Dust of Dreams: Book Nine of The Malazan Book of the Fallen - By Steven Erikson Page 0,426

each step he took, and there was little debate as to who was the tallest, biggest soldier in Brys’s army. He drew curious stares as he made his way to HQ. He wasn’t astride his huge horse, after all, and not riding at a torrid pitch making people scatter as was his habit; thus, seeing him on foot was shocking in itself, quite apart from the fact that he was striding into the heart of the encampment. Henar Vygulf hated crowds. He probably hated people. Could be he hated the world.

Trailing two steps behind him was Lance Corporal Odenid, who was attached to the commander’s staff as a message-bearer. This was his sole task these days: finding soldiers and dragging them back to Brys Beddict. The commander was conducting intensive and extensive interviews, right through the whole army. Odenid had heard that for the most part Brys was asking about the Wastelands, collecting rumours, old tales, wispy legends. The most extraordinary thing of all, when it came to these interviews, was Brys Beddict’s uncanny ability to remember names and faces. At day’s end he would call in a scribe and recount for her a complete and detailed list of those soldiers and support staff he’d spoken with that day. He would give ages, places of birth, military history, even family details such as he had gleaned, and he would add notes on whatever each soldier knew or thought they knew about the Wastelands.

The Beddict brothers, Odenid concluded, were probably not even human. Probably both god-touched. Hadn’t Brys returned from the dead? And hadn’t he been the only one—until that Tarthenal—to have defeated the Emperor of a Thousand Deaths?

Henar Vygulf had been summoned for an interview, but this time there was more to it, or so Odenid suspected. An officer from the Bonehunters had ridden into camp early this morning. Something had happened. Odenid didn’t rank high enough to be able to lounge around in the HQ tent, and the commander’s inner circle were a close-mouthed lot one and all. Whatever the news had been, it had stalled the march, probably until noon. And the Malazan was still there, in a private meeting with Brys and his Ceda—Odenid had seen them himself when he’d been summoned in and told to head to the outriders and bring back Henar Vygulf. ‘Or,’ had said Brys, ‘I think he is so named. The tall one, the one with Bluerose ancestry. Has in his train about ten specially bred horses strong enough to carry him—a family of horse-breeders, I seem to recall . . .’

And the man slept on his right and pissed standing on one leg, yes, that’s him all right.

The added thought made Odenid smile. God-touched. Brys hadn’t even interviewed Henar yet.

They reached the front entrance to the command tent. Henar halted, ignoring the lone guard standing beside the flap as he turned to Odenid. ‘Do you announce me?’

‘No. Just go in, Outrider.’

Henar had to duck, something that never put him in a good mood. There were reasons for living out in the open, good ones, and even these flimsy walls of canvas and now silk seemed to push in on him. He was forced to deepen his breathing, struggling to beat down the panic rising within him.

Two other aides waved him through to the inner chambers. He tried not to see them once the gestures were made. Walls were miserable enough; people crowded inside the tight spaces they made, with Henar trapped in there with them, was even worse. They were breathing his air. It was all he could do not to snap both their necks.

That was the problem with armies. Too many people. Even the relatively open camp with its berms and corner fortlets and widely spaced tent rows could instil in him a wild desperation. When he delivered dispatches into such camps, he rode like a madman, just to push through and deliver the message and then get the damned out as quickly as possible.

He made his way down a too-narrow passage and stepped through a cloying slit in the silks to find himself in a larger room, the ceiling peaked and morning sunlight making the air glow. Commander Brys sat in a folding chair, the Atri-Ceda Aranict standing on his left. Seated in another chair was the Malazan officer, her legs folded showing him a solid, muscled thigh—his eyes followed the sweeping curve of its underside and all at once his breathing steadied. A moment later his gaze lifted