Red Country

In Threes

‘Fuck, it’s cold,’ whispered Shy.

They’d found a shred of shelter wedged in a hollow among frozen tree-roots, but when the wind whipped up it was still like a slap in the face, and even with a piece of blanket double-wrapped around her head so just her eyes showed, it left Shy’s face red and stinging as a good slapping might’ve. She lay on her side, needing a piss but hardly daring to drop her trousers in case she ended up with a yellow icicle stuck to her arse to add to her discomforts. She dragged her coat tight around her shoulders, then the frost-crusted wolfskin Sweet had given her tight around that, wriggled her numb toes in her icy boots and pressed her dead fingertips to her mouth so she could make the most of her breath while she still had some.

‘Fuck, it’s cold.’

‘This is nothing,’ grunted Sweet. ‘Got caught in drifts one time in the mountains near Hightower for two months. So cold the spirits froze in the bottles. We had to crack the glass off and pass the booze around in lumps.’

‘Shhh,’ murmured Crying Rock, faintest puff of smoke spilling from her blued lips. ’Til that moment Shy had been wondering whether she’d frozen to death hours before with her pipe still clamped in her mouth. She’d scarcely even blinked all morning, staring through the brush they’d arranged the previous night as cover and down towards Beacon.

Not that there was much to see. The camp looked dead. Snow in the one street was drifted up against doors, thick on roofs toothed with glinting icicles, pristine but for the wandering tracks of one curious wolf. No smoke from the chimneys, no light from the frozen flaps of the half-buried tents. The old barrows were just white humps. The broken tower which in some forgotten past must’ve held the beacon the place was named for held nothing but snow now. Aside from wind sad in the mangy pines and making a shutter somewhere tap, tap, tap, the place was silent as Juvens’ grave.

Shy had never been much for waiting, that wasn’t news, but lying up here in the brush and watching reminded her too much of her outlaw days. On her belly in the dust with Jeg chewing and chewing and spitting and chewing in her ear and Neary sweating an inhuman quantity of salt water, waiting for travellers way out of luck to pass on the road below. Pretending to be the outlaw, Smoke, half-crazy with meanness, when what she really felt like was a painfully unlucky little girl, half-crazy with constant fear. Fear of those chasing her and fear of those with her and fear of herself most of all. No clue what she’d do next. Like some hateful lunatic might seize her hands and her mouth and use them like a puppet any moment. The thought of it made her want to wriggle out of her own sore skin.

‘Be still,’ whispered Lamb, motionless as a felled tree.

‘Why? There’s no one bloody here, place is dead as a—’

Crying Rock raised one gnarled finger, held it in front of Shy’s face, then gently tilted it to point towards the treeline on the far side of the camp.

‘You see them two big pines?’ whispered Sweet. ‘And them three rocks like fingers just between? That’s where the hide is.’

Shy stared at that colourless tangle of stone and snow and timber until her eyes ached. Then she caught the faintest twitch of movement.

‘That’s one of them?’ she breathed.

Crying Rock held up two fingers.

‘They go in pairs,’ said Sweet.

‘Oh, she’s good,’ whispered Shy, feeling a proper amateur in this company.

‘The best.’

‘How do we flush ’em out?’

‘They’ll flush ’emselves out. Long as that drunk madman Cosca comes through on his end of it.’

‘Far from a certainty,’ muttered Shy. In spite of Cosca’s talk about haste his Company had loitered around Crease like flies around a turd for a whole two weeks to resupply, which meant to cause every kind of unsavoury chaos and steadily desert. They’d taken even longer slogging across the few dozen miles of high plateau between Crease and Beacon as the weather turned steadily colder, a good number of Crease’s most ambitious whores, gamblers and merchants straggling after in hopes of wrenching free any money the mercenaries had somehow left unspent. All the while the Old Man smiled upon this tardy shambles like it was exactly the plan discussed, spinning far-fetched yarns about his glorious past for the benefit of his idiot biographer. ‘Seems to me talk and action have come properly uncoupled for that bastard—’

‘Shhh,’ hissed Lamb.

Shy pressed herself against the dirt as a gang of outraged crows took off clattering into the frozen sky below. Shouting drifted deadened on the wind, then the rattle of gear, then horsemen came into view. Twenty or more, floundering up through the snow drifted in the valley and making damned hard work of it, dipping and bobbing, riders slapping at their mounts’ steaming flanks to keep them on.

‘The drunk madman comes through,’ muttered Lamb.

‘This time.’ Shy had a strong feeling Cosca didn’t make a habit of it.

The mercenaries dismounted and spread out through the camp, digging away at doorways and windows, ripping open tents with canvas frozen stiff as wood, raising a whoop and a clamour which in that winter deadness sounded noisy as the battle at the end of time. That these scum were on her side made Shy wonder whether she was on the right side, but she was where she was. Making the best from different kinds of shit was the story of her life.

Lamb touched her arm and she followed his finger to the hide, caught a dark shape flitting through the trees behind it, keeping low, quickly vanished among the tangle of branch and shadow.

‘There goes one,’ grunted Sweet, not keeping his voice so soft now the mercenaries were raising hell. ‘Any luck, that one’ll run right up to their hidden places. Right up to Ashranc and tell the Dragon People there’s twenty horsemen in Beacon.’

‘When strong seem weak,’ muttered Lamb, ‘when weak seem strong.’

‘What about the other one?’ asked Shy.

Crying Rock tucked away her pipe and produced her beaked club, as eloquent an answer as was called for, then slipped limber as a snake around the tree she had her back to and into cover.

‘To work,’ said Sweet, and started to wriggle after her, a long stretch faster than Shy had ever seen him move standing. She watched the two old scouts crawl between the black tree-trunks, through the snow and the fallen pine needles, working their way towards the hide and out of sight.

She was left shivering on the frozen dirt next to Lamb, and waiting some more.

Since Crease he’d stuck to shaving his head and it was like he’d shaved all sentiment off, too, hard lines and hard bones and hard past laid bare. The stitches had been pulled with the point of Savian’s knife and the marks of the fight with Glama Golden were fast fading, soon to be lost among all the rest. A lifetime of violence written so plain into that beaten anvil of a face she’d no notion how she never read it there before.

Hard to believe how easy it had been to talk to him once. Or talk at him, at least. Good old cowardly Lamb, he’ll never surprise you. Safe and comfortable as talking to herself. Now there was a wider and more dangerous gulf between them each day. So many questions swimming round her head but now she finally got her mouth open, the one that dropped out she hardly cared about the answer to.

‘Did you fuck the Mayor, then?’

Lamb left it long enough to speak, she thought he might not bother. ‘Every which way and I don’t regret a moment.’

‘I guess a fuck can still be a wonderful thing between folk who’ve reached a certain age.’

‘No doubt. Specially if they didn’t get many beforehand.’

‘Didn’t stop her knifing you in the back soon as it suited her.’

‘Get many promises from Temple ’fore he jumped out your window?’

Shy felt the need for a pause of her own. ‘Can’t say I did.’

‘Huh. I guess fucking someone don’t stop them fucking you.’

She gave a long, cold, smoking sigh. ‘For some of us it only seems to increase the chances…’

Sweet came trudging from the pines near the hide, ungainly in his swollen fur coat, and waved up. Crying Rock followed and bent down, cleaning her club in the snow, leaving the faintest pink smear on the blank white.

‘I guess that’s it done,’ said Lamb, wincing as he clambered up to a squat.

‘I guess.’ Shy hugged herself tight, too cold to feel much about it but cold. She turned, first time she’d looked at him since they started speaking. ‘Can I ask you a question?’

The jaw muscles worked on the side of his head. ‘Sometimes ignorance is the sweetest medicine.’ He turned this strange, sick, guilty look on her, like a man who’s been caught doing murder and knows the game’s all up. ‘But I don’t know how I’d stop you.’ And she felt worried to the pit of her stomach and could hardly bring herself to speak, but couldn’t stand to stay silent either.

‘Who are you?’ she whispered. ‘I mean… who were you? I mean—shit.’

She caught movement—a figure flitting through the trees towards Sweet and Crying Rock.

‘Shit!’ And she was running, stumbling, blundering, snagged a numb foot at the edge of the hollow and went tumbling through the brush, floundered up and was off across the bare slope, legs so caught in the virgin snow it felt like she was dragging two giant stone boots after her.

‘Sweet!’ she wheezed. The figure broke from the trees and over the unspoiled white towards the old scout, hint of a snarling face, glint of a blade. No way Shy could get there in time. Nothing she could do.

‘Sweet!’ she wailed one more time, and he looked up, smiling, then sideways, eyes suddenly wide, shrinking away as the dark shape sprang for him. It twisted in the air, fell short and went tumbling through the snow. Crying Rock rushed up and hit it over the head with her club. Shy heard the sharp crack a moment after.

Savian pushed some branches out of his way and trudged through the snow towards them, frowning at the trees and calmly cranking his flatbow.

‘Nice shot,’ called Crying Rock, sliding her club into her belt and jamming that pipe between her teeth.

Sweet pushed back his hat. ‘Nice shot, she says! I’ve damn near shat myself.’

Shy stood with her hands on her hips and tried to catch her smoking breath, chest on fire from the icy coldness of it.

Lamb walked up beside her, sheathing his sword. ‘Looks like they sometimes go in threes.’

Among the Barbarians

‘They hardly look like demons.’ Cosca nudged the Dragon Woman’s cheek with his foot and watched her bare-shaved head flop back. ‘No scales. No forked tongues. No flaming breath. I feel a touch let down.’

‘Simple barbarians,’ grunted Jubair.

‘Like the ones out on the plains.’ Brachio took a gulp of wine and peered discerningly at the glass. ‘A step above animals and not a high step.’

Temple cleared his sore throat. ‘No barbarian’s sword.’ He squatted down and turned the blade over in his hands: straight, and perfectly balanced, and meticulously sharpened.

‘These ain’t no common Ghosts,’ said Sweet. ‘They ain’t really Ghosts at all. They aim to kill and know how. They don’t scare at nothing and know each rock o’ this country, too. They did for every miner in Beacon without so much as a struggle.’

‘But clearly they bleed.’ Cosca poked his finger into the hole made by Savian’s flatbow bolt and pulled it out, fingertip glistening red. ‘And clearly they die.’

Brachio shrugged. ‘Everyone bleeds. Everyone dies.’

‘Life’s one certainty,’ rumbled Jubair, rolling his eyes towards the heavens. Or at least the mildewed ceiling.

‘What is this metal?’ Sworbreck pulled an amulet from the Dragon Woman’s collar, a grey leaf dully gleaming in the lamplight. ‘It is very thin but…’ He bared his teeth as he strained at it. ‘I cannot bend it. Not at all. The workmanship is remarkable.’

Cosca turned away. ‘Steel and gold are the only metals that interest me. Bury the bodies away from the camp. If I’ve learned one thing in forty years of warfare, Sworbreck, it’s that you have to bury the bodies far from camp.’ He drew his cloak tight at the icy blast as the door was opened. ‘Damn this cold.’ Hunched jealously over the fire, he looked like nothing so much as an old witch over her cauldron, thin hair hanging lank, grasping hands like black claws against the flames. ‘Reminds me of the North, and that can’t be a good thing, eh, Temple?’

‘No, General.’ Being reminded of any moment in the past ten years was no particularly good thing in Temple’s mind—the whole a desert of violence, waste and guilt. Except, perhaps, gazing out over the free plains from his saddle. Or down on Crease from the frame of Majud’s shop. Or arguing with Shy over their debt. Dancing, pressed tight against her. Leaning to kiss her, and her smile as she leaned to kiss him back… He shook himself. All thoroughly, irredeemably fucked. Truly, you never value what you have until you jump out of its window.

‘That cursed retreat.’ Cosca was busy wrestling with his own failures. There were enough of them. ‘That damned snow. That treacherous bastard Black Calder. So many good men lost, eh, Temple? Like… well… I forget the names, but my point holds.’ He turned to call angrily over his shoulder. ‘When you said “fort” I was expecting something more… substantial.’

Beacon’s chief building was, in fact, a large log cabin on one and a half floors, separated into rooms by hanging animal skins and with a heavy door, narrow windows, access to the broken tower in one corner and a horrifying array of draughts.

Sweet shrugged. ‘Standards ain’t high in the Far Country, General. Out here you put three sticks together, it’s a fort.’

‘I suppose we must be glad of the shelter we have. Another night in the open you’d have to wait for spring to thaw me out. How I long for the towers of beautiful Visserine! A balmy summer night beside the river! The city was mine, once, you know, Sworbreck?’

The writer winced. ‘I believe you have mentioned it.’

‘Nicomo Cosca, Grand Duke of Visserine!’ The Old Man paused to take yet another swig from his flask. ‘And it shall be mine again. My towers, my palace, and my respect. I have been often disappointed, that’s true. My back is a tissue of metaphorical scars. But there is still time, isn’t there?’

‘Of course.’ Sworbreck gave a false chuckle. ‘You have many successful years ahead of you, I’m sure!’

‘Still a little time to make things right…’ Cosca was busy staring at the wrinkled back of his hand, wincing as he worked the knobbly fingers. ‘I used to be a wonder with a throwing knife, you know, Sworbreck. I could bring down a fly at twenty paces. Now?’ He gave vent to an explosive snort. ‘I can scarcely see twenty paces on a clear day. That’s the most wounding betrayal of all. The one by your own flesh. Live long enough, you see everything ruined…’

The next whirlwind heralded Sergeant Friendly’s arrival, blunt nose and flattened ears slightly pinked but otherwise showing no sign of discomfort at the cold. Sun, rain or tempest all seemed one to him.

‘The last stragglers are into camp along with the Company’s baggage,’ he intoned.

Brachio poured himself another drink. ‘Hangers-on swarm to us like maggots to a corpse.’

‘I am not sure I appreciate the image of our noble brotherhood as a suppurating carcass,’ said Cosca.

‘However accurate it may be,’ murmured Temple.

‘Who made it all the way here?’

Friendly began the count. ‘Nineteen whores and four pimps—’

‘They’ll be busy,’ said Cosca.

‘—twenty-two wagon-drivers and porters including the cripple Hedges, who keeps demanding to speak to you—’

‘Everyone wants a slice of me! You’d think I was a feast-day currant cake!’

‘—thirteen assorted merchants, pedlars and tinkers, six of whom complain of having been robbed by members of the Company—’

‘I consort with criminals! I was a Grand Duke, you know. So many disappointments.’

‘—two blacksmiths, a horse trader, a fur trader, an undertaker, a barber boasting of surgical qualifications, a pair of laundry women, a vintner with no stock, and seventeen persons of no stated profession.’

‘Vagrants and layabouts hoping to grow fat on my crumbs! Is there no honour left, Temple?’

‘Precious little,’ said Temple. Certainly his own stock was disgracefully meagre.

‘And is Superior Pike’s…’ Cosca leaned close to Friendly and after taking another swallow from his flask whispered, entirely audibly, ‘secret wagon in the camp?’

‘It is,’ said Friendly.

‘Place it under guard.’

‘What’s in it, anyway?’ asked Brachio, wiping some damp from his weepy eye with a fingernail.

‘Were I to share that information, it would no longer be a secret wagon, merely… a wagon. I think we can agree that lacks mystique.’

‘Where will all this flotsam find shelter?’ Jubair wished to know. ‘There is hardly room for the fighting men.’

‘What of the barrows?’ asked the Old Man.

‘Empty,’ said Sweet. ‘Robbed centuries ago.’

‘I daresay they’ll warm up something snug. The irony, eh, Temple? Yesterday’s heroes kicked from their graves by today’s whores!’

‘I thrill to the profundity,’ muttered Temple, shivering at the thought of sleeping in the dank innards of those ancient tombs, let alone fucking in them.

‘Not wanting to spoil your preparations, General,’ said Sweet, ‘but I’d best be on my way.’

‘Of course! Glory is like bread, it stales with time! Was it Farans who said so, or Stolicus? What is your plan?’

‘I’m hoping that scout’ll run straight back and tell his Dragon friends there’s no more’n twenty of us down here.’

‘The best opponent is one befuddled and mystified! Was that Farans? Or Bialoveld?’ Cosca treated Sworbreck, busy with his notebooks, to a contemptuous glare. ‘One writer is very much like another. You were saying?’

‘Reckon they’ll set to wondering whether to stay tucked up at Ashranc and ignore us, or come down and wipe us out.’

‘They’ll trip over a shock if they try it,’ said Brachio, jowls wobbling as he chuckled.

‘That’s just what we want ’em to do,’ said Sweet. ‘But they ain’t prone to come down without good reason. A little trespass on their ground should hook ’em. Prickly as all hell about their ground. Crying Rock knows the way. She knows secret ways right into Ashranc, but that’s a hell of a risk. So all we do is creep up there and leave some sign they won’t miss. A burned-out fire, some nice clear tracks across their road—’

‘A turd,’ said Jubair, pronouncing the word as solemnly as a prophet’s name.

Cosca raised his flask. ‘Marvellous! Lure them with a turd! I’m reasonably sure Stolicus never recommended that, eh, Temple?’

Brachio squeezed his big lower lip thoughtfully between finger and thumb. ‘You’re sure they’ll fall for this turd trap?’

‘They’ve been the big dogs around here for ever,’ said Sweet. ‘They’re used to slaughtering Ghosts and scaring off prospectors. All that winning’s made ’em arrogant. Set in old ways. But they’re dangerous, still. You’d best be good and ready. Don’t reel ’em in ’til they’ve swallowed the hook.’

Cosca nodded. ‘Believe me when I say I have stood at both ends of an ambush and fully understand the principles. What would be your opinion of this scheme, Master Cantliss?’

The wretched bandit, his clothes splitting at the seams and stuffed with straw against the cold, had until then been sitting in the corner of the room nursing his broken hand and quietly sniffling. He perked up at the sound of his name and nodded vigorously, as though his support might be help to any cause. ‘Sounds all right. They think they own these hills, that I can chime with. And that Waerdinur killed my friend Blackpoint. Snuffed him out casual as you please. Can I…’ licking his scabbed lips and reaching towards Cosca’s flask.

‘Of course,’ said Cosca, draining it, upending it to show it was empty, then shrugging. ‘Captain Jubair has picked out eight of his most competent men to accompany you.’

Sweet looked less than reassured as he gave the hulking Kantic a sidelong glance. ‘I’d rather stick with folks I know I can count on.’

‘So would we all, but are there truly any such in life, eh, Temple?’

‘Precious few.’ Temple certainly would not have counted himself among their number, nor anyone else currently in the room.

Sweet affected an air of injured innocence. ‘You don’t trust us?’

‘I have been often disappointed by human nature,’ said Cosca. ‘Ever since Grand Duchess Sefeline turned on me and poisoned my favourite mistress I have tried never to encumber working relationships with the burden of trust.’

Brachio gave vent to a long burp. ‘Better to watch each other carefully, stay well armed and mutually suspicious, and keep our various self-interests as the prime motives.’

‘Nobly said!’ And Cosca slapped his thigh. ‘Then, like a knife in the sock, we make trust our secret weapon in the event of emergencies.’

‘I tried a knife in the sock,’ muttered Brachio, patting the several he had stowed in his bandolier. ‘Chafed terribly.’

‘Shall we depart?’ rumbled Jubair. ‘Time is wasting, and there is God’s work to be done.’

‘There’s work, anyway,’ said Sweet, pulling the collar of his big fur coat up to his ears as he ducked out into the night.

Cosca tipped up his flask, realised it was empty and held it aloft for a refill. ‘Bring me more spirit! And Temple, come, talk to me as you used to! Offer me comfort, Temple, offer me advice.’

Temple took a long breath. ‘I’m not sure what advice I can offer. We’re far beyond the reach of the law out here.’

‘I don’t speak of the law, man, but of the righteous path! Thank you.’ This as Sergeant Friendly began to decant a freshly opened bottle into Cosca’s waving flask with masterful precision. ‘I feel I am adrift upon strange seas and my moral compass spins entirely haywire! Find me an ethical star to steer by, Temple! What of God, man, what of God?’

‘I fear we may be far beyond the reach of God as well,’ muttered Temple as he made for the door. Hedges limped in as he opened it, clutching tight to his ruin of a hat and looking sicker than ever, if that was possible.

‘Who’s this now?’ demanded Cosca, peering into the shadows.

‘The name’s Hedges, Captain General, sir, one of the drovers from Crease. Injured at Osrung, sir, leading a charge.’

‘The very reason charges are best left led by others.’

Hedges sidled past into the room, eyes nervously darting. ‘Can’t say I disagree, sir. Might I have a moment?’ Grateful for the distraction, Temple slipped out into the bitter darkness.

In the camp’s one street, secrecy did not seem a prime concern. Men swathed in coats and furs, swaddled in torn-up blankets and mismatched armour stomped cursing about, churning the snow to black slush, holding rustling torches high, dragging reluctant horses, unloading boxes and barrels from listing wagons, breath steaming from wrappings around their faces.

‘Might I accompany you?’ asked Sworbreck, threading after Temple through the chaos.

‘If you’re not scared my luck will rub off.’

‘It could be no worse than mine,’ lamented the biographer.

They passed a group huddled in a hut with one missing wall, playing dice for bedding, a man sharpening blades at a shrieking grindstone, sparks showering into the night, three women arguing over how best to get a cook-fire started. None had the answer.

‘Do you ever feel…’ Sworbreck mused, face squashed down for warmth into the threadbare collar of his coat, ‘as though you have somehow blundered into a situation you never intended to be in, but now cannot see your way clear of?’

Temple looked sidelong at the writer. ‘Lately, every moment of every day.’

‘As if you were being punished, but you were not sure what for.’

‘I know what for,’ muttered Temple.

‘I don’t belong here,’ said Sworbreck.

‘I wish I could say the same. But I fear that I do.’

Snow had been dug away from one of the barrows and torchlight flickered in its moss-caked archway. One of the pimps was busy hanging a worn hide at the entrance of another, a disorderly queue already forming outside. A shivering pedlar had set up shop between the two, offering belts and boot-polish to the heedless night. Commerce never sleeps.

Temple caught Inquisitor Lorsen’s grating tones emerging from a cabin’s half-open door, ‘. . Do you really believe there are rebels in these mountains, Dimbik?’

‘Belief is a luxury I have not been able to afford for some time, Inquisitor. I simply do as I’m told.’

‘But by whom, Captain, by whom is the question. I, after all, have the ear of Superior Pike, and the Superior has the ear of the Arch Lector himself, and a recommendation from the Arch Lector…’ His scheming was lost in the babble.

In the darkness at the edge of the camp, Temple’s erstwhile fellows were already mounting up. It had begun to snow again, white specks gently settling on the manes of the horses, on Crying Rock’s grey hair and the old flag it was bound up with, across Shy’s shoulders, hunched as she steadfastly refused to look over, on the packages Lamb was busy stowing on his horse.

‘Coming with us?’ asked Savian as he watched Temple approach.

‘My heart is willing but the rest of me has the good sense to politely decline.’

‘Crying Rock!’ Sworbreck produced his notebook with a flourish. ‘It is a most intriguing name!’

She stared down at him. ‘Yes.’

‘I daresay an intriguing story lies behind it.’

‘Yes.’

‘Would you care to share it?’

Crying Rock slowly rode off into the gathering darkness.

‘I’d call that a no,’ said Shy.

Sworbreck sighed. ‘A writer must learn to flourish on scorn. No passage, sentence or even word can be to the taste of every reader. Master Lamb, have you ever been interviewed by an author?’

‘We’ve run across just about every other kind of liar,’ said Shy.

The biographer persisted. ‘I’ve heard it said that you have more experience of single combat than any man alive.’

Lamb pulled the last of the straps tight. ‘You believe everything you hear?’

‘Do you deny it, then?’

Lamb did not speak.

‘Have you any insights into the deadly business, for my readers?’

‘Don’t do it.’

Sworbreck stepped closer. ‘But is it true what General Cosca tells me?’

‘From what I’ve seen, I wouldn’t rate him the yardstick of honesty.’

‘He told me you were once a king.’

Temple raised his brows. Sweet cleared his throat. Shy burst out laughing, but then she saw Lamb wasn’t, and trailed off.

‘He told me you were champion to the King of the Northmen,’ continued Sworbreck, ‘and that you won ten duels in the Circle in his name, were betrayed by him but survived, and finally killed him and took his place.’

Lamb dragged himself slowly up into his saddle and frowned off into the night. ‘Men put a golden chain on me for a while, and knelt, because it suited ’em. In violent times folk like to kneel to violent men. In peaceful times they remember they’re happier standing.’

‘Do you blame them?’

‘I’m long past blaming. That’s just the way men are.’ Lamb looked over at Temple. ‘Can we count on your man Cosca, do you reckon?’

‘Absolutely not,’ said Temple.

‘Had a feeling you’d say that.’ And Lamb nudged his horse uphill into the darkness.

‘And they say I’ve got stories,’ grumbled Sweet as he followed.

Sworbreck stared after them for a moment, then fumbled out his pencil and began to scratch feverishly away.

Temple met Shy’s eye as she turned her mount. ‘I hope you find them!’ he blurted. ‘The children.’

‘We will. Hope you find… whatever you’re looking for.’

‘I think I did,’ he said softly. ‘And I threw it away.’

She sat there a moment as though considering what to say, then clicked her tongue and her horse walked on.

‘Good luck!’ he called after her. ‘Take care of yourself, among the barbarians!’

She glanced over towards the fort, from which the sounds of off-key singing were already beginning to float, and raised one eyebrow.

‘Likewise.’

Bait

The first day they rode through towering forest, trees far bigger’n Shy ever saw, branch upon branch upon branch blocking out the sun so she felt they stole through some giant’s crypt, sombre and sacred. The snow had found its way in still, drifted a stride deep between the crusted trunks, frozen to a sparkling crust that skinned the horse’s legs, so they had to take turns breaking new ground. Here and there a freezing fog had gathered, curling round men and mounts as they passed like spirits jealous of their warmth. Not that there was much of that to be had. Crying Rock gave a warning hiss whenever anyone started in to talk so they just nodded in dumb misery to the crunching of snow and the laboured breaths of the struggling horses, Savian’s coughing and a soft mumbling from Jubair which Shy took for prayers. He was a pious bastard, the big Kantic, that you couldn’t deny. Whether piety made him a safe man to have at your back she profoundly doubted. Folk she’d known to be big on religion had tended to use it as an excuse for doing wrong rather’n a reason not to.

Only when the light had faded to a twilight glimmer did Sweet lead them to a shallow cave under an overhang and let them stop. By then the mounts and the spare mounts were all blown and shuddering and

Shy wasn’t in a state much better, her whole body one stiff and aching, numbed and prickling, chafed and stinging competition of complaints.

No fire allowed, they ate cold meat and hard biscuit and passed about a bottle. Savian put a hard face over his coughing like he did over everything else, but Shy could tell he was troubled with it, bent and hacking and his pale hands clawing his coat shut at his neck.

One of the mercenaries, a Styrian with a jutting jaw by the name of Sacri, who struck Shy as the sort whose only comfort in life is others’ discomfort, grinned and said, ‘You got a cough, old man. You want to go back?’

Shy said, ‘Shut your mouth,’ with as much fire as she could muster which right then wasn’t much.

‘What’ll you do?’ he sneered at her. ‘Slap me?’

That struck a hotter spark from her. ‘That’s right. With a fucking axe. Now shut your mouth.’

This time he did shut it, too, but by the moon’s glimmering she gathered he was working out how to even the score, and reckoned she’d better mind her back even closer than before.

They kept watch in pairs, one from the mercenaries, one from the Fellowship that had been, and they watched each other every bit as hard as they watched the night for Dragon People. Shy marked time by Sweet’s snoring, and when the moment came she shook Lamb and whispered in his ear.

‘Wake up, your Majesty.’

He gave a grunting sigh. ‘Wondered how long it’d be ’fore that floated up again.’

‘Pardon the foolishness of a witless peasant. I’m just overcome at having the King of the Northmen snoring in my blankets.’

‘I spent ten times as long poorer’n a beggar and without a friend to my name. Why does no one want to talk about that?’

‘In my case ’cause I know well enough what that feels like. I haven’t had occasion to wear a crown that often.’

‘Neither have I,’ he said, crawling stiffly clear of the bedding. ‘I had a chain.’

‘A golden one?’

‘With a diamond like that.’ And he made a shape the size of a hen’s egg with his thumb and forefinger and eyed her through it.

She still wasn’t sure whether this was all some kind of a joke. ‘You.’

‘Me.’

‘That got through a whole winter in one pair of trousers.’

He shrugged. ‘I’d lost the chain by then.’

‘Any particular way I should act around royalty?’

‘The odd curtsy wouldn’t go amiss.’

She snorted. ‘Fuck yourself.’

‘Fuck yourself, your Majesty.’

‘King Lamb,’ she muttered, crawling into the blankets to make the most of his already fading warmth. ‘King Lamb.’

‘I had a different name.’

Shy looked sideways at him. ‘What name?’

He sat there in the wide mouth of the cave, hunched black against the star-speckled night, and she couldn’t guess at what was on his face. ‘Don’t matter,’ he said. ‘No good ever came of it.’

Next morning the snow whirled down on a wind that came from every way at once, bitter as a bankrupt. They mounted up with all the joy of folk riding to their own hangings and pressed on, uphill, uphill. The forest thinned out, trees shrinking, withering, twisting like folk in pain. They threaded through bare rocks and the way grew narrow—an old stream bed, maybe, though sometimes it looked more like a man-made stair worn almost smooth by years and weather. Jubair sent one of his men back with the horses and Shy half-wished she was going with him. The rest of them toiled on by foot.

‘What the hell are these Dragon bastards doing up here anyhow?’ Shy grunted at Sweet. Didn’t seem like a place anyone in their right mind would want to visit, let alone live in.

‘Can’t say I know exactly… why they’re up here.’ The old scout had to talk in rushes between his heaving breaths. ‘But they been here a long time.’

‘She hasn’t told you?’ asked Shy, nodding at Crying Rock, striding on hard up ahead.

‘I reckon it’s on account… o’ my reluctance to ask those kind o’ questions… she’s stuck with me down the years.’

‘Ain’t for your good looks, I can tell you that.’

‘There’s more to life than looks.’ He glanced sideways at her. ‘Luckily for us both.’

‘What would they want with children?’

He stopped to take a swallow of water and offered one to her while the mercenaries laboured past under the considerable burden of their many weapons. ‘The way I hear it, no children are born here. Something in the land. They turn barren. All the Dragon People were taken from someone else, one time or another. Used to be that meant Ghosts mostly, maybe Imperials, the odd Northman strayed down from the Sea of Teeth. Looks like since the prospectors drove the Ghosts out they’re casting their net wider. Buying children off the likes of Cantliss.’

‘Less talk!’ hissed Crying Rock from above. ‘More walk!’

The snow came down weightier than ever but didn’t drift as deep, and when Shy peeled the wrappings off her face she found the wind wasn’t half so keen. An hour later the snow was slippery slush on the wet rock, and she pulled her soaked gloves off and could still feel her fingertips. An hour after that the snow still fell but the ground was bare, and Shy was sweating fast enough she had to strip her coat off and wedge it in her pack. The others were doing the same. She bent and pressed her palm to the earth and there was a strange warmth, like it was the wall of a baker’s and the oven was stoked on the other side.

‘There is fire below,’ said Crying Rock.

‘There is?’ Shy snatched her hand back like flames might pop from the dirt then and there. ‘Can’t say that notion floods a woman with optimism.’

‘Better’n freezing the crap up my arse, ain’t it?’ said Sweet, pulling his shirt off to reveal another underneath. Shy wondered how many he had on. Or if he’d keep taking them off until he disappeared altogether.

‘Is that why the Dragon People live up here?’ Savian pressed his own palm to the warm dirt. ‘Because of the fire?’

‘Or because they live here there is a fire.’ Crying Rock stared up the slope, bare rock and scree now, crusted in places with stains of yellow sulphur, overlooked by a towering bastard of a rock face. ‘This way may be watched.’

‘Certainly it will be,’ said Jubair. ‘God sees all.’

‘Ain’t God as’ll put an arrow in your arse if we keep on this path,’ said Sweet.

Jubair shrugged. ‘God puts all things where they must be.’

‘What now, then?’ asked Savian.

Crying Rock was already uncoiling a rope from her pack. ‘Now we climb.’

Shy rubbed at her temples. ‘Had a nasty feeling she’d say that.’

Damn it if the climbing wasn’t even harder than the walking and a long drop scarier. Crying Rock swarmed up like a spider and Lamb wasn’t much slower, seeming well at home among the mountains, the two of them getting ropes ready for the rest. Shy brought up the rear with Savian, cursing and fumbling at the slick rock, arms aching from the effort and her hands burning from the hemp.

‘Haven’t had the chance to thank you,’ she said as she waited on a ledge.

He didn’t make a sound but the hissing of the rope through his gnarled hands as he pulled it up behind them.

‘For what you did back in Crease.’ Silence. ‘Ain’t had my life saved so often that I overlook it.’ Silence. ‘Remember?’

She thought he gave the tiniest shrug.

‘Get the feeling you’ve been avoiding mention of it.’

Silence. He avoided mentioning anything wherever possible.

‘Probably you ain’t much of a one for taking thanks.’

More silence.

‘Probably I ain’t much of a one for giving ’em.’

‘You’re taking your time about it, all right.’

‘Thanks, then. Reckon I’d be good and dead if it weren’t for you.’

Savian pressed his thin lips together even tighter and gave a throaty grunt. ‘Reckon you or your father would’ve done the same for me.’

‘He ain’t my father.’

‘That’s between you two. But if you were to ask, I’d say you could do worse.’

Shy snorted. ‘I used to think so.’

‘This isn’t what he wanted, you know. Or the way he wanted it.’

‘I used to think that, too. Not so sure any more. Family, eh?’

‘Family.’

‘Where’s Corlin got to?’

‘She can look after herself.’

‘Oh, no doubt.’ Shy dropped her voice. ‘Look, Savian, I know what you are.’

He looked up at her hard. ‘That so?’

‘I know what you got under there,’ and she moved her eyes down to his forearms, blue with tattoos, she knew, under his coat.

‘Can’t fathom your meaning,’ but tweaking one of his sleeves down even so.

She leaned closer and whispered, ‘Just pretend you can, then. When Cosca got to talking about rebels, well, my big fucking mouth ran away with me, like always. I meant well, like always, trying to help out… but I haven’t, have I?’

‘Not a lot.’

‘My fault you’re in this fix. If that bastard Lorsen finds out what you got there… what I’m saying is, you should go. This ain’t your fight. Naught to stop you slipping away, and no shortage of empty to slip into.’

‘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.

‘Where?’

‘If I knew that, I would not have to watch.’

‘We leave this bait soon?’

‘Soon.’

‘I hope it ain’t really a turd you got in mind,’ grunted Sweet, surely down to his last shirt now, ‘’cause I don’t fancy dropping my trousers here.’

‘Shut up,’ hissed Crying Rock, sticking her hand out hard behind her.

A shadow was shifting in the murk on the valley’s side, a figure hopping from one boulder to another. Hard to tell for the distance and the mist but it looked like a man, tall and heavy-built, dark-skinned, bald-headed, a staff carried loose in one hand.

‘Is he whistling?’ Shy muttered.

‘Shh,’ hissed Crying Rock.

The old man left his staff beside a flat rock at the water’s edge, shrugged off his robe and left it folded carefully on top, then did a little dance, spinning naked in and out of some broken pillars at the shoreline.

‘He don’t look all that fearsome,’ whispered Shy.

‘Oh, he is fearsome,’ said Crying Rock. ‘He is Waerdinur. My brother.’

Shy looked at her, pale as new milk, then back to the dark-skinned man, still whistling as he waded out into the pool. ‘Ain’t much resemblance.’

‘We came of different wombs.’

‘Good to know.’

‘What is?’

‘Had a feeling you might’ve hatched from an egg, you’re that painless.’

‘I have my pains,’ said Crying Rock. ‘But they must serve me, not the other way about.’ And she stuck the stained stem of her pipe between her jaws and chomped down hard on it.

‘What is Lamb doing?’ came Jubair’s voice.

Shy turned and stared. Lamb was scurrying through the boulders and down towards the water, already twenty strides away.

‘Oh, hell,’ muttered Sweet.

‘Shit!’ Shy forced her stiff knees into life and vaulted over the crumbling wall. Sweet made a grab at her but she slapped his hand off and threaded after Lamb, one eye on the old man still splashing happily below them, his whistling floating through the mist. She winced and skidded over the slick rocks, almost on all fours, ankles aching as her feet were jarred this way and that, burning to shout to Lamb but knowing she couldn’t make a peep.

He was too far ahead to catch, had made it all the way down to the water’s edge. She could only watch as he perched on that flat rock with the folded robe as a cushion, laid his drawn sword across one knee, took out his whetstone and licked it. She flinched as he set it to the blade and gave it a single grating stroke.

Shy caught the surprise in the tightening of Waerdinur’s shoulders, but he didn’t move right off. Only as the second stroke cut the silence did he slowly turn. A kind face, Shy would’ve said, but she’d seen kind-looking men do some damned mean things before.

‘Here is a surprise.’ Though he seemed more puzzled than shocked as his dark eyes shifted from Lamb to Shy and back again. ‘Where did you two come from?’

‘All the way from the Near Country,’ said Lamb.

‘The name means nothing to me.’ Waerdinur spoke common without much of an accent. More’n likely he spoke it better’n Shy did. ‘There is only here and not here. How did you get here?’

‘Rode some, walked the rest,’ grunted Lamb. ‘Or do you mean, how did we get here without you knowing?’ He gave his sword another shrieking stroke. ‘Maybe you ain’t as clever as you think you are.’

Waerdinur shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘Only a fool supposes he knows everything.’

Lamb held up the sword, checked one side and the other, blade flashing. ‘I’ve got some friends waiting, down in Beacon.’

‘I had heard.’

‘They’re killers and thieves and men of no character. They’ve come for your gold.’

‘Who says we have any?’

‘A man named Cantliss.’

‘Ah.’ Waerdinur splashed water on his arms and carried on washing. ‘That is a man of no substance. A breeze would blow him away. You are not one such, though, I think.’ His eyes moved across to Shy, weighing her, no sign of fear at all. ‘Neither of you. I do not think you came for gold.’

‘We came for my brother and sister,’ grated Shy, voice harsh as the stone on the blade.

‘Ah.’ Waerdinur’s smile slowly faded as he considered her, then he hung his head, water trickling down his shaved scalp. ‘You are Shy. She said you would come and I did not believe her.’

‘Ro said?’ Her throat almost closing up around the words. ‘She’s alive?’

‘Healthy and flourishing, safe and valued. Her brother, too.’

Shy’s knees went for a moment and she had to lean on the rock beside Lamb.

‘You have come a long, hard way,’ said Waerdinur. ‘I congratulate you on your courage.’

‘We didn’t come for your fucking congratulations!’ she spat at him. ‘We came for the children!’

‘I know. But they are better off with us.’

‘You think I care a fuck?’ There was a look on Lamb’s face then, vicious as an old fighting dog, made Shy go cold all over. ‘This ain’t about them. You’ve stolen from me, fucker. From me!’ Spit flicked from his bared teeth as he stabbed at his chest with a finger. ‘And I’ll have back what’s mine or I’ll have blood.’

Waerdinur narrowed his eyes. ‘You, she did not mention.’

‘I got one o’ those forgettable faces. Bring the children down to Beacon, you can forget it, too.’

‘I am sorry but I cannot. They are my children now. They are Dragon People, and I have sworn to protect this sacred ground and those upon it with my last blood and breath. Only death will stop me.’

‘He won’t stop me.’ Lamb gave his sword another grinding lick. ‘He’s had a thousand chances and never took a one.’

‘Do you think death fears you?’

‘Death loves me.’ Lamb smiled, black-eyed, wet-eyed, and the smile was worse even than the snarl had been. ‘All the work I done for him? The crowds I’ve sent his way? He knows he ain’t got no better friends.’

The leader of the Dragon People looked back sad and level. ‘If we must fight it would be… a shame.’

‘Lot o’ things are,’ said Lamb. ‘I gave up trying to change ’em a long time ago.’ He stood and slid his sword back into its sheath with a scraping whisper. ‘Three days to bring the children down to Beacon. Then I come back to your sacred ground.’ He curled his tongue and blew spit into the water. ‘And I’ll bring death with me.’ And he started picking his way back towards the ruins on the valley side.

Shy and Waerdinur looked at each other a moment longer. ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘For what has happened, and for what must happen now.’

She turned and hurried to catch up to Lamb. What else could she do?

‘You didn’t mean that, did you?’ she hissed at his back, slipping and sliding on the broken rocks. ‘About the children? That this ain’t about them? That it’s about blood?’ She tripped and skinned her shin, cursed and stumbled on. ‘Tell me you didn’t mean that!’

‘He got my meaning,’ snapped Lamb over his shoulder. ‘Trust me.’

But there was the problem—Shy was finding that harder every day. ‘Weren’t you just saying that when you mean to kill a man, telling him so don’t help?’

Lamb shrugged. ‘There’s a time for breaking every rule.’

‘What the hell did you do?’ hissed Sweet when they clambered back into the ruin, scrubbing at his wet hair with his fingernails and no one else looking too happy about their unplanned expedition either.

‘I left him some bait he’ll have to take,’ said Lamb.

Shy glanced back through one of the cracks towards the water. Waerdinur was only now wading to the shore, scraping the wet from his body, putting on his robe, no rush. He picked up his staff, looked towards the ruins for a while, then turned and strode away through the rocks.

‘You have made things difficult.’ Crying Rock had already stowed her pipe and was tightening her straps for the trip back. ‘They will be coming now, and quickly. We must return to Beacon.’

‘I ain’t going back,’ said Lamb.

‘What?’ asked Shy.

‘That was the agreement,’ said Jubair. ‘That we would draw them out.’

‘You draw ’em out. Delay’s the parent o’ disaster, and I ain’t waiting for Cosca to blunder up here drunk and get my children killed.’

‘What the hell?’ Shy was tiring of not knowing what Lamb would do one moment to the next. ‘What’s the plan now, then?’

‘Plans have a habit o’ falling apart when you lean on ’em,’ said Lamb. ‘We’ll just have to think up another.’

The Kantic cracked a bastard of a frown. ‘I do not like a man who breaks an agreement.’

‘Try and push me off a cliff.’ Lamb gave Jubair a flat stare. ‘We can find out who God likes best.’

Jubair pressed one fingertip against his lips and considered that for a long, silent moment. Then he shrugged. ‘I prefer not to trouble God with every little thing.’

Savages

‘I’ve finished the spear!’ called Pit, doing his best to say the new words just the way Ro had taught him, and he offered it up for his father to see. It was a good spear. Shebat had helped him with the binding and declared it excellent, and everyone said that the only man who knew more about weapons than Shebat was the Maker himself, who knew more about everything than anyone, of course. So Shebat knew a lot about weapons, was the point, and he said it was good, so it must be good.

‘Good,’ said Pit’s father, but he didn’t really look. He was walking fast, bare feet slapping against the ancient bronze, and frowning. Pit wasn’t sure he’d ever seen him frown before. Pit wondered if he’d done wrong. If his father could tell his new name still sounded strange to him. He felt ungrateful, and guilty, and worried that he’d done something very bad even though he hadn’t meant to.

‘What have I done?’ he asked, having to hurry to keep up, and realised he’d slipped back to his old talk without thinking.

His father frowned down, and it seemed then he did it from a very long way up.

‘Who is Lamb?’

Pit blinked. It was about the last thing he’d expected his father to ask.

‘Lamb’s my father,’ he said without thinking, then put it right, ‘was my father, maybe… but Shy always said he wasn’t.’ Maybe neither of them were his father or maybe both, and thinking about Shy made him think about the farm and the bad things, and Gully saying run, run, and the journey across the plains and into the mountains and Cantliss laughing and he didn’t know what he’d done wrong and he started to cry and he felt ashamed and so he cried more, and he said ‘Don’t send me back.’

‘No!’ said Pit’s father. ‘Never!’ Because he was Pit’s father, you could see it in the pain in his face. ‘Only death will part us, do you understand?’

Pit didn’t understand the least bit but he nodded anyway, crying now with relief that everything would be all right, and his father smiled, and knelt beside him, and put his hand on Pit’s head.

‘I am sorry.’ And Waerdinur was sorry, truly and completely, and he spoke in the Outsiders’ tongue because he knew it was easier on the boy. ‘It is a fine spear, and you a fine son.’ And he patted his son’s shaved scalp. ‘We will go hunting, and soon, but there is business I must see to first, for all the Dragon People are my family. Can you play with your sister until I call for you?’

He nodded, blinking back tears. He cried easily, the boy, and that was a fine thing, for the Maker taught that closeness to one’s feelings was closeness to the divine.

‘Good. And… do not speak to her of this.’

Waerdinur strode to the Long House, his frown returning. Six of the Gathering were naked in the hot dimness, hazy in the steam, sitting on the polished stones around the fire-pit, listening to Uto sing the lessons, words of the Maker’s father, all-mighty Euz, who split the worlds and spoke the First Law. Her voice faltered as he strode in.

‘There were outsiders at the Seeking Pool,’ he growled as he stripped off his robe, ignoring the proper forms and not caring.

The others stared upon him, shocked, as well they might be. ‘Are you sure?’ Ulstal’s croaking voice croakier still from breathing the Seeing Steam.

‘I spoke to them! Scarlaer?’

The young hunter stood, tall and strong and the eagerness to act hot in his eye. Sometimes he reminded Waerdinur so much of his younger self it was like gazing in Juvens’ glass, through which it was said one could look into the past.

‘Take your best trackers and follow them. They were in the ruins on the north side of the valley.’

‘I will hunt them down,’ said Scarlaer.

‘They were an old man and a young woman, but they might not be alone. Go armed and take care. They are dangerous.’ He thought of the man’s dead smile, and his black eye, like gazing into a great depth, and was sore troubled. ‘Very dangerous.’

‘I will catch them,’ said the hunter. ‘You can depend on me.’

‘I do. Go.’

He bounded from the hall and Waerdinur took his place at the fire-pit, the heat of it close to painful before him, perching on the rounded stone where no position was comfortable, for the Maker said they should never be comfortable who weigh great matters. He took the ladle and poured a little water on the coals, and the hall grew gloomier yet with steam, rich with the scents of mint and pine and all the blessed spices. He was already sweating, and silently asked the Maker that he sweat out his folly and his pride and make pure choices.

‘Outsiders at the Seeking Pool?’ Hirfac’s withered face was slack with disbelief. ‘How did they come to the sacred ground?’

‘They came to the barrows with the twenty Outsiders,’ said Waerdinur. ‘How they came further I cannot say.’

‘Our decision on those twenty is more pressing.’ Akarin’s blind eyes were narrowed. They all knew what decision he would favour. Akarin tended bloody, and bloodier with each passing winter. Age sometimes distils a person—rendering the calm more calm, the violent more violent.

‘Why have they come?’ Uto leaned forward into the light, shadow patching in the hollows of her skull. ‘What do they want?’

Waerdinur glanced around the old sweat-beaded faces and licked his lips. If they knew the man and woman had come for his children they might ask him to give them up. A faint chance, but a chance, and he would give them up to no one but death. It was forbidden to lie to the Gathering, but the Maker set down no prohibition on offering half the truth.

‘What all outsiders want,’ said Waerdinur. ‘Gold.’

Hirfac spread her gnarled hands. ‘Perhaps we should give it to them? We have enough.’

‘They would always want more.’ Shebat’s voice was low and sad. ‘Theirs is a hunger never satisfied.’

A silence while all considered, and the coals shifted and hissed in the pit and sparks whirled and glowed in the dark and the sweet smell of the Seeing Steam washed out among them.

The colours of fire shifted across Akarin’s face as he nodded. ‘We must send everyone who can hold a blade. Eighty of us are there, fit to go, who did not travel north to fight the Shanka?’

‘Eighty swords upon my racks.’ Shebat shook his head as if that was a matter for regret.

‘It worries me to leave Ashranc guarded only by the old and young,’ said Hirfac. ‘So few of us now—’

‘Soon we will wake the Dragon.’ Ulstal smiled at the thought.

‘Soon.’

‘Soon.’

‘Next summer,’ said Waerdinur, ‘or perhaps the summer after. But for now we must protect ourselves.’

‘We must drive them out!’ Akarin slapped knobbly fist into palm. ‘We must journey to the barrows and drive out the savages.’

‘Drive them out?’ Uto snorted. ‘Call it what it is, since you will not be the one to wield the blade.’

‘I wielded blades enough in my time. Kill them, then, if you prefer to call it that. Kill them all.’

‘We killed them all, and here are more.’

‘What should we do, then?’ he asked, mocking her. ‘Welcome them to our sacred places with arms wide?’

‘Perhaps the time has come to consider it.’ Akarin snorted with disgust, Ulstal winced as though at blasphemy, Hirfac shook her head, but Uto went on. ‘Were we not all born savage? Did not the Maker teach us to first speak peace?’

‘So he did,’ said Shebat.

‘I will not hear this!’ Ulstal struggled to his feet, wheezing with the effort.

‘You will.’ Waerdinur waved him down. ‘You will sit and sweat and listen as all sit and listen here. Uto has earned her right to speak.’ And Waerdinur held her eye. ‘But she is wrong. Savages at the Seeking Pool? Outsiders’ boots upon the sacred ground? Upon the stones where trod the Maker’s feet?’ The others groaned at each new outrage, and Waerdinur knew he had them. ‘What should we do, Uto?’

‘I do not like that there are only six to make the choice—’

‘Six is enough,’ said Akarin.

Uto saw they were all fixed on the steel road and she sighed, and reluctantly nodded. ‘We kill them all.’

‘Then the Gathering has spoken.’ Waerdinur stood, and took the blessed pouch from the altar, knelt and scooped up a handful of dirt from the floor, the sacred dirt of Ashranc, warm and damp with life, and he put it in the pouch and offered it to Uto. ‘You spoke against this, you must lead.’

She slipped from her stone and took the pouch. ‘I do not rejoice in this,’ she said.

‘It is not necessary that we rejoice. Only that we do. Prepare the weapons.’ And Waerdinur put his hand on Shebat’s shoulder.

Shebat slowly nodded, slowly rose, slowly put on his robe. He was no young man any more and it took time, especially since, even if he saw the need, there was no eagerness in his heart. Death sat close beside him, he knew, too close for him to revel in bringing it to others.

He shuffled from the steam and to the archway as the horn was sounded, shrill and grating, to arms, to arms, the younger people putting aside their tasks and stepping out into the evening, preparing themselves for the journey, kissing their closest farewell. There would be no more than sixty left behind, and those children and old ones. Old and useless and sitting close to death, as he was.

He passed the Heartwoods, and patted his fondly, and felt the need to work upon it, and so he took out his knife, and considered, and finally stripped the slightest shaving. That would be today’s change. Tomorrow might bring another. He wondered how many of the People had worked upon it before his birth. How many would work upon it after his death.

Into the stone darkness he went, the weight of mountains heavy above him, the flickering oil wicks making gleam the Maker’s designs, set into the stone of the floor in thrice-blessed metal. Shebat’s footsteps echoed in the silence, through the first hall to the place of weapons, his sore leg dragging behind him. Old wound, old wound that never heals. The glory of victory lasts a moment, the wounds are always. Though he loved the weapons, for the Maker taught the love of metal and of the thing well made and fitted for its purpose, he gave them out only with regret.

‘For the Maker taught also that each blow struck is its own failure,’ he sang softly as one blade at a time he emptied the racks, wood polished smooth by the fingertips of his forebears. ‘Victory is only in the hand taken, in the soft word spoken, in the gift freely given.’ But he watched the faces of the young ones as they took from him the tools of death, hot and eager, and feared they heard his words but let their meaning slip away. Too often of late the Gathering spoke in steel.

Uto came last, as fitted the leader. Shebat still thought she should have been the Right Hand, but in these hard days soft words rarely found willing ears. Shebat handed her the final blade.

‘This one I kept for you. Forged with my own hands, when I was young and strong and had no doubts. My best work. Sometimes the metal…’ and he rubbed dry fingertips against thumb as he sought the words, ‘comes out right.’

She sadly smiled as she took the sword. ‘Will this come out right, do you think?’

‘We can hope.’

‘I worry we have lost our way. There was a time I felt so sure of the path I had only to walk forward and I would be upon it. Now I am hemmed in by doubts and know not which way to turn.’

‘Waerdinur wants what is best for us.’ But Shebat wondered if it was himself he struggled to convince.

‘So do we all. But we disagree on what is best and how to get it. Waerdinur is a good man, and strong, and loving, and can be admired for many reasons.’

‘You say that as if it is a bad thing.’

‘It makes us likely to agree when we had better consider. The soft voices are all lost in the babble. Because Waerdinur is full of fire. He burns to wake the Dragon. To make the world as it was.’

‘Would that be such a bad thing?’

‘No. But the world does not go back.’ She lifted the blade he had given her and looked at it, the flickering reflection of the lights on her face. ‘I am afraid.’

‘You?’ he said. ‘Never!’

‘Always. Not of our enemies. Of ourselves.’

‘The Maker taught us it is not fear, but how we face it that counts. Be well, my old friend.’ And he folded Uto in his arms, and wished that he was young again.

They marched through the High Gate swift and sure, for once the Gathering has debated the arguments and spoken its judgement there is no purpose in delay. They marched with swords sharpened and shields slung that had been ancient in the days of Uto’s great-grandfather’s great-grandfather. They marched over the names of their ancestors, etched in bronze, and Uto asked herself whether those Dragon People of the past would have stood shoulder to shoulder with this cause of theirs. Would the Gatherings of the past have sent them out to kill? Perhaps. Times rarely change as much as we suppose.

They left Ashranc behind, but they carried Ashranc with them, the sacred dirt of their home kept in her pouch. Swift and sure they marched and it was not long before they reached the valley of the Seeking Pool, the mirror of the surface still holding a patch of sky. Scarlaer was waiting in the ruin.

‘Have you caught them?’ asked Uto.

‘No.’ The young hunter frowned as if the Outsiders’ escape was an insult to him alone. Some men, especially young ones, are fixed on taking offence at everything, from a rain shower to a fallen tree. From that offence they can fashion an excuse for any folly and any outrage. He would need watching. ‘But we have their tracks.’

‘How many are they?’

Maslingal squatted over the ground, lips pressed tight together. ‘The marks are strange. Sometimes it has the feel of two trying to seem a dozen, sometimes of a dozen trying to seem like two. Sometimes it has the feel of carelessness, sometimes the feel of wanting to be followed.’

‘They will receive their wish and far more than they wished for, then,’ growled Scarlaer.

‘It is best never to give your enemy what they most desire.’ But Uto knew she was without choice. Who has choice, in the end? ‘Let us follow. But let us be watchful.’

Only when snow came and hid the moon did Uto give the sign to stop, lying awake under the burden of leadership as the time slipped by, feeling the warmth of the earth and fearing for what would come.

In the morning they felt the first chill and she waved to the others to put on their furs. They left the sacred ground and passed into the forest, jogging in a rustling crowd. Scarlaer led them fast and merciless after the tracks, always ahead, always beckoning them on, and Uto ached and trembled and breathed hard, wondering how many more years she could run like this.

They stopped to eat near a place where there were no trees, only unsullied snow, a field of white innocence, but Uto knew what lay beneath. A crust of frozen dirt, then the bodies. The rotting remains of the Outsiders who had come to stab at the earth and delve in the streams and cut down the trees and plant their rotting shacks among the barrows of the old and honoured dead, using up the world and using up each other and spreading a plague of greed into the sacred places.

Uto squatted, and looked across that clean whiteness. Once the Gathering has debated the arguments and spoken its judgement there is no place for regrets, and yet she had kept hers, as often checked and polished and as jealously guarded as any miser’s hoard. Something of her own, perhaps.

The Dragon People had fought, always. Won, always. They fought to protect the sacred ground. To protect the places where they mined for the Dragon’s food. To take children so that the Maker’s teaching and the Maker’s work might be passed on and not be lost like smoke on the wind of time. The bronze sheets reminded them of those who had fought and those fallen, of what was won and what lost in those battles of the past, and the far past, back into the Old Time and beyond. Uto did not think the Dragon People had ever killed so many to so little purpose as they had here.

There had been a baby in the miners’ camp but she had died, and two boys who were with Ashod now, and prospering. Then there had been a girl with curly hair and pleading eyes just on the cusp of womanhood. Uto had offered to take her but she was thirteen, and even at ten winters there were risks. She remembered Waerdinur’s sister, taken from the Ghosts too old, who could not change and carried a fury of vengeance in her until she had to be cast out. So Uto had cut the girl’s throat instead and laid her gently in the pit and wondered again what she dare not say—could the teachings that led them to this be right?

Evening was settling when they looked down upon Beacon. The snow had stopped but the sky was gloomy with more. A flame twinkled in the top of the broken tower and she counted four more lights at the windows, but otherwise the place was dark. She saw the shapes of wagons, one very large, almost like a house on wheels. A few horses huddled at a rail. What she might have expected for twenty men, all unwary, except…

Tracks sparkled faintly with the twilight, filled with fresh snow so they were no more than dimples, but once she saw one set, like seeing one insect then realising the ground crawled with them, she saw more, and more. Criss-crossing the valley from treeline to treeline and back. Around the barrows and in at their fronts, snow dug away from their entrances. Now she saw the street between the huts, rutted and trampled, the ancient road up to the camp no better. The snow on the roofs was dripping from warmth inside. All the roofs.

Too many tracks for twenty men. Far too many, even careless as the Outsiders were. Something was wrong. She held her hand up for a halt, watching, studying.

Then she felt Scarlaer move beside her, looked around to see him already slipping through the brush, without orders.

‘Wait!’ she hissed at him.

He sneered at her. ‘The Gathering made their decision.’

‘And they decided I lead! I say wait!’

He snorted his contempt, turned for the camp, and she lunged for his heels.

Uto snatched at him but she was weak and slow and Scarlaer brushed off her fumbling hand. Perhaps she had been something in her day, but her day was long past and today was his. He bounded down the slope, swift and silent, scarcely leaving marks in the snow, up to the corner of the nearest hut.

He felt the strength of his body, the strength of his beating heart, the strength of the steel in his hand. He should have been sent north to fight the Shanka. He was ready. He would prove it whatever Uto might say, the withered-up old hag. He would write it in the blood of the Outsiders and make them regret their trespass on the sacred ground. Regret it in the instant before they died.

No sound from within the shack, built so poorly of split pine and cracking clay it almost hurt him to look upon its craftsmanship. He slipped low beside the wall, under the dripping eaves and to the corner, looking into the street. A faint crust of new snow, a few new trails of boot-prints and many, many older tracks. Maker’s breath but they were careless and filthy, these Outsiders, leaving dung scattered everywhere. So much dung for so few beasts. He wondered if the men shat in the street as well.

‘Savages,’ he whispered, wrinkling his nose at the smell of their fires, of their burned food, of their unwashed bodies. No sign of the men, though, no doubt all deep in drunken sleep, unready in their arrogance, shutters and doors all fastened tight, light spilling from cracks and out into the blue dawn.

‘You damned fool!’ Uto slipped up, breathing hard from the run, breath puffing before her face. But Scarlaer’s blood was up too hot to worry at her carping. ‘Wait!’ This time he dodged her hand and was across the street and into the shadow of another shack. He glanced over his shoulder, saw Uto beckoning and the others following, spreading out through the camp, silent shadows.

Scarlaer smiled, hot all over with excitement. How they would make these Outsiders pay.

‘This is no game!’ snarled Uto, and he only smiled again, rushed on towards the iron-bound door of the largest building, feeling the folk behind him in a rustling group, strong in numbers and strong in resolve—

The door opened and Scarlaer was left frozen for a moment in the lamplight that spilled forth.

‘Morning!’ A wispy-haired old man leaned against the frame in a bedraggled fur with a gilded breastplate spotted with rust showing beneath. He had a sword at his side, but in his hand only a bottle. He raised it now to them, spirit sloshing inside. ‘Welcome to Beacon!’

Scarlaer lifted his blade and opened his mouth to make a fighting scream, and there was a flash at the top of the tower, a pop in his ears and he was shoved hard in the chest and found himself on his back.

He groaned but could not hear it. He sat up, head buzzing, and stared into oily smoke.

Isarult helped with the cooking at the slab and smiled at him when he brought the kill home blooded, and sometimes, if he was in a generous mood, he smiled back. She had been ripped apart. He could tell it was her corpse by the shield on her arm but her head was gone, and the other arm, and one leg so that it hardly looked like it could ever have been a person but just lumps of stuff, the snow all around specked, spattered, scattered with blood and hair and splinters of wood and metal, other friends and lovers and rivals flung about and torn and smouldering.

Tofric, who was known to be the best skinner anywhere, staggered two stiff-legged steps and dropped to his knees. A dozen wounds in him turned dark the furs he wore and one under his eye dripped a black line. He stared, not looking pained, but sad and puzzled at the way the world had changed so suddenly, all quiet, all in silence, and Scarlaer wondered, What sorcery is this?

Uto lay next to him. He put a hand under her head and lifted it. She shuddered, twitched, teeth rattling, red foam on her lips. She tried to pass the blessed pouch to him but it was ripped open and the sacred dust of Ashranc spilled across the bloodied snow.

‘Uto? Uto?’ He could not hear his own voice.

He saw friends running down the street to their aid, Canto in the lead, a brave man and the best to have beside you in a fix. He thought how foolish he had been. How lucky he was to have such friends. Then as they passed one of the barrows smoke burst from its mouth and Canto was flung away and over the roof of the shack beside. Others tumbled sideways, spun about, reeled blinking in the fog or strained as if into a wind, hands over their faces.

Scarlaer saw shutters open, the glint of metal. Arrows flitted silently across the street, lodged in wooden walls, dropped harmlessly in snow, found tottering targets, brought them to their knees, on their faces, clutching, calling, silently screaming.

He struggled to his feet, the camp tipping wildly. The old man still stood in the doorway, pointing with the bottle, saying something. Scarlaer raised his sword but it felt light, and when he looked at his hand his bloody palm was empty. He tried to search for it and saw there was a short arrow in his leg. It did not hurt, but it came upon him like a shock of cold water that he might fail. And then that he might die. And suddenly there was a fear upon him like a weight.

He tottered for the nearest wall, saw an arrow flicker past and into the snow. He laboured on, chest shuddering, floundering up the slope. He snatched a look over his shoulder. The camp was shrouded in smoke as the Gathering was in the Seeing Steam, giant shadows moving inside. Some of his people were running for the trees, stumbling, falling, desperate. Then shapes came from the whirling fog like great devils—men and horses fused into one awful whole. Scarlaer had heard tales of this obscene union and laughed at its foolishness but now he saw them and was struck with horror. Spears and swords flashed, armour glittered, towering over the runners, cutting them down.

Scarlaer struggled on but his arrow-stuck leg would hardly move, a trail of blood following him up the slope and a horse-man following that, his hooves mashing the snow, a blade in his hand.

Scarlaer should have turned and shown his defiance, at least, proud hunter of the Dragon People that he was. Where had his courage gone? Once there had seemed no end to it. Now there was only the need to run, as desperate as a drowning man’s need to breathe. He did not hear the rider behind him but he felt the jarring blow across his back and the snow cold, cold on his face as he fell.

Hooves thumped about him, circling him, showering him with white dust. He fought to get up but he could get no further than his hands and knees, trembling with that much effort. His back would not straighten, agony, all burning, and he whimpered and raged and was helpless, his tears melting tiny holes in the snow beneath his face, and someone seized him by the hair.

Brachio put his knee in the lad’s back and forced him down into the snow, pulled a knife out and, taking care not to make a mess of it, which was something of a challenge with the lad still struggling and gurgling, cut his ears off. Then he wiped the knife in the snow and slipped it back into his bandolier, reflecting that a bandolier of knives was a damn useful thing to have in his business and wondering afresh why it hadn’t caught on more widely. Might be the lad was alive when Brachio winced and grunted his bulk back up into his saddle, but he wasn’t going anywhere. Not with that sword-cut in him.

Brachio chuckled over his trophies and, riding down to the camp, thought they’d be the perfect things to scare his daughters with when Cosca had made him rich and he finally came home to Puranti. Genuine Ghost ears, how about that? He imagined the laughter as he chased them around the parlour, though in his imaginings they were little girls still, and it made him sad to think they would be nearly women grown when he saw them again.

‘Where does the time go?’ he muttered to himself.

Sworbreck was standing at the edge of the camp, staring, mouth open as the horsemen chased the last few savages up into the woods. He was a funny little fellow but Brachio had warmed to him.

‘You’re a man of learning,’ he called as he rode up, holding high the ears. ‘What do you think I should do? Dry them? Pickle them?’ Sworbreck did not answer, only stood there looking decidedly bilious. Brachio swung down from his saddle. There was riding to do but damn it if he’d be hurrying anywhere, he was out of breath already. No one was as young as they used to be, he supposed. ‘Cheer up,’ he said. ‘We won, didn’t we?’ And he clapped the writer on his scrawny back.

Sworbreck stumbled, put out a hand to steady himself, felt a warmth, and realised he had sunk his fingers into a savage’s steaming guts, separated by some distance from the ruined body.

Cosca took another deep swallow from his bottle—if Sworbreck had read in print the quantity of spirits the Old Man was currently drinking each day he would have cursed it for an outrageous lie—and rolled the corpse over with his boot, then, wrinkling his pinked nose, wiped the boot on the side of the nearest shed.

‘I have fought Northmen, Imperials, Union men, Gurkish, every variety of Styrian and plenty more whose origin I never got to the bottom of.’ Cosca gave a sigh. ‘And I am forced to consider the Dragon Person vastly overrated as an opponent. You may quote me on that.’ Sworbreck only just managed to swallow another rush of nausea while the Old Man burbled on. ‘But then courage can often be made to work against a man in a carefully laid ambuscade. Bravery, as Verturio had it, is the dead man’s virtue—Ah. You are… discomfited. Sometimes I forget that not everyone is familiar with such scenes as this. But you came to witness battle, did you not? Battle is… not always glorious. A general must be a realist. Victory first, you understand?’

‘Of course,’ Sworbreck found he had mumbled. He had reached the point of agreeing with Cosca on instinct, however foul, ridiculous or outrageous his utterances. He wondered if he had ever come close to hating anyone as much as he did the old mercenary. Or relying on anyone so totally for everything. No doubt the two were not unrelated. ‘Victory first.’

‘The losers are always the villains, Sworbreck. Only winners can be heroes.’

‘You are absolutely right, of course. Only winners.’

‘The one good way to fight is that which kills your enemy and leaves you with the breath to laugh…’

Sworbreck had come to see the face of heroism and instead he had seen evil. Seen it, spoken with it, been pressed up against it. Evil turned out not to be a grand thing. Not sneering Emperors with world-conquering designs. Not cackling demons plotting in the darkness beyond the world. It was small men with their small acts and their small reasons. It was selfishness and carelessness and waste. It was bad luck, incompetence and stupidity. It was violence divorced from conscience or consequence. It was high ideals, even, and low methods.

He watched Inquisitor Lorsen move eagerly among the bodies, turning them to see their faces, waving away the thinning, stinking smoke, tugging up sleeves in search of tattoos. ‘I see no sign of rebels!’ he rasped at Cosca. ‘Only these savages!’

The Old Man managed to disengage lips from bottle for long enough to shout back, ‘In the mountains, our friend Cantliss told us! In their so-called sacred places! In this town they call Ashranc! We will begin the pursuit right away!’

Sweet looked up from the bodies to nod. ‘Crying Rock and the rest’ll be waiting for us.’

‘Then it would be rude to delay! Particularly with the enemy so denuded. How many did we kill, Friendly?’

The sergeant wagged his thick index finger as he attempted to number the dead. ‘Hard to say which pieces go with which.’

‘Impossible. We can at least tell Superior Pike that his new weapon is a great success. The results scarcely compare to when I blew up that mine beneath the fortress of Fontezarmo but then neither does the effort involved, eh? It employs explosive powders, Sworbreck, to propel a hollow ball which shatters upon detonation sending splinters—boom!’ And Cosca demonstrated with an outward thrusting of both hands. An entirely unnecessary demonstration, since the proof of its effectiveness was distributed across the street in all directions, bloody and raw and in several cases barely recognisable as human.

‘So this is what success looks like,’ Sworbreck heard Temple murmur. ‘I have often wondered.’

The lawyer saw it. The way he took in the charnel-house scene with his black eyes wide and his jaw set tight and his mouth slightly twisted. It was some small comfort to know there was one man in this gang who, in better company, might have approached decency, but he was just as helpless as Sworbreck. All they could do was watch and, by doing nothing more, participate. But how could it be stopped? Sworbreck cowered as a horse thundered past, showering him with gory snow. He was one man, and that one no fighter. His pen was his only weapon and, however highly the scribes might rate its power, it was no match for axe and armour in a duel. If he had learned nothing else the past few months, he had learned that.

‘Dimbik!’ shrieked Cosca, and took another swig from his bottle. He had abandoned the flask as inadequate to his needs and would no doubt soon graduate to sucking straight from the cask. ‘Dimbik? There you are! I want you to lead off, root out any of these creatures left in the woods. Brachio, get your men ready to ride! Master Sweet will show us the way! Jubair and the others are waiting to open the gates! There’s gold to be had, boys, and no time to waste! And rebels!’ he added hastily. ‘Rebels, too, of course. Temple, with me, I want to be certain on the terms of the contract as regard plunder. Sworbreck, it might be better if you were to remain here. If you haven’t the stomach for this, well…’

‘Of course,’ said Sworbreck. He felt so very tired. So very far from home. Adua, and his neat office with the clean walls and the new Rimaldi printing press of which he had been so particularly proud. All so far away, across an immeasurable gulf in time and space and thinking. A place where straightening the collar seemed important and a bad review was a disaster. How could such a fantastical realm occupy the same world as this slaughter-yard? He stared at his hands: calloused, blood-daubed, dirt-scraped. Could they be the same ones that had so carefully set the type, inky at the fingertips? Could they ever do so again?

He let them drop, too tired to ride let alone write. People do not realise the crushing effort of creation. The pain of dragging the words from a tortured mind. Who read books out here, anyway? Perhaps he would lie down. He began to shamble for the fort.

‘Take care of yourself, author,’ said Temple, looking grimly down from horseback.

‘You too, lawyer,’ said Sworbreck, and patted him on the leg as he passed.

The Dragon’s Den

‘When do we go?’ whispered Shy.

‘When Savian says go,’ came Lamb’s voice. He was close enough she could almost feel his breath, but all she could see in the darkness of the tunnel was the faintest outline of his stubbled skull. ‘Soon as he sees Sweet bring Cosca’s men up the valley.’

‘Won’t these Dragon bastards see ’em, too?’

‘I expect so.’

She wiped her forehead for the hundredth time, rubbing the wet out of her eyebrows. Damn, but it was hot, like squatting in an oven, the sweat tickling at her, hand slippery-slick on the wood of her bow, mouth sticky-dry with heat and worry.

‘Patience, Shy. You won’t cross the mountains in a day.’

‘Easily said,’ she hissed back. How long had they been there? Might’ve been an hour, might’ve been a week. Twice already they’d had to slink back into the deeper blackness of the tunnel when Dragon People had strayed close, all pressed together in a baking panic, her heart beating so hard it made her teeth rattle. So many hundreds of thousands of things that could go wrong she could hardly breathe for their weight.

‘What do we do when Savian says go?’ she asked.

‘Open the gate. Hold the gate.’

‘And after?’ Providing they were still alive after, which she wouldn’t have wanted to bet good money on.

‘We find the children,’ said Lamb.

A long pause. ‘Starting to look like less and less of a plan, ain’t it?’

‘Do the best you can with what there is, then.’

She puffed her cheeks out at that. ‘Story of my life.’

She waited for an answer but none was forthcoming. She guessed danger makes some folk blather and some clamp tight. Sadly, she was in the former camp, and surrounded by the latter. She crept forwards on all fours, stone hot under her hands, up next to Crying Rock, wondering afresh what the Ghost woman’s interest in all this was. Didn’t seem the type to be interested in gold, or rebels, or children neither. No way of knowing what went on behind that lined mask of a face, though, and she wasn’t shining any lights inward.

‘What’s this Ashranc place like?’ asked Shy.

‘A city carved from the mountain.’

‘How many are in there?’

‘Thousands once. Few now. Judging from those who left, very few, and mostly the young and old. Not good fighters.’

‘A bad fighter sticks a spear in you, you’re just as dead as with a good one.’

‘Don’t get stuck, then.’

‘You’re just a mine of good advice, ain’t you?’

‘Fear not,’ came Jubair’s voice. Across the passageway she could only see the gleam of his eyes, the gleam of his ready sword, but she could tell he was smiling. ‘If God is with us, He will be our shield.’

‘If He’s against?’ asked Shy.

‘Then no shield can protect us.’

Before Shy could tell him what a great comfort that was there was scuffling behind, and a moment later Savian’s crackling voice. ‘It’s time. Cosca’s boys are in the valley.’

‘All of them?’ asked Jubair.

‘Enough of them.’

‘You’re sure?’ The shudder of nerves up Shy’s throat almost choked her. For months now she’d been betting everything she had on finding Pit and Ro. Now the moment might’ve come she would’ve given anything to put it off.

‘Course I’m bloody sure! Go!’

A hand shoved at her back and she knocked into someone and almost fell, staggered on a few steps, fingers brushing the stone to keep her bearings. The tunnel made a turn and suddenly she felt cooler air on her face and was out blinking into the light.

Ashranc was a vast mouth in the mountainside, a cavern cut in half, its floor scattered with stone buildings, a huge overhang of rock shadowing everything above. Ahead of them, beyond a daunting drop, a grand expanse of sky and mountain opened out. Behind the cliff was riddled with openings—doorways, windows, stairways, bridges, a confusion of wall and walkway on a dozen levels, houses half-built into the rock face, a city sunk in stone.

An old man stared at them, shaved bald, a horn frozen on the way to his mouth. He muttered something, took a shocked step back, then Jubair’s sword split his head and he went over in a shower of blood, horn bouncing from his hand.

Crying Rock darted right and Shy followed, someone whispering ‘Shit, shit, shit,’ in her ear and she realised it was her. She rushed along low beside a crumbling wall, breath punching hard, every part of her singing with an unbearable fear and panic and rage, so wild and strong she thought she might burst open with it, sick it up, piss it out. Shouting from high above. Shouting from all around. Her boots clanked over metal plates polished smooth and scrawled with writing, grit pinging and rattling from her heels. A tall archway in a cleft in the rocks, bouncing and shuddering as she ran. A heavy double-door, one leaf already closed, two figures straining to haul the other fast, a third on the wall above, pointing at them, bow in hand. Shy went down on one knee and nocked her own arrow. A shaft looped down, missed one of the running mercenaries and clattered away across the bronze. Snap of the bowstring as Shy let fly and she watched her own arrow cover the distance, hanging in the still air. It caught the archer in the side and she gave a yelp—a woman’s voice, or maybe a child’s—staggered sideways and off the parapet, bounced from the rock and fell crumpled beside the gate.

The two Dragon People who’d been shutting the doors had found weapons. Old men, she saw now, very old. Jubair hacked at one and sent him reeling into the rock face. Two of the mercenaries caught up with the other and cut him down, swearing, chopping, stamping.

Shy stared at the girl she’d shot, lying there. Not much older’n Ro, she reckoned. Part Ghost, maybe, from the whiteness of her skin and the shape of her eyes. Just like Shy. Blame it on your Ghost blood. She stared down and the girl stared up, breathing fast and shallow, saying nothing, eyes so dark and wet and blood across her cheek. Shy’s free hand opened and closed, useless.

‘Here!’ roared Jubair, raising one hand. Shy heard a faint answering call, through the gate saw men struggling up the mountainside. Cosca’s men, weapons drawn. Caught a glimpse of Sweet, maybe, struggling along on foot. The other mercenaries started dragging the doors wide to let them through. Doors of metal four fingers thick but swinging as smooth as a box lid.

‘God is with us,’ said Jubair, his grin spotted with blood.

God might’ve been, but Lamb was nowhere to be seen. ‘Where’s Lamb?’ she asked, staring about.

‘Don’t know.’ Savian only just managed to force the words out. He was breathing hard, bent over. ‘Went the other way.’

She took off again.

‘Wait!’ Savian wheezed after her, but he weren’t running anywhere. Shy dashed to the nearest house, about enough thought in her pounding head to sling her bow over her shoulder and pull her short-sword. Wasn’t sure she’d ever swung a sword in anger. When she killed that Ghost that killed Leef, maybe. Wasn’t sure why she was thinking about that now. Heaved in a great breath and tore aside the hide that hung in the doorway, leaped in, blade-first.

Maybe she’d been expecting Pit and Ro to look up, weeping grateful tears. Instead a bare room, naught there but strips of light across a dusty floor.

She barrelled into another house, empty as the first.

She dashed up a set of steps and through an archway in the rock face. This room had furniture, polished by time, bowls neatly stacked, no sign of life.

An old man blundered from the next doorway and right into Shy, slipped and fell, a big pot dropping from his hands and shattering across the ground. He scrambled away, holding up a trembling arm, muttering something, cursing Shy, or pleading for his life, or calling on some forgotten god, and Shy lifted the sword, standing over him. Took an effort to stop herself killing him. Her body burned to do it. But she had to find the children. Before Cosca’s men boiled into this place and caught the killing fever. Had to find the children. If they were here. She let the old man crawl away through a doorway.

‘Pit!’ she screamed, voice cracking. Back down the steps and into another dim, hot, empty room, an archway at the back leading to another yet. The place was a maze. A city built for thousands, like Crying Rock had said. How the hell to find two children in this? A roar came from somewhere, strange, echoing.

‘Lamb?’ She clawed sweaty hair out of her face.

Someone gave a panicked screech. There were people spilling from the doorways now, from the low houses below, some with weapons, others with tools, one grey-haired woman with a baby in her arms. Some stared about, sensing something was wrong but not sure what. Others were hurrying off, away from the gate, away from Shy, towards a tall archway in the rock at the far end of the open cavern.

A black-skinned man stood beside it, staff in hand, beckoning people through into the darkness. Waerdinur. And close beside him a much smaller figure, thin and pale, shaven-headed. But Shy knew her even so.

‘Ro!’ she screamed, but her voice was lost. The clatter of fighting echoed from the rocky ceiling, bounced from the buildings, coming from everywhere and nowhere. She vaulted over a parapet, hopped a channel where water flowed, startled as a huge figure loomed over her, realised it was a tree-trunk carved into a twisted man-shape, ran on into an open space beside a long, low building and slid to a stop.

A group of Dragon People had gathered ahead of her. Three old men, two old women and a boy, all shaven-headed, all armed, and none of them looking like they planned to move.

Shy hefted her sword and screamed, ‘Get out o’ my fucking way!’

She knew she wasn’t that imposing a figure, so it was something of a shock when they began to back off. Then a flatbow bolt flitted into the stomach of one of the old men and he clutched at it, dropping his spear. The others turned and ran. Shy heard feet slapping behind her and mercenaries rushed past, whooping, shouting. One of them hacked an old woman across the back as she tried to limp away.

Shy looked towards that archway, flanked by black pillars and full of shadow. Waerdinur had vanished inside now. Ro too, if it had been her. It must have been.

She set off running.

In so far as Cosca had a best, danger brought it out in him. Temple hurried cringing along, sticking so close to the walls that he would occasionally scrape his face upon them, his fingernails so busy with the hem of his shirt he was halfway to unravelling the whole thing. Brachio scuttled bent almost double. Even Friendly prowled with shoulders suspiciously hunched. But the Old Man had no fear. Not of death, at least. He strode through the ancient settlement utterly heedless of the arrows that occasionally looped down, chin high, eyes aglitter, steps only slightly wayward from drink, snapping out orders that actually made sense.

‘Bring down that archer!’ Pointing with his sword at an old woman on top of a building.

‘Clear those tunnels!’ Waving towards some shadowy openings beside them.

‘Kill no children if possible, a deal is a deal!’ Wagging a lecturing finger at a group of Kantics already daubed with blood.

Whether anyone took any notice of him, it was hard to say. The Company of the Gracious Hand were not the most obedient at the best of times, and these times in no way qualified.

Danger brought no best from Temple. He felt very much as he had in Dagoska, during the siege. Sweating in that stinking hospital, and cursing, and fumbling with the bandages, and tearing up the clothes of the dead for more. Passing the buckets, all night long, lit by fires, water slopping, and for nothing. It all burned anyway. Weeping at each death. Weeping with sorrow. Weeping with gratitude that it was not him. Weeping with fear that it would be him next. Months in fear, always in fear. He had been in fear ever since.

A group of mercenaries had gathered around an ancient man, growling unintelligible insults through clenched teeth in a language something like Old Imperial, swinging a spear wildly in both hands. It did not take long for Temple to realise he was blind. The mercenaries darted in and out. When he turned, one would poke him in the back with a weapon, when he turned again, another would do the honours. The old man’s robe was already dark with blood.

‘Should we stop them?’ muttered Temple.

‘Of course,’ said Cosca. ‘Friendly?’

The sergeant caught the blind man’s spear just below the blade in one big fist, whipped a cleaver from his coat with the other and split his head almost in half in one efficient motion, letting his body slump to the ground and tossing the spear clattering away.

‘Oh God,’ muttered Temple.

‘We have work to do!’ snapped the Old Man at the disappointed mercenaries. ‘Find the gold!’

Temple tore his hands away from his shirt and scratched at his hair instead, scrubbed at it, clawed at it. He had promised himself, after Averstock, that he would never stand by and watch such things again. The same promise he had made in Kadir. And before that in Styria. And here he was, standing uncomplaining by. And watching. But then he had never been much for keeping promises.

Temple’s nose kept running, tickling, running. He rubbed it with the heel of his hand until it bled, and it ran again. He tried to look only at the ground, but sounds kept jerking his wet eyes sideways. To crashes and screams and laughs and bellows, to whimpers and gurgles and sobs and screeches. Through the windows and the doorways he caught glimpses, glimpses he knew would be with him as long as he lived and he rooted his running eyes on the ground again and whispered to himself, ‘Oh God.’

How often had he whispered it during the siege? Over and over as he hurried through the scorched ruins of the Lower City, the bass rumble of the blasting powder making the earth shake as he rolled over the bodies, seeking for survivors, and when he found them burned and scarred and dying, what could he do? He had learned he was no worker of miracles. Oh God, oh God. No help had come then. No help came now.

‘Shall we burn ’em?’ asked a bow-legged Styrian, hopping like a child eager to go out and play. He was pointing up at some carvings chiselled from ancient tree-trunks, wood polished to a glow by the years, strange and beautiful.

Cosca shrugged. ‘If you must. What’s wood for, after all, if not to take a flame?’ He watched the mercenary shower oil on the nearest one and pull out his tinderbox. ‘The sad fact is I just don’t care much any more, either way. It bores me.’

Temple startled as a naked body crashed into the ground next to them. Whether it had been alive or dead on the way down, he could not say. ‘Oh God,’ he whispered.

‘Careful!’ bellowed Friendly, frowning up at the buildings on their left.

Cosca watched the blood spread from the corpse’s broken skull, scarcely interrupted in his train of thought. ‘I look at things such as this and feel only… a mild ennui. My mind wanders on to what’s for dinner, or the recurrent itch on the sole of my foot, or when and where I might next be able to get my cock sucked.’ He started to scratch absently at his codpiece, then gave up. ‘What horror, eh, to be bored by such as this?’ Flames flickered merrily up the side of the nearest carving, and the Styrian pyromaniac skipped happily over to the next. ‘The violence, treachery and waste that I have seen. It’s quite squeezed the enthusiasm out of me. I am numbed. That’s why I need you, Temple. You must be my conscience. I want to believe in something!’

He slapped a hand down on Temple’s shoulder and Temple twitched, heard a squeal and turned just in time to see an old woman kicked from the precipice.

‘Oh God.’

‘Exactly what I mean!’ Cosca slapped him on the shoulder again. ‘But if there is a God, why in all these years has He not raised a hand to stop me?’

‘Perhaps we are His hand,’ rumbled Jubair, who had stepped from a doorway wiping blood from his sword with a cloth. ‘His ways are mysterious.’

Cosca snorted. ‘A whore with a veil is mysterious. God’s ways appear to be… insane.’

Temple’s nose tickled with perfumed smoke as the wood burned. It had smelled that way in Dagoska when the Gurkish finally broke into the city. The flames spraying the slum buildings, spraying the slum-dwellers, people on fire, flinging themselves from the ruined docks into the sea. The noise of fighting coming closer. Kahdia’s face, lit in flickering orange, the low murmur of the others praying and Temple tugging at his sleeve and saying, ‘You must go, they will be coming,’ and the old priest shaking his head, and smiling as he squeezed at Temple’s shoulder, and saying, ‘That is why I must stay.’

What could he have done then? What could he do now?

He caught movement at the corner of his eye, saw a small shape flit between two of the low stone buildings. ‘Was that a child?’ he muttered, already leaving the others behind.

‘Why does everyone pout so over children?’ Cosca called after him. ‘They’ll turn out just as old and disappointing as the rest of us!’

Temple was hardly listening. He had failed Sufeen, he had failed Kahdia, he had failed his wife and daughter, he had sworn always to take the easy way, but perhaps this time… he rounded the corner of the building.

A boy stood there, shaven-headed. Pale-skinned. Red-brown eyebrows, like Shy’s. The right age, perhaps, could it—

Temple saw he had a spear in his hands. A short spear, but held with surprising purpose. In his worry for others, Temple had for once neglected to feel worried for himself. Perhaps that showed some level of personal growth. The self-congratulations would have to wait, however.

‘I’m scared,’ he said, without needing to dissemble. ‘Are you scared?’

No response. Temple gently held out his hands, palms up. ‘Are you Pit?’

A twitch of shock across the boy’s face. Temple slowly knelt and tried to dig out that old earnestness, not easy with the noises of destruction filtering from all around them. ‘My name is Temple. I am a friend of Shy’s.’ That brought out another twitch. ‘A good friend.’ A profound exaggeration at that moment, but a forgivable one. The point of the spear wavered. ‘And of Lamb’s too.’ It started to drop. ‘They came to find you. And I came with them.’

‘They’re here?’ It was strange to hear the boy speak the common tongue with the accent of the Near Country.

‘They’re here,’ he said. ‘They came for you.’

‘Your nose is bleeding.’

‘I know.’ Temple wiped it on his wrist again. ‘No need to worry.’

Pit set down his spear, and walked to Temple and hugged him tight. Temple blinked for a moment, then hesitantly put his arms around the boy and held him.

‘You are safe now,’ he said. ‘You are safe.’

It was hardly the first lie he had ever told.

Shy padded down the hallway, desperate to run on and scared to the point of shitting herself at once, clinging to the slippery grip of her sword. The place was lit only by flickering little lamps that struck a gleam from the metal designs on the floor—circles within circles, letters and lines—and from the blood smeared across them. Her eyes flicked between the tricking shadows, jumped from body to body—Dragon People and mercenaries, too, hacked and punctured and still leaking.

‘Lamb?’ she whispered, but so quietly even she could hardly hear it.

Sounds echoed from the warm rock, spilled from the openings to either side—screams and crashes, whispering steam, weeping and laughter leaching through the walls. The laughter worst of all.

‘Lamb?’

She edged to the archway at the end of the hall and pressed herself to the wall beside it, a hot draught sweeping past. She clawed the wet hair from her stinging eyes again, flicked sweat from her fingertips and gathered her tattered courage. For Pit and Ro. No turning back now.

She slipped through and her jaw fell. A vast emptiness opened before her, a great rift, an abyss inside the mountain. A ledge ahead was scattered with benches, anvils, smith’s tools. Beyond a black gulf yawned, crossed by a bridge no more than two strides wide, no handrail, arching through darkness to another ledge and another archway, maybe fifty strides distant. The heat was crushing, the bridge lit underneath by fires that growled far out of sight below, streaks of crystal in the rocky walls sparkling, everything metal from the hammers and anvils and ingots to her own sword catching a smelter’s glow. Shy swallowed as she edged out towards that empty plunge and the far wall dropped down, down, down. As if this were some upper reach of hell the living never should’ve broached.

‘You’d think they’d give it a fucking rail,’ she muttered.

Waerdinur stood on the bridge behind a great square shield, a dragon worked into the face, bright point of a spear-blade showing beside it, blocking the way. One mercenary lay dead in front of him, another was trying to ease back to safety, poking away wildly with a halberd. A third knelt not far from Shy, cranking a flatbow. Waerdinur lunged and smoothly skewered the halberdier with his spear, then stepped forward and brushed him off the bridge. He fell without a sound. Not of his falling. Not of his reaching the bottom.

The Dragon Man set himself again, bottom edge of that big shield clanging against the bridge as he brought it down, and he shouted over his shoulder in words Shy didn’t understand. People shuffled through the shadows behind him—old ones, and children, too, and a girl running last of all.

‘Ro!’ Shy’s scream was dead in the throbbing heat and the girl ran on, swallowed in the shadows at the far end of the bridge.

Waerdinur stayed, squatting low behind his shield and watching her over the rim, and she gritted her teeth and gave a hiss of frustrated fury. To come so close, and find no way around.

‘Have this, arsehole!’ The last mercenary levelled his flatbow and the bolt rattled from Waerdinur’s dragon shield and away into the dark, spinning end-over-end, a tiny orange splinter in all that inky emptiness. ‘Well, he’s going nowhere.’ The archer fished a bolt from his quiver and set to cranking back the string again. ‘Couple more bows up here and we’ll get him. Sooner or later. Don’t you fucking worry about—’

Shy saw a flicker at the corner of her eye and the mercenary lurched against the wall, Waerdinur’s spear right through him. He said, ‘Oh,’ and slid to sitting, setting his bow carefully on the ground. Shy was just taking a step towards him when she felt a gentle touch on her shoulder.

Lamb was at her back, but no kind of reassurance. He’d lost his coat and stood in his leather vest all scar and twisted sinew and his sword broken off halfway, splintered blade slathered in blood to his elbow.

‘Lamb?’ she whispered. He didn’t even look at her, just brushed her away with the back of his arm, black eyes picking up a fiery glimmer and fixed across that bridge, muscles starting from his neck, head hanging on one side, pale skin all sweat-beaded, blood-dotted, his bared teeth shining in a skull-grin. Shy shrank out of his way like death itself had come tapping at her shoulder. Maybe it had.

As if it was a meeting long arranged, Waerdinur drew a sword, straight and dull, a silver mark glinting near the hilt.

‘I used to have one o’ those.’ Lamb tossed his own broken blade skittering across the floor and over the edge into nothingness.

‘The work of the Maker himself,’ said Waerdinur. ‘You should have kept it.’

‘Friend o’ mine stole it.’ Lamb stepped towards one of the anvils, fingers whitening as he wrapped them around a great iron bar that lay against it, tall as Shy was. ‘And everything else.’ Metal grated as he dragged it after him towards the bridge. ‘And it was better’n I deserved.’

Shy thought about telling him not to go but the words didn’t come. Like she couldn’t get the air to speak. Wasn’t another way through that she could see, and it wasn’t as if she was about to turn back. So she sheathed her sword and shrugged her bow into her hand. Waerdinur saw it and took a few cautious steps away, light on the balls of his bare feet, calm as if he trod a dance floor rather’n a strip of stone too narrow for the slimmest of wagons to roll down.

‘Told you I’d be back,’ said Lamb as he stepped out onto the bridge, the tip of the metal bar clattering after him.

‘And so you are,’ said Waerdinur.

Lamb nudged the corpse of the dead mercenary out of his way with a boot and it dropped soundless into the abyss. ‘Told you I’d bring death with me.’

‘And so you have. You must be pleased.’

‘I’ll be pleased when you’re out o’ my way.’ Lamb stopped a couple of paces short of Waerdinur, a trail of glistening footprints left behind him, the two old men facing each other in the midst of that great void.

‘Do you truly think the right is with you?’ asked the Dragon Man.

‘Who cares about right?’ And Lamb sprang, lifting that big length of metal high and bringing it down on Waerdinur’s shield with a boom made Shy wince, leaving a great dent in the dragon design and one corner bent right back. The Dragon Man was driven sprawling, legs kicking as he scrambled from the brink. Before the echoes had faded Lamb was roaring as he swung again.

This time Waerdinur was ready, though, angled his shield so the bar glanced clear and swung back. Lamb jerked away snake-quick and the sword missed him by a feather, jerked forward snake-quick and caught Waerdinur under the jaw, sent him tottering, spitting blood. He found his balance fast, though, lashed left and right, sent sparks and splinters flying from the metal bar as Lamb brought it up to block.

Shy drew a bead but even close as she was the two old men were moving too fast—deadly, murderous fast so any step or twitch could be their last—no telling who she’d hit if she let loose the arrow. Her hand jerked about as she eased onto the bridge, trying to find the shot, always a few moments behind, sweat tickling at her flickering eyelids as she looked from the fight ahead to the void under her feet.

Waerdinur saw the next blow coming and slipped clear, nimble for all his size. The bar caught the bridge with a shrieking crash, struck sparks, left Lamb off balance long enough for the Dragon Man to swing. Lamb jerked his head away and rather’n splitting his skull the bright point left a red line down his face, drops of blood flicking into nothingness. He staggered three steps, heel slapping at the very brink on the last, space opening between the two men for just a breath as Waerdinur brought his sword back to thrust.

Shy might not have been much at waiting but when the moment came she’d always had a talent for just diving in. She didn’t even think about shooting. Her arrow flitted through the darkness, glanced the edge of the shield and into Waerdinur’s sword-arm. He grunted, point of his blade dropping and scraping harmlessly against the bridge as Shy lowered her bow, hardly believing she’d taken the shot, still less hit the target.

Lamb bellowed like a mad bull, swinging that length of metal as if it was no heavier than a willow switch, knocking Waerdinur this way and that, sending him reeling along the bridge, no chance to hit back even if he’d been able with Shy’s arrow through his arm, no chance to do anything but fight to keep his footing. Lamb kept after, tireless, merciless, driving him off the bridge and onto the ledge at the far end. One last blow tore the shield from Waerdinur’s arm and sent it tumbling away into the darkness. He stumbled against the wall, sword clattering from his limp hand, bloody now from the leaking arrow-wound.

A shape came flying from the shadows in the archway, the flash of a knife as it sprang on Lamb and he staggered back towards the brink, wrestled with it, flung it off and into the wall. A shaven-headed girl crumpled against the floor. Changed, so changed, but Shy knew her.

She threw her bow away and ran, no thought for the drop to either side, no thought for anything but the space between them.

Lamb plucked the knife out of his shoulder along with a string of blood and flicked it away like a spent toothpick, face still locked in that red smile, bloody as a new wound, seeing nothing, caring for nothing. Not the man who’d sat beside her on that wagon so many swaying miles, or patiently ploughed the field or sang to the children or warned her to be realistic. Another man, if he was a man at all. The one who’d murdered those two bandits in Averstock, who’d hacked Sangeed’s head off on the plains, who’d killed Glama Golden with his hands in the Circle. Death’s best friend indeed.

He arched back with that length of metal in his fists, cuts and notches from the Maker’s sword all angrily glinting, and Shy screamed out but it was wasted breath. He’d no more mercy in him now than the winter. All those miles she’d come, all that ground struggled over, and just those few paces left were too many as he brought the bar hissing down.

Waerdinur flung himself on top of Ro and the metal caught his big forearm and snapped it like a twig, crashed on into his shoulder, opened a great gash down his head, knocked him senseless. Lamb raised the bar again, screaming froth on his twisted lips, and Shy caught hold of the other end of it as she hurtled off the bridge, whooped as she was jerked into the air. Wind rushed, the glowing cavern flipped over, and she crashed upside down into stone.

Then all quiet.

Just a faint ringing.

Shuffling boots.

Get up, Shy.

Can’t just lie around all day.

Things need doing on a farm.

But breathing was quite the challenge.

She pushed against the wall, or the floor, or the ceiling, and the world spun right over, everything whirling like a leaf on a flood.

Was she standing? No. On her back. One arm dangling. Dangling over the edge of the drop, blackness and fire, tiny in the distant depth. That didn’t seem a good idea. She rolled the other way. Managed to find her knees, everything swaying, trying to shake the fog from her skull.

People were shouting, voices vague, muffled. Something knocked against her and she nearly fell again.

A tangle of men, shuffling, wrestling. Lamb was in the midst, face wild as an animal’s, red wet from a long cut right across it, squealing and gurgling sounds that weren’t even halfway to swearing.

Cosca’s big sergeant, Friendly, was behind him with one arm around his neck, sweat standing from his forehead with the effort but his face just faintly frowning like he was teasing out a troubling sum.

Sweet was trying to keep a grip on Lamb’s left arm, getting dragged about like a man who’d roped a crazy horse. Savian had Lamb’s right and he was croaking, ‘Stop! Stop, you mad fucker!’ Shy saw he had a knife drawn and didn’t think she could stop him using it. Didn’t even know if she wanted to.

Lamb had tried to kill Ro. All they’d gone through to find her and he’d tried to kill her. He would’ve killed Shy, too, whatever he’d promised her mother. He would’ve killed all of them. She couldn’t make sense of it. Didn’t want to.

Then Lamb went rigid, near dragging Sweet off the edge of the cliff, whites of his eyes showing under flickering lids. Then he sagged, gasping, whimpering, and he put his bloody three-fingered hand over his face, all the fight suddenly put out.

And Savian patted Lamb on the chest, drawn knife still held behind his back and said, ‘Easy, easy.’

Shy tottered up, the world more or less settled but her head throbbing, blood tickling at the back of her skull.

‘Easy, easy.’

Right arm hard to move and her ribs aching so it hurt to breathe but she started shuffling for the archway. Behind her she could hear Lamb sobbing.

‘Easy… easy…’

A narrow passageway, hot as a forge, black but for a flaring glow up ahead and glimmering spots across the floor. Waerdinur’s blood. Shy limped after, remembered her sword, managed to get it drawn but could hardly grip the thing in her numb right hand, fumbled it across to her left and went on, getting steadier, halfway to jogging now, the tunnel getting brighter, hotter still, and an opening ahead, a golden light spilling across the stones. She burst through and slid to a sudden stop, went over on her arse and lay still, propped on her elbows, gaping.

‘Fuck,’ she breathed.

They were called Dragon People, that much she knew. But she’d never guessed they actually had a dragon.

It lay there in the centre of a vast domed chamber like the big scene from a storybook—beautiful, terrible, strange, its thousand thousand metal scales dull-glistered with the light of fires.

It was hard to judge its size, coiled about and about as it was, but its tapered head might’ve been long as a man was tall. Its teeth were dagger-blades. No claws. Each of its many legs ended in a hand, golden rings upon the graceful metal fingers. Beneath its folded paper wings gears gently clicked and clattered, wheels slowly, slowly turned, and the faintest breath of steam issued from its vented nostrils, the tip of a tongue like a forked chain softly rattling, a tiny slit of emerald eye showing under each of its four metal eyelids.

‘Fuck,’ she whispered again, eyes drifting down to the dragon’s bed, no less of a child’s daydream than the monster itself. A hill of money. Of ancient gold and silver plate. Of chains and chalices, coins and coronets. Of gilded arms and armour. Of gem-encrusted everythings. The silver standard of some long-lost legion thrust up at a jaunty angle. A throne of rare woods adorned with gold leaf stuck upside down from the mass. There was so much it became absurd. Priceless treasures rendered to gaudy trash by sheer quantity.

‘Fuck,’ she muttered one last time, waiting for the metal beast to wake and fall in blazing rage upon this tiny trespasser. But it didn’t stir, and Shy’s eyes crept down to the ground. The dotted tracks of blood became a smear, then a trickle, and now she saw Waerdinur, lying back against the dragon’s foreleg, and Ro beside him, staring, face streaked with blood from a cut on her scalp.

Shy struggled up, and crept down the bowl-shaped floor of the chamber, the stone underfoot all etched with writing, gripping tight to her sword, as though that feeble splinter of steel was anything more than a petty reassurance.

She saw other things among the hoard as she came closer. Papers with heavy seals. Miners’ claims. Bankers’ drafts. Deeds to buildings long ago fallen. Wills to estates long ago divided. Shares in Fellowships, and companies, and enterprises long deceased. Keys to who knew what forgotten locks. Skulls, too. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Coins and gemstones cut and raw spilling from their empty eye sockets. What things more valued than the dead?

Waerdinur’s breath came shallow, robe blood-soaked, shattered arm limp beside him and Ro clutching at the other, Shy’s broken arrow still lodged near the shoulder.

‘It’s me,’ Shy whispered, scared to raise her voice, edging forward, stretching out her hand. ‘Ro. It’s me.’

She wouldn’t let go of the old man’s arm. It took him reaching up and gently peeling her hand away. He nudged her towards Shy, spoke some soft words in his language and pushed again, more firmly. More words and Ro hung her shaved head, tears in her eyes, and started to shuffle away.

Waerdinur looked at Shy with pain-bright eyes. ‘We only wanted what was best for them.’

Shy knelt and gathered the girl up in her arms. She felt thin, and stiff, and reluctant, nothing left of the sister she’d had so long ago. Scarcely the reunion Shy had dreamed of. But it was a reunion.

‘Fuck!’ Nicomo Cosca stood in the entrance of the chamber, staring at the dragon and its bed.

Sergeant Friendly walked towards it, sliding a heavy cleaver from inside his coat, took one crunching step onto the bed of gold and bones and papers, coins sliding in a little landslip behind his boot-heel and, reaching forward, tapped the dragon on the snout.

His cleaver made a solid clank, as if he’d tapped an anvil.

‘It is a machine,’ he said, frowning down.

‘Most sacred of the Maker’s works,’ croaked Waerdinur. ‘A thing of wonder, of power, of—’

‘Doubtless.’ Cosca smiled wide as he walked into the chamber, fanning himself with his hat. But it wasn’t the dragon that held his eye. It was its bed. ‘How great a sum, do you think, Friendly?’

The sergeant raised his brows and took a long breath through his nose. ‘Very great. Shall I count it?’

‘Perhaps later.’

Friendly looked faintly disappointed.

‘Listen to me…’ Waerdinur tried to prop himself up, blood oozing from around the shaft in his shoulder, smearing the bright gold behind him. ‘We are close to waking the dragon. So close! The work of centuries. This year… perhaps next. You cannot imagine its power. We could… we could share it between us!’

Cosca grimaced. ‘Experience has taught me I’m no good at sharing.’

‘We will drive the Outsiders from the mountains and the world will be right again, as it was in the Old Time. And you… whatever you want is yours!’

Cosca smiled up at the dragon, hands on hips. ‘It certainly is a remarkable curiosity. A magnificent relic. But against what is already boiling across the plains? The legion of the dumb? The merchants and farmers and makers of trifles and filers of papers? The infinite tide of greedy little people?’ He waved his hat towards the dragon. ‘Such things as this are worthless as a cow against a swarm of ants. There will be no place in the world to come for the magical, the mysterious, the strange. They will come to your sacred places and build… tailors’ shops. And dry-goods emporia. And lawyers’ offices. They will make of them bland copies of everywhere else.’ The old mercenary scratched thoughtfully at his rashy neck. ‘You can wish it were not so. I wish it were not so. But it is so. I tire of lost causes. The time of men like me is passing. The time of men like you?’ He wiped a little blood from under his fingernails. ‘So long passed it might as well have never been.’

Waerdinur tried to reach out, his hand dangling from the broken forearm, skin stretched around the splintered bones. ‘You do not understand what I am offering you!’

‘But I do.’ And Cosca set one boot upon a gilded helmet wedged into the hoard and smiled down upon the Maker’s Right Hand. ‘You may be surprised to learn this, but I have been made many outlandish offers. Hidden fortunes, places of honour, lucrative trading rights along the Kadiri coast, an entire city once, would you believe, though admittedly in poor condition. I have come to realise…’ and he peered discerningly up at the dragon’s steaming snout, ‘a painful realisation, because I enjoy a fantastic dream just as much as the next man…’ and he fished up a single golden coin and held it to the light. ‘That one mark is worth a great deal more than a thousand promises.’

Waerdinur slowly let his broken arm drop. ‘I tried to do… what was best.’

‘Of course.’ Cosca gave him a reassuring nod, and flicked the coin back onto the heap. ‘Believe it or not, so do we all. Friendly?’

The sergeant leaned down and neatly split Waerdinur’s head with his cleaver.

‘No!’ shrieked Ro, and Shy could hardly hold on to her, she started thrashing so much.

Cosca looked mildly annoyed at the interruption. ‘It might be best if you removed her. This really is no place for a child.’

Greed

They set off in a happy crowd, smiling, laughing, congratulating one another on their work, comparing the trophies of gold and flesh they had stolen from the dead. Ro had not thought ever in her life to look upon a man worse than Grega Cantliss. Now they were everywhere she turned. One had Akarin’s pipe and he tooted a mindless three-noted jig and some danced and capered down the valley, their clothes made motley by the blood of Ro’s family.

They left Ashranc in ruins, the carvings smashed and the Heartwoods smoking charcoal and the bronze panels gouged up and the Long House burned with the blessed coals from its fire-pit, all forever stained with death. They despoiled even the most sacred caves and tipped the Dragon over so they could steal the coins that made its bed, then they sealed it in its cavern and brought down the bridge with a burning powder that made the very earth shake in horror at the heresy.

‘Better to be safe,’ the murderer Cosca had said, then leaned towards the old man called Savian and asked, ‘Did you find your boy? My notary salvaged several children. He’s discovered quite the talent for it.’

Savian shook his head.

‘A shame. Will you keep searching?’

‘Told myself I’d go this far. No further.’

‘Well. Every man has his limit, eh?’ And Cosca gave him a friendly slap on the arm then chucked Ro under the chin and said, ‘Cheer up, your hair will grow back in no time!’

And Ro watched him go, wishing she had the courage, or the presence of mind, or the anger in her to find a knife and stab him, or rip him with her nails, or bite his face.

They set off briskly but soon slowed, tired and sore and gorged on destruction. Bent and sweating under the weight of their plunder, packs and pockets bulging with coins. Soon they were jostling and cursing each other and arguing over fallen trinkets. One man tore the pipe away and smashed it on a rock and the one who had been playing it struck him and the great black man had to drag the two of them apart and spoke about God, as if He was watching, and Ro thought, if God can see anything, why would He watch this?

Shy talked, talked, different than she had been. Pared down and pale and tired as a candle burned to the stub, bruised as a beaten dog so Ro hardly recognised her. Like a woman she saw in a dream once. A nightmare. She blathered, nervous and foolish with a mask of a smile. She asked the nine children to tell their names and some gave their old names and some their new, hardly knowing who they were any more.

Shy squatted in front of Evin when he told his name, and said, ‘Your brother Leef was with us, for a bit.’ She put the back of her hand to her mouth and Ro saw it was trembling. ‘He died out on the plains. We buried him in a good spot, I reckon. Good as you get out there.’ And she put her hand on Ro’s shoulder then and said, ‘I wanted to bring you a book or something, but… didn’t work out.’ And the world in which there were books was a half-remembered thing, and the faces of the dead so real and new about her, Ro could not understand it. ‘I’m sorry… we took so long.’ Shy looked at her with wet in the corners of her pink rimmed eyes and said, ‘Say something, can’t you?’

‘I hate you,’ said Ro, in the language of the Dragon People so she would not understand.

The dark-skinned man called Temple looked sadly at her and said, in the same tongue, ‘Your sister came a long way to find you. For months you have been all she has wanted.’

Ro said, ‘I have no sister. Tell her that.’

Temple shook his head. ‘You tell her.’

All the while the old Northman watched them, eyes wide but looking through her, as if he had seen an awful thing far-off, and Ro thought of him standing over her with that devil smile and her father giving his life for hers and wondered who this silent killer was who looked so much like Lamb. When his cut face started bleeding, Savian knelt near him to stitch it and said, ‘Hardly seemed like demons, in the end, these Dragon Folk.’

The man who looked like Lamb didn’t flinch as the needle pierced his skin. ‘The real demons you bring with you.’

When Ro lay in the darkness, even with fingers stuck in her ears all she could hear was Hirfac screaming and screaming as they burned her on the cooking-slab, the air sweet with the smell of meat. Even with her hands over her eyes, all she could see was Ulstal’s face, sad and dignified, as they pushed him off the cliff with their spears and he fell without a cry, the bodies left broken at the foot, good people she had laughed with, each with their own wisdom, made useless meat and she could not understand the waste of it. She felt she should have hated all these Outsiders beyond hating but somehow she was only numb and withered inside, as dead a thing as her family herded off the cliff, as her father with his head split, as Gully swinging from his tree.

The next morning, men were missing and gold and food missing with them. Some said they had deserted and some that they had been lured by spirits in the night and some that the Dragon People were following, vengeful. While they argued, Ro looked back towards Ashranc, a pall of smoke still hanging over the mountainside in the pale blue, and felt she was stolen from her home once again, and she reached inside her robe and clutched the dragon scale her father had given her, cool against her skin. Beside her on a rock, the old Ghost Woman stood frowning.

‘Bad luck to look back too long, girl,’ said the white-bearded one called Sweet, though Ro reckoned the Ghost fifty years old at the least, only a few yellow hairs left among the grey she had bound up with a rag.

‘It does not feel so fine as I thought it would.’

‘When you spend half your life dreaming of a thing, its coming to pass rarely measures up.’

Ro saw Shy look at her, then down at the ground, and she curled her lip back and spat through the gap in her teeth. A memory came up then all unbidden of Shy and Gully having a contest at spitting in a pot and Ro laughing, and Pit laughing, and Lamb watching and smiling, and Ro felt a pain in her chest and looked away, not knowing why.

‘Maybe the money’ll make it feel finer,’ Sweet was saying.

The old Ghost woman shook her head. ‘A rich fool is still a fool. You will see.’

Sick of waiting for their missing friends, the men went on. Bottles were opened and they got drunk and slowed under the weight of their booty, toiling in the heat over broken rocks, straining and cursing with mighty burdens as though gold was worth more than their own flesh, more than their own breath. Even so they left discarded baubles scattered in their wake, sparkling like a slug’s trail, some picked up by those behind only to be dropped a mile further on. More food had gone in the night and more water and they squabbled over what was left, a haunch of bread worth its weight in gold, then ten times its weight, jewels given over for half a flask of spirits. A man killed another for an apple and Cosca ordered him hanged. They left him swinging behind them, still with the silver chains rattling around his neck.

‘Discipline must be maintained!’ Cosca told everyone, wobbling with drunkenness in the saddle of his unfortunate horse, and up on Lamb’s shoulders Pit smiled, and Ro realised she had not seen him smile in a long time.

They left the sacred places behind and passed into the forest, and the snow began to fall, and then to settle, and the Dragon’s warmth faded from the earth and it grew bitter chill. Temple and Shy handed out furs to the children as the trees reared taller and taller around. Some of the mercenaries had thrown their coats away so as to carry more gold, and now shivered where they had sweated before, curses smoking on the chill, cold mist catching at their heels.

Two men were found dead in the trees, shot in the back with arrows while they were shitting. Arrows that the mercenaries had themselves abandoned in Ashranc so they could stuff their quivers with loot.

They sent out other men to find and kill whoever had done the shooting but they did not come back and after a while the rest pressed on, but with a panic on them now, weapons drawn, staring into the trees, starting at shadows. Men kept vanishing, one by one, and one man took another who had strayed for an enemy and shot him down, and Cosca spread his hands and said, ‘In war, there are no straight lines.’ They argued over how they might carry the wounded man or whether they should leave him, but before they decided he died anyway and they picked things from his body and kicked it into a crevasse.

Some of the children gave each other grins because they knew their own family must be following, the bodies left as a message to them, and Evin walked close beside her and said in the Dragon People’s tongue, ‘Tonight we run,’ and Ro nodded.

The darkness settled without stars or moon and the snow falling thick and soft and Ro waited, trembling with the need to run and the fear of being caught, marking the endless time by the sleeping breath of the Outsiders, Shy’s quick and even and Savian’s crackling loud in his chest and the Ghost Woman prone to mutter as she turned, more to say when she was sleeping than waking. Until the old man Sweet, who she took for the slowest runner among them, was roused for his watch and grumbled to a place on the other side of their camp. Then she tapped Evin’s shoulder, and he nodded to her, and prodded the others, and in a silent row they stole away into the darkness.

She shook Pit awake and he sat. ‘Time to go.’ But he only blinked. ‘Time to go!’ she hissed, squeezing his arm.

He shook his head. ‘No.’

She dragged him up and he struggled and shouted, ‘I won’t go! Shy!’ And someone flung back their blankets, a can clattering, all commotion, and Ro let go Pit’s hand and ran, floundering in the snow, away into the trees, caught her boot on a root and tumbled over and over and up and on. Struggling, striving, this time she would get free. Then a terrible weight took her around the knees and she fell.

She screeched and kicked and punched but she might as well have struggled with a stone, with a tree, with the mighty earth itself. The weight was around her hips, then her chest, trapping her helpless. She thought she saw Evin as the snow swirled, looking back, and she strained towards him with one hand and shouted, ‘Help me!’

Then he was lost in the darkness. Or she was.

‘Damn you!’ Ro snarled and wept and twisted but all in vain.

She heard Lamb’s voice in her ear. ‘I’m already damned. But I ain’t letting you go again,’ and he held her so tight she could scarcely move, could scarcely breathe.

So that was all.