Or, the unluckiest. To remember so much about her past life, and yet so little.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
She starts. “My-my what?”
“Flutter is what I called you. You had a name once. What is it?”
Her eyes widen, on the edge of turning into the faceted smoke-dark eyes of a cloak. I tense, and feel my spiders snap to alertness, ready to defend me, weakened as they are.
I push them back down. No transformations.
“I don’t know,” Flutter says at last. “I don’t know.” She shrugs her thin shoulders. “Flutter is as good a name as any for now.”
I know she’s lying.
A cloak drifts over to us as we enter through the doors of Kaal Baran. I call her Cloud, as in she has her head in them. She seems to live with only one foot in the real world.
I never knew that cloaks had personalities, but then, most of the time we were too busy trying to kill each other.
“They’re back,” she says.
“Who’re back?” I ask, but with little hope of a response.
True to form, Cloud’s already passed by and down to wherever she sleeps away the afternoon.
Flutter gets visibly tense, hardening at the edges. “The eerie men.”
“Ah, the band we lost.” I see them now, strutting across the courtyard, looking far too pleased with themselves. Soldiers straggling in after going willful missing.
“Perhaps I should—“ begins Flutter, but I’m already striding ahead of her. She’ll want to talk to them, because that’s what she does. Being a silent cloak must’ve just about killed her, the role is so alien to her character.
Eilendi like to teach, relate, discuss.
But that’s not how you run an army.
The eerie men halt when they see me. The minions have the grace to flinch and look ashamed, but the leader—Leap’s his name—gives me a grin full of teeth. They smell like unwashed male and fresh blood. Red stains their claws and teeth.
I catch sight of hair in their nails. Goats.
Of course.
I nudge my spiders down my left arm, asking for a little reinforcement. Leap opens his mouth—to explain, to boast, I don’t know and I don’t care.
He never gets a word in because I punch him right in the face.
He goes down like a sack full of bricks. And stays down.
The other eerie men jump, fumbling for the whips and spikes at their belt. I grab the nearest by the wrist—left hand!—and squeeze. The man gasps, turns a pale bluish color from the pain.
“Don’t—ever—leave—without—permission!” I rake the group with my coldest gaze. “Put down your weapons. Now.”
There’s a shuffling and a clatter of weapons hitting the ground. I let go of the wrist I’m holding.
“You and you.” I point. “You’re on latrine duty. You can tell the workers digging the trench that they’re relieved because you’re taking over. You—you can go polish armor in the weapons room. You, help the cobble crunchers clear the south passage on the basement level.”
“And you—” I look at the eerie man massaging his wrist—“get him away from here.” I prod Leap with my boot. “Put him somewhere he can sleep it off.
“Now.”
They leave, some stumbling in their haste, others a shade away from sauntering, as if to tell me they don’t really care. Their expressions range from sulky to studied disinterest.
One gives me a narrow-eyed look, glittering with malice, as he leaves.
That one will be trouble.
Flutter joins me and we watch as Leap is dragged away. His boots leave thin dirt tracks.
“That was—direct,” she observes.
“Actions, not words, will keep them in line.”
“How’s your hand?”
I bite back the words Which one? just in time. It’s easy to resist cradling my aching left hand since I’m down to only the one. “I’ll live.”
“Eerie men have hard skulls.” Flutter looks at the smear of brownish dirt from Leap’s boots. “Where do you think they went?”
“Goat hunting in the Scrabs by the looks of it.”
She winces. Some herding family just lost part of their livelihood. “We’ll have to pay blood gift.” I realize what a relief it is to talk to someone who understands the way of the many-banded lands, Taurin’s lands.
“Yes.” Another thing to add to my list: Track down the family that lost their goats and pay them off. With what?
“There’s bound to be something in there.” Flutter looks towards Kaal Baran. “Scrap metal, crystals…” She shrugs. A family living at the edge of the desert would be more interested in food and clothing than any antique from the fort.
“I’ll look in the stores that were brought from Highwind. Maybe they will accept some poly tents or light armor.” Even as I say this, I’m bitterly amused at the verbal contortions we’re both going through to avoid saying S—my dead wife’s name.
A shriek pierces the air, rises higher in a wail that goes on and on. An eerie man passing by drops his tools and claps his hands to his ears. Cobble crunchers swarm into the fort, fleeing the noise.
“Screech,” I mutter.
Flutter winces. It was her idea to put the unstable cloak on sentry duty, away from the accidental nudges or sidelong glances that sent Screech into hysterics.
I hadn’t even known that cloaks could make such a Taurin-cursed noise.
“I’ll go calm her down.” Flutter swoops for the steps going up to the top of the wall. I try not to notice how her feet don’t touch the ground.
“I’ll see whether she’s spotted a desert mouse or an invading army.” I head for the gates facing away from Tau Marai, opening to the rest of the world.
Screech had seen neither mouse nor army. I stand in front of the open gates, arms crossed, flanked by recently-woken eerie men, and watch the one man on the mule ride up. It takes him a long time. The cobble crunchers jeering and waving dart guns at him from the rocks probably don’t help.
Nor does the line of heavily-muscled eerie men with their blue hair and pierced skin and over-large grins.
To his credit, the rider doesn’t turn tail and run, nor
