Toll the Hounds

‘None so dire as what I would tell you!’ said Iskaral Pust.

And now Sordiko was rubbing at her own brow.

‘It’s working!’

Lady Envy eyed him. ‘If I grant you this exchange, Magus, will you then re-strain yourself, thus permitting the High Priestess and me to conduct our conver-sation?’

‘My restraint is guaranteed, Lady Envy. Of course, I make this promise only if you do the same.’

‘Whatever do you mean?’

‘Lady Envy, I arrived on a ship.’

‘What of it?’

‘A ship owned by a most delicious woman-’

‘Oh, not another one!’ moaned Sordiko Qualm.

‘The poor thing,’ said Lady Envy.

‘Hardly.’ Iskaral Pust leaned back in his chair, tilting it up on its legs so that his view could encompass both women. ‘How I dream of such moments as this! See how they hang on my every word! I have them, I have them!’

‘What is wrong with this man, High Priestess?’

‘I could not begin to tell you.’

Iskaral Pust examined has hands, his fingernails-but that made him slightly nauseous, since the bhokarala were in the habit of sucking on his fingertips when he slept at night, leaving them permanently wrinkled, mangled and decidedly un-pleasant, so he looked away, casually, and found himself staring at Therule, which wasn’t a good idea either, so, over there, at that flower-safe enough, he supposed-until it was time at last to meet Lady Envy’s extraordinary eyes. ‘Yes,’ he drawled, ‘I see the similarity at last, although you were the victor in the war of perfection. Not by much, but triumphant none the less and for that I can only ap-plaud and admire and all that. In any case, resident even at this very moment, on the ship, in the harbour, is none other than your beloved sister, Spite!’

‘I thought so!’ Lady Envy was suddenly on her feet, trembling in her… excitement?

Iskaral Pust sniggered. ‘Yes, I play at this until they play no more, and all truths are revealed, as sensibilities are rocked back and forth, as shock thunders through the cosmos, as the shadows themselves explode into all existence! For am I not the Magus of Shadow? Oh, but I am, I am!’ He then leaned forward with an expression of gravid dismay. ‘Are you not delighted, Lady Envy? Shall I hasten to her to forward your invitation to visit this wondrous garden? Instruct me as your servant, please! Whatever you wish, I will do! Of course I won’t! I’ll do what-ever I want to. Let her think otherwise-maybe it’ll bring some colour back to her face, maybe it’ll calm the storm in her eyes, maybe it’ll stop the water in this trough from boiling-impressive detail, by the way, now, what should I say next?’

Sordiko Qualm and Lady Envy never did get to their conversation that day.

Grainy-eyed and exhausted, Cutter went in search of somewhere to eat breakfast. Once his belly was full, he’d head back to the Phoenix Inn and collapse on his bed upstairs. This was the extent of his tactical prowess and even achieving that had been a struggle. He would be the last man to downplay the extraordinary variety of paths a life could take, and there were few blessings he could derive from hav-ing come full circle-from his journey and the changes wrought in himself be-tween the Darujhistan of old and this new place-and yet the contrast with the fate that had taken Challice Vidikas had left him numbed, disorientated and feel-ing lost.

He found an empty table on the half-courtyard restaurant facing Borthen Park, an expensive establishment that reminded him he was fast running out of coin, and sat waiting for one of the servers to take note of him. The staff were Rhivi one and all, three young women dressed in some now obscure fashion characterized by long swishing skirts of linen streaked in indigo dye, and tight black leather vests with nothing underneath. Their hair was bound up in knotted braids, revealing his sected clam-shells stitched over their ears. While this latter affectation was quaint the most obvious undesirable effect was that twice one of the servers sauntered past him and did not hear his attempts to accost her. He resolved to stick out a leg the next time, then was shocked at such an ungracious impulse.

At last he caught the attention of one of them and she approached. ‘A pot of tea, please, and whatever you’re serving for breakfast.’

Seeing his modest attire, she glanced away as she asked, in a bored tone, ‘Fruit breakfast or meat breakfast? Eggs? Bread? Honey? What kind of tea-we have twenty-three varieties.’

He frowned up at her. ‘Er, you decide.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘What did you have this morning?’

‘Flatcakes, of course. What I always have.’

‘Do you serve those here?’

‘Of course not.’

‘What kind of tea did you drink?’

‘I didn’t. I drank beer.’

‘Rhivi custom?’

‘No,’ she replied, still looking away, ‘it’s my way of dealing with the excitement of my day.’

‘Gods below, just bring me something. Meat, bread, honey. No fancy rubbish with the tea, either.’

‘Fine,’ she snapped, flouncing off in a billow of skirts.

Cutter squeezed the bridge of his nose in an effort to fend off a burgeoning headache. He didn’t want to think about the night just past, the bell after bell spent in that graveyard, sitting on that stone bench with Challice all too close by his side. Seeing, as the dawn’s light grew, what the handful of years had done to her, the lines of weariness about her eyes, the lines bracketing her mouth, the maturity revealed in a growing heaviness, her curves more pronounced than they had once been. The child he had known was still there, he told himself, beneath all of that. In the occasional gesture, in the hint of a soft laugh at one point. No doubt she saw the same in him-the layers of hardness, the vestiges of loss and pain, the residues of living.

He was not the same man. She was not the same woman. Yet they had sat as if they had once known each other. As if they were old friends. Whatever childish hopes and vain ambitions had sparked the space between them years ago, they were deftly avoided, even as their currents coalesced into something romantic, something oddly nostalgic.

It had been the lively light ever growing in her eyes that most disturbed Cut-ter, especially since he had felt his own answering pleasure-in the hazy reminis-cences they had played with, in the glow lifting between them on that bench that had nothing to do with the rising sun.

There was nothing right about any of this. She was married, after all. She was nobility but no, that detail was without relevance, for what she had proposed had nothing to do with matters of propriety, was in no way intended to invite public scrutiny.

She is bored. She wants a lover. She wants what she could have had but didn’t take. A second chance, that’s what she wants.

Do second chances even exist?

This would be… sordid. Despicable. How could he even contemplate such a thing?

Maybe Apsalar saw all too well. Saw right into me, to the soul that was less than it should have been, to the will that was weak. I do not stand before a woman, do I? No, I fall into her arms. I change shape to fit each one, to make things snug, as if matching their dreams is the only path I know into their hearts.

Maybe she was right to walk away.

Was this all that Challice wanted? An amusing diversion to alleviate the drudgery of her comfortable life? He admitted to some suspicion that things were not that simple. There had been a darker current, as if to take him meant some-thing more to Challice. Proof of her own descent, perhaps. Her own fall. Or some-thing else, something even more pernicious.

The Rhivi server had brought him a pot of tea, a plate of fresh bread, a dipping jar of honey, and a bowl of diced fruit. He now stared at the array on the table in front of him, trying without success to recall the moment it had all arrived.

‘I need you,’ she had said, the words cutting through his exhaustion as the sky began to show its colour.