The scene suddenly blurred, dispersed in fragments. The carriage seemed to slump under him. Darkness swept in, a smell of the sea, the thrash of waves, sand sliding beneath the wheels. The carriage side nearest him lurched into the bole of a palm tree, sending down a rain of cusser-sized nuts that pounded along the roof before bounding away. The horses stumbled, slowing their wild plunge, and a moment later everything came to a sinking halt.
Looking up Gruntle saw stars in a gentle night sky.
Beneath him the carriage door creaked open, and someone clambered out to vomit on to the sands, coughing and spitting and cursing.
Muster Quell.
Gruntle climbed down, using the spokes of the newest wheel, and, his legs feeling shaky under him, made his way to the sorceror.
The man was still on his hands and knees, hacking out the last dregs of what-ever had been in his stomach. ‘Oh,’ he gasped. ‘My aching head.’
Faint came up alongside Gruntle. She’d been wearing an iron skullcap but she’d lost it, and now her hair hung in matted strands, framing her round face. ‘I thought a damned tiger had landed on us,’ she said, ‘but it was you, putting the terror into a demon. So it’s true, those tattoos aren’t tattoos at all.’
Glanno Tarp had dropped down, dodging to avoid the snapping teeth of the nearest horses. ‘Did you see Amby Bole go flying? Gods, that was stupacular!’
Gruntle frowned. ‘Stu-what?’
‘Stupidly spectacular,’ explained Faint. ‘Or spectacularly stupid. Are you Sole-taken?’
He glanced at her, then set off to explore.
A task quickly accomplished. They were on an island. A very small island, less than fifty paces across. The sand was crushed coral, gleaming silver in the starlight. Two palm, trees rose from the centre. In the surrounding shallows, a thousand paces out, ribbons of reef ran entirely round the atoll, breaking the surface like the spine of a sea serpent. More islands were visible, few bigger than the one they were on, stretching out like the beads of a broken necklace, the nearest one per-haps three thousand paces distant.
As he returned he saw a corpse plummeting down from the carriage roof to thump in the sand. After a moment it sat up. ‘Oh,’ it said.
The Trell emerged from the carriage, followed by the swamp witch, Precious Thimble, who looked ghostly pale as she stumbled a few steps, then promptly sat down on the sand. Seeing Gruntle, Mappo walked over.
‘I gather/ he said, ‘we encountered something unexpected in Hood’s realm.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ Gruntle replied. ‘It was my first visit.’
‘Unexpected?’ Faint snorted. ‘That was insane-all the dead in existence, on the march.’
‘Where to?’ Gruntle asked.
‘Maybe not to, maybe from.’
From? In retreat? Now that was an alarming notion. If the dead are on the run…
‘Used to be,’ Faint mused, ‘the realm of the dead was an easy ride. Peaceful. But in the last few years… something’s going on.’ She walked over to Master Quell. ‘So, if that’s not going to work, Quell, what now?’
The man, still on his hands and knees, looked up. ‘You just don’t get it, do you?’
‘What?’
‘We didn’t even reach the damned gate.’
‘But, then, what-’
‘There wasn’t any gate!’ the mage shrieked.
A long silence followed.
Nearby, the undead man was collecting seashells.
Jula Bole’s watery eyes fixed on Precious Thimble, dreamy with adoration. Seeing this, Amby did the same, trying to make his expression even more desirous, so that when she finally looked over she would see that he was the right one for her, the only one for her. As the moments stretched, the competition grew fierce.
His left leg still ached, from the hip right down to his toes, and he had only one moccasin, but at least the sand was warm so that wasn’t too bad.
Precious Thimble was in a meeting with Master Quell and that scary barbed man, and the hairy giant ogre named Mappo. These were the important people, he decided, and excepting Precious Thimble he wanted nothing to do with them. Standing too close to those folk was never healthy. Heads explode, hearts burst-he’d seen it with his own eyes, back when he was a runt (but not nearly as much of a runt as Jula) and the family had decided at last to fight the Malazans who were showing up in their swamp like poison mushrooms. Buna Bole had been running things back then, before he got eaten by a toad, but it was a fact that Buna’s next-to-closest brothers-the ones who wanted to get closer-all went and got themselves killed. Exploding heads. Bursting hearts. Boiling livers. It was the law of dodging, of course. Marshals and their submarshals were smart and smart meant fast, so when the arrows and quarrels and waves of magic flew, why, they dodged out of the way. Anybody round them, trying to be as smart but not smart at all and so just that much slower, well, they didn’t dodge quick enough.