'We are lost,' Minala said, leaning back in her saddle.
'Better than dead,' Keneb muttered, offering the assassin at least that much sympathy.
Kalam felt Minala's hard grey eyes on him. 'Get us out of this Hood-cursed warren, Corporal! We're hungry, we're thirsty, we don't know where we are. Get us out!'
I've visualized Aren, I've picked the place – an unobtrusive niche at the end of the final twist of No Help Alley . . . in the heart of Dregs, that Malazan expatriate hovel close to the riverfront. Right down to the cobbles underfoot. So why can't we get there? What's blocking us? 'Not yet,' Kalam said. 'Even by warren, Aren is a long journey.' That makes sense, doesn't it? So why all this unease?
'Something's wrong,' Minala persisted. 'I can see it in your face. We should have arrived by now.'
The taste of ash, its smell, its feel, had become a part of him, and he knew it was the same for the others. The lifeless grit seemed to stain his very thoughts. Kalam had suspicions of what that ash had once been – the heap of bones they had stumbled onto when arriving had not proved unique – yet he found himself instinctively shying from acknowledging those suspicions. The possibility was too ghastly, too overwhelming, to contemplate.
Keneb grunted, then sighed. 'Well, Corporal, shall we continue on?'
Kalam glanced at the captain. The fever from his head wound was gone, though a barely perceptible slowness to his movements and expressions betrayed a healing yet incomplete. The assassin knew he could not count on the man in a fight. And with the apparent loss of Apt, he felt his back exposed. Minala's inability to trust him diminished the reliance he placed in her: she would do what was necessary to protect her sister and the children – that and nothing more.
Better were I alone. He nudged the stallion forward. After a moment the others followed.
The Imperial Warren was a realm with neither day nor night, just a perpetual dusk, its faint light sourceless – a place without shadows. They measured the passage of time by the cyclical demands imposed by their bodies. The need to eat and drink, the need to sleep. Yet, when gnawing hunger and thirst grew constant and unappeased, when exhaustion pulled at every step, the notion of time sank into meaninglessness; indeed, it revealed itself as something born of faith, not fact.
'Time makes of us believers. Timelessness makes of us unbelievers.' Another Saying of the Fool, another sly quote voiced by the sages of my homeland. Used most often when dismissing precedent, a derisive scoff at the lessons of history. The central assertion of sages was to believe nothing. More, that assertion was a central tenet of those who would become assassins.
'Assassination proves the lie of constancy. Even as the upraised dagger is itself a constant, your freedom to choose who, to choose when, is the constant's darker lie. An assassin is chaos unleashed, students. But remember, the upraised dagger can quench firestorms as easily as light them . . .'
And there, plainly carved in his thoughts as if with a dagger-point, stretched the thin, straight track that would lead him to Laseen. Every justification he needed rode unerring within that fissure. Yet, while the track cuts through Aren, it seems all unknowing something's nudged me from it, left me wandering this plain of ash.
'I see clouds ahead,' Minala said, now riding beside him.
Ridges of low-hanging dust crisscrossed the area before them. Kalam's eyes narrowed. 'As good as footprints in mud,' he muttered.
'What?'
'Look behind us – we leave the selfsame trail. We've company in the Imperial Warren.'
'And any company's unwelcome,' she said.
'Aye.'
Arriving at the first of the ragged ruts only deepened Kalam's unease. More than one. Bestial. No servants sworn to the Empress left these ...
'Look,' Minala said, pointing.
Thirty paces ahead was what appeared to be a sinkhole or dark stain on the ground. Suspended ash rimmed the pit in a motionless, semi-translucent curtain.
'Is it just me,' Keneb growled behind them, 'or is there a new smell to this Hood-rotted air?'
'Like wood spice,' Minala agreed.
Hackles rising, Kalam freed his crossbow from its binding on the saddle, cranked the claw back until it locked, then slid a quarrel into the slot. He felt Minala's eyes on him throughout and was not surprised when she spoke.
'That particular smell's one you're familiar with, isn't it? And not from rifling some merchant's bolt-chest, either. What should we be on the lookout for, Corporal?'
'Anything,' he said, kicking his horse into a walk.