Toll the Hounds

And on the road, where it passes through the leper colony west of the city, a weary ox and a tired old man escort a burdened cart on which lies a canvas-wrapped figure, worn riding boots visible.



Ahead awaits Two-Ox Gate.



Hover no longer. Plummet both wings and spirit down to the buzzing flies, the animal heat sweet and acrid, the music closeness of the stained burlap. The old man pausing to wipe sweat from his lined brow with its array of warts and moles, and his knees ache and there is dull pain in his chest.



Of late, he has been carting corpses round day and night, or so it seems. Each one made him feel older, and the glances he has been casting at the ox are tainted with an irrational dislike, wavering in its intensity, as if the beast was to blame for… for something, though he knows not what.



The two guards at the gate were leaning against a wall, staying cool in the shade that would dwindle as the day rolled on overhead. Upon seeing the jutting boots one of the men stepped forward. ‘Hold, there. You’ll find plenty of cemeteries and pits outside the walls-we don’t need more-’



‘A citizen of the city,’ said the old man. ‘Killt in a duel. By Councillor Vidikas, who said to send him back to his friends-the dead man’s friends, I mean.’



‘Oh, right. On your way, then.’



Crowded as a city can be, an ox drawing a corpse-laden cart will find its path clear, for reasons involving a host of instinctive aversions, few of which made much sense. To see a dead body was to recoil, mind spinning a dust-devil of thoughts- that is not me-see the difference between us? That is not me, that is not me. No one I know, no one I have ever known. That is not me… but… it could be.



So easily, it could be.



Remonstrance of mortality is a slap in the face, a stinging shock. It is a struggle for one to overcome this moment, to tighten the armour about one’s soul, to see bodies as nothing but objects, unpleasant, to be disposed of quickly. Soldiers and undertakers fashion macabre humour to deflect the simple, raw horror of what they must see, of that to which they are witness. It rarely works. Instead, the soul crawls away, scabbed, wounded, at peace with nothing.



A soldier goes to war. A soldier carries it back home. Could leaders truly com-prehend the damage they do to their citizens, they would never send them to war. And if, in knowing, they did so anyway-to appease their hunger for power-then may they choke on the spoils for ever more.



Ah, but the round man digresses. Forgive this raw spasm of rage. A friend lies wrapped in canvas on the bed of a cart. Death is on its way home. Forgive.



Wending through Gadrobi District, life parted its stream, voices dimmed, and it was some time after the passing through of death that those voices arose once more in its wake. Curtains of flies repeatedly billowed open and closed again, until it seemed the ox pulled a stage of a thousand acts, each one the same, and the chorus was a bow wave of silence.



Journey on, comes the prayer of all, journey on.



At last, the old man finds his destination and draws the ox up opposite the doors, halting the beast with a tug on its yoke. He spends a moment brushing dust from his clothes, and then heads inside the Phoenix Inn.



It has been a long night. He hobbles to a table and catches the eye of one of the servers. He orders a tankard of strong ale and a breakfast. Stomach before business, The body’s not going anywhere, is it?



He did not know if it was love; he suspected he did not understand that word. But there was something inside Cutter that felt… sated. Was it just physical, these tangled pitches and rolls and the oil of sweat, breaths hot in his face with the scent of wine and rustleaf? Was it just the taste of the forbidden, upon which he fed as might a bat on nectar? If so, then he should have felt the same when with Scillara, perhaps even more so, since without question Scillara’s skills in that area far eclipsed those of Challice, whose hunger whispered of insatiable needs, transform-ing her lovemaking into a frantic search that found no appeasement, no matter how many times she convulsed in orgasm.



No, something was indeed different. Still, he was troubled, wondering if this strange flavour came from the betrayal they committed time and again. A married woman, the sordid man’s conquest. Had he become such a man? Well, he supposed that he had, but not in the manner of those men who made a career of seducing and stealing the wives of other men. And yet, there was a sense, an extraordinary sense, he admitted, of dark pleasure, savage delight, and he could see just how addictive such living could become.



Even so, he was not about to pursue the headlong pitch of promiscuity. There remained a part of him that thirsted for an end-or, rather, a continuation: love and life made stable, forces of reassurance and comfort. He was not about to toss Challice aside and seek out a new lover. He was, he told himself, not Murillio, who could travel with practised ease from bedroom to bedroom-and see where it had got him, damn near murdered by some drunken suitor.