Of course he was. These hard men were no fools.
He knew that damned mob in the Phoenix Inn. He knew every one of Coll’s decrepit, lowborn friends, and he intended to kill them all.
Down from the Estates District and into the Daru District. Not far.
Two streets from the Phoenix Inn he halted his two remaining men. ‘You’ll watch the front entrance, Havet. Kust, I want you to walk in and make a show – it won’t have to be much, they’ll smell you out fast enough. I have the alley, for when somebody bolts. Both of you, keep an eye out for a short, fat man in a red waistcoat. If you get a chance, Havet, cut him down – that shouldn’t be hard. There’re two tough-looking women who run the place – they’re fair targets as well if they head outside. I’m not sure who else will be in that foul nest – we’ll find out soon enough. Now, go.’
They went one way. He went another.
Torvald Nom grunted and gasped as he pulled himself on to the estate roof. Sitting at his desk had been driving him mad. He needed to be out, roving round, keeping an eye on everything. On everything. This was a terrible night and nothing had happened yet. He missed his wife. He wished he was back home, and with the coming storm he’d be drenched by the time he stumbled into that blessed, warm abode. Assuming he ever made it.
He worked his way along the edge so that he could see down into the forecourt. And there they were, Madrun and Lazan Door, throwing knuckles against the wall to the left of the main gate. He heard the door of the house open directly beneath him and saw the carpet of light unfold on the steps and pavestones, and the silhouette of the man standing in the doorway was instantly recognizable. Studlock, Studious Lock. Not moving at all, just watching, but watching what?
Knuckles pattered, bounced on stone, then settled, and the two compound guards hunched down over them to study the cast.
That’s what he’s watching. He’s watching the throws.
And Torvald Nom saw both men slowly straighten, and turn as one to face the man standing in the doorway.
Who must have stepped back inside, softly closing the door.
Oh, shit.
There was a scuffle somewhere behind him and Torvald Nom spun round. It was too damned dark – where was the moon? Hiding somewhere behind the storm clouds, of course, and he glanced up. And saw a sweep of bright stars. What clouds? There aren’t any clouds. And if that’s thunder, then where’s the lightning? And if that’s the howl of wind, why is everything perfectly still? He wasn’t sure now if he’d actually heard anything – nothing was visible on the roof, and there were no real places to hide either. He was alone up here.
Like a lightning rod.
He tried a few deep breaths to slow the frantic beat of his heart. At least he’d prepared himself. All his instincts strumming like taut wires, he’d done all he could.
And it’s not enough. Gods below, it’s not enough!
Scorch looked startled, but then he always looked startled.
‘Relax,’ hissed Leff, ‘you’re driving me to distraction.’
‘Hey, you hear something?’
‘No.’
‘Exactly.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean? We ain’t hearing nothing. Good. That means there’s nothing to hear.’
‘They stopped.’
‘Who stopped?’
‘Them, the ones on the other side of the gate, right? They stopped.’
‘Well, thank Hood,’ said Leff. ‘Those knuckles was driving me crazy. Every damned night, on and on and on. Click clack click clack, gods below. I never knew Seguleh were such gamblers – it’s a sickness, you know, an addiction. No wonder they lost their masks – probably in a bet. Picture it. “Ug, got nuffin but this mask, and m’luck’s boot to change, ‘sgot to, right? So, I’m in – look, ‘sa good mask! Ug”.’
‘That would’ve been a mistake,’ Scorch said, nodding. ‘If you don’t want nobody to know you’re bluffing, what better way than to wear a mask? So, they lost ‘em and it’s been downhill ever since. Yeah, that makes sense, but it’s got me thinking, Leff.’
‘‘Bout what?’
‘Well, the Seguleh. Hey, maybe they’re all bluffing!’ Leff nodded back. This was better. Distract the fidgety idiot. All right, maybe things didn’t feel quite right. Maybe there was a stink in the air that had nothing to do with smell, and maybe he had sweat trickling down under his armour, and he was keeping his hand close to the sword at his belt and eyeing the crossbow leaning against the gate. Was it cocked? It was cocked.
Click clack click clack. Come on, boys, start ‘em up again, before you start making me nervous.
Cutter halted the horse and sat, leaning forward on the saddle, studying the ship moored alongside the dock. No lights showed. Had Spite gone to bed this early? That seemed unlikely. He hesitated. He wasn’t even sure why he had come here. Did he think he’d find Scillara?
That was possible, but if so it was a grotesque desire, revealing an ugly side to his nature that he did not want to examine for very long, if at all. He had pretty much abandoned her. She was a stranger to Darujhistan – he should have done better. He should have been a friend.
How many more lives could he ruin? If justice existed, it was indeed appropriate that he ruin himself as well. The sooner the better, in fact. Grief and self-pity seemed but faint variations on the same heady brew that was self-indulgence – did he really want to drown Scillara in his pathetic tears?
No, Spite would be better – he’d get three words out and she’d start slapping him senseless. Get over it, Cutter. People die. It wasn’t fair, so you put it right. And now you feel like Hood’s tongue after a night of slaughter. Live with it. So wipe your nose and get out there. Do something, be someone and stay with it.
Yes, that was what he needed right now. A cold, cogent regard, a wise absence of patience. In fact, she wouldn’t even have to say anything. Just seeing her would do.
He swung down from the saddle and tied the reins to a bollard, then crossed the gangplank to the deck. Various harbour notices had been tacked to the mainmast. Moorage fees and threats of imminent impoundment. Cutter managed a smile, imagining a scene of confrontation in the near future. Delightful to witness, if somewhat alarming, provided he stayed uninvolved.
He made his way below. ‘Spite? You here?’
No response. Spirits plunging once more, he tried the door to the main cabin, and found it unlocked. Now, that was strange. Drawing a knife, he edged inside, and waited for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. Nothing seemed untoward, no signs of disarray – so there had been no roving thief, which was a relief. As he stepped towards the lantern hanging from a hook, his foot struck something that skidded a fraction.
Cutter looked down.
His lance – the one that dead Seguleh horseman had given him, in that plague-stricken fort in Seven Cities. He recalled seeing it later, strapped to the back of a floating pack amidst wreckage in the waves. He recalled Spite’s casual retrieval. He had since stashed the weapon beneath his bunk. So, what was it doing here? And then he noted the beads of what looked like sweat glistening on the iron blade.
Cutter reached down.
The copper sheathing of the shaft was warm, almost hot. Picking the lance up, he realized, with a start, that the weapon was trembling. ‘Beru fend,’ he whispered, ‘what is going on here?’
Moments later he was back on the deck, staring over at his horse as the beast tugged at the reins, hoofs stamping the thick tarred boards of the dock. Its ears were flat, and it looked moments from tearing the bollard free – although of course that was impossible. Cutter looked down to find he was still carrying the lance. He wondered at that, but not for long, as he heard a sudden, deafening chorus of howls roll through the city. All along the shoreline, nesting birds exploded upward in shrieking panic, winging into the night.
Cutter stood frozen in place. The Hounds. They’re here.
Grisp Falaunt had once been a man of vast ambitions. Lord of the single greatest landholding
anywhere on the continent, a patriarch of orchards, pastures, groves and fields of corn stretching to the very horizon. Why, the Dwelling Plain was unclaimed, was it not? And so he could claim it, unopposed, unobstructed by prohibitions.
Forty-one years later he woke one morning stunned by a revelation. The Dwelling Plain was unclaimed because it was . . . useless. Lifeless. Pointless. He had spent most of his life trying to conquer something that was not only unconquerable, but capable of using its very indifference to annihilate every challenger.
He’d lost his first wife. His children had listened to his promises of glorious inheritance and then had simply wandered off, each one terminally unimpressed. He’d lost his second wife. He’d lost three partners and seven investors. He’d lost his capital, his collateral and the shirt on his back – this last indignity courtesy of a crow that had been hanging round the clothes line in a most suspicious manner.
There comes a time when a man must truncate his ambitions, cut them right down, not to what was possible, but to what was manageable. And, as one grew older and more worn down, manageable became a notion blurring with minimal, as in how could a man exist with the minimum of effort? How little was good enough?
He now lived in a shack on the very edge of the Dwelling Plain, offering a suitable view to the south wastes where all his dreams spun in lazy dust-devils through hill and dale and whatnot. And, in the company of a two-legged dog so useless he needed to hand-feed it the rats it was supposed to kill and eat, he tended three rows of root crops, each row barely twenty paces in length. One row suffered a blight of purple fungus; another was infested with grub-worm; and the one between those two had a bit of both.
On this gruesome night with its incessant thunder and invisible lightning and ghost wind, Grisp Falaunt sat rocking on his creaking chair on his back porch, a jug of cactus spit in his lap, a wad of rustleaf bulging one cheek and a wad of durhang the other. He had his free hand under his tunic, as would any man keeping his own company with only a two-legged dog looking on – but the mutt wasn’t paying him any attention anyway, which, all things considered, was a rare relief these nights when the beast mostly just stared at him with oddly hungry eyes. No, old Scamper had his eyes on something to the south, out there in the dark plain.
Grisp hitched the jug up on the back of a forearm and tilted in a mouthful of the thick, pungent liquor. Old Gadrobi women in the hills still chewed the spiny blades after hardening the insides of their mouths by eating fire, and spat out the pulp in bowls of water sweetened with virgins’ piss. The mixture was then fermented in sacks of sewn-up sheep intestines buried under dung heaps. And there, in the subtle cascade of flavours that, if he squeezed shut his watering eyes, he could actually taste, one could find the bouquets marking every damned stage in the brewing process. Leading to an explosive, highly volatile cough followed by desperate gasping, and then—
But Scamper there had sharpened up, as much as a two-legged dog could, anyway. Ears perking, seeming to dilate – but no, that was the spit talking – and nape hairs snapping upright in fierce bristle, and there was his ratty, knobby tail, desperately snaking down and under the uneven haunches – and gods below, Scamper was whimpering and crawling, piddling as he went, straight for under the porch – look at the damned thing go! With only two legs, too!
Must be some storm out there—
And, looking up, Grisp saw strange baleful fires floating closer. In sets of two, lifting, weaving, lowering, then back up again. How many sets? He couldn’t count. He could have, once, long ago, right up to twenty, but the bad thing about cactus spit was all the parts of the brain it stamped dead underfoot. Seemed that counting and figuring was among them.
Fireballs! Racing straight for him!
Grisp screamed. Or, rather, tried to. Instead, two wads were sucked in quick succession to the back of his throat, and all at once he couldn’t breathe, and could only stare as a horde of giant dogs attacked in a thundering charge, straight across his three weepy rows, leaving a churned, uprooted, trampled mess. Two of the beasts made for him, jaws opening. Grisp had rocked on to the two back legs of the chair with that sudden, short-lived gasp, and now all at once he lost his balance, pitching directly backward, legs in the air, even as two sets of enormous jaws snapped shut in the place where his head had been a heartbeat earlier.
His shack erupted behind him, grey shards of wood and dented kitchenware exploding in all directions.
The thumping impact when he hit the porch sent both wads out from his mouth on a column of expelled air from his stunned lungs. The weight of the jug, two fingers still hooked through the lone ear, pulled him sideways and out of the toppled chair on to his stomach, and he lifted his head and saw that his shack was simply gone, and there were the beasts, fast dwindling as they charged towards the city.
Groaning, he lowered his head, settling his forehead on to the slatted boards, and could see through the crack to the crawlspace below, only to find Scamper’s two beady eyes staring back up at him in malevolent accusation.
‘Fair ‘nough,’ he whispered. ‘Time’s come, Scamper old boy, for us to pack up ‘n’ leave. New pastures, hey? A world before us, just waitin’ wi’ open arms, just—’
The nearest gate of the city exploded then, the shock wave rolling back to flatten Grisp once more on the floorboards. He heard the porch groan and sag and had one generous thought for poor Scamper – who was scrambling as fast as two legs could take him – before the porch collapsed under him.
Like a dozen bronze bells, hammered so hard they tore loose from their frames and, in falling, dragged the bell towers down around them, the power of the seven Hounds obliterated the gate, the flanking unfinished fortifications, the guard house, the ring-road stable, and two nearby buildings. Crashing blocks of stone, wooden beams, bricks and tiles, crushed furniture and fittings, more than a few pulped bodies in the mix. Clouds of dust, spurts of hissing flame from ruptured gas pipes, the ominous subterranean roar of deadlier eruptions—
Such a sound! Such portentous announcement! The Hounds have arrived, dear friends. Come, yes, come to deliver mayhem, to reap a most senseless toll. Violence can arrive blind, without purpose, like the fist of nature. Cruel in disregard, brutal in its random catastrophe. Like a flash flood, like a tornado, a giant dust-devil, an earthquake – so blind, so senseless, so without intent!
These Hounds . . . they were nothing like that.
Moments before this eruption, Spite, still facing the estate of her venal bitch of a sister, reached a decision. And so she raised her perfectly manicured hands, up before her face, and closed them into fists. Then watched as a deeper blot of darkness formed over the estate, swelling ever larger until blood-red cracks appeared in the vast shapeless manifestation.
In her mind, she was recalling a scene from millennia past, a blasted landscape of enormous craters – the fall of the Crippled God, obliterating what had been a thriving civilization, leaving nothing but ashes and those craters in which magma roiled, spitting noxious gases that swirled high into the air.
The ancient scene was so vivid in her mind that she could scoop out one of those craters, half a mountain’s weight of magma, slap it into something like a giant ball, and then position it over the sleepy estate wherein lounged her sleepy, unsuspecting sister. And, now that it was ready, she could just . . . let go.
The mass descended in a blur. The estate vanished – as did those nearest to it – and as a wave of scalding heat swept over Spite, followed by a wall of lava thrashing across the street and straight for her, she realized, with a faint squeal, that she too was standing far too close.
Ancient sorceries were messy, difficult to judge, harder yet to control. She’d let her eponymous tendencies affect her judgement. Again.
Undignified flight was the only option for survival, and as she raced up the alley she saw, standing thirty paces ahead, at the passageway’s mouth, a figure.
Lady Envy had watched the conjuration at first with curiosity, then admira
tion, and then awe, and finally in raging jealousy. That spitting cow always did things better! Even so, as she watched her twin sister bleating and scrambling mere steps ahead of the gushing lava flow, she allowed herself a most pitiless smile.
Then released a seething wave of magic straight into her sister’s slightly prettier face.
Spite never thought ahead. A perennial problem, a permanent flaw – that she hadn’t killed herself long ago was due only to Envy’s explicit but casual-seeming indifference. But now, if the cow really wanted to take her on, at last, to bring an end to all this, well, that was just dandy.
As her sister’s nasty magic engulfed her, Spite did the only thing she could do under the circumstances. She let loose everything she had in a counter-attack. Power roared out from her, clashed and then warred with Envy’s own.
They stood, not twenty paces apart, and the space between them raged like the heart of a volcano. Cobbles blistered bright red and melted away. Stone and brick walls rippled and sagged. Faint voices shrieked. Slate tiles pitched down into the maelstrom as roofs tilted hard over on both sides.
Needless to say, neither woman heard a distant gate disintegrate, nor saw the fireball that followed, billowing high into the night. They did not even feel the thunderous reverberations rippling out beneath the streets, the ones that came from the concussions of subterranean gas chambers igniting one after another.
No, Spite and Envy had other things on their minds.
There could be no disguising a sudden rush to the estate gate by a dozen black-clad assassins. As five figures appeared from an alley mouth directly opposite Scorch and Leff, three others, perched on the rooftop of the civic building to the right of the alley, sent quarrels hissing towards the two lone guards. The remaining four, two to a side, sprinted in from the flanks.
The facing attack had made itself known a moment too soon, and both Scorch and Leff had begun moving by the time the quarrels arrived. This lack of coordination could be viewed as inevitable given the scant training these assassins possessed, since this group was, in fact, little more than a diversion, and thus comprised the least capable individuals among the attackers.