Reaper's Gale (The Malazan Book of the Fallen #7)

This was where his brother found him. His brother with the sad face so unlike the wax ones he liked to make. He arrived carrying a coil of rope, and stood just inside the gaping entrance with its jammed-wide doors all overgrown.

Beak, who had a more boring name back then, saw in his brother’s face a sudden distress, which then drained away and a faint smile took its place which was a relief since Beak always hated it when his brother went off somewhere to cry. Older brothers should never do that and if he was older, why, he’d never do that.

His brother then walked towards him, and still half smiling he said, ‘I need you to leave, little one. Take your toys and leave here.’

Beak stared with wide eyes. His brother never asked such things of him. His brother had always shared this barn. ‘Don’t you want to play with me?’

‘Not now,’ his brother replied, and Beak saw that his hands were trembling which meant there’d been trouble back at the estate. Trouble with Mother.

‘Playing will make you feel better,’ Beak said.

‘I know. But not now.’

‘Later?’ Beak began collecting his wax villagers.

‘We’ll see.’

There were decisions that did not seem like decisions. And choices could just fall into place when nobody was really looking and that was how things were in childhood just as they were for adults. Wax villagers cradled in his arms, Beak set off, out the front and into the sunlight. Summer days were always wonderful-the sun was hot enough to make the villagers weep with joy, once he lined them up on the old border stone that meant nothing any more.

The stone was about eighteen of Beak’s small paces away, toppled down at one corner of the track before it turned and sank down towards the bridge and the stream where minnows lived until it dried up and then they died because minnows could only breathe in water. He had just set his toys down in a row when he decided he needed to ask his brother something.

Decisions and choices, falling.

What was it he had wanted to ask? There was no memory of that. The memory of that was gone, melted down into nothing. It had been a very hot day.

Reaching the entrance he saw his brother-who had been sitting with legs dangling from the loft’s edge-slide over to drop down onto the floor. But he didn’t drop all the way. The rope round his neck caught him instead.

And then, his face turning dark as his eyes bulged and his tongue pushed out, his brother danced in the air, kicking through the shafts of dusty sunlight.

Beak ran up to him-the game his brother had been playing with the rope had gone all wrong, and now his brother was choking. He threw his arms about his brother’s kicking legs and tried with all his might to hold him up.

And there he stood, and perhaps he was screaming, but perhaps he wasn’t, because this was an abandoned place, too far away from anyone who might help.

His brother tried to kick him away. His brother’s fists punched down on the top of Beak’s head, hard enough to hurt but not so much since those hands couldn’t but barely reach him, short as he was being still younger than his brother. So he just held on.

Fire awoke in the muscles of his arms. In his shoulders. His neck. His legs shook beneath him, because he needed to stand on his toes-if he tried to move his arms further down to well below his brother’s knees, then his brother simply bent those knees and started choking again.

Fire everywhere, fire right through Beak’s body.

His legs were failing. His arms were failing. And as they failed his brother choked. Pee ran down to burn against Beak’s wrists and his face. The air was suddenly thick with worse smells and his brother never did things like this-all this mess, the terrible mistake with the rope.

Beak could not hold on, and this was the problem with being a younger brother, with being as he was. And the kicking finally stilled, the muscles of his brother’s legs becoming soft, loose. Two fingertips from one of his brother’s hands lightly brushed Beak’s hair, but they only moved when Beak himself moved, so those fingers were as still as the legs.

It was good that his brother wasn’t fighting any more. He must have loosened the rope from round his neck and was now just resting. And that was good because Beak was now on his knees, arms wrapped tight about his brother’s feet.

And there he stayed.

Until, three bells after dusk, one of the stable hands from the search party came into the barn with a lantern.

By then, the sun’s heat earlier that afternoon had ruined all his villagers, had drawn down their faces into expressions of grief, and Beak did not come back to collect them up, did not reshape them into nicer faces. Those lumps remained on the border stone that meant nothing any more, sinking down in the day after day sun.