Toll the Hounds

‘You don’t wish to believe, you mean. Now I will speak plain, Samar Dev. If your Toblakai wields the sword of the Crippled God, he shall have to either yield it or draw it against me. Such a weapon must be destroyed.’



‘You set yourself as an enemy of the Crippled God? Well, you’re hardly alone in that, are you?’



He frowned. ‘I did not then,’ he said, ‘nor do I desire to do so now. But he goes too far.’



‘Who are you, Traveller?’



‘I played the game of civilization once, Samar Dev. But in the end I remain as I am, a savage.’



‘Too many have put themselves into Karsa Orlong’s path,’ she said. ‘They do not stand there long.’ A pause, and then, ‘Civilized or barbarian-those are but words the cruel killer can wear all the costumes he wants, can pretend to great causes and hard necessities, God’s below, it all sickens me, the way you fools carry on. Over the whole damned world it’s ever the same.’



He answered this rant with silence, for he believed it was ever the same, and that it would never change. Animals remained just that, whether sentient or not, and they fought, they killed, they died. Life was suffered until it was over, and then… then what!



An end. It had to be that. It must be that.



Hiding on, now, no words between them. Already past the telling of stories, the recounting of adventures. All that mattered, for each of them, was what lay ahead.



With the Toblakai named Karsa Orlong.



Some time in his past, the man known as the Captain had been a prisoner to some-one. At some point he had outlived his usefulness and had been staked out on the plain, wooden spikes driven through his hands, his feet, hammered to the hard earth to feed the ants, to feed all the carrion hunters of Lamatath. But he’d not been ready to die just then. He had pulled his hands through the spikes, had worked his feet free, and had crawled on elbows and knees half a league, down into a valley where a once-mighty river had dwindled to a stream fringed by cottonwoods.



His hands were ruined. His feet could not bear his weight. And, he was con-vinced, the ants that had crawled into his ears had never left, trapped in the tun-nels of his skull, making of his brain a veritable nest-he could taste their acidic exudations on his swollen, blackened tongue.



If the legend was true, and it was, hoary long-forgotten river spirits had squirmed up from the mud beneath the exposed bank’s cracked skin, clawing like vermin to where he huddled fevered and shivering. To give life was no gift for such creatures; no, to give was in turn to take. As the king feeds his heir all he needs to survive, so the heir feeds the king with the illusion of immortality. And the hand reaches be-tween the bars of one cage, out to the hand reaching between the bars of the other cage. They exchange more than just touch.



The spirits fed him life. And he took them into his soul and gave them a new home. They proved, alas, restless, uncivil guests.



The journey and the transformation into a nomadic tyrant of the Lamatath Plains was long, difficult, and miraculous to any who could have seen the wretched, maimed creature the Captain had once been. Countless tales spun like dust-devils about him, many invented, some barely brushing the truth.



His ruined feet made walking an ordeal. His fingers had curled into hooklike things, the bones beneath calcifying into unsightly knobs and protrusions. To see his hands was to be reminded of the feet of vultures clutched in death.



He rode on a throne set on the forward-facing balcony of the carriage’s second tier, protected from the midday sun by a faded red canvas awning. Before him walked somewhere between four hundred and five hundred slaves, yoked to the carriage, each one leaning forward an they strained to pull the enormous wheeled palace over the rough ground, An equal number rested in the wagons of the en-tourage, helping the cooks and the weavers and the carpenters until their turn came in the harnesses.



The Captain did not believe in stopping. No camps were established. Motion was everything. Motion was eternal. His two wings of cavalry, each a hundred knights strong, rode in flanking positions, caparisoned in full banded armour and ebony cloaks, helmed and carrying barbed lances, the heads glinting in the sun-light. Behind the palace was a mobile kraal of three hundred horses, his greatest pride, for the bloodlines were strong and much of his wealth (that which he did not attain through raiding) came from them. Horse-traders from far to the south sought him out on this wasteland, and paid solid gold for the robust destriers.



A third troop of horse warriors, lighter-armoured, ranged far and wide on all sides of his caravan, ensuring that no enemy threatened, and seeking out possible targets-this was the season, after all, and there were-rarely these days, true enough-bands of savages eking out a meagre existence on the grasslands, in cluding those who bred grotesque mockeries of horses, wide-rumped and bristle-maned, that if nothing else proved good eating. These ranging troops included raiding parties of thirty or more, and at any one time the Captain had four or five such groups out scouring the plains.