K’azz then faced Skinner. ‘Skinner? What of you?’
He was still frowning, as if sensing a trap but unable to pin it down. Finally he shrugged as well. ‘Of course. I also swear. Fighting on has been my intent all along.’
K’azz’s hard gaze now fell upon Shimmer and a cold finger seemed to press itself upon her spine. She felt a sudden weight, as if she were being sucked down into the earth beneath her feet, or the earth itself were rising up to swallow her. The pounding of hooves returned to her ears and she thought perhaps the herd of wild horses had returned. But the thunder was too deep for mere horses. Something immense moving across the land. Or is it simply my heart? She tried to speak but could make no sound. After what seemed an eternity the words escaped her numb lips.
‘I so swear.’
The punishing weight of that gaze moved on and she could breathe again. All that must have been as an instant. Blinking to clear inexplicable tears from her gaze she peered out across the tall stands of grasses weaving in the evening winds and there she spied a lone dark figure, watching. It was a woman; that much was clear. But broad, powerful and dark-skinned, her long kinky black hair wind-tossed.
Strangely panicked by the appearance of one woman — some sort of displaced tribal, Seti or Wickan — Shimmer glanced to K’azz, now asking Lean to swear. Dare she interrupt? She returned her gaze to the grasses but the woman was gone. Moved on. A refugee, perhaps, from the fighting in the south. Odd that she should be alone.
The swearing continued, K’azz demanding a personal pledge from all gathered. For some reason the ritual awakened another memory in Shimmer and she found herself drifting back even further in time to when she was a child.
‘Shimmer …’
Had that been the wind? A distant voice calling her name?
If she tried very hard she could remember a little of her youth. A farm in one of the more rural Kan provinces. She could recall feeding chickens and pigs. Harvesting rice. Playing with an army of brothers and sisters in the dry dusty ground before their family hut.
A hard upbringing. But for the most part a happy one. Until all came to an end.
Until he came. A man so old as to be nothing more than dried flesh and wisps of white hair. Or so it appeared to the child she was at the time.
She remembered her father bending down before her. He took her shoulders in his big hard farmer’s hands. ‘You will go with this man, Iko. It is a great merit to your family that he has chosen you. Be studious. Learn his teachings. But above all — be obedient! For it is by honouring him that you honour us. Your parents and all your ancestors before you. Do you understand?’
And she looking up at him, blinking through tears, hardly understanding. ‘Yes, Father. I swear.’
‘Very good, Iko. Do not cry. You go now to the capital. To a great school. Dance well. Bring us merit.’
‘Yes, Father.’
Then a cruel dry grip upon her wrist tugging her along and a rasping mutter. ‘I do not know why I bother. Too short you are. Too short by far. But,’ and the hand swung her up on to a cart, ‘one must do the best one can with what the gods provide.’
And if her childhood had been deprived but benign, the school proved a hundred times as harsh and in no way benign. For the discipline of the dance of the whipsword was unforgiving.
‘Shimmer.’
There it was again. That voice. Calling. More insistent this time.
The school’s lessons had been brutal but she’d survived. She wondered if she was the last of the whipsword dancers, now that the Kan court had been obliterated. Thinking back, she couldn’t exactly remember how or why she’d survived the Malazan encirclement and siege. She, the last of the Kan king’s bodyguards.
‘Shimmer!’
The voice had a presence now. An image coalesced to impose itself upon her. It was the ghostly figure of Stoop, their old siegemaster. He was peering at her closely, anxiety on his crimped brows. ‘You’ve drifted far, lass. Any further and you’ll not make it back, I think. Best to return, yes?’
She peered at him, confused. ‘You’re not supposed to be here …’
‘No less than you, lass. Now stop your daydreaming. We’re in a dangerous place. Most dangerous the Guard’s ever been, I’m thinking.’
‘Dreaming?’ She frowned, glanced about at the drifting and wavering images that surrounded her. They appeared to her like the rippling reflections from a lake.
Or a river.
Her gaze snapped back to Stoop. ‘Where am I?’
‘Lost among your memories.’
‘How do I …’
He raised a brow. ‘Get back?’ He started off, but paused when she did not move. He beckoned her onward. ‘Just you follow me, lass. Any way’ll do.’ And he set off once more.
She stalked after him, full of wonder, but touched by anger as well. She now knew she was not physically present wherever this place was — her own mind, no doubt — yet she took a great deal of reassurance from the hiss and shift of her long mail coat as she moved.
She came to herself once more at the railing of the Serpent. Only now the river was hardly wider than a stream. Its dense jungle verges reached out to one another almost closing out the sun and blue sky overhead. And the vessel was not moving. They appeared to have run aground on a sand bar, or shallows. She now wore only thin linen trousers, a shirt and leather sandals. The heat and close humidity was unbearable. She could barely breathe the thick miasma. And who knew for how long they had been marooned here, the ship rotting beneath them?
Yet could this not be another dream?
‘This isn’t a dream,’ said the voice of Stoop.
She glanced aside to see him standing with her at the railing. The macabre humour of such a claim coming from him, a dead man, raised a smile to her lips. ‘It is if you’re here,’ she answered.
‘I’m close now, aye. We all are. All the Brethren. We’re frightened, Shimmer.’
The half-amused smile fell away. ‘Frightened?’
‘Aye. Of where we’re headed. Of who is awaiting us there. She’s like nothing else here in the world — ’cept maybe the Shattered God.’ He raised dead eyes to peer at her directly. ‘She has the power to steal us away, Shimmer. You won’t let that happen, yes?’
‘I promise, Stoop. I won’t let that happen to you.’
‘To me? I’m talking about all of us, lass. Now close your eyes.’
She could not help but shut them for an instant. When she opened them he was gone. She peered about the ship’s side. The rest of her companions sat about, or sprawled as if asleep. She pulled her hands from their clawed grip of the dried and splitting wood. The nails were blackened and broken. Insect bites dotted the flesh of her arms, livid and swollen, most unhealed. The noise from the surrounding jungle was now deafening: a cacophony of bird shrieks and whistles, insect whirrings, and the warning calls of unseen large animals. She went to find K’azz.
He was at the stern, sitting hunched, his head bowed. Everyone, it seemed, was bewitched. ‘K’azz,’ she urged. ‘Wake up. K’azz? What has happened to you?’
‘He dreams.’
Shimmer spun to find the Jacuruku witch, Rutana, uncomfortably close behind. This near, she could see that the whites of the woman’s eyes were not white at all, but a sickly yellow. And the pupils now appeared different, as if slit vertically. ‘What have you done?’ she breathed, and she slid back a step, a hand going to the knife at her belt.
‘I? Nothing. I do not have such power. My mistress, now. Well … that is a different matter.’ Her familiar sneering smile twitched her lips. ‘What you experience now is merely a side effect of her presence. Imagine, then, if she were to actively raise her might …’ She lifted her bony shoulders. ‘Well, there are none who could withstand her.’
‘Not even Skinner?’
Hate raged in those sallow eyes and things seemed to writhe beneath the flesh of the woman’s neck and arms. Grimacing, she clamped a hand to the amulets and charms tied to her arm and squeezed there, the hand whitening with effort. She lurched away a short distance and then stopped, turning to glare. ‘Him she permitted to leave. Permitted! Remember that, Avowed.’ She stormed off.