ‘House of Chains.’). Structurally, I could not have introduced Karsa any earlier than I did. After three novels (all subversive in their own, unique ways) I was ready for something more overt—I was ready to take on the barbarian fantasy. At the same time, an entire novel of that relentless point of view would have been one bridge too far. The struggle between barbarism and civilization is not just specific to Karsa or even his tale: it is the struggle within each of us, as we battle desires with propriety, and as we battle need with responsibility. In the remainder of the series, those battles are played out on grander scales. It could be argued that civilization’s greatest gift is compassion—the extension of empathy, even unto strangers, and as such acts in half-formed opposition to barbarism with its pragmatic viciousness, and if compassion must be our shield, it is against our own baser natures.

     Karsa’s journey in this novel and in this series stand as stepping stones across this raging river of (invented) history. Later, he appears as a chorus in the ancient Greek sense, to remind us that we’re all playing with bones, not sticks and stones. To skip him is to miss a fundamental argument of this series: but then, as mentioned before, there are many forms of escapism, and the Fantasy genre speaks to them all at one time or another.

     The Malazan Book does not offer readers the escapism into any romantic notions of barbarism, or into a world of pure, white knight Good, and pure, black tyrant Evil. In fact, probably the boldest claim to escapist fantasy my series makes, is in offering up a world where we all have power, no matter our station, no matter our flaws and weaknesses—we all have power.

     I don’t know about you, but I’ll escape into that world every chance I can.

     Now, as Karsa would say: “Too many words. Witness.”

Cheers

Steven Erikson

Mark is a young Winnipeg goalie whose life unfolds between hockey periods. He idolizes his older brother Jack, a tattooed Adonis with perfection in his blood, and together they idolize the Winnipeg Jets. After the team abandons Winnipeg, the disillusioned brothers leave Canada More…for England so that Mark can try out for the minor-league Cardiff Devils.
 

One last word of warning: this is an adult novel. There are some graphic sex scenes that no-one under eighteen should read. The author has no wish to be castigated for corrupting young minds, etc.
 

Now you can read this novel. It is available for download (see links below) in a variety of formats:

PDF (Abobe Reader)

www.stevenerikson.com/fiction/when-she’s-gone2c.pdf
 

EPUB (Open eBook Standard)

www.stevenerikson.com/fiction/when-she’s-gone2c.epub
 

AWZ (Kindle)

www.stevenerikson.com/fiction/when-she’s-gone2c.awz
 

DOC (Word)

www.stevenerikson.com/fiction/when-she’s-gone2c.doc
 

PDB (eReader)

www.stevenerikson.com/fiction/when-she’s-gone2c.pdb
 

TXT (Text)

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Great Plains Publications (Canada)  •  Winnipeg (2004)  •  paperback  •  ISBN: 1-894283-53-8
 

  ]]> http://www.stevenerikson.com/index.php/when-shes-gone-2004/feed/ 0 http://www.stevenerikson.com/index.php/the-crippled-god-excerpt/ http://www.stevenerikson.com/index.php/the-crippled-god-excerpt/#comments Mon, 21 Mar 2011 14:30:52 +0000 Rodger Turner http://www.stevenerikson.com/?p=263 Chapter One

If you never knew

the worlds in my mind

your sense of loss

would be small pity

Bantam Press (UK)

and we’ll forget this on the trail.

Take what you’re given

and turn away the screwed face.

I do not deserve it,

no matter how narrow the strand

of your private shore.

If you will do your best

I’ll meet your eye.

It’s the clutch of arrows in hand

that I do not trust

bent to the smile hitching my way.

We aren’t meeting in sorrow

or some other suture

bridging scars.

We haven’t danced the samethin ice

and my sympathy for your troubles

I give freely without thought

of reciprocity or scales on balance.

It’s the decent thing, that’s all.

Even if that thing

is a stranger to so many.

But there will be secrets

you never knew

and I would not choose any other way.

All my arrows are buried and

the sandy reach is broad

and all that’s private

cools pinned on the altar.

Even the drips are gone,

that child of wants

with a mind full of worlds

and his reddened tears.

The days I feel mortal I so hate.

The days in my worlds,

are where I live for ever,

and should dawn ever arrive

I will to its light awaken

as one reborn.

     Poet’s Night iii.iv

     The Malazan Book of the Fallen

     Fisher kel Tath

COTILLION DREW TWO DAGGERS. HIS GAZE FELL TO THE BLADES.The blackened iron surfaces seemed to swirl, two pewter rivers oozing across pits and gouges, the edges ragged where armour and bone had slowed their thrusts. He studied the sickly sky’s lurid reflections for a moment longer, and then said, ‘I have no intention of explaining a damned thing.’ He looked up, eyes locking. ‘Do you understand me?’The figure facing him was incapable of expression. The tatters of rotted sinew and strips of skin were motionless upon the bones of temple, cheek and jaw. The eyes held nothing, nothing at all.Better, Cotillion decided, than jaded scepticism. Oh, how he was sick of that. ‘Tell me,’ he resumed, ‘what do you think you’re seeing here? Desperation? Panic? A failing of will, some inevitable decline crumbling to incompetence? Do you believe in failure, Edgewalker?’

     The apparition remained silent for a time, and then spoke in a broken, rasping voice. ‘You cannot be so…audacious. I asked if you believed in failure. Because I don’t. Even should you succeed, Cotillion. Beyond all expectation, beyond, even, all desire. They will still speak of your failure.’He sheathed his daggers. ‘And you know what they can do to themselves.’The head cocked, strands of hair dangling and drifting. ‘Arrogance?’

     ’Competence,’ Cotillion snapped in reply. ‘Doubt me at your peril. They will not believe you. I do not care, Edgewalker. This is what it is.’When he set out, he was not surprised that the deathless guardian followed. We have done this before. Dust and ashes puffed with each step. The wind moaned as if trapped in a crypt. ‘Almost time, Edgewalker. I know. You cannot win.’

     Cotillion paused, half turned. He smiled a ravaged smile. ‘That doesn’t mean I have to lose, does it?’Dust lifted, twisting, in her wake. From her shoulders trailed dozens of ghastly chains: bones bent and folded into irregular links, ancient bones in a thousand shades between white and deep brown. Scores of individuals made up each chain, malformed skulls matted with hair, fused spines, long bones, clacking and clattering. They drifted out behind her like a tyrant’s legacy and left a tangled skein of furrows in the withered earth that stretched for leagues.Her pace did not slow, as steady as the sun’s own crawl to the horizon ahead, as inexorable as the darkness overtaking her. She was indifferent to notions of irony, and the bitter taste of irreverent mockery that could so sting the palate. In this there was only necessity, the hungriest of gods. She had known imprisonment. The memories remained fierce, but such recollections were not those of crypt walls and unlit tombs. Darkness, indeed, but also pressure. Terrible, unbearable pressure.Madness was a demon and it lived in a world of helpless need, a thousand desires unanswered, a world without resolution. Madness, yes, she had known that demon. They had bargained with coins of pain, and those coins came from a vault that never emptied. She’d once known such wealth.And still the darkness pursued.

     Walking, a thing of hairless pate, skin the hue of bleached papyrus, elongated limbs that moved with uncanny grace. The landscape surrounding her was empty, flat on all sides but ahead, where a worn-down range of colourless hills ran a wavering claw along the horizon.

     She had brought her ancestors with her and they rattled a chaotic chorus. She had not left a single one behind. Every tomb of her line now gaped empty, as hollowed out as the skulls she’d plundered from their sarcophagi. Silence ever spoke of absence. Silence was the enemy of life and she would have none of it. No, they talked in mutters and grating scrapes, her perfect ancestors, and they were the voices of her private song, keeping the demon at bay. She was done with bargains.Long ago, she knew, the worlds – pallid islands in the Abyss – crawled with creatures. Their thoughts were blunt and simple, and beyond those thoughts there was nothing but murk, an abyss of ignorance and fear. When the first glimmers awakened in that confused gloom, they quickly flickered alight, burning like spot fires. But the mind did not awaken to itself on strains of glory. Not beauty, not even love. It did not stir with laughter or triumph. Those fires, snapping to life, all belonged to one thing and one thing only.The first word of sentience was justice. A word to feed indignation. A word empowering the will to change the world and all its cruel circumstances, a word to bring righteousness to brutal infamy. Justice, bursting to life in the black soil of indifferent nature. Justice, to bind families, to build cities, to invent and to defend, to fashion laws and prohibitions, to hammer the unruly mettle of gods into religions. All the prescribed beliefs rose out twisting and branching from that single root, losing themselves in the blinding sky.But she and her kind had stayed wrapped about the base of that vast tree, forgotten, crushed down; and in their place, beneath stones, bound in roots and dark earth, they were witness to the corruption of justice, to its loss of meaning, to its betrayal.Gods and mortals, twisting truths, had in a host of deeds stained what once had been pure.

     Well, the end was coming. The end, dear ones, is coming. There would be no more children, rising from the bones and rubble, to build anew all that had been lost. Was there even one among them, after all, who had not suckled at the teat of corruption? Oh, they fed their inner fires, yet they hoarded the light, the warmth, as if justice belonged to them alone.She was appalled. She seethed with contempt. Justice was incandescent within her, and it was a fire growing day by day, as the wretched heart of the Chained One leaked out its endless streams of blood. Twelve Pures remained, feeding. Twelve. Perhaps there were others, lost in far-flung places, but she knew nothing of them. No, these twelve, they would be the faces of the final storm, and, pre-eminent among them all, she would stand at that storm’s centre.She had been given her name for this very purpose, long ago now. The Forkrul Assail were nothing if not patient. But patience itself was yet one more lost virtue.Chains of bone trailing, Calm walked across the plain, as the day’s light died behind her.

     ’God failed us.’Trembling, sick to his stomach as something cold, foreign, coursed through his veins, Aparal Forge clenched his jaw to stifle a retort. This vengeance is older than any cause you care to invent, and no matter how often you utter those words, Son of Light, the lies and madness open like flowers beneath the sun. And before me I see nothing but lurid fields of red, stretching out on all sides.This wasn’t their battle, not their war. Who fashioned this law that said the child must pick up the father’s sword? And dear Father, did you really mean this to be? Did she not abandon her consort and take you for her own? Did you not command us to peace? Did you not say to us that we children must be as one beneath the newborn sky of your union?What crime awoke us to this?

     I can’t even remember.’Do you feel it, Aparal? The power?’

     ’I feel it, Kadagar.’ They’d moved away from the others, but not so far as to escape the agonized cries, the growl of the Hounds, or, drifting out over the broken rocks in ghostly streams, the blistering breath of cold upon their backs. Before them rose the infernal barrier. A wall of imprisoned souls. An eternally crashing wave of despair. He stared at the gaping faces through the mottled veil, studied the pitted horror in their eyes. You were no different, were you? Awkward with your inheritance, the heavy blade turning this way and that in your hand.Why should we pay for someone else’s hatred?’What so troubles you, Aparal? We cannot know the reason for our god’s absence, Lord. I fear it is presumptuous of us to speak of his failure.’Kadagar Fant was silent.

     Aparal closed his eyes. He should never have spoken. I do not learn. He walked a bloody path to rule and the pools in the mud still gleam red. The air about Kadagar remains brittle. This flower shivers to secret winds. He is dangerous, so very dangerous.

     ’The Priests spoke of impostors and tricksters, Aparal.’ Kadagar’s tone was even, devoid of inflection. It was the voice he used when furious. ‘What god would permit that? We are abandoned. The path before us now belongs to no one else – it is ours to choose.’Ours. Yes, you speak for us all, even as we cringe at our own confessions. ‘Forgive my words, Lord. I am made ill – the taste— We had no choice in that, Aparal. What sickens you is the bitter flavour of its pain. It passes.’ Kadagar smiled and clapped him on the back. ‘I understand your momentary weakness. We shall forget your doubts, yes? And never again speak of them. We are friends, after all, and I would be most distressed to be forced to brand you a traitor. Set upon the White Wall… I would kneel and weep, my friend. I would.’A spasm of alien fury hissed through Aparal and he shivered. Abyss! Mane of Chaos, I feel you! ‘My life is yours to command, Lord. Lord of Light!’

     Aparal turned, as did Kadagar.

     Blood streaming from his mouth, Iparth Erule staggered closer, eyes wide and fixed upon Kadagar. ‘My lord, Uhandahl, who was last to drink, has just died. He – he tore out his own throat! Then it is done,’ Kadagar replied. ‘How many?’Iparth licked his lips, visibly flinched at the taste, and then said, ‘You are the First of Thirteen, Lord.’Smiling, Kadagar stepped past Iparth. ‘Kessobahn still breathes? Yes. It is said it can bleed for centuries—’

     ’But the blood is now poison,’ Kadagar said, nodding. ‘The wounding must be fresh, the power clean. Thirteen, you say. Excellent.’Aparal stared at the dragon staked to the slope behind Iparth Erule. The enormous spears pinning it to the ground were black with gore and dried blood. He could feel the Eleint’s pain, pouring from it in waves. Again and again it tried to lift its head, eyes blazing, jaws snapping, but the vast trap held. The four surviving Hounds of Light circled at a distance, hackles raised as they eyed the dragon. Seeing them, Aparal hugged himself. Another mad gamble. Another bitter failure. Lord of Light, Kadagar Fant, you have not done well in the world beyond.Beyond this terrible vista, and facing the vertical ocean of deathless souls as if in mocking madness, rose the White Wall, which hid the decrepit remnants of the Liosan city of Saranas. The faint elongated dark streaks lining it, descending just beneath the crenellated battlements, were all he could make out of the brothers and sisters who had been condemned as traitors to the cause. Below their withered corpses ran the stains from everything their bodies had drained down the alabaster facing. You would kneel and weep, would you, my friend?Iparth asked, ‘My lord, do we leave the Eleint as it is? No. I propose something far more fitting. Assemble the others. We shall veer.’

     Aparal started but did not turn. ‘Lord— We are Kessobahn’s children now, Aparal. A new father, to replace the one who abandoned us. Osserc is dead in our eyes and shall remain so. Even Father Light kneels broken, useless and blind.’Aparal’s eyes held on Kessobahn. Utter such blasphemies often enough and they become banal, and all shock fades. The gods lose their power, and we rise to stand in their stead. The ancient dragon wept blood, and in those vast, alien eyes there was nothing but rage. Our father. Your pain, your blood, our gift to you. Alas, it is the only gift we understand. ‘And once we have veered? Why, Aparal, we shall tear the Eleint apart.’He’d known what the answer would be and he nodded. Our father.

     Your pain, your blood, our gift. Celebrate our rebirth, O Father Kessobahn, with your death. And for you, there shall be no return.’I have nothing with which to bargain. What brings you to me? No, I see that. My broken servant cannot travel far, even in his dreams. Crippled, yes, my precious flesh and bones upon this wretched world. Have you seen his flock? What blessing can he bestow? Why, naught but misery and suffering, and still they gather, the mobs, the clamouring, beseeching mobs. Oh, I once looked upon them with contempt. I once revelled in their pathos, their ill choices and their sorry luck. Their stupidity.’But no one chooses their span of wits. They are each and all born with what they have, that and nothing more. Through my servant I see into their eyes – when I so dare – and they give me a look, a strange look, one that for a long time I could not understand. Hungry, of course, so brimming with need. But I am the Foreign God. The Chained One. The Fallen One, and my holy word is Pain. ‘Yet those eyes implored.

     ’I now comprehend. What do they ask of me? Those dull fools glittering with fears, those horrid expressions to make a witness cringe. What do they want? I will answer you. They want my pity.

     ’They understand, you see, their own paltry scant coins in their bag of wits. They know they lack intelligence, and that this has cursed them and their lives. They have struggled and lashed out, from the very beginning. No, do not look at me that way, you of smooth and subtle thought, you give your sympathy too quickly and therein hide your belief in your own superiority. I do not deny your cleverness, but I question your compassion.

Tor (USA)

     ’They wanted my pity. They have it. I am the god that answers prayers – can you or any other god make that claim? See how I have changed. My pain, which I held on to so selfishly, now reaches out like a broken hand. We touch in understanding, we flinch at the touch. I am one with them all, now.

     ’You surprise me. I had not believed this to be a thing of value. What worth compassion? How many columns of coins balance the scales? My servant once dreamed of wealth. A buried treasure in the hills. Sitting on his withered legs, he pleaded with passers-by in the street. Now you look at me here, too broken to move, deep in the fumes, and the wind slaps these tent walls without rest. No need to bargain. My servant and I have both lost the desire to beg. You want my pity? I give it. Freely.

     ’Need I tell you of my pain? I look in your eyes and find the answer.

     ’It is my last play, but you understand that. My last. Should I fail…

     ’Very well. There is no secret to this. I will gather the poison, then. In the thunder of my pain, yes. Where else?

     ’Death? Since when is death failure?

     ’Forgive the cough. It was meant to be laughter. Go then, wring your promises with those upstarts.

     ’That is all faith is, you know. Pity for our souls. Ask my servant and he will tell you. God looks into your eyes, and God cringes.’

     Three dragons chained for their sins. At the thought Cotillion sighed, suddenly morose. He stood twenty paces away, ankle deep in soft ash. Ascendancy, he reflected, was not quite as long a stride from the mundane as he would have liked. His throat felt tight, as if his air passages were constricted. The muscles of his shoulders ached and dull thunder pounded behind his eyes. He stared at the imprisoned Eleint lying so gaunt and deathly amidst drifts of dust, feeling…mortal. Abyss take me, but I’m tired.

     Edgewalker moved up alongside him, silent and spectral.

     ’Bones and not much else,’ Cotillion muttered.

     ’Do not be fooled,’ Edgewalker warned. ‘Flesh, skin, they are raiment. Worn or cast off as suits them. See the chains? They have been tested. Heads lifting…the scent of freedom.’

     ’How did you feel, Edgewalker, when everything you held fell to pieces in your hands? Did failure arrive like a wall of fire?’ He turned to regard the apparition. ‘Those tatters have the look of scorching, come to think of it. Do you remember that moment, when you lost everything? Did the world echo to your howl?’

     ’If you seek to torment me, Cotillion—’

     ’No, I would not do that. Forgive me.’

     ’If these are your fears, however…’

     ’No, not my fears. Not at all. They are my weapons.’

     Edgewalker seemed to shiver, or perhaps some shift of the ash beneath his rotted moccasins sent a tremble through him, a brief moment of imbalance. Settling once more, the Elder fixed Cotillion with the withered dark of its eyes. ‘You, Lord of Assassins, are no healer.’

     No. Someone cut out my unease, please. Make clean the incision, take out what’s ill and leave me free of it. We are sickened by the unknown, but knowledge can prove poisonous. And drifting lost between the two is no better. ‘There is more than one path to salvation.’

     ’It is curious. What is?’

     ’Your words…in another voice, coming from…someone else, would leave a listener calmed, reassured. From you, alas, they could chill a mortal soul to its very core.’

     ’This is what I am,’ Cotillion said.Edgewalker nodded. ‘It is what you are, yes.’Cotillion advanced another six paces, eyes on the nearest dragon, the gleaming bones of the skull visible between strips of rotted hide. ‘Eloth,’ he said, ‘I would hear your voice. Shall we bargain again, Usurper?’The voice was male, but such details were in the habit of changing on a whim. Still, he frowned, trying to recall the last time. ‘Kalse, Ampelas, you will each have your turn. Do I now speak with Eloth?’

     ’I am Eloth. What is it about my voice that so troubles you, Usurper? I sense your suspicion. I needed to be certain,’ Cotillion replied. ‘And now I am. You are indeed Mockra.’A new draconic voice rumbled laughter through Cotillion’s skull, and then said, ‘Be careful, Assassin, she is the mistress of deceit.’Cotillion’s brows lifted. ‘Deceit? Pray not, I beg you. I am too innocent to know much about such things. Eloth, I see you here in chains, and yet in mortal realms your voice has been heard. It seems you are not quite the prisoner you once were.’

     ’Sleep slips the cruellest chains, Usurper. My dreams rise on wings and I am free. Do you now tell me that such freedom was more than delusion? I am shocked unto disbelief.’Cotillion grimaced. ‘Kalse, what do you dream of? Ice.’

     Does that surprise me? ‘Ampelas? The rain that burns, Lord of Assassins, deep in shadow. And such a grisly shadow. Shall we three whisper divinations now? All my truths are chained here, it is only the lies that fly free. Yet there was one dream, one that still burns fresh in my mind. Will you hear my confession? My rope is not quite as frayed as you think, Ampelas. You would do better to describe your dream to Kalse. Consider that advice my gift.’ He paused, glanced back at Edgewalker for a moment, and then faced the dragons once more. ‘Now then, let us bargain for real.’

     ’There is no value in that,’ Ampelas said. ‘You have nothing to give us. But I do.’

     Edgewalker suddenly spoke behind him. ‘Cotillion— Freedom,’ said Cotillion.Silence.

     He smiled. ‘A fine start. Eloth, will you dream for me? Kalse and Ampelas have shared your gift. They looked upon one another with faces of stone. There was pain. There was fire. An eye opened and it looked upon the Abyss. Lord of Knives, my kin in chains are…dismayed. Lord, I will dream for you. Speak on.’

     ’Listen carefully then,’ Cotillion said. ‘This is how it must be.’The depths of the canyon were unlit, swallowed in eternal night far beneath the ocean’s surface. Crevasses gaped in darkness, a world’s death and decay streaming down in ceaseless rain, and the currents whipped in fierce torrents that stirred sediments into spinning vortices, lifting like whirlwinds. Flanked by the submerged crags of the canyon’s ravaged cliffs, a flat plain stretched out, and in the centre a lurid red flame flickered to life, solitary, almost lost in the vastness.Shifting the almost weightless burden resting on one shoulder, Mael paused to squint at that improbable fire. Then he set out, making straight for it.Lifeless rain falling to the depths, savage currents whipping it back up into the light, where living creatures fed on the rich soup, only to eventually die and sink back down. Such an elegant exchange, the living and the dead, the light and the lightless, the world above and the world below. Almost as if someone had planned it.He could now make out the hunched figure beside the flames, hands held out to the dubious heat. Tiny sea creatures swarmed in the reddish bloom of light like moths. The fire emerged pulsing from a rent in the floor of the canyon, gases bubbling upward.

     Mael halted before the figure, shrugging off the wrapped corpse that had been balanced on his shoulder. As it rocked down to the silts tiny scavengers rushed towards it, only to spin away without alighting. Faint clouds billowed as the wrapped body settled in the mud.The voice of K’rul, Elder God of the Warrens, drifted out from within his hood. ‘If all existence is a dialogue, how is it there is still so much left unsaid?’Mael scratched the stubble on his jaw. ‘Me with mine, you with yours, him with his, and yet still we fail to convince the world of its inherent absurdity.’K'rul shrugged. ‘Him with his. Yes. Odd that of all the gods, he alone discovered this mad, and maddening, secret. The dawn to come…shall we leave it to him? Well,’ Mael grunted, ‘first we need to survive the night. I have brought the one you sought.’

     ’I see that. Thank you, old friend. Now tell me, what of the Old Witch?’Mael grimaced. ‘The same. She tries again, but the one she has chosen…well, let us say that Onos T’oolan possesses depths Olar Ethil cannot hope to comprehend, and she will, I fear, come to rue her choice. A man rides before him.’Mael nodded. ‘A man rides before him. It is…heartbreaking. “Against a broken heart, even absurdity falters.”’

     ’“Because words fall away.”’Fingers fluttered in the glow. ‘“A dialogue of silence.” “That deafens.”’ Mael looked off into the gloomy distance. ‘Blind Gallan and his damnable poems.’ Across the colourless floor armies of sightless crabs were on the march, drawn to the alien light and heat. He squinted at them. ‘Many died. Errastas had his suspicions, and that is all the Errant needs. Terrible mischance, or deadly nudge. They were as she said they would be. Unwitnessed.’ K’rul lifted his head, the empty hood now gaping in Mael’s direction. ‘Has he won, then?’Mael’s wiry brows rose. ‘You do not know?’

     ’That close to Kaminsod’s heart, the warrens are a mass of wounds and violence.’Mael glanced down at the wrapped corpse. ‘Brys was there. Through his tears I saw.’ He was silent for a long moment, reliving someone else’s memories. He suddenly hugged himself, released a ragged breath. ‘In the name of the Abyss, those Bonehunters were something to behold!’The vague hints of a face seemed to find shape inside the hood’s darkness, a gleam of teeth. ‘Truly? Mael – truly?’Emotion growled out in his words. ‘This is not done. Errastas has made a terrible mistake. Gods, they all have!’

     After a long moment, K’rul sighed, gaze returning to the fire. His pallid hands hovered above the pulsing glow of burning rock. ‘I shall not remain blind. Two children. Twins. Mael, it seems we shall defy the Adjunct Tavore Paran’s wish to be for ever unknown to us, unknown to everyone. What does it mean, this desire to be unwitnessed? I do not understand.’Mael shook his head. ‘There is such pain in her…no, I dare not get close. She stood before us, in the throne room, like a child with a terrible secret, guilt and shame beyond all measure. Perhaps my guest here will have the answer. Is this why you wanted him? To salve mere curiosity? Is this to be a voyeur’s game, K’rul? Into a woman’s broken heart? Partly,’ K’rul acknowledged. ‘But not out of cruelty, or the lure of the forbidden. Her heart must remain her own, immune to all assault.’ The god regarded the wrapped corpse. ‘No, this one’s flesh is dead, but his soul remains strong, trapped in its own nightmare of guilt. I would see it freed of that.’

     ’How? Poised to act, when the moment comes. Poised to act. A life for a death, and it will have to do.’Mael sighed unevenly. ‘Then it falls on her shoulders. A lone woman. An army already mauled. With allies fevered with lust for the coming war. An enemy awaiting them all, unbowed, with inhuman confidence, so eager to spring the perfect trap.’ He lifted his hands to his face. ‘A mortal woman who refuses to speak. Yet they follow.’

     ’They follow. Mael, do they truly have a chance?’

     He looked down at K’rul. ‘The Malazan Empire conjured them out of nothing. Dassem’s First Sword, the Bridgeburners, and now the Bonehunters. What can I tell you? It is as if they were born of another age, a golden age lost to the past, and the thing of it is: they don’t even know it. Perhaps that is why she wishes them to remain unwitnessed in all that they do. What do you mean?’

     ’She doesn’t want the rest of the world to be reminded of what they once were.’K'rul seemed to study the fire. Eventually, he said, ‘In these dark waters, one cannot feel one’s own tears.’Mael’s reply was bitter. ‘Why do you think I live here? If I have not challenged myself, if I have not striven to give it all I have, then will I stand head bowed before the world’s judgement. But if I am to be accused of being cleverer than I am – and how is this even possible? – or, gods forbid, too aware of every echo sent charging out into the night, to bounce and cavort, to reverberate like a sword’s edge on a shield rim, if, in other words, I am to be castigated for heeding my sensitivities, well, then something rises like fire within me. I am, and I use the word most cogently, incensed.’

     Udinaas snorted. The page was torn below this, as if the author’s anger had sent him or her into an apoplectic frenzy. He wondered at this unknown writer’s detractors, real or imagined, and he thought back to the times, long ago, when someone’s fist had answered his own too-quick, too-sharp wits. Children were skilled at sensing such things, the boy too smart for his own good, and they knew what needed doing about it. Beat him down, lads. Serves him right. So he was sympathetic to the spirit of the long-dead writer.’But then, you old fool, they’re dust and your words live on. Who now has the last laugh?’The rotting wood surrounding him gave back no answer. Sighing, Udinaas tossed the fragment aside, watched flakes of parchment drift down like ashes. ‘Oh, what do I care? Not much longer, no, not much longer.’ The oil lamp was guttering out, used up, and the chill had crept back in. He couldn’t feel his hands. Old legacies, no one could shake them, these grinning stalkers.Ulshun Pral had predicted more snow, and snow was something he had grown to despise. ‘As if the sky itself was dying. You hear that, Fear Sengar? I’m almost ready to take up your tale. Who could have imagined that legacy?’Groaning at the stiffness in his limbs, he clambered out of the ship’s hold, emerged blinking on the slanted deck, the wind battering at his face. ‘World of white, what are you telling us? That all is not well. That the fates have set a siege upon us.’

     He had taken to talking to himself. That way, no one else had to cry, and he was tired of those glistening tears on weathered faces. Yes, he could thaw them all with a handful of words. But that heat inside, well, it had nowhere to go, did it? He gave it to the cold, empty air instead. Not a single frozen tear in sight.Udinaas climbed over the ship’s side, dropped down into knee-deep snow, and then took a fresh path back to the camp in the shelter of rocks, his thick, fur-lined moccasins forcing him to waddle as he ploughed through the drifts. He could smell woodsmoke.

     He caught sight of the emlava halfway to the camp. The two enormous cats stood perched on high rocks, their silvered backs blending with the white sky. Watching him. ‘So, you’re back. That’s not good, is it?’ He felt their eyes tracking him as he went on. Time was slowing down. He knew that was impossible, but he could imagine an entire world buried deep in snow, a place devoid of animals, a place where seasons froze into one and that season did not end, ever. He could imagine the choking down of every choice until not a single one was left.

     ’A man can do it. Why not an entire world?’ The snow and wind gave no answer, beyond the brutal retort that was indifference.

     In between the rocks, now, the bitter wind falling off, the smoke stinging awake his nostrils. There was hunger in the camp, there was white everywhere else. And still the Imass sang their songs. ‘Not enough,’ Udinaas muttered, breath pluming. ‘It’s just not, my friends. Face it, she’s dying. Our dear little child.’

     He wondered if Silchas Ruin had known all along. This imminent failure. ‘All dreams die in the end. Of all people I should know that. Dreams of sleep, dreams of the future, sooner or later comes the cold, hard dawn.’ Walking past the snow-humped yurts, scowling against the droning songs drifting out around the hide flaps, he made for the trail leading to the cave.

     Dirty ice crusted the rocky maw, like frozen froth. Once within its shelter the air warmed around him, damp and smelling of salts. He stamped the snow from his moccasins, and then strode into the twisting, stony corridor, hands out to the sides, fingertips brushing the wet stone. ‘Oh,’ he said under his breath, ‘but you’re a cold womb, aren’t you?’

     Ahead he heard voices, or, rather, one voice. Heed your sensitivities now, Udinaas. She stands unbowed, for ever unbowed. This is what love can do, I suppose.

     The old stains on the stone floor remained, timeless reminders of blood spilled and lives lost in this wretched chamber. He could almost hear the echoes, sword and spear, the gasp of desperate breaths. Fear Sengar, I would swear your brother stands there still. Silchas Ruin staggering back, step by step, his scowl of disbelief like a mask he’d never worn before, and was it not ill-fitting? It surely was. Onrack T’emlava stood to the right of his wife. Ulshun Pral crouched a few paces to Kilava’s left. Before them all reared a withered, sickly edifice. Dying House, your cauldron is cracked. She was a flawed seed.

     Kilava turned upon his arrival, her dark animal eyes narrowing as would a hunting cat’s as it gathered to pounce. ‘Thought you might have sailed away, Udinaas.’

     ’The charts lead nowhere, Kilava Onass, as I’m sure the pilot observed upon arriving in the middle of a plain. Is there anything more forlorn than a foundered ship, I wonder?’

     Onrack spoke. ‘Friend Udinaas, I welcome your wisdom. Kilava speaks of the awakening of the Jaghut, the hunger of the Eleint, and the hand of the Forkrul Assail, which never trembles. Rud Elalle and Silchas Ruin have vanished – she cannot sense them and she fears the worst.’

     ’My son lives.’

     Kilava stepped closer. ‘You cannot know that.’

     Udinaas shrugged. ‘He took more from his mother than Menandore ever imagined. When she faced that Malazan wizard, when she sought to draw upon her power, well, it was one of many fatal surprises that day.’ His gaze fell to those blackened stains. ‘What happened to our heroic outcome, Fear? To the salvation you gave your life to win? “If I have not challenged myself, if I have not striven to give it all I have, then will I stand head bowed before the world’s judgement.” But the world’s judgement is cruel.’

     ’We contemplate a journey from this realm,’ said Onrack.

     Udinaas glanced at Ulshun Pral. ‘Do you agree?’

     The warrior freed one hand to a flurry of fluid gestures.

     Udinaas grunted. Before the spoken word, before song, there was this. But the hand speaks in broken tongue. The cipher here belongs to his posture – a nomad’s squat. No one fears walking, or the unfolding of a new world. Errant take me, this innocence stabs the heart. ‘You won’t like what you will find. Not the fiercest beast of this world stands a chance against my kind.’ He glared at Onrack. ‘What do you think that Ritual was all about? The one that stole death from your people?’

     ’Hurtful as his words are,’ growled Kilava, ‘Udinaas speaks the truth.’ She faced the Azath once more. ‘We can defend this gate. We can stop them.’

     ’And die,’ snapped Udinaas.

     ’No,’ she retorted, wheeling to face him. ‘You will lead my children from here, Udinaas. Into your world. I will remain. I thought you said “we”, Kilava.’

     ’Summon your son. No.’

     Her eyes flared.’Find someone else to join you in your last battle. I will stand with her,’ said Onrack.’You will not,’ hissed Kilava. ‘You are mortal—’

     ’And you are not, my love? I am a Bonecaster. I bore a First Hero who became a god.’ Her face twisted but there was anguish in her eyes. ‘Husband, I shall indeed summon allies to this battle. But you, you must go with our son, and with Udinaas.’ She pointed a taloned finger at the Letherii. ‘Lead them into your world. Find a place for them— A place? Kilava, they are as the beasts of my world – there are no places left! You must find one.’

     Do you hear this, Fear Sengar? I am not to be you after all. No, I am to be Hull Beddict, another doomed brother. ‘Follow me! Listen to all my promises! Die.’ ‘There is nowhere,’ he said, throat tight with grief, ‘In all the world…nowhere. We leave nothing well enough alone. Not ever. The Imass can make claim to empty lands, yes, until someone casts upon it a covetous eye. And then they will begin killing you. Collecting hides and scalps. They will poison your food. Rape your daughters. All in the name of pacification, or resettlement, or whatever other euphemistic bhederin shit they choose to spit out. And the sooner you’re all dead the better, so they can forget you ever existed in the first place. Guilt is the first weed we pluck, to keep the garden pretty and smelling sweet. That is what we do, and you cannot stop us – you never could. No one can.’

     Kilava’s expression was flat. ‘You can be stopped. You will be stopped.’Udinaas shook his head.

     ’Lead them into your world, Udinaas. Fight for them. I do not mean to fall here, and if you imagine I am not capable of protecting my children, then you do not know me. You condemn me, Kilava. Summon your son.’

     ’No. Then you condemn yourself, Udinaas.’

     ’Will you speak so coolly when my fate extends to your children as well?’When it seemed that no answer was forthcoming, Udinaas sighed and, turning about, set off for the outside, for the cold and the snow, and the whiteness and the freezing of time itself. To his anguish, Onrack followed.’My friend.’

     ’I'm sorry, Onrack, I can’t tell you anything helpful – nothing to ease your mind. Yet,’ rumbled the warrior, ‘you believe you have an answer. Hardly.’

     ’Nonetheless.’

     Errant’s nudge, it’s hopeless. Oh, watch me walk with such resolve. Lead you all, yes. Bold Hull Beddict has returned, to repeat his host of crimes one more time.Still hunting for heroes, Fear Sengar? Best turn away, now.’You will lead us, Udinaas. So it seems.’

     Onrack sighed.Beyond the cave mouth, the snow whipped down.

     He had sought a way out. He had flung himself from the conflagration. But even the power of the Azath could not breach Akhrast Korvalain, and so he had been cast down, his mind shattered, the fragments drowning in a sea of alien blood. Would he recover? Calm did not know for certain, but she intended to take no chances. Besides, the latent power within him remained dangerous, a threat to all their plans. It could be used against them, and that was not acceptable. No, better to turn this weapon, to take it into my own hand and wield it against the enemies I know I must soon face. Or, if that need proves unnecessary, kill him.Before either could ever happen, however, she would have to return here. And do what must be done. I would do it now, if not for the risk. Should he awaken, should he force my hand…no, too soon. We are not ready for that.Calm stood over the body, studying him, the angular features, the tusks, the faint flush that hinted of fever. Then she spoke to her ancestors. ‘Take him. Bind him. Weave your sorcery – he must remain unconscious. The risk of his awakening is too great. I will return before too long. Take him. Bind him.’ The chains of bones slithered out like serpents, plunging into the hard ground, ensnaring the body’s limbs, round the neck, across the torso, stitching him spread-eagled to this hilltop.She saw the bones trembling. ‘Yes, I understand. His power is too immense – that is why he must be kept unconscious. But there is something else I can do.’ She stepped closer and crouched. Her right hand darted out, the fingers stiff as blades, and stabbed a deep hole in the man’s side. She gasped and almost reeled back – was it too much? Had she awoken him?Blood seeped down from the wound.

     But Icarium did not move.

     Calm released a long, unsteady breath. ‘Keep the blood trickling,’ she told her ancestors. ‘Feed on his power.’Straightening, she lifted her gaze, studied the horizon on all sides. The old lands of the Elan. But they had done away with them, leaving nothing but the elliptical boulders that once held down the sides of tents, and the old blinds and runs from an even older time; of the great animals that once dwelt in this plain not even a single herd remained, domestic or wild. There was, she observed, admirable perfection in this new state of things. Without criminals, there can be no crime. Without crime, no victims. The wind moaned and none stood against it to give answer.Perfect adjudication, it tasted of paradise.Reborn. Paradise reborn. From this empty plain, the world. From this promise, the future.Soon.

     She set out, leaving the hill behind, and with it the body of Icarium, bound to the earth in chains of bone. When she returned again to this place, she would be flush with triumph. Or in desperate need. If the latter, she would awaken him. If the former, she would grasp his head in her hands, and with a single, savage twist, break the abomination’s neck.

     And no matter which decision awaited her, on that day her ancestors would sing with joy.Crooked upon the mound of rubbish, the stronghold’s throne was burning in the courtyard below. Smoke, grey and black, rose in a column until it lifted past the ramparts, where the wind tore it apart, shreds drifting like banners high above the ravaged valley.Half-naked children scampered across the battlements, their voices cutting sharp through the clatter and groan from the main gate, where the masons were repairing yesterday’s damage. A watch was turning over and the High Fist listened to commands snapping like flags behind him. He blinked sweat and grit from his eyes and leaned, with some caution, on the eroded merlon, his narrowed gaze scanning the well-ordered enemy camp spread out along the valley floor.From the rooftop platform of the square tower on his right a child of no more than nine or ten years was struggling with what had once been a signal kite, straining to hold it overhead, until with thudding wing-flaps the tattered silk dragon lifted suddenly into the air, spinning and wheeling. Ganoes Paran squinted up at it. The dragon’s long tail flashed silver in the midday sunlight. The same tail, he recalled, that had been in the sky above the stronghold the day of the conquest.What had the defenders been signalling then?

     Distress. Help.He stared up at the kite, watched it climb ever higher. Until the wind-spun smoke devoured it.Hearing a familiar curse, he turned to see the Host’s High Mage struggling past a knot of children at the top of the stairs, his face twisted in disgust as if navigating a mob of lepers. The fish spine clenched between his teeth jerking up and down in agitation, he strode up to the High Fist.’I swear there’re more of them than yesterday, and how is that possible? They don’t leap out of someone’s hip already half grown, do they?’

     ’Still creeping out from the caves,’ Ganoes Paran said, fixing his attention on the enemy ranks once more.Noto Boil grunted. ‘And that’s another thing. Whoever thought a cave was a decent place to live? Rank, dripping, crawling with vermin. There will be disease, mark my words, High Fist, and the Host has had quite enough of that. Instruct Fist Bude to assemble a clean-up crew,’ Paran said. ‘Which squads got into the rum store? Seventh, Tenth and Third, Second Company. Captain Sweetcreek’s sappers.’

     Noto Boil plucked the spine from his mouth and examined the pink point. He then leaned over the wall and spat something red. ‘Aye, sir. Hers.’Paran smiled. ‘Well then. Aye, serves them right. So, if they stir up more vermin— They are children, mage, not rats. Orphaned children. Really? Those white bony ones make my skin crawl, that’s all I’m saying, sir.’ He reinserted the spine and it went up and down. ‘Tell me again how this is better than Aren.’

     ’Noto Boil, as High Fist I answer only to the Empress.’The mage snorted. ‘Only she’s dead. Which means I answer to no one, not even you. And that’s the problem, nailed straight to the tree, sir. Nailed to the tree.’ Seemingly satisfied with that statement, he pointed with a nod and jab of the fish spine in his mouth. ‘Lots of scurrying about over there. Another attack coming?’Paran shrugged. ‘They’re still…upset.’

     ’You know, if they ever decide to call our bluff— Who says I’m bluffing, Boil?’The man bit something that made him wince. ‘What I mean is, sir, no one’s denying you got talents and such, but those two commanders over there, well, if they get tired of throwing Watered and Shriven against us – if they just up and march themselves over here, in person, well…that’s what I meant, sir. I believe I gave you a command a short while ago.’Noto scowled. ‘Fist Bude, aye. The caves.’ He turned to leave and then paused and looked back. ‘They see you, you know. Standing here day after day. Taunting them.’

     ’I wonder,’ Paran mused as he returned his attention to the enemy camp.’Sir?’

     ’The Siege of Pale. Moon’s Spawn just sat over the city. Months, years. Its lord never showed himself, until the day Tayschrenn decided he was ready to try him. But here’s the thing, what if he had? What if, every damned day, he’d stepped out on to that ledge? So Onearm and all the rest could pause, look up, and see him standing there? Silver hair blowing, Dragnipur a black god-shitting stain spreading out behind him.’

     Noto Boil worked his pick for a moment, and then said, ‘What if he had, sir?’

     ’Fear, High Mage, takes time. Real fear, the kind that eats your courage, weakens your legs.’ He shook his head and glanced at Noto Boil. ‘Anyway, that was never his style, was it? I miss him, you know.’ He grunted. ‘Imagine that.’

     ’Who, Tayschrenn?’

     ’Noto, do you understand anything I say? Ever?’

     ’I try not to, sir. No offence. It’s that fear thing you talked about.’

     ’Don’t trample any children on your way down.’

     ’That’s up to them, High Fist. Besides, the numbers could do with some thinning.’

     ’Noto.’

     ’We’re an army, not a crèche, that’s all I’m saying. An army under siege. Outnumbered, overcrowded, confused, bored – except when we’re terrified.’ He plucked out his fish spine again, whistled in a breath between his teeth. ‘Caves filled with children – what were they doing with them all? Where are their parents?’

     ’Noto.’

     ’We should just hand them back, that’s all I’m saying, sir.’

     ’Haven’t you noticed, today’s the first day they’re finally behaving like normal children. What does that tell you?’

     ’Doesn’t tell me nothing, sir.’

     ’Fist Rythe Bude. Now.’

     ’Aye sir, on my way.’

     Ganoes Paran settled his attention on the besieging army, the precise rows of tents like bone tesserae on a buckled floor, the figures scrambling tiny as fleas over the trebuchets and Great Wagons. The foul air of battle never seemed to leave this valley. They look ready to try us again. Worth another sortie? Mathok keeps skewering me with that hungry look. He wants at them. He rubbed at his face. The shock of feeling his beard caught him yet again, and he grimaced. No one likes change much, do they? But that’s precisely my point.

     The silk dragon cut across his vision, diving down out of the reams of smoke. He glanced over to the boy on the tower, saw him struggling to keep his footing. A scrawny thing, one of the ones from up south. A Shriven. When it gets too much, lad, be sure to let go.

     Seething motion now in the distant camp. The glint of pikes, the chained slaves marching out to the yokes of the Great Wagons, High Watered emerging surrounded by runners. Dust slowly lifting in the sky above the trebuchets as they were wheeled forward.

     Aye, they’re still upset all right.

     ’I knew a warrior once. Awakening from a wound to the head believing he was a dog, and what are dogs if not loyalty lacking wits? So here I stand, woman, and my eyes are filled with tears. For that warrior, who was my friend, who died thinking he was a dog. Too loyal to be sent home, too filled with faith to leave. These are the world’s fallen. When I dream, I see them in their thousands, chewing at their own wounds. So, do not speak to me of freedom. He was right all along. We live in chains. Beliefs to shackle, vows to choke our throats, the cage of a mortal life, this is our fate. Who do I blame? I blame the gods. And curse them with fire in my heart.’When she comes to me, when she says that it’s time, I shall take my sword in hand. You say that I am a man of too few words, but against the sea of needs, words are weak as sand. Now, woman, tell me again of your boredom, this stretch of days and nights outside a city obsessed with mourning. I stand before you, eyes leaking with the grief of a dead friend, and all I get from you is a siege of silence.’

     She said, ‘You have a damned miserable way of talking your way into my bed, Karsa Orlong. Fine then, get in. Just don’t break me. I only break what I do not want. And if the days of this relationship are numbered? They are,’ he replied, and then he grinned. ‘But not the nights.’

     Faintly, the distant city’s bells tolled their grief at the fall of darkness, and in the blue-lit streets and alleys, dogs howled.In the innermost chamber of the palace of the city’s lord, she stood in shadows, watching as he moved away from the hearth, brushing charcoal from his hands. There was no mistaking his legacy of blood, and it seemed the weight his father had borne was settling like an old cloak on his son’s surprisingly broad shoulders. She could never understand such creatures. Their willingness to martyrdom. The burdens by which they measured self-worth. This embrace of duty.He settled into the high-backed chair, stretched out his legs, the awakening fire’s flickering light licking the studs ringing his knee-high leather boots. Resting his head back, eyes closed, he spoke. ‘Hood knows how you managed to get in here, and I imagine Silanah’s hackles are lifting at this very moment, but if you are not here to kill me, there is wine on the table to your left. Help yourself.’Scowling, she edged out from the shadows. All at once the chamber seemed too small, its walls threatening to snap tight around her. To so willingly abandon the sky in favour of heavy stone and blackened timbers, no, she did not understand this at all. ‘Nothing but wine?’ Her voice cracked slightly, reminding her that it had been some time since she’d last used it.His elongated eyes opened and he observed her with unfeigned curiosity. ‘You prefer?’

     ’Ale. Sorry. You will need to go to the kitchens below for that. Mare’s milk, then.’His brows lifted. ‘Down to the palace gate, turn left, walk half a thousand leagues. And that is just a guess, mind you.’Shrugging, she edged closer to the hearth. ‘The gift struggles.’

     ’Gift? I do not understand.’She gestured at the flames.

     ’Ah,’ he said, nodding. ‘Well, you stand in the breath of Mother Dark—’ and then he started. ‘Does she know you’re here? But then,’ he settled back again, ‘how could she not? Do you know who I am?’ she asked.’An Imass.’

     ’I am Apsal’ara. His night within the Sword, his one night, he freed me. He had the time for that. For me.’ She found she was trembling.He was still studying her. ‘And so you have come here.’

     She nodded.’You didn’t expect that from him, did you? No. Your father – he had no reason for regret.’He rose then, walked over to the table and poured himself a goblet of wine. He stood with the cup in hand, staring down at it. ‘You know,’ he muttered, ‘I don’t even want this. The need…to do something.’ He snorted. ‘“No reason for regret”, well… They look for him – in you. Don’t they?’

     He grunted. ‘Even in my name you will find him. Nimander. No, I’m not his only son. Not even his favoured one – I don’t think he had any of those, come to think of it. Yet,’ and he gestured with the goblet, ‘there I sit, in his chair, before his fire. This palace feels like…feels like— His bones?’

     Nimander flinched, looked away. ‘Too many empty rooms, that’s all. I need some clothes,’ she said.He nodded distractedly. ‘I noticed. Furs. Skins.’

     ’You intend to stay, Apsal’ara?’

     ’At your side, yes.’He turned at that, eyes searching her face.’But,’ she added, ‘I will not be his burden.’A wry smile. ‘Mine, then? Name your closest advisers, Lord.’

     He swallowed half the wine, and then set the goblet down on the table. ‘The High Priestess. Chaste now, and I fear that does not serve her well. Skintick, a brother. Desra, a sister. Korlat, Spinnock, my father’s most trusted servants. Tiste Andii.’

     ’Of course. And the one below?’

     ’The one? Did he once advise you, Lord? Do you stand at the bars in the door’s window, to watch him mutter and pace? Do you torment him? I wish to know the man I will serve.’

     She saw clear anger in his face. ‘Are you to be my jester now? I have heard of such roles in human courts. Will you cut the sinews of my legs and laugh as I stumble and fall?’ He bared his teeth. ‘If yours is to be my face of conscience, Apsal’ara, should you not be prettier?’She cocked her head, made no reply.Abruptly his fury collapsed, and his eyes fell away. ‘It is the exile he has chosen. Did you test the lock on that door? It is barred from within. But then, we have no problem forgiving him. Advise me, then. I am a lord and it is in my power to do such things. To pardon the condemned. Yet you have seen the crypts below us. How many prisoners cringe beneath my iron hand? One.’

     ’And I cannot free him. Surely that is worth a joke or two. Is he mad?’

     ’Clip? Possibly.’

     ’Then no, not even you can free him. Your father took scores for the chains of Dragnipur, scores just like this Clip. I dare say he did not call it freedom. Nor mercy,’ she replied. ‘They are beyond a lord’s reach, even that of a god. Then we fail them all. Both lords and gods – we fail them, our broken children.’This, she realized, would not be an easy man to serve. ‘He drew others to him – your father. Others who were not Tiste Andii. I remember, in his court, in Moon’s Spawn.’

     Nimander’s eyes narrowed.She hesitated, unsure, and then resumed. ‘Your kind are blind to many things. You need others close to you, Lord. Servants who are not Tiste Andii. I am not one of these…jesters you speak of. Nor, it seems, can I be your conscience, ugly as I am to your eyes—’He held up a hand. ‘Forgive me for that, I beg you. I sought to wound and so spoke an untruth, just to see it sting. I believe I stung you first, my lord.’He reached again for the wine, and then stood looking into the hearth’s flames. ‘Apsal’ara, Mistress of Thieves. Will you now abandon that life, to become an adviser to a Tiste Andii lord? All because my father, at the very end, showed you mercy?’

     ’I never blamed him for what he did. I gave him no choice. He did not free me out of mercy, Nimander. Then why?’

     She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. But I mean to find out. And this pursuit – for an answer – has brought you here, to Black Coral. To…me. Yes.’

     ’And how long will you stand at my side, Apsal’ara, whilst I govern a city, sign writs, debate policies? Whilst I slowly rot in the shadow of a father I barely knew and a legacy I cannot hope to fill?’Her eyes widened. ‘Lord, that is not your fate.’

     He wheeled to her. ‘Really? Why not? Please, advise me.’She cocked her head a second time, studied the tall warrior with the bitter, helpless eyes. ‘For so long you Tiste Andii prayed for Mother Dark’s loving regard. For so long you yearned to be reborn to purpose, to life itself. He gave it all back to you. All of it. He did what he knew had to be done, for your sake. You, Nimander, and all the rest. And now you sit here, in his chair, in his city, among his children. And her holy breath, it embraces you all. Shall I give you what I possess of wisdom? Very well. Lord, even Mother Dark cannot hold her breath for ever. She does not—’

     ’When a child is born it must cry. You—’

     ’With its voice, it enters the world, and it must enter the world. Now,’ she crossed her arms, ‘will you continue hiding here in this city? I am the Mistress of Thieves, Lord. I know every path. I have walked them all. And I have seen what there is to be seen. If you and your people hide here, Lord, you will all die. And so will Mother Dark. Be her breath. Be cast out. But we are in this world, Apsal’ara!’

     ’One world is not enough. Then what must we do? What your father wanted. And what is that?’

     She smiled. ‘Shall we find out? You have some nerve, Dragon Master.’

     A child shrieked from somewhere down the walkway.Without turning, Ganoes Paran sighed and said, ‘You’re frightening the young ones again. Not nearly enough.’ The iron-shod heel of a cane cracked hard on the stone. ‘Isn’t that always the way, hee hee! I don’t think I appreciate the new title you’re giving me, Shadowthrone.’

     A vague dark smear, the god moved up alongside Paran. The cane’s gleaming head swung its silver snarl out over the valley. ‘Master of the Deck of Dragons. Too much of a mouthful. It’s your…abuses. I so dislike unpredictable people.’ He giggled again. ‘People. Ascendants. Gods. Thick-skulled dogs. Children. Where is Cotillion, Shadowthrone? You should be tired of that question by now. I am tired of waiting for an answer. Then stop asking it!’ The god’s manic shriek echoed through the fortress, rattled wild along corridors and through hallways before echoing back to where they stood atop the wall.

     ’That has certainly caught their attention,’ Paran observed, nodding to a distant barrow where two tall, almost skeletal figures now stood.Shadowthrone sniffed. ‘They see nothing.’ He hissed a laugh. ‘Blinded by justice.’Ganoes Paran scratched at his beard. ‘What do you want? Whence comes your faith? Excuse me?’

     The cane rapped and skittered on the stone. ‘You sit with the Host in Aren, defying every imperial summons. And then you assault the Warrens with this.’ He suddenly cackled. ‘You should have seen the Emperor’s face! And the names he called you, my, even the court scribers cringed!’ He paused. ‘Where was I? Yes, I was berating you, Dragon Master. Are you a genius? I doubt it. Leaving me no choice but to conclude that you’re an idiot.’

     ’Is that all? Is she out there?’

     ’You don’t know? Do you?’

     Paran slowly nodded. ‘Now I understand. It’s all about faith. A notion unfamiliar to you, I take it. This siege is meaningless! Is it?’

     Shadowthrone hissed, one ethereal hand reaching out, as if to claw at Paran’s face. Instead, it hovered, twisted and then shrank into something vaguely fist-shaped. ‘You don’t understand anything!’

     ’I understand this,’ Paran replied. ‘Dragons are creatures of chaos. There can be no Dragon Master, making the title meaningless.’

     ’Exactly.’ Shadowthrone reached out to gather up a tangled snarl of spider’s web from beneath the wall’s casing. He held it up, apparently studying the cocooned remnant of a desiccated insect.

     Miserable turd. ‘Here is what I know, Shadowthrone. The end begins here. Do you deny it? No, you can’t, else you wouldn’t be haunting me—’

     ’Not even you can breach the power surrounding this keep,’ the god said. ‘You have blinded yourself. Open your gate again, Ganoes Paran, find somewhere else to lodge your army. This is pointless.’ He flung the web away and gestured with the head of his cane. ‘You cannot defeat those two, we both know that.’

     ’But they don’t, do they?’

     ’They will test you. Sooner or later.’

     ’I'm still waiting.’

     ’Perhaps even today.’

     ’Will you wager on that, Shadowthrone?’

     The god snorted. ‘You have nothing I want.’

     ’Liar.’

     ’Then I have nothing you want.’

     ’Actually, as it happens…’

     ’Do you see me holding a leash? He’s not here. He’s off doing other things. We’re allies, do you understand? An alliance. Not a damned marriage!’

     Paran grinned. ‘Oddly enough, I wasn’t even thinking of Cotillion.’

     ’A pointless wager in any case. If you lose you die. Or abandon your army to die, which I can’t see you doing. Besides, you’re nowhere near as devious as I am. You want this wager? Truly? Even when I lose, I win. Even when I lose… I win!’

     Paran nodded. ‘And that has ever been your game, Shadowthrone. You see, I know you better than you think. Yes, I would wager with you. They shall not try me this day. We shall repulse their assault…again. And more Shriven and Watered will die. We shall remain the itch they cannot scratch.’

     ’All because you have faith? Fool!’

     ’Those are the conditions of this wager. Agreed?’

     The god’s form seemed to shift about, almost vanishing entirely at one moment before reappearing, and the cane head struck chips from the merlon’s worn edge. ‘Agreed!’

     ’If you win and I survive,’ resumed Paran, ‘you get what you want from me, whatever that is, and assuming it’s in my power to grant. If I win, I get what I want from you.’

     ’If it’s in my power—’

     ’It is.’

     Shadowthrone muttered something under his breath, and then hissed. ‘Very well, tell me what you want.’

     And so Paran told him.

     The god cackled. ‘And you think that’s in my power? You think Cotillion has no say in the matter?’

     ’If he does, best you go and ask him, then. Unless,’ Paran added, ‘it turns out that, as I suspect, you have no idea where your ally has got to. In which case, Lord of Shadows, you will do as I ask, and answer to him later.’

     ’I answer to no one!’ Another shriek, the echoes racing.

     Paran smiled. ‘Why, Shadowthrone, I know precisely how you feel. Now, what is it you seek from me?’

     ’I seek the source of your faith.’ The cane waggled. ‘That she’s out there. That she seeks what you seek. That, upon the Plain of Blood and Chains, you will find her, and stand facing her – as if you two had planned this all along, when I damned well know you haven’t! You don’t even like each other!’

     ’Shadowthrone, I cannot sell you faith.’

     ’So lie, damn you, just do it convincingly!’

     He could hear silk wings flapping, the sound a shredding of the wind itself. A boy with a kite. Dragon Master. Ruler over all that cannot be ruled. Ride the howling chaos and call it mastery – who are you fooling? Lad, let go now. It’s too much. But he would not, he didn’t know how.

     The man with the greying beard watches, and can say nothing.

     Distress.

     He glanced to his left, but the shadow was gone.

     A crash from the courtyard below drew him round. The throne, a mass of flames, had broken through the mound beneath it. And the smoke leapt skyward, like a beast unchained.

The Bonehunters are marching to Kolanse, and to an unknown fate. Tormented and exhausted, they are an army on the brink of mutiny.But Adjunct Tavore will not relent.If she can hold her forces together, if the fragile alliances she has forged can survive and if it is within her power, one final act remains. For Tavore Paran means to challenge the gods.

Ranged against Tavore and her allies are formidable foes. The Fokrul Assail are drawing upon a terrible power; their desire is to cleanse the world – to eradicate every civilization, to annihilate every human – in order to begin anew. The Elder Gods, too, are seeking to return. And to do so, they will shatter the chains that bind a force of utter devastation and release her from her eternal prison. It seems that, once more, there will be dragons in the world.

And in Kurald Galain, where the once-lost city of Kharkanas has been found, thousands have gathered upon the First Shore. Commanded by Yedan Derryg, they await the coming of the Tiste Liosan. Are they truly ready to die in the name of an empty city and a queen with no subjects?

In every world there comes a time when choice is no longer an option – a moment when the soul is laid bare and there is nowhere left to turn. And when this last hard truth is faced, when compassion is a virtue on its knees, what is there left to do?Now that time is come – now is the moment to proclaim your defiance and make a stand…

And so begins the final cataclysmic chapter in Steven Erikson’s extraordinary, genre-defining ‘Malazan Book of the Fallen’.

 


Bantam Press (UK)  •  London (2011)  •  hard cover  •  ISBN: 0-593-04635-8

Bantam Press (UK)  •  London (2011)  •  trade paperback  •  ISBN: 0-593-04636-6
 

 

Tor Books

Savaged by the K’Chain Nah’Ruk, the Bonehunters march for Kolanse, where waits an unknown fate. Tormented by questions, the army totters on the edge of mutiny, but Adjunct Tavore will not relent. One final act remains, if it is in her power, if she can hold her army together, if the shaky allegiances she has forged can survive all that is to come. A woman with no gifts of magic, deemed plain, unprepossessing, displaying nothing to instill loyalty or confidence, Tavore Paran of House Paran means to challenge the gods – if her own troops don’t kill her first.

Awaiting Tavore and her allies are the Forkrul Assail, the final arbiters of humanity. Drawing upon an alien power terrible in its magnitude, they seek to cleanse the world, to annihilate every human, every civilization, in order to begin anew. They welcome the coming conflagration of slaughter, for it shall be of their own devising, and it pleases them to know that, in the midst of the enemies gathering against them, there shall be betrayal.

In the realm of Kurald Galain, home to the long lost city of Kharkanas, a mass of refugees stand upon the First Shore. Commanded by Yedan Derryg, the Watch, they await the breaching of Lightfall, and the coming of the Tiste Liosan. This is a war they cannot win, and they will die in the name of an empty city and a queen with no subjects.

Elsewhere, the three Elder Gods, Kilmandaros, Errastas and Sechul Lath, work to shatter the chains binding Korabas, the Otataral Dragon, from her eternal prison. Once freed, she will rise as a force of devastation, and against her no mortal can stand. At the Gates of Starvald Demelain, the Azath House sealing the portal is dying. Soon will come the Eleint, and once more, there will be dragons in the world.

 


Tor Books  •  New York (2011)  •  hard cover  •  ISBN: 978-0-7653-1010-1

Tor Books  •  New York (2011)  •  trade paperback  •  ISBN: 978-0-7653-1656-1

Tor Books  •  New York (2011)  •  ebook  •  ISBN: 978-1-4299-6947-5

     Young as we were at the time, we did not game in a bubble. Factors were at work on us all the while: the outer world—our studies (where we were learning the craft of fiction writing), the books we read, the films we watched, the ongoing analyses we engaged in on myriad subjects, from anthropology to war fiction and nonfiction, from the Latin American magic realists to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, from G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday to Franz Kafka’s The Castle, from The Lion in Winter to Milos Forman’s Amadeus to Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff (now some eager student is bound to plunge into examining the dates of release for some of this stuff, or indeed all of it, and find … timeline issues).

     So one could ask, what were our outside influences to the gaming we did? But there is something about gaming itself that makes such factors less relevant than they might seem. You see, we were escaping. The only thing we brought into that magical world was a set of sensibilities shaped by what we liked and what we didn’t like—about fantasy fiction, and about some of the gaming worlds being offered us. If we then stole from seemingly disconnected sources to inspire our own gaming sessions, was simply a reflection of our imaginations using anything and everything at our disposal, since both of us were creating for an audience of one, and that ‘one’ had fucking high standards.

     Let’s go back to what most would consider the basic look and feel of traditional role-playing games. The first games we played were set in the AD&D world, and we almost immediately clashed with the class and alignment rules set in place by Gary Gygax. We recognized them, you see, because we’d read fantasy fiction; but now those particular gaming rules were in turn affecting most of the new fantasy fiction at the time (with notable exceptions). The tropes were bleeding back and forth, yet the literary foundation was fifty years old. We recoiled, I think, from what we perceived as an ossification of the genre (I could go off on a tangent now and talk about Glen Cook, but do recall, his Black Company novels were not widely-read the first time they came out; even more-so for his Dread Empire stuff—he seemed a lone voice in the crowd, but for a while there he was the only one we were prepared to listen to).

     Beyond even the class definitions and the alignment rules, there were other game-set elements finding form in contemporary fantasy fiction: the quest group (of course acknowledging the LOTR biofeedback thing going on here); the standardization of good and evil—the actual birth of the Dark Lord cliché was right there in front of us (and the only real interesting take on that one was from Donaldson, but how much of that was from the sheer power of his writing?); and of course the un-killable hero.

     It was as if the two forms of entertainment were doing little more than reinforcing each other, on virtually every level. Me and Cam, well, we railed at it, all of it. It drove us to distraction. Frustrated us, infuriated us. The closest I ever got to Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms was when I bought the box game set for the latter (I think this was before the novels came out). I well recall this—we were living in James Bay, in Victoria. We opened the box up and took out the maps while sitting in a Mexican restaurant. Ten minutes later I was as close as I have ever been to publicly burning someone else’s creation.

     No doubt I will take hits and get flamed a few million times for that comment. No matter. It’s not like I really care. On one level, if you ask what was the effect RPGs had on my fantasy novels, I could answer: they showed us the face of the enemy. But there’s more to this, and in fact that reply of mine is not entirely accurate. You see, we were already gaming by this point: we were old hands at it, in fact. And we’d moved on to a more flexible gaming system (GURPS), one which did away with classes and alignments and had an interesting magic system. What bothered us was the reworking of every fantasy cliché imaginable, all in one package now, and none of it made sense. Neither were we unmindful that what we were seeing in that pretty box was a kind of summary, an encapsulation: we knew the language it was speaking; we just didn’t want to speak it anymore.

     Intense gaming sears the tropes into the brain, even when you’re working against them. The patterns of recognition are set: one can either slide right in and do nothing new, or one can take the whole mess by the throat and give it a shake. Ambition, arrogance and youth all go together, don’t you know.

     So much for background: the stuff we shared, Cam and me; stuff we’ve since talked out. Time to move on. What did I carry over into my writing from those RPGs we played out? Note the distinction: there is role-playing gaming, and then there is the gaming we did. The first is AD&D and all its subsets, it’s the thing that’s out there, still thriving, still inviting fans of fantasy to define their characters by class, their goodness or their evilness, and still sending them off on quests for loot and adventure. How pervasive is this structure? It rules the show for most console and computer-based gaming—we ‘level up.’ Well, to ‘level up’ is an AD&Dism. We use points or whatever to generate our character, balancing attributes like intelligence, wisdom, agility, etc. This is all AD&D, right down to the clothes you put on that generated on-screen character. We do team-playing and assemble those teams on the basis of various talents to make the group well-rounded and capable of meeting any threat, a ‘balanced party’. In other words, in terms of entertainment, from film to on-screen gaming to novels, AD&D has been a pervasive defining force: and as much as I may have found its strictures frustrating, let me say it plain: Gygax was a genius. He systematized LOTR and that system has extended through numerous forms of entertainment (Counter Strike anyone?), and for all its initial strictures, it is malleable, adaptable beyond belief. It has, in fact, moved far beyond fantasy itself.

     In our own gaming, we took from AD&D the most basic tenets of gaming: we created characters, assigned values to their basic attributes, physical and mental; we selected from a list of talents and skills and put ‘points’ into them to shape our character’s abilities. We invented stories and plotlines involving contests and goals, and to gauge success we rolled the damned die. This sounds basic, but it is fundamental. Where we deviated was in the details, in creating a viable world with cultures and histories that made sense to us. We then spiced it with other stuff, be it inspired by war literature, tragedies, films, and so on.

     This all became the grounding of the fictional world we then created, and those who have gamed well see the basic gaming elements at work in our tales. To be specific: the Malazan Empire was founded in a tavern called Smiley’s in an island city: its core of players were a balanced party of sorcerers, fighters, assassins, thieves and priests. The events in the city of Darujhistan leading up to the night of fete were all gamed, and again we had balanced groups (Kruppe, Coll, Murillio and Rallick; Whiskeyjack, Mallet, Fiddler, Hedge, Quick Ben and Kalam; and so on). The squad finale of The Crippled God, the tenth and final novel of the series, was gamed.

     So, I can rail at the clichés established by AD&D, but man, they’re in my fucking blood, like it or not. I use them. All. The. Time. And lo, it’s not a problem. In fact, I depend on them: as my readers know, in the Malazan series there’s scant else for them to connect with at first glance. And even as readers get a handle on them, I mess them up.

     The role of AD&D is seminal to modern fantasy fiction. If anything, its influence is so vast it can be hard to get a handle on it. As for me, why, I miss gaming. But I found, during the writing of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series, I could not quite both game and write. They drew from the same well, I think. The same narrative impulse, the same thirst for adventure, the same delight in characterization.

     For what it is worth: all you gamers out there, go to it. And if I dare offer advice, make a point of creating characters unlike you and unlike each other—stretch yourself. Step into unfamiliar shoes and see out from unfamiliar eyes. It’s good for the soul.

Cheers

Steven Erikson

     Initially, I was responding to various assertions Jensen made regarding what he sees as the idyllic and only sustainable form of human culture: the hunter/gatherer society; and later to his avowed desire to return humanity to that state of existence.  With respect to his observations on the psychotic nature of civilization, I actually have no argument: his vision is a clear one.  Where I took exception was with his ‘solutions,’ namely, bringing down civilization.

     I finally managed to get this letter sent to Jensen, via email, but his responses were sufficiently terse to a) suggest he had not read through what I had written, or b) simply was not interested in engaging in any form of dialogue.  I did not pursue the matter and these two files sat unopened on my hard-drive … until now.

     I stumbled over them during a recent bout of archiving stuff I’d written (and saved), and since I am aware of a certain paucity of original material on the eponymous website, it occurred to me that I could store these letters in a kind of online archive, on my site.

     So, here it is.  I suspect it will be only of interest to readers out there who are familiar with Jensen’s work, and his cause.  For those who aren’t, well, perhaps there is enough in these passages to give you asense of his position, and of course, mine.

     Feel free to comment.

     Cheers
     Steven Erikson

     I write novels under the name of Steven Erikson.  I am nearing completion of a ten book Fantasy series entitled ‘The Malazan Book of the Fallen.’  These novels are set on a fictitious world that is Homeric in nature—magic and meddling gods—but at a technological level somewhere around late Roman Empire.  Progress has stalled, as magic has supplanted technological innovation.  Unfortunately, magic is also highly destructive. While these epic novels seek to portray a history in an entertaining style, the underlying themes concern the life cycles of cultures and civilizations(including those of nonhumans) against the backdrop of environmental degradation.

Seven Stories Press (USA)

     Before becoming a full-time writer, I worked as anarchaeologist for eighteen years (and still find myself on digs when time andopportunity permits).  In that career I worked in central Canada (Northwestern Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan) and in Belize, Central America.  My specialties (pretty much by default) included stone technology, rock art, and surveying (in the latter I seem to have a knack for finding sites).  I make full use of this experience and the perspective it has given me when writing my fantasy novels.

     Two days ago while in my local bookstore the cover of your book, Endgame, caught my eye.  Two things sold me on the book—the subtitle and the fact that it was Volume One, which implied to me an author with a grand vision (something that, for obvious reasons, I find appealing).

     Taking it home and opening it up, I found the twenty premises.  I was floored.

     In the fourth novel in my series I introduced, rather brutally, a character emerging from an isolated tribal culture, who finds himself first a slave, then an escaped slave, within the far larger world of civilization of which he previously knew nothing.  He ultimately concludes, after numerous travails, that civilization is an abomination, and so he vows to destroy it.

     As this character is terse and rather inarticulate, he rarely expounds on the reasons for his conclusion.  As the author, however, I needed to give much thought to such matters.

     So, in seeing and now reading your book, I find myself shaking my head again and again, as I see you make the same observations I have made; yet where I work through the vehicle of fiction to express the fullest range of emotions I am feeling (sometimes my series feels like a ten thousand page requiem for our species, or a long, drawn-out howl verging on utter despair; as I search in desperation for moral gestures of humanity, no matter how small, no matter how momentary, in the midst of self-inflicted carnage), you have done away with the pretense of the ‘other world.’

     I am about two hundred pages into your book, and I would like to take the opportunity to comment as I go—without expectation of any engagement on your part—in the hopes that my observations will be of interest to you.

     1.  Northwest indigenous cultures were something of an aberration in the Americas, primarily because the subsistence base was extraordinarily fecund.  While it possessed functional mechanisms for maintaining that base, there is no possible certainty that such a system, barring absolute isolation, would have persisted unchanged.  Of this, more later.

     2.  It is perhaps comforting to view the Hunter/Gatherer culture as the ideal system for humanity’s survival in a balanced, self-sustaining environment.  Without doubt, it remains the longest-lasting system in human history, and clearly the post-city-state forms continuing to this day will not prove anywhere near as successful (for all the reasons discussed in your book); but that longevity did not come from some inherently unique virtue of the life style.  Hunter/Gatherer groups that persisted into modern times are universally peripheral groups.  In other words, they have been pushed into regions unsuitable for anything but the hunter/gatherer style of living (which is why, as technology advances, these regions continue to shrink).

     The loci where horticulture and animal husbandry first emerged all reveal evidence of similar periods of transition from a previously existing hunter/gatherer system.  Both horticulture and animal husbandry are products of necessity, survival mechanisms.  Neither constituted an ‘improvement’ in the quality of living among the people concerned.  They were more labour intensive; they wore out bodies, wore out teeth, created rich environments for contagion and parasites—basically, they killed people in ways not experienced by the hunter/gatherers.  They also created hierarchies that had not previously existed.  So, if the new lifestyle was in fact more miserable than the previous one, why choose it?

     The answer is found in the faunal remains excavated at such transition sites.  Basically, the hunter/gatherers had no choice.  They’d depleted the wild game and other resources they traditionally depended upon—they were, in fact, too efficient.  To put it another way: we as a species are too efficient.

     Necessity forced the capture and control of prey animals. Necessity established the notion of territorial possession—ground to break, seeds to plant, harvest to reap—and from this rose the imperative to protect and defend that territory.  At precisely the same time as the first sedentary villages appeared, so too did walls and fortifications.

Seven Stories Press (USA)

     3.  City-states and empires existed in the Americas long before European contact, revealing the cycle of rise and fall with all the endemic destruction of civilizations the world over.  I recall standing on a pyramid in the Guatemalan jungle (back in ’83), during the modern civil war (that had everything to do with land), and perversely feeling a strange optimism.  After all, when the Mayan Priest-King stood where I was standing, only a few centuries ago, he could see the vast expanse of his demesne—planted fields out to every horizon.  I’m sure he believed it would last forever (just as we believe our civilization will last forever, that we are somehow exempt from the rise and fall cycle that afflicted every previous civilization).  He didn’t realize that his culture was unsustainable.  That it was destined to collapse even before European contact.  He believed as did the pre-Inca civilizations in Peru and Chile.  Why did I feel optimistic?  Because I was surrounded in jungle.  The natural world had reclaimed everything.  It had healed, and in a very short time.

     Agriculture was already making inroads in North America by the time Europeans arrived.  If not for the return of the horse, nomadic hunting, warrior societies like the Teton Sioux and the Lakota and the Comanche, would all have converted to horticulture, as did many of their neighbours, for example the Mandan.  The horse opened the Great Plains to native hunters.  Prior to its arrival, bison hunts occurred on the peripheral regions of the Great Plains, taking advantage of the herds’ seasonal migrations.  With the horse, hunters could chase those herds into the very heart of the grasslands.  In addition to this cultural revolution centered on the bison hunt, the warrior cultures quickly comprehended that raiding farming communities was far more rewarding than actually adopting farming for themselves.  The Hopi, Navajo, Mandan and countless other nascent farming tribes in North America were under sustained assault from the horse-warrior tribes; and even here the situation was growing dire.  Genocide was forcing farmers to abandon their way of life.  Some simply took up the raiding habits of their belligerent neighbours (as did a number of the Apache sub-tribes). Others vanished.

     By the time of the first major inroads of Europeans into heartland America, the indigenous nations were in the midst of very tumultuous times.  The Lakota had been driven south by the Ojibwa and the Cree.  Until they acquired the horse, they were in fact on their way out; suddenly they were on the ascent.  By the time of the Sioux Wars, the Lakota were at the apogee of their culture, and had already exterminated a number of rivals.

     It’s risky to romanticize the pre-contact cultures of the Americas.  One thing that haunted me and haunts me to this day is the nature of the empires of Central and South America.  In their essence (as far as I can see), they were psychotic civilizations (amazingly, Mel Gibson’s ‘Apocalypto’ film portrayed this descent into hell beautifully, if that word can be used to describe such brutal insanity).  And they were intrinsically formed to catastrophically self-destruct.

     4.  I am sure you are aware of the book, 1491, which describes the nature of the Americas prior to contact.  This book recounts the circumstances of the collapse of the cultures of the New World.  One section chimed chillingly with the evidence I have observed firsthand: at bison kill-sites.  In the period between initial European contact and subsequent explorations and settling, the indigenous human populations of the Americas dropped by as much as ninety percent, as those populations were genetically resistant to parasites rather than diseases (the opposite to Old World populations).  When explorers spoke of idyllic Edens on the east coast, they were describing depopulated wilderness.  They also made note of all the abandoned villages (not just the US east coast, but up the Amazon as well). When explorers wrote of bison herds stretching from horizon to horizon on the Great Plains, they were in fact witnessing the effect of the virtual elimination of the primary predator—humans.  Bison in their tens of millions were an anomaly.

     There is a bison jump site in Wyoming that was used extensively just before and then after European contact.  It’s a small one, a sinkhole, in fact, and so could not take down large percentages of the herd. Accordingly, the animals killed in the jump were thoroughly processed—nothing that could be used was left behind.  Contrast this with one of the longest used bison jumps in North America: Head-Smashed-In in Alberta, Canada (worth a visit, by the way).  There are gaps in the usage of this site, but in the broader sense it was continually used for about eight thousand years.

     In times of plenty, the killed bison were barely processed at all.  There was such a glut of dead animals that the butchery became highly selective (tongues, hoofs, etc).  The rest was left to rot.  Needless to say, such slaughter resulted in feast/famine cycles (thus explaining the gaps in usage).

     With the return of the horse the last subspecies of bison resident on the Great Plains was essentially fucked.  It had run out of places to hide.  If not for massive depopulation of humans, they would probably have joined bison antiquus and bison occidentalis.  Not to mention mammoths, giant sloths, etc (and the rival predator species dependent upon them).

     The tool-kit we find at sites reflects the transition: in the Paleo period the spear-points are big, to suit big game.  By the Archaic period, following the extinction of the big game, the spear-points get small, to suit the animals left.

     Archaeology and paleoanthropology are disciplines engaged in a rather awkward dance round more than one giant elephant (or mammoth, if you will) standing in the middle of the room.  It is not the cultural habits of a people that determine value judgements of virtue and vice.  Hunter/Gatherers are not implicitly more ethical than city-states (except perhaps in the context of human relations [and that has more to do with the imperative of maintaining the status quo in a self-limiting, communal society]—definitely not in the context of resource exploitation).  I have excavated scores of New World sites—we dig up their garbage.  It is of course mostly biodegradable (barring stone waste and fired clay), so not much survives.  I have also camped near a still-active Wild Rice harvesters’ campsite (a traditional activity still practiced by local native groups), and found that future archaeologists would have no trouble recovering artifacts—the place was a garbage dump of cans, tinfoil, bottles and plastic.  Is this the result of a destroyed indigenous culture? No, it is the continuation of a traditional practice, that of throwing your crap away and not giving a fuck.

     In paleoanthropology, there is presently a huge debate regarding the extinction of the Neanderthals.  It turns out that said extinctions of various populations of Neanderthals throughout their range occurred at different times within a certain window.

     In this respect, I see civilization as but a particularly efficient expression of what has always been with us (and may be implicit in all life—even the virus kills its host and then moves on).  The primary distinction between hunter/gatherers and the hierarchical systems that followed was one of efficacy.  Hunter/gatherers could alter and manage their environment to some extent (and we may look at large mammal extinctions in the New World around the period of the first specialized big-game hunters, the Clovis Culture, as an example of that); but never to the extent that horticulturalists, pastoralists and agriculturalists could.  The fundamental urge was/is one of control and stability, which together comprised safety.

     We desire stability and security above all else, even love. The tragedy lies in the very short-sightedness of such concepts as stability and security.  Stability requires stasis, the kind of gesture to achieve equilibrium that we see in a deer caught in the headlights.  Security measures safety in moments, not weeks, not months, not even years.

     Culture is the pursuit of these two things above all else, which is why it is universally incapable of collectively focusing on the long-term.  Individually, we are generally forced to such long-term considerations after the traumatic annihilation of all immediate stability and security, and even then we seek the first place of safety we can find—somewhere from which to take measure, to recover what we can of our equilibrium.  It seems likely that our species will, as you say, suffer a corresponding trauma, that of collapse.  There will be those who escape, who hunker down, and likely survive.  Most won’t.

     As I mentioned earlier, sometimes I just want to howl.

     I recall a ‘holy fuck’ moment from a few years back.  Grasslands National Park, Saskatchewan.  We were staying at a B&B and the owner, a transplanted businessman from Calgary, upon hearing that I was an archaeologist, excitedly told us of two sites just outside the park boundaries but on community pasture.  He drew us maps.  One site was a tipi ring site; the other an unexcavated bison jump.  The tipi ring site was closest so we headed there first.

     Tipi rings leave me crushed—for this reason:  they consist of a ring of boulders once used to hold down the sides of a tipi, and to stand beside one is to look down on evidence of the last natives who ever camped there. The very last.  Forever.  What had been part of a seasonal round, used year after year for countless generations, was over.  Such places are desolate, ineffably forlorn.  In such places, I often weep.

     The site was off a section road.  We arrived with two thunderheads massing in the sky, but by their trajectories both would miss us. A storm had passed earlier that left at least one cow lying legs in the air in the pasture on the other side of the road, lightning-struck.  On this trip, it was just my wife and me (our son was at camp).  As we walked over the unbroken prairie towards an old, abandoned radio tower on concrete feet, I scanned the ground, seeking out the telltale boulder rings.  Instead, I started making out someone else.  As did my wife, who drew close when she saw me light a cigarette—something I normally don’t do at prehistoric sites.  But the remnants I saw surrounding us, sharing the hill top with the defunct tower, belonged to a Medicine Wheel.  A big one, mostly destroyed.  Off to our left was a small cairn of boulders.  This was a holy site, and we were trespassing.

     We returned to the car and headed overland, off road, to the bison jump.  Seeing it for the first time, I could not believe my eyes.  A huge section of the cliff had collapsed into the valley, burying most of the kill zone but exposing masses of bones nonetheless.  Looters had dug a few holes here and there, looking for ‘arrow-heads’ but my attention was more on the bones themselves.  Because two animals haunt my dreams.  Bears and bison.  And their respective habitats haunt my dreams as well; boreal forest and the grasslands.

     I found plenty of bones, but very few butcher marks.  Most of the horns had been left behind as well, as had the hoofs (plenty of toe bones).  There were a lot of juveniles.  Generally, the animal remains found at the actual kill-site comprise those left unprocessed, as the area of processing meat, skin, marrow, etc are generally off to one side, up-wind of the kill-site.

     We found a few arrowheads (actually, spear-points), of a style known as Oxbow, which dates to around 4000 years ago.  The vista at the head of the jump was one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen.  Directly below, however, was a place of death, and wanton waste.  If the hunters spoke to the bison, they had nothing good to say.

     Despite this, the grasslands do indeed possess a kind of beauty even in the midst of their unnatural desolation.  You can still find pronghorn antelope, jack rabbits, red-tail hawks, prairie dogs, mule deer and coyotes.  Just no bison.  And no Plains Cree.

     That was a day of two ‘holy fucks’ and they have marked me for good.  And I came away feeling closer to the indigenous peoples of this land (I’ve worked and lived alongside many)—just as profligate as the rest of us, after all.  A sobering feeling.  And closeness here does not imply comfort of any sort.

     The East Coast of North America was crowded with confederations and nascent nation-states when the Europeans arrived—and those native groups were warring with each other over the usual things: territory and the resources in that territory.  The Moche and the Aztecs repressed countless peoples.  The Inca carried little children to mountain tops and smashed their skulls in.  The Maya drugged virgins and threw them into cenotes.  The Puebla and their pre-cursors ate each other—and lovely as the view from those cliff-face towns are, they were built there for self-defense.  Long before the Dutch arrived, the inhabitants of a chain of islands in a Pacific archipelago were locked in an endemic war that resulted in genocide and enslavement.  The first human colonists of Easter Island gave us all the perfect analogy for resource depletion and the collapse that followed.  The colonization by humans of Australia and New Zealand (and Madagascar) resulted in the extinctions of most large animals—by hunter/gatherers, no less.

     It is simply too easy to ascribe all vice upon a dominant civilization, and lather thick the virtues of less-dominant ones (indigenous or otherwise, especially since the notion of ‘indigenous’ is something of a misnomer: ultimately, we’re all indigenous to Africa).  The distinction depends upon efficacy and capacity—but even the smallest group capable of sustaining itself can exhibit the fullest range of human traits one might consider insensitive, reprehensible and ultimately suicidal.

     Whew.

     

     The second ‘letter’ was written after reading Volumes I and II of Endgame. The tone shifts from the personal to rather more academic, as I was more consciously engaged in formulating an argument, rather than simply observing; and my audience had shifted from Jensen himself to … someone else)…

     

     As much as it makes my skin crawl to say this, let us assume that Jensen’s vision of the idyllic future of hunter/gatherer subsistence for the chosen few, arriving as a consequence of the active destruction of civilisation, is somehow confirmed as viable, how do we get there?  Before I address that, let’s look at the initial assumption.  It is predicated on the notion that such cultures existed and thrived in the past (to which I would point out that yes, they existed, and might even be seen to have thrived, indeed for a very long time, but that life in that system was far from idyllic; one need only look at the paleo-forensic evidence to see the signs of stress, injury, periods of deprivation and malnutrition, and endemic diseases and parasitic invasion, to know that life was hard and plagued with suffering and misery. And as soon as strategies arrived that had the potential to mitigate that difficult existence, those who could jumped at them).  Whether such an idyllic existence existed in the past is, however, not really the point.  The point is, and this is what Jensen is precisely addressing, how do we return to it, given the planet’s present condition?

     The answer is, we can’t.  We have long since passed the point of no return.  Let us now look at the possible scenarios to reaching Jensen’s goal  (and this goal is born of the heartfelt desire to save the wild animals of the world).  In the broadest sense, there are two.  Both are dependent on a radical depopulation of the human species, down to perhaps one or two percent of the present population.  The distinction lies in how we get there, and it is in that distinction on which everything hinges.

     Hunter-Gatherers need something to hunt and something to gather.  Without them, the hunter-gatherer starves.  Accordingly, for that last one or two percent of humanity left after the fall of civilisation, there needs to be enough animals left to hunt and eat; and there needs to be abundant edible plants to harvest and maintain.  Having one and not the other is of course possible, as with the traditional Inuit or strictly vegetarian cultures (not that many of those ever truly existed), but these were very specific in their characteristics. And for the populations in question, biological adaptation was a crucial factor in survival.  Finally, the biome being exploited was in each instance fecund enough to sustain viable (if small) populations, all other things being equal (i.e. the presence of ice).

     What will those hardy survivors of civilization’s end eat? The answer to that depends on how the other ninety-eight percent died; more specifically, on how quickly they died.  If civilisation falls with minimal loss of life, or if it crumbles over a matter of a few years or even a decade or so, then we are looking at six billion very hungry people.  What will they eat when the last stockpiles of processed food are gone?  Why, they will eat everything (a present-day corollary can be found in the Congo, where civilization has already collapsed).  They’ll start with the best stuff first: every animal wild and domestic they can track down and slaughter.  Once those are all gone, they’ll turn to lesser creatures—those more difficult to capture or of little or no nutritional value.  And finally, when they too are all gone, when every forest is silent, when the skies are truly empty, they will turn to the last source of food available to them: each other.

     This scenario, of slow or gradual collapse, will in fact trigger an absolute extinction of every wild and domestic animal on Earth, concluding with us.

     Those people who did what they could to prepare for the end will find themselves under siege.  They will live (for a time) in heavily fortified enclaves, desperately defending their livestock, seed-store and harvest, and indeed, the delicious biomass that is their family and friends. Equally (or better) armed raiders—getting hungrier by the moment—will descend upon those enclaves in ever more desperate waves of need.  And attrition will tell in the end.  The bullets will run out; the defenses will be breached; defenders will die; and even if all that is survived, all the livestock will have been stolen, and malnutrition and disease will descend. Medicines will run out or expire, losing efficacy.  Eventually, should the enclave prevail and survive the year or two of absolute horror, they will be looking upon a lifeless world.  They will have eaten the last attacker shot or speared to death.  At which point, they had better pray to whatever hard-eyed gods they’ve rediscovered, that the climate’s deterioration doesn’t then hit them with drought, because they have no reserves.  If, for whatever reason, their crops fail, they will all die.

     Jensen advocates taking down civilisation piece by piece, hydroelectric dam by microwave tower, Wal-Mart by oil tanker.  He advocates a steady destruction, at some point reaching a threshold of zeal so that the point of no return is finally reached, and it all crashes into ruin.  That sounds like a slow process to me.  In fact, it sounds like the perfect recipe for the violent slow-death scenario I have just described.

     No, one needs to knock off ninety-eight percent of humanity through something faster, fast enough to leave populations of wild animals mostly intact.  Nuclear Armageddon won’t do it, since it’ll likely kill most of those animals.  So what are we left with?  Conventional wars take too long.  No, what we need is something biological.  Let’s call it the Ultimate Plague. Maybe it’s diabolically created and released to do its work; maybe it’s the inevitable consequence of overuse of antibiotics; maybe it just shows up.  But it needs to be virtually untreatable.  It needs to kill everyone, well, almost everyone.  Leave us a few to inherit the hunter-gatherer idyll.  Of course, the Ultimate Plague doesn’t skip the Chosen, the ones with well-stocked hidey-holes and an arsenal on their cellar wall; nor the ones in their happy communes busy learning the old ways of living.  Presumably, unless someone climbs inside a sealed bubble and stays there for as long as necessary, or takes to the hills (but then, there’s Bill the neighbour doing the same thing, damn him), the Ultimate Plague will disregard even those boundaries of righteousness and moral purity.  Since that is the case, then, there is no guarantee that the ones who survive the plague also happen to be people capable of surviving in a wild, uncivilized world.  At least there is one consolation to this scenario: the wild animals return.  Earth recovers from our manic depredations.  And maybe one percent of the one percent surviving the Ultimate Plague then manage to eke out a living for a while longer.

     This latter scenario, in fact, is the only one with the potential to achieve what Jensen wants.  But, as one can see, its outcome is neither controllable nor ideal, and most certainly it is not guaranteed to create a hunter-gathering utopia of harmony and perpetual sustainability.

     Well now.

     Let’s reiterate.  I run through these thoughts:  Jensen wants spasms of destruction, ultimately leading to the fall of civilization, and with that fall, the end of humanity’s ever expanding front of destruction upon the natural world.  I fully understand his sentiment, and I understand as well, his need for attacking those skeptics who hold to a darker view of human nature—a view so much darker that many of them have concluded we’re not worth saving.  That conclusion infuriates him and he heaps no end of scorn upon such believers, primarily because he views such a conclusion as a convenient excuse for inaction. 

     He has a vision.  It is born of a collection of beliefs in the world that once was, the world that preceded this present civilization.  It is a collection of beliefs imbued with denial, ignorance, wishful thinking and whole heaps of noble-savage romanticism.  But he needs it, for without it he can offer no viable alternative to our present mess.  Without it, there is no light at the end of the bone-walled tunnel.  Accordingly, he reserves his most vicious attacks for those who, in seeing what he sees with respect to the un-sustainability of modern civilisation, most egregiously arrive at a conclusion fundamentally different from his own; specifically, that a backward step to hunter/gathering is unworkable and doomed to fail; and secondly, that the destruction of modern civilization serves no purpose and will in no way achieve an earthly paradise for the chosen.

     But I need to make a slight correction on that last point. The destruction of modern civilization as advocated by Jensen does serve a purpose.  Alas, it has nothing to do with saving the wild world.  Rather, the sentiment being exercised is one of personal satisfaction.  It is, in fact, about vengeance.  Vengeance as a virtue; vengeance as the mobilized hand of Nature swinging down to destroy the destroyers, to slay the slayers.  It is, in essence, the hand of God’s wrath. 

     But look at this objectively.  He actually has righteousness on his side, because civilization is really making a mess of things.  He also has the biblical imperative of an eye for an eye, hard and cold justice against the sinners, and oceans of blood miraculously parting to guide his chosen few out of the ravaged, death-worshipping hell he has both helped to bring down (civilization) and thereafter helped to create (in the messy ashes of post-civilization).

     So, it is important to attack and denigrate those people (environmentalists, scientists, writers, etc.) who—seeing what he sees—then possess the audacity of seeking another way through the ongoing wreck that is civilisation.  Who, indeed, see no value in destruction per se (for it will not win a brave new world for anyone), and therefore endeavour to participate in civilization and therein seek to mitigate its destructive nature.

     There’s another way of looking at this: it is worthy and indeed imperative that we save the wildness of our world; and accordingly, we need to continue fighting the good fight.  At the same time, what little conscience civilization possesses is the only thing keeping wild animals and their habitats alive.  Jensen wants to end civilization to save the wild animals, when ending civilization will actually seal the annihilation of every wild animal walking, flying or swimming on this planet.  What irony.

     The present situation?  How fares the health of modern civilization?  There may be some blips of recovery, but in essence we’re going down.  We cannot sustain our present lifestyle but we’re not willing to surrender it, and so we proceed as we have always done, and it’s killing the planet and with it, us.  Blowing up dams and Wal-Marts will only make the fall that much uglier, and the wild creatures of the world will suffer as a consequence of this appalling virtue of vengeance.  Finding clean energy alternatives and boycotting the destructive, de-humanizing underpinnings of iniquitous manufacture and trade systems, might—just might—hold the wolves of expansion at bay for a little while longer.

     There is no question that things cannot continue unchanged: we are fast reaching our limits and more than one threshold has already been crossed.  Is there a solution?  Is there a way through to a new and viable way of living?  I wish I knew, but frankly—and I truly hate to say this—Jensen doesn’t have a workable answer.

     Wisdom doesn’t come cheap.  Sometimes it arrives too late. But even then, it will find its expression, forcing the changes that need forcing, finding ways through that simply didn’t exist before.  What can civilisation do to help?  It can house and protect wisdom; more importantly, it can make available the resources needed to put that wisdom into practice.  Without that cocoon, wisdom yields nothing.  Standing in the wreckage of a destroyed civilization, whatever satisfaction the scene yields soon fades.  What takes its place?  An empty stomach. Wisdom doesn’t come cheap, and sometimes it arrives too late.   Mister Jensen: take a step back and give this some more thought.  Surrender those most cherished hopes and beliefs about what was and what might be again.  You’re a smart man and if anyone can find a way through, it’s you.  But destroying civilization?  It may satisfy, but it wins nothing, and doing it will kill the very things you love and value above all else.

     Finally, let’s say you win.  You lead your crusade of destruction and manage to bring it all down.  Though I do possess survival skills, I don’t really expect to personally survive the terrible age that will follow.  No matter.  I’ll give you this word of advice.  In your army there will be many soldiers who care nothing about saving the world, people or wild animals.  They’re in it because they like destroying things.  They get off on it.  Best keep a loyal friend guarding your back, because those soldiers will turn on you.  Sooner or later, they will turn on you.  If you’ll forgive the corporate analogy, you can bank on it.  On the rarest of occasions, vengeance can be a virtue.  Mostly, it’s anything but.

     Good luck.

The intrepid necromancers Bauchelain and Korbal Broach, scourges of civilization, raisers of the dead, reapers of the souls of the living, devourers of hope, betrayers of faith, slayers of the innocent and modest personifications of evil, have a lot to answer for and answer they will. Known as the Nehemoth, they are pursued by countless self-professed defenders of decency, sanity and civilization. After all, since when does evil thrive unchallenged? Well, often: but not this time.

Hot on their heels are the Nehemothanai, avowed hunters of Bauchelain and Korbal Broach. In the company of a gaggle of artists and pilgrims, stalwart Mortal Sword Tulgord Vise, pious Well Knight Arpo Relent, stern Huntsman Steck Marynd, and three of the redoubtable Chanter brothers (and their lone sister) find themselves faced with the cruelest of choices. The legendary Cracked Pot Trail, a stretch of harsh wasteland between the Gates of Nowhere and the Shrine of the Indifferent God, has become a tortured path of deprivation.

Will honour, moral probity and virtue prove champions in the face of brutal necessity? No, of course not. Don’t be silly.

PS Publishing (UK)

 


PS Publishing (UK)  •  Hornsea (2009)  •  signed/traycased  •  ISBN: 978-1-84863-058-1

PS Publishing (UK)  •  Hornsea (2009)  •  hard cover  •  ISBN: 978-1-84863-057-4

Elan Plain, west of Kolanse

     THERE WAS LIGHT, AND THEN THERE WAS HEAT. He knelt, carefully taking each brittle fold in his hands, ensuring that every crease was perfect, that nothing of the baby was exposed to the sun. He drew the hood in until little more than a fist-?sized hole was left for her face, her features grey smudges in the darkness, and then he gently picked her up and settled her into the fold of his left arm. There was no hardship in this.

Bantam Press (UK)

     They’d camped near the only tree in any direction, but not under it. The tree was a gamleh tree and the gamlehs were angry with people. In the dusk of the night before, its branches had been thick with fluttering masses of grey leaves, at least until they drew closer. This morning the branches were bare.

     Facing west, Rutt stood holding the baby he had named Held. The grasses were colourless. In places they had been scoured away by the dry wind, wind that had then carved the dust out round their roots to expose the pale bulbs so the plants withered and died. After the dust and bulbs had gone, sometimes gravel was left. Other times it was just bedrock, black and gnarled. Elan Plain was losing its hair, but that was something Badalle might say, her green eyes fixed on the words in her head. There was no question she had a gift, but some gifts, Rutt knew, were curses in disguise.

     Badalle walked up to him now, her sun-charred arms thin as stork necks, the hands hanging at her sides coated in dust and looking oversized beside her skinny thighs. She blew to scatter the flies crusting her mouth and intoned:

         ’Rutt he holds Held Wraps her good
         In the morning
         And then up he stands—’

     ’Badalle,’ he said, knowing she was not finished with her poem but knowing, as well, that she would not be rushed, ‘we still live.’

     She nodded. These few words of his had become a ritual between them, although the ritual never lost its taint of surprise, its faint disbelief. The ribbers had been especially hard on them last night, but the good news was that maybe they had finally left the Fathers behind.

     Rutt adjusted the baby he’d named Held in his arm, and then he set out, hobbling on swollen feet. Westward, into the heart of the Elan.

     He did not need to look back to see that the others were following. Those who could, did. The ribbers would come for the rest. He’d not asked to be the head of the snake. He’d not asked for anything, but he was the tallest and might be he was the oldest. Might be he was thirteen, could be he was fourteen.

         Behind him Badalle said,

         ’And walks he starts
         Out of that morning
         With Held in his arms
         And his ribby tail
         It snakes out
         Like a tongue
         From the sun.
         You need the longest
         Tongue
         When searching for
         Water
         Like the sun likes to do . . .’

     Badalle watched him for a time, watched as the others fell into his wake. She would join the ribby snake soon enough. She blew at the flies, but of course they came right back, clustering round the sores puffing her lips, hopping up to lick at the corners of her eyes. She had been a beauty once, with these green eyes and her long fair hair like tresses of gold. But beauty bought smiles for only so long. When the larder gapes empty, beauty gets smudged. ‘And the flies,’ she whispered, ‘make patterns of suffering. And suffering is ugly.’

     She watched Rutt. He was the head of the snake. He was the fangs, too, but that last bit was for her alone, her private joke.

     This snake had forgotten how to eat.

     She’d been among the ones who’d come up from the south, from the husks of homes in Korbanse, Krosis and Kanros. Even the isles of Otpelas. Some, like her, had walked along the coast of the Pelasiar Sea, and then to the western edge of Stet which had once been a great forest, and there they found the wooden road, Stump Road they sometimes called it. Trees cut on end to make flat circles, pounded into rows that went on and on. Other children then arrived from Stet itself, having walked the old stream beds wending through the grey tangle of shattered tree-?fall and diseased shrubs. There were signs that Stet had once been a forest to match its old name which was Forest Stet, but Badalle was not entirely convinced—all she could see was a gouged wasteland, ruined and ravaged. There were no trees standing anywhere. They called it Stump Road, but other times it was Forest Road, and that too was a private joke.

     Of course, someone had needed lots of trees to make the road, so maybe there really had once been a forest there. But it was gone now.

     At the northern edge of Stet, facing out on to the Elan Plain, they had come upon another column of children, and a day later yet another one joined them, down from the north, from Kolanse itself, and at the head of this one there had been Rutt. Carrying Held. Tall, his shoulders, elbows, knees and ankles protruding and the skin round them slack and stretched. He had large, luminous eyes. He still had all his teeth, and when the morning arrived, each morning, he was there, at the head. The fangs, and the rest just followed.

     They all believed he knew where he was going, but they didn’t ask him since the belief was more important than the truth, which was that he was just as lost as all the rest.

         ’All day Rutt holds Held
         And keeps her
         Wrapped
         In his shadow.
         It’s hard
         Not to love Rutt
         But Held doesn’t
         And no one loves Held
         But Rutt.’

     Visto had come from Okan. When the starvers and the bone-?skinned inquisitors marched on the city his mother had sent him running, hand in hand with his sister who was two years older than he was, and they’d run down streets between burning buildings and screams filled the night and the starvers kicked in doors and dragged people out and did terrible things to them, while the bone-?skins watched on and said it was necessary, everything here was necessary.

     They’d pulled his sister out of his grip, and it was her scream that still echoed in his skull. Each night since then, he had ridden it on the road of sleep, from the moment his exhaustion took him until the moment he awoke to the dawn’s pale face.

     He ran for what seemed forever, westward and away from the starvers. Eating what he could, savaged by thirst, and when he’d outdistanced the starvers the ribbers showed up, huge packs of gaunt dogs with red-?rimmed eyes and no fear of anything. And then the Fathers, all wrapped in black, who plunged into the ragged camps on the roads and stole children away, and once he and a few others had come upon one of their old night-?holds and had seen for themselves the small split bones mottled blue and grey in the coals of the hearth, and so understood what the Fathers did to the children they took.

     Visto remembered his first sight of Forest Stet, a range of denuded hills filled with torn-?up stumps, roots reminding him of one of the bone-?yards that ringed the city that had been his home, left after the last of the livestock had been slaughtered. And at that moment, looking upon what had once been a forest, Visto had realized that the entire world was now dead. There was nothing left and nowhere to go.

     Yet onward he trudged, now just one among what must be tens of thousands, maybe even more, a road of children leagues long, and for all that died along the way, others arrived to take their place. He had not imagined that so many children existed. They were like a great herd, the last great herd, the sole source of food and nourishment for the world’s last, desperate hunters.

     Visto was fourteen years old. He had not yet begun his growth-?spurt and now never would. His belly was round and rock hard, protruding so that his spine curved deep just above his hips. He walked like a pregnant woman, feet splayed, bones aching. He was full of Satra Riders, the worms inside his body endlessly swimming and getting bigger by the day. When they were ready—soon—they would pour out of him. From his nostrils, from the corners of his eyes, from his ears, from his belly button, his penis and his anus, and from his mouth. And to those who witnessed, he would seem to deflate, skin crinkling and collapsing down into weaving furrows running the length of his body. He would seem to instantly turn into an old man. And then he would die.

     Visto was almost impatient for that. He hoped ribbers would eat his body and so take in the eggs the Satra Riders had left behind, so that they too would die. Better yet, Fathers—but they weren’t that stupid, he was sure—no, they wouldn’t touch him and that was too bad.

     The Snake was leaving behind Forest Stet, and the wooden road gave way to a trader’s track of dusty, rutted dirt, wending out into the Elan. So, he would die on the plain, and his spirit would pull away from the shrunken thing that had been its body, and begin the long journey back home. To find his sister. To find his mother.

     And already, his spirit was tired, so tired, of walking.

     

     At day’s end, Badalle forced herself to climb an old Elan longbarrow with its ancient tree at the far end—grey leaves fluttering—from which she could turn and look back along the road, eastward, as far as her eyes could retrace the day’s interminable journey. Beyond the mass of the sprawled camp, she saw a wavy line of bodies stretching to the horizon. This had been an especially bad day, too hot, too dry, the lone waterhole a slough of foul, vermin-?ridden mud filled with rotting insect carcasses that tasted like dead fish.

     She stood, looking for a long time on the ribby length of the Snake. Those that fell on the track had not been pushed aside, simply trampled on or stepped over, and so the road was now a road of flesh and bone, fluttering threads of hair, and, she knew, staring eyes. The Snake of Ribs. Chal Managal in the Elan tongue.

     She blew flies from her lips. And voiced another poem.

         ’On this morning We saw a
         tree With leaves of grey
         And when we got closer
         The leaves flew away.

         At noon the nameless boy With the
         eaten nose Fell and did not move
         And down came the leaves
         To feed.

         At dusk there was another tree Grey
         fluttering leaves Settling in for the
         night Come the morning They’ll fly
         again.’

     

     
Ampelas Rooted, the Wastelands

     

     The machinery was coated in oily dust that gleamed in the darkness as the faint glow of the lantern light slid across it, conveying motion where none existed, the illusion of silent slippage, as of reptilian scales that seemed, as ever, cruelly appropriate. She was breathing hard as she hurried down the narrow corridor, ducking every now and then to avoid the lumpy black cables slung along from the ceiling. Her nose and throat stung with the rank metal reek of the close, motionless air. Surrounded by the exposed guts of Root, she felt besieged by the unknowable, the illimitable mystery of dire arcana. Yet, she had made these unlit, abandoned passageways her favoured haunt, knowing full well the host of self-?recriminating motivations that had guided her to such choices.

Tor (USA)

     The Root invited the lost, and Kalyth was indeed lost. It was not that she could not find her way among the countless twisting corridors, or through the vast chambers of silent, frozen machines, evading the pits in the floors over which flagstones had never been installed, and staying clear of the chaos of metal and cables spilling out from unpanelled walls—no, she knew her way round, now, after months of wandering. This curse of helpless, hopeless bewilderment belonged to her spirit. She was not who they wanted her to be, and nothing she said could convince them of that.

     She had been born in a tribe on the Elan Plain. She had grown into adulthood there, from child to girl, from girl to woman, and there had been nothing to set her apart, nothing to reveal her as unique, or gifted with unexpected talents. She had married a month after her first blooding. She had borne three children. She had almost loved her husband, and had learned to live with his faint disappointment in her, as her youthful beauty gave way to weary motherhood. She had, in truth, lived a life no different from that of her own mother, and so had seen clearly—without any special talent—the path of her life ahead, year after year, the slow decay of her body, the loss of suppleness, deepening lines upon her face, the sag of her breasts, the miserable weakening of her bladder. And one day she would find herself unable to walk, and the tribe would leave her where she was. To die in solitude, as dying was always a thing of solitude, as it must ever be. For the Elan knew better than the settled peoples of Kolanse, with their crypts and treasure troves for the dead, with the family servants and advisors all throat-?cut and packed in the corridor to the sepulchre, servants beyond life itself, servants for ever.

     Everyone died in solitude, after all. A simple enough truth. A truth no one need fear. The spirits waited before they cast judgement upon a soul, waited for that soul—in its dying isolation—to set judgement upon itself, upon the life it had lived, and if peace came of that, then the spirits would show mercy. If torment rode the Wild Mare, why, then, the spirits knew to match it. When the soul faced itself, after all, it was impossible to lie. Deceiving arguments rang loud with falsehood, their facile weakness too obvious to ignore.

     It had been a life. Far from perfect, but only vaguely unhappy. A life one could whittle down into something like contentment, even should the result prove shapeless, devoid of meaning.

     She had been no witch. She had not possessed the breath of a shaman, and so would never be a Rider of the Spotted Horse. And when the end of that life had come for her and her people, on a morning of horror and violence, all that she had revealed then was a damning selfishness—in refusing to die, in fleeing all that she had known.

     These were not virtues.

     She possessed no virtues.

     Reaching the central, spiral staircase—each step too shallow, too broad for human strides—she set off, her gasps becoming shallower and quicker with the exertion as she ascended level after level, up and out from Root, into the lower chambers of Feed, where she made use of the counterweighted ramp that lifted her by way of a vertical shaft past the seething vats of fungi, the stacked pens of orthen and grishol, drawing to a grating, shivering halt on the base level of Womb. Here, the cacophony of the young assailed her, the hissing shrieks of pain as the dread surgeries were performed—as destinies were decreed in bitter flavours—and, having regained some measure of her wind, she hastened to ascend past the levels of terrible outrage, the stench of wastes and panic that shone like oil on soft hides among shapes writhing on all sides—shapes she was careful to avoid with her eyes, hurrying with her hands clapped over her ears.

     From Womb to Heart, where she now passed among towering figures that paid her no heed, and from whose paths she had to duck and dodge lest they simply trample her underclaw. Ve’Gath Soldiers stood flanking the central ramp, twice her height and in their arcane armour resembling the vast machinery of Root far below. Ornate grilled visors hid their faces save their fanged snouts, and the line of their jaws gave them ghastly grins, as if the implicit purpose of their breed delighted them. More so than the J’an or the K’ell, the true soldiers of the K’Chain Che’Malle frightened Kalyth to the very core of her being. The Matron was producing them in vast numbers.

     No further proof was needed—war was coming.

     That the Ve’Gath gave the Matron terrible pain, each one thrust out from her in a welter of blood and pungent fluid, had become irrelevant. Necessity, Kalyth well knew, was the cruellest master of all.

     Neither soldier guarding the ramp impeded her as she strode on to it, the flat stone underfoot pitted with holes designed to hold claws, and from which cold air flowed up around her—the plunge in ambient temperature on the ramp evidently served somehow to quell the instinctive fear the K’Chain experienced as the conveyance lifted with squeals and groans up past the levels of I leart, ending at Fyes, the Inner

     Keep, Acyl Nest and home of the Matron herself. Riding the ramp alone, however, the strain of the mechanism was less pronounced, and she heard little more than the rush of air that ever disoriented her with a sense of falling even as she raced upward, and the sweat on her limbs and upon her brow quickly cooled. She was shivering by the time the ramp slowed and then halted at the base level of Eyes.

     J’an Sentinels observed her arrival from the foot of the half-?spiral stairs that led to the Nest. As with the Ve’Gath, they were seemingly indifferent to her—no doubt aware that she had been summoned, but even were that not so they would see in her no threat whatsoever to the Matron they had been bred to protect. Kalyth was not simply harmless; she was useless.

     The hot, rank air engulfed her, cloying as a damp cloak, as she made her way to the stairs and began the awkward climb to the Matron’s demesne.

     At the landing one last sentinel stood guard. At least a thousand years old, Bre’nigan was gaunt and tall—taller even than a Ve’Gath—and his multilayered scales bore a silvered patina that made the creature seem ghostly, as if hewn from sun-?bleached mica. Neither pupil nor iris was visible in his slitted eyes, simply a murky yellow, misshapen with cataracts. She suspected the bodyguard was blind, but in truth there was no way to tell, for when Bre’nigan moved, the J’an displayed perfect sureness, indeed, grace and liquid elegance. The long, vaguely curved sword slung through a brass ring at his hip—a ring half embedded in the creature’s hide—was as tall as Kalyth, the blade a kind of ceramic bearing a faint magenta hue, although the flawless edge gleamed silver.

     She greeted Bre’nigan with a nod that elicited no reaction whatsoever, and then stepped past the sentinel.

     Kalyth had hoped—no, she had prayed—and when she set eyes upon the two K’Chain standing before the Matron, and saw that they were unaccompanied, her spirits plummeted. Despair welled up, threatened to consume her. She fought to draw breath into her tight chest.

     Beyond the newcomers and huge on the raised dais, Gunth’an Acyl, the Matron, emanated agony in waves—and in this she was unchanged and unchanging, but now Kalyth felt from the enormous queen a bitter undercurrent of . . . something.

     Unbalanced, distraught, Kalyth only then discerned the state of the two K’Chain Che’Malle, the grievous wounds half-?healed, the chaotic skeins of scars on their flanks, necks and hips. The two creatures looked starved, driven to appalling extremes of deprivation and violence, and she felt an answering pang in her heart.

     But such empathy was shortlived. The truth remained: the K’ell Hunter Sag’Churok and the One Daughter Gunth Mach had failed.

     The Matron spoke in Kalyth’s mind, although it was not speech of any sort, simply the irrevocable imposition of knowledge and meaning. ‘Destriant Kalytb, an error in choice. We remain broken. I remain broken. You cannot mend, not alone, you cannot mend.’

     Neither knowledge nor meaning proved gifts to Kalyth. For she could sense Gunth’an Acyl’s madness beneath the words. The Matron was undeniably insane. So too the course of action she had forced upon her children, and upon Kalyth herself. No persuasion was possible.

     It was likely that Gunth’an Acyl comprehended Kalyth’s convictions—her belief that the Matron was mad—but this too made no difference. Within the ancient queen, there was naught but pain and the torment of desperate need.

     ‘Destriant Kalytb, they shall try again. What is broken must be mended.’

     Kalyth did not believe Sag’Churok and the One Daughter could survive another quest. And that was another truth that failed in swaying Acyl’s imperative.

     ‘Destriant Kalyth, you shall accompany this Seeking. K’Chain Che’Malle are blind to recognition.’

     And so, at last, they had reached what she had known to be inevitable, despite her hopes, her prayers. ‘I cannot,’ she whispered.

     ‘You shall. Guardians are chosen. K’ell Sag’Churok, Rythok, Kor Thuran. Shi’gal Gu’Rull. One Daughter Gunth Mach.’

     ’I cannot,’ Kalyth said again. ‘I have no . .. talents. I am no Destriant—I am blind to whatever it is a Destriant needs. I cannot find a Mortal Sword, Matron. Nor a Shield Anvil. I am sorry.’

     The enormous reptile shifted her massive weight, and the sound was as of boulders settling in gravel. Lambent eyes fixed upon Kalyth, radiating waves of stricture.

     ‘I have chosen you, Destriant Kalyth. It is my children who are blind. The failure is theirs, and mine. We have failed every war. I am the last Matron. The enemy seeks me. The enemy will destroy me. Your kind thrives in this world—to that not even my children are blind. Among you, I shall find new champions. My Destriant must find them. My Destriant leaves with the dawn.’

     Kalyth said no more, knowing any response was useless. After a moment, she bowed and then walked, feebly, as if numb with drink, from the Nest.

     A Shi’gal would accompany them. The significance of this was plain. There would be no failure this time. To fail was to receive the Matron’s displeasure. Her judgement. Three K’ell Hunters and the One Daughter, and Kalyth herself. If they failed . . . against the deadly wrath of a Shi’gal Assassin, they would not survive long.

     Come the dawn, she knew, she would begin her last journey.

     Out into the wastelands, to find Champions that did not even exist.

     And this, she now understood, was the penance set upon her soul. She must be made to suffer for her cowardice. I should have died with the rest. With my husband. My children. I should not have run away. I now must pay for my selfishness.

     The one mercy was that, when the final judgement arrived, it would come quickly. She would not even feel, much less see, the killing blow from the Shi’gal.

     A Matron never produced more than three assassins at any one time, and their flavours were anathema, preventing any manner of alliance. And should one of them decide that the Matron must be expunged, the remaining two, by their very natures, would oppose it. Thus, each Shi’gal warded the Matron against the others. Sending one with the Seeking was a grave risk, for now there would be only two assassins defending her at any time.

     Further proof of the Matron’s madness. To so endanger herself, whilst at the same time sending away her One Daughter—her only child with the potential to breed—was beyond all common sense.

     But then, Kalyth was about to march to her own death. What did she care about these terrifying creatures? Let the war come. Let the mysterious enemy descend upon Ampelas Rooted and all the other Rooted, and cut down every last one of these K’Chain Che’Malle. The world would not miss them.

     Besides, she knew all about extinction. The only real curse is when you find yourself the last of your kind. Yes, she well understood such a fate, and she knew the true depth of loneliness—no, not that paltry, shallow, self-?pitying game played out by people everywhere—but the cruel comprehension of a solitude without cure, without hope of salvation.

     Yes, everyone dies alone. And there may be regrets. There may be sorrows. But these are as nothing to what comes to the last of a breed. For then there can be no evading the truth of failure. Absolute, crushing failure. The failure of one’s own kind, sweeping in from all sides, finding this last set of shoulders to settle upon, with a weight no single soul can withstand.

     There had been a residual gift of sorts with the language of the K’Chain Che’Malle, and it now tortured Kalyth. Her mind had awakened, far beyond what she had known in her life before now. Knowledge was no blessing; awareness was a disease that stained the entire spirit. She could gouge out her own eyes and still see too much.

     Did the shamans of her tribe feel such crushing guilt, when recognition of the end finally arrived? She remembered anew the bleakness in their eyes, and understood it in ways she had not comprehended before, in the life she had once lived. No, she could do naught but curse the

     deadly blessings of these K’Chain Che’Malle. Curse them with all her heart, all her hate.

     Kalyth began her descent. She needed the closeness of Root; she needed the decrepit machinery on all sides, the drip of viscid oils and the foul, close air. The world was broken. She was the last of the Elan, and now her sole remaining task on this earth was to oversee the annihilation of the last Matron of the K’Chain Che’Malle. Was there satisfaction in that? If so, it was an evil kind of satisfaction, making its taste all the more alluring.

     Among her people, death arrived winging across the face of the setting sun, a black, tattered omen low in the sky. She would be that dread vision, that shred of the murdered moon. Driven to the earth as all things were, eventually.

This is all true.

See the bleakness in my eyes.

     Shi’gal Gu’Rull stood upon the very edge of Brow, the night winds howling round his tall, lean form. Eldest among the Shi’gal, the assassin had fought and defeated seven other Shi’gal in his long service to Acyl. He had survived sixty-?one centuries of life, of growth, and was twice the height of a full-?grown K’ell Hunter, for unlike the Hunters—who were flavoured with mortality’s sudden end at the close of ten centuries—the Shi’gal possessed no such flaw in their making. They could, potentially, outlive the Matron herself.

     Bred for cunning, Gu’Rull held no illusions regarding the sanity of Mother Acyl. Her awkward assumption of godly structures of faith ill fitted both her and all the K’Chain Che’Malle. The matron sought human worshippers, human servants, but humans were too frail, too weak to be of any real value. The woman Kalyth was proof enough of that, despite the flavour of percipience Acyl had given her—a percipience that should have delivered certitude and strength, yet had been twisted by a weak mind into new instruments of self-?recrimination and self-?pity.

     That flavour would fade in the course of the Seeking, as Kalyth’s swift blood ever thinned Acyl’s gift, with no daily replenishment possible. The Destriant would revert to her innate intelligence, and that was a meagre one by any standard. She was already useless, as far as Gu’Rull was concerned. And upon this meaningless quest, she would become a burden, a liability.

     Better to kill her as soon as possible, but alas, Mother Acyl’s command permitted no such flexibility. The Destriant must choose a Mortal Sword and a Shield Anvil from among her own kind.

     Sag’Churok had recounted the failure of their first selection. The mass of flaws that had been their chosen one: Redmask of the Awl.

     Gu’Rull did not believe the Destriant would fare any better. Humans might well have thrived in the world beyond, but they did so as would feral orthen, simply by virtue of profligate breeding. They possessed no other talents.

     The Shi’gal lifted his foreshortened snout and opened his nostril slits to scent the chill night air. The wind came from the east and, as usual, it stank of death.

     Gu’Rull had plundered the pathetic memories of the Destriant, and therefore knew that no salvation would be found to the east, on the plains known as the Elan. Sag’Churok and Gunth Mach had set out westward, into the Awl’dan, and there too they found only failure. The north was a forbidding, lifeless realm of ice, tortured seas and bitter cold.

     Thus, they must journey south.

     The Shi’gal had not ventured outside Ampelas Rooted in eight centuries. In that short span of time, it was likely that little had changed in the region known to humans as the Wastelands. Nonetheless, some advance scouting was tactically sound.

     With this in mind, Gu’Rull unfolded his month-?old wings, spreading the elongated feather-?scales so that they could flatten and fill out under the pressure of the wind.

     And then the assassin dropped over the sheer edge of Brow, wings snapping out to their fullest extent, and there arose the song of flight, a low, moaning whistle that was, for the Shi’gal, the music of freedom.

     Leaving Ampelas Rooted … it had been too long since Gu’Rull felt this . . . this exhilaration.

     The two new eyes beneath the lines of his jaw now opened for the first time, and the compounded vision—of the sky ahead and the ground below—momentarily confused the assassin, but after a time Gu’Rull was able to enforce the necessary separation, so that the vistas found their proper relationship to one another, creating a vast panorama of the world beyond.

     Acyl’s new flavours were ambitious, indeed, brilliant. Was such creativity implicit in madness? Perhaps.

     Did that possibility engender hope in Gu’Rull? No. Hope was not possible.

     The assassin soared through the night, high above a blasted, virtually lifeless landscape. Like a shred of the murdered moon.

In the fictitious country of Canada the arts scene is ruled by technocrats who thrive in a secret, nepotistic society of granting agencies, bursaries, awards and peer review boards, all designed to permit self-proclaimed artists to survive without an audience.

In Revolvo, self-proclaimed “hack genre writer” Steven Erikson provides a daring expose of creative skullduggery in the wilds of a country suffering an interminable identity crisis. The names of plenty of real people have been changed and all specific details of the setting have been messed with, so if anyone guesses a certain prairie city in the middle Canada, where the author used to live, well, you’d be plain wrong. Besides, it was a long time ago and his memory is not so good.
 


PS Publishing (UK)  •  Hornsea (2008)  •  jacketed hard cover  •  ISBN: 978-1906301736

PS Publishing (UK)  •  Hornsea (2008)  •  hard cover  •  ISBN: 978-1906301729