A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 4

main cabin, and found it unlocked. Now,
that was strange. Drawing a knife, he edged inside, and
waited for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. Nothing seemed
untoward, no signs of disarray – so there had been no
roving thief, which was a relief. As he stepped towards the
lantern hanging from a hook, his foot struck something
that skidded a fraction.
    Cutter looked down.
    His lance – the one that dead Seguleh horseman had
given him, in that plague-stricken fort in Seven Cities. He
recalled seeing it later, strapped to the back of a floating
pack amidst wreckage in the waves. He recalled Spite's
casual retrieval. He had since stashed the weapon beneath
his bunk. So, what was it doing here?
And then he noted the beads of what looked like sweat
glistening on the iron blade.
    Cutter reached down.
    The copper sheathing of the shaft was warm, almost
hot. Picking the lance up, he realized, with a start, that the
weapon was trembling . 'Beru fend,' he whispered, 'what is
going on here?'
    Moments later he was back on the deck, staring over at
his horse as the beast tugged at the reins, hoofs stamping
the thick tarred boards of the dock. Its ears were flat, and it
looked moments from tearing the bollard free – although of
course that was impossible. Cutter looked down to find he
was still carrying the lance. He wondered at that, but not
for long, as he heard a sudden, deafening chorus of howls
roll through the city. All along the shoreline, nesting birds
exploded upward in shrieking panic, winging into the
night.
    Cutter stood frozen in place. The Hounds.
They're here.
    Grisp Falaunt had once been a man of vast ambitions.
Lord of the single greatest landholding anywhere on the
continent, a patriarch of orchards, pastures, groves and
fields of corn stretching to the very horizon. Why, the
Dwelling Plain was unclaimed, was it not? And so he could
claim it, unopposed, unobstructed by prohibitions.
    Forty-one years later he woke one morning stunned by
a revelation. The Dwelling Plain was unclaimed because
it was . . . useless. Lifeless. Pointless. He had spent most
of his life trying to conquer something that was not only
unconquerable, but capable of using its very indifference to
annihilate every challenger.
    He'd lost his first wife. His children had listened to his
promises of glorious inheritance and then had simply wandered
off, each one terminally unimpressed. He'd lost his
second wife. He'd lost three partners and seven investors.
He'd lost his capital, his collateral and the shirt on his back
– this last indignity courtesy of a crow that had been hanging
round the clothes line in a most suspicious manner.
    There comes a time when a man must truncate his ambitions,
cut them right down, not to what was possible, but
to what was manageable. And, as one grew older and more
worn down, manageable became a notion blurring with
minimal, as in how could a man exist with the minimum
of effort? How little was good enough?
    He now lived in a shack on the very edge of the Dwelling
Plain, offering a suitable view to the south wastes where all
his dreams spun in lazy dust-devils through hill and dale
and whatnot. And, in the company of a two-legged dog so
useless he needed to hand-feed it the rats it was supposed
to kill and eat, he tended three rows of root crops, each row
barely twenty paces in length. One row suffered a blight of
purple fungus; another was infested with grub-worm; and
the one between those two had a bit of both.
    On this gruesome night with its incessant thunder and
invisible lightning and ghost wind, Grisp Falaunt sat rocking
on his creaking chair on his back porch, a jug of cactus
spit in his lap, a wad of rustleaf bulging one cheek and a
wad of durhang the other. He had his free hand under his
tunic, as would any man keeping his own company with
only a two-legged dog looking on – but the mutt wasn't
paying him any attention anyway, which, all things considered,
was a rare relief these nights when the beast mostly
just stared at him with oddly hungry eyes. No, old Scamper
had his eyes on something to the south, out there in the
dark plain.
    Grisp hitched the jug up on the back of a forearm and
tilted in a mouthful of the thick, pungent liquor. Old
Gadrobi women in the hills still chewed the spiny blades
after hardening the insides of their mouths by eating fire,
and spat out the pulp in bowls of water sweetened with
virgins' piss. The mixture was then fermented in sacks of
sewn-up sheep intestines buried