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

Dust of Dreams (The Malazan Book of the Fallen #9) Page 328

Not crumbled coral. Not stone.

‘It’s bone,’ said Yedan Derryg, standing a few paces to her left. ‘See that driftwood? Long bones, mostly. Those cobbles, they’re-’

‘Yes,’ she snapped. ‘I know.’ She flung away the handful of bone fragments.

‘It was easier,’ he continued, ‘from back there. We’re too close-’

‘Be quiet, will you?’

Suddenly defiant, she willed herself to look-and reeled back a step, breath hissing from between her teeth.

A sea indeed, yet one that rose like a wall, its waves rolling down to foam at the waterline. She grunted. But this was not water at all. It was… light.

Behind her, Yedan Derryg said, ‘Memories return. When they walked out from the Light, their purity blinded us. We thought that a blessing, when in truth it was an attack. When we shielded our eyes, we freed them to indulge their treacherous ways.’

‘Yedan, the story is known to me-’

‘Differently.’

She came near to gasping in relief as she turned from the vast falling wall to face her brother. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The Watch serves the Shore in its own way.’

‘Then, in turn, I must possess knowledge that you don’t-is that what you’re saying, brother?’

‘The Queen is Twilight, because she can be no other. She holds the falling of night. She is the first defender against the legions of light that would destroy darkness itself. But we did not ask for this. Mother Dark yielded, and so, to mark that yielding, Twilight relives it.’

‘Again and again. For ever.’

Yedan’s bearded jaws bunched, his face still stained with blood. Then he shook his head. ‘Nothing’s for ever, sister.’

‘Did we really lack sophistication, Yedan? Back then? Were we really that superstitious, that ignorant?’

His brows lifted.

She gestured at the seething realm behind her. ‘This is the true border of Thyrllan. It’s that and nothing more. The First Shore is the shore between Darkness and Light. We thought we were born on this shore-right here-but that cannot be true! This shore destroys -can you not feel it? Where do you think all these bones came from?’

‘This was a gift to no one,’ Yedan replied. ‘Look into the water, sister. Look deep into it.’

But she would not. She had already seen what he had seen. ‘They cannot be drowning-no matter what it looks like-’

‘You are wrong. Tell me, why are there so few Liosan? Why is the power that is Light so weak in all the other worlds?’

‘If it wasn’t we would all die-there’d be no life anywhere at all!’

He shrugged. ‘I have no answer to that, sister. But I think that Mother Dark and Father Light, in binding themselves to each other, in turn bound their fates. And when she turned away, so did he. He had no choice-they had become forces intertwined, perfect reflections. Father Light abandoned his children and they became a people lost-and lost they remain.’

She was trembling. Yedan’s vision was monstrous. ‘It cannot be. The Tiste Andii weren’t trapped. They got away.’

‘They found a way out, yes.’

‘How?’

He cocked his head. ‘Us, of course.’

‘ What are you saying? ’

“In Twilight was born Shadow.”

‘I was told none of this! I don’t believe you! What you’re saying makes no sense, Yedan. Shadow was the bastard get of Dark and Light-commanded by neither-’

‘Twilight, Shadow is everything we have ever known. Indeed, it is everywhere.’

‘But it was destroyed!’

‘Shattered, yes. Look at the beach. Those bones-they belong to the Shake. We were assailed from both sides-we didn’t stand a chance-that any of us survived at all is a miracle. Shadow was first shattered by the legions of Andii and the legions of Liosan. Purity cannot abide imperfection. In the eyes of purity, it becomes an abomination.’

She was shaking her head. ‘Shadow was the realm of the Edur -it has nothing to do with us, with the Shake.’

Yedan smiled-she could not even recall the last time he had done that and the sight of it jolted her. He nodded. ‘Our very own bastard get.’

She sank down to her knees in the bed of crumbled bone. She could hear the sea now, could hear the waves rolling down-and beneath all of that she could hear the deluged voices of the doomed behind the surface. He turned away when she did. But his children had no way out. We held against them, here. We stood and we died defending our realm. ‘Our blood was royal,’ she whispered.