“An auspicious moment had not offered itself.”
“Nor would it have until the Deodand pounced.”
She stopped walking and her hand went to the hilt of a hunting knife. “You fight well, but your style is not one that will allow you to survive long in the Great Erm. I, on the other hand, survived here for three years.”
“Under the protection of the Busacios.”
Her hand tightened on the hilt. “Not so. I escaped after eight months. The remainder of those years I spent hunting Busacios.” She shifted her stance the slightest bit, easing back her left foot and resting her full weight upon it. “Do you know why Vasker hired you? They expect you to control me. They are afraid I will be so inflamed by the sight of Cugel, I may not be able to restrain myself from killing him and all the knowledge that can save them will go glimmering.”
“Are they correct in that assumption?”
“Only in that I will not be controlled.” With her left hand, she brushed a stray hair from her eyes, carefully laying it in place behind her ear. “It is impossible to discern the depths of one’s own heart. My reaction to meeting Cugel again is thus unknowable. If you intend to thwart me, however, perhaps now would be the time.”
Thiago felt the push of her anger; her pulse seemed to fill the air. “I will await a more auspicious moment.”
He began walking again and after a second or two she ran to catch up.
“What are your intentions toward Cugel?” she asked. “I must be the one to kill him.”
“A seer of peerless reputation in Kaiin has assured me that Cugel will not die by my hand, but by his own.”
“He said that? Then he is a fool. Cugel would never take his own life! He defends it as a pig his last truffle.”
Thiago shrugged. “The seer is not often wrong.”
A frown notched Derwe Coreme’s brow. “Of course, if I were to force suicide upon him, if I were to torture him and then offer a choice of more pain, unbearable pain, or the use of one of my knives to end his suffering…That would be delicious, would it not? To watch him slice into his body, seeking the source of his life’s blood, his hands trembling, almost too weak to make the final cut?”
“It would serve a purpose,” said Thiago.
She went with her head down for a few paces and then said, “Yes, the longer I think about it, the more certain I become of your seer’s acumen.”
At Twilight Thiago built a fire that illumined a ragged clearing some fifteen yards in diameter. The stream cut through the edge of the lighted area and, after staring at it yearningly for several minutes, Derwe Coreme stood and removed her jacket.
“I intend to bathe while the warmth of day still lingers,” she said. “There are scars on my body as well as my face, but if the urge to see me at my bath persists, I cannot prevent you from watching. I would caution you, however, against acting upon whatever attendant urges may spring to mind. My knives are never far from hand.”
Thiago, who was eating parched corn and dried apples, grunted to signal his indifference. Yet though he determined not to watch, he could not resist. At that distance the scars resembled tattoos. Kneeling in the stream, the water running about her waist, she was lovely and clean-limbed, an image from legend, the nymph unmindful of a spying ogre, and he wondered at the alchemy that had transformed her into such a hate-filled creature…though he had witnessed such a human result on many previous occasions. Cupping her hand, she sluiced water across her shoulders. He imagined that a woman’s back must be the purest shape in all the world.
Darkness fell. She stepped from the stream, dried herself, probing him with glances as though to know his mind, and then, wrapping herself in a blanket, came to sit by the fire. He maintained a stoic reserve and thought to detect irritation in her manner, as if she were annoyed by his lack of reaction to her nudity. Her scars were livid from the cold water, but now he saw them as designs and irrelevant to her beauty. The fire spoke in a language of snaps and crackles, and a night thing quarreled with itself, its ornate chortling echoing above a backdrop of lesser hoots and trills. She asked why he had chosen fighting as a profession.
“I liked to fight,” he said. “I like it still. In Kaiin there is always a call for fighters to fill Shins Stadium. I did not enjoy hurting my opponents as much as some of the others. Not in the beginning, anyway. Later…perhaps I did. I became First Champion of Kaiin for six years.”
“Did something happen?” she asked. “To make you better or more fierce.”
“Cugel.”
She waited for him to go on.
“It’s an old story.” He spat into the fire. “A woman was at issue.”
When he did not elaborate, she asked why he had waited so long to even the score.
“I lost sight of the matter,” he said. “There were other women. I had money and a large house and friends with which to fill it. Then Sylgarmo’s Proclamation alerted me to the fact that time was growing short. I began to miss the woman again and I recalled the debt I owed my cousin.”
They were silent a while, each absorbed in their own thoughts. Something stirred in the bushes; then a feral outcry, the leaves and branches shook violently; then all was quiet. Derwe Coreme shifted closer to Thiago, reached out tentatively and touched the tip of her finger to a scar that transected his eyebrow, turning a portion of it gray.
“Mine are deeper, but you have more scars than I,” she said wonderingly.
She seemed animated by something other than her usual sullen fury. Her hand lingered near his cheek and in the unsteady light of the fire her expression was open and expectant; but she snatched back her hand and, like an old sun restored for an instant to youthful radiance, its burst of energy spent, she lapsed once again into a funereal glow.
Thiago’s imagination peopled the avenues among the trees with sinister ebony figures whose eyes were the color of fire. Dark spotches the size of a water-shadow filtered down through the canopy. He blinked them away and fought off fatigue. Some time later Derwe Coreme shook him awake. He was dazed, mortified, sputtering apologies for having fallen asleep.
“Keep quiet!” she said.
He continued to apologize and she flicked her hand at his cheek, not quite a slap, and said, “Listen!”
A sound came from the direction of the gorge. He thought initially it was that of a large beast munching greenery, smacking its lips and making pleased rumbles between bites; but as it grew louder and more distinct, he decided this impression had been counterfeited by many voices speaking at once. It grew more distinct yet and he became less certain of its nature.
The gorge brimmed with a night mist. Three pale lights, halated by the mist, rode atop an immense shape that moved ponderously, sluggishly, surging forward one plodding step after another, as though mired in mud. Peering into the murk, Thiago heard laughter and chatter, such as might be uttered by a great assemblage; then a piercing whistle came to his ears. The beast rumbled in apparent distress and flung up its head so that it surfaced from the mist. The sight of its coppery sphinx-like face, bland and empty of all human emotion, struck terror into his heart. A gid![2] Beside him, Derwe Coreme let out a shriek. The gid halted its progress, its cavernous bleak eyes fixed on the thicket where they were hiding. Its nose, the merest bump perforated by two gaping nostrils, lent it a vaguely amphibian aspect, and the lights (globes affixed to its temples and forehead) added a touch of the surreal. Mist obscured its wings and sloping, muscular body.
“Show yourselves!” a booming voice sang out. “It is I, Melorious, who speaks! I offer safe passage through the Great Erm.”
This pronouncement stilled the babble of voices, but soon they returned, directing merry insults and impudent remarks toward Melorious. The gid surged forward and again lifted its head, trying to wedge it through the break in the earth, but failed in the attempt — it was too wide by half. Thiago was now situated directly above the gid’s back and through the mist he saw what looked to be steel panniers strapped to its side. The panniers were each divided into four segments and each segment served as a cage in which forty or fifty men and women were kept. Thiago estimated there were several hundred people so encaged, yet none exhibited the attitude of captives, but rather acted like the passengers on a pleasure barge. Amorous couples lay intertwined on the floor. In another of the
