The Crippled God - Page 98/472

Not quite. I tore it apart. Only to have Quick Ben make sure most of it came back. Do I feel different? Am I changed? How would I even know?

But I miss the Bonehunters. I miss my miserable squad. I miss the damned Adjunct .

We’re nothing but the sword in her hand, but we’re a comfortable grip. Use us, then. Just do it in style .

‘Camp glow ahead,’ said Masan Gilani, who once more rode her horse. ‘Looks damned big.’

‘Her allies have arrived,’ said Ruthan Gudd, then added, ‘I expect.’

Bottle snorted. ‘Does she know you’re alive, Captain?’

‘Why should she?’

‘Well, because …’

‘I’m a captain, soldier.’

‘Who rode alone into the face of a Nah’ruk legion! Armoured in ice! With a sword of ice! A horse—’

‘Oh, enough, Bottle. You have no idea how much I regret doing what I did. It’s nice not being noticed. Maybe one day you humans will finally understand that, and do away with all your mad ambitions, your insipid self-delusional megalomania. You weren’t shat out by some god on high. You weren’t painted in the flesh of the divine – at least, not any more than anyone or anything else. What’s with you all, anyway? You jam a stick up your own arse then preen at how tall and straight you’re standing. Soldier, you think you put your crawling days behind the day you left your mother’s tit? Take it from me – you’re still crawling, lad. Probably always will.’

Bludgeoned by the tirade, Bottle was silent.

‘You two go on,’ said Masan Gilani. ‘I need to piss.’

‘That last time was the horse then?’ Rudd asked.

‘Oh, funny man – or whatever.’ She reined in.

‘So they bowed to you,’ Bottle said as he and the captain continued on. ‘Why take it out on me?’

‘I didn’t – ah, never mind. To answer you, no, the Adjunct knows nothing about me. But as you say, my precious anonymity is over – or it is assuming the moment we’re in camp you go running off to your sergeant.’

‘I’m sure I will,’ Bottle replied. ‘But not, if you like, to babble about you being an Elder God.’

‘God? Not a god, Bottle. I told you: it’s not what you think.’

‘I’ll keep your ugly little secret, sir, if that’s how you want it. But that won’t change what we all saw that day, will it?’

‘Stormrider magic, yes. That.’

‘That.’

‘I borrowed it.’

‘Borrowed?’

‘Yes,’ he snapped in reply. ‘I don’t steal, Bottle.’

‘Of course not, sir. Why would you need to?’

‘Exactly.’

Bottle nodded in the gloom, listening as Masan rode back up to them. ‘Borrowed.’

‘A misunderstood people, the Stormriders.’

‘No doubt. Abject terror leaves little room for much else.’

‘Interestingly,’ Ruthan Gudd said in a murmur, ‘needs have converged somewhat. And I’m too old to believe in coincidence. No matter. We do what we do and that’s that.’

‘Sounds like something Fiddler would say.’

‘Fiddler’s a wise man, Bottle. He’s also the best of you, though I doubt many would see that, at least not as clearly as I do.’

‘Fiddler, is it? Not the Adjunct, Captain?’

He heard Ruthan Gudd’s sigh, and it was a sound filled with sorrow. ‘I see pickets.’

‘So do I,’ said Masan Gilani. ‘Not Malazan. Perish.’

‘Our allies,’ said Bottle, glaring at Ruthan Gudd, but of course it was too dark for him to see that. Then again, what’s darkness to a Hood-cursed ice-wielding Imass-kneeling Elder God?

Who then spoke. ‘It was a guess, Bottle. Truly.’

‘You took my anger.’

The voice came out of the shadows. Blinking, Lostara Yil slowly sat up, the furs sliding down, the chill air sweeping around her bared breasts, back and belly. A figure was sitting on the tent’s lone camp stool to her left, cloaked, hooded in grey wool. The two hands, hanging down past the bend of his knees, were pale as bone.

Lostara’s heart thudded hard in her chest. ‘I felt it,’ she said. ‘Rising like a flood.’ She shivered, whispered, ‘And I drowned.’

‘Your love summoned me, Lostara Yil.’

She scowled. ‘I have no love for you, Cotillion.’

The hooded head dipped slightly. ‘The man you chose to defend.’