The Napan waved a hand. ‘Listen, lad. When a man arranges his own death, he needs to plan ahead. A life of anonymity doesn’t come as cheap as you’d imagine. I emptied half of Aren’s treasury a day before my tragic drowning. Now, you might manage to kill me and try to find it, but it’d be hopeless. So thank me for my generosity and get on your way.’

‘One day,’ Karsa said, ‘I shall return here and repay you.’

‘For the coin or the broken ribs?’

The Teblor simply smiled.

Keeper laughed, then rose and ducked through the doorway. A moment later, they could hear him climbing the frame.

Torvald collected the pack, drawing the straps over his shoulders, then handed one of the gourds to Karsa.

They set off down the road.

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FOUR

‘Has a drowned Napan’s body ever surfaced?’

Empress Laseen to High Mage Tayschrenn

following the Disappearances

Life of Empress Laseen

Abelard

There were villages on the coastal road, usually set on the inland side, as if the inhabitants sought nothing from the sea. A scattering of adobe dwellings, flimsy corrals, goats, dogs and dark-skinned figures hidden within swaths of full-length, sun-bleached cloth. Shadowed faces tracked the Teblor and the Daru from doorways but otherwise made no move.

On the fourth day, in the fifth of such villages, they found a merchant’s wagon drawn up in the virtually empty market square, and Torvald managed to purchase, for a handful of silver, an antique sword, top-heavy and sharply curved. The merchant had bolts of cloth for sale as well, but nothing already made into clothing. The sword’s handle fell apart shortly afterwards.

‘I need to find a wood-carver,’ Torvald said after a lengthy and rather elaborate string of curses. They were once more walking down the road, the sun overhead fiercely hot in a cloudless sky. The forest had thinned to either side, low, straggly and dusty, allowing them a view of the turquoise water of the Otataral Sea to their right, and the dun tones of the undulating horizon inland. ‘And I’d swear that merchant understood Malazan – even as bad as I speak it. He just wouldn’t admit to that fact.’

Karsa shrugged. ‘The Malazan soldiers in Genabaris said the Seven Cities was going to rebel against their occupiers. This is why the Teblor do not make conquests. Better that the enemy keeps its land, so that we may raid again and again.’