Toll the Hounds

Desra rushed into the chamber. She saw Skintick, saw him slowly sitting up. She saw what must be the Jaghut, the hood drawn back to reveal that greenish, unhu-man visage, the hairless pate so mottled it might have been a mariner’s map of islands, a tortured coastline, reefs. He stood tall in his woollen robes. But nowhere could she find Nimander.



The Jaghut’s eyes fixed on her for a moment, and then he faced one of the walls of ice.



She followed that gaze.



Staggering into darkness he was struck countless times. Fists pounded, fingers raked ragged furrows through his skin. Hands closed about his limbs and pulled.



‘This one is mine!’



‘No, mine!’All at once voices cried out on all sides and a hand closed about Nimander’s waist, plucked him into the air. The giant figure carrying him ran, feet thumping like thunder, up a steep slope, rocks scurrying down, first a trickle, then a roar of cascading stones, with screams in their wake.



Choking dust blinded him.



A sharp-edged crest crunching underfoot, and then a sudden even steeper de-scent, down into a caldera. Grey clouds rising in plumes, sudden coruscating heat foul with gases that stung his eyes, burned in his throat.



He was flung on to hot ash.



The giant creature loomed over him.



Through tears Nimander looked up, saw a strangely child-like face peering down. The forehead sloped back behind an undulating brow-ridge from which the eyebrows streamed down in thick snarls of pale, almost white hair. Round, smooth cheeks, thick lips, a pug nose, a pale bulging wattle beneath the rounded chin. Its skin was bright yellow, its eyes emerald green.



It spoke in the language of the Tiste Andii. ‘I am like you. I too do not belong here.’



The voice was soft, a child’s voice. The giant slowly blinked, and then smiled, revealing a row of dagger like fangs.



Nimander struggled to speak: ‘Where-who-all those people…’



‘Spirits. Trapped like ants in amber. But it is not amber. It is the blood of dragons.’



‘Are you a spirit?’



The huge head shook in a negative. ‘I am an Elder, and I am lost.’



‘Elder.’ Nimander frowned. ‘You call yourself that. Why?’ A shrug like hills in motion. ‘The spirits have so named me.’



‘How did you come to be here?’



‘I don’t know. I am lost, you see.’



‘And before this place?’



‘Somewhere else. I built things. Of stone. But each house I built then vanished-I know not where. It was most… frustrating.’



‘Do you have a name?’



‘Elder?’



‘Nothing else?’



‘Sometimes, I would carve the stone. To make it look like wood. Or bone. I remember… sunsets. Different suns, each night, different suns. Sometimes two. Sometimes three, one fierce, the others like children. I would build another house, if I could. I think, if I could do that, I would stop being lost.’



Nimander sat up. He was covered in volcanic dust, so fine it shed from him like liquid. ‘Build your house, then.’



‘Whenever I begin, the spirits attack me. Hundreds, then thousands. Too many.’



‘I stepped through a wall of ice.’ The memory was suddenly strong. ‘Omtose Phellack-’



‘Oh, ice is like blood and blood is like ice. There are many ways in. None out. You do not belong here because you are not yet dead. You are, lost, like me. We should be friends, I think.’



‘I can’t stay-’



‘I am sorry.’



Panic seethed to life in Nimander. He stood, sinking to his shins in the hot ash. ‘I can’t-Gothos. Find me. Gothos!’



‘I remember Gothos.’ A terrible frown lowered the Elder’s brows. ‘He would appear, just before the last stone was set. He would look upon my house and pronounce it adequate. Adequate! Oh, how I hated that word! My sweat, my blood, and he called them adequate! And then he would walk inside and close the door, and I would place the last stone, and the house would vanish! I don’t think I like Gothos.’



‘I don’t blame you,’ Nimander said, unwilling to voice his suspicion that Gothos’s arrival and the vanishing of the houses were in fact connected; that indeed the Jaghut came to collect them. This Elder builds the Houses of the Azath.



And he is lost.



‘Tell me,’ Nimander said, ‘do you think there are others like you? Others, out there, building houses?’



‘I don’t know.’



Nimander looked round. The jagged walls of the cone enclosed the space. Enormous chunks of pumice and obsidian lay half buried in the grey dust. ‘Elder, do the spirits ever assail you here?’