Toll the Hounds

by Steven Erikson

  There was so much he needed to tell them, and so much that he needed to hear. Discussions, arguments, the weighing of risks and contingencies and coordination. All the things demanded of one who would lead; but his inability to give voice to his intentions, to deliver orders at the end of a long debate, had made him next to useless.

  By his presence alone, Clip had stopped Nimander in his tracks.

  In this game of move and counter-move, Clip had outwitted him, and that galled. The moment the charade was shattered, there would be chaos, and in that scene Clip held the advantage. He had only himself to worry about, after all.

  No, Nimander had no choice but to act alone, to trust in the others to follow.

  He knew they were watching him, his every move, studying his face for any telltale expression, for every silent message, and this meant he had to hold himself in check. He had to guard himself against revealing anything, lest one of them misunderstand and so make a fatal mistake, and all of this was wearing him down.

  Something lifted noisily from the black water. A span of darkness, vertical, its upper edges dripping, fast dissolving.

  ‘Follow me,’ Clip gasped. ‘Quickly!’

  Nimander rose and tugged Skintick back – ‘Everyone, stay behind me’ – and, seeing Clip lunge forward and vanish within the Gate, he hurried forward.

  But Nenanda reached the portal before him, rushing in even as he drew his sword.

  Cursing under his breath, Nimander darted after him.

  The Gate was collapsing. Someone shrieked in his wake.

  Nimander staggered on slippery, uneven bedrock, half blinded by streaks of luminescence that scattered like cut webs. He heard a gasping sound, almost at his feet, and a moment later stumbled against something that groaned.

  Nimander reached down, felt a body lying prone. Felt something hot and welling under one palm – the slit of a wound, the leaking of blood. ‘Nenanda?’

  Another gasp, and then, ‘I’m sorry, Nimander – I saw – I saw him reaching for his dagger, even as he stepped through – I saw – he knew, he knew you were following, you see – he—’

  From somewhere ahead there came a hollow laugh. ‘Do you imagine me an idiot, Nimander? Too bad it wasn’t you. It should have been you. But then, this way it’s just one more death for you to carry along.’

  Nimander stared but could see nothing. ‘You still need us!’

  ‘Maybe, but it’s too risky to have you so close. When I see a viper, I don’t invite it into my belt-pouch. So, wander lost in here . . . for ever, Nimander. It won’t feel very different from your life before this, I expect.’

  ‘The god within you,’ Nimander said, ‘is a fool. My Lord will cut it down and you with it, Clip. You don’t know him. You don’t know a damned thing!’

  Another laugh, this one much farther away.

  Nimander wiped the tears from his cheeks with his free forearm. Beneath his palm, the pulse of blood from the wound had slowed.

  Too many failures. Too many defeats.

  A soul carries a vessel of courage. It cannot be refilled. Every thing that takes from it leaves less behind.

  What do I have left?

  Whatever it was, the time had come to drink deep, to use it all. One last time. Nimander straightened.

  ‘Desra? Skintick? Anyone?’

  His words drew echoes, and they were the only replies he received.

  Nimander drew his sword, and then set out. In the direction of that mocking laughter.

  Ribbons of light swam in the air on all sides.

  He encountered no walls, felt no wayward currents of air. The folded bedrock beneath his feet undulated randomly, angling neither upward nor downward for long, uneven enough to make him stumble every now and then, and once to land on his knees with a painful, stinging jolt.

  Lost. Not a single sound to betray where Clip might be now.

  Yes, this was a clever end for Nimander, one that must have given Clip moments of delicious anticipation. Lost in darkness. Lost to his kin. To his Lord, and to a future that now would never arrive. So perfect, so precise, this punishment—

  ‘Enough of that, you pathetic creature.’

  Phaed.

  ‘They’re here, you fool. As lost as you.’

  What? Who? Leave me be. I told you, I’m sorry. For what happened to you, for what I tried to do. I’m sorry—

  ‘Too late for that. Besides, you don’t understand. I lived in fear. I lived in perpetual terror. Of everything. Of all of you. That I’d be found out. Can you imagine, Nimander, what that was like? To live was torture, to dread an end even worse. Oh, I knew it was coming. It had to. People like me win for only so long, before someone notices – and then his face fills with disgust, and he crushes me underfoot.

  ‘Or throws me out of a window.’

  Please, no more—

  ‘They’re here. Desra, Skintick. Sweet Aranatha. Find them.’

  How?

  ‘I can’t do this for you. Shouts will go unheard. There are layers to this place. Layers and layers and layers. You could have walked right through one of them and known nothing. Nimander Golit, the blood of our Lord is within you. The blood of Eleint, too – is that the secret? Is that the one weapon Clip did not know you possess? How could he know? How could anyone? We have suppressed it within ourselves for so long now—’

  Because Andarist told us to!

  ‘Because Andarist told us to. Because he was bitter. And hurting. He thought he could take his brother’s children and make them his own, more his own than Rake’s.’

  Nenanda—

  ‘Had the thinnest blood of all. We knew that. You knew it, too. It made him too predictable. It’s probably killed him. Brother, father, son – these layers are so precious, aren’t they? Look on them again, my lover, my killer, but this time . . . with a dragon’s eyes.’

  But, Phaed, I don’t know how! How do I do that?

  She had no answer. No, it would never be that simple, would it? Phaed was not an easy memory, not a gentle ghost. Nor his wise conscience. She was none of that.

  Just one more kin whose blood stained Nimander’s hands.

  He had stopped walking. He stood now, surrounded by oblivion.

  ‘My hands,’ he whispered. And then slowly lifted them. ‘Stained,’ he said. ‘Yes, stained.’

  The blood of kin. The blood of Tiste Andii. The blood of dragons.

  That shines like beacons. That call, summon, can cast outward until—

  A woman’s hand reached out as if from nowhere, closing round one of his own in a cold grip.

  And all at once she was before him, her eyes like twin veils, parting to reveal a depthless, breathtaking love.

  He gasped, vertiginous, and almost reeled. ‘Aranatha.’

  She said, ‘There is little time, brother. We must hurry.’

  Still holding his hand, she set off, pulling him along as she might a child.

  But Nimander was of no mind to complain.

  He had looked into her eyes. He had seen it. That love.

  He had seen it.

  And more, he had understood.

  The Dying God, he was coming. Pure as music, bright as truth, solid as certainty. A fist of power, driving onward, smashing everything in its path, until that fist uncurled and the hand opened, to close round the soul of the Redeemer. A weaker god, a god lost in its own confusion.

  Salind would be that fist, she would be that hand. Delivering a gift, from which a true and perfect faith would emerge. This is the blood of redemption. You will understand, Redeemer. Drink deep the blood of redemption, and dance.

  The song is glory, and glory is a world we need never leave. And so, my beloved Itkovian, dance with me. Here, see me reaching for you—

  Supine on the muddy floor of Gradithan’s hut, Salind leaked thick black mucus from her mouth and nose, from the tear ducts of her eyes. Her fingernails were black, and more inky fluid oozed out of them. She was naked, and as he knelt beside her Gradithan had paused,
breathing hard, his eyes fixed on the black milk trickling down from the woman’s nipples.

  Standing wrapped in his raincape close to the doorway, Monkrat looked on with flat eyes, his face devoid of expression. He could see how Gradithan struggled against the sudden thirst, the desire that was half childlike and half sexual, as he stared down at those leaking breasts. The bastard had already raped her, in some twisted consummation, a sacrifice of her virginity, so the only thing that must have been holding the man back was some kind of overriding imperative. Monkrat was not happy thinking about that.

  Gradithan lifted Salind’s head with one hand and tugged open her mouth with the other. He reached for the jug of saemankelyk. ‘Time,’ he muttered, ‘and time, time, time, the time. Is now.’ He tipped the jug and the black juice poured into Salind’s gaping, stained mouth.

  She swallowed, and swallowed, and it seemed she would never stop, that her body was depthless, a vessel with no bottom. She drank down her need, and that need could never find satiation.

  Monkrat grunted. He’d known plenty of people like that. It was a secret poorly kept once you knew what to look for, there in their eyes. Hope and expectation and hunger and the hint of spiteful rage should a single demand be denied. They had a way of appearing, and then never leaving. Yes, he’d known people like that.

  And, well, here was their god, shining from Salind’s eyes. Everyone needed a god. Slapped together and shaped with frantic hands, a thing of clay and sticks. Built up of wants and all those unanswerable questions that plagued the mortal soul. Neuroses carved in stone. Malign obsessions given a hard, judgemental face – he had seen them, all the variations, in city after city, on the long campaigns of the Malazan Empire. They lined the friezes in temples; they leered down from balustrades. Ten thousand gods, one for every damned mood, it seemed. A pantheon of exaggerated flaws.

  Salind was convulsing now, the black poison gushing from her mouth, thick as honey down her chin, and hanging in drop-heavy threads like some ghastly beard.

  When she smiled, Monkrat flinched.

  The convulsions found a rhythm, and Gradithan was pushed away as she undulated upright, a serpent rising, a thing of sweet venom.

  Monkrat edged back, and before Gradithan could turn to him the ex-Bridgeburner slipped outside. Rain slanted down into his face. He paused, ankle-deep in streaming mud, and drew up his hood. That water had felt clean. If only it could wash all of this away. Oh, not the camp – it was already doing that – but everything else. Choices made, bad decisions stumbled into, years of useless living. Would he ever do anything right? His list of errors had grown so long he felt trapped by some internal pell-mell momentum. Dozens more awaited him—

  A bedraggled shape emerged from the rain. Grizzled face, a sopping hairshirt. Like some damned haunt from his past, a ghoul grinning with dread reminders of everything he had thrown away.

  Spindle stepped up to Monkrat. ‘It’s time.’

  ‘For what? Aye, we got drunk, we laughed and cried and all that shit. And maybe I told you too much, but not enough, I’m now thinking, if you believe you can do a damned thing about all this. It’s a god we’re talking about here, Spin. A god.’

  ‘Never mind that. I been walking through this shit-hole.

  Monkrat, there’s children here. Just . . . abandoned.’

  ‘Not for long. They’re going to be taken. Used to feed the Dying God.’

  ‘Not if we take ‘em first.’

  ‘Take them? Where?’

  Spindle bared his teeth, and only now did Monkrat comprehend the barely restrained fury in the man facing him. ‘Where? How about away? Does that sound too complicated for you? Maybe those hills west of here, in the woods. You said it was all coming down. If we leave ‘em they’ll all die, and I won’t have it.’

  Monkrat scratched at his beard. ‘Now ain’t that admirable of you, but—’

  The hard angled point of a shortsword pressed the soft flesh below Monkrat’s chin. He scowled. The bastard was fast, all right, and old Monkrat was losing his edge.

  ‘Now,’ hissed Spindle, ‘you either follow Gredithick around—’

  ‘Gradithan.’

  ‘Whatever. You either follow him like a pup, or you start helping me round up the runts still alive.’

  ‘You’re giving me a choice?’

  ‘Kind of. If you say you want to be a pup, then I’ll saw off your head, as clumsily as I can.’

  Monkrat hesitated.

  Spindle’s eyes widened. ‘You’re in a bad way, soldier—’ ‘I ain’t a soldier no more.’

  ‘Maybe that’s your problem. You’ve forgotten things.

  Important things.’

  ‘Such as?’

  Spindle grimaced, as if searching for the right words, and Monkrat saw in his mind a quick image of a three-legged dog chasing rabbits in a field. ‘Fine,’ Spindle finally said in a grating tone. ‘It had to have happened to you at least once. You and your squad, you come into some rotten foul village or hamlet. You come to buy food or maybe get your tack fixed, clothes mended, whatever. But you ain’t there to kill nobody. And so you get into a few conversations. In the tavern. The smithy. With the whores. And they start talking. About injustices. Bastard landholders, local bullies, shit-grinning small-time tyrants. The usual crap. The corruption and all that. You know what I’m talking about, Monkrat?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘We hunted the scum down and flayed their arses. Sometimes we even strung ‘em up.’

  Spindle nodded. ‘You did justice, is what you did. It’s what a soldier can do, when there’s nobody else. We got swords, we got armour, we got all we need to terrorize anybody we damned well please. But Dassem taught us – he taught every soldier in the Malazan armies back then. Sure, we had swords, but who we used ‘em on was up to us.’ The point of the shortsword fell away. ‘We was soldiers, Monkrat. We had the chance – the privilege – of doing the right thing.’

  ‘I deserted—’

  ‘And I was forced into retirement. Neither one changes what we were.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong.’

  ‘Then listen to this.’ The shortsword pressed against his throat again. ‘I can still deliver justice, and if need be I’ll do it right now and right here. By cutting a coward’s head off.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about cowardice!’ Monkrat snapped. ‘Soldiers don’t talk that ever! You just broke the first rule!’ ‘Someone turns his back on being a soldier – on what it means in the soul – that’s cowardice. You don’t like the word, don’t live it.’

  Monkrat stared into the man’s eyes, and hated what he saw there. He sagged. ‘Best get on with it then, Spin. I got nothing left. I’m used up. What do you do when the soldier inside you dies before you do? Tell me.’

  ‘You go through the motions, Monkrat. You just follow me. Do as I do. We start there and worry about the rest later.’

  Monkrat realized that Spindle was still waiting. ‘Do what’s right,’ Dassem told us. Gods, even after all this time he still remembered the First Sword’s words. ‘That’s a higher law than the command of any officer. Higher even than the Emperor’s own words. You are in a damned uniform but that’s not a licence to deliver terror to everyone – just the enemy soldier you happen to be facing. Do what is right, for that armour you wear doesn’t just protect your flesh and bone. It defends honour. It defends integrity. It defends justice. Soldiers, heed me well. That armour defends humanity. And when I look upon my soldiers, when I see these uniforms, I see compassion and truth. The moment those virtues fail, then the gods help you, for no armour is strong enough to save you.’

  ‘All right, Spin. I’ll follow you.’

  A sharp nod. ‘Dassem, he’d be proud. And not surprised, no, not surprised at all.’

  ‘We have to watch out for Gradithan – he wants those virgins. He wants their blood, for when the Dying God arrives.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, Gredishit can chew on Hood’s ar
sehole. He ain’t getting ‘em.’

  ‘A moment ago I was thinking, Spin . . .’

  ‘Thinking what?’

  ‘That you was a three-legged dog. But I was wrong. You’re a damned Hound of Shadow is what you are. Come on. I know where they all huddle to stay outa the rain.’

  Seerdomin adjusted the grip on his sword and then glanced back at the Redeemer. The god’s position was unchanged. Kneeling, half bent over, face hidden behind his hands. A position of abject submission. Defeat and despair. Hardly an inspiring standard to stand in front of, hardly a thing to fight for, and Seerdomin could feel the will draining from him as he faced once more the woman dancing in the basin.

  Convulsing clouds overhead, an endless rain of kelyk that turned everything black. The drops stung and then numbed his eyes. He had ceased to flinch from the crack of lightning, the stuttering crash of thunder.

  He had fought for something unworthy once, and had vowed never again. Yet here he was, standing between a god of unimaginable power and a god not worth believing in. One wanted to feed and the other looked ready to be devoured – why should he get in the way of the two?

  A wretched gasp from the Redeemer snapped him round. The rain painted Itkovian black, ran like dung-stained water down the face he had lifted skyward. ‘Dying,’ he murmured, so faint that Seerdomin had to step closer to catch the word. ‘But no end is desired. Dying, for all eternity. Who seeks this fate? For himself? Who yearns for such a thing? Can I . . . can I help him?’

  Seerdomin staggered back, as if struck by a blow to his chest. That – Beru fend – that is not a proper question! Not against this . . . this thing. Look to yourself, Redeemer! You cannot heal what does not want healing! You cannot mend what delights in being broken! ‘You cannot,’ he growled. ‘You cannot help it, Redeemer. You can only fall to it. Fall, vanish, be swallowed up.’

  ‘He wants me. She wants me. She gave him this want, do you see? Now they share.’

  Seerdomin turned to gaze upon the High Priestess. She was growing more arms, each bearing a weapon, each weapon whirling and spinning in a clashing web of edged iron. Kelyk sprayed from the blades, a whirling cloud of droplets. Her dance was carrying her closer.