The Demon and the City

shakily. It was hard to walk when your ankles had been shackled and your arms were tied behind your back.
    "Be quiet," the dogman behind her snapped. She felt hot, reeking breath on the back of her neck. From the corner of her eye she saw Mhara, similarly shackled, hobbling along. They had left the fields far behind them and now walked through a wilderness of sharp stones and jagged outcrops. Through gaps in the rock Robin occasionally glimpsed distant lights, and a vast roiling expanse that knowledge and half-memory told her was the Sea of Night. It made her sick to look at it: a horrible thought, to know that her soul had already crossed that sea many times before. She could not imagine sailing upon it. Small wonder that memories of the life-between-lives could not be accessed, otherwise life itself would be a landscape of anticipatory dread. And now Robin herself would suffer from this suffocating fear of death, having seen what awaited her at the other end. Even Hell would be better than that dark ocean. If she even lived . . . The boundaries had become too blurred; she did not know what that meant anymore.
    Then the rocks clustered more densely around them and the glimpses of the Sea of Night vanished, to Robin's intense relief. She could feel Mhara glancing at her, but she did not want him to meet her eyes and see her fear and dismay, so she stared rigidly at the ground and concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. But then a howling filled the air: a deep baying, interspersed with wolf-like cries and high puppy yelps. Around her, Robin saw their captors drop to all fours. The armor and the weapons disappeared. She and Mhara were surrounded by the doglike creatures that Deveth had turned into, their little yellow and amber eyes lit by a wicked intelligence. They bounded forward and turned the corner out of sight.
    But one remained, in semi-human form: the pack leader. He prodded Robin between the shoulder blades with a hard hand. "Go on. What are you waiting for?"
    Reluctantly, Robin followed the pack. On turning the corner, she saw what lay before them and once more had to be shoved forward. As she had guessed, it was Bad Dog Village.
    Rickety roofs showed over a high jumble of palisade. From a watchtower that seemed to have been assembled from roughly cut branches, a lamp burned with a dirty orange light. Architecture was clearly not the dogmen's strong point. The gates to the palisade were open. Robin could see movement within and hear a snapping, snarling argument.
    "Do not worry," Mhara murmured, as the pack leader was distracted. "You've been here before." But he did not sound convinced by his own reassurances and Robin, looking at the place before them, felt no sense of familiarity, only an overwhelming dismay.
    Within the palisade, it was even worse. The village stank of shit and Robin had to be careful where she placed her feet. Real dogs might have gone outside to shit, but these beings seemed to combine the worst of being human with the worst of the canine, too. The dogs herded them through into a compartmentalized stockade and here she and Mhara were separated. Robin clung to him when she realized what was happening, but it was no use. The dogmen dragged them apart and shoved Robin through the door of a small, slatted hovel, with a pit in the floor. She ran to the wall, but could not see where Mhara was being taken. She did, however, see something else: a small, pallid band of ghosts, hastening through Bad Dog Village with their heads bowed, clutching one another's hands. The dogmen rushed out: one of the ghosts was pulled away from the rest and hauled into the darkness. The others stood, aimlessly lamenting for a while, until reason evidently overcame them and they rushed away. Robin went slowly back into the hovel and sat down on the cleanest patch of straw.
    It was impossible to know what the dogmen were planning. Whatever it might be, Robin was sure that she was entirely expendable. The statement made by the pack leader seemed to point to that: So you're the missing boy . Did that mean that the dogmen were somehow connected to Paugeng? Or were they referring to further back down the chain and Mhara's absence from Heaven itself? One possibility offered hope, the other, ruin, and Robin had no way of telling which it might be. But judging from the nature of Bad Dog Village, ruin seemed more likely.
     
    Later, Robin woke, with no recollection of having fallen asleep. It was