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

Cutter stood frozen in place. The Hounds.

They’re here.

Grisp Falaunt had once been a man of vast ambitions. Lord of the single greatest landholding anywhere on the continent, a patriarch of orchards, pastures, groves and fields of corn stretching to the very horizon. Why, the Dwelling Plain was un-claimed, was it not? And so he could claim it, unopposed, unobstructed by prohi-bitions.

Forty-one years later he woke one morning stunned by a revelation. The Dwelling Plain was unclaimed because it was… useless. Lifeless. Pointless. He had spent most of his life trying to conquer something that was not only uncon-querable, but capable of using its very indifference to annihilate every challenger.

He’d lost his first wife. His children had listened to his promises of glorious in-heritance and then had simply wandered off, each one terminally unimpressed. He’d lost his second wife. He’d lost three partners and seven investors. He’d lost his capital, his collateral and the shirt on his back-this last indignity courtesy of a crow that had been hanging round the clothes line in a most suspicious manner.

There comes a time when a man must truncate his ambitions, cut them right down, not to what was possible, but to what was manageable. And, as one grew older and more worn down, manageable became a notion blurring with minimal, as in how could a man exist with the minimum of effort? How little was good enough?

He now lived in a shack on the very edge of the Dwelling Plain, offering a suit-able view to the south wastes where all his dreams spun in lazy dust-devils through hill and dale and whatnot. And, in the company of a two-legged dog so useless he needed to hand-feed it the rats it was supposed to kill and eat, he tended three rows of root crops, each row barely twenty paces in length. One row suffered a blight of purple fungus; another was infested with grub-worm; and the one between those two had a bit of both.

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Cutter stood frozen in place. The Hounds.

They’re here.

Grisp Falaunt had once been a man of vast ambitions. Lord of the single greatest landholding anywhere on the continent, a patriarch of orchards, pastures, groves and fields of corn stretching to the very horizon. Why, the Dwelling Plain was un-claimed, was it not? And so he could claim it, unopposed, unobstructed by prohi-bitions.

Forty-one years later he woke one morning stunned by a revelation. The Dwelling Plain was unclaimed because it was… useless. Lifeless. Pointless. He had spent most of his life trying to conquer something that was not only uncon-querable, but capable of using its very indifference to annihilate every challenger.

He’d lost his first wife. His children had listened to his promises of glorious in-heritance and then had simply wandered off, each one terminally unimpressed. He’d lost his second wife. He’d lost three partners and seven investors. He’d lost his capital, his collateral and the shirt on his back-this last indignity courtesy of a crow that had been hanging round the clothes line in a most suspicious manner.

There comes a time when a man must truncate his ambitions, cut them right down, not to what was possible, but to what was manageable. And, as one grew older and more worn down, manageable became a notion blurring with minimal, as in how could a man exist with the minimum of effort? How little was good enough?

He now lived in a shack on the very edge of the Dwelling Plain, offering a suit-able view to the south wastes where all his dreams spun in lazy dust-devils through hill and dale and whatnot. And, in the company of a two-legged dog so useless he needed to hand-feed it the rats it was supposed to kill and eat, he tended three rows of root crops, each row barely twenty paces in length. One row suffered a blight of purple fungus; another was infested with grub-worm; and the one between those two had a bit of both.

On this gruesome night with its incessant thunder and invisible lightning and ghost wind, Grisp Falaunt sat rocking on his creaking chair on his back porch, a jug of cactus spit in his lap, a wad of rustleaf bulging one cheek and a wad of durhang the other. He had his free hand under his tunic, as would any man keeping his own company with only a two-legged dog looking on-but the mutt wasn’t paying him any attention anyway, which, all things considered, was a rare relief these nights when the beast mostly just stared at him with oddly hungry eyes. No, old Scamper had his eyes on something to the south, out there in the dark plain.

Grisp hitched the jug up on the back of a forearm and tilted in a mouthhful of the thick, pungent liquor. Old Gadrobi women in the hills still chewed the spiny blades after hardening the insides of their mouths by eating fire, and spat out the pulp in bowls of water sweetened with virgin’s piss. The mixture was then fer-mented in sacks of sewn-up sheep intestines buried under dung heaps. And there, in the subtle cascade of flavours that, if he squeezed shut his watering eyes, he could actually taste, one could find the bouquets marking every damned stage in the brewing process. Leading to an explosive, highly volatile cough followed by desperate gasping, and then-

But Scamper there had sharpened up, as much as a two-legged dog could, any-way. Ears perking, seeming to dilate-but no, that was the spit talking-and nape hairs snapping upright in fierce bristle, and there was his ratty, knobby tail, des-perately snaking down and under the uneven haunches-and gods below, Scamper was whimpering and crawling, piddling as he went, straight for under the porch-look at the damned thing go! With only two legs, too!

Must be some storm out there-’

And, looking up, Grisp saw strange baleful fires floating closer. In sets of two, lifting, weaving, lowering, then back up again. How many sets? He couldn’t count. He could have, once, long ago, right up to twenty, but the bad thing about cactus spit was all the parts of the brain it stamped dead underfoot. Seemed that counting and figuring was among them.

Fireballs! Racing straight for him!

Grisp screamed. Or, rather, tried to. Instead, two wads were sucked in quick succession to the back of his throat, and all at once he couldn’t breathe, and could only stare as a horde of giant dogs attacked in a thundering charge, straight across his three weepy rows, leaving a churned, uprooted, trampled mess. Two of the beasts made for him, jaws opening. Grisp had rocked on to the two back legs of the chair with that sudden, shortlived gasp, and now all at once he lost his balance, pitching directly backward, legs in the air, even as two sets of enormous jaws snapped shut in the place where his head had been a heartbeat earlier.

His shack erupted behind him, grey shards of wood and dented kitchenware exploding in all directions.

The thumping impact when he hit the porch sent both wads out from his mouth on a column of expelled air from his stunned lungs. The weight of the jug, two fin-gers still hooked through the lone ear, pulled him sideways and out of the toppled chair on to his stomach, and he lifted his head and saw that his shack was simply gone, and there were the beasts, fast dwindling as they charged towards the city.