Toll the Hounds

None of it works. The forms crumble and dissolve. To face death is to stand alone.



How far can a lost soul travel? Picker believed she had begun in some distant frozen world, struggling thigh-deep through drifts of snow, a bitter wind howling round her. Again and again she fell, crusted ice scraping her flesh raw-for she was naked, her fingers blackening from the tips as they froze into solid, dead things. Her toes and then her feet did the same, the skin splitting, the ankles swelling.



Two wolves were on her trail. She did not know how she knew this, but she did. Two wolves. God and Goddess of War, the Wolves of Winter. They scented her as they would a rival-but she was no ascendant, and certainly no goddess. She had worn tores once, sworn to Treach, and this now marked her.



War could not exist without rivals, without enemies, and this was as true in the immortal realm as it was in the mortal one. The pantheon ever reflects the nature of its countless aspects. The facets deliver unerring truths. In winter, war was the lifeless chill of dead flesh. In summer, war rotted in fetid, flyblown clouds. In autumn, the battlefield was strewn with the dead. In spring, war arose anew in the same fields, the seeds well nurtured in rich soil.



She fought through a dark forest of black spruce and firs. Her fingers dropped off one by one. She stumbled on stumps. The winter assailed her, the winter was her enemy, and the wolves drew ever closer.



Through a mountain pass, then; brief flashes of awareness and each time they arrived, lifting her out of oblivion, she found the landscape transformed. Heaped boulders, eskers, ragged peaks towering overhead. A tortured, twisted trail, sud-denly pitching sharply downward, stunted pines and oaks to either side. Bestial howls voicing their rage high above, far behind her now.



A valley below, verdant and rank, a jungle nestled impossibly close to the high ranges and the whipping snow-sprayed winds-or perhaps she had traversed con-tinents. Her hands were whole, her bare feet sinking into warm, wet loam. Insects spun and whirred about her.



From the thicket came an animal cough, a cat’s heavy growl.



And another hunter had found her.



She hurried on, as if some other place awaited her, a sanctuary, a cave that she could enter, to emerge upon some other side, reborn. And now she saw, rising hap-hazardly from the moss and humus and mounds of rotted trunks, swords, blades encrusted, cross-hilts bedecked in moss, pommels green with verdigris. Swords of all styles, all so corroded and rusted that they would be useless as weapons.



She heard the cat’s cough again, closer this time.



Panic flitted through her.



She found a clearing of high swaying grasses, a sea of emerald green that she plunged into, pushing her way across.



Something thrashed into her wake, a swift, deadly rush.



She screamed, fell to the ground.



Snapping, barking voices surrounded her, answered by a snarl from some-. where close behind her. Picker rolled on to her back. Humanlike figures crowded her, baring their teeth and making stabbing gestures with lire-hardened spears towards a leopard crouched down not three paces from where she was lying. The beast’s cars were flattened back, its eyes blazing. Then, in a flash, it was gone.



Picker pushed herself to her feet, and found that she towered over these people, and yet they were one and all adults-even through the fine pelt of hair covering them she could see that. Five females, four males, and the females were the more robust between them, with wide hips and deep rib cages.



Luminous brown eyes fixed upon her with something like worship, and then the spears were brought around and she was being prodded along, on to a trail cutting across the path she had been taking. So much for worship. Those spears threatened, and she saw something black smeared on the points. I’m a prisoner. Terrific.



They hurried down the trail, a trail never meant for one as tall as Picker, and she found branches scraping across her face again and again. Before long they reached another clearing, this one at the foot of a cliff. A wide, low rock shelf prelected over a sipping cave-mouth from which drifted woodsmoke. Two ancients were squatting at the entrance, both women, with a gaggle of children staring out behind them.



There was none of the expected squealing excitement from the children-indeed, no sounds were uttered at all, and Picker felt a sudden suspicion: these creatures were not the masters of their domain. No, they behaved as would prey. She saw stones to either side of the cave, heaped up to be used to make a barricade come the dusk.



Her captors drove her into the cave. She was forced to bend over to keep from scraping her head on the pitched, blackened ceiling. The children fled to either side. Beyond the flickering light from the lone hearth the cave continued on into darkness. Coughing in the smoke, she stumbled forward, round the fire, and into the depths. The shafts of the spears urged her on. The floor of packed earth beneath her feet was free of rubble, but the slope was getting ever steeper and she felt herself sliding, losing purchase.