Moog threw up his hands, exasperated. “Babies! They’re going to breed with her, Gabriel. Are you still okay with this?”
“She’s dangerous,” Gabe murmured, but without his earlier conviction.
Moog jabbed a finger on Gabriel’s plate armour. “You’re dangerous. Heathen’s bloody balls, I’m dangerous. Ganelon’s a natural fucking disaster! Excuse my language,” he said to the chieftain, though if she understood him she gave no indication. “So Sabbatha has a sordid past! Don’t we all? We’ve all done plenty of things we’re not proud of.”
Clay thought of Ganelon trapped in the Quarry, a prisoner in his own flesh. “We can’t give them Larkspur,” he said. “Or Sabbatha, whichever she is. We just … can’t.”
Gabriel sighed in resignation. “Okay, fine. So Kit stays?”
“I feel like that should be off the table by now,” Kit said. “Also, I am lamentably ill equipped for making babies.”
“No one stays,” Clay uttered.
Gabriel set his jaw. “We fight, then.” He glanced around, trying to number the guards within the smoke-shrouded interior of the tent.
There were six, Clay knew, since he’d already counted, though one was an old man and was holding his spear upside down.
“You and I can handle these,” he told Gabriel. “Moog, you get outside and warn the others. Light some fires, maybe open a few of those cages we saw. Gabe and I will be right behind you. Got it?”
Moog closed his eyes. “No.”
“Good. Now when … wait, no?”
“There’s another way,” said the wizard. “A better way. We don’t need to kill anyone, or leave one of us behind.”
Clay glanced over Gabriel’s shoulder. The chieftain was watching them with the appraising regard of something waiting for you to die so it could peck at your corpse.
“Moog, if it involves faking our deaths I don’t think it’s gonna work this time.”
“No, I know,” said Moog. He reached up and pulled the pointed hat off his head. “But this will.”
Chapter Thirty-six
Rambling On
Moog was right: They settled it without blood, though the wizard looked close to tears when negotiations ended and he handed the enchanted hat to Teresa, who in turn offered it to the chieftain, who reached her hand inside and drew out a slab of raw red beef.
“She’s not even using it right,” he complained.
The massive woman wolfed it down almost without chewing, and afterward loosed a tremendous belch, which Teresa took the liberty of translating.
“CHIEFTAIN IS PLEASED,” he announced.
“She ought to be,” Moog grumbled. “This …walrus gets free steak for life, and we get stuck with a … stuck with a …” He trailed off, absently smoothing his beard against the front of his robe.
Clay placed a consoling hand on his shoulder. “Moog, you did—”
“Her fingers,” he hissed.
“I saw them.”
“No, you didn’t. You didn’t, Clay. You didn’t see them.” The wizard’s voice skirled higher with every word. He took hold of Clay’s arm, his fingers trembling like a child hauled from the waters of a winter lake. “Clay, they’re healed.”
Clay shook his head. What the wizard said didn’t make sense. The rot didn’t heal. The rot spread. The rot withered your flesh and made husks of your organs. The rot killed you. Always.
Moog was starting to bounce on the soles of his feet. A smile that threatened to tear his face in half spread from one ear to another. “They’re healed! Clay, look! She’s licking them!”
And so she was. Scant minutes ago those fingers had been useless, diseased beyond hope of reclamation.
Except apparently not.
Moog slipped around Clay and leapt toward the chieftain’s bedside. The guards made to intercept him, but Teresa settled them with a wave. Shooing the servant girl away, the wizard knelt beside the gargantuan woman and flexed his hands like a thief preparing to tackle an especially complex lock. “May I?” he asked.
The woman rolled her big shoulders and offered her right arm to Moog, while the other plunged back into the magic hat and withdrew an uncooked chicken leg.
The wizard marvelled over the pudgy pink fingers. “I can’t believe it,” he breathed. “They’re still a bit stiff, actually, but otherwise … I just can’t even believe it.”
Teresa cleared his throat and pointed toward the chieftain’s feet. “SAME HERE. STONE SKIN. IS BETTER NOW.”
Sure enough, the woman’s right foot was sheathed in a black crust that flaked off as she wriggled her toes. Moog laughed and clapped his hands. “Brilliant! Beautiful!” He looked to his friends. “It’s the mudweed. It must be. I mean, it fixed Matrick’s arm almost overnight. It set the bones in Sabbatha’s wing. Your nose, Clay—it was broken, right? Does it even hurt?”
Clay blinked. “Actually, no.” He hadn’t thought of it since waking up this morning. He touched it now, cautiously, and found there was no pain at all. It was still crooked, but since he’d had as many broken noses as he’d had birthdays, crooked was the best he could hope for. “But you—” he broke off, because what if it hadn’t been the mudweed that cured the rot? Moog might very well have built up his hopes only to see them dashed to pieces again.
“Yes, I smoked it, too,” said the wizard, and his eyes drifted to the tip of his left foot. “With everything that’s happened, I suppose I haven’t … I mean, I can’t feel it, but …” He went very still, and Clay could see his dear old friend steeling himself against the possibility of disappointment. With the trepidation of a frightened child kneeling to peek under its bed, Moog reached down and used both hands to remove his soft leather boot, and then slowly, cautiously, pulled off the sock he was wearing underneath.
His face crumpled, and just as quickly reformed—like a mask shattering in reverse. He tried opening his mouth to speak, but couldn’t seem to.
And so Clay spoke for him. “It’s gone.”
“It’s gone,” Moog gasped, as though he’d been holding his breath. He closed his eyes and exhaled a long, shuddering sigh.
The wizard sat for a while with his boot in his lap. His expression, bathed in the orange glow of smouldering embers, was torn between relief, disbelief, and utter misery. “All those years,” he moaned eventually. “So much wasted effort. So many dead ends. But I knew. I knew there had to be a way, and now there is. A cure for the rot,” he said with a mystified chuckle. “No more waiting for death. No more watching it happen. Now we can save them.”
He laughed again, but there was a bitter edge to the sound. He grinned, but the grin was a broken thing, and breaking still, until Moog was only baring his teeth below eyes that brimmed over with tears. “I could have saved him,” he whimpered, then brought his slender hands to his face and began sobbing.
Clay had no doubt who he was. Although Fredrick had been gone for nineteen years, his death was a wound the wizard had cauterized but never, ever allowed to heal.
They stood in silence as the wizard wept, unburdening himself of years and years of unexpressed grief. Only the chieftain seemed indifferent, noisily sucking meat from her chicken leg.
And so it goes, thought Clay. Life was funny, and fickle, and often cruel. Sometimes the unworthy went on living, while those who deserved better were lost.
Or not lost, he considered, since they lingered on in the hearts of those who loved them, who love them still, their memory nurtured like a sprig of green in an otherwise desolate soul. Which was, he supposed, a kind of immortality, after all.
The Boneface Clan held a feast that night in Saga’s honour, which Clay thought was tremendously gracious considering Ganelon had killed their greatest champion—not to mention a few dozen other hunters—the day before.
The chieftain remained confined to her tent, but Teresa presented Moog’s miraculous hat to the villagers, who had no reservations whatsoever about eating the food it produced. Cannibals were a notoriously adventurous people,
culinarily speaking.
Moog had cheered considerably since his breakdown earlier, stowing whatever grief remained to him wherever it was wizards kept such things. In their heads, Clay suspected, and not their hearts. He demonstrated to a crowd of awestruck Ferals the full range of the hat’s capabilities.
Out came slabs of roast venison, salted steaks, chicken spiced with subtle herbs, pork tenderloin wrapped in bacon and stuffed with mushrooms. He dazzled the children with bananas, sweet strawberries, clusters of fat purple grapes, and an enormous watermelon, which they took an unsettling delight in smashing open as if it were an enemy’s head. For dessert there were custards, cakes, and pies. There was even flavoured ice, a treat favoured by the Narmeeri, and also by Ganelon, who ate three bowls by himself.
Bowls, of course, being a loose term for hollowed-out human skulls.
Matrick was in especially high spirits after learning of Moog’s recovery, and Kit had even more good news for Agria’s exiled king. When the Ferals demanded the ghoul leave The Carnal Court, he had smuggled with him two things besides his precious batingting. The first was a bottle of sixty-year-old Tarindian Rum, and the second was Grace, the dagger Matrick had fumbled back on the ship. The king of Agria kissed the ghoul on the mouth for his trouble.
A long line of suitors formed a queue beside Larkspur, bearing gifts they hoped might persuade the daeva to forswear her companions and breed cannibal babies instead. Among the more interesting offerings was a necklace strung with clattering rat skulls and a shawl made of coarse human hair. One fellow handed her a small pouch from which she withdrew a scrap of old leather.
“What is it?” she asked through a polite smile.
Beside her, Moog spoke around a mouthful of cake. “His foreskin.”
Her smile vanished like a snowball lobbed into the mouth of a volcano. Visibly furious, she returned the flesh to the pouch, then tossed the pouch into a nearby fire. The cannibal looked on sullenly as it burned, no doubt wishing he’d bestowed such a princely gift upon someone more appreciative.
Gabriel sat apart from the others, barely eating, distracted by his concern for Rose and gazing west as the sun set beyond the smudge of distant mountains.
The entire village woke to see them off at dawn. The magic hat was still being passed from hand to hand; everywhere Clay looked Ferals were gnawing happily on duck wings, biting into loaves of warm bread, eating salt and sugar by the handful. An old woman was cradling a fish as long as her arm, occasionally hoisting it up so she could lick its scales.
Clay almost said something but decided not to bother. They’ll figure it out, he decided, watching another man consume an entire banana without peeling it first. Eventually. Maybe.
Moog was in a mood again. He was watching the ettin beside which they’d been left to wait the day before. Despite being chained by his throat to a rock, Gregor smiled and waved. After a whispered word in his brother’s ear, so did Dane. The wizard waved back, then levelled a gloomy look at Gabriel.
Gabe stirred and looked over. “What?”
The wizard said nothing.
“What?”
Still nothing. But Moog’s bottom lip edged out just a little.
Gabriel looked over at Clay, who shrugged. “Fine,” he sighed, turning back to Moog. “Go tell Teresa we’re altering the deal. The ettin is coming with us.”
The Boneface Clan had yet another gift in store for the band, and it was a doozy. Having survived (if not thrived) in the Heartwyld for who-knew-how-many generations, they had a comprehensive grasp of local geography. The elder’s son, Jeremy, offered to escort them for several days on their journey west, and the young cannibal—his head still pink from where the spark monkey’s dung had landed—showed them the secret paths known only to his kind. When the way allowed they moved at a brisk jog, and, thanks to Jeremy’s guile, managed to avoid the more treacherous parts of the forest.
Gabriel’s mood, which had been dark upon departing the village, grew steadily more optimistic as the days wore on and the low ridge of the Emperor’s Mantle became a white-capped wall and then resolved into distant, individual peaks. Clay found himself coming to grips with the skyship’s loss as well. Though the first leg of their flight had been relatively benign, the storm had served to show them how quickly things could go south—or straight down, for that matter. On the ground, at least, they weren’t so obvious a target, and if something did want to kill them it would have to do it the old-fashioned way.
At last Jeremy called a stop at the summit of a hill that sloped away westward, disappearing into a sea of murky trees.
“TIKOO PADA PA KA!” said the cannibal, gesturing first at the forest below and then back the way they had come.
“This is as far as he goes?” Clay assumed out loud.
Moog blinked at him. “I see you’ve picked up a little of the language.”
Clay shrugged. “Here and there,” he lied, and saw Matrick cover a smirk with his hand.
After Jeremy departed, Gabriel led them down into woods, though the forest they entered was very different from the one Dane experienced, enthralled as he was by his brother’s wildly inaccurate narrative. While they stepped around puddles of toxic sludge, Gregor described sparkling pools of crystalline water. When they ducked below gnarled branches whose leaves dripped poison, Dane strolled beneath the eaves of majestic oaks. According to Gregor, and therefore Dane, the charcoal sky was blue, the ashen grass was green, and the reek of a mangled carcass they came upon was in fact the scent of vividly detailed flowers.
Even the insects received a kind word. One dusk, as the rest of the party plodded through a swarm of orcflies (so-called because they were hideous if you looked at them up close), Dane marvelled at a cloud of brilliant moonbugs.
“Wow!” he said, beaming. “I wish I could see them!”
“I wish I could see them,” Clay muttered, slapping at something on the back of his neck.
They came to a bog, and Gabe led them straight on through. It was waist deep, and the footing was treacherous. More than once Clay stumbled over what he hoped was a submerged log but was probably a rotting carcass. Sabbatha (as he’d finally begun calling her in his own head) looked positively disgusted as she waded through, careful to keep her wings above the sludge. Kit, as well, kept his sacred batingting clear of the muck.
Poor Matrick tripped and went right under. He came up sputtering and groaned, “Oh dear gods, it’s in my mouth.”
In the heavy mist Clay mistook every jutting branch for the tentacle of some hidden horror, so that when something finally did come boiling up at Ganelon he was almost relieved. The warrior made short work of whatever it was. Once Syrinx had cut a few writhing limbs from its body the thing fled and did not return.
Onward they slogged, and for Clay it started to feel like old times again: Gabriel leading the way; Moog and Matrick laughing, or bickering, often both at once. Ganelon stalked with his axe in hand, spoiling for a fight, while Clay brought up the rear, desperate to avoid conflict of any sort. Following the bout of nostalgia, however, he was overcome by a pang of excruciating homesickness. He missed his wife, and his daughter, and his dog. He missed the way his home smelled, the way his bed felt. He even missed standing on the wall all day, looking north at mountains he never planned on crossing.
There was an Old Dominion road leading up out of the bog. It was straight and wide, and despite the filth that covered it the fitted stones were still intact. After wading through waist-deep water for several hours it was a welcome blessing.
“Gotta hand it to the rabbits,” said Ganelon, “they sure knew how to make a road.”
Sabbatha, walking behind him, tested the span of her wounded wing and winced in pain. “Ouch. Wait, rabbits?” she asked.
“A slang term for the druin,” Kit informed her. “And not an especially clever one if you ask me. Ah, but you should hear what the druins used to call southerners!” He looked about to expound on this before catching a sidelong glare from Ganelon
. “Alas, I … seem to have forgotten what it was.”
The daeva folded her crooked wing back over her shoulder. “Cool story,” she said. “So this road is, what, hundreds of years old?”
“Try a thousand!” crowed Moog. “It’s likely this road was in disrepair long before the Dominion fell, and when the Emperor-in-exile came this way four hundred years ago he and his followers found the ruins of a once-mighty city on the other side.”
“You mean Castia?” she asked.
The wizard chuckled. “I mean Teragoth—a druin city, much older than Castia, my dear. In fact, it was the son of Grandual’s first Emperor who founded the Republic. He and his ancestors built Castia from the ground up, and I’ve heard you can see the ruins of ancient Teragoth from the city walls.”
“You can,” said Kit.
“You’ve never been there?” the daeva asked Moog, who shook his head.
“The mountains were as far west as we ever went. We were hunting monsters, after all, and in Endland, well … the Republic took care of its monster problems long ago.”
“How so?”
Moog shrugged. “Genocide. Slavery. Second-class citizenship. The usual suspects.”
“Nevertheless,” said Kit, “the city is quite unlike any you’ll see back east. Few of Grandual’s strongholds could withstand a siege like the one Castia now endures. Its walls are a miracle of engineering, as are its bridges. And its arena, the Crucible, while not so ostentatious as the Maxithon or the Giant’s Cradle, is an undeniably beautiful building, despite its vulgar purpose. But believe me when I say that however beautiful Castia is—or was, rather—Teragoth was more splendid still.”
“Or so you’ve read,” said Sabbatha.
The ghoul’s laugh was a sound like parchment tearing. “So I’ve seen,” he told her. “It’s where I was born.”
“What? How old are you?”
Kit looked mildly offended. “Excuse me? How old are you?”
Sabbatha shrugged. “I stopped counting at sixteen.”
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