Midnight Tides & The Bonehunters - By Steven Erikson Page 0,591

eyes narrowed as she watched the old soldiers approaching.

'You're in trouble,' Scant said. 'You did something, Gilani, and now they want your blood.'

It certainly looked that way, so Masan made no reply to Scant's words. She thought back over all of the things she had done of late. Plenty to consider, but none came to mind that anyone might find out about, not after all this time. 'Hey, Scant,' she said.

The soldier looked up. 'What?'

'You know that big hook-blade I keep with my gear?'

Scant's eyes brightened. 'Yes?'

'You can't have it,' she said. 'Saltlick can have it.'

'Thanks, Masan,' Saltlick said.

'I always knew,' Hanno said, 'you had designs on Salty. I could tell, you know.'

'No I don't, I just don't like Scant, that's all.'

'Why don't you like me?'

'I just don't, that's all.'

They fell silent as the veterans arrived. Sergeant Gesler, his eyes on Masan, said, 'We need you, soldier.'

'That's nice.' She noted the way his eyes travelled her mostly naked frame, lingering on her bared breasts with their large, dark nipples, before, with a rapid blinking, he met her eyes once more.

'We want you to take Apsalar's horse and catch up with the Fourteenth.' This was from Sergeant Strings or Fiddler or whatever his name was these days. It seemed Gesler had forgotten how to talk.

'That's it?'

'Aye.'

'All right. It's a nice horse.'

'We need you to convince the Adjunct we're actually alive,' Fiddler went on. 'Then get her to send us mounts and supplies.'

'All right.'

The woman presumably named Apsalar led her horse forward and handed Masan Gilani the reins.

She swung up into the saddle, then said, 'Anybody got a spare knife or something?'

Apsalar produced one from beneath her cloak and passed it up to her.

Masan Gilani's fine brows rose. 'A Kethra. That will do. I'll give it back to you when we meet up again.'

Apsalar nodded.

The Dal Honese set off.

'Shouldn't take long,' Gesler said, watching as the woman, riding clear of the column, urged her horse into a canter.

'We'll rest for a while longer here,' Faradan Sort said, 'then resume our march.'

'We could just wait,' Fiddler said.

The captain shook her head, but offered no explanation.

The sun settled on the horizon, bleeding red out to the sides like blood beneath flayed skin. The sky overhead was raucous with sound and motion as thousands of birds winged southward. They were high up, mere black specks, flying without formation, yet their cries reached down in a chorus of terror.

To the north, beyond the range of broken, lifeless hills and steppe-land ribboned by seasonal run-off, the plain descended to form a white-crusted salt marsh, beyond which lay the sea. The marsh had once been a modest plateau, subsiding over millennia as underground streams and springs gnawed through the limestone. The caves, once high and vast, were now crushed flat or partially collapsed, and those cramped remnants were flooded or packed with silts, sealing in darkness the walls and vaulted ceilings crowded with paintings, and side chambers still home to the fossilized bones of Imass.

Surmounting this plateau there had been a walled settlement, small and modest, a chaotic array of attached residences that would have housed perhaps twenty families at the height of its occupation. The defensive walls were solid, with no gates, and for the dwellers within, ingress and egress came via the rooftops and single-pole ladders.

Yadeth Garath, the first human city, was now little more than salt-rotted rubble swallowed in silts, buried deep and unseen beneath the marsh. No history beyond the countless derivations from its ancient name remained, and of the lives and deaths and tales of all who had once lived there, not even bones survived.

Dejim Nebrahl recalled the fisher folk who had dwelt upon its ruins, living in their squalid huts on stilts, plying the waters in their round, hide boats, and walking the raised wooden platforms that crossed the natural canals wending through the swamp. They were not descendants of Yadeth Garath. They knew nothing of what swirled beneath the black silts, and this itself was an undeniable truth, that memory withered and died in the end. There was no single tree of life, no matter how unique and primary this Yadeth Garath – no, there was a forest, and time and again, a tree, its bole rotted through, toppled to swiftly vanish in the airless muck.

Dejim Nebrahl recalled those fisher folk, the way their blood tasted of fish and molluscs, dull and turgid and clouded with stupidity. If man and woman cannot – will not – remember, then they deserved all