Reaper's Gate & Toll the Hounds - By Steven Erikson Page 0,294

the earth beneath them.

'Four!' Fiddler said with a savage grin.

Bottle saw Cuttle staring at the sergeant with undisguised awe and more than a little worship.

Smoke now, billowing in the distance, an earthen blot rising above the treeline.

'Let's make for that farm ahead,' Fiddler said. 'We'll rest up there for the day – I don't think our pursuers are in any condition to do much.'

'The drum,' Cuttle whispered. 'I seen it. The drum. Now I can die happy.'

Damned sappers. Bottle shook his head. There was pain there, now, in that mangled stretch of track a quarter league away. Human, beast, and . . . oh, and demon. You'd have done better chasing us. Even so, what a mess we've made.

Yes, plenty of pain, but more death. Flat, dwindling death, spreading dark as that dust in the air. Fiddler's drum. No better announcement imaginable, that the Malazans were here.

Thom Tissy's descent from the tree was a little loud, a little fast. In a skein of snapped branches, twigs, leaves and one abandoned wasp nest, the sergeant landed heavy and hard on his backside. 'Ow, gods below, gods below!'

'Ain't no god at that end, just a tailbone,' a soldier called out from the nearby squads.

Keneb waited for a few more heartbeats, then asked, 'Sergeant, tell me what you saw.'

Thom Tissy slowly, carefully, regained his feet. He walked about on his short bandy legs, squat as an ogre, replete with pocked face and warty hands. 'Smoke, Fist, and plenty of it. Counted ten spots in all, one of 'em big – probably the thunder we heard a little while back – more than one cusser for sure. Maybe three, maybe more.'

Meaning someone was in desperate trouble. Keneb glanced away, scanned the motley soldiers hunkered down in the forest glade. 'Ten?'

'Aye, Fist. I guess we stirred 'em up some, enough so that the fighting's getting fierce. When the captain gets back, we'll find out some details, I suppose.'

Yes. Faradan Sort. But she and Beak had been away for days, almost a week now.

'Ten.'

'Expecting more, Fist?' Thom Tissy asked. 'My line of sight wasn't bad, but not perfect. I saw six on the north side, four on the south, putting us near dead centre and a half a night's travel behind. Anyway, the outermost smokes were right on the horizons, so we're still spread well out, the way we should be. And the smoke just tells us where bigger fights happened, not all the other little ambushes and the like. Something wrong, Fist?'

'Settle the squads in,' Keneb replied, turning away. Oh, aye, there was fighting going on. But nothing evenly matched. His marines were outnumbered; no chance of acquiring the allies they'd thought they'd get. True, they were loaded down with munitions, but the more mages arriving with the Edur and Letherii troops the more the sheer overwhelming imbalance would start to tell. His squads, even paired up, couldn't afford losses. Four or five dead and that threshold of effectiveness would have been crossed. There would have to be convergence, merging of survivors – and this leagues-long line of advance would start thinning out. Instead of gaining in strength and momentum as the advance began to close in on this empire's capital, the Malazan marines would in fact be weaker.

Of course, this invasion was not simply Keneb's covert marine advance. There were other elements – the Adjunct and Blistig's regular infantry, who would be led in the field, when that time came, by the terrifying but competent Captain Kindly. There were the Khundryl Burned Tears and the Perish – although they were, for the moment, far away. A complicated invasion indeed.

For us, here, all we need to do is sow confusion, cut supplies to the capital whenever we can, and just keep the enemy off balance, guessing, reacting rather than initiating. The fatal blows will come from elsewhere, and I need to remind myself of that. So that I don't try to do too much. What counts is keeping as many of my marines alive as possible – not that the Adjunct's tactics with us give me much chance of that. I think I'm starting to understand how the Bridgeburners felt, when they were being thrown into every nightmare, again and again.

Especially at the end. Pale, Darujhistan, that city called Black Coral.

But no, this is different. The Adjunct doesn't want us wiped out. That would be insanity, and she may be a cold, cold bitch, but she's not mad. At least not so it's showed, anyway.

Keneb