‘I heard you impaled him on the horns of an enraged steer,’ said Shy.
‘And in the newest version to reach my ear,’ said Temple, ‘you killed him in a duel over the good name of a woman.’
Sweet snorted. ‘Where the hell do they get this rubbish? Everyone knows there’s no women o’ my acquaintance with a good name. This your plot?’
‘It is,’ said Majud.
‘It is a plot,’ said Crying Rock solemnly.
‘Majud has contracted me to build a shop upon it,’ said Temple.
‘More buildings?’ Sweet wriggled his shoulders. ‘Bloody roofs hanging over you. Walls bearing in on you. How can you take a breath in those things?’
Crying Rock shook her head. ‘Buildings.’
‘A man can’t think of nothing when he’s in one but how to get back out. I’m a wanderer and that’s a fact. Born to be under the sky.’ Sweet watched Lamb drag another wriggling drunk from a tent one-handed and toss him rolling into the street. ‘Man has to be what he is, don’t he?’
Shy frowned up. ‘He can try to be otherwise.’
‘But more often than not it don’t stick. All that trying, day after day, it wears you right through.’ The old scout gave her a wink. ‘Lamb taking up the Mayor’s offer?’
‘We’re thinking on it,’ she snapped back.
Temple looked from one to the other. ‘Am I missing something?’
‘Usually,’ said Shy, still giving Sweet the eyeball. ‘If you’re heading on out of town, don’t let us hold you up.’
‘Wouldn’t dream of it.’ The old scout pointed down the main street, busier with traffic as the day wore on, weak sun raising a little steam from the wet mud, the wet horses, the wet roofs. ‘We’re signed up to guide a Fellowship of prospectors into the hills. Always work for guides around Crease. Everyone here wants to be somewhere else.’
‘Not I,’ said Majud, grinning as Lamb kicked another tent over.
‘Oh no.’ Sweet gave the plot a final glance, smile lurking at the corner of his mouth. ‘You lot are right where you belong.’ And he trotted on out of town, Crying Rock at his side.
Words and Graces
Shy didn’t much care for pretension, and despite having crawled through more than her share was no high enthusiast for dirt. The dining room of Camling’s Hostelry was an unhappy marriage of the two uglier by far than either one alone. The tabletops were buffed to a prissy shine but the floor was caked with boot- mud. The cutlery had bone handles but the walls were spattered hip high with ancient food. There was a gilt- framed painting of a nude who’d found something to smirk about but the plaster behind was blistered with mould from a leak above.
‘State o’ this place,’ muttered Lamb.
‘That’s Crease for you,’ said Shy. ‘Everything upside down.’
On the trail she’d heard the stream-beds in the hills were lined with nuggets, just itching for greedy fingers to pluck them free. Some lucky few who’d struck gold in Crease might’ve dug it from the earth but it looked to Shy like most had found a way to dig it out of other folks. It weren’t prospectors crowding the dining room of Camling’s and forming a grumpy queue besides, it was pimps and gamblers, racketeers and money lenders, and merchants pedalling the same stuff they might anywhere else at half the quality and four times the price.
‘A damn superfluity of shysters,’ muttered Shy as she stepped over a pair of dirty boots and dodged a careless elbow. ‘This the future of the Far Country?’
‘Of every country,’ muttered Lamb.
‘Please, please, my friends, do sit!’ Camling, the proprietor, was a long, oily bastard with a suit wearing through at the elbows and a habit of laying soft hands where they weren’t wanted which had already nearly earned him Shy’s fist in his face. He was busy flicking crumbs from a table perched on an ancient column top some creative carpenter had laid the floorboards around. ‘We try to stay neutral but any friend of the Mayor’s is a friend of mine, indeed they are!’
‘I’ll face the door,’ said Lamb, shifting his chair around.
Camling drew out the other for Shy. ‘And may I say how positively radiant you are this morning?’
‘You can say it, but I doubt anyone’ll be taking your word over the evidence o’ their senses.’ She levered her way to sitting, not easy since the ancient carvings on the column were prone to interfere with her knees.
‘On the contrary, you are a positive ornament to my humble dining room.’
Shy frowned up. A slap in the face she could take in good part but all this fawning she didn’t trust in the least. ‘How about you bring the food and hold on to the blather?’
Camling cleared his throat. ‘Of course.’ And slipped away into the crowd.
‘That Corlin over there?’
She was wedged into a shadowy corner, eyeing the gathering with her mouth pressed into that tight line of hers, like it’d take a couple of big men with pick and crowbar to get a word out.
‘If you say so,’ said Lamb, squinting across the room. ‘My eyes ain’t all they were.’
‘I say so. And Savian, too. Thought they were meant to be prospecting?’
‘Thought you didn’t believe they would be?
‘Looks like I was right.’
‘You usually are.’
‘I’d swear she saw me.’
‘And?’
‘And she ain’t given so much as a nod.’
‘Maybe she wishes she hadn’t seen you.’
‘Wishing don’t make it so.’ Shy slipped from the table, having to make room for a big bald bastard who insisted on waving his fork around when he talked.
‘. . there’s still a few coming in but less than we hoped. Can’t be sure how many more’ll turn up. Sounds like Mulkova was bad…’ Savian stopped short when he saw Shy coming. There was a stranger wedged even further into the shadows between him and Corlin, under a curtained window.
‘Corlin,’ said Shy.
‘Shy,’ said Corlin.
‘Savian,’ said Shy.
He just nodded.
‘I thought you two were out digging?’
‘We’re putting it off a while.’ Corlin held Shy’s eye all the time. ‘Might leave in a week. Might be later.’
‘Lot of other folks coming through with the same idea. You want to claim aught but mud you’d best get into them hills.’
‘The hills have been there since great Euz drove the devils from the world,’ said the stranger. ‘I predict that they will persist into next week.’ He was an odd one, with bulging eyes, a long tangle of grey beard and hair and eyebrows hardly shorter. Odder yet, Shy saw now he had a pair of little birds, tame as puppies, pecking seed from his open palm.
‘And you are?’ asked Shy.
‘My name is Zacharus.’
‘Like the Magus?’
‘Just like.’
Seemed a foolish sort of thing to take the name of a legendary wizard, but then you might have said the same for naming a woman after social awkwardness. ‘Shy South.’ She reached for his hand and an even smaller bird hopped from his sleeve and snapped at her finger, gave her the hell of a shock and made her jerk it back. ‘And, er, that’s Lamb over there. We rolled out from the Near Country in a Fellowship with these two. Faced down Ghosts
