*
Three nights later, Jull Solman, a fisherman out of Malaz City, sat in the dugout that his father had sat in all his life, and set his lines. His lantern wobbled and glowed in the night from its stand at the pointed bow.
Satisfied with his lines, he crouched and waited for the lantern to do its work of drawing the curious fish from the dark depths below. During these quiet moments he would think, and he reflected now that all his life he’d resented that he was still nothing more than a fisher like his father before him … while others, friends and cousins, had joined the raiders and become crew on Malazan freebooters.
That is, until this latest disastrous raid, what with near half the crews failing to return. Only now was he beginning to see the wisdom in his father’s words, and his demands that he follow in his footsteps and remain a fisher.
Perhaps he hadn’t been such a bitter, mean, stubborn, worthless old fool after all.
As to his father’s other claims and wild talk … well, some things were just too foolish to believe. That these raiders and pirates were just recent arrivals to the island and that its true occupants were the fisher folk themselves? Jull could only shake his head. What of it if it were true?
And that the island’s true guardian and protector was a common fisher just like them? He reached out and jiggled one of the lines. Nothing more than wishful thinking. Ridiculous old local legends and stories.
That hook, as the saying goes, was just too big to swallow.
It was then in his musings that he glimpsed a strange glow approaching from the south. Squinting, he sat up and stared, studying the eerie phenomenon. A patch of nightglow as can sometimes gyre atop the waves? A gathering of the bright deep-water fish? Or – and here the hair upon his neck stirred and prickled – the daemon Stormriders come to claim his spirit?
The glow thickened into a patch of mist and fog that closed upon him, and now, amid this freezing witch-gust of air, there emerged the tall prow of a vessel. Jull gaped up as it passed: a caravel, great tendrils and scarves of mist boiling from its hull; its sails hanging in torn ribbons; great sheaths of ice crackling and calving from its sides as it came. And there, in spidery silver upon its black hull as it loomed past, he read, emblazoned, the name Twisted.
Jull fell back into his dugout as it rocked gently from the ghostly passage. By the gods! The cursed witch-vessel itself. Everyone said it had sunk! Yet here it was, spat up from the very floor of the Abyss. Returned from the sunken paths of Ruse. Cursed from who knew what fiendish rendezvous? Perhaps a pact with the Riders themselves …
He shivered anew in the unearthly wind blowing off the daemon-vessel as he yanked up his lines. This tale would win him an entire night of free drinks at the Hanged Man. What a dreadful portent! The Twisted returned from its presumed end … he shook his head as he readied the oars. Escaped the ambush after all … well, who would even dare attack it anyway?
Dreadful times were coming with the return of such a harbinger, for sure.
Chapter 14
Koro alighted on the blunt stone tip of a standing menhir and cocked his head, regarding with his black beady eyes the surrounding rocky dunes of what some named the Plains of Waste. Idly, he preened the bedraggled fur of his body and wondered anew what to do about these damned pesky meddlers in Shadow.
If Edgewalker refused to act – the obdurate fool! – then it must fall to him.
Yet how to be rid of them?
Had Koro still held human form he would have tapped his chin with a finger, but as it was he pecked at the gritty ancient stone of the menhir then squawked and flapped his membranous wings in alarm as a spark of power glowed to silver life and began rolling a turning route down the outside of the carved stone.
He alighted again, watching, intrigued, while the quicksilver flash spiralled like a bead of mercury down a curved runnel hacked in the face of the stone. Glyphs of power glowed to life as it descended.
Close to the base, the bead of silver was now a blazing fist of power spinning with dizzying speed.
Koro squawed anew, losing his perch, as the ball of sizzling might smashed into something at the base of the stone. Alighting once more, he turned first one black bead of an eye to the spot, then the other. A heap of wind-blown sand there was shifting, and a groan reached him.
A chitinous armoured head and shoulders emerged, shaking off the sands.
Koro now knew where he perched, and he looked to the pewter sky. Oh, him.
‘Where am I?’ the unfortunate below asked aloud.
‘You are imprisoned,’ Koro answered.
The alien angles of the daemon’s armoured head lowered as it considered its buried torso. ‘This I see.’
‘I want to get rid of two meddling troublemakers,’ Koro continued. ‘Have you any ideas?’
‘Troublemakers?’ the entity echoed, sounding confused. ‘What, pray tell, do you mean by that?’
‘Oh, shut up!’ Koro hissed, shifting from foot to foot.
‘I once was powerful,’ the daemon murmured, as if groping after something. ‘I once was … someone…’
Koro rolled his pebble eyes to the sky once more. ‘Oh, please! Well, now you’re an imprisoned nobody.’ Then he jumped, his tattered wings half-flapping, and he opened his beak in silent laughter. Of course!
‘Do you know my name?’ the creature below asked, almost plaintively.
‘Shut up, fool – I am having an inspiration!’
‘I think you know my name,’ the daemon continued stubbornly.
Koro cursed, pecked the stone, then jumped into the air. ‘Fool!’
A spark of silver glowed to life atop the menhir.
‘I will remember you!’ the daemon howled after him.
No you won’t.
And he cawed his harsh laughter as he went.
*
The meagre fire cast further shifting shadows across the tall crumbling walls of the gulch surrounding them, and standing in the darkness Dancer wondered on the wisdom of such an … extravagance?
He glanced back to the fire, and the dark figure hunched there, staring into its depths, chin resting atop his walking stick. Clenching his teeth, he returned to stare down at Kellanved. After a moment, he let out a long-suffering breath and said once more, ‘We really should return.’
The wizened black-skinned mage did not answer; he kept his gaze firm upon the fire. Wilfully so, it seemed to Dancer, who cleared his throat again. ‘They’ll catch us eventually – you must know this.’
The hunched Dal Hon shrugged, unconcerned. ‘I will shift us again.’
‘There were four last time.’
‘I can now stay ahead of them.’
Dancer drew a quick breath, fought down his anger and grated, ‘For the moment. But eventually…’
The little man’s shoulders clenched higher and his lips tightened stubbornly.
Sighing, Dancer looked away to the weak shifting shadows. ‘What is this thing you’re trying to sense, anyway?’