by Paul Stewart
He made to step off the screemound, one bony hand outstretched, but Leah stopped him by raising the sidewinder to her shoulder.
‘That’s far enough, preacherman,’ she warned. ‘I ain’t fixing to make a new acquaintance.’
The man’s eyes had strayed, and he was looking right past her at the camp, where their equipment was spread out on the wyrmeskin for all to see, along with the backpacks, cooking pot and water gourds.
And the sack.
It was tethered to a heavy boulder close by the blackened remains of the fire, and as Leah glanced round, it moved, angular shapes writhing beneath the rough material. She turned back to face the stone prophet, whose eyes had narrowed.
‘What’s that you got in the sack?’ he asked, jumping off the screemound and taking a step towards her.
‘What’s that to do with you?’
‘Thought I saw it moving, is all.’ He paused. ‘Wouldn’t be trading in live goods, would you?’
He took another step towards her, his eyes glistening.
‘That’s no concern of yours.’
‘So you wouldn’t mind if I took a look then?’
‘You take one step and I’ll shoot you down like the no-good suntouched heaven-pedlar that you are …’
The man raised his hands. ‘Surely it ain’t worth threatening old Ichabod over?’ His eyes bored into Leah’s. ‘’Specially with a crossbow that ain’t cranked nor loaded …’
Ichabod’s hand slipped into the folds of his tattered shirt and Leah flinched and backed away, still clutching the all but useless sidewinder. When he withdrew it, she saw that he was holding a small liquor flask.
‘Care for a swig while we talk the matter over?’ Ichabod said, smiling gap-toothed as he approached her. Leah could smell the sour odour of his unwashed skin and the rank grease of his hair. ‘Finest green spirit in all the wyrmeweald,’ he told her, grinning lopsidedly. ‘Smooth as soulskin …’
There was a sudden humming sound, followed by a tinny clank, and the flask exploded in the scarecrow’s hand. Leah spun round and flung herself down onto the wyrmeskin behind her, scattering the carefully laid out equipment in all directions. She turned back, green eyes hard, a wyrmebarb grasped in one hand and a serrated harpoon in the other – only to find that the stone prophet had fled.
‘Did I get him?’ said Solomon, approaching the camp moments later, grinning, his strong even teeth white against the blue-black stubble of his jaw. In one hand he held a slim spitbolt; in the other, a brace of plump manderwyrmes, their striped bodies limp and wings dangling.
‘No,’ said Leah darkly. She laid the weapons aside and climbed to her feet. ‘But you did his liquor flask a mortal injury.’ She kicked the remnants of the tin bottle at her feet.
‘Who was he?’
‘Just some crazy preacherman out scavenging, I reckon.’ Her eyes narrowed as she pushed back her hair from her face. ‘What took you so long?’
Solomon shrugged and held up the manderwyrmes. ‘Had to do some hard climbing to snag these, Leah. Climbed nigh on halfway up those bluffs before I could get me a clear shot …’
The vermilion cliffs were home to manderwyrme, spike back and blue wing colonies, that nested in a squawking, flapping, flame-spitting cacophony in the shallow caves and ledges of its upper reaches. It was a good place to camp, though that was not why they were there.
Solomon searched the jumble of equipment scattered across the rock until he found a gutting knife, and then set about skinning and filleting the manderwyrmes. Leah went across and untied the sack, carefully opening it and tethering the whitewyrme by the neck when its head appeared.
It had grown, she noted, its yellow eyes already darting and alert with an intelligence that made her uneasy. Soon it would be too big for the sack, and too strong for the tether, and what was more, this whitewyrme would know it.
Solomon tossed over chunks of the freshly butchered manderwyrme meat and Leah fed them to the whitewyrme, taking care not to let the creature’s snapping needle fangs nip her fingertips. It ate voraciously, pausing now and again to scrutinize her with a yellow eye.
‘We can’t wait any longer, Sol,’ she said when the wyrme had eaten its fill and she had forced it back into the sack with tugs on the choke-chain and encouraging prods from a rock-spike.
Solomon was crouched over the fire, gently coaxing a flame with the last of their fuel. The clouds had thickened, and a bitter halfwinter wind was now cutting across the plateau.
‘I surely know it,’ he conceded, dropping meat into the cooking pot and beginning the makings of a stew. ‘It’s just like Jesse to get distracted by some fool side-business over there at the tarn, when right here is the source of our returner’s wealth. But you know Jesse, Leah. Never would listen to reason.’
Solomon peered over at the sack, which no longer writhed with agitation, but now rose and fell gently.
‘It’s bad enough we’ve lost Esau’s muscle to the nursing of Beth’s injury,’ said Leah, and shook her head ruefully. She was packing up their rucksacks before the yellow-grey skies fulfilled their promise of snow. ‘She’ll die of it for sure, for it takes kin to heal kin wounds. We’re only gonna meet up with the one of them at our winter den. You and I both know it.’
Solomon nodded, and stirred the pot.
‘But now Jesse ain’t showed up, and I’m fearing it’ll just be the two of us on this here venture. And that scares me, Sol.’ Her nose crinkled. ’Specially when I think of where we have to go,’ she added.
‘I surely know it,’ Solomon repeated, rubbing a hand over his stubbled jaw.
He pulled at the cord round his neck and took a small leather pouch from under his tunic and loosed the tie. Tipping out its contents into a cupped palm, he raised it for Leah’s inspection.
‘Three opals, one sapphire and a half-cut blackstone,’ he said, as Leah looked down at the small dull stones in his hand. ‘That’s it. That’s all we’ve got to show for our long years of toil and tribulation up here in the high country, the five of us – and we must be ’bout the hardest flint-heart kith around, by my reckoning.’
He turned the gemstones over in his hand, then slipped them back into the pouch, which he concealed beneath his coat. He looked up, and the flames gleamed on his shaved head.
‘But now we have the means to turn that whitewyrme into a fistful of wealth we can scarcely imagine.’ He raised his hand and clenched it. ‘Think of it, Leah, wealth that’ll buy us a fine estate back on the plains, just like we always dreamed of, and a farm apiece for Esau and Jesse into the bargain – and all of it will fit into this fist of mine. Returner’s wealth. And if we have to go into the caverns of the keld to get it, just the two of us, then I say it’s a risk worth taking.’
Solomon’s eyes sparkled, and Leah smiled as she leaned forward towards him. She placed her hand on his.
‘Returner’s wealth,’ she said, and kissed him.
Forty-Two
Thrace braced herself, her eyes narrowed against the blizzard of small hard snowflakes that flew at her as Aseel soared across the sky. They pattered against her soulskin; they stung her face, her hands, her eyes.
The whitewyrme’s powerful wings beat up and down, his shoulder muscles rippling rhythmically beneath her with every movement. The long arch of his neck stretched out before her, while behind, she could feel the constant sweep of his tail as Aseel adjusted to the evershift of the icy wind.
Gripping hold of his jutting shoulder ridge with numb fingers, she leaned across and stared down into the streak and smear of the landscape below. It was bleak here, treeless and scrubfree, with steep cliff-faces and jagged stacks, and boulderfields with deep perilous crevices crouched between the jumble of huge irregular slabs. It was a harsh trail to cross on foot, but up here on Aseel’s back, it raced past with every wingbeat, like a fast-flowing river.
She s
at up straight and tasted the flakes that clung to her lips with her tongue. They were cold and pure, and tasted of the sky.
Thrace leaned forward, wrapped her arms around the whitewyrme’s neck, her fingertips seeking out the jagged scar, her cheek pressed against his smooth glassy scales. She felt the warmth of his body on her cold skin. She breathed in his rich musky scent and felt a tiny, yet unmistakeable, shudder pass beneath her touch.
She raised an arm tentatively, pressed her nose against the palm of her hand and breathed in long and deep. It was still there, faint but detectable, the taint of kithodour.
Aseel had noticed it the moment she’d run up to him back at the high pass. He’d recoiled with a judder and bared his fangs, and she had stepped willingly into the billowing clouds of wyrmesmoke that poured from his mouth, bathing her, cleansing her, scouring her body of the fetid odour.
Yet she could still smell it on her hand.
The smell of kith; the smell of death – and they were one and the same. Dead wyrmes. Their rank odour had been everywhere. In the oil kith burned, the boots and clothes they wore, the skins they lay down and slept upon at night. The stench, rank and distasteful, was in their pores, their hair, upon their breath …
Her eyes darkened and her pulse quickened.
‘It will leave me, Aseel,’ she whispered, ‘this smell of death.’
The whitewyrme tensed beneath her, and Thrace flinched at the sound of the ugly guttural words that had come too easily to her lips. She tensed, and then sat back, arching her back and tilting this way and that as she attuned her movements once more to the sway of the neck and the sweep of the tail.
Aseel understood, and he stretched his wings wide and glided on the rushing currents of the wind. He had accepted her back, and she was one with him.
Thrace’s gaze softened. The boy, Micah, was new to the weald and had yet to acquire the kith odour. The scent of his skin had been warm and sweet, she remembered, like aromatic leafcrush or fresh-trodden moss. He was not like the others. Not yet. She recalled his awkward looks and gestures that said so much more to her than his stilted faltering words.
‘You interest me …’
But it was not just curiosity she’d detected in those wide eyes, but something deeper and more intense. Something that had made her burn inside.
Beneath her, Aseel shifted, but Thrace was too lost in thought to notice. Now, the icy wind dragged at her suddenly tense and stooped body, and Aseel became aware of a burden upon his back, heavy and snagging, and he flexed his shoulders and beat his powerful wings in vexation.
Yes, he’d been reunited with Thrace, but she seemed different – and both of them knew it.
In apology, Thrace relaxed her muscles and balanced herself once more, and the rhythm returned to Aseel’s wingbeats. She would not allow this kith boy into her thoughts, she told herself – would not allow him to destroy this feeling of exhilaration.
For that was what kith did. Every last one. They sullied and desecrated. They spoiled everything they touched. They stole wyrmelings that had taken long decades to hatch; they slaughtered whitewyrmes and murdered their kin. They ran their foul hands over helpless bodies, groping, probing. She could still taste the rancid rag that had been stuffed inside her mouth …
She gripped the lance tightly, her body flexed and her face a grim mask. Beneath her, Aseel thrust his neck forward, opened his jaws, and a great yellow and white plume of flame roared before them, turning the driving snow to wisps of steam.
The landscape sped past below them in smudged streaks of muted colour. Stained browns and smeared ochres. And far in the distance, like a droplet of blood on pure white skin, was redwater. Though as they approached, Thrace realized – with a jolt that she hoped Aseel would not notice, but knew he would – that it was the kithname for the place, uttered by the kithwoman, that had lodged inside her head.
The gutting tarn.
Forty-Three
‘Never thought I’d say this,’ said Eli, turning to Micah, ‘but I’m surely beginning to miss that talkative tongue of yours.’
Micah shrugged and stared disconsolately into the distance. Eli turned back and resumed his steady tramp up the screeslip of the mountainside towards the high pass.
‘It’s that kin girl, ain’t it, lad?’ he said a while later. ‘Kin’s ways are different from ours, Micah. Like I told you before, they’re wild, untameable. We can’t tread the same trail as them, no matter how much we wish we could.’
Behind him, Eli heard a muffled grunt, followed by a long sigh. A while after that, closer to the top and with the snow already falling, Eli spoke again.
‘You let me know when you want to rest up, son. We’ve got two days ahead of us. More, if this weather sets in.’
And this time Micah didn’t manage a single sound, and Eli swung round with half a mind to chide him for his lack of response, only to see that the boy had heard, and was nodding, and he recognized the look of keen bleak despair in his eyes.
‘The gutting tarn, the place where we’re headed,’ Eli began, as he fell into step with the silent boy, ‘it’s quite a sight to behold.’
Micah nodded.
He’d felt disinclined to talk ever since Thrace and Aseel had left them the day before, yet the cragclimber’s voice had kept breaking into his thoughts, and though he knew Eli was endeavouring to buoy up his spirits, he was in no mood to listen. He’d fallen back a ways, to dissuade him from such endeavours, but Eli himself had slowed his pace and now was walking beside him – and despite himself, Micah found he was beginning to listen to the cragclimber’s low rumble of a voice.
‘But it’s the smell of the tarn,’ Eli was saying, and his face screwed up. ‘That’s what’ll hit you first. Gutsmen use the tarn because its sides are steep and ridged – well-suited for leaving the organs they gut to drain, while the texture of the rock itself is just right for fleshing and scripping down carcasses. But such work comes at a cost.’ He glanced round at Micah. ‘The lake’s dead,’ he told him, his grip tightening on the handle of his walking staff. ‘When the wind’s in the right direction, it gives off a putrid stench that can be smelled from miles off.’
Micah pulled his tattered cape tighter around him, listening intently.
‘Them gutsmen are a rough lot, even for kith,’ Eli went on. ‘They live in fortified rock barrows close by the tarn, despite its foul odour, and their only interest is the distillation of flameoil, wyrmemusk, gall-tincture and the like from the organs they harvest. And they are wasteful in their greed for these things. They think nothing of slaughtering a wyrme for a single gland or growth that they deem valuable, and simply abandoning the rest. For the only thing these tarn gutsmen are interested in is accruing returner’s wealth, so that they might leave the high country and return to the plains …’
Eli hesitated, reached up and gripped the brim of his hat, pulling it down against the snow, which had started to fall. He tugged at an earlobe.
‘Returner’s wealth,’ said Micah. ‘That’s what I came to the weald for … Though I had but the haziest notion of how to come by it.’
‘Anything of high value that is small enough to be carried back to the low plains counts as returner’s wealth,’ Eli told him. ‘Powerful elixirs, some might choose; rarest wyrme ivory for others, or best of all, precious gemstones – though acquiring them means descending into those dark dangerous places beneath the mountains …’
‘And why are they best?’ asked Micah, fascinated.
‘Because,’ said Eli, ‘they are the easiest to transport on the perilous, oft-times fatal, journey back from the wyrmeweald. Kith have had to learn that the hard way. Returner’s wealth is no use if it’s too heavy or bulky to be carried safely back, and few kith are up to more than a couple of journeys.’ He smiled wryly. ‘The wyrmeweald would be full to bursting if people from the plains could come and go with ease, but as it is, f
ew survive the journey up here, and fewer still survive the return. They’re not like kin …’
He hesitated, aggrieved by his mention of kin that would bring Micah right back to the very thoughts he’d been endeavouring to distract him from. But the boy didn’t seem to have noticed.
‘Where’s your returner’s wealth?’ he asked.
‘I don’t have none,’ said Eli evenly. ‘I don’t need it,’ he added, ‘for I don’t aim to return, Micah. Not ever. The wyrmeweald is my home.’
They rested up in a damp hollow shortly after crossing the crest of the pass, when the snow became too thick for them to continue with confidence. Eli used some of his precious flameoil to tease a fire from sodden firewood. Micah sat before the hissing blaze, legs outstretched and the bottoms of his breeches steaming. Carefully, he eased off his finely tooled boots and examined his tired and aching feet. The nails were unfamiliar grey and the skin was white, and when he inspected the soles, he saw the telltale signs of creeping skinpeel.
He fumbled in his backpack and found the small pot of salve that Jura the wyrmekin had given them. It seemed an age since Micah had lain in the cavern behind the waterfall and listened to her whispered conversation with Eli. Opening the pot, he methodically rubbed the aromatic whiterot salve into his feet, one after the other. The cragclimber had cared deeply for the wyrmekin, and she for him. Perhaps that was what had kept him in the wyrmeweald all these years. Thrace’s face came into Micah’s mind, and an ache tightened his chest.
He arose early the following morning, hardbitten with raw cold, and he stamped his feet and hugged his arms to his body until the sluggish blood in his veins started to flow. He’d have liked to warm himself by a fire, but Eli seemed anxious to move on, and he had to content himself with blowing warm air onto his fingers as they started down the rockside.
The previous day’s snowfall was wet and soft beneath their feet, and dripped from jutting rocks. They headed down over the stepped rock almost as quickly as Thrace had suggested, and entered the broad gulch as the pale-grey sun was halfway up in the sky. The snow here was melting in earnest, and Micah’s boots broke through its slushed surface and onto bare wet rock beneath. But then later, the sky brightened and the wind chilled. Underfoot, the snowmelt froze and crusted over once more and the dripping fell silent as icicles began to form at the tips of the jutting rocks.