Toll the Hounds

He had looked into her eyes. He had seen it. That love. He had seen it.

And more, he had understood.

The Dying God, he was coming. Pure as music, bright as truth, solid as certainty. A fist of power, driving onward, smashing everything in its path, until that fist uncurled and the hand opened, to close round the soul of the Redeemer. A weaker god, a god lost in its own confusion.

Salind would be that fist, she would be that hand. Delivering a gift, from which a true and perfect faith would emerge.

This is the blood of redemption. You will understand, Redeemer. Drink deep the blood of redemption, and dance.

The song is glory, and glory is a world we need never leave. And so, my beloved Itkovian, dance with me. Here, see me reaching for you-

Supine on the muddy floor of Gradithan’s hut, Salind leaked thick black mucus from her mouth and nose, from the tear ducts of her eyes. Her fingernails were black, and more inky fluid oozed out of them. She was naked, and as he knelt beside her Gradithan had paused, breathing hard, his eyes fixed on the black milk trickling down from the woman’s nipples.

Standing wrapped in his raincape close to the doorway, Monkrat looked on with flat eyes, his face devoid of expression. He could see how Gradithan struggled against the sudden thirst, the desire that was half childlike and half sexual, as he stared down at those leaking breasts. The bastard had already raped her, in some twisted consummation, a sacrifice of her virginity, so the only thing that must have been holding the man back was some kind of overriding imperative. Monkrat was not happy thinking about that.

Gradithan lifted Salind’s head with one hand and tugged open her mouth with the other. He reached for the jug of saemankelyk. ‘Time,’ he muttered, ‘and time, time, time, the time. Is now.’ He tipped the jug and the black juice poured into Salind’s gaping, stained mouth.

She swallowed, and swallowed, and it seemed she would never stop, that her body was depthless, a vessel with no bottom. She drank down her need, and that need could never find satiation.

Monkrat grunted. He’d known plenty of people like that. It was a secret poorly kept once you knew what to look for, there in their eyes. Hope and expectation and hunger and the hint of spiteful rage should a single demand be denied. They had a way of appearing, and then never leaving. Yes, he’d known people like that.

And, well, here was their god, shining from Salind’s eyes. Everyone needed a god. Slapped together and shaped with frantic hands, a thing of clay and sticks. Built up of wants and all those unanswerable questions that plagued the mortal soul. Neu-roses carved in stone. Malign obsessions given a hard, judgemental face-he had seen them, all the variations, in city after city, on the long campaigns of the Malazan Empire. They lined the friezes in temples; they leered down from balustrades. Ten thousand gods, one for every damned mood, it seemed. A pantheon of exaggerated flaws.

Salind was convulsing now, the black poison gushing from her mouth, thick as honey down her chin, and hanging in drop-heavy threads like some ghastly beard.

When she smiled, Monkrat flinched.

The convulsions found a rhythm, and Gradithan was pushed away as she un-dulated upright, a serpent rising, a thing of sweet venom.

Monkrat edged back, and before Gradithan could turn to him the ex-Bridgeburner slipped outside. Rain slanted down into his face. He paused, ankle-deep in streaming mud, and drew up his hood. That water had felt clean. If only it could wash all of this away. Oh, not the camp-it was already doing that-but everything else. Choices made, bad decisions stumbled into, years of useless living. Would he ever do anything right? His list of errors had grown so long he felt trapped by some inter-nal pell-mell momentum. Dozens more awaited him-

A bedraggled shape emerged from the rain. Grizzled face, a sopping hairshirt. Like some damned haunt from his past, a ghoul grinning with dread reminders of everything he had thrown away.

Spindle stepped up to Monkrat. ‘It’s time.’

‘For what? Aye, we got drunk, we laughed and cried and all that shit. And maybe I told you too much, but not enough, I’m now thinking, if you believe you can do a damned thing about all this. It’s a god we’re talking about here, Spin. A god.’

‘Never mind that. I been walking through this shit-hole. Monkrat, there’s chil-dren here. Just… abandoned.’

‘Not for long. They’re going to be taken. Used to feed the Dying God.’

‘Not if we take ’em first.’

‘Take them? Where?’

Spindle bared his teeth, and only now did Monkrat comprehend the barely re-strained fury in the man facing him. ‘Where? How about away? Does that sound too complicated for you? Maybe those hills west of here, in the woods. You said it was all coming down. If we leave ’em they’ll all die, and I won’t have it.’

Monkrat scratched at his beard. ‘Now ain’t that admirable of you, but-’

The hard angled point of a shortsword pressed the soft flesh below Monkrat’s chin. He scowled. The bastard was last, all right and old Monkrat was losing his edge.

‘Now,’ hissed Spindle, ‘you either follow Gredithick around-’

‘Gradithan.’

‘Whatever. You either follow him like a pup, or you start helping me round up the runts still alive.’

‘You’re giving me a choice?’

‘Kind of. If you say you want to be a pup, then I’ll saw off your head, as clum-sily as I can.’

Monkrat hesitated.

Spindle’s eyes widened. ‘You’re in a bad way, soldier-’

‘I ain’t a soldier no more.’

‘Maybe that’s your problem. You’ve forgotten things. Important things.’

‘Such as?’

Spindle grimaced, as if searching for the right words, and Monkrat saw in his mind a quick image of a three- legged dog chasing rabbits in a field. ‘Fine,’ Spindle finally said in a.grating tone. ‘It had to have happened to you at least once. You and your squad, you come into some rotten foul village or hamlet. You come to buy food or maybe get your tack fixed, clothes mended, whatever. But you ain’t there to kill nobody. And so you get into a few conversations. In the tavern. The smithy. With the whores. And they start talking. About injustices. Bastard landholders, local bullies, shit-grinning small-time tyrants. The usual crap. The corruption and all that. You know what I’m talking about, Monkrat?’

‘Sure.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘We hunted the scum down and flayed their arses. Sometimes we even strung ’em up.’

Spindle nodded. ‘You did justice, is what you did. It’s what a soldier can do, when there’s nobody else. We got swords, we got armour, we got all we need to terrorize anybody we damned well please. But Dassem taught us-he taught every soldier in the Malazan armies back then. Sure, we had swords, but who we used ’em on was up to us.’ The point of the shortsword fell away. ‘We was soldiers, Monkrat. We had the chance-the privilege-of doing the right thing.’

‘I deserted-’

‘And I was forced into retirement. Neither one changes what we were.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong.’

‘Then listen to this.’ The shortsword pressed against his throat again. ‘I can still deliver justice, and if need be I’ll do it right now and right here. By cutting a coward’s head off.’

‘Don’t talk to me about cowardice!’ Monkrat snapped. ‘Soldiers don’t talk that ever! You just broke the first rule!’

‘Someone turns his back on being a soldier-on what it means in the soul-that’s cowardice. You don’t like the word, don’t five it.’

Monkrat stared into the man’s eyes, and hated what he saw there. He sagged.

‘Best get on with it then, Spin. I got nothing left. I’m used up. What do you do when the soldier inside you dies before you do? Tell me.’