Toll the Hounds
The healer had left. In the main room below, Duiker and Scillara sat in the company of ghosts and not much else.
Although still weak, Blend set out to collect her weapons and armour. Antsy followed her into the corridor.
‘What’re you planning?’ he demanded, almost on her heels as she went into her own room.
‘I’m not sure,’ she replied, laying out her chain hauberk on the bed, then pulling off her shirt to find the padded undergarment.
Antsy’s eyes bugged slightly as he stared at her breasts, the faint bulge of her belly, the sweet-
Blend tugged on the quilted shirt and then returned to the hauberk. ‘You’ll need to wrap me,’ she said.
‘Huh? Oh, aye. Right. But what about me?’
She regarded him for a moment. ‘You want to help?’
He half snarled in reply.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Go find a couple of crossbows and plenty of quarrels. You’re going to cover me, for as long as that’s possible. We don’t walk together.’
‘Aye, Blend.’
She worked the hauberk over her head and pushed her arms through the heavy sleeves.
Antsy went to the equipment trunk at the foot of the bed and began rummaging through its contents, looking for the swaths of black cloth to bind the armour close and noiseless about Blend’s body. ‘Gods below, woman, what do you need all these clothes for?’
‘Banquets and soirees, of course.’’You ain’t never been to one in your life woman.’
‘The possibility always exists, Antsy. Yes, those ones, but make sure the draw-strings are still in them.’
‘How do you expect to find the nest?’
‘Simple,’ she said. ‘Don’t know why we didn’t think of it before. The name Picker said, the one that Jaghut heard.’ She selected a matched pair of Wickan longknives from her store of weapons and strapped the belt on, low on her hips, offered Antsy a hard grin. ‘I’m going to ask the Eel.’
xx
And these things were never so precious
Listen to the bird in its cage as it speaks
In a dying man’s voice; when he is gone
The voice lives to greet and give empty
Assurances with random poignancy
I do not know if I could live with that
If I could armour myself as the inhuman beak
Opens to a dead man’s reminder, head cocked
As if channelling the ghost of the one
Who imagines an absence of sense, a vacuum awaiting
The cage is barred and nightly falls the shroud
To silence the commentary of impossible apostles
Spirit godlings and spanning abyss, impenetrable cloud
Between the living and the dead, the here and the gone
Where no bridge can smooth the passage of pain
And these things were never so precious
Listening to the bird as it speaks and it speaks
And it speaks, the one who has faded away
The father departed knowing the unknown
And it speaks and it speaks and it speaks
In my father’s voice
– Caged Bird , Fisher kel That
There was no breath to speak of. Rather, what awoke him was the smell of death, dry, an echo of pungent decay that might belong to the carcass of a beast left in the high grasses, desiccated yet holding its reek about itself, close and suffocating as a cloak. Opening his eyes, Kallor found him-self staring up at the enormous, rotted head of a dragon, its massive fangs and shredded gums almost within reach.
The morning light was blotted out and it seemed the shade cast by the dragon roiled with all its centuries of forgotten breath. As the savage thunder of Kallor’s heartbeat eased, he slowly edged to one side i-the dragon’s viper head tilting to track his movement-and carefully stood, keeping his hands well away from the scabharded sword lying on the ground beside his bedroll. ‘I did not,’ he said, scowling, ‘ask for company.’
The dragon withdrew its head in a crackling of dried scales along the length of its serpent neck; settled back between the twin cowls of its folded wings.
He could see runnels of dirt trickling down from creases and joins on the creature’s body. One gaunt forelimb bore the tracery of fine roots in a colourless mockery of blood vessels. From the shadowed pits beneath the gnarled brow ridges there was the hint of withered eyes, a mottling of grey and black that could hold no display of desire or intent; and yet Kallor felt that regard raw as sharkskin against his own eyes as he stared up at the undead dragon.
‘You have come,’ he said, ‘a long way, I suspect. But I am not for you. I can give you nothing, assuming I wanted to, which I do not. And do not imagine,’ he added, ‘that I will bargain with you, whatever hungers you may still possess.’