Toll the Hounds

  The attack was beginning.

  ‘Who,’ Seerdomin whispered, ‘will share this with me?’

  ‘Find her,’ said the Redeemer. ‘She remains, deep inside. Drowning, but alive. Find her.’

  ‘Salind? She is nothing to me!’

  ‘She is the fire in Spinnock Durav’s heart. She is his life. Fight not for me. Fight not for yourself. Fight, Seerdomin, for your friend.’

  A sob was wrenched from the warrior. His soul found a voice, and that voice wailed its anguish. Gasping, he lifted his sword and set his eyes upon the woman cavorting in her dance of carnage. Can I do this? Spinnock Durav, you fool, how could you have fallen so?

  Can I find her?

  I don’t know. I don’t think so.

  But his friend had found love. Absurd, ridiculous love. His friend, wherever he was, deserved a chance. For the only gift that meant a damned thing. The only one.

  Blinking black tears from his eyes, Seerdomin went down to meet her.

  Her howl of delight was a thing of horror.

  A soldier could discover, in one horrendous, crushing moment, that everything that lay at the heart of duty was a lie, a rotted, fetid mass, feeding like a cancer on all that the soldier was; and that every virtue was rooted in someone else’s poison.

  Look to the poor fool at your side. Know well there’s another poor fool at your back. This is how far the world shrinks down, when everything else melts in front of your eyes – too compromised to sustain clear vision, the brutal, uncluttered recognition of the lie.

  Torn loose from the Malazan Empire, from Onearm’s Host, the bedraggled clutch of survivors that was all that remained of the Bridgeburners had dragged their sorry backsides to Darujhistan. They found for themselves a cave where they could hide, surrounded by a handful of familiar faces, to remind them of what had pushed them each step of the way, from the past to the present. And hoping it would be enough to take them into the future, one hesitant, wayward step at a time.

  Slash knives into the midst of that meagre, vulnerable clutch, and it just falls apart.

  Mallet. Bluepearl.

  Like blindfolded goats dragged up to the altar stone.

  Not that goats needed blindfolds. It’s just no fun looking into a dying animal’s eyes.

  Picker fell through darkness. Maybe she was flesh and bone. Maybe she was nothing but a soul, torn loose and now plummeting with naught but the weight of its own regrets. But her arms scythed through bitter cold air, her legs kicked out to find purchase where none existed. And each breath was getting harder to snatch from that rushing blast.

  In the dream-world every law could be twisted round, bent, folded. And so, as she sensed the unseen ground fast approaching, she spun herself upright and slowed, sudden and yet smooth, and moments later she landed lightly on uneven bedrock. Snail shells crunched underfoot; she heard the faint snap of small rodent bones.

  Blinking, gasping one breath after another deep into her lungs, she simply stood for a time, knees slightly flexed, hands out to her sides.

  She could smell an animal stench, thick, as if she found herself in a den in some hillside.

  The darkness slowly faded. She saw rock walls on which scenes had been pecked, others painted in earthy hues. She saw the half-shells of gourds crowding the rough floor on both sides – she had landed upon a sort of path, reaching ahead and behind, perhaps three paces wide. Before her, six or seven paces away, it ended in a stone wall. Behind her, the trail blended into darkness. She looked once more at the objects cluttering the flanks. In each gourd there was thick, dark liquid. She knew instinctively that it was blood.

  The image etched into the wall in front, where the path ended, now snared her attention, and slowly its details began to resolve. A carriage or wagon, a swarm of vague shapes all reaching up for it on both sides, with others hinted at in its wake. A scene of frenzy and panic, the figure sitting on the bench holding reins that seemed to whip about – but no, her mind was playing tricks in this faint light, and that sound, as of wheels slamming and rocking and spinning over broken ground, was only her lunging heart, the rush of blood in her ears.

  But Picker stared, transfixed.

  A soldier with nothing left to believe in is a terrible thing to behold. When the blood on the hands is unjust blood, the soul withers.

  Death becomes a lover, and that love leads to but one place. Every time, but one place.

  Friends and family watch on, helpless. And in this tragic scene, the liars, the cynical bearers of poison, they are nowhere to be found.

  Endest Silann had once been a priest, a believer in forces beyond the mortal realm; a believer in the benign regard of ancestors, spirits, each one a moral lodestone that cut through the dissembling, the evasions of responsibility, the denials of culpability – a man of faith, yes, in the traditional sense of the word. But these things no longer found harbour in his soul. Ancestors dissolved into the ground, leaving nothing but crumbling flecks of bone in dark earth. Spirits offered no gifts and those still clinging to life were bitter and savage, too often betrayed, too often spat upon, to hold any love for anyone.

  He now believed that mortals were cursed. Some innate proclivity led them again and again on the same path. Mortals betrayed every gift granted them. They betrayed the giver. They betrayed their own promises. Their gods, their ancestors, their children – everywhere, betrayal.

  The great forests of Kharkanas had been cut down; the squalid dying islands of growth left behind had each one fallen to fire or blight. The rich soils washed down into the rivers. The flesh of the land was stripped back to reveal bedrock bones. And hunger stalked the children. Mothers wailed, fathers tried on hardened masks of resolve, but before any of this both had looked out upon the ravaged world with affronted disbelief – someone’s to blame, someone always is, but by the Abyss, do not look at me!

  But there was nowhere else to look. Mother Dark had turned away. She had left them to fates of their own devising, and in so doing, she had taken away their privilege of blaming someone else. Such was a godless world.

  One might think, then, that a people would rise to fullest height, stand proud, and accept the notion of potential culpability for each decision made or not made. Yes, that would be nice. That would be something to behold, to feed riotous optimism. But such a moment, such stature, never came. Enlightened ages belonged to the past or waited for the future. Such ages acquired the gloss of iconic myth, reduced to abstractions. The present world was real, filled with the grit of reality and compromise. People did not stand tall. They ducked.

  There was no one about with whom Endest Silann could discuss all this. No one who might – just might – understand the significance of what he was thinking.

  Rush headlong. Things are happening. Standing stones topple one against another and on and on. Tidal surges lift ever higher. Smoke and screams and violence and suffering. Victims piled in heaps like the plunder of cannibals. This is the meat of glee, the present made breathless, impatience burning like acid. Who has time to comprehend?

  Endest Silann stood atop the lesser tower of the keep. He held out one hand, knuckles to the earth, as black rain pooled in the cup of his palm.

  Was the truth as miserable as it seemed?

  Did it all demand that one figure, one solitary figure, rise to stand tall? To face that litany of destruction, the brutality of history, the lie of progress, the desecration of a home once sacred, precious beyond imagining? One figure? Alone?

  Is his own burden not enough? Why must he carry ours? Why have we done this to him? Why, because it’s easier that way, and we so cherish the easy paths, do we not? The least of effort defines our virtues. Trouble us not, for we dislike being troubled.

  The children are hungry. The forests are dead, the rivers poisoned. Calamity descends again and again. Diseases flower like mushrooms on corpses. And soon we will war over what’s left. As we did in Kharkanas.

  He will take this burden, but what does that mean? That we are fr
eed to stay unchanging? Freed to continue doing nothing?

  The black water overflowed the cup, spilled down to become rain once more.

  Even the High Priestess did not understand. Not all of it, no. She saw this as a single, desperate gambit, a cast of the knuckles on which rode everything. But if it failed, well, there’d be another game. New players, the same old tired rules. The wealth wagered never lost its value, did it? The heap of golden coins will not crumble. It will only grow bigger yet.

  Then, if the players come and go, while the rules never change, does not that heap in fact command the game? Would you bow to this god of gold? This insensate illusion of value?

  Bow, then. Press forehead to the hard floor. But when it all goes wrong, show me no affronted disbelief.

  Yes, Anomander Rake would take that burden, and carry it into a new world. But he would offer no absolution. He would deliver but one gift – an undeserved one – and that was time.

  The most precious privilege of all. And what, pray tell, shall we do with it?

  Off to his left, surmounting a much higher tower, a dragon fixed slitted eyes upon a decrepit camp beyond the veil of Night. No rain could blind it, no excuse could brave its unwavering regard. Silanah watched. And waited.

  But the waiting was almost over.

  Rush then, to this feast. Rush, ye hungry ones, to the meat of glee.

  The wall had never been much to begin with. Dismantled in places, unfinished in others. It would never have withstood a siege for any length of time. Despite its execrable condition, the breach made by the Hounds of Shadow was obvious. An entire gate was gone, filled with the flame-licked wreckage of the blockhouses and a dozen nearby structures. Figures now clambered in its midst, hunting survivors, fighting the flames.

  Beyond it, vast sections of the city – where heaving clouds of smoke lifted skyward, lit bright by raging gas-fires – suddenly ebbed, as if Darujhistan’s very breath had been snatched away. Samar Dev staggered, fell to her knees. The pressure closing about her head felt moments from crushing the plates of her skull. She cried out even as Karsa crouched down beside her.

  Ahead, Traveller had swung away from the destroyed gate, seeking instead another portal to the east, through which terrified refugees now spilled out into the ramshackle neighbourhood of shanties, where new fires had erupted from knocked-down shacks and in the wake of fleeing squatters. How Traveller intended to push his way through that mob—

  ‘Witch, you must concentrate.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘In your mind, raise a wall. On all sides. Make it strong, give it the power to withstand the one who has arrived.’

  She pulled away from his hand. ‘Who? Who has arrived? By the spirits, I can’t stand—’

  He slapped her, hard enough to knock her down. Stunned, she stared up at him.

  ‘Samar Dev, I do not know who, or what – it is not the Hounds. Not even Shadowthrone. Someone is there, and that someone blazes. I – I cannot imagine such a being—’

  ‘A god.’

  He shrugged. ‘Build your walls.’

  The pressure had eased and she wondered at that, and then realized that Karsa had moved round, placing himself between her and the city. She saw sweat running down the Toblakai’s face, streaming like rain. She saw the tightness in his eyes. ‘Karsa—’

  ‘If we are to follow, you and me both, then you must do this. Build walls, witch, and hurry.’

  His gaze lifted to something behind her and all at once she felt a breath of power at her back, gusting against her, sinking past clothes, past skin, through flesh and then deep into her bones. She gasped.

  The pressure was pushed back, left to rage against immense barriers now shielding her mind.

  She climbed to her feet.

  Side by side, they set out after Traveller.

  He was cutting across a ragged strip of fallow field, dust rising with each stride, making for the gate at a sharp angle.

  The surging mob of people blocking the portal seemed to melt back, and she wondered what those refugees had seen in Traveller’s face as he marched straight for them. Whatever it had been, clearly it was not something to be challenged.

  A strange, diffuse light now painted the city, the uneven wall, the domes, minarets and spires visible behind it. From a thousand throats erupted a moaning wail. Of shock, of dread. She saw faces lift, one by one. She saw eyes widen.

  Grunting, Karsa glanced back, and then halted. ‘Gods below!’

  She spun. The giant bear loomed twenty or so paces back, its outline limned by a silver light – and that light—

  The moon had finally clambered free of the horizon – but it was . . . Queen of Dreams—

  ‘Shattered,’ Karsa said. ‘The moon has shattered. Faces in the Rock, what has happened?’

  What rose now into the sky was a mass of fragments, torn apart amidst a cloud of thin rings of dust. It had expanded in its eruption and was now twice its normal size. Huge chunks were visibly spiralling away from the centre. The light it cast was sickly yet astonishingly bright.

  The monstrous bear had half turned and was lifting its snout towards that devastated world, as if it was capable of smelling death across the span of countless leagues.

  Karsa tugged at Samar Dev. ‘He’s in the city, witch. We cannot lose him.’

  She permitted him to drag her along, her hand enveloped by his.

  Perched in a niche close to the gate, Chillbais tracked the one known as Traveller. The demon was shaking uncontrollably. The bellowing of Hounds, the detonations of entire buildings, the arrival of the Son of Darkness and the slaying of a god – oh, any of these could have been sufficient cause for such quivering terror. Even that ruined moon thrusting skyward to the south. Alas, however, it was none of these that had elicited the winged toad’s present state of abject extremity.

  No, the source was threading through the crowd at the gate, now passing beneath the arch. The one named Traveller. Oh, he held in so much of himself, a will of such breathtaking intensity that Chillbais imagined it could, if the man so desired, reach into the heavens, close about all those spinning pieces in the sky, and remake the entire moon.

  But this was not a healing power. This was not a benign will.

  The Hounds howled anew, announcing all that they had sensed, all that they even now reeled away from. Goaded, they lashed out in all directions, killing with mindless frenzy. And once more madness was unleashed upon the hapless people of Darujhistan.

  Oh, the master would be furious at this loss of control. Most furious.

  Chillbais opened his mouth and managed an impossibly broad grin. A smile to the crazed night sky. The demon worked its way out of the niche and flapped its wings a few times to work out the folds. Then it sprang into the air.

  Plunging into the milling crowd was not part of the plan, and the panic that ensued seemed out of all proportion to this modest demon’s unexpected arrival. After some hectic moments, Chillbais succeeded in flapping upward once more, bruised and scraped, scratched and scuffed, winging his way to the estate of his master.

  Eager to deliver a message.

  He is here! He is here! Dassem Ultor is here!

  Can I leave now?

  Both Karsa and Samar Dev had witnessed the demon’s plight, but neither made comment, even as it winged back up to vanish over the wall. They were rushing, Karsa Orlong imposing enough to clear a path, straight for the gate.

  A short time later they stumbled through, out on to a broad avenue into which citizens streamed from every conceivable direction.

  They saw Traveller sixty or so paces ahead, reaching an intersection oddly empty of refugees. Those figures nearest it were running in blind panic.

  Traveller had halted. A solitary figure, bathed in the light of the shattered moon.

  A Hound trotted into view on the warrior’s left. A mangled, headless torso hung in its jaws, still draining thick blood. Its lambent eyes were on Traveller, who had not moved, although it was clear t
hat he was tracking the beast with his gaze.

  Karsa unsheathed his sword and quickened his pace. Samar Dev, her heart pounding, hurried after him.

  She saw the Toblakai slow suddenly, and then stop, still thirty paces from the intersection, and a moment later she saw why.

  Cotillion was walking up to Traveller. Another Hound – the black one – had appeared to guard the god’s other flank.

  Behind them a distant building suddenly crashed down, and in the heart of that thunder there was the sound of two beasts locked in mortal combat, neither yielding. Frail screams echoed in fragile counterpoint.

  Traveller waited. Cotillion came to stand directly in front of him, and began to speak.

  Samar Dev wanted to rush forward, at least to a spot from where she could overhear the god, catch whatever response Traveller delivered. But Karsa’s hand held her back, and he shook his head, saying in a murmur, ‘This is not for us, witch.’

  Traveller seemed to be refusing something, stepping back, looking away.

  Cotillion pressed on.

  ‘He does not want it,’ Karsa said. ‘Whatever he asks, Traveller does not want it.’

  Yes, she could see that. ‘Please, I need to—’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Karsa—’

  ‘What drives you is want, not need.’

  ‘Fine, then! I’m a nosy bitch – just leave me to it—’

  ‘No. This is between them, and so it must remain. Samar Dev, answer me this. If you could hear what they say, if you comprehended all that it might mean, would you be able to stay silent?’

  She bristled, and then hissed in frustration. ‘I’m not very good at doing that, am I? All right, Karsa – but what if I did say something? What harm would that do?’

  ‘Leave him,’ said Karsa. ‘Leave him free to choose for himself.’

  Whatever Cotillion was saying seemed to strike like physical blows, which Traveller absorbed one after another, still looking away – still clearly unable to meet the god’s eyes.

  The Hound with the chewed-up torso was now eating it with all the mindless intensity common to carnivores filling their stomachs. The other beast had half turned away and seemed to be listening to that distant fight.