Toll the Hounds полностью

Fully one half of the sky was now a seething argent storm. Thunder rolled from the horizon behind them, as the very ground was ripped up, annihilated — their world had acquired an edge, raw as a cliff, and that cliff was drawing closer as vast sections sheared away, as the raging abyss swallowed the toppling stone columns one by one.

And it occurred to Draconus, then, that each of them here, seemingly alone, each with his or her own shackle, his or her own chain, had finally, at long last, come together.

We are an army. But an army in retreat. See the detritus we leave in our wake, the abandoned comrades. See the glaze of our eyes, this veil of numbed exhaustion — when at last we tear it aside, we will find the despair we have harboured for so long, like a black poisoned fruit under a leaf — all revealed as we look into each other’s eyes.

Was the comfort found in mutual recognition of any true worth? Here, at the last? When the common ground is failure? Like a field of corpses after a battle. Like a sea of skulls rolling in the tide. Is not the brotherhood too bitter to bear?

And now, he wanted to. . to what? Yes, to rage, but first, let me close my eyes. Just for a moment. Let me find, again, my will-

‘Draconus?’

‘Yes, Pearl?’

‘Do you hear drums? I hear drums.’

‘The thunder-’ and then he stopped, and turned round, to look back at that fulminating, crazed horizon. ‘Gods below.’

Chaos had found a new way to mock them. With legions in ranks, weapons and armour blazing, with standards spitting lightning into the sky. Emerging in an endless row, an army of something vaguely human, shaped solely by intent, in numbers unimaginable — they did not march so much as flow, like a frothing surge devouring the ground — and no more than a league away. Lances and pike heads flashing, round shields spinning like vortices. Drums like rattling bones, rushing to swarm like maddened wasps.

So close. . has the hunger caught fresh our scent — does the hunger now rush to us, faster than ever before?

Is there something in that storm. . that knows what it wants?

‘I do not understand,’ said Pearl. ‘How can chaos take shapes?’

‘Perhaps, friend, what we are seeing is the manifestation of what exists in all of us. Our secret love of destruction, the pleasure of annihilation, our darkest glee. Perhaps when at last they reach us, we shall realize that they are us and we are them.’ That Dragnipur has but cut us in two, and all chaos seeks is to draw us whole once more.

Oh, really now, Draconus, have you lost your mind?

‘If they are the evil in our souls, Pearl, then there can be no doubt as to their desire.’

‘Perhaps not just our souls,’ mused Pearl, wiping blood from his eyes. ‘Perhaps every soul, since the beginning of creation. Perhaps, Draconus, when each of us dies, the evil within us is torn free and rushes into the realm of Chaos. Or the evil is that which survives the longest. .’

Draconus said nothing. The demon’s suggestions horrified him, and he thought — oh, he was thinking, yes — that Pearl had found a terrible truth. Somewhere among those possibilities.

Somewhere among them. . I think. . there is a secret. An important secret.

Somewhere. .

‘I do not want to meet my evil self,’ said Pearl.

Draconus glanced across at him. ‘Who does?’

Ditch was dreaming, for dreaming was his last road to freedom. He could stride, reaching out to the sides, reshaping everything. He could make the world as he wanted it, as it should be, a place of justice, a place where he could be a god and look upon humanity as it truly was: a mob of unruly, faintly ridiculous children. Watch them grasp things when they think no one’s looking. Watch them break things, hurt things, steal. Listen to their expostulations of innocence, their breathless list of excuses, listen to how they repent and repent and repent and then go and do the same damned things all over again. Children.