The Hounds on the Stair

They heard nothing more that night, and nothing all the next day.

They climbed. The road went up the face of the Cloudwall in its long gray switchbacks, and on the third of September it went up into the snow. At first there were only drifts in the shadows of the turns, crusted and old, and then the drifts joined. By the afternoon they were wading through it to their shins, on a road they could no longer see, following the line of the cut into the mountainside and the marks Fenn read off Iyene's map. They slept that night in the lee of a rock wall at a turning-place, packed together under every blanket they had. Nobody slept much, and every time the wind moaned in the cliffs somebody sat up, but no hounds bayed, and no horn blew.

"Maybe they've gone," Pip said in the morning, with his teeth chattering.

"Maybe," said Bracken.

"Do you think they've gone?"

"No."

The fourth of September came up clear and bitter, with a hard blue sky and the snow blazing white under it. They could see the summit now, a notch in the ridge above them, a saddle of snow between two black peaks, and in the notch something that caught the sun and glittered blue. Alder shaded his eyes and studied it, and did not say what it was.

"Tomorrow," Iyene said. "Early, if the road holds."

"And then you open your letter," said Wren.

Iyene looked at her. "And then I open my letter."

The road narrowed after the second turn.

The switchbacks up here had been cut into the face of a cliff. On the inside the rock went straight up, black and hung with icicles. On the outside the road stopped at an edge, and past the edge there was nothing but a long fall of rock and snow. It was so steep that the snow could barely cling to it. Far below it lay the white slopes of the switchbacks they had already climbed, and beyond those, very small and very far, the green of Dall.

The Survey had cut a mark in the rock at the start of that stretch, and Wren knew it from the kitchen table: two short lines and a long one.

"Mind the edge," she said.

"Mind the edge," said Iyene. "Fenn. Single file. Keep to the wall."

They went single file. Fenn led, with Iyene's map inside his coat and his sword drawn, and after him came Iyene, and then Wren, with the Waybook in its satchel under her coat and her sling in her fist. Then came Alder and Dorrit, and Pip leading Barrow, and Tolly and Ash with Nettle between them, Tolly at her head and Ash at her tail. Merritt followed with her crossbow, and the clay fire-pot swinging from its chain at her belt with the morning's coals in it, and Bracken came last, with his spear.

The ledge was eight feet wide, in places less, and the snow on it was packed and slick, and the mules hated it. Barrow went along it with his head low and his ears turning, placing each hoof as carefully as a cat. Nettle went along it hating everyone, and twice tried to turn round, and Ash had to talk to her in a low voice the whole time to keep her going.

"Good girl. Good girl. Horrible girl. That's it. Nobody likes you. Keep going."

Wren kept her left hand on the rock, so cold that it burned through her glove, and she did not look over the edge. She looked at Iyene's back, and at the snow at her feet, and at the next bend in the road a hundred yards ahead, where the ledge went round a shoulder of cliff out of sight.

Above them the rock wall went up for thirty or forty feet and then leaned back into a slope, a long steep snow-field running up toward the ridge. Wren did not look at that either, though she should have.

The first sound was a stone. It came down off the snow-field above them, bouncing, and struck the road ten feet ahead of Iyene and shot off over the edge, and they all stopped, and Wren looked up.

On the rim of the rock wall above them, against the blue sky, there was a hound.

It was bigger than any dog Wren had ever seen, bigger than a calf, long-legged and deep-chested and white. Its fur stood up stiff and glittering all over its body, like the frost on Cob's ewe. It was looking down at them with pale bright blue eyes, and its mouth was open, and inside its mouth was dark blue, nearly black. Another came up beside it, and then another.

"Back," said Iyene. "Back to the wall. Weapons."

The first hound threw back its head and bayed, and the sound hit the cliff and came back off it, doubled, huge. And then there were hounds all along the rim above them, a dozen of them, white against the sky, all baying.

They came down the rock wall where no dog could have come, in long bounding leaps from ledge to ledge, sending snow and stones flying. The first one hit the road ahead of Fenn. Two more landed in the middle of the line, between Pip and Tolly. One landed on the edge beside Merritt and scrabbled for a moment with its hind legs over the drop, and found its footing, and turned on her.

Merritt shot it in the chest at four feet, and the bolt went in to the fletching. The hound shrieked and went over backward off the edge, twisting, and fell, and did not stop falling.

Then everything happened at once.

Wren slung at the nearest hound. The stone hit it on the skull with a crack and bounced off, and it shook its head and came on, and she fumbled for another stone and dropped it. The hound was on the road ten feet from her, between her and Fenn, and it came at her low and fast with its blue-black mouth open.

Iyene stepped in front of her, and her sabre came out of its scabbard with a hiss. The hound leaped. Iyene cut across its face, right to left, and the blade opened it from eye to jaw, and it fell against the rock wall and tried to rise. She cut again, down, into the back of its neck, a short hard chop with her whole weight behind it. It stopped moving.

"Fire!" Iyene shouted. "Merritt! Fire!"

Up ahead, Fenn was fighting two of them with his back to the wall. Behind Wren somebody screamed, and she turned.

Two hounds had come down between Pip and Tolly. One had leaped straight onto Tolly and borne him down in the snow, and it had its jaws in his shoulder, at the neck, while he hit at it with his fists. Ash had let go of Nettle and was hacking at the hound's back with his sword, yelling, until the second hound hit him from the side and he went down under it.

Nettle reared up on the ledge, a gray mule loaded with sacks and jugs, screaming like a woman, and came down with both forefeet on the back of the hound that was on Ash. Wren heard its spine go. It yelped and dragged itself sideways, and Nettle kicked it with both hind feet, and it flew over the edge.

Then the third hound came down off the wall onto Nettle's back.

It landed on her load and sank its teeth into her neck. She screamed again, and spun, and staggered, and her hind feet went to the edge, and the snow broke away under them. For a moment she hung there, her forefeet scrabbling at the road, her eyes rolling white, with the hound on her back. Then the edge crumbled, and she went over.

Wren heard her screaming all the way down. The hound went with her, and so did the food, and the oil, and half of everything they had.

"Pip!" Dorrit was shouting. "Pip, get back!"

Wren turned again. Merritt was running toward her along the ledge, past Dorrit, with the fire-pot swinging, and behind Merritt, Pip had let go of Barrow. A hound had come down between them and the edge, and it had the whole back of Pip's coat in its jaws and was dragging him backward across the snow toward the drop.

Pip was yelling. He dug his heels in and they skidded, and he grabbed at the snow, at the road, at nothing, and his legs went over the edge.

Bracken came past Merritt at a run, with his spear in one hand. He did not stop to use it. He threw himself flat in the snow at the edge and grabbed Pip by the belt with his free hand, and held.

The hound pulled, and Pip was over the edge to his waist, kicking at air, and Bracken's arm was straight and shaking. The hound set its feet and pulled harder, and Bracken slid a foot toward the drop.

"Let go of him!" Dorrit screamed. She had nothing in her hands. She looked round wildly. Then she grabbed the thing nearest her, which was the iron stew-pot tied to Barrow's pack, and tore it off its strap. She ran at the hound and swung the pot two-handed into the side of its head.

It made a sound like a bell.

The hound's jaws opened, and Pip's coat tore free. The hound staggered, shaking its head, and Dorrit hit it again, and it stumbled sideways off the edge and was gone.

Bracken heaved. He rolled over backward in the snow and dragged Pip up over the edge by his belt, and Pip came sprawling onto the road on top of him.

"Thank you, Sergeant," Pip said, in a very high voice.

"Get off me," said Bracken.

"Wren!"

It was Merritt, at her elbow, thrusting a torch at her. Wren took it, and Merritt pulled the lid off the fire-pot in a gust of heat, and Wren shoved the torch-head down among the coals until the pitch caught and flared up yellow and smoking.

"Go," said Merritt.

Wren went. Ahead, Fenn was down on one knee with his sword up. He had killed one of his two hounds, but the other was on him, snapping at his sword arm, and there was blood on the snow. Iyene was coming up behind it with her sabre, but Wren got there first and rammed the torch into the hound's flank.

The ice in its fur went up in steam, and it shrieked and turned on her, and she shoved the torch into its face, into its open blue-black mouth, and held it there. The fur round its muzzle caught and burned. It reared back, howling, and Iyene's sabre came down across its neck.

Wren turned. Behind her, Tolly was lying in the snow, and the hound that had held him stood over him with its muzzle red. It looked up and saw Wren's torch and snarled.

Bracken was up and coming back along the ledge toward it with his spear leveled in both hands, and Wren saw his face, and did not want to see it again. The hound turned to meet him, and leaped.

Bracken took it on the spear. The broad iron head went in under its breastbone, and the crossbar stopped it a foot from his face. It hung there on the spear, snapping, its jaws closing on air an inch from his arm, its hind legs raking. One of its claws caught his forearm and tore his sleeve open, and his arm under it, and the blood ran, but he did not seem to notice. He took a step forward, and another, carrying it on the spear, and heaved it off the edge. It fell away silently.

"Wren!" Dorrit shouted. "Behind you!"

Wren spun round. There was one more hound on the road between her and Iyene, the biggest yet, crouched with its belly in the snow and its blue eyes on her, and it was going to jump.

Then it stopped, with its head up and its ears forward, and every hound left alive on the Stair did the same thing at the same moment. There were four or five of them, on the road and on the rock wall above, and they all went rigid and turned their heads, and looked up at the snow-field.

A horn blew the same call they had heard in the night, long and clear, rising and holding and falling away, from above them and very close. Wren looked up. On the snow-field above the rock wall, against the blue sky, there was a rider.

She sat a tall horse that had once been white and was now the gray-white of old bone, its coat patchy and stiff with frost, its eyes clouded. Its breath did not smoke. The woman on its back was tall and straight. She wore a long coat and a hood of dark green, but the green was rotted, faded and stained and hanging in tatters at the hem, and her face under the hood was pale. In her right hand she held a long spear upright, the butt resting on her stirrup, and in her left, raised to her mouth, a silver horn that flashed in the sun.

She lowered the horn, and the hounds went. They turned as one and went back up the rock wall in long leaps, and up onto the snow-field. They ran past the horse and on up the slope and over the ridge, a streak of white on white, and not one of them looked back.

The rider stayed, sitting her pale horse on the snow above them, looking down. She did not look at Iyene with her sabre, or at Bracken with his spear, or at Merritt, who had wound her crossbow and was aiming it at her. She looked at Wren.

Wren looked back at her. She could not see the woman's eyes under the hood, only that the face was pale, and still, and turned toward her. The torch in her hand was burning down to her glove, and she did not move.

Merritt shot, and the bolt went up the slope, straight at the rider, and into the snow a foot from the horse's hoof. The rider did not turn her head to look at it. She looked at Wren a moment more, and then turned the pale horse, without hurry, and rode up the snow-field and over the ridge.

The torch burned Wren's hand, and she dropped it in the snow.

Tolly was dead, and had been dead, Dorrit said, before the hound let go of his throat. Ash was alive when they reached him, lying on his back in the snow at the edge of the road with his sword still in his hand. His coat was torn open across the chest, and his chest was torn open under it. He looked up at them and tried to say something, and Dorrit knelt beside him and put her hands on the wounds and pressed, and her hands went red to the wrists. Ash looked at her, and at the sky, and then he stopped looking at anything.

Dorrit took her hands away and knelt there in the snow, looking at them. Nobody spoke. The wind blew snow off the rim of the rock wall, and it came down over them in a thin glittering veil.

Then Iyene came and knelt by Ash, stiffly, one knee and then the other, and put her sabre down in the snow beside her. She reached out to close his eyes, and Wren saw that her hand shook so badly that she could not close them the first time, and had to do it again. Then she laid her palm on his chest, over the torn coat, and left it there.

Bracken stood behind her. His forearm was running with blood and he had not noticed. He said, "Sir."

Iyene did not answer. Her hand stayed where it was.

"Sir," said Bracken again, very quietly.

Iyene took her hand away from Ash's chest. She picked up her sabre and wiped it on the snow, both sides, carefully, and sheathed it and stood, and when she turned round her face was the same as it always was.

"Stones," she said. "We can't dig. We'll cover them with stones. Sergeant, see to it. Fenn, how's your arm?"

"Bitten, Sir. It'll do."

"Get it seen to. Merritt, find out what we have left. Food, oil, blankets, all of it. I want to know in a quarter of an hour. We move in an hour." She looked at Alder. "Warden. A word."

They buried Ash and Tolly under stones at the foot of the rock wall, side by side, on the inside of the road where the snow was thinnest. They took the stones from the rubble at the edge of the road and passed them hand to hand. It took a long time, and Pip carried stones until his hands bled through his gloves. When it was done there was a long low mound against the black rock, and Bracken pushed Ash's sword into the top of it, and Tolly's beside it. He stood at the foot of it and said the soldier's words over them, short words, without looking at anyone.

Iyene had drawn Alder aside, a little way along the ledge, and Wren, carrying stones, heard some of what they said. "Will they rise?"

"I do not think so," said Alder. "The hounds are flesh. They kill as wolves kill. It is the other kind of death that walks."

"You don't think so."

"I do not know. Nobody knows. But I do not think so."

Iyene looked at the mound. "Then we'll leave them," she said. "And pray you're right."

When the mound was finished, Wren went to her, because she had to know. "The horn," she said. "Do you know it?"

Iyene looked up the snow-field, toward the ridge where the rider had gone. "Sing me the call," she said. "You've a good ear, Sandover says. The one she blew. Sing it."

Wren sang it without having to think. It rose a fifth and held, and fell away by steps, with a little flourish at the end, and she sang it through once, softly, and stopped.

Iyene closed her eyes, and when she opened them her face was very pale. "I've seen that," she said. "Written down. In the King's archive, in Merrow. There's a book there, from Meddan. The ceremonial of the old court, from before the Frost. Every call of the royal hunt is in it, written out in notes. I copied them when I was a clerk, thirty years ago." She drew a breath. "That's the call of the Master of the King's Hounds. The Master's own call. The one that brought the pack in."

"Of Meddan?"

"Of Meddan."

"So somebody still has the office," said Wren. "Over there. In the West."

"No," said Iyene. "That office ended three hundred years ago. There's been no king in Meddan since the Frost. No court. No hunt." She looked up the snow-field again, at the long blue shadows lying across it. "There's been no Master of the King's Hounds since the day the Stair was shut."

Barrow carried everything now, the blankets and the tools and the little food that was left, and the one jug of oil that had been on his pack and not on Nettle's. He carried it all without complaint, with his head low, placing his hooves with care on the slick ledge. Pip walked beside him with one hand on his neck and had not said a word since the edge.

They made camp that night at the next turning-place, a wide bend in the road with a spur of rock to keep off the wind. The summit was close now, and they could see the black peaks on either side of the saddle, very high, with the stars coming out round them. The blue thing in the notch between them had stopped glittering when the sun went, and was only a darkness against the dark.

Merritt had gone through the food, and there was enough for five days if they were careful, and oil for one night's fire or a great many torches. Iyene chose the torches, and they made a small fire of the last of the wood.

Dorrit sat by it with her medicine roll open on her knees, and Bracken sat beside her with his sleeve rolled up and his torn arm held out.

It was a bad tear. Four long gashes ran down the outside of his right forearm from the elbow nearly to the wrist, where the hound's claws had gone in, and they had mostly stopped bleeding. Dorrit washed them slowly and gently with water warmed in a cup over the fire, and there was no word about heads or cough-drops, and none about wardrobes, while Bracken watched her hands.

She laid a salve along the gashes, the comfrey and honey she had put on Tansy's hand. She wrapped his arm in linen from the roll, round and round, firm and neat, and tied it off. Then she sat with her hands resting on the bandage for a moment, and did not take them away.

"You were good," Bracken said. "With the pot."

"I didn't think," said Dorrit. "I just hit it."

"That's the trick of it."

Dorrit looked down at the bandage under her hands. "Ash was twenty-two," she said. "He told me. He was going to be married at midwinter. To a girl in Merrow who sells gloves."

"I know."

"I couldn't do anything. I had my hands on him and I couldn't do anything at all."

"No," said Bracken. "Nobody could." He looked at the fire. "You held on to him, though. He wasn't on his own."

Dorrit took her hands off his arm and began to roll up the linen and the salve, very neatly, into the medicine roll, and her hands were shaking. Bracken watched her do it, and after a while he took the end of the roll and held it for her while she tied it. He did it with his left hand, and there was a ring on it, a plain band of old gold worn thin at the back.

"My father's," he said, when he saw her looking. "Only thing he left me that wasn't a temper."

Across the fire, Iyene sat alone with her back to the rock and her dispatch case on her knees. Her eyes were on the black notch in the ridge above them, where the road went over, and her hand lay flat on the case, over the place where the sealed letter was.

Wren watched her, but Iyene did not open the case. Tomorrow, she had said, at the summit.