Dust of Dreams (The Malazan Book of the Fallen #9)

Dust of Dreams (The Malazan Book of the Fallen #9) Page 256

These K’Chain Che’Malle felt none of that, she believed. They did not think as she did. Everything was a taste, a smell-thoughts and feelings, the sun’s very light, all flowing in a swarm of currents. Existence was an ocean. One could skate upon the surface, clinging to the shallows, or one could plunge into the depths, until the skull creaked with the pressure. She knew they saw her and her kind as timid, frightened by the mystery of unplumbed depths. Creatures floundering in fears, terrified of drowning knee-deep in truths.

But your Matron wants you to slide into the shallows, to find my world of vulnerabilities-to find out what we do to defeat them. You seek new strategies for living, you seek our secret of success. But you don’t understand, do you? Our secret is annihilation. We annihilate everyone else until none are left, and then we annihilate each other. Until we too are gone.

Such a wondrous secret. Well, she would give it to them, if she could. Her grand lessons of survival, and only she would hear the clamouring howl of the ghosts storming her soul.

Riding Gunth Mach’s back, Kalyth’s hands itched. Destinies were drawing close. I will find my hands of fire, and we will use you, Sag’Churok. You and Gunth Mach and all your kind. We will show you the horrors of the modern world you so want to be a part of.

She thought of their dread enemy, the faceless killers of the K’Chain Che’Malle. She wondered at this genocidal war, and suspected it was, in its essence, no different from the war humans had been engaged in for all time. It is the same, but it is also different. It is… naive.

With what was coming, with what she would bring… Kalyth felt a deep, sickening stab.

Of pity.

In an unbroken line from each mother to every daughter, memory survived, perpetuating a continuous history of experience. Gunth Mach held in her mind generations of lives trapped in a succession of settings that portrayed the inexorable collapse, the decay, the failure of their civilization. This was unbearable. Knowledge was an unceasing scream in her soul.

Every Matron was eventually driven insane: no daughter, upon ascension to the role, could long withstand the deluge. Male K’Chain Che’Malle had no comprehension of this; their lives were perfectly contained, the flavours of their selves truncated and unsubtle. Their unswerving loyalty was sustained in ignorance.

She had sought to break this pattern, with Sag’Churok, and in so doing was betraying the inviolate isolation of the Matrons. But she did not care. All that had gone before had not worked.

She remembered half a continent pounded level and then made smooth as a frozen lake, on which cities sprawled in a scale distorted even to K’Chain Che’Malle eyes, as if grandeur and madness were one and the same. Domes large enough to swallow islands, curling towers and spires like the spikes riding the backs of dhenrabi. Buildings with single rooms so huge that clouds formed beneath the ceiling, and birds dwelt there in their thousands, oblivious to the cage that held them. She remembered entire mountain ranges preserved as if they were works of art, at least until their value as quarries for sky keeps was realized, in the times of the civil wars-when those mountains were carved down to stumps. She remembered looking upon her kind in league-wide columns twenty leagues long as they set out to found new colonies. She stood, creaking beneath her own weight, and watched as fifty legions of Ve’Gath Soldiers-each one five thousand strong-marched to wage war against the Tartheno Tel Akai. And she was there when they returned, decimated, leaving a trail of their own dead that stretched across the entire continent.

She recalled the birth pains of the Nah’ruk, and then the searing agony of their betrayal. Burning cities and corpses three-deep on vast fields of battle. Chaos and terror within the nests, the shriek of desperate births. And the sly mockery of the waves on the shores as a dying Matron loosed her eggs into the surf in the mad hope that something new would be made-a hybrid of virtues with all the flaws discarded.

And so much more… fleeing through darkness and blinding smoke… the slash of an Assassin’s talons. Cold, sudden adjudication. Life draining away, the blessed relief that followed. Flavours awakening cruel and bitter in the daughter who followed-for nothing was lost, nothing was ever lost.

There was a goddess of the K’Chain Che’Malle. Immortal, omniscient as such things were supposed to be. The goddess was the Matron, mahybe of the eternal oil. Once, that oil had been of such strength and volume that hundreds of Matrons were needed as holy vessels.

Now there was but one.

She could remember the pride, the power of what had once been. And the futile wars waged to give proof to that pride and that power, until both had been utterly obliterated. Cities gone. The birth of wastelands across half the world.