Toll the Hounds

by Steven Erikson

‘I don’t.’

  ‘I am Kadaspala, brother to Enesdia who was wife to Andarist.’

  Andarist. That’s one name I recognize. ‘You wanted to murder the brother of your sister’s husband?’

  ‘I did. For what he did to them, what he did to them. For what he did to them!’ Ditch stared at the anguish in the man’s ravaged face. ‘Who blinded you, Kadaspala?’

  ‘It was a gift. A mercy. I did not comprehend the truth of that, not the real truth of it, the real truth. No. Besides, I thought my inner sight would be enough – to challenge Draconus. To steal Dragnipur. I was wrong, wrong. I was wrong. The truth is a gift, a mercy.’

  ‘Who blinded you?’

  The Tiste Andii flinched, then seemed to curl into himself. Tears glistened in the pits of his sockets. ‘I blinded myself,’ Kadaspala whispered. ‘When I saw what he’d done. What he’d done. To his brother. To my sister. To my sister.’

  Suddenly, Ditch did not want to ask any more questions of this man. He pushed himself from between the two bodies.

  ‘I am going to . . . explore.’

  ‘Come back, mage. Nexus. Come back. Come back.’

  We’ll see.

  *

  With all this time to reflect on things, Apsal’ara concluded that her biggest mistake was not in finding her way into Moon’s Spawn. Nor in discovering the vaults and the heaps of magicked stones, ensorcelled weapons, armour, the blood-dipped idols and reliquaries from ten thousand extinct cults. No, her greatest error in judgement had been in trying to stab Anomander Rake in the back.

  He’d been amused at finding her. He’d not spoken of executing her, or even chaining her in some deep crypt for all eternity. He’d simply asked her how she had managed to break in. Curiosity, more than a little wonder, perhaps even some admiration. And then she went and tried to kill him.

  The damned sword had been out of its scabbard faster than an eye-blink, the deadly edge slicing across her belly even as she lunged with her obsidian dagger.

  Such stupidity. But lessons only became lessons when one has reached the state of humility required to heed them. When one is past all the egotistical excuses and explanations flung up to fend off honest culpability. It was nature to attack first, abjuring all notions of guilt and shame. Lash out, white with rage, then strut away convinced of one’s own righteousness.

  She had long since left such imbecilic posturing behind. A journey of enlightenment, and it had begun with her last mortal breath, as she found herself lying on the hard stone floor, looking up into the eyes of Anomander Rake, and seeing his dismay, his regret, his sorrow.

  She could feel the growing heat of the storm, could feel its eternal hunger. Not long now, and then all her efforts would be for naught. The kinks of the chain finally showed some wear, but not enough, not nearly enough. She would be destroyed along with everyone else. She was not unique. She was, in fact, no different from every other idiot who’d tried to kill Rake, or Draconus.

  The rain trickling down from the wagon bed was warmer than usual, foul with sweat, blood and worse. It streamed over her body. Her skin had been wet for so long it was coming away in ragged pieces, white with death, revealing raw red meat underneath. She was rotting.

  The time was coming when she would have to drop down once more, emerge from under the wagon, and see for herself the arrival of oblivion. There would be no pity in its eyes – not that it had any – just the indifference that was the other face of the universe, the one all would have for ever turned away. The regard of chaos was the true source of terror – all the rest were but flavours, variations.

  I was a child once. I am certain of it. A child. I have a memory, one memory of that time. On a barren bank of a broad river. The sky was blue perfection. The caribou were crossing the river, in their tens and tens of thousands.

  I remember their up-thrust heads. I remember seeing the weaker ones crowded in, pushed down to vanish in the murky water. These carcasses would wash up down current, where the short-nosed bears and the wolves and eagles and ravens waited for them. But I stood with others. Father, mother, perhaps sisters and brothers – just others – my eyes on the vast herd.

  Their seasonal migration, and this was but one of many places of crossing. The caribou often chose different paths. Still, the river had to be crossed, and the beasts would mill for half a morning on the bank, until they plunged into the current, until all at once they were flooding the river, a surging tide of hide and flesh, of breaths drawn in and gusted out.

  Not even the beasts display eagerness when accosting the inevitable, when it seems numbers alone can possibly confuse fate, and so each life strives, strikes out into the icy flow. ‘Save me.’ That is what is written in their eyes. ‘Save me above all the others. Save me, so that I may live. Give me this moment, this day, this season. I will follow the laws of my kind . . .’

  She remembered that one moment when she was a child, and she remembered her sense of awe in witnessing the crossing, in that force of nature, that imposition of will, its profound implacability. She remembered, too, the terror she had felt.

  Caribou are not just caribou. The crossing is not just this crossing. The caribou are all life. The river is the passing world. Life swims through, riding the current, swims, drowns, triumphs. Life can ask questions. Life – some of it – can even ask: how is it that I can ask anything at all? And: how is it that I believe that answers answer anything worthwhile? What value this exchange, this precious dialogue, when the truth is unchanged, when some live for a time while others drown, when in the next season there are new caribou while others are for ever gone?

  The truth is unchanged.

  Each spring, in the time of crossing, the river is in flood. Chaos swirls beneath the surface. It is the worst time.

  Watch us.

  The child had not wanted to see. The child had wailed and fled inland. Brothers and sisters pursued, laughing maybe, not understanding her fear, her despair. Someone pursued, anyway. Laughing, unless it was the river that laughed, and it was the herd of caribou that surged up from the bank and lunged forward, driving the watchers to scatter, shouting their surprise. Perhaps that was what had made her run. She wasn’t sure.

  The memory ended with her panic, her cries, her confusion.

  Lying on the cross-beam, the wood sweating beneath her, Apsal’ara felt like that child once again. The season was coming. The river awaited her, in fullest flood, and she was but one among many, praying for fate’s confusion.

  A hundred stones flung into a pond will shatter the smooth surface, will launch a clash of ripples and waves until the eye loses all sense of order in what it sees.

  And this discordant moment perturbs the self, awakens unease in the spirit and leaves one restive. So it was that morning in Darujhistan. Surfaces had been shattered. People moved and every move betrayed agitation. People spoke and they were abrupt in their speech and they were short with others, strangers and dear ones alike.

  A squall of rumours rode the turgid currents, and some held more truth than others, but all of them hinted of something unpleasant, something unwelcome and disorderly. Such sensibilities can grip a city and hold tight for days, sometimes weeks, sometimes for ever. Such sensibilities could spread like a plague to infect an entire nation, an entire people, leaving them habituated in their anger, perpetually belligerent, inclined to cruelty and miserly with their compassion.

  Blood had been spilled in the night. More corpses than usual had been found in the morning, a score or more of them in the Estates District, delivering a thunderous shock to the coddled highborn citizens in their walled homes. Spurred by frantic demands for investigation, the City Guard brought in court mages to conduct magical examinations. Before long a new detail was whispered that widened eyes, that made citizens gasp. Assassins! One and all – the Guild has been devastated! And, following this, on a few faces, a sly smile of pleasure – quickly hidden or saved for private moments, since one could never be too careful. Still, the evil killers had cl
early taken on someone nastier than them, and had paid for it with dozens of lives.

  Some then grew somewhat more thoughtful – oh, they were rare enough to make one, well, depressed. None the less, for these there followed a rather ominous question: precisely who is in this city who can with impunity cut down a score of deadly assassins?

  As chaotic as that morning was, what with official carriages and corpse-wagons rattling this way and that; with squads of guards and crowds of gawping onlookers and the hawkers who descended among them with sweetened drinks and sticky candies and whatnot; with all this, none made note of the closed, boarded-up K’rul’s Bar with its freshly washed walls and flushed gutters.

  It was just as well.

  *

  Krute of Talient stepped into his squalid room and saw Rallick Nom slouched in a chair. Grunting, Krute walked over to the niche that passed for a kitchen and set down the burlap sack with its load of vegetables, fruit and wrapped fish.

  ‘Not seen you much of late,’ he said.

  ‘It’s a foolish war,’ Rallick Nom said without looking up.

  ‘I’m sure Seba Krafar agrees with you this morning. They struck, in what they must have imagined was overwhelming force, only to get mauled. If this keeps up Seba will be Master in a Guild of one.’

  ‘You sound foul of mood, Krute. Why does it matter to you that Seba is making mistakes?’

  ‘Because I gave my life to the Guild, Rallick.’ Krute stood with a turnip in one hand. After a moment he flung it into the basket beside the cask of fresh water. ‘He’s single-handedly destroying it. True, he’ll be gone soon enough, but what will be left by then?’

  Rallick rubbed at his face. ‘Everyone’s mood is sour these days, it seems.’

  ‘What are we waiting for?’

  Krute could not long hold Rallick’s gaze when the assassin finally looked at him. There was something so . . . remorseless in those cold eyes, in that hard face that seemed carved to refute for ever the notion of a smile. A face that could not soften, could not relax into anything human. No wonder he’d been Vorcan’s favourite.

  Krute fidgeted with the food he’d purchased. ‘You hungry?’ he asked.

  ‘What did you have in mind?’

  ‘Fish stew.’

  ‘In a few bells it’ll be hot enough outside to melt lead.’

  ‘That’s what I’m cooking, Rallick.’

  Sighing, the assassin rose and stretched. ‘Think I’ll take a walk instead.’

  ‘As you like.’

  At the door Rallick paused and glanced over, his expression suddenly wry. ‘It wears off, doesn’t it?’

  Krute frowned. ‘What does?’

  Rallick did not reply, and moments later he was gone, the door closing behind him.

  ‘What does?’ Did I have any reason there to be so obtuse? Must have, though I can’t think of one right now. Maybe just . . . instinctive. Yes, Rallick Nom, it wears off. Fast.

  Things were easier before – should have recognized that back then. Should have liked things just fine. Should have stopped gnawing.

  On her hands and knees, Thordy rubbed the ashes into the spaces between the set stones, into every crack and fissure, every groove scoring the vaguely flat surfaces. Tiny bits of bone rolled under her fingertips. No ash was perfect unless it came from nothing but wood, and this ash was made of more things than just wood. The dry season had, she hoped, finally arrived. Otherwise she might have to do this all over again, to keep the glyphs hidden, the pleasant, beautiful glyphs with all the promises they whispered to her.

  She heard the back door swing open on its leather hinges and knew Gaz was standing on the threshold, eyes hooded, watching her. His fingerless hands twitching at the ends of his arms, the ridge of knuckles marred and bright red, teeth-cut and bone-gouged.

  He killed people every night, she knew, to keep from killing her. She was, she knew, the cause of their deaths. Every one of them a substitute for what Gaz really wanted to do.

  She heard him step outside.

  Straightening, wiping the ash from her hands on her apron, she turned.

  ‘Breakfast leavings,’ he muttered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The house is full of flies,’ he said, standing there as if struck rooted by the sunlight. Red-shot eyes wandered about the yard as if wanting to crawl out from his head and find shelter. Beneath that rock, or the bleached plank of grey wood, or under the pile of kitchen scraps.

  ‘You need a shave,’ she said. ‘Want me to heat the water?’

  The haunted eyes flicked towards her – but there was nowhere to hide in that direction, so he looked away once more. ‘No, don’t touch me.’

  She thought of holding the razor in her hand, settling its edge against his throat. Seeing the runnels winding down through the lathered soap, the throb of his pulse. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘the beard hides how thin you’ve become. In the face, anyway.’

  His smile was a threat. ‘And you prefer that, wife?’

  ‘It’s just different, Gaz.’

  ‘You can’t prefer anything when you don’t care, right?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘You didn’t have to. Why’d you make that stone thing – right there on the best dirt?’

  ‘I just felt like it,’ she replied. ‘A place to sit and rest. Where I can keep an eye on all the vegetables.’

  ‘In case they run away?’

  ‘No. I just like looking at them, that’s all.’ They don’t ask questions. They don’t ask for much of anything at all. A few dribbles of water, maybe. A clear path to the sun, free of any weeds.

  They don’t get suspicious. They don’t think about murdering me.

  ‘Have supper ready for dusk,’ Gaz said, lurching into motion.

  She watched him leave. Gritty ash made black crescents of her fingernails, as if she had been rooting through the remnants of a pyre. Which was appropriate, because she had, but Gaz didn’t need to know things like that. He didn’t need to know anything at all.

  Be a plant, Gaz. Worry about nothing. Until the harvest.

  *

  The ox was too stupid to worry. If not for a lifetime of back-breaking labour and casual abuse, the beast would be content, existence a smooth cycle to match the ease of day into night and night into day and on and on for ever. Feed and cud aplenty, water to drink and salt to lick, a plague to eradicate the world’s biting flies and ticks and fleas. If the ox could dream of paradise, it would be a simple dream and a simple paradise. To live simply was to evade the worries that came with complexity. This end was achieved at the expense, alas, of intelligence.

  The drunks that staggered out of the taverns as the sun rose were in search of paradise and they had the sodden, besotted brains to prove it. Lying senseless in the durhang and d’bayang dens could be found others oozing down a similar path. The simplicity they would find was of course death, the threshold crossed almost without effort.

  Unmindful (naturally) of any irony, the ox pulled a cart into an alley behind the dens where three emaciated servants brought out this night’s crop of wasted corpses. The carter, standing with a switch to one side, spat out a mouthful of rustleaf juice and silently gestured to another body lying in the gutter behind a back door. In for a sliver, in for a council. Grumbling, the three servants went over to this corpse and reached for limbs to lift it from the cobblestones. One then gasped and recoiled, and a moment later so too did the others.

  The ox was not flicked into motion for some time thereafter, as humans rushed about, as more arrived. It could smell the death, but it was used to that. There was much confusion, yet the yoked beast remained an island of calm, enjoying the shade of the alley.

  The city guardsman with the morning ache in his chest brushed a hand along the ox’s broad flank as he edged past. He crouched down to inspect the corpse.

  Another one, this man beaten so badly he was barely recognizable as human. Not a single bone in his face was left unbroken. The eyes were pulped. Few
teeth remained. The blows had continued, down to his crushed throat – which was the likely cause of death – and then his chest. Whatever weapon had been used left short, elongated patterns of mottled bruising. Just like all the others.

  The guardsman rose and faced the three servants from the dens. ‘Was he a customer?’

  Three blank faces regarded him, then one spoke, ‘How in Hood’s name can we tell? His damned face is gone!’

  ‘Clothing? Weight, height, hair colour – anyone in there last—’

  ‘Sir,’ cut in the man, ‘if he was a customer he was a new one – he’s got meat on his bones, see? And his clothes was clean. Well, before he spilled hisself.’

  The guardsman had made the same observations. ‘Might he have been, then? A new customer?’

  ‘Ain’t been none in the last day or so. Some casuals, you know, the kind who can take it or leave it, but no, we don’t think we seen this one, by his clothes and hair and such.’

  ‘So what was he doing in this alley?’

  No one had an answer.

  Did the guardsman have enough to requisition a necromancer? Only if this man was well born. But the clothes aren’t that high-priced. More like merchant class, or some midlevel official. If so, then what was he doing here in the dregs of Gadrobi District? ‘He’s Daru,’ he mused.

  ‘We get ‘em,’ said the loquacious servant, with a faint sneer. ‘We get Rhivi, we get Callowan, we get Barghast even.’

  Yes, misery is egalitarian. ‘Into the cart, then, with the others.’

  The servants set to work.

  The guardsman watched. After a moment his gaze drifted to the carter. He studied the wizened face with its streaks of rustleaf juice running down the stubbled chin.

  ‘Got a loving woman back home?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I imagine that ox is happy enough.’

  ‘Oh, aye, that it is, sir. All the flies, see, they prefer the big sacks.’

  ‘The what?’

  The carter squinted at him, then stepped closer. ‘The bodies, sir. Big sacks, I call ‘em. I done studies and lots of thinking, on important things. On life and stuff. What makes it work, what happens when it stops and all.’