He leaned his head back on the damp clay of the slope, his legs trembling.
More boots thumped overhead, then the trapdoor was lifted. The glow of lantern light descended the steps, and within it Karsa saw the nameless guard.
‘Uryd,’ he called out. ‘Do you still breathe?’
‘Come closer,’ Karsa challenged in a low voice, ‘and I will show you the extent of my recovery.’
The lowlander laughed. ‘Master Silgar saw true, it seems. It will take some effort to break your spirit, I suspect.’ The guard remained standing halfway down the steps. ‘Your Sunyd kin will be returning in a day or two.’
‘I have no kin who accept the life of slavery.’
‘That’s odd, since you clearly have, else you would have contrived to kill yourself by now.’
‘You think I am a slave because I am in chains? Come closer, then, child.’
‘ “Child,” yes. Your strange affectation persists, even while we children have you at our mercy. Well, never mind. The chains are but the beginning, Karsa Orlong. You will indeed be broken, and had you been captured by the bounty hunters high on the plateau, by the time they’d delivered you to this town you’d have had nothing left of Teblor pride, much less defiance. The Sunyd will worship you, Karsa Orlong, for killing an entire camp of bounty hunters.’
‘What is your name?’ Karsa asked.
‘Why?’
The Uryd warrior smiled in the gloom. ‘For all your words, you still fear me.’
‘Hardly.’ But Karsa heard the strain in the guard’s tone and his smile broadened. ‘Then tell me your name.’
‘Damisk. My name is Damisk. I was once a tracker in the Greydog army during the Malazan conquest.’
‘Conquest. You lost, then. Which of our spirits has broken, Damisk Greydog? When I attacked your party on the ridge, you fled. Left the ones who had hired you to their fates. You fled, as would a coward, a broken man. And this is why you are here, now. For I am chained and you are beyond my reach. You come, not to tell me things, but because you cannot help yourself. You seek the pleasure of gloating, yet you devour yourself inside, and so feel no true satisfaction. Yet we both know, you will come again. And again.’
‘I shall advise,’ Damisk said, his voice ragged, ‘my master to give you to the surviving bounty hunters, to do with you as they will. And I will watch-’
‘Of course you will, Damisk Greydog.’
The man backed up the stairs, the lantern’s light swinging wildly.
Karsa laughed.