Dust of Dreams: Book Nine of The Malazan Book of the Fallen - By Steven Erikson Page 0,28

Rud Elalle’s own lesson arrives, he may not be so fortunate.’

‘Ever had a child, Silchas? I thought not. Giving advice to a child is like flinging sand at an obsidian wall. Nothing sticks. The brutal truth is that we each suffer our own lessons—they can’t be danced round. They can’t be slipped past. You cannot gift a child with your scars—they arrive like webs, constricting, suffocating, and that child will struggle and strain until they break. No matter how noble your intent, the only scars that teach them anything are the ones they earn themselves.’

‘Then I must ask you, as his father, for a boon.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘I am, Udinaas.’

Fear Sengar had tried to stab this Tiste Andii in the back, had tried to step into Scabandari Bloodeye’s shadow. Fear had been a difficult man, but Udinaas, for all his jibes and mockery, his bitter memories of slavery, had not truly disliked him. Nobility could be admired even when not met eye to eye. And he had seen Trull Sengar’s grief. ‘What would you ask of me, then?’

‘Give him to me.’

‘What?’

The Tiste Andii held up a hand. ‘Make no answer yet. I will explain the necessity. I will tell you what is coming, Udinaas, and when I am done, I believe you will understand.’

Udinaas found he was trembling. And as Silchas Ruin continued to speak, he felt the once-solid ground inexorably shifting beneath his feet.

The seemingly turgid pace of this world was proved an illusion, a quaint conceit.

The truth was, everything was pitching headlong, a hundred thousand boulders sliding down a mountainside. The truth was, quite simply, terrifying.

Onrack stood watching the two figures. The conversation had stretched on much longer than the Imass had anticipated, and his worry was burgeoning along with it. Little good was going to come of this, he was certain. He heard a coughing grunt behind him and turned to see the two emlava crossing his trail a hundred or so paces back. They swung their massive, fanged heads in his direction and eyed him warily, as if seeking permission—but he could see by their loping gait and ducked tail-stubs that they were setting out on a hunt. The guilt beneath their intent seemed instinctive, as did their wide-eyed belligerence. They might be gone a day, or weeks. In need of a major kill, with winter fast approaching.

Onrack turned his attention back to Udinaas and Silchas Ruin, and saw that they were now walking towards him, side by side, and the Imass could read well enough Udinaas’s battered spirit, his fugue of despair.

No, nothing good was on its way here.

He heard the scrabble behind him as the emlava reached the point where the trail they’d taken would move them out of Onrack’s line of sight, and both animals bolted to escape his imagined attention. But he had no interest in calling them back. He never did. The beasts were simply too stupid to take note of that.

Intruders into this realm rode an ill tide, arriving like vanguards to legions of chaos. Change stained the world the hue of fresh blood more often than not. When the truth was, the one thing all Imass desired was peace, affirmed in the ritual of living, secure and stable and exquisitely predictable. Heat and smoke from the hearths, the aromas of cooking meats, tubers, melted marrow. The nasal voices of the women singing as they went about their day’s modest demands. The grunts and gasps of love-making, the chants of children. Someone might be working an antler tine, the spiral edge of a split long-bone, or a core of flint. Another kneeling by the stream, scraping down a hide with polished blades and thumbnail scrapers, and nearby there was the faint depression marking a pit of sand where other skins had been buried. When anyone needed to urinate they would squat over the pit to send their stream down. To cure the hides.

Elders sat on boulders and watched the camp and all their kin going about their tasks, and they dreamed of the hidden places and the pathways that opened in the fever of droning voices and drumming and swirling scenes painted on torch-lit stone, deep in the seethe of night when spirits blossomed before the eyes in myriad colours, when the patterns rose to the surface and floated and flowed in the smoky air.

The hunt and the feast, the gathering and the shaping. Days and nights, births and deaths, laughter and grief, tales told and retold, the mind within unfolding