Toll the Hounds
Might she try again?
He realized he was no longer sure she wouldn’t.
This is the moment for mirrors, and surely that must be understood by now. Pol-ished, with the barest of ripples to twist the reflection, to make what one faces both familiar and subtly altered. Eyes locked, recognition unfolding, quiet horrors flow-ering. What looks upon you here, now, does not mock, denies the cogent wink, and would lead you by a dry and cool hand across the cold clay floor of the soul.
People will grieve. For the dead, for the living. For the loss of innocence and for the surrender of innocence, which are two entirely different things. We will grieve, for choices made and not made, for the mistakes of the heart which can never be undone, for the severed nerve-endings of old scars and those to come.
A grey-haired man walks through the Estate District. No more detailed de-scription is necessary. The blood on his hands is only a memory, but some mem-ories leave stains difficult to wash away. By nature, he observes. The world, its multitude of faces, its tide-tugged swirling sea of emotions. He is a caster of nets, a trailer of hooks. He speaks in the rhythm of poetry, in the lilt of song. He un-derstands that there are wounds in the soul that must not be touched; but there are others that warm to the caress. He understands, in other words, the necessity of the tragic theme. The soul, he knows, will, on occasion, offer no resistance to the tale that draws blood.
A moment for mirrors, a moment for masks. The two ever conspire to play out the tale. Again and again, my friends.
Here, take my hand.
Before one’s eyes, solidity seems poised, moments from crumbling into disso-lution. Uncertainty becomes a law, rising supreme above all others. For a bard, this time is a minor key, a stretch of frailty, a pensive interlude. Sadness drifts in the air, and his thoughts are filled with endings.
He recalls the soft songs he has sung here, unaccompanied by any instrument. Songs drawn from a hundred cultures, a dozen worlds. His voice weaving together the fragments of Shadow’s arrival, drawing together the day just past and the night eager to arrive.
There were secrets in music and poetry. Secrets few knew and even fewer un-derstood. Their power often stole into a listener subtle as the memory of scent on a drawn breath, less than a whisper, yet capable of transforming the one so gifted, an instinctual ecstasy that made troubles vanish, that made all manner of grandeur possible-indeed, within reach.
A skilled bard, a wise bard, knew that at certain moments in the course of a cycle of day and night, the path into the soul of a listener was smooth, unob-structed, a succession of massive gates that swung open to a feather’s touch. This was the most precious secret of all. Dusk, midnight, and that strange period of sudden wakefulness known as the watch-yes, the night and its stealthy ap-proach belonged to the heart.
Hearing a footfall behind him, he turns.
Every sense, he knows, is a path into the heart.
Lady Envy watches him, and he is content to let her do so, as he in turn re-gards her.
They could discuss the Seguleh-the dead ones in the casks, the living ones serving in this estate. They could ponder all that they sensed fast approaching. He could speak of his anger, its quiet, deadly iron that was so cold it could burn at the touch-and she would see the truth of his words in his eyes. She might drift this way and that in this modest garden, brushing fingertips along trembling petals, and speak of desires so long held that she was almost insensate to the myr-iad roots and tendrils they had wrought through her body and soul, and he would perhaps warn her of the dangers they presented, the risk of failure that must be faced and, indeed, accepted-and she would sigh and nod and know well he spoke with wisdom.