The Great Leveller: Best Served Cold, The Heroes and Red Country (232 page)

‘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?