Deadhouse Gates

else.

Nethpara was breathless as he hurried up, his slack folds of flesh quivering and mud-spattered. 'Imperial Historian Duiker, we wish to speak with you.'

Lack of sleep — and a host of other things — had drawn Duiker's tolerance short, but he managed to keep his tone calm. 'I suggest another time-'

'Quite impossible!' snapped the third nobleman. 'The Council is not to be brushed off yet again. Coltaine holds the sword and so may keep us at bay with his barbaric indifference, but we will have our petition delivered one way or the other!'

Duiker blinked at the man.

Tumlit cleared his throat apologetically and dabbed his watering eyes. 'Historian, permit me to introduce the Highborn Lenestro, recent resident of Sialk-'

'No mere resident!' Lenestro squealed. 'Sole representative of the Kanese family of the same name, in all Seven Cities. Factor in the largest trade enterprise exporting the finest tanned camel hide. I am chief within the Guild, granted the honour of First Potency in Sialk. More than one Fist has bowed before me, yet here I stand, reduced to demanding audience with a foul-bespattered scholar-'

'Lenestro, please!' Tumlit said in exasperation. 'You do your cause little good!'

'Slapped across the face by a lard-smeared savage the Empress should have had spiked on a wall years ago! I warrant she will regret her mercy when news of this horror reaches her!'

'Which horror would that be, Lenestro?' Duiker quietly asked.

The question made Lenestro gape and sputter, his face reddening.

Nethpara elected to answer. 'Historian, Coltaine conscripted our servants. It was not even a request. His Wickan dogs simply collected them — indeed, when one of our honoured colleagues protested, he was struck upon his person and knocked to the ground. Have our servants been returned? They have not. Are they even alive? What horrible suicide stand was left to them? We have no answers, Historian.'

'Your concern is for the welfare of your servants?' Duiker asked.

'Who shall prepare our meals?' Lenestro demanded. 'Mend our clothes and raise our tents and heat the water for our baths? This is an outrage!'

'Their welfare is uppermost in my mind,' Tumlit said, offering a sad smile.

Duiker believed the man. 'I shall enquire on your behalf, then.'

'Of course you shall!' Lenestro snapped. 'Immediately.'

'When you can,' Tumlit said.

Duiker nodded, turned away.

'We are not yet done with you!' Lenestro shouted.

'We are,' Duiker heard Tumlit say.

'Someone must silence these dogs! Their howling has no end!'

Better howling than snapping at the heel. He walked on. His desire to wash himself was becoming desperate. The residue of blood and flesh had begun to dry on his clothes and on his skin. He was attracting attention as he shuffled down the aisle between the tents. Warding gestures were being made as he passed. Duiker feared he had inadvertently become a harbinger, and the fate he promised was as chilling as the soulless howls of the camp dogs.

Ahead, the morning's light bled across the sky.

Book Three

Chain of Dogs

When the sands

Danced blind,

She emerged from the face

Of a raging goddess

Sha'ik

Bidithal

CHAPTER ELEVEN

If you seek the crumbled bones

of the T'lan Imass,

gather into one hand

the sands of Raraku

The Holy Desert

Anonymous

Kulp felt like a rat in a vast chamber crowded with ogres, caged in by shadows and but moments away from being crushed underfoot. Never before when entering the Meanas Warren had it felt so … fraught.

There were strangers here, intruders, forces so inimical to the realm that the very atmosphere bridled. The essence of himself that had slipped through the fabric was reduced to a crouching, cowering creature. And yet, all he could feel was a series of fell passages, the spun wakes that marked the paths the unwelcome had taken. His senses shouted at him that — for the moment at least — he was alone, the dun sprawled-out landscape devoid of all life.

Still he trembled with terror.

Within his mind he reached back a ghostly hand, finding the tactile reassurance of the place where his body existed, the heave and slush of blood in his veins, the solid weight of flesh and bone. He sat cross-legged in the captain's cabin of the Silanda, watched over by a wary, restless Heboric, while the others waited on the deck, ever scanning the unbroken, remorselessly flat horizon on all sides.

They needed a way out. The entire Elder Warren they'd found themselves in was flooded, a soupy, shallow sea. The oarsmen could propel Silanda onward for a thousand years, until the wood rotted in their dead hands, the shafts snapping, until the ship began to disintegrate around them, still the drum would beat and the backs would bend. And we'd be long dead by then, nothing but mouldering dust. To escape, they must find a means of shifting warrens.

Kulp cursed his own limitations. Had he been a practitioner of Sere, or Denul or D'riss or indeed virtually any of the other warrens accessible to humans, he would find what they needed. But not Meanas. No seas, no rivers, not even a Hood-damned puddle. From within his warren, Kulp was seeking to effect a passage through to the mortal world. . and it was proving problematic.

They were bound by peculiar laws, by rules of nature that seemed to play games with the principles of cause and effect. Had they been riding a wagon, the passage through the warrens would unerringly have taken them on a dry path. The primordial elements asserted an intractable consistency across all warrens. Land to land, air to air, water to water.

Kulp had heard of High Mages who — it was rumoured — had found ways to cheat those illimitable laws, and perhaps the gods and other Ascendants possessed such knowledge as well. But they were as beyond a lowly cadre mage as the tools of an ogre's smithy to a cowering rat.