‘Oh frail city, where strangers arrive…’

An empty plain beneath an empty night sky. A lone fire, so weak as to be nearly swallowed by the blackened, cracked stones encircling it. Seated on one of the two flat stones close to the hearth, a short, round man with sparse, greasy hair. Faded red waistcoat, over a linen shirt with stained once-white blousy cuffs erupting around the pudgy hands. The round face was flushed, reflecting the flickering flames. From the small knuckled chin dangled long black hairs-not enough to braid, alas-a new affectation he had taken to twirling and stroking when deep in thought, or even shallowly so. Indeed, when not thinking at all, but wishing to convey an impression of serious cogitation, should anyone regard him thoughtfully.

He stroked and twirled now as he frowned down into the fire before him.

What had that grey-haired bard sung? There on the modest stage in K’rul’s Bar earlier in the night, when he had watched on, content with his place in the glorious city he had saved more than once?

‘Oh frail city, where strangers arrive…’

‘I need to tell you something, Kruppe.’

The round man glanced up to find a shrouded figure seated on the other flat stone, reaching thin pale hands out to the flames. Kruppe cleared his throat, then said, ‘It has been a long time since Kruppe last found himself perched as you see him now. Accordingly, Kruppe had long since concluded that you wished to tell him something of such vast import that none but Kruppe is worthy to hear.’

A faint glitter from the darkness within the hood. ‘I am not in this war.’

Kruppe stroked the rattails of his beard, delighting himself by saying nothing.

‘This surprises you?’ the Elder God asked.

‘Kruppe ever expects the unexpected, old friend. Why, could you ever expect otherwise? Kruppe is shocked. Yet, a thought arrives, launched brainward by a tug on this handsome beard. K’rul states he is not in the war. Yet, Kruppe suspects, he is nevertheless its prize.’

‘Only you understand this, my friend,’ the Elder God said, sighing. Then cocked its head. ‘I had not noticed before, but you seem sad.’

‘Sadness has many flavours, and it seems Kruppe has tasted them all.’

‘Will you speak now of such matters? I am, I believe, a good listener.’

‘Kruppe sees that you are sorely beset. Perhaps now is not the time.’

‘That is no matter.’

‘It is to Kruppe.’

K’rul glanced to one side, and saw a figure approaching, grey-haired, gaunt.

Kruppe sang,’”Oh frail city, where strangers arrive”… and the rest?’

The newcomer answered in a deep voice, ‘“… pushing into cracks, there to abide.”‘

And the Elder God sighed.

‘Join us, friend,’ said Kruppe. ‘Sit here by this fire: this scene paints the history of our kind, as you well know. A night, a hearth, and a tale to spin. Dear K’rul, dearest friend of Kruppe, hast thou ever seen Kruppe dance?’

The stranger sat. A wan face, an expression of sorrow and pain.

‘No,’ said K’rul. ‘I think not. Not by limb, not by word.’

Kruppe’s smile was muted, and something glistened in his eyes. ‘Then, my friends, settle yourselves for this night. And witness.’

This creature of words cuts

To the quick and gasp, dart away

The spray of red rain

Beneath a clear blue sky

Shock at all that is revealed

What use now this armour

When words so easy slant between?

This god of promises laughs

At the wrong things, wrongly timed

Unmaking all these sacrifices

In deliberate malice

Recoil like a soldier routed

Even as retreat is denied

Before corpses heaped high in walls

You knew this would come

At last and feign nothing, no surprise

To find this cup filled

With someone else’s pain

It’s never as bad as it seems

The taste sweeter than expected

When you squat in a fool’s dream

So take this belligerence

Where you will, the dogged cur

Is the charge of my soul

To the centre of the street

Spinning round all fangs bared

Snapping at thirsty spears

Thrust cold and purged of your hands

– Hunting Words, Brathos Of Black Coral

Oh frail city!

Where strangers arrive

Pushing into cracks

There to abide

Oh blue city!

Old friends gather sighs

At the foot of docks

After the tide

Uncrowned city!

Where sparrows alight

In spider tracks

On sills well high

Doomed city!

Closing comes the night

History awakens

Here to abide

– Frail Age, Fisher Kel That

Surrounded in a city of blue fire, she stood alone on the balcony. The sky’s darkness was pushed away, an unwelcome guest on this the first night of the Gedderone Fete. Throngs filled the streets of Darujhistan, happily riotous, good-natured in the calamity of one year’s ending and another’s beginning. The night air was humid and pungent with countless scents.

There had been banquets. There had been unveilings of eligible young men and maidens. Tables laden with exotic foods, ladies wrapped in silks, men and women in preposterous uniforms all glittering gilt-a city with no standing army bred a plethora of private militias and a chaotic proliferation of high ranks held, more or less exclusively, by the nobility.

Among the celebrations she had attended this evening, on the arm of her hus¬band, she had not once seen a real officer of Darujhistan’s City Watch, not one genuine soldier with a dusty cloak-hem, with polished boots bearing scars, with a sword-grip of plain leather and a pommel gouged and burnished by wear. Yet she had seen, bound high on soft, well-fed arms, torcs in the manner of decorated sol¬diers among the Malazan army-soldiers from an empire that had, not so long ago, provided for Darujhistan mothers chilling threats to belligerent children. ‘Malazans, child! Skulking in the night to steal foolish children! To make you slaves for their terrible Empress-yes! Here in this very city!’

But the torcs she had seen this night were not the plain bronze or faintly etched silver of genuine Malazan decorations and signifiers of rank, such as appeared like relics from some long-dead cult in the city’s market stalls. No, these had been gold, studded with gems, the blue of sapphire being the commonest hue even among the coloured glass, blue like the blue fire for which the city was fa¬mous, blue to proclaim some great and brave service to Darujhistan itself.

Her fingers had pressed upon one such torc, there on her husband’s arm, al¬though there was real muscle beneath it, a hardness to match the contemptuous look in his eyes as he surveyed the clusters of nobility in the vast humming hall, with the proprietary air he had acquired since attaining the Council. The contempt had been there long before and if anything had grown since his latest and most triumphant victory.

Daru gestures of congratulation and respect had swirled round them in their stately passage through the crowds, and with each acknowledgement her husband’s face had grown yet harder, the arm beneath her fingers drawing ever tauter, the knuckles of his hands whitening above his sword-belt where the thumbs were tucked into braided loops in the latest fashion among duellists. Oh, he revelled in being among them now; indeed, in being above many of them. But for Gorlas Vidikas, this did not mean he had to like any of them. The more they fawned, the deeper his contempt, and that he would have been offended without their obsequy was a contradiction, she suspected, that a man like her husband was not wont to entertain.