Pale with exhaustion, Katla sealed our choice by dropping her backsack and then herself on to the ground a short distance from the ruins. Jonno sat down beside her and began talking to her in a low voice, in what I assumed was the next round in their ongoing discussion of life, the universe and his poetry. By this point the others had arrived—Mallinna drooping under her backsack, Angel resembling a crumpled heap of blankets on the sledge, Tig ambling along as if he had forgotten the broad leather harness around his chest had a heavy weight attached to the other end. I could see by his eyes that he was not fully with us.
"This appears to be the best we can do for tonight," I said.
Tig looked straight through me and then up, a fair way up, though not as high as the polished peak of the mountain. "And a very fine guardpoint it is, too, Vero. Middle-Empire style, we'd say; designed at a time when the Fathids were still building for beauty—out of habit, mainly—but were just beginning to display the more brutally minimalist propensities of the Late Empire. Note the—"
"Do you need any help with the sledge?"
"We'll manage." He towed it blithely behind him through the ruins, into the lee of the standing walls. I did notice, though, that while most of us simply walked across the foundation traces embedded in the ground as if they weren't there, my father carefully followed the line of the outer wall to the vitrified threshold of a doorway before entering the ruin. Oddly enough, Katla took the same route a few minutes later.
It was just another evening in the mountains as far as routine went. Since we could carry very little fuel and the dead terrain provided nothing to burn, the fire we built was a pathetic affair just sufficient to heat water for a tepid infusion of herbs. We huddled together for warmth as we downed a dismal supper of fenset and biscuit; we went out in pairs for our ablutions, one acting as guard for the other; and finally we cleaned up the camp, a task which consisted of piling the backsacks on the sledge, secure in the shadowed angle where the two walls met. Then, fully dressed, we went straight to bed—that is, we wrapped ourselves in our bedrolls and curled up close together on the cold hard ground, five packages in a row along the base of one wall, with Angel beside the sledge and me at the other end. Jonno, whose watch it was, hunched himself in a blanket near the dying fire. He was too tired and cold to recite any poetry, and the rest of us were too tired and cold to listen. A quarter-moon was expected somewhat later, but it had not yet risen clear of the mountains; the only light was from the embers of the fire, the only sounds were our breathing and the wind. In moments, I was asleep.
We had divided the dark hours into three watches. On that fourth night in the mountains, Jonno had the first watch, Mallinna the second, and it was going to be my turn to enjoy the dawn. I think I slept with the concentrated stillness of a corpse for the first part of the night, but by the time Mallinna shook me awake, I was deep in a dream that for once did not involve awful things happening to Katla—a dream, in fact, in which Mallinna herself figured prominently and delightfully. Confused by the transition, but not so confused that I forgot to keep the blanket around me for warmth, I sat up and yawned—Mallinna put her hand over my mouth before I could make any noise. She brought her lips close to my ear.
"Something's out there," she breathed.
Three developments within a broken second: I was fully awake, the leather guard of the chain was looped over the fingers of my left hand, and a naked knife was in my right. "Where?"
"I don't know."
"How many?"
"I don't know."
"Only one? More than one? Big? Huge?"
"I don't—"
"How long ago?"
"Just now."
We peered out of our half-chamber at the phantom outlines of rooms and courtyards gleaming on the silver-washed surface of the slag, the fragments of walls standing in their own shadows among pallid pools of moonlight. Mallinna shivered—her blanket had slipped unnoticed off her shoulders—so I laid my knife down and pulled her inside the warmth of my own blanket with my right arm wrapped around her; the more lethal left hand stayed outside the blanket with the chain at the ready. Her skin was icy, even through the tunic; she put her arms around me gratefully, though she said nothing and never moved her eyes from the cold silver slag-flats stretching between us and the road. Tense and watchful, we sat like that in silence for a good ten minutes, listening to the wind, and nothing happened except Mallinna's teeth stopped chattering as she warmed up. At last I whispered, "Are you absolutely sure you saw something?"
"Not absolutely sure," she whispered back. "Maybe something was moving, I don't know—mostly, I just felt watched. Do you know that feeling?"
"Oh, yes." I knew it well. It was the classic reaction of a neophyte night-guard. I almost whooped with relief and the release of tension. At the same time, it felt quite natural to hold Mallinna closer. "Don't worry, I think we're safe."
She peered up me out of our shared blanket, her tilted chin just about touching mine.
"So you don't think there's anything out there?"
"Nothing but the wind, Mallinna. It's easy to start imagining things when you're keeping watch alone—an eerie place like this."
"But the feeling was so strong." She shivered again, but her hands felt quite warm against my back. "I'm sorry I woke you up for nothing, Vero. You're not on watch for another hour yet."
"You were right to waken me if you had any doubts at all," I protested, pulling back a little while I tucked the chain away, then using that hand to pat her shoulder comfortingly under the blanket. She gazed back at me from such close range that I could see the separate moonshadow that each eyelash cast on her smooth cheek. We cleared our throats simultaneously.
"Well—so—we're in no danger, then," she said after a few moments.
"Apparently not." I turned my head to survey the quiet camp. Angel was snoring softly at the far end of the row of five shadowy bundles, beside the deeper shadow that concealed the sledge; at this end, the bundle that was Jonno twitched in his sleep. I turned my head back again and was surprised to find my nose and mouth resting comfortably against Mallinna's still fragrant cloud of hair. It was now quite warm inside our blanket.
She had dropped her head against my chest with her lips somewhere in the region of my breastbone, so her voice was muffled. "Vero—may I ask you something?"
"Of course. Anything you like."
She moved her cheek against my dusty tunic, just about where my heart would be. "Did you ever see a work in the archives called the Erotic Mistifalia?"
"In two volumes," I answered breathlessly after a short, stunned pause, "dating from the reign of Cosillef Third. Profusely illustrated. I may have glanced through it." One of her hands, I noticed, was slowly tracing a circle between my shoulderblades. Without thinking, I kissed the top of her head. "Why do you ask?"
Warning! Warning! An alarmed voice in my head.
"It's just that I've always wondered about some of those illustrations," she whispered, swivelling her face up, somehow managing to brush my collarbone and neck very lightly with her lips on the way.
"What—what about the illustrations?" I asked.
Five shadowy bundles?
"Well, you see—I've often thought some of the acts depicted do not look physically possible—"
"Oh," I said, "they're all possible in theory, though some of them would require a great deal of practice—" I broke off.
Five? Five?
"Vero, what's wrong?"
Five!
"Raksh!" I whispered, "Oh, great gods!"
"Vero?"
I pressed her face into my shoulder to silence her—the tiny scrape of sound I'd heard was not repeated, and I could not tell where it came from. The moon was midway across the sky between the peaks, just beginning its slow slide to the west, changing all the shadows around; one end of the sledge was now visible, and it was empty. Empty. Angel snuffled in his sleep at the far end of a row of four shadowy bundles. Four.
"Stay down," I
hissed, "keep flat on the ground."
I pushed her down and dropped to a half-crouch, the chain out and ready in my left hand, trying to watch all the puddles of shade around us at once. Nothing moved. From behind us, there was the subtlest grating of sound; I whirled to find myself facing the blank wall. Something scrabbled again and something else clicked—just the thickness of the wall away. Mallinna drew her breath in sharply.
"Don't move."
Gradually, still facing the wall, I began to straighten my legs. The wall was about a span away and no higher than my mid-chest; as I inched silently towards it upright, the moon-flooded northern arc of the plateau came slice by slice into view, over the top of the wall: the cliffs at the far rim . . . a segment of the road . . . the open ground behind the ruins . . . the edge of the long shadow cast by the wall . . . the eyes . . .
The next sound I heard was the hissing of my chain.
I must have missed. Seven, eight, nine dark forms streaked into the moonlight and scampered for the cliffs. They ran close to the ground, almost as if on four feet, but straightened when they were midway across the flats. More or less straightened; there was something odd and tilted about them, halfway between man and mantis, a little too long in the legs and a little too short in the body, and when I tried to see them in my mind's eye later I could conjure up no clear picture of the head. And, by Raksh, despite the strangely familiar burdens which four of them were dragging along by the back-straps, they were certainly fast movers, scuttling like woodroaches when a log is thrown on the fire. All in near silence, too; the only sound I remembered later was a tattoo of rapid clicks, which put me in mind of birds' claws scrabbling against a pane of glass. By the time I could draw in the chain and throw myself over the wall, they were already at the foot of the cliffs; and there, they simply vanished.
I could count. I knew nothing would be left on the sledge. All four backsacks had been taken, and with them every scrap of our food and fuel. Jonno and I still had our fire flints but nothing to burn. All of us had our own knives, Kat and I had our chains, Jonno had two swords and five throwing disks, and Angel had his notebook and a writing stick. Tigrallef, meantime, had a damn good sleep. Everyone but him was roused by my roar as I set off after the thiefpack—fortunately Mallinna caught up with me while I was still casting about for a way up the cliffs and Jonno pounded up a moment later, and between them they persuaded me to abandon the almost certainly suicidal pursuit.
I could hardly look at Mallinna as we trudged back to camp in grim silence; shame, mostly, coupled with bitter embarrassment. I was very busy assigning blame, none of it to Mallinna. It was not significant that this disaster had happened on her watch—she had quite properly wakened me, so the responsibility was mine. It was true we had neither heard nor seen anything that would have caused me, say, to ring the Fifth's alarm bell during an ordinary watch—whatever these creatures were, they had made a science and an art out of moving without noise—but Mallinna had been wiser than me in her perception that something was wrong. I could not blame Mallinna.
But I could hotly, vigorously and justly blame myself. I was experienced—how many thousands of hours had I spent on watch in the past fifteen years?—and yet I had made the mistakes of a raw beginner. I had let myself be put off guard by the lifelessness of this landscape and a few uneventful nights; I had allowed myself to dally unforgivably with Mallinna. At one point, I realized with a shudder, I had actually seen one of the mantis-thieves, camouflaged in the guise of a sleeper right beside Angel, one body over from my sister, a deadly enemy loose in the very heart of our camp among helpless sleepers who trusted me—and I had been too fuddled by Mallinna's closeness to notice until too late. It was all my fault.
"It's all my fault," Mallinna whispered.
"It's not your fault, it's mine."
"It's my fault, Vero," she insisted, "I started it. If we hadn't—if I hadn't—"
She shut her mouth abruptly.
"If you hadn't what?" Jonno asked.
"If we had not been discussing some works of literature from the archives," Mallinna said with dignity and truth, "we might have seen the danger earlier."
I stopped short; so did Mallinna.
"Jonno," I said, "run ahead and make sure the others are all right. Check the sledge, see if those ghouls left anything behind." He gave me a very interested look, but he ran off without protest. When I judged he was out of earshot, I turned to Mallinna and reached for her hand. "Flogging yourself with blame is not going to get the supplies back."
"You should take your own advice."
"But it was all my—never mind, we won't start that again."
"Everything's in ruins, isn't it?" she said.
"I suppose you could say that."
"We're probably going to die in these mountains—yes, Vero, when all factors are taken into account, that seems the most likely outcome. No food, no fire, enemies all around and their stronghold ahead of us; and Lord Tigrallef, who is choosing our path, is digging himself deeper and deeper into insanity every day. Don't deny it," she insisted when I shook my head, "by any definition I've ever seen, he's completely mad. I've seen ecstatics from the Niltha dreamflower cult with a firmer hold on reality; I've seen Lucian zealots with a more balanced view of the world."
You've got it backwards, I wanted to say; he's not mad, he just sees things too clearly and in too many layers. But I said nothing about it, because I knew the effect was identical to madness and just as likely to lead us into disaster. All I said was, "I'm sorry you were dragged into this, you and Angel and Jonno. Perhaps if we turn back now—"
"I'm not sorry, and I don't think we should turn back. I've told you before, I'd rather be here in the middle of a doomed venture than sitting in the archives waiting for the Second Flamen to work through his decade of celibacy. There's a fine fate worse than death for you! And we both know Angel's happy just being at Lord Tigrallef's side again, even if it means dying there. Jonno, well—if he dies now, he'll die with his soul intact; a life in the Flamens' Corps would murder more than the poetry in him within a few years, trust me. All that I'm sorry about—"
She hesitated, frowning at the ground and shifting from foot to foot. I was still holding her hand; she withdrew it gently and used it to push her hair off her face.
"Well?"
"I'm sorry," she said firmly, raising her eyes, "that we didn't get to finish our discussion on the Erotic Mistifalia—and it looks like we never will."
Before I could respond—and I had no idea how to respond—she turned and started for camp with her long confident stride, her boots ringing on the armoured surface. I let her get about ten paces ahead before I followed.
Back in camp, Tigrallef was just sitting up and rubbing the sleep out of his eyes as I stepped around the end of the wall. Angel looked up at me with no expression. Jonno, sitting rather dolefully on the empty sledge beside Katla, shook his head and spread his hands in a gesture of emptiness: nothing left.
Tigrallef yawned. "Good morning, all. It's a bit early for breakfast, isn't it?"
"What breakfast, Da? We don't have any tupping food." A small part of my self-reproach shifted in his direction.
"Oh, really?" He yawned again and stretched until I heard his muscles creak. "They took everything? In that case, as long as we're all awake, we might as well push on, don't you think?"
"It might make more sense to turn back," I said bitterly; reproach was turning to anger.
"Nonsense, Vero. We're probably fewer nights distant from Cansh Fathan than we are from Faddelin."
"Probably?" I repeated. The anger was rising, starting to pile up like water behind a dam. "Don't you know for sure? You and your all-knowing parasite?"
He looked up at me mildly. "Perhaps we should clarify. We're significantly closer to Cansh Fathan than to Faddelin, but the road is uphill. We cannot accurately estimate our rate of travel from this point, given the incalculable effects of hunger versus stamina. However, Cansh Fathan—"
"—will be expecting us," I interrupted. "That's another thing. We've been seen now. They know we're here."
"You'll wear yourself out with worrying, Vero."
The dam burst. "Mighty Raksh, Father! Don't you dare tell me there's nothing to worry about. But do tell me this, Great Ark and Sceptre: why didn't you hear anything with those sensitive ears of yours? If you can see Cansh Fathan, why not a band of thieves in the cliffs right beside the road? And what if they'd killed us all, turned this ruin into a small Faddelin or a little Deppowe—"
"Please don't exaggerate. They wouldn't have hurt us," Tigrallef broke in calmly. "Did you get a good look at them?"
"No." I said this very firmly, because I was trying to convince myself that it was true; the unhappy alternative was believing what I had seen. I was already certain that the odd-shaped eyes in the shadow of the wall had been reflecting the moon, not glowing with their own silver light.
"What a pity," Tigrallef said. "As for turning back, the answer is that we must go on. What's happening is not important. How many times do we need to tell you that?"
"You can tell it to our bellies in a day or two."
Kat's voice emanated from the direction of the sledge: "Stop it, Verolef."
I ignored her. "How will starving to death or getting ripped to pieces in the mountains help Mother and Shree and Chasco? Eh, Da?"
Kat again: "You must stop it, Vero. You're going too far."
Tig also ignored her. "What would you like us to do, Child of the Naar?" There was a slight edge to his voice. "Would you like us to set up a great banquet for you, over there in the guardsmen's mess? What do you fancy? Tripe and lentils? A haunch of deer? Nine-bird pie?"
Gil Trilogy 3: Lady Pain Page 27
