Memories of Ice & House of Chains - By Steven Erikson Page 0,404

Swords down below, readying lassos, lances and shields – preparing to charge the K'Chain Che'Malle. Dujek's army was being destroyed within the city – the north gate had to be breached. She saw Gruntle, Trake's Mortal Sword, leading his motley legion down to join the Grey Swords. She saw officers riding before the wavering line of Malazans, rallying the heartbroken soldiers. She saw Artanthos – Tayschrenn – preparing to unleash his warren. Caladan Brood knelt beside Korlat, High Denul sorcery enwreathing the Tiste Andii woman. Orfantal stood behind the warlord – she felt the dragon in his blood, icy hunger, eager to return.

All for naught. The Seer and his demonic condors . . . and the K'Chain Che'Malle . . . will kill them all.

She had no choice. She would have to begin. Defy the despair, begin all that she had set in motion so long ago. Without hope, she would take the first step on the path.

Silverfox opened the Warren of Tellann.

Vanished within.

A mother's love abides.

But I was never meant to be a mother. I wasn't ready. I was unprepared to give so much of myself. A self I had only begun to unveil.

The Mhybe could have turned away. At the very beginning. She could have defied Kruppe, defied the Elder God, the Imass – what were these lost souls to her? Malazans, one and all. The enemy. Dire in the ways of magic. All with the blood of Rhivi staining their hands.

Children were meant to be gifts. The physical manifestation of love between a man and a woman. And for that love, all manner of sacrifice could be borne.

Is it enough that the child issued from my flesh? Arrived in this world in the way of all children? Is the simple pain of birth the wellspring of love? Everyone else believed so. They took the bond of mother and child as given, a natural consequence of the birth itself.

They should not have done that.

My child was not innocent.

Conceived out of pity, not love; conceived with dread purpose – to take command of the T'lan Imass, to draw them into yet another war – to betray them.

And now, the Mhybe was trapped. Lost in a dreamworld too vast to comprehend, where forces were colliding, demanding that she act, that she do ... something.

Ancient gods, bestial spirits, a man imprisoned in pain, in a broken, twisted body. This cage of ribs before me – is it his? The one I spoke with, so long ago? The one writhing so in a mother's embrace? Are we as kin, he and I? Both trapped in ravaged bodies, both doomed to slide ever deeper into this torment of pain?

The beast waits for me – the man waits for me. We must reach out to each other. To touch, to give proof to both of us that we are not alone.

Is this what awaits us?

The cage of ribs, the prison, must be broken from the outside.

Daughter, you may have forsaken me. But this man, this brother of mine, him I shall not forsake.

She could not be entirely sure, but she believed that she started crawling once more.

The beast howled in her mind, a voice raw with agony.

She would have to free it, if she could. Such was pity's demand.

Not love.

Ah, now I see . . .

Thus.

He would embrace them. He would take their pain. In this world, where all had been taken from him, where he walked without purpose, burdened with the lives and deaths of tens of thousands of mortal souls – unable to grant them peace, unable – unwilling – to simply cast them off, he was not yet done.

He would embrace them. These T'lan Imass, who had twisted all the powers of the Warren of Tellann into a ritual that devoured their souls. A ritual that had left them – in the eyes of all others – as little more than husks, animated by a purpose they had set outside themselves, yet were chained to – for eternity.

Husks, yet... anything but.

And that was a truth Itkovian had not expected, had no way to prepare for.

Insharak Ulan, who was born third to Inal Thoom and Sultha A'rad of the Nashar Clan that would come to be Kron's own, in the spring of the Year of Blighted Moss, below the Land of Raw Copper, and I remember—

I remember—

A snow hare, trembling, no more than a dusk-shadow's length from my reach, my child's arm and hand stretching. Streaks in the white, the promise of