tutored mind of yours to all those bullshit hero-with-a-high-destiny legends you people are so fucking fond of telling one another. You really think, in a mudball slaughterhouse of a world like this, where war and privation harden whole populations to inhuman brutality and ignorance, where the ruling classes dedicate their sons to learning the science of killing men the way they consign their daughters to breeding till they crack you really think the gods of a world like that have got no better thing to do with their time than take some random piece of lowborn trash and spend long years carving him into shape for a cat s-paw?
I had Ringil swallows on an abrupt gut-swooping gust of insolence that licks up in the pit of his belly like flames no idea that time was so precious a commodity among the denizens of the Immortal Watch.
Beat of silence among the shrouded stones. Then Dakovash grunts, as if from some old pain returning.
Not many call us by that name any longer.
Ringil shrugs. Not many can read. Or care about any past beyond their own fucked-up selective remembrance.
He thinks the shadowed figure smiles at that.
You sound bitter, hero.
Do I? Ringil gestures impatiently against the returning chill in his bones. I m not the one complaining about a lack of supplicant awe, though, am I? I m not the one short of time for my immortal designs.
More quiet. Framed on either side by the silent monoliths, the Salt Lord seems to be studying him as if through the bars of a cage.
Finally, he says this:
The march of time is broken, Ringil Eskiath. Something in that softly rasping voice that might be admission, concession, or maybe just a bone-deep weariness. The bounds of possibility come adrift around us, the old certainties are all in their graves. Cats can no longer be considered alive or dead.
Cats?
The skeins are tangled. Some butterfly shaman up in the north beats his puny fucking wings and the storm gathers before you know it. Chaos gathers, like a bad poet s verse. We run damage control, but the rules of engagement have changed. You think we re any happier about it than you? We ve got our balls to the wall here, hero. We re fighting half blind, nothing works, not the way it should, not anymore. Which being the case, well A shrug. Let us just say that in a situation like that, you work with the tools at hand. And speaking of which
Like a scything shard of darkness, the Ravensfriend, still in its scabbard, pitches through the gloom from the Salt Lord s pale grasp, through the gap between the standing stones, and onto the long, wind-matted grass at Ringil s feet.
Try not to drop that again. You re going to need it.
I teeth now clenched for a swirl of reasons, fear, anger, the growing cold, that he cannot unpick am not your fucking cat s-paw.
But the space between the two stones, when he looks up from his sword, is empty. Only a faint breeze, wandering through as if following the sword, touching his face with cold.
It leaves traceries in the mist like the motions of a languid hand in water.
The Salt Lord is gone.
Eyes open, on blinding blue sky.
He blinked, vision tearing up from all the sudden brightness. He propped himself up a little and rubbed hard at his eyes. He was back on the flat rock under a declining afternoon sun. The Ravensfriend lay at his side. He rolled over, reached convulsively for the sword. Discovered he was shivering despite the warmth still in the day. More than shivering, actually a feverish chill rode his bones and racked him with a desire to curl into a ball. He coughed, and found a razor s edge in his throat.
Great. And now he remembered the boy sneezing on him the night before. Marsh flu, that s all I fucking need.
He levered himself to his feet and stared around. Treetops nodding in the breeze, the thickly wooded slopes and the unattainable road north threading between. Over everything a blue haze of distance that seemed to be thickening.
Shadows a little longer than they d been.
Farther up the rock, Eril snored throatily, one arm cast up to shield his eyes from the sun, but otherwise unmoved since Ringil had last looked at him.
The hovering hawk was gone. And no sign of Dakovash. It could all have been yeah, right a dream.
Chaos gathers, like a bad poet s verse.
He looked westward, frowning.
Hey now, come on. That s just stupid
Is it? He turned the sudden glimmer of it carefully, panning for some truthful assessment of its value. Got a better plan, do you, Gil? State you re in?
He held down a fresh bout of shivering, wrapped his cloak tighter about himself, and crouched beside Eril s sleeping form. Made a tight hssst he knew would waken the Marsh Brotherhood enforcer without fuss.
Sure enough, Eril s eyes slid open at the sound, as wakeful as if he d only closed them a moment before. His hand was already on his knife hilt.
Yeah?
Time to get moving, Ringil told him.
Eril got to his feet, staying low, and didn t argue. He looked about at their unchanged surroundings, then back at Ringil, curiously.
Did I miss something? he asked.
No, said Ringil briskly. You didn t miss a thing. But I ve got an idea how to get us out of here.
CHAPTER 12
It called itself Anasharal.
Archeth had never seen anything like it. The Helmsmen of her youth came large and semi-visible at best mostly they were in the walls, or the hulls and bulkheads of the fireships, like helpful rats out of some fairy tale or shelved talking library books. They engaged you in solemn conversation, sometimes they solved your problems for you or at least told you why they couldn t and they could manipulate numerous aspects of the Kiriath domain in ways she d never been able to think of as anything but magical. As a child, she d gotten the impression some of them were taking a slightly scary avuncular delight in guiding her, and not always along paths her parents approved.
But one thing they weren t was mobile.
Later, when the engineers started stripping some of the old fireships preparatory to leaving, she saw why: The component parts came out into the light like giant iron organs and loops of intestine surgically removed. Angfal, once Helmsman for the wrecked flagship rough translation Sung Through Lava Like the Petal of an Autumn Rose on the Scorching Late-Summer Breeze, now hung on the walls of her study in Yhelteth, looking discomfortingly like a huge, gross-bodied spider oozing through from the next room. But the impression was fleeting at best Angfal could no more move unaided than the next fat keg of ale waiting in a tavern cellar.
Anasharal had limbs.
It wasn t a feature that was immediately apparent. Archeth and the eight men Hald detailed to go down with her came awkwardly across the glassy surface in the bottom half of the crater, aping the motions of wading through cold water on a stony shore, and found themselves staring at something rather like a moldy, half-eaten pie that someone had mistakenly put back in the oven. The heat shimmer rose off a roughly hemispherical knobbed gray carapace cracked neatly apart across the middle. It was the gray crust itself that was smoking, but where the crack ran through, there was a faint white mist that spilled steadily out onto the glassy ground and crawled about there in wisps that gave out a faint, sorcerous chill. Peering into the space the mist was vacating, they saw a nested hollow about four feet across, something like an opened rose with its heart punched out. In the middle, something like a huge egg was rocking back and forth.
The men drew back, doing their best not to step in the puddles of chilly mist. They looked to Archeth for
