He looked at the silver ring on his finger.
He’d made a vow. A promise of atonement. And he meant to keep it.
He’d gone some way from the Ketty Jay now, and the immense quiet of the desert surrounded him. Here was limbo, a pause in the world. He was nowhere, and that suited him fine.
There was a feeling that had been growing inside him, for how long he didn’t know. He wasn’t sure what it was, but he’d had his suspicions from the start. Now he needed to name it, to try it on his tongue to see if tasted false. He didn’t dare do it in front of anyone else, so he said it to the moon instead.
‘I love her.’
He stood there a long while, letting the sound of it run through him. Finally, he nodded to himself.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘There it is.’
Then he turned and walked back to the Ketty Jay, and his friends, and whatever would come after.
Also by Chris Wooding from Gollancz:
The Braided Path Omnibus
The Fade
TALES OF THE KETTY JAY
Retribution Falls
The Black Lung Captain
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Chris Wooding 2011
All rights reserved
The right of Chris Wooding to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane,
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
This eBook first published in 2011 by Gollancz.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 09809 1
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.chriswooding.com
www.orionbooks.co.uk
The Iron Jackal Page 55
