‘More like Sinkhound.’
‘You don’t know anything you think you know, Leff. That’s your problem. Al-ways has been, always will be.’
‘Wish there’d been twenty more of them assassins.’
‘There were, just not attacking us. We was the diversion, that’s what Tor said.’
‘We diverted ’em, all right.’
At that moment a Hound of Shadow slunk into view, not twenty paces away. Its sides were heaving, strips of flesh hanging down trailing threads of blood. Its mouth was crusted with red foam. It swung its head and eyed them.
In unison, Scorch and Leff lifted their crossbows into vertical positions, and spat on the barbed heads. Then they slowly settled the weapons back down, trained on the Hound.
Nostrils flaring, the beast flinched back. A moment later and it was gone.
‘Shit!’
‘I knew you smelled bad, damn you! We almost had it!’
‘Wasn’t me!’
‘It’s no fun wandering around with you, Scorch, no fun at all. Every chance we get, you go and mess it all up.’
‘Not on purpose. I like doing fun stuff as much as you do, I swear it!’
‘Next time,’ muttered Leff. ‘We shoot first and argue later,’’
‘Good idea. Next time, We’ll do it rigtht the next time,’
Beneath a moon that haunted him with terrifying memories, Cutter rode Coll’s horse at a slow trot down the centre of the street. In one hand he gripped the lance, but it felt awkward, too heavy. Not a weapon he’d ever used, and yet something made him reluctant to abandon it.
He could hear the Hounds of Shadow, unleashed like demons in his poor city, and this too stirred images from the past, but these were bittersweet. For she was in them, a presence dark, impossibly soft. He saw once more every one of her smiles, rare as they had been, and they stung like drops of acid on his soul.
He had been so lost, from the very morning he awoke in the monastery to find her gone. Oh, he’d delivered his brave face, standing there beside a god and unwill-ing to see the sympathy in Cotillion’s dark eyes. He had told himself that it was an act of courage to let her go, to give her the final decision. Courage and sacrifice.
He no longer believed that. There was no sacrifice made in being abandoned. There was no courage in doing nothing. Regardless of actual age, he had been so much younger than her. Young in that careless, senseless way. When thinking felt hard, unpleasant, until one learned to simply shy away from the effort, even as blind emotions raged, one conviction after another raised high on the shining shield of truth. Or what passed for truth; and he knew now that whatever it had been, truth it was not. Blustery, belligerent stands, all those pious poses-they seemed so childish now, so pathetic. I could have embraced the purest truth. Still, nobody would listen. The older you get, the thicker your walls. No wonder the young have grown so cynical. No wonder at all.
Oh, she stood there still, a dark figure in his memories, the flash of eyes, the beginnings of a smile even as she turned away. And he could forget nothing.
At this moment, Challice, having ascended to the top of the estate tower-that ghoulish Gadrobi embarrassment-now stepped out on to the roof, momentarily buffeted by a gust of smoke. She held in her hands the glass globe in which shone the prisoner moon, and she paused, lifting her gaze, and stared in wonder at the destruction now filling a third of the sky.
But she had left him with bad habits. Terrible ones, and they had proceeded to shape his entire life. Cutter remembered the expression on Rallick’s face-the shock and the dismay-as he looked down at the knife buried in his shoulder. The recognition- yes, Cutter was Apsalar’s creation, through and through. Yes, another man had been lost.
It seemed wryly fitting that the moon was breaking into pieces in the night sky, but to find amusement in such a poignant symbol was proving a struggle. He did not possess Rallick’s hardness, the layers of scar tissue worn like armour. And, for all that she had given him, Cutter was not her perfect reflection. He could not si-lence the anguish he felt inside, the legacy of delivering murder, making the notion of justice as unpalatable as a prisoner’s gruel. And these were things she did not feel.
He rode on.
The Hounds knew him, he was sure of that, and if that meant anything on this night, then he had no reason to fear them.
The occasional refugee darted across his path. Like ousted rats, the desperate hunt for cover filled their minds, and the faces flashing past seemed empty of any-thing human. Survival was a fever, and it left eyes blank as those of a beached fish. Witnessing this, Cutter felt his heart breaking.