Scillara knew better. She had faced her own sadness often enough. Even when she discovered her first means of escaping it, in durhang, she’d known that such an escape was simply a flight from feelings that existed legitimately. She’d just been unable to permit herself any sympathy for such feelings, because to do so was to surrender to their truth.
Sadness belonged. As rightful as joy, love, grief and fear. All conditions of being.
Too often people mistook the sadness in others for self-pity, and in so doing re shy;vealed their own hardness of spirit, and more than a little malice.
The taproom stank of blood, shit, piss and vomit. Blend was recovering in her bedroom upstairs, as close to death as she’d ever been, but the worst was past, now. Barathol and Chaur had gone down to the cellars below to help Picker and Antsy bury the bodies of their comrades. The blacksmith’s grief at the death of his new friend, Mallet, was too raw for Scillara to face — he was in no way a hard man and this jarred her frail assembly of beliefs, for he should have been. Yet had she not seen the same breathless vulnerability when he’d struggled to bring Chaur back to life after the huge simpleton had drowned?
‘He is. .’ Duiker began, and then frowned, ‘a remarkable man, I think.’
Scillara blinked.’Who?’
The historian shook his head, unwilling to meet her eyes. ‘I should be getting drunk.’
‘Never works,’ she said.
‘I know.’
They were silent again, moments stretching on.
We just stumbled into these people. A crazy contest at a restaurant. We were just getting to know them, to treasure each and every one of them.
Mallet was a healer. A Bridgeburner. In his eyes there had burned some kind of self-recrimination, a welter of guilt. A healer tortured by something he could not heal. A list of failures transformed into failings. Yet he had been a gentle man. That soft, oddly high voice — which they would never hear again.
For him, Barathol had wept.
Bluepearl was a mage. Amusingly awkward, kind of wide-eyed, which hardly fit all that he’d been through, because he too had been a Bridgeburner. Antsy had railed over the man’s corpse, a sergeant dressing down a soldier so incompetent as to be dead. Antsy had been offended, indignant, even as anguish glittered in his bright blue eyes. ‘You damned fool!’ he’d snarled. ‘You Hood-damned useless id shy;iotic fool!’ When he’d made to kick the body Picker had roughly pulled him back, almost off his feet, and Antsy had lurched off to slam the toe of one boot into the planks of the counter.
They looked older now. Picker, Antsy. Wan and red-eyed, shoulders slumped, not bothering to rinse the dried blood from their faces, hands and forearms.
Duiker alone seemed unchanged, as if these last deaths had been little more than someone pissing into a wide, deep river. His sadness was an absolute thing, and he never came up for air. She wanted to take him in her arms and shake the life back into him. Yet she would not do that, for she knew such a gesture would be a selfish one, serving only her own needs. As much, perhaps, as her initial impulse to embrace him in sympathy.
Because she too felt like weeping. For having dragged the historian out into the city — away from what had happened here the past night. For having saved his life.
When they’d first arrived back; when they’d seen the bodies on the street; when they’d stepped inside to look upon the carnage, Duiker had shot her a single glance, and in that she had read clearly the thought behind it. See what you took me away from? A thought as far away from the sentiment of gratitude that it might as well be in another realm.
The truth was obvious. He would rather have been here. He would rather have died last night. Instead, interfering bitch that she was, Scillara had refused him that release. Had instead left him in this sad life that would not end. That glance had been harder, more stinging, than a savage slap in the face.
She should have gone below. Should be standing there in that narrow, cramped cellar, holding Chaur’s hand, listening to them all grieve, each in their own way. Antsy’s curses. Picker at his side, so close as to be leaning on him, but otherwise expressionless beyond the bleakness of her glazed stare. Barathol and his glisten shy;ing beard, his puffy eyes, the knotted muscles ravaging his brow.
The door opened suddenly, sending a shaft of daylight through suspended dust, and in stepped the gray-haired bard.
She and Duiker watched as the man shut the door behind him and replaced the solid iron bar in its slots — how he had ended up with that bar in his hands was a mystery, yet neither Scillara nor the historian commented.
The man approached, and she saw that he too had not bothered to change his clothes, wearing the old blood with the same indifference she had seen in the others.
There’d been a half-dozen bodies, maybe more, at the stage. A passing observa shy;tion from Blend implicated the bard in that slaughter, but Scillara had trouble be shy;lieving that. This man was gaunt, old. Yet her eyes narrowed on the blood spatter on his shirt.
He sat down opposite them, met Duiker’s eyes, and said, ‘Whatever they have decided to do, Historian, they can count me in.’
‘So they did try for you, too,’ said Scillara.
He met her gaze. ‘Scillara, they attacked everyone in the room. They killed in shy;nocents.’
‘I don’t think they’ll do anything,’ said Duiker, ‘except sell up and leave.’
‘Ah,’ the bard said, then sighed. ‘No matter. I will not be entirely on my own in any case.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I called in an old favour, Historian. Normally, I am not one to get involved in. . things.’
‘But you’re angry,’ Scillara observed, recognizing at last the odd flatness in the old man’s eyes, the flatness that came before — before cold killing. This poet has claws indeed. And now I look at him, he’s not as old as I thought he was.
‘I am, yes.’
From below there came a splintering crack followed by shouts of surprise. All three at the table swiftly rose. Duiker leading the way, they ran to the kitchen, then down the narrow stairs to the cellar. Torchlight wavered at the far end of the elongated storage room, casting wild shadows on a bizarre scene. Pungent fluid sloshed on the earthen floor, seeming reluctant to drain, and in a half-circle stood the two Malazans, Barathol and Chaur, all facing one side wall where a large cask had shattered.
Antsy, Scillara surmised, had just kicked it.
Splitting it open, in a cascade of pickling juice, revealing to them all the object that liquid had so perfectly preserved.
Folded up with knees beneath chin, arms wrapped round the shins.
Still wearing a mask on which four linear, vertical barbs marked a row across the forehead.
The bard grunted. ‘I’d often wondered,’ he said under his breath, ‘where the old ones ended up.’
The fluids were now seeping into the floor, along the edges of the freshly dug mounds.
A hundred stones, a cavort of ripples, the city in its life which is one life which is countless lives. To ignore is to deny brotherhood, sisterhood, the commonality that, could it be freed, would make the world a place less cruel, less vicious. But who has time for that? Rush this way, plunge that way, evade every set of eyes, permit no recognition in any of the faces flashing past. The dance of trepidation is so very tiresome.
Hold this gaze, if you dare, in the tracking of these tremulous ripples, the lives, the lives! See Stormy Menackis, wrought with recrimination, savaged by guilt. She sleeps badly or not at all (who would risk peering into her dark bedroom at night, for fear of seeing the gleam of staring eyes?). She trembles, her nerves like strings of fire, whilst poor Murillio stands apart, desperate to comfort her, to force open all that had now closed between them.