The Long War

wash over her, and she felt as if these creatures could not have been more alien.
    Finn McCool was watching her. ‘You strange to them-mm, but not that ss-strange. They think you kobolds-ss.’ He laughed at that. ‘We’re all the ss-same to them, we human-nn f-folk. Ss-ame to stupid puppies-ss.’
    ‘You and I,’ Sally said with cold contempt, ‘are not the same.’
    It was a relief when the cart at last reached the city itself. The Eye of the Hunter was a wide brownish smear of wooden buildings set in a muddy plain, under a pall of smoke. The central development was bounded by a wide moat spanned by solid-looking bridges of wood and stone. The moat was evidently for defence, but there was no city wall that Jansson could discern, just a low, irregular dry stone barrier that looked as if it was intended to keep out beasts wandering from the fields rather than purposeful invaders.
    Just before they reached the moat, they passed stockades into which farm animals were being driven for slaughter. Jansson, in a quick glance, saw the beagles working, polished stone blades flashing, blood spurting, and the animals fell one by one. Death and blood: universals on every world, it seemed, no matter how far you travelled. Jansson felt her queasy stomach churn.
    In the city, the buildings, none more than a couple of storeys high, were robust but unadorned, wooden boxes with walls of stone or packed mud and roofs of timber or a kind of coarse thatch: irregular shapes, nothing of the squareness or roundness you’d associate with a human town. There seemed to be only a couple of traffic arteries, long, straight avenues running north–south, east–west through the heart of the city; the other tracks were winding, irregular. Whatever these dogs were, they weren’t geometers – not in the style of human geometry, anyhow. Now the dominant smell was of wood smoke and a lingering raw-meat stench, overlying the rich dog-like scent of the beagles themselves. And this was a noisy place as well as a smelly one, with an unending chorus of barks and yaps and howls.
    They didn’t get much further before they were held up by a small pack of tough-looking male dogs. They surrounded the cart, and began to interrogate Snowy and Li-Li with rapid-fire yelps and growls.
    ‘Cops,’ Sally said. ‘Or royal guards. We must be heading straight for the palace . . . Some palace, however. Not exactly Paris, France, is it?’
    ‘It’s not even Paris, Texas.’
    ‘But it’s not built to impress us .’
    Li-Li gave them a wolfish grin, and sniffed, with short chuffing sounds. ‘Know this from rrh-kobolds. Humans can’t smell. But city, city full of wo-rrds. Scent over there. I he-hre, half day ago, seeking you . And distant, distant – hear howls? I, I have fine f-hhrresh meat from count-hrry, buy now, buy now . . .’
    Sally grinned. ‘Think of that, Jansson. Imagine if you had the nose of a police dog. The city’s full of information. There are scent markers everywhere, just like posters or graffiti on the walls, and the howls must be more long-range, like some kind of internet.’
    They came at last to a building bigger than most, wider, but no taller, and no more elaborately constructed than the rest. Here the human party was told to wait with Snowy, while Li-Li jogged inside.
    The strongest smell just here was wood smoke. ‘Dogs discover fire,’ Jansson murmured.
    ‘Maybe that’s how it started,’ Sally mused. ‘Dogs are smart animals. Intensely social, adaptable, easy to train. Here, maybe us clever monkeys never evolved to keep them in their place. And one day, in some starving pack out on the prairie, one bright young female comes home with a burning branch in her jaws, taken from some lightning-struck forest . . .’
    ‘Or some bright young male.’
    Sally grinned. ‘Be serious.’
    Li-Li returned, to say they would be taken in to see the Granddaughter immediately.

51
    T HEY WERE LED through narrow, twisting, confusing corridors – confusing unless you could follow scents, probably – to a large chamber, with long curving walls of stone and mud, a high ceiling, windows, and a fireplace, unlit.
    The basics of the room might have been laid out by a human, Jansson thought, down to the detail of the fireplace built under what was evidently a chimney stack. Some things were universal. But the room, while well constructed, was drab to human eyes; there was no paint, no wallpaper, no tapestries, no art on the walls. What