Toll the Hounds

As might a crow or an owl, or indeed a winged eel, hover now a moment above this fair city, its smoke haze, the scurrying figures in the streets and lanes, the im-penetrable dark cracks of narrow alleyways. Thieves’ Road spreads a tangled web between buildings. Animals bawl and wives berate husbands and husbands bellow back, night buckets gush from windows down into the guttered alleys and-in some poorer areas of the Gadrobi District- into streets where pedestrians duck and dodge in the morning ritual of their treacherous journeys to work, or home. Clouds of flies are stirred awake with the dawn’s light. Pigeons revive their hopeless struggle to walk straight lines. Rats creep back into their closed-in refuges after yet another night of seeing far too much. The night’s damp smells are burned off and new stinks arise in pungent vapours.

And on the road, where it passes through the leper colony west of the city, a weary ox and a tired old man escort a burdened cart on which lies a canvas-wrapped figure, worn riding boots visible.

Ahead awaits Two-Ox Gate.

Hover no longer. Plummet both wings and spirit down to the buzzing flies, the animal heat sweet and acrid, the music closeness of the stained burlap. The old man pausing to wipe sweat from his lined brow with its array of warts and moles, and his knees ache and there is dull pain in his chest.

Of late, he has been carting corpses round day and night, or so it seems. Each one made him feel older, and the glances he has been casting at the ox are tainted with an irrational dislike, wavering in its intensity, as if the beast was to blame for… for something, though he knows not what.

The two guards at the gate were leaning against a wall, staying cool in the shade that would dwindle as the day rolled on overhead. Upon seeing the jutting boots one of the men stepped forward. ‘Hold, there. You’ll find plenty of cemeteries and pits outside the walls-we don’t need more-’

‘A citizen of the city,’ said the old man. ‘Killt in a duel. By Councillor Vidikas, who said to send him back to his friends-the dead man’s friends, I mean.’

‘Oh, right. On your way, then.’

Crowded as a city can be, an ox drawing a corpse-laden cart will find its path clear, for reasons involving a host of instinctive aversions, few of which made much sense. To see a dead body was to recoil, mind spinning a dust- devil of thoughts-that is not me-see the difference between us? That is not me, that is not me. No one I know, no one I have ever known. That is not me… but… it could be.

So easily, it could be.

Remonstrance of mortality is a slap in the face, a stinging shock. It is a struggle for one to overcome this moment, to tighten the armour about one’s soul, to see bodies as nothing but objects, unpleasant, to be disposed of quickly. Soldiers and undertakers fashion macabre humour to deflect the simple, raw horror of what they must see, of that to which they are witness. It rarely works. Instead, the soul crawls away, scabbed, wounded, at peace with nothing.

A soldier goes to war. A soldier carries it back home. Could leaders truly com-prehend the damage they do to their citizens, they would never send them to war. And if, in knowing, they did so anyway-to appease their hunger for power-then may they choke on the spoils for ever more.

Ah, but the round man digresses. Forgive this raw spasm of rage. A friend lies wrapped in canvas on the bed of a cart. Death is on its way home. Forgive.

Wending through Gadrobi District, life parted its stream, voices dimmed, and it was some time after the passing through of death that those voices arose once more in its wake. Curtains of flies repeatedly billowed open and closed again, until it seemed the ox pulled a stage of a thousand acts, each one the same, and the chorus was a bow wave of silence.

Journey on, comes the prayer of all, journey on.

At last, the old man finds his destination and draws the ox up opposite the doors, halting the beast with a tug on its yoke. He spends a moment brushing dust from his clothes, and then heads inside the Phoenix Inn.

It has been a long night. He hobbles to a table and catches the eye of one of the servers. He orders a tankard of strong ale and a breakfast. Stomach before business, The body’s not going anywhere, is it?

He did not know if it was love; he suspected he did not understand that word. But there was something inside Cutter that felt… sated. Was it just physical, these tangled pitches and rolls and the oil of sweat, breaths hot in his face with the scent of wine and rustleaf? Was it just the taste of the forbidden, upon which he fed as might a bat on nectar? If so, then he should have felt the same when with Scillara, perhaps even more so, since without question Scillara’s skills in that area far eclipsed those of Challice, whose hunger whispered of insatiable needs, transform- ing her lovemaking into a frantic search that found no appeasement, no matter how many times she convulsed in orgasm.

No, something was indeed different. Still, he was troubled, wondering if this strange flavour came from the betrayal they committed time and again. A married woman, the sordid man’s conquest. Had he become such a man? Well, he supposed that he had, but not in the manner of those men who made a career of seducing and stealing the wives of other men. And yet, there was a sense, an extraordinary sense, he admitted, of dark pleasure, savage delight, and he could see just how addictive such living could become.

Even so, he was not about to pursue the headlong pitch of promiscuity. There remained a part of him that thirsted for an end-or, rather, a continuation: love and life made stable, forces of reassurance and comfort. He was not about to toss Challice aside and seek out a new lover. He was, he told himself, not Murillio, who could travel with practised ease from bedroom to bedroom-and see where it had got him, damn near murdered by some drunken suitor.

Oh, there was a lesson there, yes. At least it seemed that Murillio had heeded it, if the rumours of his “retirement” were accurate. And what about me? Have I taken note? It seems not. I still go to her, I still plunge into this betrayal. I go to her, so hungry, so desperate, it is as if we have remade ourselves into perfect reflections. Me and Challice. Hand in hand in our descent.

Because it makes the fall easier, doesn’t it?

There was nothing to stop Gorlas Vidikas from exacting vengeance. He would be entirely within his rights to hunt them both down and murder them, and a part of Cutter would not blame him if he did just that.

He was thinking such thoughts as he walked to the annexe warehouse/but they did little to assail his anticipation. Into each other’s arms again, desire hot as a fever in their mouths, their hands, their groins. Proof, to Cutter’s mind, of the claims of some scholars that humans were but animals-clever ones, but animals hone the less. There was no room for thinking, no space for rationality. Consequences thinned to ethereal ghosts, snatched in with the first gasp and flung away in the next. Only the moment mattered.

He made no effort to disguise himself, no effort to mask the destination of his journey, and he well knew how the locals around the warehouse watched him, with that glittering regard that was envy and disgust and amusement in equal parts; much as they had watched Challice perhaps only moments earlier, although in her ease lust probably warred with all the other emotions. No, this af-fair was a brazen thing, and that in itself somehow made it all the more erotic,

There was heat in his mind as he used his key to open the office door, and when he stepped within he could smell her perfume in the dusty air. Through the office and into the cavernous warehouse interior, and then to the wooden steps leading to the loft.

She must have heard his ascent, for she was standing facing the door when he arrived.

Something in her eyes stopped him.

‘You have to save me,’ she said.

‘What has happened?’

‘Promise you’ll save me, my love. Promise!’

He managed a step forward. ‘Of course. What’s-’

‘He knows.’

The heat of desire evaporated. He was suddenly cold inside.

Challice drew closer and in her face he saw an expression he struggled to iden-tify, and when he did the cold turned into ice. She is… excited.

‘He will kill you. And me. He’ll kill us both, Crokus!’

‘As is his right-’

In her eyes a sudden fear, and she fixed him with it’ for a long moment before turning round. ‘Maybe you have no problem with dying,’ she hissed as she walked to the bed, where she faced him again. ‘But I have!’