Dust of Dreams (The Malazan Book of the Fallen #9) 61

‘Stop it!’

She sat up, groaning with the effort. Seeing the tears he could not wipe away she reached out one hand. ‘Come here, husband.’

But he could not move. His legs were rooted tree-trunks beneath him.

She said, ‘Something new comes squalling into the world every moment of every day. Opening eyes that can barely see. And as they come, other things leave.’

‘I gave him that command. I did it myself.’

‘Such is a Warleader’s burden, husband.’

He fought back a sob. ‘I feel so alone.’

She was at his side, taking one of his hands. ‘That is the truth we all face,’ she said. ‘I have had seven children since then, and yes, most of them are yours. Do you ever wonder why I cannot give up? What it is that drives women to suffer this time and again? Listen well to this secret, Gall, it is because to carry a child is to be not alone. And to lose a child is to be so wretchedly alone that no man can know the same… except perhaps the heart of a ruler, a leader of warriors, a Warleader.’

He found he could meet her eyes once again. ‘You remind me,’ he said, voice rough.

She understood. ‘And you me, Gall. We forget too easily and too often these days.’

Yes. He felt her callused hand in his, and something of that loneliness crumbled away. Then he guided their hands down on to her rounded belly. ‘What awaits this one?’ he wondered aloud.

‘That we cannot say, husband.’

‘Tonight,’ he said, ‘we shall call all our children together. We shall eat as a family-what do you think?’

She laughed. ‘I can almost see their faces, all around us-the looks so dumbfounded, so confused. What will they make of such a thing?’

Gall shrugged, a sudden looseness to his limbs, the tightness of his chest vanishing in a single breath. ‘We call them not for them but for us, for you and me, Hanavat.’

‘Tonight,’ she said, nodding. ‘Vedith plays with our son once more. I can hear them shouting and laughing, and the sky is before them and it does not end.’

With genuine feeling-the first time in years-Gall took his wife into his arms.

Chapter Fifteen

People will not know the guilt

they cannot deny, cannot escape.

Blind the gods and fix their scales

with binding chains and pull them

down like the truths we hate.

We puzzle over the bones of

strangers and wonder at the world

when they danced free of us

blessedly long ago and we are

different now, but even to speak

of the men and women we were

then, tempts the whirlwind ghosts

of our victims and this will not do

as we treasure the calm and the

smooth of pretend-what cruel

weapons of nature and time

struck down all these strangers

of long ago, when we were

witness in a hapless if smug way?

We dodged the spear-thrusts of

mischance where they stumbled

too oafish too clumsy and altogether

inferior-and their bones you will

find in mountain caves and river clay,

in white spider crevasses above

white beaches, in forest shelters of

rock and all the places in between,

so many that one slayer, we say,

cannot be responsible; but many

the weapons of nature-and the

skittish thing in our eyes as they

slide away, perhaps mutters, to a

sharp ear, the one constant shadow

behind all those deaths-why, that

would be us, silent in guilt, undeserving

recipients of the solitary gift

that leaves us nothing but the bones

of strangers to tumble and roll

beneath our arguments.

They are wordless in repose but

still unwelcome, for they speak

as only bones can, and still we will

not listen. Show me the bones of

strangers, and I become disconsolate.

Unwelcome Lament, Gedesp, First Empire

H e saw a different past. One that rolled out after choices not made. He saw the familiar trapped inside strangeness. Huddling round fires as winds howled and new things moved in the darkness beyond. The failure of opportunities haunted him and his kind. A dogged rival slipped serpent-like into the mossy cathedrals of needled forests, sliding along shadow streams, and life became a time of picking through long-dead kills, frowning at broken tools of stone different from anything ever seen before. This-all of this-he realized, was the slow failure that, in his own past, had been evaded.

By the Ritual of Tellann. The sealing of living souls inside lifeless bone and flesh, the trapping of sparks inside withered eyes.