Dust of Dreams: Book Nine of The Malazan Book of the Fallen - By Steven Erikson Page 0,436

me?’

‘I heard you, Gesler. Dreams. It was those damned scaled rats. Every time I saw one on the trail I got the shivers.’

‘Rats ain’t K’Chain Che’Malle. You know, if you had even half a brain maybe you could’ve figured out your dreams, and maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess!’

Stormy dropped his hands, swung his shaggy head to regard Kalyth. ‘Look at her,’ he muttered.

‘What about her?’

‘Reminds me of my mother.’

Gesler’s hands twitched, closed into fists. ‘Don’t even think it, Stormy.’

‘Can’t help it. She does—’

‘No, she doesn’t. Your mother had red hair—’

‘Not the point. Around her eyes, see it? You should know, Ges, you went and bedded her enough times—’

‘That was an accident—’

‘A what?’

‘I mean, how did I know she went around seducing your friends?’

‘She didn’t. Just you.’

‘But you said—’

‘So I lied! I was just trying to make you feel better! No, fuck that, I was trying to make you feel that you’re nobody important—your head’s swelled up bad enough as it is. Anyway, it don’t matter any more, does it? Forget it. I forgave you, remember—’

‘You were drunk and we’d just trashed an alley trying to kill each other—’

‘Then I forgave you. Forget it, I said.’

‘I wish I could! Now you go and say this one looks like—’

‘But she does!’

‘I know she does! Now just shut the fuck up! We ain’t—we ain’t—’

‘Yes, we are. You know it, Ges. You don’t like it, but you know it. We been cut loose. We got us a destiny. Right here. Right now. She’s Destriant and you’re Shield Anvil and I’m Mortal Sword—’

‘Wrong way round,’ Gesler snarled. ‘I’m the Mortal Sword—’

‘Good. Glad we got that settled. Now get her to cook us something—’

‘Oh, is that what Destriants do, then? Cook for us?’

‘I’m hungry and I got no food!’

‘Then ask her. Politely.’

Stormy scowled at Kalyth.

‘Trader tongue,’ Gesler said.

Instead, Stormy pointed at his mouth and then patted his stomach.

Kalyth said, ‘You eat.’

‘Hungry, aye.’

‘Food,’ she said, nodding, and then pointed to a small leather satchel to one side.

Gesler laughed.

Kalyth then rose. ‘They come.’

‘Who come?’ Gesler asked.

‘K’Chain Che’Malle. Army. Soon . . . war.’

At that moment Gesler felt the trembling ground underfoot. Stormy did the same and as one they both turned to face north.

Fener’s holy crotch.

Chapter Twenty-Three

I am the face you would not own

Though you carve your place

Hidden in the crowd

Mine are the features you never saw

As you stack your thin days

In the tick of tonight’s straw

My legion is the unexpected

A forest turned to masts

Grass blades to swords

And this is the face you would not own

A brother with bad news

Hiding in the crowd

HARBINGER

FISHER

S

he’d had an uncle, a prince high on the rungs but, alas, the wrong ladder. He had attempted a coup, only to find that all his agents were someone else’s agents. Was it this conceit that had led to his death? Which choice made it all inevitable? Queen Abrastal had thought many times on the man’s fate. The curious thing was, he’d actually made his escape, out from the city, all the way to the eastern border, in fact. But on the morning of his last ride, a farmer had woken with crippling rheumatism in his legs. This man was fifty-seven years old and, for thirty-odd years, each month through the summers and autumns he had taken the harvest of his own family’s plot up to the village a league and a half away. And he had done this by pulling a two-wheeled cart.

He must have awoken that morning in the turgid miasma of his own mortality. Wearing down, wearing out. And studying the mists wreathing the low hills and glades edging the fields, he must have held a silence in his hands, and in his heart. We pass on. All that was effortless becomes an ordeal, yet the mind remains lucid, trapped inside a failing body. Though the morning promised a fine day, night’s cold darkness remained lodged within him.

He had three sons but all were in the levy and off fighting somewhere. Rumours of some uprising; the old man knew little about it and cared even less. Except for the fact that his sons were not with him. In motions stiff with pain he had hitched up the mule to a rickety flatbed wagon. He could as easily have chosen the cart, but the one mule he owned that wasn’t too old or lame was a strangely long-bodied specimen, too long for the cart’s yoke and spar.

The efforts of preparation, concluding with loading the flatbed, had taken most of the morning, even