by Julia Knight
The horses caught their breath and they moved on at a slower pace, no one talking, content to follow her lead. She looked ahead, saw fires dotted along the various tracks of the pass and wondered if the army had any way to communicate in the dark. Most likely it did, and even if it didn’t any guards worth their cogs would have seen the commotion and would be alert.
There were smaller paths up here, narrow cracks through the crags that had never been mapped, but most of them were no good to anyone on a horse. Walking and leading the horses, perhaps. And maybe they led only to blank walls or sheer drops. She knew none of them well enough, only knew that they were there. Another glance ahead saw movement by the fires, caught glimpses of men on horses moving down towards them and decided her. Lost was better than caught between the hammer and the anvil.
She pulled her horse to a stop and waited for the others. Cospel and his pony seemed bright enough, but the other two… Dom sat in his saddle like a sack of wet fish and Vocho was slumped and whey-faced. His hand groped for his pack as soon as they stopped and brought out the bottle that Esti had given him. He took a pull on it and a deep breath afterwards, then his whole body seemed to relax. Just one more thing to worry about, but she had no time now, and wouldn’t know what to think if she did.
She sidled her horse up to Dom’s. He kept taking little sideways glances back down into the valley behind them before his eyes shied away as though they’d seen something dead and rotting, something he’d killed himself perhaps and was now haunting him.
“Dom? Dom!”
He looked at her finally, and she flinched back in the saddle at that look. He’d always seemed so carefree, even in the midst of armed men trying to kill him. Always there with a faux-bumble to make her laugh, or a grin as sharp as daggers drawn, hinting at who he was underneath all the pretence. Now he looked every one of the ten years he had on her, and more. It was in the slump of his shoulders, the twitching of his mouth in the faint light, the hands that kept opening and closing, opening and closing. She was glad she couldn’t see him properly, but she could see enough to give her pause.
“Dom,” she said again, and finally he seemed to see her. “Do you know any of these paths?”
“What? I… I… Maybe.” He shook himself like a dog and seemed to get a grip then, became his usual sharp-eyed self yet with an undercurrent, as though he’d let slip the real him. He wouldn’t look her in the eye when he spoke, but kept his gaze behind them, maybe hoping to catch a glimpse of someone, something. “I know a few paths, the less used ones. But for all these cracks are a maze for us to lose people in, there’s the long narrow part at the other end, in Reyes, the Throttled Neck, they call it. No other way but that, and all they need do is set enough men there and there’s no way through for us.”
Kass’s horse flicked its ears forward then twitched one to the side, stamped and sidled, gearing up for a fight, and she trusted his hearing better than any of theirs. Cospel whipped his head round, and she was kicking her horse on even before he said anything–he didn’t need to. She could now hear the jangle of harness, the snick of a bit between teeth, the breath of horses hard pushed.
“Pick a path,” she said to Dom. “We’ll deal with the Neck when we come to it. Just pick one!”
He hesitated. For a second she was reminded of Dom the bumbler as she’d first known him, pretending to be the idiot. He looked utterly lost until a man shouting up the defile galvanised him to action.
“This way.” He didn’t stop to see if they followed but reined his horse about and spurred it into a crack between the rocks so small and dark she thought he’d lost his cogs. Then his horse’s quarters disappeared into the gloom so thoroughly she wouldn’t have believed it if she hadn’t seen it. She kicked her own on, with Vocho and Cospel hard on her heels. Her beast tried for Vocho’s with a hind leg and caught it a glancing blow that made it more careful as any faint light ceased in the narrowness of the crack.
The way widened after a short time and she almost barrelled into Dom as he waited in silence. The sounds behind grew louder, louder still until it seemed the men that hunted them must almost be on top of them, before they gradually faded to murmurs and the spang of steel shoe on rock. It wouldn’t be long before there were more. Finally there was silence except for their own breathing–Vocho’s was a staggered hitching breath that sounded odd–the soft movements of the horses, the hiss of wind across stones.
When all sounds of their followers had gone, Dom led them on at a fair pace–not fast enough to make too much noise, but not too slow either. The way opened up further, letting in a little moonlight, just enough to see the way once their eyes were accustomed to it. All of them stayed silent, for reasons of their own. Kass nudged her horse up next to Dom’s and watched him a while from under her eyelashes.
It seemed to her that Dom was not one thing or another, that she was constantly peeling back layers to see another underneath. First a bumbling fool, then an assassin, now… now what? Now a man with a furrow in his brow, a silence that lay on his shoulders like the weight of years, and a hand that opened and closed, opened and closed as though grasping for something that wasn’t there, that had never been there.
The crack twisted and turned, widened and narrowed, branched so often Kass was hard put to name which way north lay. Finally she broke the silence but in a hushed tone that made her wonder what she was afraid of–hunters behind or the quiet of the trail.
“Dom, do you know the way?”
He laughed at that, a sad and hopeless sound swallowed up by the rocks that towered over them. “I’ve never known my way. Has anyone? I’m only groping as blindly as the rest.” He grimaced at that and spared her a glance that told her nothing at all. “Not the answer you wanted. No, not really. Not even the goats that live here know all the paths, I’m sure.”
“I’m sure I can hear a but in there somewhere.”
The laugh was brighter this time, and his shoulders lost some of their tense droop. “Indeed. But I think I can get us where we need to be. I just can’t be sure what we’ll find once we get there, or that no one will find us in the meantime. Come dawn they’ll find our trail. A scuff of steel-shod hoof on stone, a disturbed bird, a stray wisp of smoke if we dare a fire, or the smell of horses if we don’t, an echo out of place. The men they’ll send aren’t woodsmen, but some are mountain men. They can see a goat’s bleat across the valley. And… the life-warriors.” He hesitated, cast her a look that debated whether he should say more and plunged on. “They aren’t just people, not just men. They don’t stop. Ever, unless they’re dead. It’s easy to think they don’t have a heart, that maybe they have cogs instead like the Clockwork God. Like they’re battle machines. They certainly fight like it, and it’s a mercy they’re so few. Only one weakness, so far as I know.”
“They have a weakness?”
He looked at her quizzically but only said, “Yes. Of a kind. It does rather depend on you killing one of them, which is a drawback seeing as it’s so damned difficult. They have this, what’s the word? Geas? Basically it means if one dies, the other is honour bound to follow him to the afterlife as soon as he can. A lone life-warrior is a man with no honour and no soul. That’s what they believe anyway. All to do with the two warriors being two halves of one soul or somesuch. So–” he smiled brightly as though suggesting a nice picnic “–all we have to do is kill one of each pair. Which is, er, about two dozen life-warriors in total, and I’d say Orgull will have all of them with him. Nothing to it.”
Kass stared blindly ahead, remembering a sudden sword in the dark. “So if there was one life-warrior on his own…”
“Impossible. They’d rather die than live without the other. They’ve been known to take the matter into their own hands–they carry a blade for just that purpose.”
“Just say there was. What would that mean?”
Dom raised an eyebrow. “Well, I’d say you’ve got a man who knows how to gut an opponent silently twenty different ways, who thinks
he has no honour and no soul, a man who thinks those two things are everything that matters. A man with nothing to lose and everything to gain, a man unafraid of death even more than he was before. Not a man I’d chose to fight, to be honest.” He pondered a moment. “It’d probably be quicker and more painless just to gut yourself and have done with it. Now, tell me why you ask.”
Was it her or had it gone suddenly cold? Her hair prickled with the itch of a thousand biting ants; the rock walls seemed to close in and at the same time seethe with shadows that could hide a man determined to do whatever he needed to.
“Before we reached the army,” she said at last. “He’d followed us from Ikaras, I’m sure, watched us at the house there.”
She told him the rest too, how she thought he was something to do with Alicia, how he’d played with them, how helpless she’d felt–and that last was a wrench to admit but somehow with Dom it was OK.
When she’d finished, he was silent a long time. She looked back at Vocho and Cospel, saw one only barely holding on to his saddle, white with pain, the other nodding and waking himself up on the apex of his snores. Dom followed her look and, with an unspoken agreement, they began to look for somewhere safe to stop, as safe as anywhere could be in mountains swarming with people who wanted to kill them.
Dom kicked his horse on ahead while she dropped back next to Vocho, who said no word when she appeared at his side, only stared at his horse’s ears, Esti’s fast-emptying bottle and reins clutched in one hand, the other white on his saddle. It was the silence that perturbed her. Vocho could always be relied on to say something annoying, but now he was silent as the rocks above, as the waiting night. Beads of sweat popped out on his forehead like berries before they broke and rolled down his already drenched face. Yet he’d not complained. If he had, she’d not have let Dom take them so far before they tried to find a place to hole up.
She talked to him as they went on–of nothing much, her mind distracted by how old he looked. He was bent as an eighty-year-old docker, shoulders stooped, hands clawed. She was glad when Dom dropped back and told her he’d found a good spot just ahead, though again they shared a look–this was not the time to stop and probably no place counted as good, only the best he could find.
It was the best she could have hoped for in the circumstances–a widening of the trail, open at each end so they could see down the path and there was little chance of ambush. To one side was a hollow in the rocks, not a cave exactly but a deep overhang which would shelter them from what felt like another storm coming in and hid them from above. It wasn’t going to be comfortable, but it was as safe as they could hope to be.
They had to help Vocho off his horse, and that was when Kass really started to worry. They tried talking to him but all they got was a wan “I just need to rest. And the jollop, so I can.” So they made him as comfortable as they could, bedded down on a patch of grassy soil among the rocks. Cospel saw to the horses, fed them from the dwindling supply of grain in their bags, checked their legs, rubbed them down and slipped their bits so they might find what they could to eat–a few hardy bushes and tough grasses scrambled for a life in cracks and nooks. Kass’s horse was even worse than normal, and in the end she had to tether him as far from the others as they could before he took a chunk out of one of them. At least she could be sure anyone trying to attack from that direction was going to get more than they bargained for.
When she came back under the overhang, Vocho was in a twitching, clenched sort of sleep, Esti’s bottle in one hand, and Cospel had fallen asleep sitting up with his back to the rock wall. Dom was waiting for her. He leaned back against a rock, and she thought that she’d never seen him nervous before–when he was acting the idiot didn’t count. Now he was fiddling with a bit of harness and trying not to look at her while looking at her. He made a mess of the harness, swore, apologised for swearing and started on the harness again.
“So, you’re too polite to ask, but you want to know,” he said in the end. “Correct?”
She sank down next to him and watched him carefully. She was dying to know, but it hadn’t been politeness that had stopped her–more wanting to get out alive coupled with not knowing how to bring it up. “Correct.”
He blew out a breath, threw the bit of harness and ran a distracted hand through his hair before he chanced a grin. “I have this friend, you see. He’s not very smart and gets into trouble. I could tell you about him.”
She couldn’t help but laugh at that. “All right.”
“So, this friend. Bit of an idiot when he was young, all those romantic notions, you know? How the world is supposed to be, what’s good and right. What justice is. Poor fool. Well, there he was, bound not to hold anything above his oath to the guild. You know the words–no spouse, no children, nothing to distract you from what you’ve sworn to. Dalliances, OK. Flings, no problem. Full-blown affairs, absolutely fine and dandy, just as long as you recall who your master is, and it is the guild. But this friend… well. This poor fool of a friend had to go and fall in love. And because he had all these romantic notions of, basically, stupidness, he went and married the object of his desire. It took a lot of lies–to her, to the guild, to Eneko–but he did it and thought himself ever so clever, and that a few lies for something so… so grand, so bloody world-shattering was a small price to pay. And he was happy for a while, deliriously so, and so was she, and all was right in the world. True love conquers all, star-crossed lovers make good, cosmic justice–all that sort of crap.”
He shook his head at that, laughed ruefully and ran the hand through his hair again.
“So, what happened?” she asked when it looked like he wasn’t going to carry on.
“What happened? Well, what happened was he got careless. Even more stupid than he’d been originally. Two sorts of stupid even. The worst, the stupidest, was thinking he was above the guild and its oath. That Eneko would make an exception for him because, well, because he was Eneko’s apprentice and personal assassin, and we know how very loyal he is, don’t we? I thought I knew how loyal, much like you thought you did. I learned fast and hard. The worst part was so did she. Cee. Alicia. Whatever you want to call her. My wife.”
“You married a magician?” She stared at him, aghast.
“God’s cogs, no. Do you take me for that much of a fool? She was no magician then. There’s a lot of things she wasn’t then. We were both very young, and she was… well, not innocent exactly, but we shared the same sort of romantic, idiotic notions. And it hit her harder when that all turned to shit. I’d lied to her, you see. For noble reasons–to protect her because I loved her. She’d never known I was a guildsman, never knew that, legally, our marriage was invalid. That she was now mother to a bastard. Eneko went to see her, and I don’t know what he said or did. I know I came home and there was no baby, only her ready and waiting with a knife. Something turned in her then, and she found the hard place inside her. It was always there, perhaps, underneath, waiting for the right circumstances to bring it out. We were very alike in many ways. But that it should come out like that… She tried to kill me. Almost managed it, gave me a scar on my belly that reminds me of her every day. I deserved it too. I still deserve it. She left–who can blame her? And I went to Eneko, to try to work something out, find out what he’d said, where the child was. My little Maitea. All I got for my trouble was thrown out of the guild, and Eneko gave everyone some bullshit reason. He’d sent our daughter away, he said, and I believed that. I still do, live in hope that it’s true and I might find her again. But then I’d no one, nothing left. No wife, no child, no guild, no way to get any of them back. My father disowned me for the disgrace; he still hasn’t forgiven me, as you might recall from our little escapade in the Shrive. He had to move out to the country, become someone new to escape the shame I’d brought on him. But the worst was no Cee, no little Maitea with her dimpled smile, and that crushed me. I thought I could make it right. I could find what Eneko had done with our daughter, bring her back, make Ce
e love me again. Only I couldn’t–can’t. I thought maybe Eneko had sent her with the slaves he was selling to Ikaras, so eventually I followed, went to Ikaras and the university, met Bakar there even, that much is true. And Cee was there already. I saw her once, and she was, well, she wasn’t the girl I married. That girl died the day she tried to kill me. But then I’m not the boy she married either, not any more. So no, I didn’t marry a magician. I made her one, perhaps. Made her bitter enough to take that route. I tried to find her again but it was like she’d vanished. So when I saw her again, after all this time…”
He sat up straight and took a deep breath, ran a hand over his face and ended by pinching the bridge of his nose. “Well, that went on a bit longer than I expected. So there you have it.” He looked at her oddly, shyly almost, as though worried what her reaction was going to be.
And what was her reaction? She couldn’t be sure, felt all kinds of things but said, “Funny how love makes idiots of all of us.” She thought of Petri with a shiver that wasn’t all regret, of how blind he’d made her just by being there. Blind and deaf to everything else. She couldn’t be sure she’d not do it again either if–no, when–she saw him. Because Vocho was right, damn his eyes. She was going back to Reyes for Petri. Because she’d once loved him, and he’d once loved her and, god’s cogs, she wanted to feel like that again. And love was making her blind.
She looked over at Voch, where he lay all twisted up and muttering in his sleep. She’d pushed him too far, too hard, she knew that. Knew that he’d been right, that this was madness, and yet she couldn’t stop.