Toll the Hounds - Page 3/467

The strain was unbearable, yet bear it he did. The way ahead was infinite, screaming of madness, yet he held on to his own sanity as a drowning man might cling to a frayed rope, and he dragged himself onward, step by step. Iron shackles made his limbs weep blood, with no hope of surcease. Figures caked in mud plod¬ded to either side, and beyond them, vague in the gloom, countless others.

Was there comfort in shared fate? The question alone invited hysterical laughter, a plunge into insanity’s precious oblivion. No, surely there was no such comfort, beyond the mutual recognition of folly, ill luck and obstinate stupidity, and these traits could not serve camaraderie. Besides, one’s companions to either side were in the habit of changing at a moment’s notice, one hapless fool replacing another in a grainy, blurred swirl.

Heaving on the chains, to keep the Burden in motion, this nightmarish flight left no energy, no time, for conversation. And so Ditch ignored the hand buffeting his shoulder the first time, the second time. The third time, however, was hard enough to send the wizard staggering to one side. Swearing, he twisted round to glare at the one now walking at his side.

Once, long ago, he might have flinched back upon seeing such an apparition. His heart would have lurched in terror.

The demon was huge, hulking. Its once royal blood availed it no privilege here in Dragnipur. Ditch saw that the creature was carrying the fallen, the failed, gathering to itself a score or more bodies and the chains attached to them. Mus-eles strained, bunched and twisted as the demon pulled itself forward. Scrawny bodies, hanging limp, crowded like cordwood under each arm. One, still conscious though her head lolled, rode its broad back like a newborn ape, glazed eyes sliding acroii the wizard’s face.

‘You fool,’ Ditch snarled. ‘Throw ’em into the bed!’

‘No room,’ piped the demon in a high, childish voice.

But the wizard had used up his sympathy. For the demon’s sake, it should have left the fallen behind, but then, of course, they would all feel the added weight, the pathetic drag on the chains. Still, what if this one fell? What if that extraordinary strength and will gave way? ‘Curse the fool!’ Ditch growled. ‘Why doesn’t he kill a few more dragons, damn him!’

‘We fail,’ said the demon.

Ditch wanted to howl at that. Was it not obvious to them all? But that quavering voice was both bemused and forlorn, and it struck through to his heart. ‘I know, friend. Not long now.’

‘And then?’

Ditch shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Who does?’

Again the wizard had no answer.

The demon persisted. ‘We must find one who does. I am going now. But I will return. Do not pity me, please.’

A sudden swirl, grey and black, and now some bear-like beast was beside him, too weary, too mindless, to even lunge at him-as some creatures still did.

‘You’ve been here too long, friend,’ Ditch said to it.

Who does?

An interesting question. Did anyone know what would happen when the chaos caught them? Anyone here in Dragnipur?

In his first moments following his kissing the sword, in between his frenzied attempts at escape, his shrieks of despair, he had flung questions at everyone-why, he’d even sought to accost a Hound, but it had been too busy lunging at its own chains, froth fizzing from its massive jaws, and had very nearly trampled him, and he’d never seen it again.

But someone had replied, someone had spoken to him. About something… oh, he could not recall much more than a name. A single name.

Draconus.

She had witnessed many things in this interminable interlude in her career, but none more frustrating than the escape of two Hounds of Shadow. It was not for one such as Apsal’ara, Lady of Thieves, to besmirch her existence with the laborious indignity of tugging on a chain for all eternity. Shackles were to be escaped, burdens deftly avoided.

From the moment of her first stumbling arrival, she had set upon herself the task of breaking the chains binding her in this dread realm, but this task was virtually impossible if one were cursed to ever pull the damned wagon. And she had no desire to witness again the horrible train at the very end of the chains, the abraded lumps of still living meat dragging across the gouged muddy ground, the flash of an open eye, a flopping nub of a limb straining towards her, a terrible army of the failed, the ones who surrendered and the ones whose strength gave out.

No, Apsal’ara had worked her way closer to the enormous wagon, eventually finding herself trudging beside one of the huge wooden wheels. Then she had lagged in her pace until just behind that wheel. From there, she moved inward, slipping beneath the creaking bed with its incessant rain of brown water, blood and the wastes that came of rotting but still living flesh. Dragging the chain behind her she had worked her way on to a shelf of the undercarriage, just above the front axle, wedging herself in tight, legs drawn up, her back against slimy wood.