The Bonehunters

She watched him examining the various mechanisms she had invented, and the long-term experiments, many of which showed no evident alteration of conditions. He poked. Sniffed, and even sought to taste one dish filled with gelatinous fluid. She thought to stop him, then decided to remain quiet. The warrior's wounds had healed with appalling swiftness, with no signs of infection. The thick liquid he was licking from his finger wasn't particularly healthy to ingest, but not fatal.

Usually.

He made a face. 'This is terrible.'

'I am not surprised.'

'What do you use it for?'

'What do you think?'

'Rub it into saddles. Leather.'

'Saddles? Indirectly, I suppose. It is an ointment, for the suppurating wounds that sometimes arise on the lining of the anus-'

He grunted loudly, then said, 'No wonder it tasted awful,' and resumed his examination of the room's contents.

She regarded him thoughtfully. Then said, 'The Falah'd sent soldiers into the keep. They found signs of past slaughter – as you said, not one Malazan left alive. They also found a demon. Or, rather, the corpse of a demon, freshly killed. They have asked me to examine it, for I possess a little knowledge of anatomy and other, related subjects.'

He made no reply, peering into the wrong end of a spyglass.

'If you come to the window, and look through the other end, Karsa, you will see things far away drawn closer.'

He scowled at her, and set the instrument down. 'If something is far away, I simply ride closer.'

'And if it is at the top of a cliff? Or a distant enemy encampment and you want to determine the picket lines?'

He retrieved the spyglass and walked over. She moved her chair to one side to give him room. 'There is a falcon's nest on the ledge of that tower, the copper-sheathed one.'

He held up the glass. Searched until he found the nest. 'That is no falcon.'

'You are right. It's a bokh'aral that found the abandoned nest to its liking. It carries up armfuls of rotting fruit and it spends the morning dropping them on people in the streets below.'

'It appears to be snarling…'

'That would be laughter. It is forever driven to bouts of hilarity.'

'Ah – no, that wasn't fruit. It was a brick.'

'Oh, unfortunate. Someone will be sent to kill it, now. After all, only people are allowed to throw bricks at people.'

He lowered the spyglass and studied her. 'That is madness. What manner of laws do you possess, to permit such a thing?'

'Which thing? Stoning people or killing bokh'arala?'

'You are strange, Samar Dev. But then, you are a witch, and a maker of useless objects-'

'Is that spyglass useless?'

'No, I now understand its value. Yet it was lying on a shelf…'

She leaned back. 'I have invented countless things that would prove of great value to many people. And that presents me with a dilemma. I must ask myself, with each invention, what possible abuses await such an object? More often than not, I conclude that those abuses outweigh the value of the invention. I call this Dev's First Law of Invention.'

'You are obsessed with laws.'

'Perhaps. In any case, the law is simple, as all true laws must be-'

'You have a law for that, too?'

'Founding principle, rather than law. In any case, ethics are the first consideration of an inventor following a particular invention.'

'You call that simple?'

'The statement is, the consideration is not.'

'Now that sounds more like a true law.'

She closed her mouth after a moment, then rose and walked over to the scriber's desk, sat and collected a stylus and a wax tablet. 'I distrust philosophy,' she said as she wrote. 'Even so, I will not turn away from the subject… when it slaps me in the face. Nor am I particularly eloquent as a writer. I am better suited to manipulating objects than words. You, on the other hand, seem to possess an unexpected talent for… uh… cogent brevity.'

'You talk too much.'

'No doubt.' She finished recording her own unexpectedly profound words – profound only in that Karsa Orlong had recognized a far vaster application than she had intended. She paused, wanting to dismiss his genius as blind chance, or even the preening false wisdom of savage nobility. But something whispered to her that Karsa Orlong had been underestimated before, and she vowed not to leap into the same pit.

Setting the stylus down, she rose to her feet. 'I am off to examine the demon you killed. Will you accompany me?'