Toll the Hounds

It was not just a matter of choosing the slowest burning wood, after all, was it? And with that thought he kicked at the coals of the fire, watched sparks roil nightward. Sometimes, the urgent flames of the quick and the short-lived delivered their own kind of heat. Hard wood and slow burn, soft wood and smoulder¬ing reluctance before ashen collapse. Resinous wood and oh how she flared! Blinding, yes, a glory no man could turn from.



Too bad he’d had to kill every child he begat. No doubt that left most of his wives and lovers somewhat disaffected. But he had not been so cruel as to hesi¬tate, had he? No. Why, he’d tear those ghastly babes from their mothers’ arms not moments after they’d tumbled free of the womb, and was that not a true sign of mercy? No one grows attached to dead things, not even mothers.



Attachments, yes, now they were indeed a waste of time and, more relevantly, a weakness. To rule an empire-to rule a hundred empires-one needed a certain objectivity. All was to be used, to be remade howsoever he pleased. Why, he had launched vast construction projects to glorify his rule, but few understood that it was not the completion that mattered, but the work itself and all that it implied-his command over their lives, their loyalty, their labour. Why, he could work them for decades, see generations of the fools pass one by one, all working each and every day of their lives, and still they did not understand what it meant for them to give to him-to Kallor-so many years of their mortal existence, so much of it, truly, that any rational soul would howl at the cruel injustice of such a life.



This was, as far as he was concerned, the real mystery of civilization-and for all that he exploited it he was, by the end, no closer to understanding it. This willingness of otherwise intelligent (well, reasonably intelligent) people to parcel up and then bargain away appalling percentages of their very limited lives, all in service to someone else. And the rewards? Ah, some security, perhaps. The cement that is stability A sound roof, something on the plate, the beloved offspring each one destines to repeat the whole travail And was that an even exchange?



It would not have been no, for him, He knew that, had known it from the very first. He would bargain away nothing of his life. He would serve no one, yield none of his labour to the edification and ever-expanding wealth of some fool who imagined that his or her own part of the bargain was profound in its generosity, was indeed the most precious of gifts. That to work for him or her was a privilege-gods! The conceit of that! The lie, so bristling and charged in its brazen display!



Just how many rules of civil behaviour were designed to perpetuate such egregious schemes of power and control of the few over the many? Rules defended to the death (usually the death of the many, rarely that of the few) with laws and wars, with threats and brutal repression-ah, those were the days, were they not? How he had gloried in that outrage!



He would never be one of the multitude. And he had proved it, again and again, and again. And he would continue to prove it.



A crown was within reach. A kingship waited to be claimed. Mastery not over something as mundane as an empire-that game had grown stale long ago-but over a realm. An entity consisting of all the possible forces of existence. The power of earthly flesh, every element unbound, the coruscating will of belief, the skein of politics, religion, social accord, sensibilities, woven from the usual tragic roots of past ages golden and free of pain and new ages bright with absurd promise. While through it all fell the rains of oblivion, the cascading torrent of failure and death, suffering and misery, a god broken and for ever doomed to remain so-oh, Kallor knew he could usurp such a creature, leave it as powerless as his most abject subject.



All-all of it-within his reach.



He kicked again at the embers, the too-small branches that had made up this shortlived fire, saw countless twigs fall into white ash. A few picked bones were visible amidst the coals, all that remained of the pathetic creature he had devoured earlier this night.



A smear of clouds cut a swath across the face of the stars and the dust-veiled moon had yet to rise. Somewhere out on the plain coyotes bickered with the night. He had found trader tracks this past day, angling northwest-southeast. Well-worn wagon ruts, the tramping of yoked oxen. Garbage strewn to either side. Rather dis¬appointing, all things considered; he had grown used to solitude, where the only sign of human activity had been the occasional grassfire on the western horizon-plains nomads and their mysterious ways-something to do with the bhederin herds and the needs for various grasses, he suspected. If they spied him they wisely kept their distance. His passing through places had a way of agitating ancient spirits, a detail he had once found irritating enough to hunt the things down and kill them, but no longer. Let them whine and twitch, thrash and moan in the grip of timorous nightmares, and all that. Let their mortal children cower in the high grasses until he was well and gone.