‘No idea, Highness. Honest.’
Janath rose. ‘Let’s go pounce on the men in the garden, shall we?’
Departing the palace unseen was enabled by the Queen’s silent servants leading the two Bolkando women down a maze of unused corridors and passageways, until at last they were ushered out into the night through a recessed postern gate.
They walked to a nearby street and there awaited the modest carriage that would take them back to their rooms in a hostel of passing quality down near the harbourfront.
Felash held one hand in the air, fingers moving in slow, sinuous rhythm-an affectation of which she seemed entirely unaware. ‘A contract! Ridiculous!’
Her handmaiden said nothing.
‘Well,’ said Felash, ‘if the captain proves too troublesome-’ and into that uplifted hand snapped a wedge-bladed dagger, appearing so suddenly it might well have been conjured out of the thin night air.
‘Mistress,’ said the handmaiden in a low, smooth and stunningly beautiful voice, ‘that will not work.’
Felash frowned. ‘Oh, grow up, you silly girl. We can leave no trail-no evidence at all.’
‘I mean, mistress, that the captain cannot be killed, for I believe she is already dead.’
‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘Even so, mistress. Furthermore, she is enlivened by an ootooloo.’
‘Oh, now that’s interesting! And exciting!’ The dagger vanished as quickly as it had appeared. ‘Fix me a bowl, will you? I need to think.’
‘Here they come,’ murmured Bugg.
Tehol turned. ‘Ah, see how they’ve made up and everything. How sweet. My darlings, so refreshing this night air, don’t you think?’
‘I’m not your darling,’ said Shurq Elalle. ‘She is.’
‘And isn’t she just? Am I not the luckiest man alive?’
‘Errant knows, it’s not talent.’
‘Or looks,’ added Janath, observing her husband with gauging regard.
‘It was better,’ Tehol said to Bugg, ‘when they weren’t allies.’
‘Divide to conquer the divide, sire, that’s my motto.’
‘And a most curious one at that. Has it ever worked for you, Bugg?’
‘I’ll be sure to let you know as soon as it does.’
Thirty leagues north of Li Heng on the Quon Talian mainland was the village of Gethran, an unremarkable clump of middling drystone homes, workshops, a dilapidated church devoted to a handful of local spirits, a bar and a gaol blockhouse where the tax-collector lived in one of the cells and was in the habit of arresting himself when he got too drunk, which was just about every night.
Behind the squat temple with its thirty-two rooms was a tiered cemetery that matched the three most obvious levels of class in the village. The highest and furthest from the building was reserved for the wealthier families-the tradesfolk and skilled draft workers whose lineages could claim a presence in the town for more than three generations. Their graves were marked by ornate sepulchres, tombs constructed in the fashion of miniature temples, and the occasional tholos bricked tomb-a style of the region that reached back centuries.
The second level belonged to residents who were not particularly well-off, but generally solvent and upstanding. The burials here were naturally more modest, yet generally well maintained by relatives and offspring, characterized by flat-topped shrines and capped, stone-lined pits.
Closest to the temple, and level with its foundations, resided the dead in most need of spiritual protection and, perhaps, pity. The drunks, wastrels, addicts and criminals, their bodies stacked in elongated trenches with pits reopened in a migratory pattern, up and down the row, to allow sufficient time for the corpses to decompose before a new one was deposited.
A village no different from countless others scattered throughout the Malazan Empire. Entire lives spent in isolation from the affairs of imperial ambition, from the marching armies of conquest and magic-ravaged battles. Lives crowded with local dramas and every face a familiar one, every life known from blood-slick birth to blood-drained death.
Hounded by four older sisters, the grubby, half-wild boy who would one day be named Deadsmell was in the habit of hiding out with Old Scez, who might have been an uncle or maybe just one of his mother’s lovers before his father came back from the war. Scez was the village dresser of the dead, digger of the graves, and occasional mason for standing stones. With hands like dusty mallets, wrists as big around as a grown man’s calf, and a face that had been pushed hard to one side by a tumbling lintel stone decades back, he was not a man to draw admiring looks, but neither was he short of friends. Scez did right by the dead, after all. And he had something-every woman said as much-he had something, all right. A look in his eye that gave comfort, that promised more if more was needed. Yes, he was adored, and in the habit of making breakfasts for women all over the village, a detail young Deadsmell was slow to understand.