Night of Knives

PROLOGUE

Sea of Storms south of Malaz Isle

Season of Osserc

1154th Year of Burn’s Sleep

96th Year of the Malazan Empire

Last Year of Emperor Kellanved’s Reign

The two-masted raider RHENl’S DREAM raced north-east under full straining sails. Captain Murl gripped the stern railing and watched the storm close upon his ship. Pushed to its limit, the hull groaned ominously while the ropes skirled high notes Murl had never heard.

The storm had swelled like a wall of night out of the south, a solid front of billowing black clouds over wind-lashed waves. But it was not the storm that worried Captain Murl, no matter how unnatural its rising; Rheni’s Dream had broached the highest seas known to Jakatan pilots, from the northern Sea of Kalt to the driving trade winds of the Reach south of Stratem. No, what sank fingers of dread into his heart were the azure flashes glinting like shards of ice amid the waves at the base of the churning cloud-front. No one told of seeing them this close. None who returned.

Riders, Murl and his fellow pilots called them. Sea-demons and Stormriders to others. Beings of sea and ice who claimed this narrow cut as their own and suffered no trespass. Only his Jakatan forbears knew the proper offerings to bribe the swiftest passage south of Malaz Isle. Why then did the Riders pursue? What could entice them this far north?

Murl turned his back to the punishing wind. His cousin, Lack-eye, fought to control the helm, his legs splayed, arms quivering at the tiller’s broad wheel. As the ship canted forward into a trough, Murl tightened his grip against the fall and booming impact. ‘Did we forget any of the offerings?’ he shouted over the roar of the wind.

Gaze fixed ahead to the bows, Lack-eye shook his head. ‘None,’ he called. ‘We’ve tried ‘em all.’ He glared over his shoulder with a pale blue eye. ‘All save the last.’

Murl flinched away. He drew himself amidships hand over hand along the guide ropes. Already the deck lay treacherous beneath a sheet of ice. Wind-driven rime as sharp as needles raised blood on his neck and hands. All save the last. But that rite he’d never enact. Why, in Chem’s cold embrace — every soul on the Rheni was blood-kin to him! Murl remembered the one time he’d witnessed that rite: the poor lad’s black-haired head bobbing atop the waves, pale arms clawing desperately at the water. He shuddered from the cold and something worse. No, that he could not bring himself to do.

Murl crouched next to a slim figure lashed to the mainmast, slumped as if asleep. With a hand numb from the freezing salt-spume, he reached out to caress a pale cheek. Ah Rheni dear, I’m so sorry. It was just too much for you. Who could possibly hope to soothe a storm such as this?

Ice crackled next to Murl as his first mate, Hoggen, thumped against the mast and wrapped an arm about it. ‘Shall I break out the weapons?’

Murl choked down a maniacal urge to laugh. He peered keenly at Hoggen to see if the man were serious. Sadly, it appeared he was. Frost shone white in his beard and his eyes were flat and dull. It was as if the fellow were already dead. Murl groaned within. ‘Go ahead, if you must.’ He squinted up to the mast top. A shape straddled the crossbar there, at mast and spur. Something glinted over his trousers, shirt, and arms: a layer of entombing ice. ‘And get young Mole down from there.’

‘The lad won’t answer. I think the cold’s done for him.’

Murl closed his eyes against the spray, hugged the mast.

‘We’re slowing,’ Hoggen observed in a toneless voice.

Murl barely heard him through the wind. He could feel his soaked clothes draining the life warmth from him. He shuddered uncontrollably. ‘Ice at the sails. They’ll tear soon.’

‘Have to hammer it. Knock it off.’

‘Try all you like.’

Coughing hoarsely, Hoggen laboured to pull away from the mast. Murl held to. It was fitting, he decided, that he should meet his end here, with Rheni, on the ship he’d named in her honour. Why, he was virtually surrounded by family; even loyal plodding Hoggen was related by marriage. Murl glanced down. How he ached to stroke the long black hair that shivered and jingled now like a fistful of icicles.

‘Rider hard a-port!’ came a shout. Dazed, Murl was surprised that a crewman remained aware enough to raise the hail. He swung his gaze there, squinting through spume spraying high above the gunwales.

Waves twice the height of the masts rolled past, foaming with ice and rime. Then Murl saw it, a dazzling sapphire figure breaching the surface: helmed, armoured, a tall lance of jagged ice couched at the hip. Its mount seemed half beast and half roiling wave. He fancied it turned a dark inscrutable gaze his way through cheekguards of frozen scale. Then, just as suddenly, the Rider dived, returning to the churning sea. Murl was reminded of blue gamen whales leaping before the prow. Another broached the surface further out. Then another. They rode the waves abreast of Rheni’s Dream yet seemed oblivious to it. Were they men or the ancient Jaghut race, as some claimed? He watched feeling oddly detached, as if this were all happening to someone else.

A crewman, Larl, steadied himself at the railing and raised a crossbow at the nearest Rider. The quarrel shot wildly astray. Murl shook his head — what was the use? They were dead already. There was nothing they could do. Then, remembering the sternchaser scorpion, he tore himself from the mast and lurched sternward. Lack-eye still stood rigid at the wheel, arms wide, staring ahead. Murl wrapped one numbed arm around the pedestalled weapon and seized the crank. The iron bit at his flesh as if red-hot, tearing patches of skin from his palm as he fought the mechanism.

‘What do they want?’ Murl called to Lack-eye. Tears froze in his eyes, blinding him. The scorpion wouldn’t budge. He pulled his hand free of the searing iron. Blood froze like tatters of red cloth. Lack-eye did not respond; did not even turn. Throwing himself to the wheel, Murl thrust an arm through the spokes.

Lack-eye would never answer again. Standing rigid at the wheel of Rheni’s Dream, the helmsman stared straight ahead into the gathering night, his one remaining eye white with frost. His shirt and trousers clattered in the wind, frozen as hard as sheets of wood.

Horrified, Murl stared, and in Lack-eye’s indifferent gaze, directed ahead to unknown distances, he had his answer. The Riders cared nothing for them. They were here for another reason, answering some inhuman summons, heaving themselves northward, an invading army throwing its might against the one thing that had confined them so long to this narrow passage: the island of Malaz.

The ship groaned like a tortured beast. Its prow heaved, ice-heavy, submerging beneath a wave. The blow shocked Murl from his grip at the wheel. When the spray cleared Lack-eye remained alone to pilot the frozen tomb northwards. Sails fell, stiff, and shattered to the decks. Ice layered the masts and decking, binding the ship like a dark heart within a frozen crag that rushed on groaning and swelling.

Still the storm coursed northward like a horizon-spanning tidal bore. From its gloom emerged a flotilla of emerald mountains etched by deep crevasses, the snow at their peaks gleaming in the last light.

Like unstoppable siege engines constructed to humble continents, they surged onward. At their flanks the Riders lunged forward, lances raised, pointing north.