A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 4

ghost
    Old Hunch Arbat , Tarthenal
    Pithy , an ex-con
    Brevity , an ex-con
    Pully , a Shake witch
    Skwish , a Shake witch

PROLOGUE
    The Elder Warren of Kurald Emurlahn
The Age of Sundering
    In a landscape torn with grief, the carcasses of six
dragons lay strewn in a ragged row reaching a thousand
or more paces across the plain, flesh split apart, broken
bones jutting, jaws gaping and eyes brittle-dry. Where their
blood had spilled out onto the ground wraiths had gathered
like flies to sap and were now ensnared, the ghosts writhing
and voicing hollow cries of despair, as the blood darkened,
fusing with the lifeless soil; and, when at last the substance
grew indurate, hardening into glassy stone, those ghosts
were doomed to an eternity trapped within that murky
prison.
    The naked creature that traversed the rough path formed
by the fallen dragons was a match to their mass, yet bound
to the earth, and it walked on two bowed legs, the thighs
thick as thousand-year-old trees. The width of its shoulders
was equal to the length of a Tartheno Toblakai's height;
from a thick neck hidden beneath a mane of glossy black
hair, the frontal portion of the head was thrust forward –
brow, cheekbones and jaw, and its deep-set eyes revealing
black pupils surrounded in opalescent white. The huge
arms were disproportionately long, the enormous hands
almost scraping the ground. Its breasts were large,
pendulous and pale. As it strode past the battered, rotting
carcasses, the motion of its gait was strangely fluid, not at
all lumbering, and each limb was revealed to possess extra
joints.
    Skin the hue of sun-bleached bone, darkening to veined
red at the ends of the creature's arms, bruises surrounding
the knuckles, a latticework of cracked flesh exposing the
bone here and there. The hands had seen damage,
the result of delivering devastating blows.
    It paused to tilt its head, upward, and watched as three
dragons sailed the air high amidst the roiling clouds,
appearing then disappearing in the smoke of the dying
realm.
    The earthbound creature's hands twitched, and a low
growl emerged from deep in its throat.
    After a long moment, it resumed its journey.
    Beyond the last of the dead dragons, to a place where
rose a ridge of hills, the largest of these cleft through as if a
giant claw had gouged out the heart of the rise, and in that
crevasse raged a rent, a tear in space that bled power in
nacreous streams. The malice of that energy was evident in
the manner in which it devoured the sides of the fissure,
eating like acid into the rocks and boulders of the ancient
berm.
    The rent would soon close, and the one who had last
passed through had sought to seal the gate behind him. But
such healing could never be done in haste, and this wound
bled anew.
    Ignoring the virulence pouring from the rent, the
creature strode closer. At the threshold it paused again and
turned to look back the way it had come.
    Draconean blood hardening into stone, horizontal sheets
of the substance, already beginning to separate from the
surrounding earth, to lift up on edge, forming strange, disarticulated
walls. Some then began sinking, vanishing from
this realm. Falling through world after world. To reappear,
finally, solid and impermeable, in other realms, depending
on the blood's aspect, and these were laws that could not be
challenged. Starvald Demelain, the blood of dragons and
the death of blood.
    In the distance behind the creature, Kurald Emurlahn,
the Realm of Shadows, the first realm born of the conjoining
of Dark and Light, convulsed in its death-throes. Far
away, the civil wars still raged on, whilst in other areas the
fragmenting had already begun, vast sections of this world's
fabric torn away, disconnected and lost and abandoned – to
either heal round themselves, or die. Yet interlopers still
arrived here, like scavengers gathered round a fallen
leviathan, eagerly tearing free their own private pieces of
the realm. Destroying each other in fierce battles over the
scraps.
    It had not been imagined – by anyone – that an entire
realm could die in such a manner. That the vicious acts of
its inhabitants could destroy . . . everything. Worlds live
on, had been the belief – the assumption – regardless of the
activities of those who dwelt upon them. Torn flesh heals,
the sky clears, and something new crawls from the briny
muck.
    But not this time.
    Too many powers, too many betrayals, too vast and all-consuming
the crimes.
    The creature faced the