Toll the Hounds

Nimander leaned on the rail, close to Aranatha. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.



Glancing up, she gave him another one of those appallingly innocent smiles. ‘Can you feel me now, Nimander?’



Was the idea of water enough to create an illusion so perfect that every sense was deceived? The serpent curl of the One River, known as Dorssan Ryl, encircled half the First City of Kharkanas. Before the coming of light there was no reflec-tion from its midnight surface, and to settle one’s hand in its ceaseless flow was to feel naught but a cooler breath against the skin as the current sighed round the intrution. ‘Water in Darkness, dreams in sleep’- or so wrote one of Mad Poets of the ninety-third century, during the stylistic trend in poetry characterized by brevity, a style that crashed in the following century during the period of art and oratory known as the Flowering Bright.



Water in perfect illusion… was this fundamentally no different from real wa-ter? If the senses provide all that defines the world, then were they not the ar-biters of reality? As a young acolyte, fired with passions of all sorts, Endest Silann had argued bell after bell with his fellow students over such matters. All those ‘Essence of truth, senses will lie’ themes that seemed so important then, before every universe exploded in the conflagration of creation, shoving all those bright, Muring candles over the table edge, down into the swirling sea of wax where every notion, every idea, melted into one and none, into the scalding sludge that drowned everyone no matter how clever, how wise, how poetic.



What am I thinking of these days! Naught but the nonsense of my wasted youth. ‘Certainty scours, a world without wonder.’ Ah, then, perhaps those terse poets had stumbled on to something after all. Is this what obsesses me now? A suspicion that all the truths that matter lie somewhere in a soul’s youth, in those heady days when words and thoughts could still shine-as if born from nothing solely for our personal edification.



Generation upon generation, this does not change. Or so it comforts us to be-lieve. Yet I wonder, now, does that stretch of delight grow shorter! Is it tighten-ing, cursed into a new kind of brevity, the one with ignorance preceding and cynicism succeding, each crowding the precious moment?



What then the next generation? Starved of wonder, indifferent to the reality or the unreality of the water flowing past, caring only whether they might drift or drown. And then, alas, losing the sense of difference between the two.



There was no one, here in his modest chamber, to hear his thoughts. No one, indeed, who even cared. Deeds must tumble forward, lest all these witnesses grow bored and restless. And if secrets dwelt in the lightless swirl of some un-seen, unimagined river, what matter when the effort to delve deep was simply too much? No, better to… drift.



But worries over the mere score of young Tiste Andii growing now in Black Coral was wasted energy. He had no wisdom to offer, even if any of them was in-clined to listen, which they weren’t. The old possessed naught but the single virtue of surviving, and when nothing changed, it was indeed an empty virtue.



He remembered the great river, its profound mystery of existence. Dorssan Ryl, into which the sewers poured the gritty, rain-diluted blood of the dead and dying. The river, proclaiming its reality in a roar as the rain lashed down in tor-rents, as clouds, groaning, fell like beasts on to their knees, only to fold into the now-raging currents and twist down into the black depths. All this, swallowed by an illusion.



There had been a woman, once, and yes, he might have loved her. Like the hand plunged into the cool water, he might have been brushed by this heady emo-tion, this blood-whispered obsession that poets died for and over which people murdered their dearest, And he recalled that the last time he set eyes upon her, down beside Dorssan Ryl, driven mad by Mother’s abandonment (many were), there was nothing he recognized in her eyes. To see, there in a face he had known, had adored, that appalling absence-she was gone, never to return.



So I held her head under, watched those staring, uncomprehending eyes grow ever wider, filling with blind panic-and there! At the last moment, did I not see-a sudden light, a sudden -



Oh, this was a nightmare. He had done nothing, he had been too much the coward. And he had watched her leave, with all the others so struck by loss, as they set out on a hopeless pilgrimage, a fatal search to find Her once again. What a journey that must have been! Before the last crazed one fell for the final time, punctuating a trail of corpses leagues long. A crusade of the insane, wandering into the nowhere.



Kharkanas was virtually an empty city after they’d gone. Anomander Rake’s first lordship over echoing chambers, empty houses. There would be many more,