“If any more of you bastards want to waste my time with stupid melodrama, please form an orderly queue.” I let my voice echo down the corridors.
The Nuban once told me about a tribe in Nuba that ate the heart and the brains of their enemies. They thought it gave them their foes’ strength and cunning. I never saw the Nuban do it, but he didn’t dismiss the idea.
I held the heart up to my mouth.
“Prince!” Makin stepped toward me. “That’s evil meat.”
“There is no evil, Makin,” I said. “There’s the love of things, power, comfort, sex, and there’s what men are willing to do to satisfy those lusts.” I kicked the ruin of the necromancer’s corpse. “You think these sad creatures are evil? You think we should fear them?”
I took a bite, as big as I could manage. Raw flesh is chewy, but the necromancer’s heart had some give in it, like a game bird hung until it’s ready to drop off the hook. The bitter gall of the blood scoured my throat. I swallowed my mouthful and it slid down, slow and sour.
I think for the first time Burlow watched me eat without the green eyes of jealousy. I threw the rest of it down. The brothers stood mute, eyes watering from the torch-smoke. That’s the problem with tar-torches, you have to keep moving. I felt a touch odd. I had the feeling you get when you know you really should be somewhere else, as if you’d promised a duel that morning or some such but couldn’t quite remember what it was. Chills ran up my back and along my arms, as if ghosts trailed their fingers over me.
I opened my mouth, then closed it, interrupted by a whisper. I looked around. Whispers came from every corner, just at that maddening level where you can hear the words but not understand them. The brothers started to look around too, nervous.
“Do you hear it?” I asked.
“Hear what?” Makin said.
The voices came louder, angry but indistinct, louder, a multitude advancing, louder. A faint breeze disturbed the air.
“Time to climb, gentlemen.” I wiped my hand across my mouth, scraping away purple muck on the back of my gauntlet. “Let’s see how fast we can do this.”
I picked the necromancer’s head from the floor, half-expecting the eyes to roll down and fix me with a glare. “I think our heartless foe has friends coming,” I said. “Lots of friends.”
Everyone likes to eat. One man marches on his stomach as much as an army does. Only Fat Burlow didn’t much take to marching, and took too much to munching. And some of the brothers were apt to hold that against a man. Still, I had more time for old Burlow than I did for most of my road-kin. Of all of them, save Makin, he was the only one who owned to reading. Of course he bore watching for that. There’s a saying on the road, “Never trust a lettered man.”
32
We ascended the Great Stair with the screams of ghosts rising beneath us. They say fear lends a man wings. None of the brothers flew up the Stair, but the way they scrambled over the slickness of that rocky throat would teach a lizard plenty about climbing.
I let them lead the way. It was as good a means as any to test the footing. Grumlow first, then Liar and young Sim. Gog scrambled behind them, followed by Gorgoth. I guessed the leucrotas’ accord with the necromancers might be somewhat broken.
Makin was the last of them. He could feel the dead coming. I saw it in the pallor of his skin. He looked like a dead thing himself.
“Jorg! Get up here! Climb!” He grabbed at my arm as he passed.
I shook him off. I could see ghosts boiling along the tunnel toward us, others stepping from the walls.
“Jorg!” Makin took my shoulders and pulled me toward the Stair.
He couldn’t see them. I knew from the wild sweep of his gaze. His eyes never touched them. The closest of them looked to me like chalk drawings half-erased, hanging in the air. Sketches of corpses, some naked, some clad in rags, or pieces of broken armour. A coldness came from them, reaching for my flesh, stealing warmth with invisible fingers.
I laughed at them. Not because I thought they had no power to harm me, but because they had. I laughed to show them what I cared for their threat. I laughed to hurt them. And they suffered for it. The taste of dead heart-meat lingered at the back of my throat, and a dark power ran through me.
“Die!” I shouted at them, spitting away the laughter. “A man should at least know how to stay dead!”
And they did. I think. As if my words held them to obey. Makin had me dragged away, nearly round the corner, but I saw the spirits stop. I saw pale flames light upon their limbs, the ghost of fire. And, oh, the screaming. Even Makin heard it, like the scrape of nails on slate, cold wind on a migraine. We both ran then, close enough to flying.
It was hours before we stopped, a thousand feet or more up the Stair. The downward tumble of the long-vanished river paused here to scour out a bowl, set about with smaller sinkholes and decorated with the frozen tracery of stone that graces the deep places of the world.
“Fuckit.” Fat Burlow collapsed in a boneless heap and lay motionless.
Red Kent sat back against a stalagmite, his face coloured to match his name.
Close by, Elban spat into a sinkhole pool, then turned, wiping mucus from his wizened lips. “Heh! You looks like one o’ them Blushers, Kent.”
Kent just gave him mean eyes.
“So.” Makin hauled in a huge breath and tried again. “So, Prince, we’re climbing up. Well
