Hounds without skin that howl in human voices as they tear throats from the living. — from the older chronicle of Kargath's host
#On Their Nature
That one line is very nearly the whole of the dossier. I have placed it at the head of this entry the way a sacristan places the single authenticated knucklebone in a reliquary built for a whole saint. The case is large and the contents are small, and the faithful will be invited to admire the case.
The Carrion-Dogs belong to the host of Kargath, the Maw of Endless Hunger, Sin-General of Gluttony. They are named in the consolidated entry on the Seven beside the Bloat-Hulks and the Mawwheel. The ledger puts them in the same column. It does not say who drives whom, whether any Bloat-Hulk has ever called a Carrion-Dog to heel, or whether the Mawwheel counts them as colleagues or as fuel. The association is entered. The command line is blank.
The record supports only a little about the body. They are hounds, or shaped enough like hounds to be called so. They have no skin. Whatever lies under a skin is therefore on display, and the descriptions in my keeping do not linger over it, which I take as evidence of good sense in whoever first wrote them down. They attack the living, and they go for the throat.
They are physical. Everything the Church has established about the lesser manifestations of the Seven applies to them. Such a creature can be killed. Its carcass stays where it falls, and it does not rise again on that spot. Whether some part of it goes back east and is cut into a fresh dog, no one can say. I would distrust any clerk who claimed he could.
Where they came from is not in the file. The Great Deceiver has not deposited his manufacturing records with the Bureau of Records. When they first appeared is not in the file either. They belong, with their master, to the Sundering of 1 November A.S. 45 and the years after it. I hold no dated first encounter with a Carrion-Dog, and I will not invent one to fill a box on a form.
"He manifested in the ash-years after the Eastern Silence, when Pannonia's barns were already rotting."
The Eastern Silence of A.S. 38 was an omen. The Sundering of A.S. 45 was the arrival. Kargath and every hound of his host are entered from the Sundering onward, as the survey of the Blightmarsh of the Drava already records. Grain that rotted before that date rotted without his help.
#On the Human Voice
The howl is the part that is confirmed. It is human.
By this I mean exactly what the record means and nothing more: when a Carrion-Dog lifts its head, the sound it makes is the sound a man makes. The record says voices. Nowhere does it say words. No account in my keeping has a Carrion-Dog speaking a name, calling a sentry by his mother's pet-word, or repeating the last prayer of the man it ate. Those embellishments belong to the canteen, and they are welcome there. Here they are struck out.
This restraint costs me something. A beast that recited names would be a doctrinal problem with a doctrinal remedy. The Bureau of Doctrine would classify the names, the Bureau of Purity would forbid anyone to listen, and the matter would be folded, sealed and shelved by Vespers. A beast that only sounds like a man is worse. In the wet hours a soldier cannot tell whether the cry from the wire is a wounded comrade or the thing about to eat the wounded comrade. The Creator gave us ears so that we might know our brothers. Kargath's kennel has turned that gift into a hazard.
The howl compels no one. The record must be firm on this point, because the canteen is not. A man who climbs out toward the sound does so by his own choice, however bad the choice and however loud the sound. The dog lies with its throat. The man decides with his feet.
An earlier survey of Kargath's troops contains an older account, never corroborated, which says the Carrion-Dogs were men once and are now hunched and many-toothed. I report it because it exists. I do not certify it. No deposition stands behind it, and no carcass has been opened in my presence to prove it. A human voice in a canine throat proves a human past no better than a parrot's Paternoster proves the parrot ordained.
#On Their Feeding
As the Church has come to understand Gluttony, it is need that grows with feeding: provision that fails to nourish, a belly emptier after the meal than before it. That doctrine explains why such a creature belongs in Kargath's host. It does not license me to hang every Gluttonous power on the creature's collar.
The confirmed act is the tearing of the throat from the living. The older survey adds more. It says the dogs hunt in packs behind the lines, that they eat the fallen of both sides without distinction, and that they neither tire nor fatten. Each of these particulars sits in the record as hearsay of respectable age, and I enter them as an older account. If they are true, they describe the hunger exactly as Doctrine would predict it: feeding without end and without profit, the carcass picked clean and the picker no heavier. If they are false, Doctrine predicted them anyway, and that tells you something about Doctrine.
Nothing in my keeping says that a Carrion-Dog rots grain by standing near it, fouls water or carries Kargath's famine on its breath. Those are the works of the Sin-General and of other servants. A dog that eats your horse has done enough without also being charged with the price of bread.
There are, in fact, horses. Among the variant lives of Marrow-Saint Elen preserved by the Handlers is one in which she is a debtor from the Danube settlements who will not let go of a saint's tibia while carrion-dogs eat the escort horses. The Handlers keep it as one version among several, and I enter it as a devotional variant. It proves that convoy-folk fear these animals, which no one disputed. It proves nothing about where or when any convoy suffered such a thing.
#On the Ground They Haunt
Kargath's domain is the Blightmarsh: old Pannonian grain country gone to grey water, the drowned valleys of the Drava and the Sava. At its centre stands the Cauldron Citadel, drowned cities fused into one fortress under smoke that never clears. The dogs are entered in the host, and the host is entered in the marsh. That is as far as the map goes.
Nothing establishes that the Citadel breeds them, that some pit in the marsh whelps them, or that they range only within the Drava. The interior accounts of the Citadel are attributed intelligence, and none of them describes a kennel. A host's territory is not a species' range, and I will not draw one in ink to please a cartographer.
Kargath's war presses hardest on Bastion-Constantinople, the southern anchor of the Sagittal Line at the Bosphorus, which also faces Maldrake. The garrison learns the difference quickly. Wrath comes as fire and slag. Gluttony comes as spoiled stores and failed supply. The file does not say, sector by sector, where the Carrion-Dogs fall within that pressure. The grey country the garrison there calls the Blightmarch has its own name and is its own ground. No surveyor has walked a continuous marsh from the Drava to the Thracian shore, and I will not draw one with a pen.
Any honest report must keep three grounds apart: the hostile country to the east, the contested No-Man's-Land, and the bastion behind its wire. A howl heard from the second is not a dog inside the third. A sentry who writes it that way will be corrected.
#On Defence and Classification
Against the Carrion-Dog itself, the Church has the ordinary arsenal and nothing special. The record names no weakness peculiar to the creature, no repellent that works reliably, and no blessed powder that sends it whimpering back across the wire. It has a body, and bodies can be stopped.
Against Kargath, the Church has the measures it has always had, and their reputation is better than their results. Rationing is kept as discipline as well as arithmetic. Communal meals are urged, on the theory that a man who eats beside his company does not hoard and does not starve alone. Provisions are blessed before issue. The Bureau of Relics maintains that properly blessed food cannot carry the Maw's curse. The field evidence on that point is mixed, which is how the Bureau of Relics describes a loss. None of these measures was devised against dogs, and a blessed biscuit has never kept a throat whole.
What follows is my own counsel. It is an inference and nothing more, and no officer of the Bureau of War is bound by it. A sentry should be taught about the howl before he hears it, so that the first time is not the first time. A man who knows a voice can come out of a skinless throat will still crawl out to his wounded brother. He will at least go armed, and looking low.
The record has no recovery protocol for the carcass. I note only that it is meat, that the men on Kargath's front are hungry, and that hunger is a condition of the body and no sin of the hungry. The rest I leave to the chaplains, who are better fed than the men they serve and know it.
#Ratification
The howl is confirmed. Close the file, and do not answer it if it calls.