Gardens of the Moon (The Malazan Book of the Fallen #1) 54

And then she'd kill them. And as for the Coin Bearer and the girl, where could they hope to escape to, up here on this tower?

She unsheathed her daggers and prepared for her attack. A dozen wards protected her back, all along the staircase. An approach from there was impossible.

Two sharp points touched her flesh, one under her chin and the other beneath her left shoulder blade. The Tiste And? froze. And then she heard a voice close to her ear-a voice she recognized.

“Give Rake this warning, Serrat. He'll only get one, and the same for you. The Coin Bearer shall not be harmed. The games are done. Try this again and you'll die.”

“You bastard!” she exploded. “My lord's anger-”

“Will be in vain. We both know who sends this message, don't we? And, as Rake well knows, he's not as far away as he once was.” The point beneath her chin moved away to allow her to nod, then returned. “Good. Deliver the message, then, and hope we don't meet again.”

“This will not be forgotten,” Serrat promised, shaking with rage.

A low chuckle answered her. “Compliments of the Prince, Serrat. Take it up with our mutual friend.”

The daggers left her flesh. Serrat exhaled a long breath, then sheathed her weapons. She snapped a Kurald Galain spell and vanished.

Crokus jumped at a faint plopping sound from the stairwell. He laid his hands on his knives, tensing.

“What's wrong?” Apsalar said.

“Shhh. Wait.” He felt his heart pound hard against his chest. “I'm ducking at shadows,” he said, sitting back. “Well, we're off soon, anyway.”

It was an age of wind, sweeping across the grass plains beneath a pewter sky, a wind whose thirst assailed all life, mindless, unrelenting like a beast that did not know itself.

Struggling in his mother's wake, it was Raest's first lesson in power. In the hunt for domination that would shape his life, he saw the many ways of the wind-its subtle sculpting of stone over hundreds and then thousands of years, and its raging gales that flattened forests-and found closest to his heart the violent power of the wind's banshee fury.

Raest's mother had been the first to flee his deliberate shaping of power. She'd denied him to his face, proclaiming the Sundering of Blood and thus cutting him free. That the ritual had broken her he disregarded.

It was unimportant. He who would dominate must learn early that those resisting his command should be destroyed. Failure was her price, not his.

While the Jaghut feared community, pronouncing society to be the birthplace of tyranny-of the flesh and the spirit-and citing their own bloody history as proof, Raest discovered a hunger for it. The power he commanded insisted upon subjects. Strength was ever relative, and he could not dominate without the company of the dominated.

At first he sought to subjugate other Jaghut, but more often than not they either escaped him or he was forced to kill them. Such contests held only momentary satisfaction. Raest gathered beasts around him, bending nature to his will. But nature withered and died in bondage, and so found an escape he could not control. In his anger he laid waste to the land, driving into extinction countless species. The earth resisted him, and its power was immense. Yet it was directionless and could not overwhelm Raest in its ageless tide. His was a focused power, precise in its destruction and pervasive in its effect.

Then into his path came the first of the Imass, creatures who struggled against his will, defying slavery and yet living on. Creatures of boundless, pitiful hope. For Raest, he had found in them the glory of domination, for with each Imass that broke he took another. Their link with nature was minimal, for the Imass themselves played the game of tyranny over their lands. They could not defeat him.

He fashioned an empire of sorts, bereft of cities yet plagued with the endless dramas of society, its pathetic victories and inevitable failure. The community of enslaved Imass thrived in this quagmire of pettines They even managed to convince themselves that they possessed freedom, a will of their own that could shape destiny. They elected champion. They tore down their champions once failure draped its shroud over them. They ran in endless circles and called it growth, emergence, knowledge. While over them all, a presence invisible to their eyes, Raest flexed his will. His greatest joy came when his slaves proclaimed him god-though they knew him not-and constructed temples to serve him and organized priesthoods whose activities mimicked Raest's tyranny with such cosmic irony that the Jaghut could only shake his head.

It should have been an empire to last for millennia, and its day of dying should have been by his own hand, when he at last tired of it.