A sword had ripped open everything below his ribcage. He was lying on his back, on the corpses of strangers and kin, his intestines spilled out and tangled round his legs.
Something was pulsing in the air – he could not be certain if it came from outside or from somewhere deep inside him. No. Outside . Voices, rising in rhythm, but he could not quite make out the word. Again and again, the sound rising and falling, coming from somewhere off to his right.
He found the pounding of his heart falling into that pulse, and warmth flowed through him, though he knew not the reason for it.
Darkness was drawing close.
That sound. That sound … voices. They are voices. Rising from the Malazans. What are they saying? What do they shout, again and again?
Abruptly, thick blood crackled in one ear, opened a way through, and he could at last hear the endlessly repeated cry.
‘ Khundryl! Khundryl! Khundryl! ’
A word for his fading heart, a song for his ending life. Coltaine, I shall stand before you. We shall ride with your Wickans. I see crows over the Ancestral Hills —
Sister Freedom strode forward as the huge Imass toppled. She kicked him on to his back, plunged her battered hands down, closed her fingers through torn, papery skin and ripped sinews, and took hold of his spine. She paused a moment, glaring at the one with the flint-studded harpoon who was rising yet again a few paces away.
The Forkrul Assail was a mass of wounds and broken bones, but she was far from dead. Bellowing, she lifted the T’lan Imass from the ground and broke his spine like a branch, twisting it amidst snapping, grinding sounds. Flinging the corpse away, she advanced on the last undead warrior.
‘This ends now!’
The female warrior backed away.
They were both down from the rise, down among heaps of bodies – cold flesh and thick, cooling blood underfoot, limbs that flopped away with each step.
Fury filled Freedom. At the murder of Brother Aloft. At the pathetic audacity and stubbornness of these T’lan Imass. At this army of foreigners who refused to break, who did nothing but die where they stood, killing her soldiers and killing yet more of them.
She would destroy them – soon, once this last Imass was crushed and torn apart.
She stepped over a dead horse-warrior, one boot cracking into the side of the man’s head.
The blow rang loud, and Gall opened his eyes. Blinked up at the sky. I should be dead. Why am I not yet dead?
Behind him he heard someone speak. ‘Surrender to me, T’lan Imass. Your kin are all gone. There is no point in continuing this fight. Stand and I will destroy you. But I will give you leave to depart. Be done with this – it is not your battle.’
Gall reached down, took hold of a handful of his intestines, just under his ribcage and tore it free. He groped, slicing open the palm of his hand on a discarded sword – a Kolansii blade, straight and tipped for thrusting. A child’s toy. Not like my tulwar. But it will have to do . He climbed to his feet, almost folded as a weight slipped behind his ribs and sternum – with his free hand he reached in, to hold everything up.
Turning, he found himself staring at the back of the Forkrul Assail. Beyond her stood a T’lan Imass, the one he knew to be named Nom Kala. Her left thigh had been shattered, bent and splintered, yet still she stood, her spear held at the ready.
Gall stepped forward, and drove the sword through the Forkrul Assail, through her spine. She arched in shock, the breath rushing from her.
The Khundryl fell back, his lungs slipping past his spread fingers to flop in his lap.
He was dead before his head hit the ground.
Nom Kala stepped forward. The Forkrul Assail’s eyes were wide, staring into her own. The T’lan Imass had been watching those eyes for what seemed an eternity, since the moment they had risen up from the ground beneath her. She had studied the malice and ferocity in that unhuman glare. She had witnessed the flares of pleasure and triumph each time the Assail had shattered another of her kin. She had seen their delight when breaking Kalt Urmanal’s spine.
But now there was a sword thrust through the Forkrul Assail, iron gleaming blue-red, and those eyes held nothing but astonishment.
Nom Kala took one more step closer. Then drove her harpoon into the bitch’s eye.
Hard enough to drive through, punching out the back of the Assail’s skull.
The Malazan army was crumbling. Driven back, pushed ever tighter inward, they left bodies heaped in ribboned mounds with every step they yielded. Joined by a stumbling Pores, Banaschar led the non-combatants – the children of the Snake and the Khundryl – as far back as they dared, but it was clear that the Kolansii sought only to annihilate the Bonehunters. All the heavy infantry now working round from the south were ignoring the huddled mass of unarmed onlookers.