Toll the Hounds

by Steven Erikson

  The journey from the Scour Tavern back to the New Palace skirted the ruins of the great fortress, the collapse of which had brought to an end the Pannion Domin. Unlit and now perpetually shrouded in gloom, the heaped rubble of black stone still smelled of fire and death. The ragged edge of this shattered monument was on Spinnock Durav’s left as he walked the street now called Fringe Stagger. Ahead and slightly to the right rose Dragon Tower, and he could feel Silanah’s crimson eyes on him from atop its great height. The regard of an Eleint was never welcome, no matter how familiar Silanah’s presence among Rake’s Tiste Andii.

  Spinnock could well recall the last few times he had been witness to the dragon unleashed. Flames ripping through the forest that was Mott Wood, crashing down in a deluge, with a deafening concussion that drowned out every death-cry as countless unseen creatures died. Among them, perhaps a handful of Crimson Guard, a dozen or so Mott Irregulars. Like using an axe to kill ants.

  Then, from the very heart of that fiery maelstrom, virulent sorcery lashed out, striking Silanah in a coruscating wave. Thunder hammering the air, the dragon’s scream of pain. The enormous beast writhing, slashing her way free, then, trailing ropes of blood, flying back towards Moon’s Spawn.

  He recalled Anomander Rake’s rage, and how he could hold it in his eyes like a demon chained to his will, even as he stood motionless, even as he spoke in a calm, almost bored tone. A single word, a name.

  Cowl. And with that name, oh, how the rage flared in those draconean eyes.

  There had begun, then, a hunt. The kind only a fool would choose to join. Rake, seeking out the deadliest wizard among the Crimson Guard. At one point, Spinnock remembered standing on the high ledge on the face of Moon’s Spawn, watching the mage-storms fill half the northern night sky. Flashes, the knight charge of thunder through a smoke-wreathed sky. He had wondered, then, if the world was on the very edge of being torn apart, and from the depths of his soul had risen a twisted, malignant thought. Again . . .

  When great powers strode on to the field of battle, things had a way of getting out of hand.

  Had it been Cowl who first blinked? Bowing out, yielding ground, fleeing?

  Or had it been the Son of Darkness?

  Spinnock doubted he would ever find out. Such questions were not asked of Anomander Rake. Some time later, it was discovered by the Tiste Andii, Cowl had resurfaced, this time in Darujhistan. Causing more trouble. His stay there had been blessedly brief.

  Another vision of Silanah, laying the trap for the Jaghut Tyrant in the Gadrobi Hills. More wounds, more ferocious magic. Wheeling over the ravaged plain. Five Soletaken Tiste Andii whirling round her like crows escorting an eagle.

  Perhaps he was alone, Spinnock reflected, in his unease with the alliance between the Tiste Andii and the Eleint. There had been a time, after all, when Anomander Rake had warred against the pure-blood dragons. When such creatures broke loose from their long-standing servitude to K’rul; when they had sought to grasp power for themselves. The motivation for Rake’s opposition to them was, typically, obscure. Silanah’s arrival – much later – was yet another event shrouded in mystery.

  No, Spinnock Durav was far from thrilled by Silanah’s bloodless regard.

  He approached the arched entrance to the New Palace, ascending the flagstone ramp. There were no guards standing outside. There never were. Pushing open one of the twin doors, he strode inside. Before him, a buttressed corridor that humans would find unnaturally narrow. Twenty paces in, another archway, opening out into a spacious domed chamber with a floor of polished blackwood inset with the twenty-eight spiralling terondai of Mother Dark, all in black silver. The inside of the dome overhead was a mirror image. This homage to the goddess who had turned away was, to Spinnock’s mind, extraordinary; appallingly out of place.

  Oh, sages might well debate who had done the turning away back then, but none would dismiss the terrible vastness of the schism. Was this some belated effort at healing the ancient wound? Spinnock found that notion unfathomable. And yet, Anomander Rake himself had commissioned the terondai, the Invisible Sun and its whirling, wild rays of onyx flame.

  If Kurald Galain had a heart in this realm’s manifestation of the warren, it was here, in this chamber. Yet he felt no presence, no ghostly breath of power, as he made his way across the floor to the curling bone-white staircase. Just beyond the turn above wavered a pool of lantern light.

  Two human servants were scrubbing the alabaster steps.

  At his arrival they ducked away.

  ‘Mind the wet,’ one muttered.

  ‘I’m surprised,’ Spinnock said as he edged past, ‘there’s need to clean these at all. There are all of fifteen people living in this palace.’

  ‘You’ve that, sir,’ the man replied, nodding.

  The Tiste Andii paused and glanced back. ‘Then why are you bothering? I can hardly believe the castellan set you upon this task.’

  ‘No sir, he never did. We was just, er, bored.’

  After a bemused moment, Spinnock resumed his ascent. These short-lived creatures baffled him.

  The journey to the chambers where dwelt the Son of Darkness was a lengthy traverse made in solitude. Echoing corridors, unlocked, unguarded doors. The castellan’s modest collection of scribes and sundry bureaucrats worked in offices on the main floor; kitchen staff, clothes-scrubbers and wringers, hearth-keepers and taper-lighters, all lived and worked in the lower levels. Here, on the higher floors, darkness ruled a realm virtually unoccupied.

  Reaching the elongated room that faced the Nightwater, Spinnock Durav found his lord.

  Facing the crystal window that ran the entire length of the Nightwater wall, his long silver-white hair was faintly luminous in the muted, refracted light cast into the room by the faceted quartz. The sword Dragnipur was nowhere in sight.

  Three steps into the chamber and Spinnock halted.

  Without turning, Anomander Rake said, ‘The game, Spinnock?’

  ‘You won again, Lord. But it was close.’

  ‘The Gate?’

  Spinnock smiled wryly. ‘When all else seems lost . . .’

  Perhaps Anomander Rake nodded at that, or his gaze, fixed somewhere out on the waves of Nightwater, shifted downward to something closer by. A fisher boat, or the crest of some leviathan rising momentarily from the abyss. Either way, the sigh that followed was audible. ‘Spinnock, old friend, it is good that you have returned.’

  ‘Thank you, Lord. I, too, am pleased to see an end to my wandering.’

  ‘Wandering? Yes, I imagine you might have seen it that way.’

  ‘You sent me to a continent, Lord. Discovering the myriad truths upon it necessitated . . . fair wandering.’

  ‘I have thought long on the details of your tale, Spinnock Durav.’ Still Rake did not turn round. ‘Yielding a single question. Must I journey there?’

  Spinnock frowned. ‘Assail? Lord, the situation there . . .’

  ‘Yes, I understand.’ At last, the Son of Darkness slowly swung about, and it seemed his eyes had stolen something from the crystal window, flaring then dimming like a memory. ‘Soon, then.’

  ‘Lord, on my last day, a league from the sea . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I lost count of those I killed to reach that desolate strand. Lord, by the time I waded into the deep, enough to vanish beneath the waves, the very bay was crimson. That I lived at all in the face of that is—’

  ‘Unsurprising,’ Anomander Rake cut in with a faint smile, ‘as far as your Lord is concerned.’ The smile faded. ‘Ah, but I have sorely abused your skills, friend.’

  Spinnock could not help but cock his head and say, ‘And so, I am given leave to wield soldiers of wood and stone on a wine-stained table? Day after day, my muscles growing soft, the ambition draining away.’

  ‘Is this what you call a well-earned rest?’

  ‘Some nights are worse than others, Lord.’

  ‘To hear you speak of ambition, Spinnock, recalls to my min
d another place, long, long ago. You and I . . .’

  ‘Where I learned, at last,’ Spinnock said, with no bitterness at all, ‘my destiny.’

  ‘Unseen by anyone. Deeds unwitnessed. Heroic efforts earning naught but one man’s gratitude.’

  ‘A weapon must be used, Lord, lest it rust.’

  ‘A weapon overused, Spinnock, grows blunt, notched.’

  To that, the burly Tiste Andii bowed. ‘Perhaps, then, Lord, such a weapon must be put away. A new one found.’

  ‘That time is yet to arrive, Spinnock Durav.’

  Spinnock bowed again. ‘There is, in my opinion, Lord, no time in the foreseeable future when you must journey to Assail. The madness there seems quite . . . self-contained.’

  Anomander Rake studied Spinnock’s face for a time, then nodded. ‘Play on, my friend. See the king through. Until . . .’ and he turned once more back to the crystal window.

  There was no need to voice the completion of that sentence, Spinnock well knew. He bowed a third time, then walked from the chamber, closing the door behind him.

  Endest Silann was slowly hobbling up the corridor. At Spinnock’s appearance the old castellan glanced up. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘is our Lord within?’

  ‘He is.’

  The elder Tiste Andii’s answering smile was no gift to Spinnock, so strained was it, a thing of sorrow and shame. And while perhaps Endest had earned the right to the first sentiment – a once powerful mage now broken – he had not to the second. Yet what could Spinnock say that might ease that burden? Nothing that would not sound trite. Perhaps something more . . . acerbic, something to challenge that self-pity—

  ‘I must speak to him,’ Endest said, reaching for the door.

  ‘He will welcome that,’ Spinnock managed.

  Again the smile. ‘I am sure.’ A pause, a glance up into Spinnock’s eyes. ‘I have great news.’

  ‘Yes?’

  Endest Silann lifted the latch. ‘Yes. I have found a new supplier of cadaver eels.’

  ‘Lord of this, Son of that, it’s no matter, izzit?’ The man peeled the last of the rind from the fruit with his thumbknife, then flung it out on to the cobbles. ‘Point is,’ he continued to his companions, ‘he ain’t even human, is he? Just another of ‘em hoary black-skinned demons, as dead-eyed as all the rest.’

  ‘Big on husking the world, aren’t ya?’ the second man at the table said, winking across at the third man, who’d yet to say a thing.

  ‘Big on lotsa things, you better believe it,’ the first man muttered, now cutting slices of the fruit and lifting each one to his mouth balanced on the blade.

  The waiter drew close at that moment to edge up the wick in the lantern on the table, then vanished into the gloom once more.

  The three were seated at one of the new street-side restaurants, although ‘restaurant’ was perhaps too noble a word for this rough line of tables and unmatched wooden chairs. The kitchen was little more than a converted cart and a stretch of canvas roof beneath which a family laboured round a grill that had once been a horse trough.

  Of the four tables, three were occupied. All humans – the Tiste Andii were not wont to take meals in public, much less engage in idle chatter over steaming mugs of Bastion kelyk, a pungent brew growing in popularity in Black Coral.

  ‘You like to talk,’ the second man prodded, reaching for his cup. ‘But words never dug a ditch.’

  ‘I ain’t alone in being in the right about this,’ the first man retorted. ‘Ain’t alone at all. It’s plain that if the Lord Son was dead and gone, all this damned darkness would go away, an’ we’d be back to normal wi’ day ‘n’ night again.’

  ‘No guarantees of that,’ the third man said, his tone that of someone half asleep.

  ‘It’s plain, I said. Plain, an’ if you can’t see that, it’s your problem, not ours.’

  ‘Ours?’

  ‘Aye, just that.’

  ‘Plan on sticking that rind-snicker through his heart, then?’

  The second man grunted a laugh.

  ‘They may live long,’ the first man said in a low grumble, ‘but they bleed like anybody else.’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ the third man said, fighting a yawn, ‘you’re the mastermind behind what you’re talking about, Bucch.’

  ‘Not me,’ the first man, Bucch, allowed, ‘but I was among the first t’give my word an’ swear on it.’

  ‘So who is?’

  ‘Can’t say. Don’t know. That’s how they organize these things.’

  The second man was now scratching the stubble on his jaw. ‘Y’know,’ he ventured, ‘it’s not like there’s a million of ‘em, is it? Why, half the adults among us was soldiers in the Domin, or even before. And nobody took our weapons or armour, did they?’

  ‘Bigger fools them,’ Bucch said, nodding. ‘Arrogance like that, they should pay for, I say.’

  ‘When’s the next meeting?’ the second man asked.

  The third man stirred from his slouch on his chair. ‘We were just off for that, Harak. You want to come along?’

  As the three men rose and walked off, Seerdomin finished the last of his kelyk, waited another half-dozen heartbeats, and then rose, drawing his cloak round him, even as he reached beneath it and loosened the sword in its scabbard.

  He paused, then, and formally faced north. Closing his eyes, he spoke a soft prayer.

  Then, walking with a careless stride, he set off, more or less in the direction the three men were taking.

  High on the tower, a red-scaled dragon’s eyes looked down upon all, facets reflecting scenes from every street, every alley, the flurry of activity in the markets, the women and children appearing on flat rooftops to hang laundry, figures wandering here and there between buildings. In those eyes, the city seethed.

  Somewhere, beyond Night, the sun unleashed a morning of brazen, heady heat. It gave form to the smoke of hearth fires in the makeshift camps alongside the beaten tracks wending down from the north, until the pilgrims emerged to form an unbroken line on the trails, and then it lit into bright gold a serpent of dust that rode the winds all the way to the Great Barrow.

  The destitute among them carried shiny shells collected from shoreline and tidal pools, or polished stones or nuggets of raw copper. The better off carried jewellery, gem-studded scabbards, strips of rare silk, Delantine linen, Daru councils of silver and gold, loot collected from corpses on battlefields, locks of hair from revered relatives and imagined heroes, or any of countless other items of value. Now within a day’s march of the Great Barrow, the threat of bandits and thieves had vanished, and the pilgrims sang as they walked towards the vast, descended cloud of darkness to the south.

  Beneath that enormous barrow of treasure, they all knew, lay the mortal remains of the Redeemer.

  Protected for ever more by Night and its grim, silent sentinels.

  The serpent of dust journeyed, then, to a place of salvation.

  Among the Rhivi of North Genabackis, there was a saying. A man who stirs awake the serpent is a man without fear. A man without fear has forgotten the rules of life.

  Silanah heard their songs and prayers.

  And she watched.

  Sometimes, mortals did indeed forget. Sometimes, mortals needed . . . reminding.

  CHAPTER THREE

  And he knew to stand there

  Would be a task unforgiving

  Relentless as sacrifices made

  And blood vows given

  He knew enough to wait alone

  Before the charge of fury’s heat

  The chants of vengeance

  Where swords will meet

  And where once were mortals

  Still remain dreams of home

  If but one gilded door

  Could be pried open.

  Did he waste breath in bargain

  Or turn aside on the moment

  Did he smile in pleasure

  Seeking chastisement?

  (See him still, he stands there

&n
bsp; While you remain, unforgiving

  The poet damns you

  The artist cries out

  The one who weeps

  Turns his face away

  Your mind is crowded

  By the inconsequential

  Listing the details

  Of the minuscule

  And every measure

  Of what means nothing

  To anyone

  He takes from you every rage

  Every crime . . . Whether you like it

  Or you do not . . .

  Sacrifices made

  Vows given

  He stands alone

  Because none of you dare

  Stand with him)

  Fisher’s challenge to his listeners,

  breaking the telling of

  The Mane of Chaos

  On this morning, so fair and fresh with the warm breeze coming down off the lake, there were arrivals. Was a city a living thing? Did it possess eyes? Could its senses be lit awake by the touch of footsteps? Did Darujhistan, on that fine morning, look in turn upon those who set their gazes upon it? Arrivals, grand and modest, footsteps less than a whisper, whilst others trembled to the very bones of the Sleeping Goddess. Were such things the beat of the city’s heart?

  But no, cities did not possess eyes, or any other senses. Cut stone and hardened plaster, wood beams and corniced façades, walled gardens and quiescent pools beneath trickling fountains, all was insensate to the weathering traffic of its denizens. A city could know no hunger, could not rise from sleep, nor even twist uneasy in its grave.

  Leave such things, then, to a short rotund man, seated at a table at the back of the Phoenix Inn, in the midst of an expansive breakfast – to pause with a mouth crammed full of pastry and spiced apple, to suddenly choke. Eyes bulging, face flushing scarlet, then launching a spray of pie across the table, into the face of a regretfully hungover Meese, who, now wearing the very pie she had baked the day before, simply lifted her bleary gaze and settled a basilisk regard upon the hacking, wheezing man opposite her.

  If words were necessary, then, she would have used them.

  The man coughed on, tears streaming from his eyes.