In the morning, Yullveig had no hot tea or drink to offer. She handed over slices of the smoked venison wrapped in burlap, then collected an immense spear from next to the door and headed out. Kyle followed. They spoke little the entire time; Yullveig proved a far more sombre guide than her voluble husband. She struck a south-east route and four days’ hard journeying brought them to a stretch of forest that betrayed patches of recent clearing.
‘Homesteaders,’ she explained.
Kyle listened but heard no reports of further chopping, nor voices calling out. He wondered if Baran and Erta had been through recently.
‘You are on your own from here, cousin. Give our regards to the Losts.’
‘I shall. Give my thanks to Cull, won’t you?’
‘Yes. Fare you well. Oh,’ she gestured to his side, ‘I’d cover a weapon such as that if I were you.’
‘Ah — yes. I usually do. Goodbye.’
Yullveig turned and jogged off. She disappeared in what seemed an instant among the dark trunks of the spruce and pine. He thought there must be some sort of magic in how these Icebloods came and went so quietly and suddenly here within their Holdings.
He did indeed wrap the sword in leather before heading into the clearing. But he kept it at his side in case he had call to use it. He travelled easily down among the foothills; parties crossed his path now and then, but none challenged or harassed him. He supposed he looked too much like what he was: just another ragged fortune-hunter.
He met more and more gold-chasers the further he went. They were a friendly lot away from the actual bearing fields and stream beds. Some invited him to join them at their fires. They told tall tales of the difficulties of their passages north — and of the hard knocks and precious few rewards since. And every day Kyle listened for the mention of a fierce warrior-woman, a shieldmaiden. For most of the men and women he met hailed from nearby Genabackis, and would know her as such.
The trails that had been newly tramped out of the wilderness led him down to the shores of the Sea of Gold, and a rambling tent city its fortune-hunter founders named, ironically perhaps, Wrongway.
At a tent-tavern, he heard that a band of Malazan marauders had attacked and half burned the place to the ground. After this, the thug who ran the town, one Lying Gell, died of a mysterious knife-thrust and most of the gold-hunters decamped to join the crowd pressing the siege of the last independent local settlement, Mantle. The prospect of loot on hand, it seemed, was preferable to trying to track it down and dig it up. Kyle reflected that an invasion of fortune-hunters had now made the transition into a plain invasion. Inevitable, he supposed, when these rootless blades appeared to outnumber the locals by far.
‘Who are the leaders?’ he asked the crowded table.
It turned out the captains were from all over, though none were Malazan, given the recent attack — which everyone seemed to regard as some sort of betrayal. A betrayal of what, Kyle couldn’t quite understand. There was a Lether captain who called himself Marshal Teal; a number of ex-ship’s captains who’d kept their crews together, and a Genabackan troop pulled together by a woman who’d actually served in the north, under the Warlord Caladan Brood.
‘This woman,’ Kyle asked, ‘what’s her name?’
The fortune-hunters glanced to one another, uncertain. One fellow spoke up. ‘Don’t know her name,’ he offered. ‘Only know what they call her.’
‘What’s that?’
‘They call her the Shieldmaiden.’
And Kyle sat back, sipping his drink of watered ale. Lyan. Served under Brood? Neglected to mention that … But then, she knew he’d served with the Malazans, didn’t she?
He stood from the table.
‘Headed out?’ someone asked.
Kyle finished his drink and saluted the table. ‘Yes. Going to join up.’
* * *
The seventh day after they entered the Sea of Dread, a long low vessel came storming out of the west to intercept them. The Crimson Guard led the convoy of twelve in their captured local raider ship, which Captain Ghelath insisted on rechristening Mael’s Forbearance.
The strange vessel was long and sleek, and moved with extraordinary speed — all the more astonishingly as she showed no sail nor sweeps. Like a shot arrow, it darted straight for the Forbearance and pulled up alongside, slowing to match the ponderous pace of the sweeps that pulled the Forbearance along, as there was no wind to speak of.
A lone figure straightened from the deck. It was a thin old man, mostly bald, wrapped in a ragged cloak. ‘Permission to come aboard,’ he called up in a reedy voice.
Gwynn, next to Shimmer, muttered: ‘That vessel is soaked in magery.’
‘Raise your Warren,’ she answered, and signed likewise to Petal and Blues.
A rope ladder was lowered. The foreign vessel manoeuvred alongside. The old man climbed aboard — quite vigorously for such an ancient. K’azz came forward to meet him. The fellow scanned the deck with eyes tiny and dark, like deep wells.
‘What can we do for you?’ K’azz asked.
‘You can surrender this vessel and all those behind to us.’
‘I’m sorry …’ K’azz began.
The old man snapped up a wizened hand. ‘Do not argue. And do not resist. We will destroy-’ The fellow stopped himself, his gaze narrowing. He murmured, ‘Wait a moment …’
Someone very big and sturdy brushed past Shimmer: Bars pushing his way forward. ‘Just a minute,’ he called.
The two met at mid-deck. The old man’s gaze widened and he gaped; Bars rocked back, pointing. ‘You!’ the old man growled.
‘It’s them!’ Bars called. ‘The Sharrs of Exile Keep!’
Snarling, the old man spun sending his cloak flying across to enmesh Bars who went down in its smothering folds. Beneath, bands and belts wrapped the old fellow from head to foot, all holding short blades that shone like polished silver. He threw his arms out and every one of the blades, an entire forest of them, flew from their many sheaths.
The blades scattered over the deck. Shimmer staggered at a blow to her chest, then threw herself flat as several glinting shards flew for her face. She heard the slivers punch into someone near, and his answering grunt as he felclass="underline" Sept, thrust through the throat. Multiple impacts now sounded as Black the Elder closed on the man behind his shield — the blades thudding home. But, the slivers of metal flew like birds, and many swung round to strike Black from the rear, hammering into him so hard they disappeared fully into his back. He fell as well.
She glimpsed Gwynn lying against the side, a hand pressed to one eye, blood coursing between the fingers.
A thrown rope took the mage round his neck and yanked him viciously from his feet, but the spinning blades flew and severed the rope. A new figure appeared at the bow: a young man wielding lengths of slim chain in each hand. These he lashed about, clearing the space round him. The tearing of cloth revealed Bars freeing himself. K’azz and others were closing on the old man, all crawling forward.
With another snarl, the Sharr mage jumped over the side. Shimmer leapt to the rail; saw him on his own vessel. A panicked yell snapped her attention to the bow: Blues was closing upon the youth, the chains now wrapped about his twinned fighting sticks. Bars lunged in, blade overhead, for a ferocious swipe that hacked through the lad’s shoulder, collarbone and ribs and stuck in the spine. A kick sent the body over the side. As one, like a flock, all the flying shards converged upon Bars. Rather coolly, he simply rolled over the rail to follow the lad into the sea below.
At that instant Reed, Cole and Amatt all bounded past Shimmer to throw themselves after the mage. K’azz and she yelled simultaneously, ‘No!’ But all three thumped to the strange vessel’s deck, rolling, and came up, blades readied.
K’azz joined Shimmer at the rail. ‘Get off there!’ he yelled.