Toll the Hounds

She should have gone below. Should be standing there in that narrow, cramped cellar, holding Chaur’s hand, listening to them all grieve, each in their own way. Antsy’s curses. Picker at his side, so close as to be leaning on him, but otherwise expressionless beyond the bleakness of her glazed stare. Barathol and his glisten-ing beard, his, puffy eyes, the knotted muscles ravaging his brow.

The door opened suddenly, sending a shaft of daylight through suspended dust, and in stepped the gray-haired bard.

She and Duiker watched as the man shut the door behind him and replaced the solid iron bar in its slots-how he had ended up with that bar in his hands was a mystery, yet neither Scillara nor the historian commented.

The man approached, and she saw that he too had not bothered to change his clothes, wearing the old blood with the same indifference she had seen in the others.

There’d been a half-dozen bodies, maybe more, at the stage. A passing observa-tion from Blend implicated the bard in that slaughter, but Scillara had trouble be-lieving that. This man was gaunt, old. Yet her eyes narrowed on the blood spatter on his shirt.

He sat down opposite them, met Duiker’s eyes, and said, ‘Whatever they have decided to do, Historian, they can count me in.’

‘So they did try for you, too,’ said Scillara.

He met her gaze. ‘Scillara, they attacked everyone in the room. They killed in-nocents.’

‘I don’t think they’ll do anything,’’ said Duiker, ‘except sell up and leave.’

‘Ah,’ the bard said, then sighed. ‘No matter. I will not be entirely on my own in any case.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I called in an old favour, Historian. Normally, I am not one to get involved in… things.’

‘But you’re angry,’ Scillara observed, recognizing at last the odd flatness in the old man’s eyes, the flatness that came before-before cold killing. This poet has claws indeed. And now I look at him, he’s not as old as I thought he was.

‘I am, yes.’

From below there came a splintering crack followed by shouts of surprise. All three at the table swiftly rose. Duiker leading the way, they ran to the kitchen, then down the narrow stairs to the cellar. Torchlight wavered at the far end of the elongated storage room, casting wild shadows on a bizarre scene. Pungent fluid sloshed on the earthen floor, seeming reluctant to drain, and in a half-circle stood the two Malazans, Barathol and Chaur, all facing one side wall where a large cask had shattered.

Antsy, Scillara surmised, had just kicked it.

Splitting it open, in a cascade of pickling juice, revealing to them all the object that liquid had so perfectly preserved.

Folded up with knees beneath chin, arms wrapped round the shins.

Still wearing a mask on which four linear, vertical barbs marked a row across the forehead.

The bard grunted. ‘I’d often wondered/ he said under his breath, ‘where the old ones ended up.’

The fluids were now seeping into the floor, along the edges of the freshly dug mounds.

A hundred stones, a cavort of ripples, the city in its life which is one life which is countless lives. To ignore is to deny brotherhood, sisterhood, the commonality that, could it be freed, would make the world a place less cruel, less vicious. But who has. time for that? Rush this way, plunge that way, evade every set of eyes, permit no recognition in any of the faces flashing past. The dance of trepidation is so very tiresome.

Hold this gaze, if you dare, in the tracking of these tremulous ripples, the lives, the lives! See Stormy Menackis, wrought with recrimination, savaged by guilt. She sleeps badly or not at all (who would risk peering into her dark bedroom at night, for fear of seeing the gleam of staring eyes?). She trembles, her nerves like strings of fire, whilst poor Murillio stands apart, desperate to comfort her, to force open all that had now closed between them.

And in the courtyard a mob of unattended young savages whaled about with wooden swords and it’s a miracle no one’s yet lost an eye or dropped to the pave-stones with a crushed trachea.

While, in a workroom not too far away, Tiserra sits at the potter’s wheel and stares into space as the lump of clay spins round and round to the rhythm of her pumping foot-struck frozen, shocked by the stunning realization of the sheer depth of her love for her husband. A love so fierce that she is terrified, compre-hending at last the extent of her vulnerability.

The sense is a wonder. It is delicious and terrifying. It is ecstatic.

Smile with her. Oh, do smile with her!

Whilst at this very moment, the object of Tiserra’s devotion strides into the courtyard of the Varada estate, his new place of employment. His mind, which had been calm in the course of his walk from home, now stirs with faint unease. He had sent Scorch and Leff home, and he had stood at the gate watching them stumble off like undead, and this had made him think of moment of greatest danger-just before dawn was the moment to strike, if one intended such violence-but who would bother? What was this mysterious Lady Varada up to anyway?

A seat on the Council, true, but was that sufficient cause for assassination? And why was he thinking of such things at all? There’d been rumours-picked up at the drunk baker’s stall-that the night just past should have belonged to the Assassins’ Guild but had turned sour for the hired killers and oh, wasn’t that re-grettable? A moment of silence then pass the dumplings, if you please.

Now he paused in the courtyard, seeing the latest employees, his peculiar charges, with their dubious pasts and potentially alarming motivations. Reunited, yes, with the castellan, with the infamous Studious Lock. Madrun and Lazan Door were tossing knuckles against the compound wall to his right. Technically, their shift was over, although Torvald Norn suspected that this game of theirs had been going on for some time. Another word of warning to them? No, his spir-its were already plunging, as they were wont to do when he awakened to a sense that something was being pulled over him, that he was being connived around-as his mother used to say when with one foot she pinned young Torvald to the floor and stared down at him as he squirmed and thrashed (mostly an act, of course; she weighed about as much as a guard dog, without the bite). Connived around, dear boy, and when I get to the bottom of things and all the trouble’s on the table, why, who will I find hiding in the closet?

His sweet mother never quite mastered the extended metaphor, bless her.

Suddenly too despondent to so much as announce his arrival, Torvald Nom headed for his office, eager to climb over the desk and plant himself in the chair, where he could doze until the sounding of the lunch chime. At least the cooks she’d employed knew their business.

Leave him there, now, and ride one last ripple, out beyond the city, west along the lakeshore, out to a dusty, smoky pit where the less privileged laboured through their shortened lives to keep such creatures as Gorlas Vidikas and Humble Measure at the level of comfort and entitlement they held to be righteous. And, to be fair, they laboured as well to contribute to the general feeling of civilization, which is normally measured by technical wherewithal, a sense of progression and the notion of structural stability, little of which said labourers could themselves experience, save vicariously.

The child Harllo has been lashed ten times for being places he wasn’t supposed to be, and this punishment was fierce enough to leave him prostrate, lying on his stomach on his cot with thick unguents slowly melting into the wounds on his back.

Bainisk had received a whip to his left shoulder which would result in the third such scar for dereliction of his responsibilities as overseer in Chuffs, and he now came to sit beside Harllo, studying his young charge in a silence that stretched.

Until at last Harllo said, ‘I’m sorry, Bainisk-’

‘Never mind that. I just want to know what you were up to. I didn’t think you’d keep secrets from me, I really didn’t. Venaz is saying “I told you so”. He’s saying you’re no good, Mole, and that I should just push you on to the dredge crews.’

The young ones did not live long in the dredge crews. ‘Venaz wants to be your best mole again.’

‘I know that, only he’s grown too big.’

‘People like him never like people like me,’ Harllo said. This was not a whine, just an observation.

‘Because you’re smarter than he is and his being older means nothing, means it’s worse even, because in your head you’re already past him, past us all, maybe. Listen, Harllo, I seen ones like you before, coming in, going through. They get beaten down, beaten stupid. Or they end up getting killed. Maybe they try to run, maybe they stand up to the pit bosses over something. Your smartness is what’s going to ruin you, you understand?’