Stonewielder Read Free Page B

rotting Jourilan cargo scow. He threw his only baggage, a cloth roll cinched tight by rope, on to the dock, then climbed up on to the mildewed blackwood slats. He straightened his squat broad form, hands at the small of his back, and stretched, grimacing.
    An excise officer taking inventory on the galley pointed his baton of office. ‘You there! You can’t tie up here! This is a commercial dock. Take that toy to the public wharf.’
    ‘Take what?’ the man asked blandly.
    The dock master opened his mouth to respond, then shut it. He’dthought the fellow old by his darkly tanned shaven head, but power clearly remained in the meaty thick neck, rounded shoulders, and gnarled, big-knuckled hands. More alarmingly, faded remnants of blue tattoos swirled across his brow, cheeks, and chin, demarking a fiercely snarling boar’s head. ‘The boat – move the boat.’
    ‘’Tain’t mine.’
    ‘Yes it is! I saw you tie it up just now!’
    ‘You there,’ the fellow called to an old man in rags on his hands and knees scouring the dock with a pumice stone. ‘How about a small launch? Battered but seaworthy.’
    The elder stared then laughed a wet cackle, shaking his head. ‘Haven’t the coin.’
    The newcomer threw a copper coin to the dock. ‘Now you do.’
    The excise officer’s gaze flicked suspiciously between the two. ‘Wait a moment …’
    The old man took up the coin, cocked an amused eye at the excise officer and tossed it back. The newcomer snatched it from the air. ‘Talk to this man,’ he told the officer, turning his back.
    ‘Hey! You can’t just—’
    ‘I’ll be moving my boat right away, sir!’ the old man cackled, revealing a dark pit empty of teeth. ‘Wouldn’t think of tying up here, sir!’
    Walking away, the newcomer allowed his mouth to widen in a broad frog-like grin beneath his splayed, squashed nose.
    He passed Banith’s harbour guardhouse, where his gaze lingered on the Malazan soldiers lounging in the shade of the porch. He took in the opened leather jerkin of one, loosened to accommodate a bulging stomach; the other dozing, chair tipped back, helmet forward over his eyes.
    The newcomer’s smile faded. Ahead, the front street of Banith ran roughly east–west. The town climbed shallow coastal hills, its roofs dominated by the tall jutting spires of the Holy Cloister and the many gables of the Hospice nearby. Beyond these, rich cultivated rolling plains, land once forested, stretched into the mist-shrouded distance. The man turned right. Walking slowly, he studied the shop fronts and stalls. He passed a knot of street toughs and noted the much darker or fairer hues of mixed Malazan blood among them, so different from the uniformly swart Fistian heritage.
    ‘Cast us a coin, beggar priest,’ one bold youth called, the eldest.
    ‘All I own is yours,’ the fellow answered in his gravelly voice.
    That brought many up short. Glances shot between the puzzled youths until the older tough snorted his disbelief. ‘Then hand it all over.’
    The squat fellow was examining an empty shop front. ‘Easily done – since I own nothing. This building occupied?’
    ‘Debtors’ prison,’ answered a girl, barefoot, in tattered canvas pants and dirty tunic, boasting the frizzy hair of mixed Korel and foreign parentage. ‘Withholding taxes from the Malazan overlords.’
    The man raised his thick arms to it. ‘Then I consecrate it to my God.’
    ‘Which of all your damned foreign gods is that?’
    The man turned. A smile pulled up his uneven lips and distorted the faded boar’s head tattoo. His voice strengthened. ‘Why, since you ask … Let me tell you about my God. His domain is the downtrodden and dispossessed. The poor and the sick. To him social standing, riches and prestige are meaningless empty veils. His first message is that we are all weak. We all are flawed. We all are mortal. And that we must learn to accept this.’
    ‘Accept? Accept what?’
    ‘Our failings. For we are all of us