Bathing in very cold water, for example. Or eating fruit that isn’t quite ripe. They don’t have teeth to set on edge, but the expression around their beaks is quite sufficient to evoke sympathy.
Which is beside the point. Queynt has a fondness for fantastical dress and ornamental speech and enjoys being thought a fool. He says he learns a great deal that way. He is an explorer at heart, so he has said, and exploring is what he and Peter and Chance and I had been doing for some time. He is the only person to whom Chance has ever given unstinting admiration. So Peter says, who has known Chance far longer than I.
This admiration is more understandable in that Vitior Vulpas Queynt and Chance much resemble each other. Both are brown, muscular men who look a little soft without being so at all. Both are jolly-appearing men who seem a little stupid and aren’t. And both have quantities of common sense. As for the rest of it, Queynt is a Wizard of vast experience and education, while Chance is an ex-sailor with a fondness for gambling who was hired to bring Peter up safely and did so more or less. Both of them have had a certain tutelary role in our lives. Peter’s and mine, and truth to tell, I like them both mightily. Even on an occasion like this, when weariness made it hard to be fond of anyone.
We approached the lanterns. A faint sweetish smell told me everything I wanted to know about it before we got there. More dream crystal deaths.
Before we ever started on this trip—after the Battle of the Bones on the Wastes of Bleer it was, when we were all remarkably glad merely to be alive—I had known about dream crystals. My un-mother (the woman who bore me but did not conceive me, if that makes sense) had had at least one. It had led her into ruin and ended, I supposed, by killing her. My much hated enemy, Porvius Bloster, had had one, and it had done him no good at all except to make him exceed his limitations and bring destruction upon his Demesne. Even girls at school had had dream crystals, assortments of them, like candies. I had known what they were in a casual way, known enough to stay away from them and mistrust those who used them, but it was not until this trip that I had seen them in general use. Misuse.
Whatever. It was not until this trip I had seen them killing people by the dozens. There, that’s plain enough.
The current situation was a case in point. It was another of those pathetic encampments we had seen entirely too many of during the past season.
One couldn’t dignify the structures even as huts.
They were the kind of shelter a bored child might build in a few careless moments; a few branches leaned against a fallen tree—its trunk loaded with epiphytes and fogged by a dense cloud of ghost moths—and a circle of rocks rimming a pool of ash. And the corpses.
Three of them this time; man, woman, and baby.
Starved to death, from the look of them, and with food all round for the picking or digging—furry, thickskinned pocket-bushes full of edible nuts, a northern thrilp bush—smaller fruit, and sweeter than the southern variety—table roots just beside the tiny stream.
“Hell,” I said to Queynt, disgusted. “I suppose they’ve got those yellow crystals in their mouths, like all the rest.” Half-right. In the lantern light we could see the male corpse had one on a thong around his neck; the female had one in her mouth, having sucked herself to death on it. Their bodies were still warm. The baby was cold, probably dead of dehydration after screaming his lungs out for several days trying to tell someone he was hungry and thirsty and wet.
Chance and Peter were dismounted by the corpses.
Peter gave me a troubled look, knowing I’d be upset by the baby. Chance eased his wide belt and mused, “I suppose we could dig them in, though there seems little sense to bother.” At first we’d stopped to bury the human dead along the road, but they had become more and more numerous as we came farther north. There had soon been too many to bury, but it still bothered me to let the babies lie. “I’ll bury the baby,” I said in a voice that sounded angry even to me. “Let the others alone.” Queynt shook his head, but he didn’t argue. All the babies reminded me of one I’d taken care of in a class back in Xammer. The one in Xammer had the same baffled look when he fell asleep that many of the dead babies did, as though it had all been too much for him and he was glad to be out of it. I wrapped this one in our last towel, reminding myself to buy towels the next time we got to any place civilized—if there were any place civilized in these northlands. I’d used up our supply burying babies and children.
Queynt said, “Jinian, if you’re going to go on like this, I’ll lay in a supply of shrouds. It would be cheaper than good toweling.” I flushed, getting on with the half-druggled grave I was digging with the shovel we used for latrine ditches.
“I know it doesn’t make sense, Queynt, but otherwise I get bad dreams.” He
