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

Badan Gruk frowned down at Tarr. Some new fever to chase them down? He hoped not. It looked particularly unpleasant, reminding him of the shaking fever, only worse. This place had almost as many miserable diseases and parasites as in the jungles of Dal Hon.

Feeling nostalgic, the sergeant left Tarr to Nep Furrow’s ministrations. He would have been happier if he’d been on the same barge as Sinter, even Kisswhere. Corporal Ruffle was around, but she’d discovered a bones and trough game with a few heavies and was either heading for a sharp rise in her income or a serious beating. No matter what, she’d make enemies. Ruffle was like that.

He still didn’t know what to make of this army, these Bonehunters. He could find nothing-no detail-that made them what they were. What we are. I’m one of them now. There were no great glories in the history of these legions-he’d been in the midst of the conquest of Lether and it had been a sordid thing. When the tooth’s rotten right down to its root, it’s no feat to tug it out. Maybe it was a just war. Maybe it wasn’t. Did it make any difference? A soldier takes orders and a soldier fights. The enemy wore a thousand masks but they all turned out the same. Just people determined to stand in their way. This was supposed to be enough. Was it? He didn’t know.

Surrounded by foreigners, friendly or otherwise, settled a kind of pressure on every Malazan soldier here. Demanding a shape to this army, and yet something was resisting it, something within the Bonehunters, as if hidden forces pushed back against that pressure. We are and we aren’t, we will and we won’t. Are we just hollow at the core? Does it start and end with the Adjunct? That notion felt uncharitable. People were just restless, uneasy with all this not knowing.

Who was the enemy awaiting them? What sort of mask would they see this time?

Badan Gruk could not remember ever knowing a person who deliberately chose to do the wrong thing, the evil thing-no doubt such people existed, the ones who simply didn’t care, and ones who, for all he knew, enjoyed wearing the dark trappings of malice. Armies served and sometimes they served tyrants-bloodthirsty bastards-and they fought against decent, right-minded folk out of fear and in the interests of self-preservation, and out of greed, too, come to that. Did they see themselves as evil? How could they not? But then, how many campaigns could you fight, if you were in that army? How many before you started feeling sick inside? In your gut. In your head. When the momentum of all those conquests starts to falter, aye, what then?

Or when your tyrant Empress betrays you?

No one talked much about that, and yet Badan Gruk suspected it was the sliver of jagged iron lodged in the heart of the Bonehunters, and the bleeding never slowed. We did everything she asked of us. The Adjunct followed her orders and got it done. The rebellion crushed, the leaders dead or scattered. Seven Cities brought under the imperial heel once again. In the name of order and law and smiling merchants. But none of it mattered. The Empress twitched a finger and the spikes were readied for our heads.

Anger burned for only so long. Enough to cut a messy path through the Empire of Lether. And then it was done. That ‘then’ was now. What did they have to take anger’s place? We are to be Unwitnessed, she said. We must fight for each other and ourselves and no one else. We must fight for survival, but that cannot hold us together-it’s just as likely to tear us apart.

The Adjunct held to an irrational faith-in her soldiers, in their resolve. We’re a fragile army and there are enough reasons for that being true. That sliver needs to be pulled, the wound needs to knit.

We’re far from the Malazan Empire now, but we carry its name with us. It’s even what we call ourselves. Malazans. Gods below, there’s no way out of this, is there?

He turned away from the inky river carrying them along, scanned the huddled, sleeping forms of his fellow soldiers. Covering every available space on the deck, motionless as corpses.

Badan Gruk fought off a shiver and turned back to the river, where nothing could resist the current for long.

It was an old fancy, so old he’d almost forgotten it. A grandfather-it hardly mattered whether he’d been a real one or some old man who’d thrown on that hat for the duration of the memory-had taken him to the Malaz docks, where they’d spent a sunny afternoon fishing for collar-gills and blue-tube eels. ‘ Take a care on keeping the bait small, lad. There’s a demon at the bottom of this harbour. Sometimes it gets hungry or maybe just annoyed. I heard of fishers snapped right off this dock, so keep the bait small and keep an eye on the water. ’ Old men lived for stories like that. Putting the fright into wide-eyed runts who sat with their little legs dangling off the edge of the pier, runts with all the hopes children have and wasn’t that what fishing was all about?