A young Malazan lad of no more than twelve or thirteen. Capemoths rode his arms from shoulder to wrist, making them look like wings. Rhizan gathered in writhing clumps at his hands and feet, where the spikes had been driven through bones and flesh. The boy had no eyes, no nose – his face was a ravaged wound – yet he still lived.

The image was etching itself into Kalam’s heart like acid into bronze. His limbs felt cold, as if his own claim to life was withdrawing, pooling in his gut. I cannot save him. I cannot even kill him in swift mercy. Not this lad, not a single one of these hundreds of Malazans surrounding this army. I can do nothing. The knowledge was a whisper of madness. The assassin feared but one thing that left him skeined with terror: helplessness. But not the helplessness of being a prisoner, or of undergoing torture – he’d been victim to both, and he well knew that torture could break anyone – anyone at all. But this ... Kalam feared insignificance, he feared the inability to produce an effect, to force a change upon the world beyond his flesh.

It was this knowledge that the scene before him was searing into his soul. I can do nothing. Nothing. He stared across the intervening fifty paces into the young man’s sightless sockets, the distance between diminishing with every breath, until he felt close enough to brush his lips against the boy’s sun-cracked forehead. To whisper lies – your death won’t be forgotten, the truth of your precious life which you still refuse to surrender because it’s all you have. You are not alone, child – lies. The lad was alone. Alone with his withering, collapsing life. And when the body became a corpse, when it rotted and fell away to join all those others ringing a place that had once held an army, he would be forgotten. Another faceless victim. One in a number that beggared comprehension.

The Empire would exact revenge – if it was able – and the numbers would grow. The Imperial threat was ever thus: The destruction you wreak upon us and our kind, we deliver back to you tenfold. If Kalam succeeded in killing Laseen, then perhaps he would also succeed in guiding to the throne someone with spine enough to avoid ruling from a position of crisis. The assassin and Quick Ben had someone in mind for that. If all goes as planned. But for these, it was too late.

He let out a slow breath, only now realizing he was lying on an ants’ nest and its inhabitants were telling him to leave in no uncertain terms. I lie with the weight of a god on their world, and these ants don’t like it. We’re so much more alike than most would think.