‘Hey, you hear something?’
‘No.’
‘Exactly.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean? We ain’t hearing nothing. Good. That means there’s nothing to hear.’
‘They stopped.’
‘Who stopped?’
‘Them, the ones on the other side of the gate, right? They stopped.’
‘Well, thank Hood,’ said Leff. ‘Those knuckles was driving me crazy. Every damned night, on and on and on. Click clack click clack, gods below. I never knew Seguleh were such gamblers-it’s a sickness, you know, an addiction. No wonder they lost their masks-probably in a bet. Picture it. “Ug, got nuffin but this mask, and m’luck’s boot to change, ‘sgot to, right? So, I’m in-look, ‘sa good mask! Ug.”‘
‘That would’ve been a mistake,’ Scorch said, nodding. ‘If you don’t want nobody to know you’re bluffing, what better way than to wear a mask? So, they lost ’em and it’s been downhill ever since. Yeah, that makes sense, but it’s got me thinking, Leff.’
“Bout what?’
‘Well, the Seguleh. Hey, maybe they’re
Leff nodded back. This was better. Distract the fidgety idiot. All right, maybe things didn’t feel quite right. Maybe there was a stink in the air that had nothing to do with smell, and maybe he had sweat trickling down under his armour, and he was keeping his hand close to the sword at his belt and eyeing the crossbow leaning against the gate. Was it cocked? It was cocked.
Cutter halted the horse and sat, leaning forward on the saddle, studying the ship moored alongside the dock. No lights showed. Had Spite gone to bed this early? That seemed unlikely. He hesitated. He wasn’t even sure why he had come here. Did he think he’d find Scillara?
That was possible, but if so it was a grotesque desire, revealing an ugly side to his nature that he did not want to examine for very long, if at all. He had pretty much abandoned her. She was a stranger to Darujhistan-he should have done better. He should have been a friend.
How many more lives could he ruin? If justice existed, it was indeed appropriate that he ruin himself as well. The sooner the better, in fact. Grief and self-pity seemed but faint variations on the same heady brew that was self-indulgence-did he really want to drown Scillara in his pathetic tears?
No, Spite would be better-he’d get three words out and she’d start slapping him senseless.
Yes, that was what he needed right now. A cold, cogent regard, a wise absence of patience. In fact, she wouldn’t even have to say anything. Just seeing her would do.
He swung down from the saddle and tied the reins to a bollard, then crossed the gangplank to the deck. Various harbour notices had been tacked to the mainmast. Moorage fees and threats of imminent impoundment. Cutter managed a smile, imagining a scene of confrontation in the near future. Delightful to witness, if somewhat alarming, provided he stayed uninvolved.
He made his way below. ‘Spite? You here?’
No response. Spirits plunging once more, he tried the door to the main cabin, and found it unlocked. Now, that was strange. Drawing a knife, he edged inside, and waited for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. Nothing seemed untoward, no signs of disarray-so there had been no roving thief, which was a relief. As he stepped to-wards the lantern hanging from a hook, his foot struck something that skidded a fraction.
Cutter looked down.
His lance-the one that dead Seguleh horseman had given him, in that plague-stricken fort in Seven Cities. He recalled seeing it later, strapped to the back of a floating pack amidst wreckage in the waves. He recalled Spite’s casual retrieval. He had since stashed the weapon beneath his bunk. So, what was it doing here?
And then he noted the beads of what looked like sweat glistening on the iron blade.
Cutter reached down.
The copper sheathing of the shaft was warm, almost hot. Picking the lance up, he realized, with a start, that the weapon was
Moments later he was back on the deck, staring over at his horse as the beast tugged at the reins, hoofs stamping the thick tarred boards of the dock. Its ears were flat, and it looked moments from tearing the bollard free-although of course that was impossible. Cutter looked down to find he was still carrying the lance. He wondered at that, but not for long, as he heard a sudden, deafening chorus of howls roll through the city. All along the shoreline, nesting birds exploded upward in shrieking panic, winging into the night.
Cutter stood frozen in place.
Grisp Falaunt had once been a man of vast ambitions. Lord of the single greatest landholding anywhere on the continent, a patriarch of orchards, pastures, groves and fields of corn stretching to the very horizon. Why, the Dwelling Plain was un-claimed, was it not? And so he could claim it, unopposed, unobstructed by prohi-bitions.
Forty-one years later he woke one morning stunned by a revelation. The Dwelling Plain was unclaimed because it was… useless. Lifeless. Pointless. He had spent most of his life trying to conquer something that was not only uncon-querable, but capable of using its very indifference to annihilate every challenger.
He’d lost his first wife. His children had listened to his promises of glorious in-heritance and then had simply wandered off, each one terminally unimpressed. He’d lost his second wife. He’d lost three partners and seven investors. He’d lost his capital, his collateral and the shirt on his back-this last indignity courtesy of a crow that had been hanging round the clothes line in a most suspicious manner.
There comes a time when a man must truncate his ambitions, cut them right down, not to what was possible, but to what was manageable. And, as one grew older and more worn down, manageable became a notion blurring with minimal, as in how could a man exist with the minimum of effort? How little was good enough?
He now lived in a shack on the very edge of the Dwelling Plain, offering a suit-able view to the south wastes where all his dreams spun in lazy dust-devils through hill and dale and whatnot. And, in the company of a two- legged dog so useless he needed to hand-feed it the rats it was supposed to kill and eat, he tended three rows of root crops, each row barely twenty paces in length. One row suffered a blight of purple fungus; another was infested with grub-worm; and the one between those two had a bit of both.
On this gruesome night with its incessant thunder and invisible lightning and ghost wind, Grisp Falaunt sat rocking on his creaking chair on his back porch, a jug of cactus spit in his lap, a wad of rustleaf bulging one cheek and a wad of durhang the other. He had his free hand under his tunic, as would any man keeping his own company with only a two-legged dog looking on-but the mutt wasn’t paying him any attention anyway, which, all things considered, was a rare relief these nights when the beast mostly just stared at him with oddly hungry eyes. No, old Scamper had his eyes on something to the south, out there in the dark plain.
Grisp hitched the jug up on the back of a forearm and tilted in a mouthhful of the thick, pungent liquor. Old Gadrobi women in the hills still chewed the spiny blades after hardening the insides of their mouths by eating fire, and spat out the pulp in bowls of water sweetened with virgin’s piss. The mixture was then fer-mented in sacks of sewn-up sheep intestines buried under dung heaps. And there, in the subtle cascade of flavours that, if he squeezed shut his watering eyes, he could actually taste, one could find the bouquets marking every damned stage in the brewing process. Leading to an explosive, highly volatile cough followed by desperate gasping, and then-
But Scamper there had sharpened up, as much as a two-legged dog could, any-way. Ears perking, seeming to dilate-but no, that was the spit talking-and nape hairs snapping upright in fierce bristle, and there was his ratty, knobby tail, des-perately snaking down and under the uneven haunches-and gods below, Scamper was whimpering and crawling, piddling as he went, straight for under the porch-look at the damned thing go! With only two legs, too!
Must be some storm out there-’
And, looking up, Grisp saw strange baleful fires floating closer. In sets of two, lifting, weaving, lowering, then back up again. How many sets? He couldn’t count. He could have, once, long ago, right up to twenty, but the bad
