‘Get a pack,’ Sour ordered.
Two mercenaries ran to obey. Murk noted that the man’s armour was torn. Consumed the flesh only. Gods, man, will it even be safe to carry? How to touch it? ‘Get some sticks,’ he told Sweetly, who nodded.
‘Murk!’ Sour called from the plaza.
Standing, he told the female mercenary: ‘Make a stretcher!’ In the panic of the moment the woman gave a quick Malazan salute. Murk ran to his partner.
Spite lay hugging the stone lip, only her head and shoulders above the gravel. Sour knelt next to her but wasn’t helping. There was something in his gaze — wonder and perhaps even a wide-eyed dread. The woman fairly glowed with power, her flesh steaming and hissing. Murk thought he caught a glimpse of rough dark-scaled features, and hands misshapen taloned claws. The eyes burned like pits of melted stone. ‘You have it?’ she grated.
‘Yes.’
‘Get me up.’
Murk held up his hands. ‘We can’t touch you yet …’
‘Oh, for the love of Night! Get a sword or something!’
‘Right.’
Spite jerked then, sinking to her open, surprised lips. For an instant those formidable eyes, so superior, so scornful, widened in unguarded panic. ‘Oh, no …’ she whispered, and then she disappeared as if snatched back by some giant.
Murk switched to Meanas to see what was going on. The chains of puissance, loose and unbounded, had flailed about seeking something to latch on to, anything, and had found Spite. She fought now, caught between the two lashing tendrils of punishing powers. Even as Murk watched, she was weakening. She kicked ineffectually and struggled to summon the streams of her own Warren-energies. But she was already exhausted and now she hung limp, her arms loose and drifting.
‘Overcome,’ Sour murmured, awed. ‘What’re we gonna do?’
‘You’re going to untie those last two bonds! Let’s go!’
‘Can’t … she’d just fall into the Abyss and that’ll be the end of her.’
‘Well, then — we’ll pull her up!’
‘Can’t yank on those chains, man. Use your head.’
Yusen came to their side. ‘What happened?’
‘Trap’s closed on her,’ Sour answered.
The man wiped the rain from his face, scowling. His disgusted expression seemed to wonder why nothing ever went right. ‘Can’t hang around here. We have to disappear.’
‘The captain’s right,’ Sour told Murk. ‘You have any idea what’s on its way right now?’
‘I know, I know,’ he answered, thinking furiously. ‘Is the stretcher made?’
‘Yes. But we haven’t touched the … thing.’
‘All right. Let’s pack up. Come back later once the dust has settled out.’
‘Right.’ Yusen jogged off. Murk waved for Sour to follow him to the body. Here their escort waited while through the rain the rest of the troop could be glimpsed withdrawing to the coast between the dolmens. Murk motioned Sour to the pack laid next to the corpse. Sweetly tossed down two broken sticks. Murk took them up and bent over the body.
‘Poor Crazy-eye,’ one of the mercs said, and he made a sign to D’rek, goddess of rot and rejuvenation.
‘Always actin’ before thinkin’,’ added another.
Murk, who had been bent over the seared torso, now leaned back to blink up at them. ‘You finished?’
They frowned down at him, puzzled, drops falling from the rims of their helmets. ‘Yeah,’ one said, shrugging. ‘I s’pose so.’
‘Fine. Thank you.’
Sour laid out a sodden blanket. ‘Put it on this. We’ll wrap it.’
‘I’ll try.’
He used the sticks to feel about. He dug against the curve of the blackened pelvic bone. Turning the box vertical he managed to get a good grip and he lifted it from the still-smoking cavity that once held Crazy-eye’s viscera. He laid it on the blanket and used the sticks to roll it over and over, then picked it up and slipped it into the pack which Sour was holding open.
Sour set the pack into the stretcher and tied it down with rope.
Murk motioned to the mercenaries. ‘Who’s got it?’
Their guards all backed away, hands raised and open.
‘Oh, come on! We’re not …’
‘Yes, you are,’ the Seven Cities woman answered.
Murk waved to Sour, impatient. ‘Fine. Let’s go.’
Sour struggled with the stretcher’s spear hafts, grumbling, ‘Not bloody fair …’
Murk waited a moment for Sour to ready himself then jogged for the shore and the waiting ship. Their guards spread out around them.
They found the crest of the strand lined by the troop, all crouched down in the rain. They crab-walked, hunched, to Yusen who alone was standing, scanning the storm-lashed seas. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Boat’s not here,’ the man answered, almost in a lazy drawl.
Murk eyed the white-capped waves as they crashed the beach. ‘Well … they must’ve just withdrawn.’
‘Oh, they’ve withdrawn all right.’ And the officer pointed out to sea.
Murk squinted into the overcast pall. Far towards the steel-grey horizon he could just make out the pale smear of sails and darker shadow of the hull. ‘What? They’ve abandoned us?’
Yusen regarded him through a half-lidded gaze. ‘What goes around comes around, hey?’
Murk adjusted his grip on the rain-slick spear hafts. ‘Shit. Well, now what? We follow the coast? Find a port?’
‘You see any ports on the way in?’
Murk shook his head. In fact, the coast had been completely uninhabited.
‘No. If we want to get lost there’s only one place for us.’ The officer raised his chin to the south.
Murk followed the man’s gaze and his shoulders fell. The jungle. The damned jungle. He heard Sour cursing away under his breath.
Yusen signed the move out, indicating the south. He stopped suddenly and eyed Murk and Sour and the burden between them, then turned on the Seven Cities woman. ‘What’s this, Burastan?’
The woman saluted. ‘Sorry, Cap-Sorry.’ She gestured curtly and Ostler came and took Murk’s place, as Dee did Sour’s. After one last warning glare Yusen turned away.
Had the woman almost said ‘Captain’? And was her name really Burastan? But Ostler and Dee took off with the stretcher bouncing between them and Murk had to run after them shouting: ‘Hey! No. Take it easy, damn it!’
*
With the evening, the low oppressive massing of clouds of the wet season announced their nightly downpour. Skinner, dressed as always in his blackened shimmering coat of armour, his barrel helm pushed back high on his head, stood at the open cloth flap of his tent where he appeared to be watching the descending curtains of rain. Within, Mara and her fellow mage Petal leaned over a tabletop cluttered in maps and documents of rotting woven plant fibres.
Sighing, Mara picked up a glass of wine. She eyed her commander’s scaled back. That armour. Gift of Ardata, he called it. Everyone else had abandoned their metal armour as useless in this constant damp. Now heavy layered leathers couldn’t be purchased for anything less than their weight in silver. Yet no rust or stain marred that blackened scale coat. And it seemed nothing could penetrate it. Perhaps that’s why Ardata had been unable to retrieve it when … well, when they parted ways.
‘Our Master of the Inner Circle remains committed?’ Petal asked in his slow and deliberate manner.
‘Quite,’ Skinner answered, keeping his back to them.
Petal pursed his thick lips, nodding. He tapped a blunt finger to the documents. ‘I calculate this force to be a full third of the entire Thaumaturg military. Their only currently assembled field army. Leaving but scattered garrisons across their lands …’
Mara lifted the glass, saluting. ‘To its success, then.’ She cocked a brow and offered a mocking smile. ‘May it advance far indeed.’
Skinner returned and picked up his glass to answer her toast. ‘As far as it is able.’
‘To the very end,’ Petal added.
Mara’s raised senses detected a familiar, and unwelcome, arrival. The insolent one has returned. She swallowed her wine while lifting a hand for silence. ‘Our would-be master approaches.’