Stonewielder (14 page)

‘Where’s Goss?’ Yana asked Pyke.

‘Up top.’

‘Okay.’ To everyone: ‘Stow your gear and head up top to keep this area clear.’

Suth pulled off his armour and hung it but Len took it down and handed it back. ‘Clean, repair, and oil it.’

‘I have nothing to use.’

‘I do.’

‘Thank you.’

The old saboteur waved that aside and headed back out to the companionway. Suth followed. He had to hunch almost double to manage the cramped quarters. They found the deck crammed with soldiers. So thick was the press that the sailors found it almost impossible to do their tasks. There was little work for them, however, as departure was delayed and delayed and then delayed some more. It was the night tide before any of the vessels began making their slow, awkward way out of the bay.

Suth and Dim sat with Len, their armour across their laps, as the man educated them in the care of their newfound riches. Half the time, though, Suth listened to the rumours circulating around them. They were headed north to Seven Cities to consolidate its pacification. To north Genabackis to relieve the 5th. East, to central Genabackis to occupy some rich city called Darujhistan. Or on to south Genabackis to initiate a new front.

Finally Suth asked Len, ‘Where
are
we headed?’

The veteran just frowned over the leathers he was sewing. ‘Doesn’t matter. Everywhere’s the same for us.’

Suth understood the cold reasoning behind that, yet this was a good deal farther than he’d ever imagined his vow to join the Malazans would take him. ‘Where do you
think
we’re headed?’

Len looked up, squinted into the clouded eastern night sky. ‘Well, it sounds to me like all this speculation on where we
might
be headed is shying scared from one of the possibilities. The one no one wants to consider.’

‘Which is what, old timer?’ a nearby soldier asked, and he raised a hand to silence his companions.

Len shrugged. ‘That we’re headed south, to Korel lands.’

‘That’s just so much horseshit!’ the soldier yelled. Everyone began
talking at once. Suth watched, amazed, as this version became the new rumour, to spread like ripples over the crowded deck, outward to the rear and to the front, raising shouts of alarm and even horror as it went.

‘Go to Hood, old man!’ shouted the soldier who’d asked for Len’s opinion in the first place.

Len merely offered Suth a knowing grin. ‘See how you should always keep your mouth shut? People only want to hear what they want to hear.’

Suth agreed. It had also occurred to him that all the speculation involving Genabackis and some city named Darujhistan seemed to be where the speakers
wanted
to go more than where they thought they
might
be going. Everyone wanted to head to overseas postings in Genabackis, or even Seven Cities.

His own personal philosophy on life told him that, therefore, that was
exactly
where they were not headed. This name, Korel, he’d heard once or twice before. It was always mentioned more as a curse than anything. It was considered the very worst, the ugliest of all the holdings of the far-flung Malazan Empire. Well, he’d joined to be tested, and it looked as though he might be headed into one of the sternest trials of his life. That was good. It would be a waste of his time otherwise.

*    *    *

The street orphans were out playing on the courtyard across the way from the temple. Ella squatted on the threshold, preparing the midday meal while keeping one affectionate eye on them. She could hardly believe that just a few years ago she ran with her own gang of urchins. She saw hardly any of them any more. The Watch beat Harl to death as a probable thief. Peek disappeared entirely; and the pimps took Tillin. That would have been her fate had she not started listening to the priest.

It was here she had run when the trolling party had come for her: hired thugs on a sweep for young girls and boys to feed the brothels and slave markets all across the archipelago. And it was on this threshold that the priest faced them. One unarmed man against seven armed, and they backed down. She pounded the pestle and shook her head. The priest. She still could not understand him. He was like nothing from her experience as a child, abandoned to fend for herself on the streets of Banith. An extremely narrow education,
she could admit. A school of casual violence, constant hunger, exploitation, and rape.

Yet not once had the priest indulged in similar practices – the stronger exacting what they wished from the weaker, including sexual gratification. Not that the man was a eunuch. It seemed that he simply refused to accept all the old, traditional ways of doing things. ‘Haven’t got us very far, have they?’ he once told her.

Giggling brought her attention back to her surroundings. A crowd of dirty grinning faces in a half-circle before her. ‘Lunch time, is it?’ Obeying the rules of the street, the feral children said nothing lest they misstep and lose their chance for a meal. They grinned instead, as if happy, and ‘made cute’ as they used to call it in her time. But in their too-bright shining eyes she saw the merciless torment of constant nagging hunger. She reached to the basket at her side, folded back the cloth across it, and distributed the small flatbreads she’d baked earlier that day. Laughing, they snatched their prizes and ran, shoving everything into their mouths before anyone, or anything, could steal it from them.

One young girl remained. Her clothes were finer than the rest, though just as torn and grimed. The bread remained in one hand. She watched Ella with large dark eyes, curiously calm and solemn. Ella returned to preparing the priest’s meal. ‘What is it, child?’ she asked.

‘Is this the house of the foreign holy man?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it true that he eats babies?’

She stopped her pounding. ‘
What?
’

‘That’s what everyone says.’

Ella rocked back on her haunches, eyed the crowded square, the small day-market, the touts and hawkers jostling pilgrims just off the boats as they milled, organizing a procession to the Cloister. ‘So that’s what they say …’ she breathed.

‘Yes. They say that at night he changes into a beast and steals babies from houses and eats their hearts.’

‘What do you think?’ Ella asked, strangely unnerved by the child’s grisly imagination.

The girl pushed her tangled hair from her pale brow.
Very pale – not of Fist? Fathered by a Malazan occupier perhaps? As she suspected she had been herself?
The girl cocked her head, thinking. ‘Oh, I don’t think he does any of
those
things. I think he’s much more dangerous than that.’

Ella stared anew at this strange child. What an odd thing to say. But the child just smiled, her eyes almost mocking, and twirling a pinch of hair in her fingers, ‘making cute’, she wandered off. Watching her go, Ella was struck most not by the child’s precocious self-possession, her assured manner, or what she’d said. Rather, it was the fact that of the pack of hungry street urchins careering around her, most by far bigger and older, not one attempted to snatch the bread held so casually in one small hand.

Later she was arranging the sauce and boiled fish on a platter for the priest when everything changed out among the crowd in the square. A child of these streets, and sensitive to their moods, she stilled as well. The urchins were gone, as were the older idlers; the shouting of the merchants had quietened, as had the general talk. In the hush Ella heard the approach of a measured tramp of boots. A Malazan patrol.

Even the pilgrims paused in their reverences, hands raised in supplication to the towers of the Cloister. The column entered the square from a side street, marched across the broad open expanse. All eyes followed its progress. A standard preceded them, a black cloth bearing the Imperial sceptre. Their surcoats were a dark grey edged in blood red. As the column tramped past the front of the temple a detachment separated and halted. It was led by a figure familiar to all those of the Banith waterfront, Sergeant Billouth, main extortionist and strong arm of the local commander, Captain Karien’el.

‘The priest here?’ Billouth demanded in accented Roolian.

She bowed. ‘I’ll see …’

‘Yes?’ It was the priest in the doorway, a robe open to his waist showing his thick chest and bulging stomach, both covered in a thick pelt of bristle-like hair and the blue curls of tattooing. Ella looked away; she’d glimpsed before that the marks extended well beyond his face, but never guessed they descended quite so far. ‘What is it?’

‘We’re looking for a man,’ Billouth said, and he crossed his arms over his studded leather hauberk, a pleased smile growing on his lips. ‘A criminal fugitive. A thief. Big fellow. Said to hang out in the neighbourhood.’ He leaned forward, lowering his voice. ‘Know anything that could help us?’

The priest’s expression didn’t change. ‘No.’

Ella lowered her gaze.

‘Really? You wouldn’t be withholding information, would you? Because when we catch this fellow and squeeze him … Well, that would be bad news for you.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Billouth ran the back of a hand over his unshaven jowls. ‘If you say so. But I think we’ll be talking again real soon,’ and he winked. Straightening, the sergeant raised his voice. ‘Thank you very much for all the information, Priest. A lot of locals will end up dancing on the Stormwall thanks to you.’

Ella gaped.
But he’d said nothing!

Billouth waved the detachment onward, saluted the priest.

Bastard
, the priest mouthed.

Ella stood watching the Malazans march away, their wicked grins at the trouble they’d stirred up, hating them. The priest took the tray from her. ‘Thank you, Ella.’

‘They want you gone.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why don’t they just … you know …’

‘Get rid of me?’

‘Yes.’

His wide frog mouth twisted up. ‘They’ve tried. A number of times. Right now it’s an uneasy truce.’ He shrugged. ‘But why should they bother when they can get the locals to do it for them?’ He ducked inside.

Ella gasped, seeing it now. She followed him inside. ‘Rumours! They’re spreading rumours about you!’

‘Yes. Them and someone else. The priests at the Cloister, I imagine.’ He sat cross-legged on a mat to eat.

‘But why should they do that?’

He shrugged again. ‘They’re on top and I’m an unknown to them. Any possible change is a threat to their position. So their reaction is to suppress.’

Ella rounded on the entrance as if she would march out to confront them all. ‘But why? You let the homeless kids sleep here. You give shelter and food to the debtors.’

‘And I extort money and sex for the privilege, yes?’

She lowered her gaze, feeling her own face heat. ‘I’d heard that one too.’

He nodded thoughtfully, chewing. ‘They might even believe it, seeing as in their hearts they know that’s what they’d do in my place. But that’s not what I’m here for.’

Surprising herself, she asked in a small voice, ‘What are you here for?’

Still nodding, he spoke, his gaze lowered to his food. ‘I’ve seen
religion from the top and from the bottom, Ella. I’ve been intimate with faith all my life. And it occurs to me that the transfixion of ecstasy, the transporting feeling of being one with a god, is the same everywhere. It matters not what image or idol is bowed to or hangs on the wall, be it the cowled figure of Hood, or a severed bull’s head. It’s all the same because the sensation, the feeling, is the same as it comes from within all of us. From inside. Not without.’ He looked up, his gaze narrowed. ‘That’s the important point. It is a natural innate emotion, a human quality, that can be exploited. That’s why I’m here.’

At some point Ella had clasped a hand to her throat as if to assure herself that she could still breathe. Taking that deep breath, she bowed to the priest and left the empty room for the cool outside. In the small front court she forced her chest to relax, drawing deep the refreshing air to stop her head from spinning. That eerie child was right. This man was somehow much more dangerous than anyone could possibly suspect.

And the question for her was, dare she follow? She saw how till now her life had been nothing more than a mad scramble to fill her stomach, avoid danger, find shelter. Now something more had been shown her; so much that she’d never even suspected existed in the world. She felt as if she’d been granted a glimpse of something terrifyingly huge, yet also awe-inspiring, impossibly grand. Oddly enough she felt humility in the glimpsing of it rather than the puffed-up self-importance she’d met in those claiming to be filled with the spirit of the gods. Was this sensation what the priest meant? If so, she knew immediately she would follow without hesitation. It felt right. Which, she supposed, was its strength, and its danger.

*    *    *

Ivanr spotted the mounted column when it entered the north cleft of the valley his fields overlooked. He could run, he supposed, abandon his home and all he’d worked so hard to build these last few years. But something prevented him. A kind of obtuse stubbornness that asserted itself always at the most inconvenient of times. Besides, there was a chance that they weren’t after him anyway. So it was that the column of Jourilan cavalry encircled him while he leaned on his hoe amid his field of beans.