Chapter 34 #2
“A gnole thinks cult-humans matter a lot.”
“It’s not about the cultists. It’s about the dogs.”
“This is the stupidest plan I have ever been involved in,” Sarkis said. “Just so we’re clear.”
“You think it won’t work?”
“No, I think it’s actually got a pretty good chance. It’s just incredibly stupid.”
Zale, who was busy wrapping strips of raw bacon around the hilt of the enchanted sword, didn’t weigh in. They just kept slowly shaking their head.
“Do you have to use so much?” Halla asked. She and Dog Violet had ridden back to the inn to acquire a side of bacon, at a price that Halla said was tantamount to extortion.
“Yes,” said Zale. “This isn’t easy. It has to be tied tightly enough that it won’t come loose when it lands, but with enough bacon under the strings that it will come loose once that’s been gnawed off.
” They demonstrated with greasy fingers.
“Now Dervish, this is probably where we want to sheathe the sword, so…”
“Right.” The Dervish took a deep breath and looked around at his companions, old and new. “Thank you all. If this works, I’ll see you again soon.”
Dog Violet made a beckoning gesture and the Dervish leaned down to hear her. To his surprise, she stretched up and licked his cheek. “Knife-man not so bad for a human. Go get mate back.”
“We’ll be waiting here,” Halla said, embracing him tightly.
“The Rat look after you. I’d hug you, but my hands are covered in bacon.”
He turned at last to Sarkis. Four hundred and fifty years had passed, and suddenly it was no time at all. “The great god go with you,” his old commander said, as he had at the start of every sortie. “I won’t forget my oath.”
The Dervish clasped Sarkis’s arm, not trusting himself to speak, and then Zale sheathed the sword and silver flame wrapped around him and took him into darkness.
The dogs that patrolled the walled yard around the Sainted Smith’s cult center came in two varieties.
The majority were hounds, with floppy ears, keen noses, and an outsized bay, which the houndmaster took out sometimes to hunt fresh game.
They could smell a deer farting in the woods half a mile away and would begin yelling at the top of their lungs to inform their packmates that Something Exciting Was Happening.
The primary danger they posed to an intruder was that they might lick you to death, or perhaps widdle on your shoes while gazing up at you with soulful eyes.
Therefore, there were another set of dogs who ran the place.
They were big, shaggy brutes that looked like a cross between a bear and a fist. When they barked, it was a low, guttural sound that struck the human ear like a rattlesnake’s buzz or the scream of a panther.
It was a sound that ran up your spine and punched directly into the parts of the brain that screamed danger!
People hearing that sound would sometimes find themselves up a very tall tree with absolutely no memory of how they had gotten there and no idea how to get down.
The primary danger these dogs posed to an intruder was immediate evisceration.
The hounds, of course, never stopped trying to make friends with them.
A little before midnight, an object fell from the sky and landed inside the yard.
The hounds began baying hysterically, in case it was an enemy or possibly a deer.
The brutes, who had been asleep in the kennels, yawned, stretched, got up, and came outside to see if there was something interesting to murder.
The houndmaster rolled over in his sleep. He heard the hounds go off a hundred times a day and didn’t wake up unless the big dogs started barking.
The big dogs did not see the need to bark. There was no enemy. There was, however, a Food.
One of the hounds was already gnawing on the Food. The nearest big dog walked up to it. The hound, in a fit of mad bravado, growled at him.
The big dog calmly engulfed the hound’s head in his jaws and waited until the smaller dog had realized the error of its ways, then opened its mouth. When you are three times the size of someone else, you don’t have anything to prove.
The hound fled, unhurt but terrified. The big dog sniffed the Food.
It was BACON.
O canine gods! The hounds watched enviously as he tore a strip loose. He had just swallowed it when his mother arrived.
His mother was twenty pounds lighter and several tons meaner. Even the houndmaster fed her on the end of a pole. The big dog hastily ripped off another strip and retreated. BACON was BACON but MOTHER was MOTHER.
The ancient scarred bitch huffed to herself as her son retreated.
She sniffed the Food and found it good, then looked around at the circle of drooling hounds and huffed again.
She was old and the hounds were annoying.
She picked up the BACON, which was, for whatever reason, long and narrow, and carried it back to her kennel.
A lesser dog might have had a hard time fitting the BACON sideways through the door, but the bitch was old and wily and understood these things. She went inside, grabbed the end in her teeth, and dragged it inside. Then she settled down to gnaw, blissfully, on the Food that fell from heaven.