Toll the Hounds

‘Don’t know how you can eat that. Meat should have blood in it. Any meat without blood in it ain’t meat.’

‘Aye, it’s conch.’

‘It’s a thing with eyes on the ends of its tentacles, watching as you cut its body apart — see how the stalks swivel, following up to your mouth, tracking every swallow? It’s watching you eat it!’

‘So what?’

Gulls shrieked in swarming clouds over the low jetties where the fishers were heaving baskets of sliverfish on to the slimy stone, children scurrying about in the hopes of being hired to slip the wriggling fish on to monger-strings in time for the morning market. Grey-backed Gadrobi cats, feral now for a thousand generations, leapt out in ambush to kill gulls. Frenzied battles ensued, feathers skirling, tufts of cat hair drifting on the breeze like thistle heads.

Below the inside docks old women wandered in the gloom between pylons, using long, thin, barbed pokers to collect up the small, hand’s-length sliverfish that managed to slip through the baskets and fall in gleaming rain as the catch was carried ashore. When the harvest was small, the old hags were wont to use those toothed pokers on each other.

Scorch could see them from where he was perched, muffled forms moving this way and that, pokers darting in the perpetual shadows. ‘I swore to never again eat anything this lake gave up,’ he muttered. ‘Gran above,’ he added in a hoarse whisper, ‘y’see I remember them cuts an’ holes in your scrawny, I remember ’em, Gran, an’ so I swore.’

‘What’s that?’ Leff asked from below.

‘Nothing, only we’re wasting our time-’

‘Patience, Scorch. We got us a list. We got us trouble. Didn’t we hear that Brokul might be making a run?’

‘The place is a damned mob, Leff.’

‘We just need to concentrate on the lines forming up.’

‘Ain’t no lines, Leff.’

Leff tossed the shell over the end of the lake wall, where it clattered down below on to ten thousand others. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘Soon.’

Just past the fork at Urs, the battered remnants of the caravan headed up towards South Worrytown. Herders and quarry workers on their way out to the Ravens edged to the sides of the road, then stopped and stared at the four charred and smoke-streaked trader-wagons rocking past. A single horse struggled in a makeshift yoke before each wain.

Of the usual assortment of guards that might be expected, even for a caravan as small as this one seemed to be, only one was visible, slouched down in a Gadrobi saddle and almost entirely hidden beneath a dusty, hooded cloak. From seamed slits in the faded brown cape, just above the man’s shoulder blades, jutted the worn grips and pommels of twin cutlasses. The leather gauntlets covering his hands where they rested on the high saddle horn were stained and mostly in shreds, revealing to those close enough to see skin tattooed to very nearly solid black.

From the shadow of the hood, strangely feline eyes held fixed on the road ahead. The first decrepit shanties of South Worrytown emerged from the morning mist like the dishevelled nests of some oversized carrion bird, lining the dirt track to either side. From cracks and holes in the leaning walls, liquid eyes peered out as the guard led his clattering train past.

Before long, they were well and truly within the maze and its crowds of life’s refugees, rising like ghosts from the shadows, raising faint voices to beg for coin and food. Few caravans coming up from the south chose this route into Darujhis shy;tan, since the track through the city’s shabby outskirts was both narrow and twisting. And those that proved insufficiently defended could become victims of the raw, desperate need drawing ever closer on all sides.

A hundred paces still south of the main road known as Jatem’s Worry, it seemed that such a fate would befall this hapless caravan and its guardian of one.

As grasping, grimy hands reached out to close round spokes in wagon wheels, and others snatched at the traces of the horses, the hooded man glanced back at the growing boldness and reined in. As he did so he seemed to suddenly fill out as he straightened in his saddle.

Eyes fixed on him, furtive and wary and with fading diffidence. One rag clad man swung up beside the first wagon’s driver who, like the guard, was hooded yanked him round, the hood fell back.

Revealing a dead man’s withered face. The mostly hairless head turned, hol shy;low sockets settling on the man crouched on the bench.

Even as the the Worrier shrieked, twisting to fling himself from the wagon, the lone caravan guard drew his cutlasses, revealing broad iron blades stained in a pattern of flaring barbs of black and pale orange. The hood dropped back to unveil a broad face tattooed in an identical fashion, the mouth opening to reveal long canines as the guard smiled. There was no humour in that smile, just the promise of mayhem.

That was enough for the crowd. Screaming, flinching back, they fled.

Moments later, the four wagons and their lone guard resumed their journey.