Kisswhere and Sinter both leaned back to regard him.
The man gave them a bright smile.
‘Sir,’ said Sinter, ‘how precisely do you intend to do that?’
The smile was replaced by an expression of shock. ‘Do you imagine your captain to be some dirty old codger, Sergeant? I certainly hope not! No, you will come to my office at the ninth bell tonight. You will strip down to your undergarments in the outer office. When you are ready, you are to knock and upon hearing my voice you are to enter immediately. Am I understood, soldiers?’
‘Yes sir,’ said Sinter.
‘Until then.’
The officer marched off.
‘How long,’ asked Kisswhere after he’d left the barracks, ‘are we going to run with this, Sint?’
‘Early days yet,’ she smiled, collecting the bones. ‘Badan, since you’re out of the game for being too obvious, I need you to do a chore for me-well, not much of a chore-anyway, I need you to go out into the city and find me two of the fattest, ugliest whores you can.’
‘I don’t like where this is all going,’ Badan Gruk muttered.
‘Listen to you,’ chided Sinter, ‘you’re getting old.’
‘What did she say?’
Sandalath Drukorlat scowled. ‘She wondered why we’d waited so long.’
Withal grunted. ‘That woman, Sand…’
‘Yes.’ She paused just inside the doorway and glared at the three Nachts huddled beneath the window sill. Their long black, muscled arms were wrapped about one another, forming a clump of limbs and torsos from which three blunt heads made an uneven row, eyes thinned and darting with suspicion. ‘What’s with them?’
‘I think they’re coming with us,’ Withal replied. ‘Only, of course, they don’t know where we’re going.’
‘Tie them up. Lock them up-do something. Just keep them here, husband. They’re grotesque.’
‘They’re not my pets,’ he said.
She crossed her arms. ‘Really? Then why do they spend all their time under your feet?’
‘Honestly, I have no idea.’
‘Who do they belong to?’
He studied them for a long moment. Not one of the Nachts would meet his eyes. It was pathetic.
‘Withal.’
‘All right. I think they’re Mael’s pets.’
‘
‘Aye. I was praying to him, you see. And they showed up. On the island. Or maybe they showed up before I started praying-I can’t recall. But they got me off that island, and that was Mael’s doing.’
‘Then send them back to him!’
‘That doesn’t seem to be the way praying works, Sand.’
‘Mother bless us,’ she sighed, striding forward. ‘Pack up-we’re leaving tonight.’
‘tonight? It’ll be dark, Sand!’
She gave him the same glare she’d given Rind, Pule and Mape.
The worst of it was, in turning away, he caught the looks of sympathy in the Nachts’ beady eyes, tracking him like mourners at a funeral.
‘If this is a new warren,’ whispered Grub, ‘then I think I’d rather we kept the old ones.’
Sinn was quiet, as she had been for most of what must have been an entire day, maybe longer, as they wandered this terrible world.
Windswept desert stretched out in all directions. The road they walked cut across it straight as a spear. Here and there, off to one side, they spied fields of stones that might have once been dwellings, and the remnants of sun-fired mud-brick pen or garden walls, but nothing grew here, nothing at all. The air was acrid, smelling of burning pitch-and that was not too surprising, as black pillars of smoke stalked the horizons.
On the road itself, constructed of crushed rock and, possibly, glass, they came upon scenes of devastation. Burnt-out hulks of carriages and wagons, scorched clothing and shattered furniture. Fire-blackened corpses, limbs curled like tree roots and hands like bird feet, mouths agape and hollow sockets staring at the empty sky. Twisted pieces of metal lay scattered about, none remotely identifiable to Grub.
Breathing made his throat sore, and the bitter chill of the morning had given way to blistering heat. Eyes stinging, feet dragging, he followed in Sinn’s wake until her shadow lengthened to a stretched-out shape painted in pitch, and to his eyes it was as if he was looking down upon the woman she would one day become. He realized that his fear of her was growing-and her silence was making it worse.
‘Will you now be mute to me as well?’ he asked her.
She glanced back over her shoulder. Momentarily.
It would soon grow cold again-he’d lost too much fluid to survive a night of shivering. ‘We need to camp, Sinn. Make a fire-’
She barked a laugh, but did not turn round. ‘Fire,’ she said. ‘Yes.
‘What?’
‘Some things are more real than others. For everyone. Each one, different, always different. What’s the most real to you?’
‘We can’t survive this place, that’s what’s most real, Sinn. We need water. Food. Shelter.’
He saw her nod. ‘That’s what this warren is telling us, Grub. Just that. What you believe has to do with surviving. It doesn’t go any further, does it? What if I told you that it used to be that for almost everybody? Before the cities, before people invented being rich.’
‘Being rich? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Before some people found other things to believe in. Before they made those things more real than anything else. Before they decided it was all right even to kill for them. Or enslave people. Or keep them stupid and poor.’ She shot him a look. ‘Did you know I had a Tanno tutor? A Spiritwalker.’
‘I don’t know anything about them. Seven Cities priests, right?’
‘He once told me that an untethered soul can drown in wisdom.’
‘What?’
‘Wisdom grows by stripping away beliefs, until the last tether is cut, and suddenly you float free. Only, because your eyes are wide open, you see right away that you can’t float in what you’re in. You can only sink. That’s why the meanest religions work so hard at keeping their followers ignorant. Knowledge is poison. Wisdom is depthless. Staying ignorant keeps you in the shallows. Every Tanno one day takes a final spiritwalk. They cut the last tether, and the soul can’t go back. When that happens, the other Tannos mourn, because they know that the spiritwalker has drowned.’
His mouth was too dry, his throat too sore, but even if that had been otherwise, he knew he would have nothing to say to any of that. He knew, after all, about his own ignorance.
‘Look around, Grub. See? There are no gifts here. Look at these stupid bodies and their stupid wagonloads of furniture. The last thing that was real for them, the only thing, was
His attention was drawn to a dust-cloud, rising in a slanted shroud of gold. Something was on a track that would converge with this road. A herd? An army?
‘Fire is not the gift you think it is, Grub.’
‘We’ll die tonight without it.’
‘We need to stay on this road.’
‘Why?’
‘To find out where it leads.’
‘We’ll die here, then.’
‘This land, Grub,’ she said, ‘has generous memories.’
The sun was low by the time the army arrived. Horse-drawn chariots and massive wagons burdened with plunder. The warriors were dark-skinned, tall and thin, bedecked in bronze armour. Grub thought there might be a thousand of them, maybe more. He saw spearmen, archers, and what must be the equivalent of heavy infantry, armed with sickle-bladed axes and short curved swords.
They cut across the track of the road as if blind to it, and as Grub stared he was startled to realize that the figures and their horses and chariots were vaguely transparent.
‘Yes.’
‘Can they see us?’
She pointed at one chariot that had thundered past only to turn round at the urging of the man behind the driver, and was now drawing up opposite them. ‘See him-he’s a priest. He can’t see us, but he senses us. Holiness isn’t always in a place, Grub. Sometimes it’s what’s passing through.’
He shivered, hugged himself. ‘Stop this, Sinn. We’re not gods.’
‘No, we’re not. We’re’-and she laughed-‘more like divine messengers.’
The priest had leapt down from the chariot-Grub could now see the old blood splashed across the spokes of the high wheels, and saw where blades were fitted in times of battle, projecting out from the hubs. A mass charge by such instruments of war would deliver terrible slaughter.
The hawk-faced man was edging closer, groping like a blind man.
Grub made to step back but Sinn caught him by the arm and held him fast.
