“And could you?”
“No . . . No, I could not.”
“Blast that whoreson idiot and his itchy trigger finger!”
“No, it was not that. I could not read the thing’s heart because it was not truly a beast.”
“What is this you’re saying, Mage?”
“I am not sure. What I think I am saying is that there was humanity there, in the beast. A soul, if you will.”
Murad and Hawkwood regarded the wizard in silence. The imp looked around and then cautiously took its fingers from out of its ears. It hated loud noises.
Murad realized that the soldiers were crowded around, listening. His face hardened.
“We’ll move on. We can discuss this later. Sergeant Mensurado, lead off and make sure the men have their wheels uncocked. I want no more discharges, or we will have Ensign di Souza evacuating the camp behind us.”
That raised a nervous laugh. The men shook out into file again, and set off. Bardolin trudged along wordlessly, the frown lines biting deep between his brows.
T HE ground continued to rise. It seemed that they were on the slopes of a hill or small mountain. It was hard going for all of them, because the black sand-like stuff of the forest floor sank under their boots. It was as if they were walking up the side of an enormous dune, their feet slipping back a yard for every yard advanced. “What is this stuff?” Murad asked. He slapped a sucking insect off his scarred cheek, grimacing.
“Ash, I think,” Hawkwood said. “There has been a great burning here. The stuff must be half a fathom deep.”
There were boulders, black and almost glassy in places. The trees were slowly splitting them apart and shifting them down-slope. And such trees! Nowhere in the world, Hawkwood thought, even in Gabrion, could there be trees like these, straight as lances, hard as bronze. A shipwright might fashion a mainmast from a single trunk, or a vessel’s keel from two. But the labour—the work of hewing down these forest giants. In this heat, it would kill a man.
A gasping, endless time in which they put down their heads and forgot everything but the next step in front of them. Several of the soldiers paused in their travails to vomit, their eyes popping. Murad gave them permission to take off their helmets and loosen their cuirasses, but they gave the impression that they were slowly being boiled alive inside the heavy armour.
At last there was a clear light ahead, an open space. The trees ended. There was a short stretch of bare rock and ash and gravel before them, and then nothing but blue, unclouded heaven.
They bent over to grasp their knees, their guts churning, the sunlight making them blink and scowl. Several of the soldiers collapsed on to their backs and lay there like bright, immobilized beetles, unable to do anything but suck in lungfuls of steaming air.
When Hawkwood finally straightened, the sight before them made him cry out in wonder.
They were above the jungle and on top of this world, it seemed. They had reached the summit of what proved to be a razor-backed ridge which was circular in shape, an eerily perfect symmetry.
Hawkwood could see for uncounted leagues in all directions. If he turned round he could see the Western Ocean stretching off to the horizon. There was the
Inland, to the west, the jungle rolled in an endless viridian carpet, lurid, garish, secretive. Its mass was broken by more formations identical to the one upon which they stood: circles of bare rock amid the greenery, barren as gravestones, unnatural-looking. They pocked the forest like crusted sores, and beyond them, far off and almost invisible in the heat shimmer and haze, were high mountains as blue as woodsmoke.
To the north and west was something else. Clouds were building up there, tall thunderheads and anvils and horsetails of angry vapour, grey and heavy in the underbelly. A shadow dominated that horizon, rearing up and up until its head was lost in the cloud. A mountain, a perfect cone. It was taller than any of the granite giants in the Hebros. Fifteen thousand feet, maybe, though it was hard to tell with its summit lost in billowing vapour.
“Craters,” Bardolin said, appearing beside him.
“What?”
“Saffarac of Cartigella, a friend of mine, once had a viewing device, an oracular constructed of two finely ground lenses mounted in a tube of leather. He was hoping to find evidence for his theory that the earth moved around the sun, not the other way round. He looked at the moon, the nearest body in heaven, and he saw there formations like these. Craters. He postulated two causes: one, fiery rock had erupted out of the moon in a series of vast explosions—”
“Like gunpowder, you mean?”
“Yes. Or two, they were caused by vast stones falling to the surface, like the one that fell in Fulk some ten years back. Big as a horse it was, and glowing red when it hit the ground. You see them on clear nights, streaks of light falling to earth. Dying stars giving out their last breath in a streak of light and beauty.”
“And that’s what made this landscape?” Murad said, coming up behind them.
“It is one theory.”
“I have heard that in the southern latitudes there are mountains such as this one,” Hawkwood volunteered. “Some of them leak smoke and sulphurous gases.”
“Mariners’ stories,” Murad sneered. “You are not in some Abrusian pothouse trying to impress the lowly, Hawkwood.”
Hawkwood said nothing. His gaze did not shift from the panorama before them.
“Not fifty years ago a man might be burnt at the stake for daring to venture that the world was round, and not flat like a buckler,” Bardolin said mildly. “And yet now, even in Charibon, they accept that we are spinning on a sphere, as Terenius of Orfor suggests.”
“I do not care what shape the world is, so long as my feet can bear me across it,” Murad snapped.
They looked down into the bowl which their ridge contained. It was perfectly round, a circle of jungle. They stood at a height of some three thousand feet, Hawkwood estimated, but the air did not seem any less dense.
“
None of them mentioned it, but they were all thinking of the monstrous bird which had studied them so nonchalantly. The thought of a night spent away from the rest of their comrades in a forest populated by such things was not tolerable.
Mensurado’s croak attracted their attention. The sergeant was pointing down at the land below.
“What is it, Sergeant?” Murad asked harshly. He seemed to be fighting off exhaustion with bile alone.
Mensurado could only point and whisper, his parade-ground bellow hoarsened out of existence. “There, sir, to the right of that weird hill, just above its flank. You see?”
They peered whilst the rest of the soldiers sat listlessly, slugging the last of their water and mopping their faces.
“Sweet Blessed Saint!” Murad said softly. “Do you see it, gentlemen?”
A space in the jungle, a tiny clearing wherein a patch of beaten earth could be glimpsed.
“A road, or track,” Bardolin said, sketching out a far-seeing cantrip to aid his tired eyes.
“Hawkwood, get out that contraption of yours and take its bearing,” the nobleman said peremptorily.
Frowning, Hawkwood did as he was told, filling the bowl with some of his own drinking water. He studied it, then looked up, gauging, and said: “West-nor’-west of here. I’d put it at fifteen leagues. It’s a broad road, to be seen at that distance.”
“That, gentlemen, is our destination,” Murad said. “Once we have ourselves organized, I am taking an expedition into the interior. You will both accompany me, naturally. We will make for that road, and see if we can’t meet up with whoever built it.”
