I never finished books 9 or 10 of the Malazan series, so recently I began a reread of all the books in order to refresh my memory, so I can finally complete the series. I am currently on book 2, and despite my very fond memories of it, I am finding it a bit of a slog to get through... mostly because I keep seeing errors and incongruities in the Chain of Dogs plotline.

As far as I can tell according to the main Seven Cities map, the journey from Hissar to the river Vathar and from Vathar to Aren are roughly similar. I didn't take a ruler to them, but just eyeballing it they seem very similar, and even if Aren is a bit closer to the Vathar as the crow flies, the fact that they swung inland should have made up the difference (not to mention that they trekked across a desert, and were greatly weakened by then, so should have been slower).

Anyway, though I didn't take notes while I was reading, I recall when at Dryj Spring Duiker thought how Coltaine couldn't possibly be leading the Chain to Sekala Crossing, because it was a journey of two months. Perhaps I am mistaken and it was at Sekala Crossing and he was thinking of the march to Gelor Ridge instead. Either way the point remains the same, according to Duiker a journey of that distance requires several months. Yet later in the book not only is the Dry March completely skipped over and covered in a handful of paragraphs, but Duiker and the refugees split from Coltaine at Sanimon, and then seemed to get to Aren in but a handful of days, perhaps even in one or two. It could not possibly have been longer since Coltaine fought against Korbolo Dom from that point until the battle at Barrow, practically the entire distance to Aren. Yet judging the distance by the map, this is a journey of well over a hundred leagues, and so should have taken just as long as the two month crossing Duiker complained about earlier. This is evident because Sanimon is just a bit further south than the city of Bylan, which is marked on the main Seven Cities map, which posses a distance scale, and shows that even as the crow flies the distance from Aren to Bylan is greater than 100 leagues.

So my question is, is this an error that Erikson somehow missed, a journey that should have been months getting squeezed into a bare few days instead? Or did he simply skip over largely everything after the Vathar in order to not bore us with the details, yet did it so poorly that the time skip is nearly undetectable?

And for that matter, how do the timelines of the Kalam, Fiddler, and Duiker storylines relate? Because it seems like the Duiker storyline should go much, much further into the future than the other two, given the distances it involves, yet we know for a fact that Duiker was reaching Sanimon just as Fiddler reached the Azath due to the arrival of Korpolan Demesand around that period. So did Fiddler simply spend that long traveling through the Azath, and Kalam on the Ragstopper? Despite hints of time fluctuating on the ship, it doesn't seem possible that they could have spent so many months sailing, simply because they would have starved if that were true. And if Fiddler traveled so long through the Azath, then what kind of magical teleporter is it anyway, if he would have practically been better off walking? Either way it seems like the times should be off, unless I am really missing something.

Have these questions been asked before? Is there something here I'm missing, or should I simply suspend my disbelief and continue on? It's strange, I overlooked these details before, apparently too enraptured by Coltaine's victories. Even stranger, so far on this reread I've enjoyed Gardens of the Moon a lot more than I remembered, and Deadhouse Gates a lot less.