‘Small things.’ He pointed at two short bottles of green glass on the shelf where the bowl had rested. Beside them a tray covered with pieces of fractured plasteek in many colours and shapes. From behind him he took a great cog of silvery metal, stained with age. It looked like an enormous cousin to one of the minute pieces from inside the watch in my baggage. ‘Nothing of great consequence. The best I sell on.’
‘And do you know about the Builders, Master Toltech? Do you learn their secrets as you sift through their leavings?’ I asked.
‘I know only what all of us here know about the Builders. What our fathers knew.’
‘And that is?’ Some men like to be prompted.
‘That they are not gone, and that you cannot trust them.’
We camped that night on the very edge of the Iberico range where a poisoned stream named the Cuyahoga ran out across the badlands. I swallowed my salt pill, the bitterness escaping despite its wrap of paper. Toltech had had no more to say about the Builders so as we settled down after sunset I quizzed Lesha.
‘What does your friend mean when he says the Builders are not gone?’
I felt rather than saw her shrug. We lay close, despite the weight of heat upon us. ‘Some say the Builders are spirits now, all around us, written into the elements.’
‘Not just echoes in machines?’ I thought of Fexler flickering into life as I came down the cellar steps.
Lesha lifted to face me, frowning, deep enough that her scars buckled into furrows. ‘Machines? Things of wheels and pulleys? I don’t understand.’
‘Spirits you say?’ I decided to keep the engines beneath my grandfather’s castle to myself. ‘Good spirits or evil ones?’
Again the shrug. ‘Just spirits. In the air, in rocks, running through rivers and streams, even staring at you out of the fire.’
‘I heard that the Builders took hold of what is real, and before they scorched the world, they changed it,’ I said.
‘Changed what?’ I’d forgotten Sunny was even there.
‘Everything. Me, you, the world, what real is. They made the world listen a little more to what’s in men’s heads. They made thoughts and fears matter, made them able to change what’s around us.’
‘They didn’t make it listen to me.’
I smiled at Sunny’s grumbling.
‘Earl Hansa had a rock-sworn mage work for him,’ Sunny added. ‘A young fellow. Must have been ten, fifteen years ago. Arron. That was it. He could work stone with his hands as if it was butter. One time he set a finger to my sword and it got so heavy I couldn’t hold it. I couldn’t pry it off the floor until the next day.’
‘What happened to him?’ He sounded like a useful man to know, this Arron.
‘Sunk.’
‘Ah.’
‘Not at sea though. Ortens says he saw it, and Ortens isn’t one for lying. He just sunk into the floor one morning. Right out in the centre courtyard. And nobody saw him again. There’s just a grey stain where he went into the rock.’
‘Well there’s a thing,’ I said.
And we all fell silent.
I lay for a time, on my blanket on the dust, listening to the silence. Something was wrong. I groped for it, reaching like you do in the night when your knife isn’t where it should be. For the longest time I couldn’t discover what it was that irked me.
‘There’s no noise.’ I sat up.
‘What?’ Lesha, sleep edging her voice.
‘Those things, those damned cicadas that screech all night. Where are they?’
‘Not here,’ she said. ‘We’re too close. Nothing lives in the Iberico. Not rats, not bugs, not lichen on rocks. If you want to go back – now is the time.’
13
Five years earlier
The silence made it hard to sleep. The quiet seemed to have infected us all, even the horses held their peace, barely a snort or scrape of hoof hour after hour. In place of the night’s muttering my ears invented their own script for the darkness. I heard whispers from the copper box, a taunting voice just beyond hearing, and behind even that, the sound of my own screaming. Perhaps the death of all those cicadas saved me, burned away by the ghost of the Builders’ fire, or maybe built as I am of suspicion and mistrust I would have heard the attackers coming wherever we slept. Somewhere a stone grated beneath the sole of a shoe.
My kick found Lesha first. A stretched hand found some part of Sunny and I pinched it. Had they been road-brothers they would have, depending on their nature, sprung up blade in hand, or frozen where they lay, alert but waiting, until they understood the need. Brother Grumlow would have knifed the hand that shook him, Brother Kent would have feigned sleep, listening. Lesha and Sunny had slept too long in safe beds and started to rise in confusion, grumbling questions.
The predawn hint gave me the enemy as clumps of blackness, low to the dark ground, moving.
‘Run!’
I threw my knife into the nearest threat, praying it wasn’t a rock, then rolled past Lesha and took off at a sprint. The shriek that went up from the new owner of my dagger did more to convince the others of the danger than did my sudden exit.
Running in the dark is foolish but I’d seen the surroundings before the sun set. No bushes to tangle the feet and most of the rocks not big enough to be a problem. I heard the others behind me, Sunny’s boots pounding, Lesha barefoot. Never let an enemy choose the ground. The only consolation in running blind into the night was that whoever meant us harm was now having to do the same.
Memory told me a shallow valley lay ahead, dividing the first swelling foothills of the Iberico. I glanced behind, knowing that if the enemy were too close I would have heard the others go down already. The pursuers had
