Dust of Dreams: Book Nine of The Malazan Book of the Fallen - By Steven Erikson Page 0,340

wanted warrens of his own, enough to trap him in one place, as if it was a web. Trap him in place. Trap him in time.’

‘The debt is mine!’ Feather Witch shrieked.

‘Not any more,’ said Veed. ‘It is now Icarium Lifestealer’s.’

‘He’s broken!’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s not his fault!’

‘No, it isn’t, and no, it’s not fair either. But there is blood on his hands, and terror in his heart. It seems we must all feed him something, doesn’t it? Or perhaps it was the other way round. But the ghost is here now, with us. Icarium is here. Time to die, Feather Witch. Taxilian.’

‘And you?’ Taxilian asked.

Veed smiled. ‘Me, too.’

‘Why?’ Taxilian demanded. ‘Why now?’

‘Because Lifestealer is where he must be. At this moment, he is in place. And we must all step aside.’ And Veed turned to face the ghost. ‘The J’an sees only you, Icarium. The Nest is ready, the flavours altered to your . . . tastes.’ He gestured and the ghost saw that both Feather Witch and Taxilian had vanished. ‘Don’t think you are quite rid of us—we’re just back inside you, old friend. We’re the stains on your soul.’

The ghost looked down and saw grey-green skin, long-fingered, scarred hands. He lifted them to touch his face, fingers brushing the tusks jutting from his lower jaw. ‘What must I do?’

But Veed was gone. He was alone in the chamber.

The J’an Sentinel, Sulkit, stood watching him. Waiting.

Icarium faced the throne. A machine. A thing of veins and arteries and bitter oils. A binder of time, the maker of certainty.

The flavours swirled round him. The entire towering city of stone and iron trembled.

I am awake—no. I am . . . reborn.

Icarium Lifestealer walked forward to take his throne.

The shore formed a ragged line, the bleak sweep of darkness manifested in all the natural ways—the sward leading to the bank that then dropped to the beach itself, the sky directly overhead onyx as a starless night yet smeared with pewter clouds—the realm behind them, then, a vast promise of purity at their backs. But the strand glowed, and as Yan Tovis dismounted and walked down her boots sank into the incandescent sand. Reaching down—not yet ready to fix her gaze on what was beyond the shoreline—she scooped up a handful. Cool, surprisingly light—she squinted.

Not crumbled coral. Not stone.

‘It’s bone,’ said Yedan Derryg, standing a few paces to her left. ‘See that driftwood? Long bones, mostly. Those cobbles, they’re—’

‘Yes,’ she snapped. ‘I know.’ She flung away the handful of bone fragments.

‘It was easier,’ he continued, ‘from back there. We’re too close—’

‘Be quiet, will you?’

Suddenly defiant, she willed herself to look—and reeled back a step, breath hissing from between her teeth.

A sea indeed, yet one that rose like a wall, its waves rolling down to foam at the waterline. She grunted. But this was not water at all. It was . . . light.

Behind her, Yedan Derryg said, ‘Memories return. When they walked out from the Light, their purity blinded us. We thought that a blessing, when in truth it was an attack. When we shielded our eyes, we freed them to indulge their treacherous ways.’

‘Yedan, the story is known to me—’

‘Differently.’

She came near to gasping in relief as she turned from the vast falling wall to face her brother. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The Watch serves the Shore in its own way.’

‘Then, in turn, I must possess knowledge that you don’t—is that what you’re saying, brother?’

‘The Queen is Twilight, because she can be no other. She holds the falling of night. She is the first defender against the legions of light that would destroy darkness itself. But we did not ask for this. Mother Dark yielded, and so, to mark that yielding, Twilight relives it.’

‘Again and again. For ever.’

Yedan’s bearded jaws bunched, his face still stained with blood. Then he shook his head. ‘Nothing’s for ever, sister.’

‘Did we really lack sophistication, Yedan? Back then? Were we really that superstitious, that ignorant?’

His brows lifted.

She gestured at the seething realm behind her. ‘This is the true border of Thyrllan. It’s that and nothing more. The First Shore is the shore between Darkness and Light. We thought we were born on this shore—right here—but that cannot be true! This shore destroys—can you not feel it? Where do you think all these bones came from?’

‘This was a gift to no one,’ Yedan replied. ‘Look into the water, sister. Look deep into it.’

But she would not. She had already seen what he had seen. ‘They cannot be drowning—no matter what it