The two men stared at their sergeant.
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"And you still need convincing?" Quick Ben demanded. "They're driving us into the ground. They mean to—"
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"Enough!" Whiskeyjack barked. "Not now. Kalam, find Fiddler. We need resupply from the Moranth. Round up the rest, Quick, and take Sorry with you. Join me outside the High Fist's tent in an hour."
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"And you?" Quick Ben asked. "What are you going to do?"
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The sergeant heard an ill-concealed yearning in the wizard's voice. The man needed a direction, or maybe confirmation that they were doing the right thing. A little late for that. Even so, Whiskeyjack felt a pang of regret--he couldn't give what Quick Ben wanted the most. He couldn't tell him that things would turn out for the best. He sank down on his haunches, his eyes on Pale. "What am I going to do? I'm going to do some thinking, Ouick Ben. I've been listening to you and Kalam, to Mallet and Fiddler, even Trotts has been jawing in my ear. Well, now it's my turn. So leave me be, Wizard, and take that damn girl with you."
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Quick Ben flinched, seeming to withdraw. Something in Whiskeyjack's words had made him very unhappy-or maybe everything.
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The sergeant was too tired to worry about it. He had their new assignment to think over. Had he been a religious man, Whiskeyjack would have let blood in Hood's Bowl, calling upon the shades of his ancestors. As much as he hated to admit it, he shared the feeling among his squad: someone in the Empire wanted the Bridgeburners dead.
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Pale was behind them now, the nightmare nothing but the taste of ashes in his mouth. Ahead lay their next destination: the legendary city of Darujhistan. Whiskeyjack had a premonition that a new nightmare was about to begin.
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Down in the camp just beyond the last crest of denuded hills, horse-drawn carts loaded with wounded soldiers crowded the narrow aisles between the tent rows. All the precise order of the Malazan encampment had disintegrated, and the air was febrile with soldiers screaming their pain, giving voice to horror.
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Tattersail threaded her way around the dazed survivors, stepping across puddles of blood in the wagon-ruts, her eyes lingering on an obscene pile of amputated limbs outside the cutter tents. From the massive sprawl of the camp followers' slum of tents and shelters came a wailing dirge-a broken chorus of thousands of voices, the sound a chilling reminder that war was always a thing of grief.
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In some military headquarters back in the Empire's capital of Unta, three thousand leagues distant, an anonymous aide would paint a red stroke across the 2nd Army on the active list, and then write in fine script beside it: Pale, late winter, the 1163rd Year of Burn's Sleep. Thus would the death of nine thousand men and women be noted. And then forgotten.
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Tattersail grimaced. Some of us won't forget. The Bridgeburners harbored some frightening suspicions. The thought of challenging Tayschrenn in a direct confrontation appealed to her sense of outrage and--if the High Mage had killed Calot-her feeling of betrayal. But she knew that her emotions had a way of running away with her. A sorcery duel with the Empire's High Mage would buy her a quick passage to Hood's Gate. Self-righteous wrath had planted more corpses in the ground than an empire could lay claim to, and as Calot used to say: Shake your fist all you want but dead is dead.
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She'd witnessed all too many scenes of death since she'd first joined the ranks of the Malazan Empire, but at least they couldn't be laid squarely at her feet. That was the difference, and it had been enough for a long time. Not as I once was. I've spent twenty years washing the blood from my hands. Right now, however, the scene that rose again and again behind her eyes was the empty armour on the hilltop, and it gnawed at her heart. Those men and women had been running to her, looking for protection against the horrors of the plain below. It had been a desperate act, a fatal one, but she understood it. Tayschrenn didn't care about them, but she did. She was one of their own. In past battles they'd fought like rabid dogs to keep enemy legions from killing her. This time, it was a mage war. Her territory. Favours were traded in the 2nd. It's what kept every-one alive, and it was what had made the 2nd a legion of legend. Those soldiers had expectations, and they had the right to them. They'd come to her for salvation. And they died for it.
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And if I had sacrificed myself then? Cast my Warren's defenses onto them instead of shielding my own hide? She'd been surviving on instinct back then, and her instincts had had nothing to do with altruism. Those kind of people didn't live long in war.
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Being alive, Tattersail concluded as she approached her tent, isn't the same as feeling good about it. She entered her tent and closed the flap behind her, then stood surveying her worldly possessions. Scant few, after two hundred and nineteen years of life. The oak chest containing her book of Thyr sorcery remained sealed by warding spells; the small collection of alchemical devices lay scattered on the tabletop beside her cot, like a child's toys abandoned in mid-game.
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Amid the clutter sat her Deck of Dragons. Her gaze lingered on the reading cards before continuing its round. Everything looked different now, as if the chest, the alchemy, and her clothes all belonged to someone else: someone younger, someone still possessing a shred of vanity. Only the Deck-the Fatid called out to her like an old friend.
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Tattersail walked over to stand before it. With an absent gesture she set down the package given her by Kalam, then pulled out a stool from under the table. Sitting down, she reached for the Deck. She hesitated.
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It had been months. Something had kept her away. Maybe Calot's death could have been foretold, and maybe that suspicion had been pacing in the darkness of her thoughts all this time. Pain and fear had been shaping her soul all her life, but her time with Calot had been another kind of shaping, something light, happy, pleasantly floating. She'd called it mere diversion.
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"How's that for willful denial?" She heard the bitterness in her tone and hated herself for it. Her old demons were back, laughing at the death of her illusions. You refused the Deck once before, the night before Mock's throat was opened, the night before Dancer and the man who would one day rule an Empire stole into your master's-your lover's-Hold. Would you deny that a pattern exists, woman?
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