Hounds of the Gods

“Hounds of the Gods” is a religiously charged name for the black dogs associated with the disease spreading through Aquafa. It turns animal attacks and fatal illness into a story of divine punishment for Zol’s invasion, but the medical investigation complicates that account: the reported cases are real, while their causes, distribution, and apparent selectivity remain uncertain. The expression therefore marks a collision between sacred categories, political grievance, and evidence still being assembled.

Sacred Wolves and the Name

In the beliefs Van explains, wolves are not ordinary animals. They and human beings were created by the same god, but wolves are considered closer to their creator and therefore sacred, deserving awe rather than familiar treatment. They are also imagined as moving along the border of the Land of the Dead, able to enter its darkness at will. The reverence is practical as well as spiritual: when wolves threaten pyuika, people are meant to drive them away with fire or shouting, not kill them as though they were prey. A sendoff rite becomes permissible only if the wolves multiply so greatly that they no longer respond to respectful efforts to deter them.

That account gives the later name its force. The black dogs are not simply dangerous animals in Tohma’s telling; he wonders whether they might be sacred agents carrying out judgment. His uncertainty is sharpened by the sight of a pack in the forest on the night he first encountered Van: perhaps, he thinks, they were not ossam but Hounds of the Gods. Yet the sacred reading sits beside a distinction Van’s knowledge makes important. The Toga Mountains once had glossy black wolves, most of which were eradicated as bearers of disease; wild mountain dogs called ossam became common in their place, while some gray wolves remained. The phrase can thus blur animals that local knowledge distinguishes.

Disease, Rumor, and Political Meaning

By the time the story of the falcon hunt reaches Van and Tohma, people have heard of deaths among those bitten by dogs in settlements on the Yukata Plains and south of the Oki Valley, as well as among immigrants. They have also heard that the Hounds of the Gods closed in on Aquafa’s old capital in the fall. In the rumor Tohma recounts, Utalu died after being bitten by black dogs and developing a rash, while Zolian women also fell ill. The king’s relatives, however, were said to have remained well despite contact with the same dogs. These reports are recited not as settled medical findings but as apparent evidence for a collective accusation.

Tohma gives that accusation its clearest political form: the gods of Aquafa, he believes people say, will kill the Zolians for invading the kingdom and return the land to its people. The salt mine becomes central to the story. All its slaves died, and people treat that disaster as the beginning of the current outbreak. Because the mine had been sacred to the people of Aquafa before the Zolians made it a place of forced labor, the rumor interprets the deaths there as punishment for defiling a divine gift—and the first strike of the Hounds of the Gods.

The claim that the disease discriminates by ancestry is not secure even within the conversation. Ohma counters that a relative of the king was reportedly left unable to walk, and that Olimu, a Zolian governor’s grandson, survived. Tohma replies that believers reinterpret Olimu’s survival as proof that Aquafaese blood protected him: his mother was a niece of the King of Aquafa. In this account, both death and survival can be made to support the same political conclusion. The expression offers a simple agent and motive where the pattern of illness is frightening but poorly understood.

Investigation and Unresolved Evidence

Hohsalle’s earlier inquiry into the salt-mine deaths shows why a single explanation is difficult to establish. The victims appeared to have been exposed, developed symptoms, and died nearly simultaneously; had one person infected another in succession, investigators reasoned, someone might have had time to report an outbreak. Hohsalle judged the disease extremely virulent, but noted that no one working at the mine after the incident had shown symptoms. That absence argued against fleas, ticks, or transmission through the wind, and supported the provisional idea that infection occurred through bites from an animal. Even then, indiscriminate hunting seemed inadequate: if sheep had been attacked by infected wolves or ossam, shepherds should also have been bitten and become ill. The relevant task, Hohsalle argued, was to identify carriers rather than hunt wild dogs or wolves at random.

Later evidence further unsettles the idea that the salt mine marked the disease’s beginning. At a medical meeting, a map assembled with Cheehana’s help showed reports of mittsual-like illness scattered across the former territory of the Kingdom of Aquafa. The cases extended from the Yukata Plains in the south to the Oki forests in the north, and servants of the Inner Circle had found an account dating back eight years—well before the mine disaster. The collected stories described separate attacks by wolves or ossam, usually involving only one or two sick people, with no reported spread from one victim to another.

Hohsalle points out the epidemiological problem in that pattern. If bites transmitted the illness and a pack contained an infected wolf, further cases might be expected around that pack; if ticks or mosquitoes carried it onward, several years of warm seasons might have allowed wider spread. Instead, cases were far apart, with few victims at each reported site. The distribution, he concludes, is unnatural enough to demand an explanation for what is preventing the disease from spreading.

Nor does a natural animal-to-animal route readily explain how the illness reached dogs and wolves over such a broad area. Tomasolle observes that northern wolves could not simply have mingled with southern ones, given the distances involved. Transmission between neighboring packs is proposed as the only natural alternative under discussion, but the participants immediately recognize that it leaves another mystery. The Hounds of the Gods remain a potent name for the feared animals and the political story attached to them; they do not resolve the investigators’ questions about the disease’s origins, its apparent selectivity, or its means of transmission.