Toll the Hounds

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. Broth-ers 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 crossbeam, 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 shat-tered. 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, some-times 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 com-passion.

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 thun-derous shock to the coddled highborn citizens in their walled homes. Spurred by frantic demands for investigation, the City Guard brought in court mages to con-duct magical examinations. Before long a new detail was whispered that widened eyes, that made citizens gasp. Assassins! One and all-the Guild has been dev-astated! And, following this, on a few faces, a sly smile of pleasure-quickly hid-den or saved for private moments, since one could never be too careful. Still, the evil killers had clearly 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 omi-

nous 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 mak-ing 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

/ ciin’i think of one right now. Maybe just… instinctive. Yes, Ralllick 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 sur-faces. 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 twitch-ing 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 re-ally 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.