Toll the Hounds

  ‘Gods, it’s been a long time since I last heard them mentioned!’ Faint stared across at Sweetest Sufferance. ‘Is this true? Your grandfather was with the Revenants?’

  ‘So he always told it. When I was very young, I believed every word he said. When I was older, I didn’t believe any of it. And now I’m still older, I’ve gone back to believing him. Things in his house, the carved flagstones, the broken masks he had on the wall . . . yes, Faint, I believe he was at that.’

  ‘Commanded by a Seguleh—’

  ‘An outlawed Seguleh, yes. Anyway, it was my grandfather who took me to watch his old company’s patron temple and all the priests and priestesses doing their flies thing.’

  ‘Wait. The Revenants were supposed to have all disappeared – taken by Hood himself, to serve him in the realm of the dead. So what was your grandfather doing living in One Eye Cat?’

  ‘He lost his sword arm in a battle. He’d been left for dead, and by the time anyone found him it was too late for any serious healing. So they seared the stump and retired him out. Now, you going to let me tell my tale or not?’

  ‘Yes, fine. Sorry.’

  ‘He said the priests were getting it all wrong, with that honey. The flies and wasps weren’t the important thing in the ceremony. It was the blood – honey, but that symbolized blood. The Revenants – who were as good as Hood’s own warrior-priests, in the mortal world anyway – well, they were flagellants. Blood on the skin, life bled out to die on the skin – that was the important detail. It’s why Hood cherishes dead soldiers more than any other of the countless dead that stumble through the gate. The Merchants of Blood, the army that will fight on the hidden plain called Defiance Last.’ She paused, then licked her lips. ‘That’s what the Dawn of Flies is about. A final battle, the dead gathered, on a hidden plain called Defiance Last.’

  ‘So,’ said Faint, feeling chilled by Sweetest Sufferance’s story, ‘maybe that’s why Hood took the Revenants. Because that battle is coming.’

  ‘Give me some more of that,’ Sweetest Sufferance said, reaching for the wineskin.

  Glanno Tarp nudged Reccanto Ilk. ‘See ‘em? They’re talking about us. Well, me, mostly. It’s gonna happen, Ilk, sooner or later, it’s gonna happen.’

  Reccanto Ilk squinted across at the man. ‘What, they gonna kill you in your sleep?’

  ‘Don’t be an idiot. One a them’s gonna ask me to forevermarry her.’

  ‘And then she’ll kill you in your sleep. And then we can all slice up your share.’

  ‘You think I didn’t see how you gropered Sweetie?’

  ‘How could you? You was driving!’

  ‘There ain’t nothing that I don’t see, Ilk. That’s what makes me such a goodiferous driver.’

  ‘She’s got the nicest handholds.’

  ‘Watch what you’re doing with my future foreverwife.’

  ‘Could be Faint you end up with, which means I can do what I like with Sweetie.’

  Glanno Tarp loosed a loud belch. ‘We should make up something to eat. Breakfast, so when they’re finished jawbering over there we can up and get on our way.’

  ‘Wherever that is.’

  ‘Wherever don’t matter. Never has and never will.’

  Reccanto Ilk grinned. ‘Right. It ain’t the destination that counts . . .’

  And together they added, ‘It’s the journey!’

  Faint and Sweetest Sufferance looked over, both scowling. ‘Not that again!’ Faint called. ‘Just stop it, you two! Stop it or we’ll kill you in your sleep!’

  Reccanto Ilk nudged Glanno Tarp.

  Mappo crouched, rocking on the balls of his broad feet, waiting for Master Quell to finish his muttered incantation against pain. He sympathized, since it was clear that the mage was suffering, his face pale and drawn, forehead slick with sweat, his hands trembling.

  That anyone would choose such a profession, given the terrible cost, was a difficult notion to accept. Was coin worth this? He could not understand that sort of thinking.

  What held real value in this world? In any world? Friendship, the gifts of love and compassion. The honour one accorded the life of another person. None of this could be bought with wealth. It seemed to him such a simple truth. Yet he knew that its very banality was fuel for sneering cynicism and mockery. Until such things were taken away, until the price of their loss came to be personal, in some terrible, devastating arrival into one’s life. Only at that moment of profound extremity did the contempt wash down from that truth, revealing it bare, undeniable.

  All the truths that mattered were banal.

  Yet here was another truth. He had paid for this journey. His coin bought this man’s pain. The exchange was imbalanced, and so Mappo grieved for Master Quell, and would not shy away from his own guilt. Honour meant, after all, a preparedness, a willingness to weigh and measure, to judge rightful balance with no hand tilting the scales.

  And so, they all here were paying to serve Mappo’s need, this journey through warrens. Another burden he must accept. If he could.

  The formidable warrior sitting beside him stirred then and said, ‘I think I see now why the Trygalle loses so many shareholders, Master Quell. By the Abyss, there must be warrens where one can journey through in peace?’

  Master Quell rubbed at his face. ‘Realms resist, Gruntle. We are like a splash of water in hot oil. It’s all I can do to not . . . bounce us off. Mages can push themselves into their chosen warrens – it’s not easy, it’s a game of subtle persuasion most of the time. Or a modest assertion of will. You don’t want to blast a hole from one realm to the next, because that’s likely to go out of control. It can devour a mage in an instant.’ He looked up at them with bloodshot eyes. ‘We can’t do it that way.’ He waved a weak hand at the carriage behind him. ‘We arrive like an insult. We are an insult. Like a white-hot spear point, we punch through, race along our wild path, and all that we leave in our wake I need to make sure is, er, cauterized. Seared shut. Failing that, a rush of power explodes behind us, and that’s a wave no mortal can ride for long.’

  Precious Thimble spoke from behind Mappo. ‘You must be High Mages, then, one and all.’

  To her observation, Master Quell nodded. ‘I admit, it’s starting to trouble me, this way of travel. I think we’re scarring the whole damned universe. We’re making existence . . . bleed. Oh, just a seep here and there, amidst whatever throbs of pain reality might possess. In any case, that’s why there’s no peaceful path, Gruntle. Denizens in every realm are driven to annihilate us.’

  ‘You said we did not even reach Hood’s Gate,’ the barbed man said after a moment. ‘And yet . . .’

  ‘Aye.’ He spat on to the sand. ‘The dead sleep no more. What a damned mess.’

  ‘Find us the nearest land in our own world,’ said Mappo. ‘I will walk from there. Make my own way—’ ‘We stay true to the contract, Trell. We’ll deliver you where you want to go—’ ‘Not at the price of you and your companions possibly dying – I cannot accept that, Master Quell.’

  ‘We don’t do refunds.’

  ‘I do not ask for one.’

  Master Quell rose shakily. ‘We’ll see after our next leg. For now, it’s time for breakfast. There’s nothing worse than heaving when there’s nothing in the gut to heave.’

  Gruntle also straightened. ‘You have decided on a new path?’

  Quell grimaced. ‘Look around, Gruntle. It’s been decided for us.’

  Mappo rose and remained at Gruntle’s side as Quell staggered to his crew, who were gathered round a brazier they had dragged out from the belly of the carriage. The Trell squinted at the modest plot of land. ‘What did he mean?’ he asked.

  Gruntle shrugged. When he smiled at Mappo his fangs gleamed. ‘Since I have to guess, Trell, I’d say we’re going for a swim.’

  And Precious Thimble snorted. ‘Mael’s realm. And you two thought Hood was bad.’

  When she was four years old, Precious Thimble was given a breathing tube and buried in p
eat, where she remained for two days and one night. She probably died. Most of them did, but the soul remained in the dead body, trapped by the peat and its dark, sorcerous qualities. This was how the old witches explained things. A child must be given into the peat, into that unholy union of earth and water, and the soul must be broken free of the flesh it dwelt within, for only then could that soul travel, only then could that soul wander free in the realm of dreams.

  She had few memories of that time in the peat. Perhaps she screamed, sought to thrash in panic. The ropes that bound her, that would be used to pull her free at dusk of the second day, had left deep burns on her wrists and her neck, and these burns had not come from the gentle, measured pressure when the witches had drawn her back into the world. It was also whispered that sometimes the spirits that lurked in the peat sought to steal the child’s body, to make it a place of their own. And the witches who sat guarding the temporary grave told of times when the rope – its ends wrapped about their wrists – suddenly grew taut, and a battle would then begin, between the witches of the surface and the spirits of the deep. Sometimes, it was admitted, the witches lost, the ropes were gnawed unto breaking, and the child was pulled into the foul deep, emerging only once every year, on the Night of the Awakened. Children with blue-brown skin and hollowed-out eye sockets, with hair the colour of rust or blood, with long polished nails – walking the swamp and singing songs of the earth that could drive a mortal mad.

  Had spirits come for her? The witches would not say. Were the burns on her skin the result of panic, or something else? She did not know.

  Her memories of that time were few and visceral. The weight on her chest. The seeping cold. The taste of fetid water in her mouth, the stinging in her squeezed-shut eyes. And the sounds she could hear, terrible trickling sounds, like the rush of fluids in the veins of the earth. The thumps and crunches, the crackling approach of . . . things.

  It was said there was no air in the peat. That not even her skin could breathe – and such breathing was necessary to all life. And so she must have died in truth.

  Since then, at night when she slept, she could rise from her flesh, could hover, invisible, above her motionless body. And look down in admiration. She was beautiful indeed, as if something of the child she had been never aged, was immune to growing old. A quality that made men desperate to claim her, not as an equal, alas, but as a possession. And the older the man the greater the need.

  When she had made this discovery, about herself and about the men who most desired her, she was disgusted. Why give this gorgeous body to such wrinkled, pathetic creatures? She would not. Ever. Yet she found it difficult to defend herself against such needy hunters of youth – oh, she could curse them into misery, she could poison them and see them die in great pain, but such things only led her to pity, the soft kind not the nasty kind, which made being cruel just that much harder.

  She had found her solution in the two young Bole brothers. Barely out of their teens, neither one well suited to staying in the Mott Irregulars, for certain reasons over which she need not concern herself. And both of them gloriously in love with her.

  It did not matter that they barely had a single brain between them. They were Boles, ferocious against mages and magic of any kind, and born with the salamander god’s gift of survival. They protected her in all the battles one could imagine, from out-and-out fighting to the devious predations of old men.

  When she was done admiring her own body, she would float over to where they slept and look down upon their slack faces, on the gaping mouths from which snores groaned out in wheezing cadence, the threads of drool and the twitching eyelids. Her pups. Her guard dogs. Her deadly hounds.

  Yet now, on this night with the tropical stars peering down, Precious Thimble felt a growing unease. This Trygalle venture she’d decided on – this whim – was proving far deadlier than she had expected. In fact, she’d almost lost one of them in Hood’s realm. And losing one of them would be . . . bad. It would free the other one to close in and that she didn’t want, not at all. And one guard dog wasn’t nearly as effective as two.

  Maybe, just maybe, she’d gone too far this time.

  Gruntle opened his eyes, and watched as the faintly glowing emanation floated over to hover above the sleeping forms of the Bole brothers, where it lingered for a time before returning to sink back down into the form of Precious Thimble.

  From nearby he heard the Trell’s soft grunt, and then, ‘What game does she play at, I wonder . . .’

  Gruntle thought to reply. Instead, sleep took him suddenly, pouncing, tumbling his mind away and down, spitting him out like a mangled rat into a damp glade of high grass. The sun blazed down like a god’s enraged eye. Feeling battered, misused, he rose on to all fours – a position that did not feel at all awkward, or strike him as unusual.

  Solid jungle surrounded the clearing, from which came the sounds of countless birds, monkeys and insects – a cacophony so loud and insistent that a growl of irritation rose from deep in his throat.

  All at once the nearest sounds ceased, a cocoon of silence broken only by the hum of bees and a pair of long-tailed hummingbirds dancing in front of an orchid – sprites that then raced off in a beating whirr of wings.

  Gruntle felt his hackles rise, stiff and prickling on the back of his neck – too fierce for a human – and looking down he saw the sleek banded forelimbs of a tiger where his arms and hands should have been.

  Another one of these damned dreams. Listen, Trake, if you want me to be just like you, stop playing these scenes for me. I’ll be a tiger if that’s what you want – just don’t confine it to my dreams. I wake up feeling clumsy and slow and I don’t like it. I wake up remembering nothing but freedom.

  Something was approaching. Things . . . three, no, five. Not big, not dangerous. He slowly swung his head round, narrowing his gaze.

  The creatures that came to the edge of the clearing were somewhere between apes and humans. Small as adolescents, lithe and sleek, with fine fur thickening at the armpits and crotch. The two males carried short curved batons of some sort, fire-hardened, with inset fangs from some large carnivore. The females wielded spears, one of them holding her spear in one hand and a broad flint axe head in the other, which she tossed into the clearing. The object landed with a thump, flattening the grasses, halfway between Gruntle and the band.

  Gruntle realized, with a faint shock, that he knew the taste of these creatures – their hot flesh, their blood, the saltiness of their sweat. In this form, in this place and in this time, he had hunted them, had pulled them down, hearing their piteous cries as his jaws closed fatally round their necks.

  This time, however, he was not hungry, and it seemed they knew it.

  Awe flickered in their eyes, their mouths twisting into strange expressions, and all at once one of the women was speaking. The language trilled, punctuated by clicks and glottal stops.

  And Gruntle understood her.

  ‘Beast of darkness and fire, hunter in dark and light, fur of night and motion in grasses, god who takes, see this our gift and spare us for we are weak and few and this land is not ours, this land is the journey for we dream of the shore, where food is plenty and the birds cry in the heat of the sun.’

  Gruntle found himself sliding forward, silent as a thought, and he was life and power bound in a single breath. Forward, until the axe blade was at his taloned paws. Head lowering, nostrils flaring as he inhaled the scent of stone and sweat, the edges where old blood remained, where grasses had polished the flint, the urine that had been splashed upon it.

  These creatures wanted to claim this glade for their own.

  They were begging permission, and maybe something more. Something like . . . protection. ‘The leopard tracks us and challenges you,’ the woman sang, ‘but she will not cross your path. She will flee your scent for you are the master here, the god, the unchallenged hunter of the forest. Last night, she took my child – we have lost all our children. Perhaps we will be the last.
Perhaps we will never find the shore again. But if our flesh must feed the hungry, then let it be you who grows strong with our blood.

  ‘Tonight, if you come to take one of us, take me. I am the eldest. I bear no more children. I am useless.’ She hunched down then, discarding her spear, and sank into the grasses, where she rolled on to her back, exposing her throat.

  They were mad, Gruntle decided. Driven insane by the terrors of the jungle, where they were strangers, lost, seeking some distant coastline. And as they journeyed, every night delivered horror.

  But this was a dream. From some ancient time. And even if he sought to guide them to the shore, he would awaken long before that journey was completed. Awaken, and so abandon them to their fates. And what if he grew hungry in this next moment? What if his instinct exploded within him, launching him at this hapless female, closing his jaws on her throat?

  Was this where the notion of human sacrifice came from? When nature eyed them avid with hunger? When they had naught but sharpened sticks and a smouldering fire to protect them?

  He would not kill them this night.

  He would find something else to kill. Gruntle set off, into the jungle. A thousand scents filled him, a thousand muted noises whispered in the deep shadows. He carried his massive weight effortlessly, silent as he padded forward. Beneath the canopy the world was dusk and so it would ever remain, yet he saw everything, the flit of a green-winged mantis, the scuttle of woodlice in the humus, the gliding escape of a millipede. He slipped across the path of deer, saw where they had fed on dark-leaved shoots. He passed a rotted log that had been torn apart and pushed aside, the ground beneath ravaged by the questing snouts of boar.

  Some time later, with night descending, he found the spoor he had been seeking. Acrid, pungent, both familiar and strange. It was sporadic, proof that the creature that left it was cautious, taking to the trees in its moments of rest.

  A female.

  He slowed his pace as he tracked the beast. All light was gone now, every colour shifted into hues of grey. If she discovered him she would flee. But then, the only beast that wouldn’t was the elephant, and he had no interest in hunting that wise leviathan with its foul sense of humour.