‘And you’d say what? Forgot all about my lost boy, did I? It’d just make ’em curious. Might make trouble for you. Might make trouble for me, in the end. Reckon I’ll just keep my head down and my sleeves down too and stick with you. Best all round.’
‘My big fucking mouth,’ she hissed to herself.
Savian grinned. It might have been the first time she’d ever seen him do it and it was like a lantern uncovered, the lines shifting in his weathered face and his eyes suddenly gleaming. ‘You know what? Your big fucking mouth ain’t to everyone’s taste but I’ve almost got to like it.’ And he put his hand down on her shoulder and gave it a squeeze. ‘You’d best watch out for that prick Sacri, though. Don’t think he sees it that way.’
Nor did she. Not long after that, a rock came clattering down that missed her head by a whisker. She saw Sacri grinning above and was sure he’d kicked it loose on purpose. Soon as she got the chance she told him so and where she’d stick her knife if another rock came along. The other mercenaries were quite tickled by her language.
‘I should teach you some manners, girl,’ snapped Sacri, sticking his jutting jaw out even further, trying to save what face he could.
‘You’d have to fucking know some to teach some.’
He put his hand on his sword, more bluster than meaning to use it, but before he even got the chance Jubair loomed between them.
‘There will be weapons drawn, Sacri,’ he said, ‘but when and against whom I say. These are our allies. We need them to show us the way. Leave the woman be or we will quarrel and a quarrel with me is a heavy weight to carry.’
‘Sorry, Captain,’ said Sacri, scowling.
Jubair offered him the way with one open hand. ‘Regret is the gateway to salvation.’
Lamb scarcely even looked over while they were arguing, and trudged off when they were done like none of it was his concern.
‘Thanks for your help back there,’ she snapped as she caught him up.
‘You’d have had it if you’d needed it. You know that.’
‘A word or two wouldn’t have hurt.’
He leaned close. ‘Way I see it, we’ve got two choices. Try and use these bastards, or kill ’em all. Hard words have never won a battle yet, but they’ve lost a few. You mean to kill a man, telling him so don’t help.’
Lamb walked on, and left her to think about that.
They camped near a steaming stream that Sweet said not to drink from. Not that anyone was keen to try since it smelled like feast-day farts. All night the water hissing in Shy’s ears and she dreamed of falling. Woke sweating with her throat raw from the warm stink to see Sacri on guard and watching her and thought she caught the gleam of metal in his hand. She lay awake after that, her own knife drawn in her fist. The way she had long ago when she was on the run. The way she’d hoped she never would again. She found herself wishing that Temple was there. Surely the man was no hero, but somehow he made her feel braver.
In the morning, grey shadows of crags loomed over them that through the shifting veil of snow looked like the ruins of walls, towers, fortresses. Holes were cut in the rock, too square to be natural, and near them mounds of spoil.
‘Prospectors get this far?’ one of the mercenaries asked.
Sweet shook his head. ‘Nowhere near. These is older diggings.’
‘How much older?’
‘Much older,’ said Crying Rock.
‘Seems like the closer we get the more I worry,’ Shy muttered at
Lamb as they set off, bent and sore.
He nodded. ‘Starting to think about all the thousand things could go wrong.’
‘Scared we won’t find ’em.’
‘Or scared we will.’
‘Or just plain scared,’ she muttered.
‘Scared is good,’ he said. ‘The dead are fearless and I don’t want either of us joining ’em.’
They stopped beside a deep gorge, the sound of water moving far below, steam rising and everywhere the reek of brimstone. An arch spanned the canyon, black rock slick with wet and bearded with dripping icicles of lime. From its middle a great chain hung, links a stride high, rust-eaten metal squealing faintly as the wind stirred them. Savian sat with his head back, breathing hard. The mercenaries slouched in a group nearby, passing round a flask.
‘And here she is!’ Sacri chuckled. ‘The child hunter!’ Shy looked at him, and at the drop beside him, and thought how dearly she’d like to introduce one to the other. ‘What kind of fool would hope to find children alive in a place like this?’
‘Why do big mouths and little brains so often go together?’ she muttered, but she thought about Lamb’s words, realised her question might apply to herself just as easily, and stopped her tongue for once.
‘Nothing to say?’ Sacri grinned down his nose as he tipped his flask up. ‘At least you’ve learned some—’
Jubair put out a great arm and brushed him off the cliff. The Styrian made a choking whoop, flask tumbling from his hand, and he was gone. A thump and a clatter of stones, then another, and another, fading out of hearing in the gorge below.
The mercenaries stared, one with a piece of dried meat halfway to his open mouth. Shy watched, skin prickling, as Jubair stepped to the brink, lips thoughtfully pursed, and looked down. ‘The world is filled with folly and waste,’ he said. ‘It is enough to shake a man’s faith.’
‘You killed him,’ said one of the mercenaries, with that talent for stating the obvious some men have.
‘God killed him. I was but the instrument.’
‘God sure can be a thorny bastard, can’t He?’ croaked Savian.
Jubair solemnly nodded. ‘He is a terrible and a merciless God and all things must bend to His design.’
‘His design’s left us a man short,’ said Sweet.
Jubair shrugged his pack over his shoulder. ‘Better that than discord. We must be together in this. If we disagree, how can God be for all of us?’ He waved Crying Rock forward, and let his surviving men step, more than a little nervously, past him, one swallowing as he peered down into the gorge.
Jubair took Sacri’s fallen flask from the brink. ‘In the city of Ul-Nahb in Gurkhul, where I was born, thanks be to the Almighty, death is a great thing. All efforts are taken with the body and a family wails and a procession of mourners follows the flower-strewn way to the place of burial. Out here, death is a little thing. A man who expects more than one chance is a fool.’ He frowned out at the vast arch and its broken chain, and took a thoughtful swig. ‘The further I go into the unmapped extremes of this country, the more I become convinced these are the end times.’
Lamb plucked the flask from Jubair’s hand, drained it, then tossed it after its owner. ‘All times are end times for someone.’
They squatted among ruined walls, between stones salt-streaked and crystal-crusted, and watched the valley. They’d been watching it for what felt like for ever, squinting into the sticky mist while Crying Rock hissed at them to keep low, stay out of sight, shut their mouths. Shy was getting just a little tired of being hissed at. She was getting a little tired altogether. Tired, and sore, and her nerves worn down to aching stubs with fear, and worry, and hope. Hope worst of all.
Now and again Savian broke out in muffled coughs and Shy could hardly blame him. The very valley seemed to breathe, acrid steam rising from hidden cracks and turning the broken boulders to phantoms, drifting down to make a fog over the pool in the valley’s bottom, slowly fading only to gather again.
Jubair sat cross-legged, eyes closed and arms folded, huge and patient, lips silently moving, a sheen of sweat across his forehead. They all were sweating. Shy’s shirt was plastered to her back, hair stuck clammy to her face. She could hardly believe she’d felt close to death from cold a day or two before. She’d have given her teeth to strip and drop into a snowdrift now. She crawled over to Crying Rock, the stones wet and sticky-warm under her palms.
‘They’re close?’
The Ghost shifted her frown up and down a fraction.
