I wade in, thumping eerie men heads and slapping cobble crunchers. Stray elbows jab me in the stomach, a punch gone wild lands against shoulder. I bite back my yelp.
Show no weakness.
A cobble cruncher attaches itself to my leg, starts shredding my pants as it screams a high-pitched war song. I pull it off, leaving gashes in my skin, and raise it to my face.
It twists, until it recognizes me. “Hullo, guv.” It touches its red hat as it dangles from my fingers. Kunj.
“Stop this,” I say, “right now.”
“Sure thing, guv!” It swings and I let go. Its feet rest briefly on my shoulder and then it’s scampering over eerie men heads, chanting to its fellows. Within moments, cobble crunchers scoot out of the writhing mass and stand by the walls, grinning at me.
It takes longer to cool the eerie men down. I take a bite in my arm, and crack a few skulls together. Once, an eerie men leaps at me, claws and teeth extended. My sluggish spiders move to defend me, but there’s no way they can get my armor up that fast.
Leap jumps in front of me, knocks my attacker to the ground. Our eyes meet, and I nod my thanks. Then he’s gone, breaking up other fights and soon I’m standing in the center of a spreading calm, surrounded by eerie men stumbling, groaning, and clutching various parts of themselves.
I’m tired. I wish I could collapse and sleep for a hundred years, but I stiffen my legs and knees. My glance falls, hard and heavy like a hammer-blow, on each face as I issue punishments. Latrine duty. Wall duty. Heck, even “sweep out dusty chambers no one will ever use” duty. Grip lurks toward the back of the mass of hang-dog eerie men, a slight smirk on his lowered face.
I know he’s been involved in all of this. I take special pleasure putting him on cleaning duty in the underground chambers the cloaks have claimed for their own. He’d find it hard to wreak havoc with that lot. I know he doesn’t care much for Cloud.
I let Leap supervise the penitent. I call specific individuals up to me—Bound and Gash, both shame-faced, and Kunj and Vrzk, who represent the cobble crunchers.
Yes, the cobble crunchers food is gone. Empty, dented cans make a forlorn heap against one wall. The well is fouled, and I need only lean over the opening for one quick, shallow breath to know that.
We need water badly. Without that well Kaal Baran is not a shelter but a death-trap.
For a moment, a longing for Highwind pierces me. Highwind, with singing streams under every road, tinkling waterfalls at every culvert, the great river rushing through the city like a foaming, roaring beast, and the chill air coming off the mountain lakes. Highwind, with all that water to spare.
Couldn’t these creatures understand how careful one must be with water in the desert?
Of course not. Water was everywhere in Highwind, for Deep Night denizen and human alike. For feral dogs and stray cats, kana rats and cobble crunchers. For night walkers, rooted into the earth… Oh.
“You!” I crook my finger at a ditch-digging team as they slink past me, hunched under shovels.
They look at me with an upward flicker of their eyelids. If they had been dogs, their ears would’ve been pressed against their heads and their tails tucked firmly between their legs.
“You’re off ditch-digging duty, and on to well-finding duty. Go to where the night walkers are. Dig next to them. And for Taurin’s sake, don’t rile them like you did the cobble crunchers! If they stomp on your fetid heads, I’ll just cheer them on, understand?”
The eerie men nod and hurry away. I stand up straighter.
The air next to me shimmers. I flinch, reaching with my right hand for the sword at my hip.
The hand I don’t have. The sword that’s on the other side of my belt.
And then Cloud’s standing there, watching me fumble for the hilt with my left hand. The sword is cold and empty, no longer a line of fire-orange and blood-red in my mind’s eye.
She could’ve ripped out my heart while I stood there, forgetting that I only have the one hand.
Kato One-Hand, the Once-Champion. Fitting epithet.
Leap’s voice comes unbidden to my mind: Ironhand…
“What is it?” My voice comes out harsh, to compensate for my weakness.
“She’s back,” says Cloud.
I see Flutter on the road from the top of the ramp. She moves like a wounded moth, darting here, swooping there, meandering in serpentine twists both on and off the road. She darts into a thorn bush, gets snagged for several moments. She thrashes and pulls away, but the thorns only dig in deeper.
I stride down to her, keeping my feet from running, keeping my voice from crying out in relief.
By the time I reach her, she’s managed to tear herself away from the bush. Thin blood, a sickly yellow, drips down the rips in her cloak. Gone are the rich dark browns and the bright blue sigils. Instead she looks grey, as insubstantial as a shadow.
“Flutter…” I stop at the sight of her eyes. They’re like huge holes torn in her paper-white face. The edges of her shimmer and curl as if invisible flames lick at them. Her substance is going up in smoke as I watch.
“Kato,” she says, in a high child-like voice. “Kato. Kato.” She takes my arms with both her pale hands; her touch is cold and light, like frost. “Bad things come.”
My stomach clenches. “What bad things? From where? Flutter—” I want to shake the knowledge right out of her, but she’s in a bad way. “Tell me, Flutter. What did you see?”
She looks at me, but doesn’t see me. “Kato. Kato.” Her voice is high, echoing, and sweet. “Bad things come. Bad things come.” She repeats the same empty words like a litany.
They grate down my nerves. I’d rather hear several
