Toll the Hounds полностью

All at once the nearest sounds ceased, a cocoon of silence broken only by the hum of bees and a pair of long-tailed hummingbirds dancing in front of an orchid — that both then raced off in a beating whirr of wings.

Gruntle felt his hackles rise, stiff and prickling on the back of his neck — too fierce for a human — and looking down he saw the sleek banded forelimbs of a tiger where his arms and hands should have been.

Another one of these damned dreams. Listen, Trake, if you want me to be just like you, stop playing these scenes for me. I’ll be a tiger if that’s what you want — just don’t confine it to my dreams. I wake up feeling clumsy and slow and I don’t like it. I wake up remembering nothing but freedom.

Something was approaching. Things. . three, no, five. Not big, not danger shy;ous. He slowly swung his head round, narrowing his gaze.

The creatures that came to the edge of the clearing were somewhere between apes and humans. Small as adolescents, lithe and sleek, with fine fur thickening at the armpits and crotch. The two males carried short curved batons of some sort, fire-hardened, with inset fangs from some large carnivore. The females wielded spears, one of them holding her spear in one hand and a broad flint axe head in the other, which she tossed into the clearing. The object landed with a thump, flattening the grasses, halfway between Gruntle and the band.

Gruntle realized, with a faint shock, that he knew the taste of these creatures — their hot flesh, their blood, the saltiness of their sweat. In this form, in this place and in this time, he had hunted them, had pulled them down, hearing their piteous cries as his jaws closed fatally round their necks.

This time, however, he was not hungry, and it seemed they knew it.

Awe flickered in their eyes, their mouths twisting into strange expressions, and all at once one of the women was speaking. The language trilled, punctuated by clicks and glottal stops.

And Gruntle understood her.

‘Beast of darkness and fire, hunter in dark and light, fur of night and motion in grasses, god who takes, see this our gift and spare us for we are weak and few and this land is not ours, this land is the journey for we dream of the shore, where food is plenty and the birds cry in the heat of the sun.’

Gruntle found himself sliding forward, silent as a thought, and he was life and power bound in a single breath. Forward, until the axe blade was at his taloned paws. Head lowering, nostrils flaring as he inhaled the scent of stone and sweat, the edges where old blood remained, where grasses had polished the flint, the urine that had been splashed upon it.

These creatures wanted to claim this glade for their own.

They were begging permission, and maybe something more. Something like. . protection.

‘The leopard tracks us and challenges you,’ the woman sang, ‘but she will not cross your path. She will flee your scent for you are the master here, the god, the unchallenged hunter of the forest. Last night, she took my child — we have lost all our children. Perhaps we will be the last. Perhaps we will never find the shore again. But if our flesh must feed the hungry, then let it be you who grows strong with our blood.

‘Tonight, If you come to take one of us, take me. I am the eldest. I bear no more children. I am useless.’ She hunched down then, discarding her spear, and sank into the grasses, where she rolled on to her back, exposing her throat.

They were mad, Gruntle decided. Driven insane by the terrors of the jungle, where they were strangers, lost, seeking some distant coastline. And as they jour shy;neyed, every night delivered horror.