Deadhouse Gates (The Malazan Book of the Fallen #2) 34

If you seek the crumbled bones

of the T'lan Imass,

gather into one hand

the sands of Raraku

The Holy Desert

Anonymous

Kulp felt like a rat in a vast chamber crowded with ogres, caged in by shadows and but moments away from being crushed underfoot. Never before when entering the Meanas Warren had it felt so ... fraught.

There were strangers here, intruders, forces so inimical to the realm that the very atmosphere bridled. The essence of himself that had slipped through the fabric was reduced to a crouching, cowering creature. And yet, all he could feel was a series of fell passages, the spun wakes that marked the paths the unwelcome had taken. His senses shouted at him that – for the moment at least – he was alone, the dun sprawled-out landscape devoid of all life.

Still he trembled with terror.

Within his mind he reached back a ghostly hand, finding the tactile reassurance of the place where his body existed, the heave and slush of blood in his veins, the solid weight of flesh and bone. He sat cross-legged in the captain's cabin of the Silanda, watched over by a wary, restless Heboric, while the others waited on the deck, ever scanning the unbroken, remorselessly flat horizon on all sides.

They needed a way out. The entire Elder Warren they'd found themselves in was flooded, a soupy, shallow sea. The oarsmen could propel Silanda onward for a thousand years, until the wood rotted in their dead hands, the shafts snapping, until the ship began to disintegrate around them, still the drum would beat and the backs would bend. And we'd be long dead by then, nothing but mouldering dust. To escape, they must find a means of shifting warrens.

Kulp cursed his own limitations. Had he been a practitioner of Sere, or Denul or D'riss or indeed virtually any of the other warrens accessible to humans, he would find what they needed. But not Meanas. No seas, no rivers, not even a Hood-damned puddle. From within his warren, Kulp was seeking to effect a passage through to the mortal world . . . and it was proving problematic.

They were bound by peculiar laws, by rules of nature that seemed to play games with the principles of cause and effect. Had they been riding a wagon, the passage through the warrens would unerringly have taken them on a dry path. The primordial elements asserted an intractable consistency across all warrens. Land to land, air to air, water to water.

Kulp had heard of High Mages who – it was rumoured – had found ways to cheat those illimitable laws, and perhaps the gods and other Ascendants possessed such knowledge as well. But they were as beyond a lowly cadre mage as the tools of an ogre's smithy to a cowering rat.

His other concern was the vastness of the task itself. Pulling a handful of companions through his warren was difficult, but manageable. But an entire ship! He'd hoped he would find inspiration once within the Meanas Warren, some thunderbolt delivering a simple, elegant solution. With all the grace of poetry. Was it not Fisher Kel'Tath himself who once said poetry and sorcery were the twin edges to the knife in every man's heart? Where then are my magic cants?

Kulp sourly admitted that he felt as stupid within Meanas as he did sitting in the captain's cabin. The art of illusion is grace itself. There must be a way to ... to trick our way through. What's real versus what isn't is the synergy within a mortal's mind. And greater forces? Can reality itself be fooled into asserting an unreality?

His shouting senses changed pitch. Kulp was no longer alone. The thick, turgid air of the Meanas Warren – where shadows were textured like ground glass and to slip through them was to feel a shivering ecstasy – had begun to bulge, then bow, as if something huge approached, pushing the air before it. And whatever it was, it was coming fast.

A sudden thought flooded the mage's mind. And moreover, it possessed ... elegance. Togg's toes, can I do this? Building pressure, then vacuous wake, a certain current, a certain flow. Hood, it ain't water, but close enough.

I hope.

He saw Heboric jump back in alarm, striking his head on a low crossbeam in the cabin. Kulp slipped back into his body and loosed a rasping gasp. 'We're about to go, Heboric. Get everyone ready!'

The old man was rubbing a stump against the back of his head. 'Ready for what, Mage?'

'Anything.'

Kulp slid back out, mentally clambering back over his anchor within Meanas.

The Unwelcome was coming, a force of such power as to make the febrile atmosphere shiver. The mage saw nearby shadows vibrate into dissolution. He felt outrage building in the air, in the loamy earth underfoot. Whatever was passing through this warren had drawn the attention of... of whatever – Shadowthrone, the Hounds – or perhaps warrens truly are alive. In any case, on it came, in arrogant disregard.