Assail Read Free

then others.’
    Shalt cut him down as well and wept as she fought, for he had been a companion of uncountable years.
    She spared the mêlée a glance and despaired. The aggressors far outnumbered the defenders. Yet she was First of the Band for a reason and she fought even as all her allies fell about her. She was last, giving ground, suffering strikes that shaved dried flesh from her limbs and cut rotted hide from her shoulders. Now her skills overcame the constraints of the attackers who fell one by one before the two-handed blade, so thin as to be translucent, that she flicked and turned as lightly as a green branch.
    A blow took her skull. It severed bone down past her right occipital ridge. Yet even as her skull shattered she dropped this last aggressor and wailed at the necessity, for it was Bruj’el, a bull of a warrior, and cousin to her mate gone these many centuries.
    She turned to the people. She could sense her animating spirit fleeing its flawed vessel. Her Tellann-provided vision was darkening, withdrawing. She fell to her bony knees. She dropped her blade to brace herself with one hand and breathed out one last fading sigh to the staring, awed figures.
    ‘
Hide yourselves …
’

CHAPTER I
     
    KYLE SAT IN his accustomed seat in a sailors’ dive in kevil, Mare, of south Fist, and considered his dwindling stash of coins, and thus options, for escaping these damnably insular Korel lands. It was a region so notoriously hostile to foreigners that should any here find him, an obvious stranger, wounded in the street, many would go out of their way to kick and spit upon him.
    Especially as he wore the gear of the hated Malazans.
    He’d ordered a stein of beer, which finally arrived at his table only because he’d proved himself a paying customer; something which might end soon enough. He supposed he could afford the short jaunt across Black Strait to Stygg on the mainland, and from there it was but a hop and a skip overland south across the Great Ice Wastes to Stratem, wasn’t it, my lad? He had the money for that at least. Or he could always join the Mare navy. They at least were recruiting. Not that they’d take a foreigner, and certainly not a blasted ex-Malazan who’d been at the naval engagement where the much vaunted Mare galleys had been razed to the waterline by said invaders and their allies.
    He sipped the beer and damned that Katakan captain he’d hired. Once Fist slipped below the horizon the man turned round! He should’ve put his sword to his throat and forced him to sail on east. ’Course, there was no way he could’ve kept the whole crew at knife point for two weeks – but at least he’d have gotten off the wretched island.
    Patience, he told himself, Kylarral-ten, son of Tulo, of the People of the Wind. There will be other chances.
    Abyss, maybe a foreign trader would put in and he’d be able to hire on as crew. He was wondering how long it would be before that happened, and whether he had enough coin, when someone eased himself down into the chair opposite.
    ‘You are looking for a ship,’ the fellow said, and crossed his arms. He was wearing a canvas shirt, ragged and much patched, and his trousers were similar. His face and neck were sun- and wind-darkened to the Mare sailor’s usual deep polished brown. An antler-handled dirk stood up from the strip of hair rope he wore tied as a belt. His dark eyes held the common disapproval and scarcely hidden hostility Kyle usually found directed at him as the cut of his leathers, his belt, sheath and boots, labelled him as being of those recent invaders.
    Kyle allowed a guarded nod. ‘Unsuccessfully,’ he said.
    ‘I speak for Tulan Orbed, Master of the
Lady’s Luck
. He is interested in your talk of lands east of here across the Bloodmare Ocean.’ The man’s face and tone, however, made it plain that he was not.
    ‘Those lands are so close the Bloodmare Ocean should be named a strait.’
    The sailor leaned forward to push his