Toll the Hounds (The Malazan Book of the Fallen 8)

Seen it? He wondered at her hesitation in that admission. But not for long. She’s used it before. She’s using it still. For trysts just like the one she’s talking about right now. Challice, why are you bothering with me!

At his hesitation she leaned closer, one hand on his arm. ‘We can just meet there, Crokus. To talk. A place where we can talk about anything, where there’s no chance of being seen. We can just talk.’

He knew, of course, that such a place was not for talking.

And, this evening, he would meet her there.

What was he-’Ow!’

The server had just cuffed him in the side of the head. Astonished, he stared up at her.

‘If I go to all that work to make you a damned breakfast, you’d better eat it!’

‘Sorry! I was just thinking-’

‘It’s easier when you’re chewing. Now, don’t make me have to come back here.’

He glared at her as she walked away. If I was nobleborn she’d never have done that. He caught the eye of a man sitting at a nearby table.

‘You have a way with women, I see.’

‘Hah hah.’

Events and moments can deliver unexpected mercy, and though she did not know it, such mercy was granted to Scillara at that instant, for she was not thinking of Cutter. Instead, she was sitting beside the Malazan historian, Duiker, fighting an instinct to close her arms round him and so in some small measure ease his silent grief. All that held her back, she knew, was the fear that he would not welcome her sympathy. That, and the distinct possibility that she was misreading him.

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Seen it? He wondered at her hesitation in that admission. But not for long. She’s used it before. She’s using it still. For trysts just like the one she’s talking about right now. Challice, why are you bothering with me!

At his hesitation she leaned closer, one hand on his arm. ‘We can just meet there, Crokus. To talk. A place where we can talk about anything, where there’s no chance of being seen. We can just talk.’

He knew, of course, that such a place was not for talking.

And, this evening, he would meet her there.

What was he-’Ow!’

The server had just cuffed him in the side of the head. Astonished, he stared up at her.

‘If I go to all that work to make you a damned breakfast, you’d better eat it!’

‘Sorry! I was just thinking-’

‘It’s easier when you’re chewing. Now, don’t make me have to come back here.’

He glared at her as she walked away. If I was nobleborn she’d never have done that. He caught the eye of a man sitting at a nearby table.

‘You have a way with women, I see.’

‘Hah hah.’

Events and moments can deliver unexpected mercy, and though she did not know it, such mercy was granted to Scillara at that instant, for she was not thinking of Cutter. Instead, she was sitting beside the Malazan historian, Duiker, fighting an instinct to close her arms round him and so in some small measure ease his silent grief. All that held her back, she knew, was the fear that he would not welcome her sympathy. That, and the distinct possibility that she was misreading him.

To live a hard life was to make solid and impregnable every way in, until no openings remained and the soul hid in darkness, and no one else could hear its screams, its railing at injustice, its long, agonizing stretches of sadness. Hardness without created hardness within.

Sadness was, she well knew, not something that could be cured. It was not, in fact, a failing, not a flaw, not an illness of spirit. Sadness was never without rea-son, and to assert that it marked some kind of dysfunction did little more than prove ignorance or, worse, cowardly evasiveness in the one making the assertion. As if happiness was the only legitimate way of being. As if those failing at it needed to be locked away, made soporific with medications; as if the causes of sad-ness were merely traps and pitfalls in the proper climb to blissful contentment, things to be edged round or bridged, or leapt across on wings of false elation.

Scillara knew better. She had faced her own sadness often enough. Even when she discovered her first means of escaping it, in durhang, she’d known that such an escape was simply a flight from feelings that existed legitimately. She’d just been unable to permit herself any sympathy for such feelings, because to do so was to surrender to their truth.

Sadness belonged. As rightful as joy, love, grief and fear. All conditions of being.

Too often people mistook the sadness in others for self-pity, and in so doing re-vealed their own hardness of spirit, and more than a little malice.

The taproom stank of blood, shit, piss and vomit. Blend was recovering in her bedroom upstairs, as close to death as she’d ever been, but the worst was past, now. Barathol and Chaur had gone down to the cellars below to help Picker and Antsy bury the bodies of their comrades. The blacksmith’s grief at the death of his new friend, Mallet, was too raw for Scillara to face-he was in no way a hard man and this jarred her frail assembly of beliefs, for he should have been. Yet had she not seen the same breathless vulnerability when he’d struggled to bring Chaur back to life after the huge simpleton had drowned?

‘He is…’ Duiker began, and then frowned, ‘a remarkable man, I think.’

Scillara blinked.’Who?’

The historian shook his head, unwilling to meet her eyes. ‘I should be getting drunk.’

‘Never works,’ she said.

‘I know.’

They were silent again, moments stretching on.

We just stumbled into these people. A crazy contest at a restaurant. We were just getting to know them, to treasure each and every one of them.

Mallet was a healer. A Bridgeburner. In his eyes there had burned some kind of self-recrimination, a welter of guilt. A healer tortured by something he could not heal. A list of failures transformed into failings. Yet he had been a gentle man. That soft, oddly high voice-which they would never hear again.

For him, Barathol had wept.

Bluepearl was a mage. Amusingly awkward, kind of wide-eyed, which hardly fit all that he’d been through, because he too had been a Bridgeburner. Antsy had railed over the man’s corpse, a sergeant dressing down a soldier so incompetent as to be dead. Antsy had been offended, indignant, even as anguish glittered in his bright blue eyes. ‘You damned fool!’ he’d snarled. ‘You Hood-damned useless id-iotic fool!’ When he’d made to kick the body Picker had roughly pulled him back, almost off his feet, and Antsy had lurched off to slam the toe of one boot into the planks of the counter.