Toll the Hounds Read online

  In his first moments following his kissing the sword, in between his frenzied attempts at escape, his shrieks of despair, he had flung questions at everyone – why, he’d even sought to accost a Hound, but it had been too busy lunging at its own chains, froth fizzing from its massive jaws, and had very nearly trampled him, and he’d never seen it again.

  But someone had replied, someone had spoken to him. About something . . . oh, he could not recall much more than a name. A single name.

  Draconus.

  She had witnessed many things in this interminable interlude in her career, but none more frustrating than the escape of two Hounds of Shadow. It was not for one such as Apsal’ara, Lady of Thieves, to besmirch her existence with the laborious indignity of tugging on a chain for all eternity. Shackles were to be escaped, burdens deftly avoided.

  From the moment of her first stumbling arrival, she had set upon herself the task of breaking the chains binding her in this dread realm, but this task was virtually impossible if one were cursed to ever pull the damned wagon. And she had no desire to witness again the horrible train at the very end of the chains, the abraded lumps of still living meat dragging across the gouged muddy ground, the flash of an open eye, a flopping nub of a limb straining towards her, a terrible army of the failed, the ones who surrendered and the ones whose strength gave out.

  No, Apsal’ara had worked her way closer to the enormous wagon, eventually finding herself trudging beside one of the huge wooden wheels. Then she had lagged in her pace until just behind that wheel. From there, she moved inward, slipping beneath the creaking bed with its incessant rain of brown water, blood and the wastes that came of rotting but still living flesh. Dragging the chain behind her she had worked her way on to a shelf of the undercarriage, just above the front axle, wedging herself in tight, legs drawn up, her back against slimy wood.

  Fire had been the gift, the stolen gift, but there could be no flame in this sodden underworld. Failing that, there was . . . friction. She had begun working one length of chain across another.

  How many years had it been? She had no idea. There was no hunger, no thirst. The chain sawed back and forth. There was a hint of heat, climbing link by link and into her hands. Had the iron softened? Was the metal worn with new, silvery grooves? She had long since stopped checking. The effort was enough. For so long, it had been enough.

  Until those damned Hounds.

  That, and the inescapable truth that the wagon had slowed, that now there were as many lying on its bed as there were still out in the gloom beyond, heaving desperate on their chains. She could hear the piteous groans, seeping down from the bed directly above her, of those trapped beneath the weight of countless others.

  The Hounds had thundered against the sides of the wagon. The Hounds had plunged into the maw of darkness at the very centre.

  There had been a stranger, an unchained stranger.

  Taunting the Hounds – the Hounds! She remembered his face, oh yes, his face. Even after he had vanished . . .

  In the wake of all that, Apsal’ara had attempted to follow the beasts, only to be driven back by the immense cold of that portal – cold so fierce it destroyed flesh, colder even than Omtose Phellack. The cold of negation. Denial.

  No greater curse than hope. A lesser creature would have wept then, would have surrendered, throwing herself beneath one of the wheels to be left dragging in the wagon’s wake, nothing more than one more piece of wreckage of crushed bone and mangled flesh, scraping and tumbling in the stony mud. Instead, she had returned to her private perch, resumed working the chains.

  She had stolen the moon once.

  She had stolen fire.

  She had padded the silent arching halls of the city within Moon’s Spawn.

  She was the Lady of Thieves.

  And a sword had stolen her life.

  This will not do. This will not do.

  Lying in its usual place on the flat rock beside the stream, the mangy dog lifted its head, the motion stirring insects into buzzing flight. A moment later, the beast rose. Scars covered its back, some deep enough to twist the muscles beneath. The dog lived in the village but was not of it. Nor was the animal one among the village’s pack. It did not sleep outside the entrance to any hut; it allowed no one to come close. Even the tribe’s horses would not draw near it.

  There was, it was agreed, a deep bitterness in its eyes, and an even deeper sorrow. God-touched, the Uryd elders said, and this claim ensured that the dog would never starve and would never be driven away. It would be tolerated, in the manner of all things god-touched.

  Surprisingly lithe despite its mangled hip, the dog now trotted through the village, down the length of the main avenue. When it came to the south end, it kept on going, downslope, wending through the moss-backed boulders and the bone-piles that marked the refuse of the Uryd.

  Its departure was noted by two girls still a year or more from their nights of passage into adulthood. There was a similarity to their features, and in their ages they were a close match, the times of their births mere days apart. Neither could be said to be loquacious. They shared the silent language common among twins, although they were not twins, and it seemed that, for them, this language was enough. And so, upon seeing the dog leave the village, they exchanged a glance, set about gathering what supplies and weapons were near at hand, and then set out on the beast’s trail.

  Their departure was noted, but that was all.

  South, down from the great mountains of home, where condors wheeled between the peaks and wolves howled when the winter winds came.

  South, towards the lands of the hated children of the Nathii, where dwelt the bringers of war and pestilence, the slayers and enslavers of the Teblor. Where the Nathii bred like lemmings until it seemed there would be no place left in the world for anyone or anything but them.

  Like the dog, the two girls were fearless and resolute.

  Though they did not know it, such traits came from their father, whom they had never met.

  The dog did not look back, and when the girls caught up to it the beast maintained its indifference. It was, as the elders had said, god-touched.

  Back in the village, a mother and daughter were told of the flight of their children. The daughter wept. The mother did not. Instead, there was heat in a low place of her body, and, for a time, she was lost in remembrances.

  ‘Oh frail city, where strangers arrive . . .’

  An empty plain beneath an empty night sky. A lone fire, so weak as to be nearly swallowed by the blackened, cracked stones encircling it. Seated on one of the two flat stones close to the hearth, a short, round man with sparse, greasy hair. Faded red waistcoat, over a linen shirt with stained once-white blousy cuffs erupting around the pudgy hands. The round face was flushed, reflecting the flickering flames. From the small knuckled chin dangled long black hairs – not enough to braid, alas – a new affectation he had taken to twirling and stroking when deep in thought, or even shallowly so. Indeed, when not thinking at all, but wishing to convey an impression of serious cogitation, should anyone regard him thoughtfully.

  He stroked and twirled now as he frowned down into the fire before him.

  What had that grey-haired bard sung? There on the modest stage in K’rul’s Bar earlier in the night, when he had watched on, content with his place in the glorious city he had saved more than once?

  ‘Oh frail city, where strangers arrive . . .’

  ‘I need to tell you something, Kruppe.’

  The round man glanced up to find a shrouded figure seated on the other flat stone, reaching thin pale hands out to the flames. Kruppe cleared his throat, then said, ‘It has been a long time since Kruppe last found himself perched as you see him now. Accordingly, Kruppe had long since concluded that you wished to tell him something of such vast import that none but Kruppe is worthy to hear.’

  A faint glitter from the darkness within the hood. ‘I am not in this war.’

  Kruppe stroked the rat-tails of his b
eard, delighting himself by saying nothing.

  ‘This surprises you?’ the Elder God asked.

  ‘Kruppe ever expects the unexpected, old friend. Why, could you ever expect otherwise? Kruppe is shocked. Yet, a thought arrives, launched brainward by a tug on this handsome beard. K’rul states he is not in the war. Yet, Kruppe suspects, he is nevertheless its prize.’

  ‘Only you understand this, my friend,’ the Elder God said, sighing. Then cocked its head. ‘I had not noticed before, but you seem sad.’

  ‘Sadness has many flavours, and it seems Kruppe has tasted them all.’

  ‘Will you speak now of such matters? I am, I believe, a good listener.’

  ‘Kruppe sees that you are sorely beset. Perhaps now is not the time.’

  ‘That is no matter.’

  ‘It is to Kruppe.’

  K’rul glanced to one side, and saw a figure approaching, grey-haired, gaunt.

  Kruppe sang, ‘“Oh frail city, where strangers arrive” . . . and the rest?’

  The newcomer answered in a deep voice, ‘“. . . pushing into cracks, there to abide.”‘

  And the Elder God sighed.

  ‘Join us, friend,’ said Kruppe. ‘Sit here by this fire: this scene paints the history of our kind, as you well know. A night, a hearth, and a tale to spin. Dear K’rul, dearest friend of Kruppe, hast thou ever seen Kruppe dance?’

  The stranger sat. A wan face, an expression of sorrow and pain.

  ‘No,’ said K’rul. ‘I think not. Not by limb, not by word.’

  Kruppe’s smile was muted, and something glistened in his eyes. ‘Then, my friends, settle yourselves for this night. And witness.’

  BOOK ONE - VOW TO THE SUN

  This creature of words cuts

  To the quick and gasp, dart away

  The spray of red rain

  Beneath a clear blue sky

  Shock at all that is revealed

  What use now this armour

  When words so easy slant between?

  This god of promises laughs

  At the wrong things, wrongly timed

  Unmaking all these sacrifices

  In deliberate malice

  Recoil like a soldier routed

  Even as retreat is denied

  Before corpses heaped high in walls

  You knew this would come

  At last and feign nothing, no surprise

  To find this cup filled

  With someone else’s pain

  It’s never as bad as it seems

  The taste sweeter than expected

  When you squat in a fool’s dream

  So take this belligerence

  Where you will, the dogged cur

  Is the charge of my soul

  To the centre of the street

  Spinning round all fangs bared

  Snapping at thirsty spears

  Thrust cold and purged of your hands

  Hunting Words

  Brathos of Black Coral

  CHAPTER ONE

  Oh frail city!

  Where strangers arrive

  Pushing into cracks

  There to abide

  Oh blue city!

  Old friends gather sighs

  At the foot of docks

  After the tide

  Uncrowned city!

  Where sparrows alight

  In spider tracks

  On sills well high

  Doomed city!

  Closing comes the night

  History awakens

  Here to abide

  Frail Age

  Fisher kel Tath

  Surrounded in a city of blue fire, she stood alone on the balcony. The sky’s darkness was pushed away, an unwelcome guest on this the first night of the Gedderone Fete. Throngs filled the streets of Darujhistan, happily riotous, good-natured in the calamity of one year’s ending and another’s beginning. The night air was humid and pungent with countless scents.

  There had been banquets. There had been unveilings of eligible young men and maidens. Tables laden with exotic foods, ladies wrapped in silks, men and women in preposterous uniforms all glittering gilt – a city with no standing army bred a plethora of private militias and a chaotic proliferation of high ranks held, more or less exclusively, by the nobility.

  Among the celebrations she had attended this evening, on the arm of her husband, she had not once seen a real officer of Darujhistan’s City Watch, not one genuine soldier with a dusty cloak-hem, with polished boots bearing scars, with a sword-grip of plain leather and a pommel gouged and burnished by wear. Yet she had seen, bound high on soft, well-fed arms, torcs in the manner of decorated soldiers among the Malazan army – soldiers from an empire that had, not so long ago, provided for Darujhistan mothers chilling threats to belligerent children. ‘Malazans, child! Skulking in the night to steal foolish children! To make you slaves for their terrible Empress – yes! Here in this very city!’

  But the torcs she had seen this night were not the plain bronze or faintly etched silver of genuine Malazan decorations and signifiers of rank, such as appeared like relics from some long-dead cult in the city’s market stalls. No, these had been gold, studded with gems, the blue of sapphire being the commonest hue even among the coloured glass, blue like the blue fire for which the city was famous, blue to proclaim some great and brave service to Darujhistan itself.

  Her fingers had pressed upon one such torc, there on her husband’s arm, although there was real muscle beneath it, a hardness to match the contemptuous look in his eyes as he surveyed the clusters of nobility in the vast humming hall, with the proprietary air he had acquired since attaining the Council. The contempt had been there long before and if anything had grown since his latest and most triumphant victory.

  Daru gestures of congratulation and respect had swirled round them in their stately passage through the crowds, and with each acknowledgement her husband’s face had grown yet harder, the arm beneath her fingers drawing ever tauter, the knuckles of his hands whitening above his sword-belt where the thumbs were tucked into braided loops in the latest fashion among duellists. Oh, he revelled in being among them now; indeed, in being above many of them. But for Gorlas Vidikas, this did not mean he had to like any of them. The more they fawned, the deeper his contempt, and that he would have been offended without their obsequy was a contradiction, she suspected, that a man like her husband was not wont to entertain.

  The nobles had eaten and drunk, and stood and posed and wandered and paraded and danced themselves into swift exhaustion, and now the banquet halls and staterooms echoed with naught but the desultory ministrations of servants. Beyond the high walls of the estates, however, the common folk rollicked still in the streets. Masked and half naked, they danced on the cobbles – the riotous whirling steps of the Flaying of Fander – as if dawn would never come, as if the hazy moon itself would stand motionless in the abyss in astonished witness to their revelry. City Watch patrols simply stood back and observed, drawing dusty cloaks about their bodies, gauntlets rustling as they rested hands on truncheons and swords.

  Directly below the balcony where she stood, the fountain of the unlit garden chirped and gurgled to itself, buffered by the estate’s high, solid walls from the raucous festivities they had witnessed during the tortured carriage ride back home. Smeared moonlight struggled in the softly swirling pool surrounding the fountain.

  The blue fire was too strong this night, too strong even for the mournful moon. Darujhistan itself was a sapphire, blazing in the torc of the world.

  And yet its beauty, and all its delighted pride and its multitudinous voice, could not reach her tonight.

  This night, Lady Vidikas had seen her future. Each and every year of it. There on her husband’s hard arm. And the moon, well, it looked like a thing of the past, a memory dimmed by time, yet it had taken her back.

  To a balcony much like this one in a time that now seemed very long ago.

  Lady Vidikas, who had once been Challice Estraysian, had just seen
her future. And was discovering, here in this night and standing against this rail, that the past was a better place to be.

  Talk about the worst night yet to run out of Rhivi flatbread. Swearing under her breath, Picker pushed her way through the crowds of the Lakefront market, the mobs of ferociously hungry, drunk revellers, using her elbows when she needed to and glowering at every delirious smile swung her way, and came out eventually at the mouth of a dingy alley heaped ankle-deep in rubbish. Somewhere just to the south of Borthen Park. Not quite the route back to the bar she would have preferred, but the fête was in full frenzy.

  Wrapped package of flatbread tucked under her left arm, she paused to tug loose the tangles of her heavy cloak, scowled on seeing a fresh stain from a careless passer-by – some grotesque Gadrobi sweetcake – tried wiping it off which only made it worse, then, her mood even fouler, set out through the detritus.

  With the Lady’s pull, Bluepearl and Antsy had no doubt fared better in finding Saltoan wine and were probably even now back at K’rul’s. And here she was, twelve streets and two wall passages away with twenty or thirty thousand mad fools in between. Would her companions wait for her? Not a chance. Damn Blend and her addiction to Rhivi flatbread! That and her sprained ankle had conspired to force Picker out here on the first night of the fête – if that ankle truly was sprained, and she had her doubts since Mallet had just squinted down at the offending appendage, then shrugged.

  Mind you, that was about as much as anyone had come to expect from Mallet. He’d been miserable since the retirement, and the chance of the sun’s rising any time in the healer’s future was about as likely as Hood’s forgetting to tally the count. And it wasn’t as if he was alone in his misery, was it?

  But where was the value in feeding her ill temper with all these well-chewed thoughts?

  Well, it made her feel better, that’s what.

  Dester Thrin, wrapped tight in black cloak and hood, watched the big-arsed woman kicking her way through the rubbish at the other end of the alley. He’d picked her up coming out of the back door of K’rul’s Bar, the culmination of four nights positioned in the carefully chosen, darkness-shrouded vantage point from which he could observe that narrow postern.