The Long War

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

THEY 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 there was, however, was a rich melange of scents, which even Jansson’s battered old cop’s schnozzle could detect.

The princess of the beagles had no throne; she sat easily on the ground, on what looked like a patch of natural turf growing in the middle of the room. The princess was flanked by guards, who had stone-tipped spears and space-age blasters to hand. Jansson wondered how the grass got the light to grow.

The Granddaughter’s title was not ‘Granddaughter’. Her name was not ‘Petra’. The adviser beside her, an ageing male with a glum posture, was not called ‘Brian’. But these were the best labels Sally and Jansson were given, courtesy of the kobold. The Granddaughter wore only a practical-looking pocket belt – that, and, Jansson saw, some kind of pendant on a loop of leather at her neck, what looked like handsome blue stones set in a ring of gold. It was an artefact that caught Jansson’s eye; it looked naggingly familiar.

And there was a dog by her side! A real dog, an authentic dog, a Datum dog, a big Alsatian if Jansson was any judge. It sat up, watching the newcomers, its tongue lolling; it looked healthy, well fed, well groomed. Somehow it looked the most natural presence in the world, here in this room full of dog-people, and yet the strangest too.

All the beagles watched stonily as Jansson and Sally, hastily instructed by Finn McCool, showed submission to the Granddaughter by getting down on the ground and lying on their backs, arms and legs up in the air.

‘God, how humiliating,’ Sally murmured.

‘You should worry. I’m going to need help getting up again.’

The kindly nurse type Li-Li came over to assist when the gesture was finished. Then Sally and Jansson, with McCool, had to sit as best they could on the hard-packed earth of the floor, while the Granddaughter murmured to her advisers.

‘That dog,’ murmured Sally, ‘is a Datum dog. Something to do with you, McCool?’

‘Not me . . . anoth-ther kobold seller-rr. Popular here. They lik-ke big males. Sex-ss toys.’

Sally snorted, but kept from laughing.

Jansson leaned over and whispered, ‘Sally. That pendant she’s wearing.’

‘Yes. Shut up about it.’

‘But it looks like—’

‘I know what it looks like. Shut up.’

At length the Granddaughter deigned to consider them. She said, with the usual rough approximation of English, ‘You. What you call hhrr-uman. From worr-ld you call Datum-mm.’

‘That’s correct,’ Sally said. ‘Umm – ma’am.’

‘Wh-hrr-at you want her-hhre?’

Sally and Jansson went through a halting explanation of why they had come: the problems with the trolls across the human Earths, how Sally had learned from the kobolds that many of the trolls had fled to this world, how they hoped that the trolls they had brought here, Mary and Ham, would be safe . . .

The Granddaughter considered this. ‘Trolls hrr-appy here. Trolls like beagrr-les. Beagles like trolls. Troll music fine. H-rruman music arse shit.’ She perked her own ears. ‘Beagle ears better-hhr than human. Human music ar-hhrse shit.’

‘That’s what my father kept telling me,’ Sally said. ‘All downhill since Simon and Garfunkel broke up, he said.’

Petra stared at her. ‘I know noth-thing of this Simon and Garr-hrr—’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Beagles despise human music. Beagles despise h-hrr-umans.’

That blunt statement shocked Jansson. ‘Why?’

The Granddaughter stood upright now and walked over to her, towering over the sitting women. Jansson did her best not to flinch, and to return that wintry stare. ‘Why? You-hhr stink. You especially . . .’

But it seemed to Jansson that the Granddaughter’s own scent was odd, unnatural, overlaid by some kind of perfume perhaps. Maybe, for a species to whom scent was so important, to mask your smell was to mask your thoughts.