Toll the Hounds

failing that becomes the essence of worship. He is the Dying God, after all.’

‘They celebrate the act of dying?’

‘In a manner, yes, assuming you can call it celebration. More like enslavement. Worship as self-destruction, perhaps, in which all choice is lost.’

‘And how can such a thing salve the mortal soul, Redeemer?’

‘That I cannot answer. But it may be that we shall soon find out.’

‘You do not believe I can protect you-at least in that we’re in agreement. So, when I fall-when I fail-the Dying God shall embrace me as it will you.’ He shook his head. ‘I am not unduly worried about me. I fear more the notion of what eternal dying can do to redemption-that seems a most unholy union.’

The Redeemer simply nodded and it occurred to Seerdomin that the god had probably been thinking of little else. A future that seemed sealed into fate, an end to what was, and nothing glorious in what would follow.

He rubbed at his face, vaguely dismayed at the weariness he felt. Here, discon-nected from his body, from any real flesh and bone, it was his spirit that was ex-hausted, battered down. And yet… and yet, I will stand. And do all I can. To defend a god I have chosen not to worship, against a woman who dreamt once of his embrace, and dreams of the same now-with far deadlier intent. He squinted down at her, a form almost shapeless in the gathering gloom beneath gravid, leaden clouds.

After a moment raindrops splashed against his helm, stained his forearms and his hands. He lifted one hand, and saw that the rain was black, thick, wending like slime.

The sky was raining kelyk.

She raised her head, and the distance between them seemed to vanish. Her eyes shone with fire, a slow, terrible pulse.

Gods below….

Like the worn ridge of a toothless jaw, the Gadrobi Hills rose into view, spanning the north horizon. Kallor halted to study them. An end to this damned plain, to this pointless sweep of grasses. And there, to the northwest, where the hills sank back down, there was a city.

He could not yet see it. Soon.

The temple would be nondescript, the throne within it a paltry thing, poorly made, an icon of insipid flaws. A broken fool once named Munug would writhe before it, in obeisance, the High Priest of Pathos, the Prophet of Failure-enough thematic unity, in fact, to give any king pause. Kallor allowed himself a faint Smirk. Yes, he was worthy of such worship, and if in the end he wrested it body and soul from the Crippled God, so be it.

The temple his domain, the score of bent and maimed priests and priestesses his court, the milling mob outside, sharing nothing but chronic ill luck, his subjects. This, he decided, had the makings of an immortal empire.

Patience-it would not do, he realized, to seek to steal the Fallen One’s wor-shippers. There was no real need. The gods were already assembling to crush the Crippled fool once and for all. Kallor did not think they would fail this time.’ Though no doubt the Fallen One had a few more tricks up his rotted sleeve, not least the inherent power of the cult itself, feeding as it did on misery and suffering-two conditions of humanity that would persist for as long as humans existed.

Kallor grunted. ‘Ah, fuck patience. The High King will take this throne. Then we can begin the… negotiations.’

He was no diplomat and had no interest in acquiring a diplomat’s skills, not even when facing a god. There would be conditions, some of them unpalatable, enough to make the hoary bastard choke on his smoke. Well, too bad.

One more throne. The last he’d ever need.

He resumed walking. Boots worn through. Dust wind-driven into every crease of his face, the pores of his nose and brow, his eyes thinned to slits. The world clawed at him, but he pushed through. Always did. Always would.

One more throne. Darujhistan.

Long ago, in some long-lost epoch, people had gathered on this blasted ridge over-looking the flattened valley floor, and had raised the enormous standing stones that now leaned in an uneven line spanning a thousand paces or more. A few had toppled here and there, but among the others Samar Dev sensed a belligerent vitality. As if the stones were determined to stand sentinel for ever, even as the bones of those who’d raised them now speckled the dust that periodically scoured their faces.

She paused to wipe sweat from her forehead, watching as Traveller reached the crest, and then moved off into the shade of the nearest stone, a massive phallic menhir looming tall, where he leaned against it with crossed arms. To await her, of course-she was clearly slowing them down, and this detail irritated her. What she lacked, she understood, was manic obsession, while her companions were driven and this lent them the vigour common to madmen. Which, she had long since decided, was precisely what they were.

She missed her horse, the one creature on this journey that she had come to feel an affinity with. An average beast, a simple beast, normal, mortal, sweetly dull-eyed and pleased by gestures of care and affection.

Resuming her climb, she struggled against the crumbled slope, forcing her legs between the sage brushes-too weary to worry about slumbering snakes and scor-pions, or hairy spiders among the gnarled, twisted branches.

The thump of Hnvok’s hoofs drummed through the ground, halting directly above her at the top of the slope. Scowling, she looked up.

Karsa’s regard was as unreadable as ever, the shattered tattoo like a web stretching to the thrust of the face behind it. He leaned forward on his mount’s neck and said, ‘Do we not feed you enough?’

‘Hood take you.’

‘Why will you not accept sharing Havok’s back, Witch?’

Since he showed no inclination to move, she was forced to work to one side as she reached the crest, using the sage branches to pull herself on to the summit. Where she paused, breathing hard, and then she held up her hands to her face, drawing in the sweet scent of the sage. After a moment she glanced up at the To-blakai. A number of responses occurred to her, in a succession of escalating vi-ciousness. Instead of voicing any of them, she sighed and turned away, finding her own standing stone to lean against-noting, with little interest, that Traveller had lowered his head and seemed to be muttering quietly to himself.

This close to the grey schist, she saw that patterns had been carved into its surface, wending round milky nodules of quartz. With every dawn, she realized, this side of the stone would seem to writhe as the sun climbed higher, the nodes glistening. And the purpose of all that effort? Not even the gods knew, she sus-pected.

History, she realized, was mostly lost. No matter how diligent the recorders, the witnesses, the researchers, most of the past simply no longer existed. Would never be known. The notion seemed to empty her out somewhere deep inside, as if the very knowledge of loss somehow released a torrent of extinction within her own memories- moments swirling away, never to be retrieved. She set a finger in one groove etched into the stone, followed its serpentine track downward as far as she could reach, then back up again. The first to do so in how long?

Repeat the old pattern-ignorance matters not-just repeat it, and so prove continuity.

Which in turn proves what!

That in living, one recounts the lives of all those long gone, long dead, even forgotten. Recounts in the demands of necessity-to eat, sleep, make love, sicken, fade into death-and the urges of blessed wonder-a finger tracking the serpent’s path, a breath against stone. Weight and presence and the lure of meaning and pattern.

By this we prove the existence of the ancestors. That they once were, and that one day we will be the same. I, Samar Dev, once was. And am no more.

Be patient, stone, another fingertip will come, to follow the track. We mark you and you mark us. Stone and flesh, stone and flesh…

Karsa slid down from Havok, paused to stretch out his back. He had been thinking much of late, mostly about his people, the proud, naive Teblor. The ever-tightening siege that was the rest of the world, a place of cynicism, a place where virtually every shadow was painted in cruelty, in countless variations on the same colourless hue. Did he truly want to lead his people into such a world? Even to deliver a most poetic summation to all these affairs of civilization?