Toll the Hounds

skill. Hood knew he was no sapper, but he was learning.

Nothing infuriated him more than losing a fight. True, they’d come out the

Other side, while pretty much all of the assassins had died, so it wasn’t really a defecit, but it felt like one. Since retiring, his handful of Malazan companions had come to feel like family. Not in the way a squad did, since squads existed to fight, to kill, to wage war, and this made the tightness between the soldiers a strange one. Stained with brutality, with the extremes of behaviour that made every mo-ment of life feel like a damned miracle. No, this family wasn’t like that. They’d all calmed down some. Loosened up, left the nasty shit far behind. Or so they’d thought.

As he and Picker set out for Coll’s estate and the wretched house behind its grounds, he tried to think back to when he’d had nothing to do with this kind of life, back to when he’d been a scrawny bow-legged runt in Falar. Bizarrely, his own mental image of his ten-year-old face retained the damned moustache and he was pretty sure he’d yet to grow one, but memories were messy things. Unreli-able, maybe mostly lies, in fact. A scatter of images stitched together by invented shit, so that what had been in truth a time as chaotic as the present suddenly seemed like a narration, a story.

The mind in the present was ever eager to narrate its own past, each one its own historian, and since when were historians reliable on anything? Aye, look at Duiker. He spun a fine tale, that one about Coltaine and the Chain of Dogs. Heartbreaking, but then those were always the best kind, since they made a per-son feel-when so much of living was avoiding feeling anything. But was any of it real! Aye, Coltaine got killed for real. The army got shattered just like he said. But any of the rest? All those details?

No way of ever knowing. And it don’t really matter in the end, does it?

Just like our own tales. Who we were, what we did. The narration going on, until it stops. Sudden, like a caught breath that never again lets out.

End of story.

The child with the moustache was looking at him, there in his head. Scowling, suspicious, maybe disbelieving. ‘You think you know me, old man? Not a chance. You don’t know a thing and what you think you remember ain’t got nothing to do with me. With how I’m thinking. With what I’m feeling. You’re farther away than my own da, that miserable, bitter tyrant neither of us could ever figure out, not you, not me, not even him. Maybe he’s not us, but then he’s not him, either.

‘Old man, you’re as lost as I am and don’t pretend no different. Lost in life… till death finds you.’

Well, this was why he usually avoided thinking about his own past. Better left untouched, hidden away, locked up in a trunk and dropped over the side to sink down into the depths. Problem was, he was needing to dredge up some things all over again. Thinking like a soldier, for one. Finding that nasty edge again, the hard way of looking at things. The absence of hesitation.

Gallons of ale wasn’t helping. Just fed his despondency, his sense of feeling too old, too old for all of it, now.

‘Gods below, Antsy, I can hear you grinding your teeth from over here. What-ever it is, looks like it’s tasting awful.’

He squinted across at her. ‘Expect me to be skippin’ a dance down this damned street? We’re in more trouble than we’ve ever been, Tick.’

‘We’ve faced worse-’

‘No. Because when we faced worse we was ready for it. We was trained to deal with it. Grab it by the throat, choke the life from it.’ He paused, and then spat on to the cobbles before adding, ‘I’m starting to realize what “retirement” really means. Everything we let go of, we’re now scrabbling to get back, only it’s outa reach. It’s fuckin’ out of reach.’

She said nothing, and that told Antsy she knew he was right; that she felt the same.

Scant comfort, this company.

They reached Coil’s estate, went round towards the back wall. The journey from K’rul’s Bar to here was already a blur in Antsy’s mind, so unimportant as to be instantly worthless. He’d not registered a single figure amidst the crowds on the streets. Had they been tracked? Followed? Probably. ‘Hood’s breath, Pick, I wasn’t checkin’ if we picked up a sniffin’ dog. See what I mean?’

‘We did,’ she replied. ’Two of ’em. Lowlifes, not actual assassins, just their dogs, like you say. They’re keeping their distance-probably warned right off us. I doubt they’ll follow us into the wood.’

‘No,’ Antsy agreed. ‘They’d smell ambush.’

‘Right, so never mind them.’

She led the way into the overgrown thicket behind the estate. The uneven for-est floor was littered at the edges with rubbish, but this quickly dwindled as they pushed deeper into the shadowy, overgrown copse. Few people, it was obvious, wanted to set eyes on the Finnest House, to feel the chill of it looking right back at them. Attention from something as ghastly as that dark edifice was unwanted attention.

Thirty uneven strides in, they caught sight of the black half-stone half-wood walls, the wrinkled, scarred face of the house, shutters matted like rotted wicker, no light leaking through from anywhere. Vines snaked up the sides, sprawled out over the humped ground in the low-walled yard. The few trees in that yard were twisted and leafless, roots bared like bones.

‘More lumps than last time I was here,’ Picker observed as they made their way towards the gate.

Antsy grunted. ‘No shortage of idiots tryin’ t’get inside. Thinkin’ they’ll find treasure…’

‘Secret short cuts to power,’ she added. ‘Magical items and crap.’

‘An’ all they got was an early grave.’ He hesitated at the gate and glanced at Picker. ‘Could be we end up the same way.’

‘Stay on the path, that’s the trick. Follow me.’

He fell into step close behind her as she set out along the narrow, winding track of tilted pavestones. Too close, as he trod on her heel and almost made her stumble. She shot him a vicious look over one shoulder before continuing on.

The sheer lack of anything untoward had Antsy’s nerves overwrought by the time they reached the door. He watched as Picker lifted a gloved hand, made a fist, hesitated, then thumped it hard against the black wood. The boom reverber-ated as if an abyss waited on the other side.

They waited. From here, all sounds of the city beyond this wood had vanished, as if the normal world had ceased to exist, or, perhaps, the endless rush of life out there held no relevance to what loomed before them now, this grotesque intru-sion from another realm.

A dozen heartbeats. Picker made to pound once more on the door.

The clunk of a latch sounded dully through the thick wood, and a moment later the door creaked back.

Paran had spoken of the lich resident in the Finnest House, the blasted creature that had once been a Jaghut, but this was Antsy’s first sight of it. Tall (gods how he hated tall things), gaunt yet large-boned, adorned in a long ragged coat of black chain. Bared head with long colourless hair hanging down from patches-where the scalp was visible there was twisted scarring, and in one place something had punctured through the skull, and within the uneven hole left behind there was only darkness, as if the apparition’s brain had simply withered away. Tusks in a shattered face, the eyes shrunken back into shadows. All in all, Antsy was not in-spired with confidence that this fell meeting would proceed in anything like a rea-sonable fashion.

‘Lord Raest,’ Picker said, bowing. ‘I am a friend of Ganoes Paran. If you recall, we met-’

‘I know who you are, Corporal Picker,’ the lich replied in a deep, resonant voice.

‘This is Sergeant Antsy-’

‘What do you want?’

‘We need to find Ganoes Paran-’

‘He is not here.’

‘We need to get a message to him.’

‘Why?’

Picker glanced at Antsy, then back up at Raest. ‘Well, it’s a complicated tale-can we come inside?’

Raest’s dead eyes held steady on her for a long moment, and then he asked, ‘Do you expect me to serve refreshments as well?’