Dust of Dreams (The Malazan Book of the Fallen 9)

Rolling the logs down cut on end

To make roads through the forest

That once was-before the logs

(Were rolled down cut on end)-

We called it stump road and we

Called it forest road when

Our imaginations starved

You can make fans with ribs

Of sheep and pouches for baubles

By pounding flat the ears

Of old women and old men-

Older is best for the ear grows

For ever it’s said, even when

There’s not a scrap anywhere to eat

So we carried our wealth

In pendulum pouches wrinkled

And hairy, diamonds and gems

Enough to buy a forest or a road

But maybe not both

Enough even for slippers of

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Rolling the logs down cut on end

To make roads through the forest

That once was-before the logs

(Were rolled down cut on end)-

We called it stump road and we

Called it forest road when

Our imaginations starved

You can make fans with ribs

Of sheep and pouches for baubles

By pounding flat the ears

Of old women and old men-

Older is best for the ear grows

For ever it’s said, even when

There’s not a scrap anywhere to eat

So we carried our wealth

In pendulum pouches wrinkled

And hairy, diamonds and gems

Enough to buy a forest or a road

But maybe not both

Enough even for slippers of

Supplest skin feathered in down

Like a baby’s cheek

There is a secret we know

When nothing else is left

And the sky stops its tears

A belly can bulge full

On diamonds and gems

And a forest can make a road

Through what once was

You just won’t find any shade

Pendulums Were Once Toys, Badalle of Korbanse Snake

To journey into the other worlds, a shaman or witch of the Elan would ride the Spotted Horse. Seven herbs, softened with beeswax and rolled into a ball and then flattened into an oblong disc that was taken into the mouth and held between lip and gum. Coolness slowly numbing and saliva rising as if the throat was the mouth of a spring, a tingling sensation lifting to gather behind the eyes in coalescing colours and then, in a blinding flash, the veil between worlds vanished. Patterns swirled in the air; complex geometries played across the landscape-a landscape that could be the limitless wall of a hide tent, or the rolling plains of a cave wall where ran the beasts-until the heart-stains emerged, pulsing, blotting the scene in undulating rows, sweet as waves and tasting of mother’s milk.

So arrived the Spotted Horse, a cascade of heart-stains rippling across the beast, down its long neck, sweeping along its withers, flowing like seed-heads from its mane and tail.

Ride into the alien world. Ride among the ancestors and the not-yet-born, among the tall men with their eternally swollen members, the women with their forever-filled wombs. Through forests of black threads, the touch or brush of any one of them an invitation to endless torment, for this was the path of return for all life, and to be born was to pass through and find the soul’s fated thread-the tale of a future death that could not be escaped. To ride the other way, however, demanded a supple traverse, evading such threads, lest one’s own birth-fate become entangled, knotted, and so doom the soul to eternal prison, snared within the web of conflicted fates.

Prophecies could be found among the black threads, but the world beyond that forest was the greatest gift. Timeless, home to all the souls that ever existed; this was where grief was shed, where sorrow dried up and blew away like dust, where scars vanished. To journey into this realm was to be cleansed, made whole, purged of all regrets and dark desires.

Riding the Spotted Horse and then returning was to be reborn, guiltless, guileless.

Kalyth knew all this, but only second-hand. The riders among her people passed on the truths, generation upon generation. Any one of the seven herbs, if taken alone, would kill. The seven mixed in wrong proportions delivered madness. And, finally, only those chosen as worthy by the shamans and witches would ever know the gift of the journey.

For one such as Kalyth, mired in the necessary mediocrity so vital to the maintenance of family, village and the Elan way of living, to take upon herself such a ritual-to even so much as taste the seven herbs-was a sentence to death and damnation.

Of course, the Elan were gone. No more shamans or witches to be found. No families, no villages, no clans, no herds-every ring of tipi stones, spanning the rises tucked at the foot of yet higher hilltops, now marked the motionless remnant of a final camp, a camp never to be returned to, the stones destined to sink slowly where they lay, the lichen on their undersides dying, the grasses so indifferently crushed beneath them turning white as bone. Such boulder rings were now maps of extinction and death. They held no promises, only the sorrow of endings.

She had suffered her own damnation, one devoid of any crime, any real culpability beyond her cowardly flight: her appalling abandonment of her family. There had been no shamans left to utter the curse, but that hardly mattered, did it?

She sat, as the sun withered in the west and the grasses surrounding her grew wiry and grey, staring down at the disc lying in the palm of her hand.

Elan magic. As foreign to her world now as the Che’Malle machines in Ampelas Rooted had been when she’d first set eyes upon them. To ride the Spotted Horse through the ashes of her people invited… what? She did not know, could not know. Would she find the spirits of her kin-would they truly look upon her with love and forgiveness? Was this her secret desire? Not a quest into the realms of prophecy seeking hidden knowledge; not searching for a Mortal Sword and a Shield Anvil for the K’Chain Che’Malle?