Toll the Hounds

soon. And then it would be over. The water was warm now-that might be one way to escape them, Do what Bainisk had just done. Just sink away, vanish,

He wasn’t wanted, he knew. Not by his mother, not by anyone. And the out who’d come to find him, well, that man had died for that. And that wasn’t right, Nobody should go and die for Harllo. Not Gruntle, not Bainisk, not anybody. So, no more of any of that-he could let go-

Foaming water, thrashing, gasps and coughs. An icy hand clutched at Harllo.

‘We can get through! Harllo-the tunnel on the other side-it slopes upward!’

‘I can’t-’

‘You have to! The city, Harllo, you have to show it to me-I’d be lost. I need you, Harllo. I need you.’

‘All right, but…’ He was about to tell Bainisk the truth. About the city. That it wasn’t the paradise he’d made it out to be. That people starved there. That people did bad things to each other. But no, that could wait. It’d be bad to talk about those things right now. ‘All right, Bainisk.’

They left the lantern. Bainisk uncoiled some of the rope and tied the end about Harllo’s waist, fumbling with numbed hands on the knot. ‘Take a few deep breaths first,’he said. ‘And then one more, deep as you can.’

The plunge into the dark left Harllo instantly disoriented. The rope round his waist pulled him down and then into the face of the current. He opened his eyes and felt the thrill of shock from the icy flow. Strange glowing streaks flashed past, possibly from the rock itself, or perhaps they were but ghosts lurking behind his eyes. At first he sought to help Bainisk, flailing with his arms and trying to kick, but after a moment he simply went limp.

Either Bainisk would pull them both through, or he wouldn’t. Either way was fine.

His mind began to drift, and he so wanted to take a breath-he couldn’t hold back much longer. His lungs were burning. The water would be cool, cool enough to quench that fire for ever more. Yes, he could do that.

Cold bit into his right hand-what? And then his head was lifted above the surface. And he was sucking in icy lungfuls of air.

Darkness, the rush and gurgle of water flowing past, seeking to pull him back, back and down. But Bainisk was tugging him along, and it was getting shallower as the tunnel widened. The black, dripping ceiling seemed to be sagging, forming a crooked spine overhead. Harllo stared up at it, wondering how he could see at all.

And then he was being dragged across broken stone.

They halted, lying side by side.

Before too long, the shivering began. Racing into Harllo like demonic posses-sion, a spirit that shook through him with rabid glee. His teeth chattered uncon-trollably.

Bainisk was plucking at him. Through clacking teeth he said, ‘Venaz won’t stop. He’ll see the lantern-he’ll know. We got to keep going, Harllo. It’s the only way to get warm again, the only way to get away.’

Hut it was so hard to climb to his feet. His legs still didn’t work properly. Bainisk had to help him and he leaned heavily on the bigger boy as they staggered skidding upslope along the scree-scattered path.

It seemed to Harllo that they walked for ever, into and out of faint light. Sometimes the slope pitched downward, only to slowly climb yet again. Pain throbbed in Harllo’s legs now, but it was welcome-life was returning, filled with its stubborn fire, and now he wanted to live, now it mattered more than anything else.

‘Look!’ Bainisk gasped. ‘At what we’re walking on-Harllo, look!’

Phosphorescent mould limned the walls, and in the faint glow Harllo could make out the vague shapes of the rubble underfoot. Broken pottery. Small fragments of burned bone.

‘It’s got to lead up,’ Bainisk said. ‘To some cave. The Gadrobi used them to bury their ancestors. A cave overlooking the lake. We’re almost there.’

Instead, they reached a cliff ledge.

And stood, silent.

A vertical section of rock had simply plummeted away, leaving a broad gap. The bottom of the fissure was swallowed in black, from which warm air rose in dry gusts. Opposite them, ten or more paces across, a slash of diffuse light revealed the continuation of the tunnel they had been climbing.

‘We’ll climb down,’ said Bainisk, uncoiling the rope and starting to tie a knot at one end. ‘And then back up. We can do this, you’ll see.’

‘What if the rope’s not long enough? I can’t see the bottom, Bainisk.’

‘We’ll just find more handholds.’ Now he was tying a loop at the other end which he then set round a knoblike projection. ‘I’ll throw a snake back up to dislodge this, so we can take the rope with us for the climb up the other side. Now, you go first.’ He tossed the rest of the rope over the edge. They heard it snap out to its full length. Bainisk grunted. ‘Like I said, we can find handholds.’

Harllo worked his way over the side, gripping hard the wet rope-it wanted to slide through, but if that happened he knew he was dead, so he held tight. His feet scrambled, found shallow ledges running at an angle across the cliff-face. Not much, but they eased the strain. He began working his way down.

He was perhaps three body-lengths down when Bainisk began following. The rope began swaying unpredictably, and Harllo found his feet slipping from their scant purchases again and again, each time resulting in a savage tug on his arms.

‘Bainisk!’ he hissed. ‘Wait! Let me go a little farther down first-you’re throwing me about.’

‘Okay. Go on.’

Harllo found purchase again and resumed the descent.

If Bainisk started up again he no longer felt the sways and tugs. The rope was getting wetter, which meant that he was reaching its end-the water was soaking its way down. And then he reached the sodden knot. Sudden panic as he sought to find projections in the wall for his feet. There were very few-the stone was almost sheer.

‘Bainisk! I’m at the knot!’ He craned his neck to look down. Blackness, unre-licved, depthless. ‘Bainisk! Where arc you?’

Since Harllo’s first call, Bainisk had not moved. The last thing he wanted to do was accidentally dislodge the boy, not after they’d made it this far. And, truth be told, he was experiencing a growing fear. This wall was too even-no cracks, the strata he could feel little more than ripples at a steeply canted angle. They would never be able to hold on once past the rope-and there was nothing he could use to slip the loop round.

They were, he realized, in trouble.

Upon hearing Harllo’s last call-the boy reaching the knot-he readied himself to resume his descent.

And there was a sharp upward tug on the rope.

He looked up. Vague faces peering over, hands and more hands reaching to close on the rope. Venaz-yes, there he was, grinning.

‘Got you,’ he murmured, low and savage. ‘Got you both, Bainisk.’

Another tug upward.

Bainisk drew his knife one-handed. He reached down to cut the rope beneath him, and then hesitated, looking up once more at Venaz’s face.

Maybe that had been his own, only a few years ago. That face, so eager to take over, to rule the moles. Well, Venaz could have them. He could have it all.

Bainisk reached up with the knife, just above his fist where it held tight. And he sliced through.

Dig heels in, it will not help. We must wing back to the present. For everything to be understood, every facet must flash alight at least once. Earlier, the round man begged forgiveness. Now, he pleads for trust. His is a sure hand, even if it trembles. Trust.

A bard sits opposite an historian. At a nearby table in K’rul’s Bar, Blend watches Scillara unfolding coils of smoke from her mouth. There is something avid in that gaze, but every now and then a war erupts in her eyes, when she thinks of the woman lying in a coma upstairs. When she thinks of her, yes. Blend has taken to sleeping in the bed with Picker, has taken to trying all she could think of to awaken sensation once more in her lover. But nothing has worked. Picker’s soul is lost, wandering far from the cool, flaccid flesh.

Blend hates herself now, as she senses her soul ready to move on, to seek the blessing of a new life, a new body to explore and caress, new lips to press upon her own.

But this is silly. Scillara’s amiability was ever casual. She was a woman who preferred a man’s charms, such as they were. And truth be told, Blend had played in that crib more than once herself. So why now has this lust awakened? What made it so wild, so needy?