Ferro frowned. “Priests?”
“Yes, and more besides.” His eyes went very wide. “An Eater,” he whispered. “They mean to take you alive. The Emperor wants to make an example of you. He has it in mind to put you on display.”
She snorted. “Fuck the Emperor.”
“I heard you already did.”
She growled and raised the knife again, but it was not a knife. There was a hissing snake in her hand, a deadly snake, with its mouth open to bite. “Ugh!” She threw it on the ground, stamped her foot down on its head, but she stamped on her knife instead. The blade snapped with a sharp crack.
“They will catch you,” said the old man. “They will catch you, and they will break your legs with hammers in the city square, so you can never run again. Then they will parade you through the streets of Shaffa, naked, sitting backwards on an ass, with your hair shaved off, while the people line the streets and shout insults at you.”
She frowned at him, but Yulwei did not stop. “They will starve you to death in a cage before the palace, cooking in the hot sun, while the good people of Gurkhul taunt you and spit on you and throw dung at you through the bars. Perhaps they will give you piss to drink, if you are lucky. When you finally die they will let you rot, and the flies will eat you bit by bit, and all the other slaves will see what freedom looks like, and decide they are better off as they are.”
Ferro was bored with this. Let them come, and the Eater too. She wouldn’t die in a cage. She would cut her own throat, if it came to that. She turned her back on him with a scowl and snatched up the shovel, started digging away furiously at the last grave. Soon it was deep enough.
Deep enough for the scum who’d be rotting in it.
She turned around. Yulwei was kneeling down by the dying soldier, giving him water from the skin round his chest.
“Fuck!” she shouted, striding over, her fingers locked around the handle of the shovel.
The old man got to his feet as she came close. “Mercy…” croaked the soldier, stretching out his hand.
“I’ll give you mercy!” The edge of the shovel bit deep into the soldier’s skull. The body twitched briefly then was still. She turned to the old man with a look of triumph. He stared back sadly. There was something in his eyes. Pity, maybe.
“What do you want, Ferro Maljinn?”
“What?”
“Why did you do that?” Yulwei pointed down at the dead man. “What do you want?”
“Vengeance.” She spat out the word.
“On all of them? On the whole nation of Gurkhul? Every man, woman and child?”
“All of them!”
The old man looked round the corpses. “Then you must be very happy with today’s work.”
She forced a smile onto her face. “Yes.” But she wasn’t very happy. She couldn’t remember what it felt like. The smile seemed strange, unfamiliar, all lop-sided.
“And is vengeance all you think of, every minute of every day, your only desire?”
“Yes.”
“Hurting
“Yes!”
“You want nothing for yourself?”
She paused. “What?”
“For yourself. What do
She stared at the old man suspiciously, but no reply came to her. Yulwei shook his head sadly. “It seems to me, Ferro Maljinn, that you are as much a slave as you ever were. Or ever could be.” He sat down, cross-legged on a rock.
She stared at him for a moment, confused. Then the anger bubbled up again, hot and reassuring. “If you came to help me, you can help me bury them!” She pointed over at the three bloody corpses, lined up next to the graves.
“Oh no. That is your work.”
She turned away from the old man, cursing under her breath, and moved over to her one-time companions. She took Shebed’s corpse under the arms and hauled him over to the first grave, his heels making two little grooves in the dust. When she made it to the hole she rolled him in. Alugai was next. A stream of dry soil ran over him as he came to rest in the bottom of his grave.
She turned to Nasar’s carcass. He had been killed by a sword cut across the face. Ferro thought it was something of an improvement to his looks.
“That one looks a good sort,” said Yulwei.
“Nasar.” She laughed without amusement. “A raper, a thief, a coward.” She hawked up some phlegm and spat into his dead face. It splattered softly against his forehead. “Much the worst of the three.” She looked down at the graves. “But they were all of them shit.”
“Nice company you keep.”
“The hunted don’t have the luxury of choosing their companions.” She stared at Nasar’s bloody face. “You take what’s offered.”
“If you disliked them so much, why don’t you leave them for the vultures, like you have these others?” Yulwei swept his arm over the broken soldiers on the ground.
“You bury your own.” She kicked Nasar into the hole. He rolled forward, arms flopping, and dropped into the grave face down. “That’s the way it’s always been.”
She grabbed hold of the shovel and started to heap the stony earth onto his back. She worked in silence, the sweat building up on her face, then dripping off onto the ground. Yulwei watched her as the holes filled up. Three more piles of dirt in the wasteland. She threw the shovel away and it bounced off one of the corpses and clattered among the stones. A small cloud of black flies buzzed angrily off the body, then returned.
Ferro picked up her bow and arrows and slung them over her shoulder. She took the water skin, checked its weight carefully, then shouldered that also. Then she picked over the bodies of the soldiers. One of them, he looked like the leader, had a fine curved sword. He hadn’t even managed to draw it before her arrow had caught him in the throat. Ferro drew it now, and she tested it with a couple of sweeps through the air. It was very good: well balanced, the long blade glittering deadly sharp, bright metal on the hilt catching the sun. He had a knife as well that matched it. She took the weapons and stuck them through her belt.
She picked over the other bodies, but there wasn’t much to take. She cut her arrows from the corpses where she could. She found some coins and tossed them away. They would only weigh her down, and what would she buy out here in the Badlands? Dirt?
That was all there was, and it was free.
They had a few scraps of food with them, but not enough even for another day. That meant there must be others, probably lots of them, and not far away. Yulwei was telling the truth, but it made no difference to her.
She turned and started to walk southward, down off the hill and towards the great desert, leaving the old man behind.
“That’s the wrong way,” he said.
She stopped, squinting at him in the bright sun. “Aren’t the soldiers coming?”
Yulwei’s eyes sparkled. “There are many ways of staying unnoticed, even out here in the Badlands.”
She looked to the north, out over the featureless plain below. Out towards Gurkhul. There wasn’t a hill, or a tree, or scarcely a bush for miles. Nowhere to hide. “Unnoticed, even by an Eater?”
The old man laughed. “Especially by those arrogant swine. They’re not half as clever as they think they are. How do you think I got here? I came through them, between them, around them. I go where I please, and I take who I please with me.”
She shaded her eyes with her hand, and squinted southward. The desert stretched away into the far distance, and beyond. Ferro could survive here in the wilderness, just about, but out there in that crucible of changing sands and merciless heat?
The old man seemed to read her thoughts. “There are always the endless sands. I have crossed them before. It can be done. But not by you.”
