Toll the Hounds Read online

See it well.

  Horses drawn to a halt on a low hilltop, grasses whispering unseen on all sides.

  ‘I once led armies,’ Traveller said. ‘I was once the will of the Emperor of Malaz.’

  Samar Dev tasted bitterness and leaned to one side and spat.

  The man beside her grunted, as if acknowledging the gesture as commentary. ‘We served death, of course, in all that we did. For all our claims otherwise. Imposing peace, ending stupid feuds and tribal rivalries. Opening roads to merchants without fear of banditry. Coin flowed like blood in veins, such was the gift of those roads and the peace we enforced. And yet, behind it all, he waited.’

  ‘All hail civilization,’ Samar Dev said. ‘Like a beacon in the dark wilderness.’

  ‘With a cold smile,’ Traveller continued, as if not hearing her, ‘he waits. Where all the roads converge, where every path ends. He waits.’

  A dozen heartbeats passed, with nothing more said.

  To the north something burned, lancing bright orange flames into the sky, lighting the bellies of churning clouds of black smoke. Like a beacon . . .

  ‘What burns?’ Traveller wondered.

  Samar Dev spat again. She just couldn’t get that foul taste out of her mouth. ‘Karsa Orlong,’ she replied. ‘Karsa Orlong burns, Traveller. Because that is what he does.’

  ‘I do not understand you.’

  ‘It’s a pyre,’ she said. ‘And he does not grieve. The Skathandi are no more.’

  ‘When you speak of Karsa Orlong,’ Traveller said, ‘I am frightened.’

  She nodded at that admission – a response he probably could not even see. The man beside her was an honest one.

  In many ways as honest as Karsa Orlong.

  And on the morrow these two would meet.

  Samar Dev well understood Traveller’s fear.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The bulls ever walk alone to the solitude

  Of their selves

  Swaggering in their coats of sweaty felt

  Every vein swollen

  Defiant and proud in their beastly need

  Thunderous in step

  Make way make way the spurting swords

  Slay damsel hearts

  Cloven the cut gaping wide – so tender an attitude!

  And we must swoon

  Before red-rimmed eyes you’ll find no guilt

  In the self so proven

  And the fiery charge of most fertile seed

  Sings like gods’ rain

  Make way make way another bold word

  The dancer’s sure to misstep

  In the rushing drums of the multitude

  Dandies of the Promenade

  Seglora

  Expectation is the hoary curse of humanity. One can listen to words, and see them as the unfolding of a petal or, indeed, the very opposite: each word bent and pushed tighter, smaller, until the very packet of meaning vanishes with a flip of deft fingers. Poets and tellers of tales can be tugged by either current, into the riotous conflagration of beauteous language or the pithy reduction of the tersely colourless.

  As with art, so too with life. See a man without fingers standing at the back of his house. He is grainy with sleep that yields no rest, no relief from a burdensome world (and all that), and his eyes are strangely blank and might be shuttered too as he stares out on the huddled form of his wife as she works some oddity in her vegetable patch.

  This one is terse. Existence is a most narrow aperture indeed. His failing is not in being inarticulate through some lack of intellect. No, this mind is most finely honed. But he views his paucity of words – in both thought and dialogue – as a virtue, sigil of rigid manhood. He has made brevity an obsession, an addiction, and in his endless paring down he strips away all hope of emotion and with it empathy. When language is lifeless what does it serve? When meaning is rendered down what veracity holds to the illusion of depth?

  Bah! to such conceits! Such anal self-serving affectation! Wax extravagant and let the world swirl thick and pungent about you! Tell the tale of your life as you would live it!

  A delighted waggle of fingers now might signal mocking cruelty when you are observing this fingerless man who stands silent and expressionless as he studies his woman. Decide as you will. His woman. Yes, the notion belongs to him, artfully whittled from his world view (one of expectation and fury at its perpetual failure). Possession has its rules and she must behave within the limits those rules prescribe. This was, to Gaz, self-evident, a detail that did not survive his own manic editing.

  But what was Thordy doing with all those flat stones? With that peculiar pattern she was building there in the dark loamy soil? One could plant nothing beneath stone, could one? No, she was sacrificing fertile ground, and for what? He didn’t know. And he knew that he might never know. As an activity, however, Thordy’s diligent pursuit was a clear transgression of the rules, and he might have to do something about that. Soon.

  Tonight he would beat a man to death. Exultation, yes, but a cold kind. Flies buzzing in his head, the sound rising like a wave, filling his skull with a hundred thousand icy legs. He would do that, yes, and this meant he didn’t have to beat his wife – not yet, anyway; a few more days, maybe a week or so – he would have to see how things went.

  Keep things simple, give the flies not much to land on, that was the secret. The secret to staying sane.

  The wedges of his battered fingerless hands burned with eager fire.

  But he wasn’t thinking much of anything at all, was he? Nothing to reach his face, his eyes, the flat line of his mouth. Sigil of manhood, this blank façade, and when a man has nothing else at least he could have that. And he would prove it to himself again and again. Night after night.

  Because this is what artists did.

  Thordy was thinking of many things, none of them particularly relevant – or so she would have judged if pressed to examination, although of course there was no one who might voice such a challenge, which was just as well. Here in her garden she could float, as aimless as a leaf blown down on to a slow, lazy river.

  She was thinking about freedom. She was thinking about how a mind could turn to stone, the patterns solid and immovable in the face of seemingly unbearable pressures, and the way dust trickled down faint as whispers, unnoticed by any. And she was thinking of the cool, polished surface of these slate slabs, the waxy feel of them, and the way the sun reflected soft, milky white and not at all painful to rest eyes upon. And she was remembering the way her husband talked in his sleep, a pouring forth of words as if whatever dam held them back in his wakefulness was kicked down and out gushed tales of gods and promises, invitations and bloodlust, the pain of maimed hands and the pain of maiming that those hands delivered.

  And she noted the butterflies dancing above the row of greens just off to her left, almost within reach if she stretched out a dirt-stained hand, but then those orange-winged sprites would wing away though she posed them no threat. Because life was uncertain and danger waited in the guise of peaceful repose.

  And her knees ached and nowhere in her thoughts could be found expectation – nowhere could be found such hard-edged proof of reality as the framework of what waited somewhere ahead. No hint at all, even as she laid down stone after stone. It was all outside, you see, all outside.

  The clerk at the office of the Guild of Blacksmiths had never once in his life wielded hammer and tongs. What he did wield demanded no muscles, no weight of impetus atop oaken legs, no sweat streaming down to sting the eyes, no gusts of scalding heat to singe the hairs on the forearms. And so, in the face of a true blacksmith, the clerk gloried in his power.

  That pleasure could be seen in his small pursed lips turned well down at each end, could be caught in his watery eyes that rested everywhere and nowhere; in his pale hands holding a wooden stylus like an assassin’s dagger, the tip stained blue by ink and wax. He sat on his stool behind the broad counter that divided the front room as if guarding the world’s wealth and every promise o
f paradise that membership in this most noble Guild offered its hallowed, upright members (and the fat man winks).

  So he sat, and so Barathol Mekhar wanted to reach over the counter, pluck the clerk into the air, and break him in half. Over and over again, until little more than a pile of brittle tailings remained heaped on the scarred counter, with the stylus thrust into it like a warrior’s sword stabbing a barrow.

  Dark was the amusement in Barathol’s thoughts as the clerk shook his head yet again.

  ‘It is simple – even for you, I’m sure. The Guild demands credentials, specifically the sponsorship of an accredited Guild member. Without this, your coin is so much dross.’ And he smiled at this clever pun voiced to a smith.

  ‘I am new to Darujhistan,’ Barathol said, again, ‘and so such sponsorship is impossible.’

  ‘Yes it is.’

  ‘As for apprenticeship—’

  ‘Also impossible. You say you have been a blacksmith for many years now and I do not doubt such a claim – the evidence is plain before me. This of course makes you overqualified as an apprentice and too old besides.’

  ‘If I cannot be apprenticed how can I get a sponsor?’

  A smile of the lips and shake of the head. A holding up of the palms. ‘I don’t make the rules, you understand.’

  ‘Can I speak to anyone who might have been involved in devising these rules?’

  ‘A blacksmith? No, alas, they are all off doing smithy things, as befits their profession.’

  ‘I can visit one at his or her place of work, then. Can you direct me to the nearest one?’

  ‘Absolutely not. They have entrusted me with the responsibilities of operating the administration of the Guild. If I were to do something like that I would be disciplined for dereliction of duty, and I am sure you do not want that on your conscience, do you?’

  ‘Actually,’ said Barathol, ‘that is a guilt I can live with.’

  The expression hardened. ‘Honourable character is an essential prerequisite to becoming a member of the Guild.’

  ‘More than sponsorship?’

  ‘They are balanced virtues, sir. Now, I am very busy today—’

  ‘You were sleeping when I stepped in.’

  ‘It may have appeared that way.’

  ‘It appeared that way because it was that way.’

  ‘I have no time to argue with you over what you may or may not have perceived when you stepped into my office—’

  ‘You were asleep.’

  ‘You might have concluded such a thing.’

  ‘I did conclude it, because that is what you were. I suppose that too might result in disciplinary measures, once it becomes known to the members.’

  ‘Your word against mine, and clearly you possess an agenda, one that reflects poorly on your sense of honour—’ ‘Since when does honesty reflect poorly on one’s sense of honour?’

  The clerk blinked. ‘Why, when it is vindictive, of course.’

  Now it was Barathol’s turn to pause. And attempt a new tack. ‘I can pay an advance on my dues – a year’s worth or more, if necessary.’

  ‘Without sponsorship such payment would be construed as a donation. There is legal precedent to back that interpretation.’

  ‘You’d take my coin and give me nothing in return?’

  ‘That is the essence of a charitable donation, is it not?’

  ‘I don’t think it is, but never mind that. What you are telling me is that I cannot become a member of the Guild of Blacksmiths.’

  ‘Membership is open to all blacksmiths wishing to work in the city, I assure you. Once you have been sponsored.’

  ‘Which makes it a closed shop.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘The Malazan Empire encountered closed shops in Seven Cities. They broke them wide open. I think even some blood was spilled. The Emperor was not one to cringe before professional monopolies of any sort.’

  ‘Well,’ the clerk said, licking his slivery lips, ‘thank all the gods the Malazans never conquered Darujhistan!’

  Barathol stepped outside and saw Mallet waiting across the street, eating some kind of flavoured ice in a broad-leaf cone. The morning’s heat was fast melting the confection, and purple water was trickling down the healer’s pudgy hand. His lips were similarly stained.

  Mallet’s thin brows rose as the blacksmith approached. ‘Are you now a proud if somewhat poorer member of the Guild?’

  ‘No. They refused me.’

  ‘But why? Can you not take some kind of exam—’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh . . . so now what, Barathol?’

  ‘What? Oh, I’ll open up a smithy anyway. Independent.’

  ‘Are you mad? They’ll burn you out. Smash up your equipment. Descend on you in a mob and beat you to death. And that’s just on opening day.’

  Barathol smiled. He liked Malazans. Despite everything, despite the countless mistakes the Empire had made, all the blood spilled, he liked the bastards. Hood knew, they weren’t nearly as fickle as the natives of his homeland. Or, he added wryly, the citizens of Darujhistan. To Mallet’s predictions he said, ‘I’ve handled worse. Don’t worry about me. I plan on working here as a blacksmith, whether the Guild likes it or not. And eventually they will have to accept me as a member.’

  ‘That won’t feel very triumphant if you’re dead.’

  ‘I won’t be. Dead, that is.’

  ‘They’ll try to stop anyone doing business with you.’

  ‘I am very familiar with Malazan weapons and armour, Mallet. My work meets military standards in your old empire, and as you know, those are set high.’ He glanced across at the healer. ‘Will the Guild scare you off? Your friends?’

  ‘Of course not. But remember, we’re retired.’

  ‘And being hunted by assassins.’

  ‘Ah, I’d forgotten about that. You have a point. Even so, Barathol, I doubt us few Malazans can keep you in business for very long.’

  ‘The new embassy has a company of guards.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘And there are other Malazans living here. Deserters from the campaigns up north—’ ‘That’s true, too, though they tend to hide from us – not that we care. In fact, we’d rather get their business at the bar. What’s the point in grudges?’

  ‘Those that come to me will be told just that, then, and so we can help each other.’

  Mallet tossed the sodden cone away and wiped his hands on his leggings. ‘They tasted better when I was a young brat – although they were more expensive since a witch was needed to make the ice in the first place. Here, of course, it’s to do with some of the gases in the caverns below.’

  Barathol thought about that for a moment as he looked upon the healer with his purple lips and saw, for the briefest moment, how this man had been when he was a child, and then he smiled once more. ‘I need to find a suitable location for my smithy. Will you walk with me, Mallet?’

  ‘Glad to,’ the healer replied. ‘Now, I know the city – what precisely are you looking for?’

  And so Barathol told him.

  And oh how Mallet laughed and off they went into the city’s dark chambers of the heart, where blood flowed in a roar and all manner of deviousness was possible. If the mind was so inclined. A mind such as Barathol Mekhar’s when down – down! – was thrown the ghastly gauntlet!

  The ox, the selfsame ox, swung its head back and forth as it pulled the cartload of masonry into the arched gateway, into blessed shade for a few clumping strides, and then out into the bright heat once more – delicate blond lashes fluttering – to find itself in a courtyard and somewhere close was sweet cool water, the sound as it trickled an invitation, the smell soft as a kiss upon the broad glistening nose with its even more delicate blond hairs, and up rose the beast’s massive head and would not the man with the switch have pity on this weary, thirsty ox?

  He would not. The cart needed unloading first and so the ox must stand, silently yearning, jaws working the cud of breakfast with
loud, thick sounds of suction and wetly clunking molars, and the flies were maddening but what could be done about flies? Nothing at all, not until the chill of night sent them away and so left the ox to sleep, upright in bovine majesty beneath stars (if one was lucky) which, perhaps, was where the flies slept.

  Of course, to know the mind of an ox is to waste inordinate amounts of time before recognizing the placid civility of a herbivore’s sensibilities. Lift gaze, then, to the two vaguely shifty characters edging in through the gate – not workers struggling to and fro in the midst of the old estate’s refurbishment; not clerks nor servants; not masons nor engineers nor inspectors nor weight-gaugers nor measurers. To all appearances malingerers, skulkers, but in truth even worse than that—

  Twelve names on the list. One happily struck off. Eleven others found and then escaped like the slippery eels they no doubt were, being hunted by debt, ill luck and the vagaries of a clearly malicious universe intent on delivering misery and whatnot. But no matter such failure among the thugs sent out to enforce collection or deliver punishment – not the problem of these men, now, was it?

  Bereft of all burdens, blessed with exquisite freedom, Scorch and Leff were here, in this soon-to-be-opulent estate that was even now rising from the dust of neglect and decay to enshroud like a cloak of jewels the mysterious arrival of a nobleborn – a woman, it was rumoured, all veiled, but see the eyes! Eyes of such beauty! Why, imagine them widening as I reach down— Scorch and Leff, edging in nervously, barely emerging from the shadow of the arched gate. Peering round, as if lost, as if moments from running off with stolen chunks of masonry or an armload of bricks or even a bag of iron wedges—

  ‘Ho – you two! What do you want here?’

  Starting guiltily. Scorch staring wide-eyed at the grizzled foreman walking up to them – a Gadrobi so bowlegged he looked to be wading hip-deep through mud. Leff ducking his head as if instinctively dodging an axe – which said a lot about his life thus far, didn’t it – and then stepping one small pace forward and attempting a smile that fared so poorly it could not even be described as a grimace.

  ‘Is there a castellan we could talk to?’ Leff asked.