Dust of Dreams: Book Nine of The Malazan Book of the Fallen - By Steven Erikson Page 0,304

We rut and bare our teeth and expose our throats. Behind our eyes our thoughts can burn bright with love or blacken with jealous rot. We seek company to find our place in it, and unless that place is at the top, all we find dissatisfies us, poisons our hearts.

In company, we are capable of anything. Murder, betrayal. In company, we invent rituals to quench every spark, to ride the murky tide of emotion, to be once again as unseeing and uncaring as the beasts.

I was hated. I was worshipped. And, in the end, I am sure, I was murdered.

Lera Epar, why are you awake once more? Why have you returned?

I was the dust in the hollows, I was the memories lost.

I did terrible things, once. Now I stand here, ready to do them all again.

She was Bitterspring, of the Brold Imass, and her world of ice and white-furred creatures was gone. She set out, a chert and jawbone mace dangling from one hand, the yellowed skin of the white-furred bear trailing down from her shoulders.

She had been too beautiful, once. But history was never kind.

He rose from the mud ringing the waterhole, shedding black roots, fish scales and misshapen cakes of clay and coarse sand. Mouth open, jaws stretched wide, he howled without sound. He had been running straight for them. Three K’ell Hunters, whose heads turned to regard him. They had been standing over the corpses of his wife, his two children. The bodies would join the gutted carcasses of other beasts brought down on their hunt. An antelope, a mule deer. The mates of the felled beasts had not challenged the slayers. No, they had fled. But this one, this male Imass roaring out his battle-cry and rushing them with spear readied, he was clearly mad. He would give his life for nothing.

The K’ell Hunters did not understand.

They had met his charge with the flat of their blades. They had broken the spear and had then beaten him unconscious. They didn’t want his meat, tainted as it was with madness.

Thus ended his first life. In rebirth, he was a man emptied of love. And he had been among the first to step into the embrace of the Ritual of Tellann. To expunge the memories of past lives. Such was the gift, so precious, so perfect.

He had lifted himself from the mud, summoned once more—but this time was different. This time, he remembered everything.

Kalt Urmanal of the Orshayn T’lan Imass stood shin-deep in mud, head tilted back, howling without sound.

Rystalle Ev crouched on a mound of damp clay twenty paces from Kalt. Understanding him, understanding all that assailed him. She too had awakened, possessor of all that she had thought long lost, and so she looked upon Kalt, whom she loved and had always loved, even in the times when he walked as would a dead man, the ashes of his loss grey and thick upon his face; and in the times before, when she harboured jealous hatred for his wife, when she prayed to all the spirits for the woman’s death.

It was possible that his scream would never cease. It was possible that, as they all rose and gathered in their disbelief at their resurrection—as they sought out the one who so cruelly summoned the Orshayn—she would have to leave him here.

Though his howl was without voice, it deafened her mind. If he did not cease, his madness would infect all the others.

The last time the Orshayn had walked the earth had been in a place far away from this one. With but three broken clans remaining—a mere six hundred and twelve warriors left—and three damaged bonecasters, they had fled the Spires and fallen to dust. That dust had been lifted high on the winds, carried half a world away—there had been no thought of a return to bone and withered flesh—to finally settle in a scattered swath across scores of leagues.

This land, Rystalle Ev knew, was no stranger to the Imass. Nor—and Kalt’s torment made this plain—was it unknown to the K’Chain Che’Malle. What were they doing here?

Kalt Urmanal fell to his knees, his cry dying away, leaving a ringing echo in her skull. She straightened, leaning heavily on the solid comfort of her spear’s shaft of petrified wood. This return was unconscionable—a judgement she knew she would not have made without her memories—to that time of raw, wondrous mortality replete with its terrible crimes of love and desire. She could feel her own rage, rising