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

Letur Anict had a wife. He had children. He’d had guards, but Orbyn Truthfinder had taken care of them.

Venitt Sathad set out to eliminate all heirs.

He no longer acted as an agent of the Liberty Consign. Now, at this moment, he was an Indebted.

Who had had enough.

Hetan left her husband kneeling beside the body of Toc the Younger. She could do no more for him, and this was not a failing on her part. The raw grief of an Imass was like a bottomless well, one that could snatch the unsuspecting and send them plummeting down into unending darkness.

Once, long ago now, Tool had stood before his friend, and his friend had not known him, and for the Imass-mortal once more, after thousands upon thousands of years-this had been the source of wry amusement, in the inanner of a trickster’s game where the final pleasure but awaited revelation of the truth.

Tool, in his unhuman patience, had waited a long time to unveil that revelation. Too long, now. His friend had died, unknowing. The trickster’s game had delivered a wound from which, she suspected, her husband might never recover.

And so, she now knew in her heart, there might be other losses on this tragic day. A wife losing her husband. Two daughters losing their adopted father, and one son his true father.

She walked to where Kilava Onass had stationed herself to watch the battle, and it was no small mercy that she had elected not to veer into her Soletaken form, that, indeed, she had left the clans of the White Face Barghast the freedom to do what they did best: kill in a frenzy of explosive savagery.

Hetan saw that Kilava stood near where a lone rider had fallen-killed by the weapons of the K’Chain Che’Malle, she noted. A typically vicious slaying, stirring in her memories of the time when she herself had stood before such terrible creatures, a memory punctuated with the sharp pang of grief for a brother who had fallen that day.

Kilava was ignoring the legless, one-armed body lying ten paces to her left. Hetan’s gaze settled upon it in sudden curiosity.

‘Sister,’ she said to Kilava-deliberate in her usage of the one title that Kilava most disliked-‘see how this one wears a mask. Was not the war leader of the Awl so masked?’

‘I imagine so,’ Kilava said, ‘since he was named Redmask.’

‘Well,’ Hetan said, walking to the corpse, ‘this one is wearing the garb of an Awl.’

‘But he was slain by the K’Chain Che’Malle.’

‘Yes, I see that. Even so…’ She crouched down, studied that peculiar mask, the strange, minute scales beneath the spatters of mud. ‘This mask, Kilava, it is the hide of a K’Chain, I would swear it, although the scales are rather tiny-’

‘Matron’s throat,’ Kilava replied.

Hetan glanced over. ‘Truly?’ Then she reached down and tugged the mask away from the man’s face. A long look down into those pale features.

Hetan rose, tossing the mask to one side. ‘You were right, it’s not Redmask.’

Kilava asked, ‘How do you know that?’

‘Well, Awl garb or not, this man was Letherii.’

Hood, High King of Death, Collector of the Fallen, the undemanding master of more souls than he could count-even had he been so inclined, which he was not-stood over the body, waiting.

Such particular attention was, thankfully, a rare occurrence. But some deaths arrived, every now and then, bearing certain… eccentricities. And the one lying below was one such arrival.

Not least because the Wolves wanted his soul, yet would not get it, but also because this mortal had evaded Hood’s grasp again and again, even though any would see and understand well the sweet gift the Lord of Death had been offering.

Singular lives, yes, could be most… singular.

Witness that of the one who had arrived a short time earlier. There were no gifts in possessing a simple mind. There was no haze of calming incomprehension to salve the terrible wounds of a life that had been ordained to remain, until the very end, profoundly innocent.

Hood had not begrudged the blood on Beak’s hands. He had, however, most succinctly begrudged the heartless actions of Beak’s mother and father.

Few mortal priests understood the necessity for redress, although they often spouted the notion in their sermons of guilt, with their implicit extortions that did little more than swell the temple coffers.

Redress, then, was a demand that even a god could not deny. And so it had been with the one named Beak.

And so it was, now, with the one named Toc the Younger.

‘Awaken,’ Hood said. ‘Arise.’

And Toc the Younger, with a long sigh, did as Hood commanded.