“They’re not hybrids,” the Gage said. He could have spoken on, and told the Dead Man that bhaluukutta were an animal as distinct in every way from both bears and dogs as the tiger is from the fox—and more distinct, at that, than tiger from lion or than fox from wolf. But the Dead Man would then have drawn the Gage into an argument on whether—since bear-dogs did not exist within the sight of the Scholar-God’s sun, and thus could not have been created by the Scholar-God—they were an abomination, of demonic origin, or simply one of nature’s small mistakes.
Instead he paused for a moment before continuing, “Big even for a bhaluukutta, I’d say.”
The Dead Man might have pursed his lips. Who could tell, behind the veil? But he definitely considered, and having done so nodded thoughtfully. “I’ll let the lookouts know we’re in something’s territory.”
The Gage could not frown, so he simply nodded. For the time being, it would have to serve.
* * *
They made swift progress through the day, and the pugmarks were eventually left behind. But as twilight dyed the backdrop to the peaks its particular shade of lavender, it would have been too dangerous to continue down the river into the dark. They tied up the boats and made themselves as comfortable as possible, posting a double watch. A double watch in addition to the Gage, who did not crave rest as did mere flesh and blood. He merely imbibed a cup of wine, and that was enough to sustain him.
The Dead Man slept like his namesake, for a change. The Gage patrolled the bank, brass feet sinking deep in the soft, sucking mud. He moved a little farther up the slope, where there were pine needles under the snow and he was less prone to bog down. He could haul himself out using trees, if they were of sufficient size, but his metal hands tended to gouge and scar the bark, damaging the tree, and he preferred to avoid killing or wounding living things where he could.
This was not the best environment for him.
Eventually, the Dead Man must have awakened—or been awakened—and come to take a turn at watch. The Gage noticed his partner coming up behind him and paused, but didn’t turn. As he had no eyes—no ears, no nose—the Gage’s senses were less directionally focused than a human’s. He sensed what he sensed and saw what he saw, and his direction of travel had little to do with it.
The Dead Man moved smoothly, all-but-silently. He was surefooted through the dark. The Gage tried to remember how well humans saw by starlight, with a reflective cover of snow under dark boughs. But it had been too long. The Dead Man had traded his thick snow boots for a softer pair with less room for wadding up wool around the toes. They barely dented the loam that the Gage’s feet were sinking down in as if he stood in a particularly sluggish patch of quicksand.
The Dead Man paused fifteen feet away. “Gage?”
“I saw you,” the Gage answered.
“You are the last person I should care to startle.” There was a smile in the words, under a friendly layer of acid. The Gage and the Dead Man understood one another.
“I’m not a person,” the Gage said.
The Dead Man flipped his hand in that dismissive gesture he liked so well. “Nor are you merely an automaton. And as you’ve no wings to speak of, you cannot be a dragon.”
“How would you know?”
“You look like no dragon.”
The Gage made an amused noise. “When have you ever seen a dragon?”
“Near enough a dragon by my lights, not a month since in the mountain pass.”
“That?” The Gage dismissed it with an oiled metal shrug. “That was just a wyrm.”
The Dead Man seemed to consider. At the very least, he paused and chewed over his next words. “There is some difference more significant than size?”
“Wyrms aren’t smart. Dragons are. Dragons are much bigger. And wyrms don’t carry the serpent-sickness.”
The Dead Man had one of the little cheroots rolled from hemp leaves that he smoked occasionally. He lifted his veil to slide it between his lips, then lit it against a magicked heatstone he kept in a case strapped to his wrist. He puffed aromatically. The ember glowed red in the dark. “I had heard the serpent-sickness was a legend. A tale to scare children.”
The Gage tipped his head. “That is not what is written in the medical texts.”
“Would that be aught you learned from your Wizard too?”
“I’m a Gage,” said the Gage. “All I know is what a Wizard told me.”
The Dead Man was silent. The Gage knew that the Dead Man knew it wasn’t entirely true. But he also knew that the Dead Man wasn’t going to bring up the ancient past, because that was a door the Gage could open just as easily.
“Have you ever seen a dragon?” The Dead Man paused. He drew a breath and qualified. “A real dragon.”
“No,” the Gage said.
“Then how do you know they exist?”
It was a good point. The Gage had seen the blasted wastelands purportedly left by their deaths. He’d seen teeth, kept well behind leaded glass to prevent their sickness from spreading. He’d never met a Wizard who did not accept the existence of dragons and of the serpent-sickness as a proven, objective, scientific fact.
He said, “I don’t know. But it seems more reasonable than the alternatives. Gages exist; gods exist—”
“God exists.”
The Gage ignored him. “Why not dragons?”
The Dead Man puffed his cheroot, then let his veil drop back while holding a deep breath in for several seconds. He released it with a satisfied sigh that made his veil fluff.
“Because dragons make me nervous,” he said. His hand described the arcing flight of the ice-wyrm. “I should not care to contemplate … a creature bigger and smarter and meaner than that monstrosity?”
“Well,” the Gage said. “Maybe not meaner. Maybe not that.” He stroked the bark of a tree with unfeeling fingertips and made a guess about the source of the Dead Man’s distress. “The message is safe.”
“This is still too lengthy a journey. Anything could be happening while we are delayed.”
Fair, though they were now traveling as fast as humanly possible. And moving through the mountain passes was always chancy. They were lucky to have gotten off as lightly as they had. On the other hand, their lack of intelligence from Messaline or Sarathai-tia was anxiety inducing. The Gage could choose not to experience such inconvenient emotions, but the Dead Man could not.
And the Gage could remember that urgency through a veil, as if thinking back to childhood. The burning need to be doing something, anything, even if it was futile. The chafing, the craving for action.
The Dead Man stood sideways to him, picking at a fingernail with the opposite thumbnail. With a start, the Gage realized that all the cuticles and the edges of the nail beds were bloody. Surely, the mountain air had caused hangnails and frostnip. But the Dead Man’s fidgeting had kept the wounds from healing.
The Gage laid a hand on his own chest. “It’s here, Serhan.”
The Dead Man looked up at him with worry-wide eyes.
“It will go through.”
“It must go through,” the Dead Man said. “And in time to prevent some tragedy. I know it with the writing on my bones.”
“I think that son of a bitch laid a geis on you, partner,” the Gage said.
“The Eyeless One?” The Dead Man shook his head, slowly side to side. But what he said was, “I think you’re right.”
He wished to sigh, and knuckled the sockets of his eyes. “Well, if she did that, I guess she must have had a pretty good reason.”
The Gage was immune to geasa, having the one imbued at his construction firmly and always in place. He was not so confident in their patron as the Dead Man was. But his was a constitution refined for constant loyalty with decades of training.
The Gage had been built to be loyal. But everything he had ever owed allegiance to was dead.
* * *
The night drifted on uneventfully, and eventually the Dead Man pinched out the remainder of his
cheroot, tucked it into his pocket, and took himself back to what passed for his bed aboard the third of the three remaining ice-boats. Whether he slept or not, slung in his hammock crowded among those of almost a dozen acrobats and sword-jugglers, the Gage could not have said.
When the sun began to paint the sky—revealing by its color and position that they had not yet left the boundaries, however loosely determined, of the Rasan Empire—the Gage was still standing on the bank, considering the amplifying light. Watchers on the boats began to wake the sleeping crew and lie down in vacated hammocks for their own rest. At the mounting bustle, the Gage splashed through the shallows of the river and climbed the reinforced boarding plank the crew lowered for him. The rest of the passengers and crew were clambering up and down ladders as they saw to nature’s morning necessities. The Gage would have shattered those in a beat of the heart he did not have.
The first boat rocked in its trim as he climbed aboard, anyway. Then the humans were breakfasting on hard tack and dried fruit and fish—all at once, which the Gage would have found unappetizing even if he were a creature with the possibility to develop an appetite—and the ropes were being untied and cast off from the shore, and the hands were scrambling up the ladders at stem and stern to board as fast as they could while oarsmen pulled against the current to hold the ice-boats back.
Everyone made it aboard without incident. The boats sailed on merrily, swept down by a current through rapids that were most likely considered less-than-slight by local standards, but which the Gage found more than sufficient for concern. He would be unlikely to suffer injury under most circumstances, but very few of his frail, fleshly human companions could say the same. The Gage sat quietly over the keel of the ice-boat with the hood of his robe drawn up and tried not to look too closely at where they might be going. The shores were very interesting, anyway, with their foreign vegetation and strange landscapes.
So it happened that he was taken completely by surprise when they came around a sharp bend and one of the bowmen put up a great cry of alarm. A moment later, before the Gage could stand without capsizing the ice-boat, its prow struck something that gave with a splintering crash. The current pushed the boat sideways. There were more splinterings, great and small, and the contrasting snapping sounds of dead wood and green as the stern began to swing around.
The Gage had managed to stand without putting fist or foot through the deck, or hull. He did not turn—being featureless had its advantages—but simply raised his voice to its full preternatural volume and bellowed. “HOLD HARD!”
If the gods were kind, the trailing ice-boats would hear him in time to keep from slamming into the lead ship with all the force of the current behind them. The Gage acknowledged grimly that kindness was not the sort of thing experienced people generally expected from their deities. He braced for impact.
It came, but not from astern. As the ice-boat’s pivot brought it perpendicular to the bank amid more snapping sounds, the starboard side collided heavily with something. The Gage glimpsed evergreen branches and massive trunks as the boat wallowed. It reminded the Gage of an enormous beaver dam.
It did not look in the least accidental.
Someone screamed—one of the crew—but before the Gage could look for him, a sound neither shriek nor roar resounded through the narrow confines of the valley, rising even over the tumult of the rushing river. It would have curdled the Gage’s blood, he supposed, if he had such a thing as blood to curdle.
A blur of black and russet swept through the lifted branches of the toppled and heaped-up trees. It moved from shore to the center of the dam in a single leap—an astounding distance even by the Gage’s standards.
The cries of the men on the trailing boats carried across the water. The Gage did not need to turn his head to see that the crews were hauling backward hard on oars usually reserved for steering. If their plan was to run the ice-boats aground, well. It was likely to be marginally better than all three boats piling up against the massive blockade, and each other.
Steering ice-boats was somebody else’s business. The Gage had more immediate problems.
The individual drawing itself up atop the barricade was an adult male Cho-tse—a creature at once humanoid and tigerish, taller and broader than the Gage and with his tattered ears slicked back against his massive skull. His lip curled up in a hideous snarl, revealing yellowed, furrowed canines like ivory tent-pegs. His fingers were flexed, and heavy, curved claws protruded from the fingertips.
The gunwales of the narrow ice-boat dipped on the side away from the trap. The force of the current was shoving against the hull, and soon the ice-boat would be swamped. The Gage balanced himself. The best thing he could do for the trapped ship was to get off it, lightening its load.
“Heave to and prepare to be boarded!” the tiger cried. His Rasani was barely intelligible, with a heavy Cho-tse accent—the ps and bs blurring into softer, burring, whistling sounds.
The Dead Man hauled himself dripping over the railing behind the Gage, and drew his sword. He must have thrown himself overboard from the trailing vessel and let the current sweep him toward the trapped one. Courageous, and more than a little mad. The Gage could hear the Dead Man’s teeth chattering as he stepped forward.
The Cho-tse eyed them both, but didn’t flinch.
“Just what this expedition was in need of,” the Dead Man said conversationally. “A pirate tiger.”
The Gage replied, “When did you learn to swim?”
He dropped his robe on the deck. Light struck curved reflections from his body, speckling wooden objects on all sides. The Cho-tse’s eyes narrowed, and perhaps there was a little less certainty in his snarl. He might never have seen a Gage—many hadn’t—and perhaps he hadn’t even heard stories, so far east as this. The Gage was intimidating whether you had any idea what you were getting into or not. He’d been built for it.
The Dead Man slung his saber from side to side with a loose wrist, warming up quite casually. His wet coat draggled from his frame and his shirt was plastered to his wiry chest, but he didn’t fuss with either. He reached up with his left hand and ceremoniously drew his faded indigo veil down from his face, letting the sodden cotton gauze hang below his chin.
It was the greatest threat a Dead Man could make, to look upon one of the living as an equal. It said, You too will be my brother soon. The Gage wondered if the Cho-tse brigand had the education to appreciate it for what it was.
Well, he thought. It won’t matter for long.
He felt—mostly—tired. Tired, and concerned with the boat swamping and for what had happened to the crewman who screamed. Not in particular concerned with this rag-eared exile tiger, whose expression was beginning to resemble that of a kitten who had scaled too large a tree. The Cho-tse had expected easy pickings and quick capitulation, and his scorn for the hairless monkey-men had left him at a serious disadvantage.
He was obviously considering whether to spring. The Gage wondered if this particular Cho-tse had access to the strange innate magics some of them were said to possess, or if it might be the sort of thing that was stripped from an exile with shredded ears. Perhaps there was a way to let the tiger off with some face intact?
If so, the Gage couldn’t think of it. But quick thinking under pressure had never exactly been his strong suit.
The Cho-tse never had to decide. There came a swoop and a rush of air as if through vast black wings. The Godmade—Nizhvashiti—settled beside them, at the Gage’s left hand as the Dead Man was on his right. The narrow booted foot came down on the deck of the tilting ice-boat, and the deck that had been in danger of swamping settled and leveled. The Godmade folded long fingers at chest height, over the knob of an ebony staff, and sighed with an expression that said clearly, You picked the wrong caravan, friend.
The Cho-tse looked like he knew it, too.
“Look,” the Godmade said. “How about you help us get these trees out of the river, and we can all part friends? It’s the path of least res
istance.”
The Cho-tse brigand had crouched back, anticipating an attack. Now, though his lip curled, he straightened up and even leaned a little forward. His accent was so thick it took the Gage several moments to understand his next words. “What’s in it for me?”
He had balls. Large, furry ones, as a point of fact.
The Gage said, “We’ll pay your labor, of course.”
Slowly, the Cho-tse nodded. “All right.”
The Dead Man sighed, much put-upon. And reluctantly pulled his soaking veil back up again.
* * *
It was hard, dirty work. But it was just work, and at least it wasn’t killing. Druja the caravan master came out to supervise, and seemed irritated that the Gage had offered to pay off the brigand rather than just slaughtering him. But he forked over some gold that the Gage also knew perfectly well had been set aside for bribing border officials, and was this really all that different?
Perhaps some people thought so.
The Cho-tse, honestly, didn’t do that much work, and slunk off as soon as nobody was looking at him. He was probably irritated too, since he’d have to put his barrier back up again before he could stop the next caravan. The Gage wasn’t bad at heavy lifting, though, and once they all hauled the ice-boat out to get it free of the barricade and to inspect the hull, the felled trees were swiftly dealt with.
It would have been faster to portage one boat. But not all three.
It turned out that the Godmade, with the intercession of the Good Daughter, had summoned up a favorable current to push the trailing ice-boats out of the trap, and that was what had prevented a massive collision. Druja was more impressed with that—even when the Godmade explained that it had only been possible because the water of this river was in some metaphysical sense also the water of the Sarathai—but he didn’t offer to refund Nizhvashiti’s price of passage.
At last the ice-boats were afloat again, but it was nearly dark, and Druja made the decision to tie up and wait out the night, despite the Dead Man’s fretting over lost time. The Cho-tse was judged likely to stay cowed, and it seemed reasonable that there would be no other brigands or large predators in his territory.
The Stone in the Skull Page 6
