Ian Esslemont - Assail

He cleared his throat into his fist and murmured, low, ‘All right. Where’s the meet?’

Gerrun smiled and took a deep drink. He wiped the foam from his moustache. ‘Know you the camp up towards Antler Rock? Over Pine Bridge?’

‘Yes.’

‘Tomorrow, then.’

He nodded and finished off his ale. As he rose, Gerrun signed to Ost, the innkeep, for another.

It was a long chilly walk through the night back to his uncle’s holding where he and his mother lived now after being taken in on the death of his father. A light icy rain fell. The snow was hard beneath his boots, the slush frozen with the night’s cold. Above, the Great Ice Bridge once more spanned the night sky, glittering and forbidding. It had been obscured of late, what with the passing of the Foreigner, or Trespasser, as some named it. People had sworn it foretold the end of the Icebloods. But no such blessing followed. As he walked the path of frozen mud he wondered whether in time it would come to be seen as a portent of this gold fever and the crushing of the Icebloods beneath the boots of a horde of outlanders … if enough really did reach this far north. In that sense perhaps it truly was an omen — of whatever came to pass.

He pushed open the door to the draughty outbuilding his uncle had grudgingly given over to them and crossed to the chest against the rear wall. He cleared away the piled litter of day to day life: the wood shavings, the old bits of burlap, wool, jute and linen his mother sewed and darned to make clothes; a wooden bowl he’d carved, now clattering with buttons, hooks, awls and needles, all carved by him from bone and antler. He opened the chest and pulled out his father’s leathers, rolled up and bound together with belts.

The strong scent of his father wafted over him then: animal fat and smoke together with pine sap and earth. The smell of the high forest.

‘You are leaving,’ came the voice of his mother behind him. He turned. She lay beneath piled blankets. Her long grey hair caught the moonlight that brightened their one window of stretched sheepskin.

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘I see. Where will you go?’

He squeezed the heavy leather shirt and trousers in his hands, cleared his throat. ‘Down to the coastal kingdoms. Perhaps I’ll join with Ronal the Bastard.’

After a long silence she said, ‘Take Boarstooth.’

He straightened, surprised. Boarstooth was his father’s spear. It hung now over the stone hearth of his uncle’s hall. ‘Jal has claimed it.’

‘I did not agree to that. But I said nothing at the time. You were too young.’ Her eyes, glittering in the faint light, shifted in the direction of the hall. ‘Go now. They will all be abed.’

He rose, slipped an arm through a belt and adjusted the roll on his back. Inside, he knew, would be the tall moccasins that his father always wore bound with leather strips up to his knees. His mother rose as well. In her long white shift she glowed like a ghost and Orman felt a shiver of premonition of her death. She met him at the door, said, ‘Go quietly.’

‘Like Father,’ he answered and she smiled, though it was tinged with sadness. A cold chill of wetness brushed his cheek as she kissed him. ‘Goodbye.’

None of his uncle’s household, his cousins or their hired men-at-arms, challenged him as he climbed the hill to the longhouse and entered. The hounds greeted him eagerly, nosing his hands for treats. He stroked them all and shushed them as he crossed to the wide stone fireplace with its mantel of chiselled river stones. Reaching up, he lifted the spear from its wooden rests. The thick ash haft and the broad leaf-shaped head, unique in being struck from some unfamiliar stone, felt lighter than the last time he’d held it: at his father’s funeral pyre.

He was halfway across the hall when a woman’s voice commanded: ‘Orman! That is not yours to take.’ He turned. Raina, Jal’s wife, stood wrapped in a blanket at the door to their sleeping chamber.

‘It comes to me from my father.’

‘That is for Jal to decide.’

‘I claim it as my father’s bequest.’

Raina turned to the sleeping chamber. ‘Jal! Rouse yourself, you great oaf! Your nephew is an ungrateful thief!’

He did not wait for the household to bestir itself. Raina’s screeching shouts followed him down the hillside. ‘Orman! We name you thief! None will harbour you! Outlaw! You will be hunted down like the dog you are!’

He broke into a run then, making for the woods. His breath plumed and Boarstooth felt as light as a willow branch in his hand. The blade of creamy brown stone seemed to sing as it sliced the cold night air.

Ahead rose forested hillside heaped above hillside up on to slope and ridge, climbing to the broad shoulders of the Salt Mountains. Their snowcapped heights glowed dark silver in the moonlight, home to the leagues upon leagues of the Iceblood Holdings. This wild country beckoned to him now — a near infinity of possibilities, it seemed, his for the taking. A promise made by his father years ago.

Her life, she decided, has been nothing more than a string of failures. Wretched failures. One piled on to the other. And all after so many had sacrificed so much to bring her into her birthright; her mother, the Rhivi tribes, Malazan marines, citizens of Darujhistan — honourable and not so honourable — had striven heroically to help her become what she was fated to become: Silverfox, Summoner to the ancient undying self-accursed T’lan Imass.

Her mother had given up her own life to nourish her. The Rhivi had endured privation and the loss of many in their migrations; one of the most beloved Malazan officers had given his life championing her; and now, after she had been named the T’lan Imass Summoner come again, it was the Imass themselves who threatened to destroy her.

She had been born to unite the many T’lan Imass clans in one gathering dedicated to the dismissal of the Tellann ritual that bound them through life and death to their relentless pursuit of the Jaghut. A war that had dissolved into irrelevance countless millennia ago as that alien race faded away into isolated individuals who retained no interest in Imass or human affairs.

Yet not all the Imass considered the war over. Here in Assail there remained one last vestige of that conflict. A soul-wrenching legacy that threatened even her sympathies for these ancient people.

Now she spent her days and nights keeping watch on the coast where the Warren, or Realm, of Tellann tended to draw those Imass guided by this lingering presence. Here they found her, and something else. Something none of them had ever anticipated, nor even imagined.

When she was at her very lowest Pran Chole would come to spend time with her — or perhaps to watch over her should she consider some sort of sudden drastic action to end her misery. She had yet to decide whether his silent company was a consolation or an aggravation. In the past, he’d once offered himself up as the defenceless target and recipient of her anger, her fury, and her outrage at the injustice of her fate. And she had beaten upon him the way a smith punishes his anvil. Yet she’d seen since how he had done it as a gift to her, out of love. That she should turn her fury upon him rather than herself.

Now she was not certain what her feelings were for the ancient Bonecaster — the closest thing to a father she could claim to have had. When she was at her lowest he could somehow sense it. He would come to her tent among the dunes, entering just as any living being would through the loose front flap, ducking his head bearing its broken-antlered headdress, to stand silent and watchful. Offering the last thing that remained to him to try to ease her mind: his company.