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Hounds – Extract

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Hounds

Christopher Allen

It was the day before Veinspill when the witch hunters rode into town.

The season of growth and birth had almost come upon the Thondian frontier, a feral fecundity stirred by the nearing alignment of Ghur with Ghyran. To the Reclaimed people of the Kett-lands, who carved their lives from the frontier’s earth, that burgeoning time meant everything. Among their clans and families, Veinspill was a time for changes, for joinings and breakings, for loyalties shifted or renewed – all sanctified with the red anointment of blood.

The celebration that marked the start of Veinspill was more than just symbolic. In the oldest settlements of the Kett-lands, raised up soon after the founding of Excelsis itself, Ghur’s influence had bitten too deep into their ageing aqualiths. Now the font-stones only bled water when Ghyran waxed strongest, and even then folk had to wet Ghur’s thirst before they might slake their own.

In Ketterhal, the largest of the region’s towns, fleshers took their slaughtering blades and filled barrels with the vital fluids of thrashing, squealing herd-beasts. Hearth-tenders burned each family’s vein-daggers clean in their firepits. The old rubbed the scars of their cheeks and forearms in reminiscence; the young anticipated the carvings that would mark their entry to adulthood.

The Equinox of Beasts and Life would be a celebration of knives, of teeth, of sharp things. It would be a crimson libation.

Vorena Endreclaw, ordained hunter of the Order of Azyr, nudged her horse along in the wake of her companion as they eased their way through the cramped veins of Ketterhal’s streets. The crooked ways were sclerotic with detritus and the timber struts that held up the ailing, leaning walls. The town seemed a scavenged place, built from bones and stone plucked from the carcasses of older buildings. For the principal settlement of the Kett-lands, it seemed to her a dismal place, barely worthy of being called civilisation.

She brought her steed to a halt as Shesheba did the same. The animal whinnied and stamped, uneasy and unnerved. The blood in the air, perhaps, Vorena thought, and she tried to calm the edge of her own anxiety. It was easy to believe this place might descend into bloody anarchy at any moment.

Vorena felt out of place among the Kett-folk in their furs and bone. Such garb was far from crude – the leather-workers and scrimshanders here possessed incredible skill – but it made the Excelsis cut of her own clothes stand out wildly in contrast, even though what she wore was by no means extravagant. The polish of her pistols alone drew eyes.

She felt a simmer of envy towards Shesheba. Decades in Ghur’s wilds had not erased the deathly pallor of the other woman’s Shyishan heritage from her skin, yet in her scars, her poise, her tooth-charms and the brutal hunting spear hefted against her shoulder, Shesheba had adapted to the sheer ferocity of Ghur, and wore it with comfortable familiarity.

Still, even Shesheba could not quite pass unnoticed here. After all, she and Vorena both wore the gleaming badge of their office at their breast, and the Order of Azyr carried authority – and fear – even to the far-flung fringes of Thondia.

They had reached Ketterhal’s central plaza, where fleshers poured animal blood into channels dug beneath a tethered, floating mass of rock: the aqualith, leashed on rusting chains. Gazes turned towards them, worry and confusion kneading weathered expressions.

An older man pushed free of the rest. Age had treated him well, piling weight on his frame rather than stripping it off. The scars upon his cheeks were deep and interlaced from dozens of Veinspills past. He stooped in deference, and winced at the creak of his bones.

‘Welcome, honoured hounds of the God-King,’ he said. ‘It’s been years since I saw you last, Shesheba.’

Vorena untethered a wet bag from her saddle and tossed its contents to the ground – the severed head of a tzaangor. Her comrade leaned forward in the saddle.

‘We’re here,’ Shesheba said, ‘about the beasts.’

Vorena secured the horses to a hitching post outside the town’s Freeguild barracks. Inside, Ketterhal’s conclave of elders had shuffled in to meet with the witch hunters – or ‘hounds’, as they insisted on saying. Vorena had never seen such a decrepit collection of supposed authority figures, and it seemed a mockery of the grandiose titles they clung to in the model of Excelsis itself.

She dipped her head under the warding charms of human teeth that hung from the barracks’ threshold. Within, Shesheba sat at a table across from the town patriarch, Artom. Each of the other elders was delegated responsibility for some facet of Ketterhal’s existence. To Vorena, the most absurd was the high artisan, Beatrijs, whose weathered skin stretched taut over her sharp-edged features. The town’s bones and veins, its buildings and its streets, were her affair. Given the state of the town, it looked to Vorena that the woman had barely raised a finger to fulfil her duties.

‘We found the tzaangor near the Excelsis road,’ Shesheba said. ‘Mewling and slick with blood. Have you been raided?’

Artom shook his head but his expression was grim. ‘We lose more and more people as each season passes,’ he said. ‘First it was the wild beasts. After the siege of Excelsis, it was as if some blind anger had filled them all.’

‘The quake-god,’ Shesheba murmured.

‘Then folk began to see beasts that walked. Just brief sightings, only one or two – no fray has stormed our palisade. But… people vanish in the night. Some we never see again. Others are torn asunder.’ He sighed. ‘And others simply leave. The young – they give up on the lives we fought so hard to claw from the wilds.’

‘Why haven’t the Freeguild stopped these attacks?’ Vorena asked.

Artom gestured at the building around them. ‘What Freeguild? Many of them died fighting the wild beasts. Others were… taken. The last few simply deserted.’

‘We begged Excelsis for help,’ spat Beatrijs. Bitterness carved itself into the lines of her face. ‘But what do they care for the Kett-lands now, poor as we are? They’d rather seek new glories, new crusades elsewhere, than spare us an ounce of quarried stone or a single bold soldier.’

‘Thousands of Freeguilders died in the siege,’ Vorena said. She couldn’t help the defensiveness creeping into her voice. ‘And the wars that rage in other corners of Thondia are ones of liberation and defence against the Great Enemy, not frivolities.’

‘The siege was a decade ago,’ Beatrijs growled. ‘Are we not as deserving as any other servant of the God-King? No, to Excelsis we are just a carcass already drained of its blood and left to rot.’

‘Remember yourself,’ Shesheba snapped. The elders flinched at the harshness of her tone. ‘The Order of Azyr is here now. Ketterhal will receive the justice it deserves.’

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A Black Library Publication

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Cover illustration by Nuala Kinrade.

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