Red Country

Hell on the Cheap

Crease at night?

Picture hell on the cheap. Then add more whores.

The greatest settlement of the new frontier, that prospector’s paradise, the Fellowship’s long-anticipated destination, was wedged into a twisting valley, steep sides dotted with the wasted stumps of felled pines. It was a place of wild abandon, wild hope, wild despair, everything at extremes and nothing in moderation, dreams trodden into the muck and new ones sucked from bottles to be vomited up and trodden down in turn. A place where the strange was commonplace and the ordinary bizarre, and death might be along tomorrow so you’d best have all your fun today

At its muddy margins, the city consisted mostly of wretched tents, scenes better left unwitnessed by mankind assaulting the eye through wind-stirred flaps. Buildings were botched together from split pine and high hopes, held up by the drunks slumped against both sides, women risking their lives to lean from wonky balconies and beckon in the business.

‘It’s got bigger,’ said Corlin, peering through the jam of wet traffic that clogged the main street.

‘Lot bigger,’ grunted Savian.

‘I’d have trouble saying better, though.’

Shy was trying to imagine worse. A parade of crazed expressions reeled at them through the litter-strewn mud. Faces fit for some nightmare stage show. A demented carnival permanently in town. Off-key giggling split the jagged night and moans of pleasure or horror, the calls of pawnbrokers and the snorts of livestock, the groaning of ruined bedsteads and the squeaking of ruined violins. All composing a desperate music together, no two bars alike, spilling into the night through ill-fitting doors and windows, roars of laughter at a joke or a good spin of the gaming wheel hardly to be told from roars of anger at an insult or the bad turn of a card.

‘Merciful heaven,’ muttered Majud, one sleeve across his face against the ever-shifting stench.

‘Enough to make a man believe in God,’ said Temple. ‘And that He’s somewhere else.’

Ruins loomed from the wet night. Columns on inhuman scale towered to either side of the main street, so thick three men couldn’t have linked their arms around them. Some were toppled short, some sheared off ten strides up, some still standing so high the tops were lost to the dark above, the shifting torchlight picking out stained carvings, letters, runes in alphabets centuries forgotten, mementoes of ancient happenings, winners and losers a thousand years dust.

‘What did this place used to be?’ muttered Shy, neck aching from looking up.

‘Cleaner, at a guess,’ said Lamb.

Shacks had sprouted around those ancient columns like unruly fungi from the trunks of dead trees. Folk had built teetering scaffolds up them, and chiselled bent props into them, and hung ropes from the tops and even slung walkways between, until some were entirely obscured by incompetent carpentry, turned to nightmare ships run thousands of miles aground, decked out in torches and lanterns and garish advertising for every vice imaginable, the whole so precarious you could see the buildings shifting when the breeze got stiff.

The valley opened up as the remnants of the Fellowship threaded its way further and the general mood intensified to something between orgy, riot and an outbreak of fever. Wild-eyed revellers rushed at it all open-mouthed, fixed on ripping through a lifetime of fun before sunup, as if violence and debauch wouldn’t be there on the morrow.

Shy had a feeling they would.

‘It’s like a battle,’ grunted Savian.

‘But without any sides,’ said Corlin.

‘Or any victory,’ said Lamb.

‘Just a million defeats,’ muttered Temple.

Men tottered and lurched, limped and spun with gaits grotesque or comical, drunk beyond reason, or crippled in head or body, or half-mad from long months spent digging alone in high extremities where words were a memory. Shy directed her horse around a man making a spatter all down his own bare legs, trousers about ankles in the muck, cock in one wobbling hand while he slobbered at a bottle in the other.

‘Where the hell do you start?’ Shy heard Goldy asking her pimp. He had no answer.

The competition was humbling, all right. The women came in every shape, colour and age, lolling in the national undress of a score of different nations and displaying flesh by the acre. Gooseflesh, mostly, since the weather was tending chilly. Some cooed and simpered or blew kisses, others shrieked unconvincing promises about the quality of their services at the torchlit dark, still others abandoned even that much subtlety and thrust their hips at the passing Fellowship with the most warlike expressions. One let a pair of pendulous, blue-veined teats dangle over the rail of a balcony and called out, ‘What d’you think o’ these?’

Shy thought they looked about as appealing as a pair of rotten hams. You never can tell what’ll light the fire in some folk, though. A man looked up eagerly with one hand down the front of his trousers noticeably yanking away, others stepping around him like a wank in the street was nothing to remark upon. Shy blew out her cheeks.

‘I been to some low-down places and I done some low-down shit when I got there, but I never saw the like o’ this.’

‘Likewise,’ muttered Lamb, frowning about with one hand resting on the hilt of his sword. Seemed to Shy it rested there a lot these days, and had got pretty comfortable too. He weren’t the only one with steel to hand, mind you. The air of menace was thick enough to chew, gangs of ugly-faced and ugly-purposed men haunting the porches, armed past their armpits, aiming flinty frowns across at groups no better favoured on the other side of the way.

While they were stopped waiting for the traffic to clear, a thug with too much chin and nowhere near enough forehead stepped up to Majud’s wagon and growled, ‘Which side o’ the street you on?’

Never a man to be rushed, Majud considered a moment before answering. ‘I have purchased a plot on which I mean to site a business, but until I see it—’

‘He ain’t talking about plots, fool,’ snorted another tough with hair so greasy he looked like he’d dipped his head in cold stew. ‘He means are you on the Mayor’s side or Papa Ring’s side?’

‘I am here to do business.’ Majud snapped his reins and his wagon lurched on. ‘Not to take sides.’

‘Only thing on neither side o’ the street is the sewer!’ shouted Chinny after him. ‘You want to go in the fucking sewer, do you?’

The way grew wider and busier still, a crawling sea of muck, the columns even higher above it, the ruin of an ancient theatre cut from the hillside where the valley split in two ahead of them. Sweet was waiting near a sprawling heap of building like a hundred shacks piled on top of each other. Looked as if some optimist had taken a stab at it with whitewash but given up halfway and left the rest to slowly peel, like a giant lizard in the midst of moulting.

‘This here is Papa Ring’s Emporium of Romance, Song and Dry Goods, known locally as the Whitehouse,’ Sweet informed Shy as she hitched her horse. ‘Over yonder,’ and the old scout nodded across the stream that split the street in two, serving at once for drinking water and sewer and crossed by a muddle of stepping stones, wet planks and improvised bridges, ‘is the Mayor’s Church of Dice.’

The Mayor had occupied the ruins of some old temple—a set of pillars with half a moss-caked pediment on top—and filled in the gaps with a riot of planks to consecrate a place of worship for some very different idols.

‘Though, being honest,’ continued Sweet, ‘they both offer fucking, drink and gambling so the distinction is largely in the signage. Come on, the Mayor’s keen to meet you.’ He stepped back to let a wagon clatter past, showering mud from its back wheels over all and sundry, then set off across the street.

‘What shall I do?’ called Temple, still on his mule with a faceful of panic.

‘Take in the sights. Reckon there’s a lifetime of material for a preacher. But if you’re tempted by a sample, don’t forget you got debts!’ Shy forded the road after Lamb, trying to pick the firmest patches as the slop threatened to suck her boots right off, around a monstrous boulder she realised was the head of a fallen statue, half its face mud-sunk while the other still wore a pitted frown of majesty, then up the steps of the Mayor’s Church of Dice, between two groups of frowning thugs and into the light.

The heat was a slap, such a reek of sweltering bodies that Shy—no stranger to the unwashed—felt for a moment like she might drown in it. Fires were stoked high and the air was hazy with their smoke, and chagga smoke, and the smoke from cheap lamps burning cheap oil with a fizz and sputter, and her eyes set right away to watering. Stained walls half green wood and half moss-crusted stone trickled with the wet of desperate breath. Mounted in alcoves above the swarming humanity were a dozen sets of dusty Imperial armour that must’ve belonged to some general of antiquity and his guards, the proud past staring down in faceless disapproval at the sorry now.

‘It gets worse?’ muttered Lamb.

‘What gets better?’ asked Sweet.

The air rang with the rattle of thrown dice and bellowed odds, thrown insults and bellowed warnings. There was a band banging away like their lives were at stake and some drunken prospectors were singing along but didn’t know even a quarter of the words and were making up the balance with swears at random. A man reeled past clutching at a broken nose and blundered into the counter—gleaming wood and more’n likely the only thing in the place that came near clean—stretching what looked like half a mile and every inch crammed with clients clamouring for drink. Stepping back, Shy nearly tripped over a card-game. One of the players had a woman astride him, sucking at his face like he’d a gold nugget down his gullet and with just a bit more effort she’d get her tongue around it.

‘Dab Sweet?’ called a man with a beard seemed to go right up to his eyes, slapping the scout on the arm. ‘Look, Sweet’s back!’

‘Aye, and brought a Fellowship with me.’

‘No trouble with old Sangeed on the way?’

‘There was,’ said Sweet. ‘As a result of which he’s dead.’

‘Dead?’

‘No doubt o’ that.’ He jerked his thumb at Lamb. ‘It was this lad did—’

But the man with all the beard was already clambering up on the nearest table sending glasses, cards and counters clattering. ‘Listen up, all o’ you! Dab Sweet killed that fucker Sangeed! That old Ghost bastard’s dead!’

‘A cheer for Dab Sweet!’ someone roared, a surge of approval battered the mildewed rafters and the band struck up an even wilder tune than before.

‘Hold on,’ said Sweet, ‘Wasn’t me killed him—’

Lamb steered him on. ‘Silence is the warrior’s best armour, the saying goes. Just show us to the Mayor.’

They threaded through the heaving crowd, past a cage where a pair of clerks weighed out gold dust and coins in a hundred currencies and transformed it through the alchemy of the abacus to gambling chips and back. A few of the men Lamb brushed out of the way didn’t much care for it, turned with a harsh word in mind, but soon reconsidered when they saw his face. Same face that, slack and sorry, boys used to laugh at back in Squaredeal. He was a man much changed since those days, all right. Or maybe just a man revealed.

A couple of nail-eyed thugs blocked the bottom of the stairs but Sweet called, ‘These two are here to see the Mayor!’ and bundled them up with a deal of back-slappery, along a balcony overlooking the swarming hall and to a heavy door flanked by two more hard faces.

‘Here we go,’ said Sweet, and knocked.

It was a woman who answered. ‘Welcome to Crease,’ she said.

She wore a black dress with a shine to the fabric, long-sleeved and buttoned all the way to her throat. Late in her forties was Shy’s guess, hair streaked with grey. She must’ve been quite the beauty in her day, though, and her day weren’t entirely past either. She took Shy’s hand in one of hers and clasped it with the other one besides and said, ‘You must be Shy. And Lamb.’ She gave Lamb’s weathered paw the same treatment, and he thanked her too late in a creaky voice and took his battered hat off as an afterthought, sparse hair overdue for a cut left flapping at all angles.

But the woman smiled like she’d never been treated to so gallant a gesture. She shut the door and with its solid click into the frame the madness outside was shut away and all was calm and reasonable. ‘Do sit. Master Sweet has told me of your troubles. Your stolen children. A terrible thing.’ And she had such pain in her face you’d have thought it was her babies had vanished.

‘Aye,’ muttered Shy, not sure what to do with that much sympathy.

‘Would either of you care for a drink?’ She poured four healthy measures of spirit without need for an answer. ‘Please forgive this place, it’s a struggle to get good furniture out here, as you can imagine.’

‘Guess we’ll manage,’ said Shy, even though it was about the most comfortable chair she’d ever sat in and about the nicest room besides, Kantic hangings at the windows, candles in lamps of coloured glass, a great desk with a black leather top just a little stained with bottle rings.

She’d real fine manners, Shy thought, this woman, as she handed out the drinks. Not that haughty, down-the-nose kind that idiots thought lifted you above the crowd. The kind that made you feel you were worth something even if you were dog-tired and dog-filthy and had near worn the arse out of your trousers and not even you could tell how many hundred miles of dusty plain you’d covered since your last bath.

Shy took a sip, noted the drink was just as far out of her class as everything else, cleared her throat and said, ‘We were hoping to see the Mayor.’

The woman perched herself against the edge of the desk—Shy had a feeling she’d have looked comfortable sitting on an open razor—and said, ‘You are.’

‘Hoping?’

‘Seeing her.’

Lamb shifted awkwardly in his chair, like it was too comfortable for him to be comfortable in.

‘You’re a woman?’ asked Shy, head somewhat scrambled from the hell outside and the clean calm in here.

The Mayor only smiled. She did that a lot but somehow you never tired of it. ‘They have other words for what I am on the other side of the street, but, yes.’ She tossed down her drink in a way that suggested it wasn’t her first, wouldn’t be her last and wouldn’t make much difference either. ‘Sweet tells me you’re looking for someone.’

‘Man by the name of Grega Cantliss,’ said Shy.

‘I know Cantliss. Preening scum. He robs and murders for Papa Ring.’

‘Where can we find him?’ asked Lamb.

‘I believe he’s been out of town. But I expect he’ll be back before long.’

‘How long are we talking about?’ asked Shy.

‘Forty-three days.’

That kicked the guts out of her. She’d built herself up to good news, or at least to news. Kept herself going with thoughts of Pit and Ro’s smiling faces and happy hugs of reunion. Should’ve known better but hope’s like damp—however much you try to keep it out there’s always a little gets in. She knocked back the balance of her drink, not near so sweet now, and hissed, ‘Shit.’

‘We’ve come a long way.’ Lamb carefully placed his own glass on the desk, and Shy noticed with a hint of worry his knuckles were white with pressure. ‘I appreciate your hospitality, no doubt I do, but I ain’t in any mood to fuck around. Where’s Cantliss?’

‘I’m rarely in the mood to fuck around either.’ The rough word sounded double harsh in the Mayor’s polished voice, and she held Lamb’s eye like manners or no she wasn’t someone to be pushed. ‘Cantliss will be back in forty-three days.’

Shy had never been one to mope. A moment to tongue at the gap between her teeth and dwell on all the unfairness the world had inflicted on her undeserving carcass and she was on to the what nexts. ‘Where’s the magic in forty-three days?’

‘That’s when things are coming to a head here in Crease.’

Shy nodded towards the window and the sounds of madness drifting through. ‘Strikes me they always are.’

‘Not like this one.’ The Mayor stood and offered out the bottle.

‘Why not?’ said Shy, and Lamb and Sweet were turning nothing down either. Refusing to drink in Crease seemed wrong-headed as refusing to breathe. Especially when the drink was so fine and the air so shitty.

‘Eight years we’ve been here, Papa Ring and I, staring across the street at each other.’ The Mayor drifted to the window and looked out at the babbling carnage below. She had a trick of walking so smooth and graceful it seemed it must done with wheels rather’n legs. ‘There was nothing on the map out here but a crease when we arrived. Twenty shacks among the ruins, places where trappers could see out the winter.’

Sweet chuckled. ‘You were quite a sight among ’em.’

‘They soon got used to me. Eight years, while the town grew up around us. We outlasted the plague, and four raids by the Ghosts, and two more by bandits, and the plague again, and after the big fire came through we rebuilt bigger and better and were ready when they found the gold and the people started coming. Eight years, staring across the street at each other, and snapping at each other, and in the end all but at war.’

‘You going to come near a point?’ asked Shy.

‘Our feud was getting bad for business. We agreed to settle it according to mining law, which is the only kind out here for the moment, and I can assure you people take it very seriously. We treated the town as a plot with two rival claims, winner takes all.’

‘Winner of what?’ asked Lamb.

‘A fight. Not my choice but Papa Ring manoeuvred me into it. A fight, man against man, bare-fisted, in a Circle marked out in the old amphitheatre.’

‘A fight in the Circle,’ muttered Lamb. ‘To the death, I daresay?’

‘I understand more often than not that’s where these things end up. Master Sweet tells me you may have some experience in that area.’

Lamb looked over at Sweet, then glanced at Shy, then back to the Mayor and grunted, ‘Some.’

There was a time, not all that long ago, Shy would’ve laughed her arse off at the notion of Lamb in a fight to the death. Nothing could’ve been less funny now.

Sweet was chuckling as he put down his empty glass, though. ‘I reckon we can drop the pretence, eh?’

‘What pretence?’ asked Shy.

‘Lamb,’ said Sweet. ‘That’s what. You know what I call a wolf wearing a sheep mask?’

Lamb looked back at him. ‘I’ve a feeling you can’t keep it to yourself.’

‘A wolf.’ The old scout wagged a finger across the room, looking quite decidedly pleased with himself. ‘I’d a crazy guess about you the moment I saw a big nine-fingered Northman kill the hell out o’ two drifters back in Averstock. When I saw you crush Sangeed like a beetle I was sure. I must admit it did occur when I asked you along that you and the Mayor might be the answer to each other’s problems—’

‘Ain’t you a clever little bastard?’ snarled Lamb, eyes burning and the veins suddenly popping from his thick neck. ‘Best be careful when you pull that mask off, fucker, you might not like what’s under there!’

Sweet twitched, Shy flinched, the comfortable room of a sudden feeling balanced on the brink of a great pit and that an awful dangerous place for a chat. Then the Mayor smiled as if this was all a joke between friends, gently took Lamb’s trembling hand and filled his glass, fingers lingering on his just a moment.

‘Papa Ring’s brought in a man to fight for him,’ she carried on, smooth as ever. ‘A Northman by the name of Golden.’

‘Glama Golden?’ Lamb shrank back into his chair like he’d been embarrassed by his own temper.

‘I’ve heard the name,’ said Shy. ‘Heard it’d be a fool who’d bet against him in a fight.’

‘That would depend who he was fighting. None of my men is a match for him, but you…’ She leaned forwards and the sweet whiff of perfume, rare as gold among the reeks of Crease, even got Shy a little warm under the collar. ‘Well, from what Sweet tells me, you’re more than a match for anyone.’

There was a time Shy would have laughed her arse off at that, too. Now, she wasn’t even near a chuckle.

‘Might be my best years are behind me,’ muttered Lamb.

‘Come, now. I don’t think either one of us is over the hill quite yet. I need your help. And I can help you.’ The Mayor looked Lamb in the face and he looked back like no one else was even there. Shy got a worried feeling, then. Like she’d somehow been out-bartered by this woman without prices even being mentioned.

‘What’s to stop us finding the children some other how?’ she snapped, her voice sounding harsh as a graveyard crow’s.

‘Nothing,’ said the Mayor simply. ‘But if you want Cantliss, Papa Ring will put himself in your way. And I’m the only one who can get him out of it. Would you say that’s fair, Dab?’

‘I’d say it’s true,’ said Sweet, still looking a little unnerved. ‘Fair I’ll leave to better judges.’

‘But you needn’t decide now. I’ll arrange a room for you over at Camling’s Hostelry. It’s the closest thing to neutral ground we have here. If you can find your children without my help, go with my blessing. If not…’ And the Mayor gave them one more smile. ‘I’ll be here.’

‘’Til Papa Ring kicks you out of town.’

Her eyes flickered to Shy’s and there was anger there, hot and sharp. Just for a moment, then she shrugged. ‘I’m still hoping to stay.’ And she poured another round of drinks.

Plots

‘It is a plot,’ said Temple.

Majud slowly nodded. ‘Undeniably.’

‘Beyond that,’ said Temple, ‘I would not like to venture.’

Majud slowly shook his head. ‘Nor I. Even as its owner.’

It appeared the amount of gold in Crease had been drastically over-stated, but no one could deny there had been a mud strike here of epic proportions. There was the treacherous slop that constituted the main street and in which everyone was forced to take their wading, cursing, shuffling chances. There was the speckly filth that showered from every wagon-wheel to inconceivable heights when it was raining, sprinkling every house, column, beast and person. There was an insidious, watery muck that worked its way up from the ground, leaching into wood and canvas and blooming forth with moss and mould, leaving black tidemarks on the hems of every dress in town. There was an endless supply of dung, shit, crap and night soil, found in every colour and configuration and often in the most unlikely places. Finally, of course, there was the all-pervasive moral filth.

Majud’s plot was rich in all of these and more.

An indescribably haggard individual stumbled from one of the wretched tents pitched higgledy-piggledy upon it, hawked up at great length and volume, and spat upon the rubbish-strewn mud. Then he turned the most bellicose of expressions towards Majud and Temple, scratched at his infested beard, dragged up his decaying full-body undershirt so it could instantly slump once more, and returned to the unspeakable darkness whence he came.

‘The location is good,’ said Majud.

‘Excellent,’ said Temple.

‘Right on the main street.’ Although Crease was so narrow that it was virtually the only street. Daylight revealed a different side to the thoroughfare: no cleaner, perhaps even less so, but at least the sense of a riot in a madhouse had faded. The flood of intoxicated criminals between the ruined columns had become a more respectable trickle. The whorehouses, gaming pits, husk-shacks and drinking dens were no doubt still taking customers but no longer advertising as if the world would end tomorrow. Premises with less spectacular strategies for fleecing passers-by came to the fore: eateries, money changers, pawnshops, blacksmiths, stables, butchers, combined stables and butchers, ratters and hatters, animal and fur traders, land agents and mineral consultancies, merchants in mining equipment of the most execrable quality, and a postal service whose representative Temple had seen dumping letters in a stream scarcely even out of town. Groups of bleary prospectors slogged miserably back to their claims, probably in hopes of scraping enough gold dust from the freezing stream-beds for another night of madness. Now and again a dishevelled Fellowship came chasing their diverse dreams into town, usually wearing the same expressions of horror and amazement that Majud and Temple had worn when they first arrived.

That was Crease for you. A place where everyone was passing through.

‘I have a sign,’ said Majud, patting it affectionately. It was painted clean white with gilt lettering and proclaimed: Majud and Curnsbick Metalwork, Hinges, Nails, Tools, Wagon Fixings, High-Quality Smithing of All Varieties. Then it said Metalwork in five other languages—a sensible precaution in Crease, where it sometimes seemed no two people spoke quite the same tongue, let alone read it. In Northern it had been spelled wrong, but it was still vastly superior to most of the gaudy shingles dangling over the main street. A building across the way sported a red one on which yellow letters had run into drips on the bottom edge. It read, simply, Fuck Palace.

‘I brought it all the way from Adua,’ said Majud.

‘It is a noble sign, and embodies your high achievement in coming so far. All you need now is a building to hang it on.’

The merchant cleared his throat, its prominent knobble bobbing. ‘I remember house-builder being among your impressive list of previous professions.’

‘I remember you being unimpressed,’ said Temple. ‘ “We need no houses out here,” were your very words.’

‘You have a sharp memory for conversations.’

‘Those on which my life depends in particular.’

‘Must I apologise at the start of our every exchange?’

‘I see no pressing reason why not.’

‘Then I apologise. I was wrong. You have proved yourself a staunch travelling companion, not to mention a valued leader of prayer.’ A stray dog limped across the plot, sniffed at a turd, added one of its own and moved on. ‘Speaking as a carpenter—’

‘Ex-carpenter.’

‘—how would you go about building on this plot?’

‘If you held a knife to my throat?’ Temple stepped forwards. His boot sank in well beyond the ankle, and it was only with considerable effort he was able to drag it squelching free.

‘The ground is not the best,’ Majud was forced to concede.

‘The ground is always good enough if one goes deep enough. We would begin by driving piles of fresh hardwood.’

‘That task would require a sturdy fellow. I will have to see if Master Lamb can spare us a day or two.’

‘He is a sturdy fellow.’

‘I would not care to be a pile under his hammer.’

‘Nor I.’ Temple had felt very much like a pile under a hammer ever since he had abandoned the Company of the Gracious Hand, and was hoping to stop. ‘A hardwood frame upon the piles, then, jointed and pegged, beams to support a floor of pine plank to keep your customers well clear of the mud. Front of the ground floor for your shop, rear for office and workshop, contract a mason for a chimney-stack and a stone-built addition to house your forge. On the upper floor, quarters for you. A balcony overlooking the street appears to be the local fashion. You may festoon it with semi-naked women, should you so desire.’

‘I will probably avoid the local fashion to that degree.’

‘A steeply pitched roof would keep off the winter rains and accommodate an attic for storage or employees.’ The building took shape in Temple’s imagination, his hand sketching out the rough dimensions, the effect only slightly spoiled by a clutch of feral Ghost children frolicking naked in the shit-filled stream beyond.

Majud gave a curt nod of approval. ‘You should have said architect rather than carpenter.’

‘Would that have made any difference?’

‘To me it would.’

‘But, don’t tell me, not to Curnsbick.’

‘His heart is of iron—’

‘I got one!’ A filth-crusted individual rode squelching down the street into town, pushing his blown nag as fast as it would hobble, one arm raised high as though it held the word of the Almighty. ‘I got one!’ he roared again. Temple caught the telltale glint of gold in his hand. Men gave limp cheers, called out limp congratulations, gathered around to clap the prospector on the back as he slid from his horse, hoping perhaps his good fortune might rub off.

‘One of the lucky ones,’ said Majud as they watched him waddle, bow-legged, up the steps into the Mayor’s Church of Dice, a dishevelled crowd trailing after, eager at the chance even of seeing a nugget.

‘I fully expect he’ll be destitute by lunchtime,’ said Temple.

‘You give him that long?’

One of the tent-flaps was thrust back. A grunt from within and an arc of piss emerged, spattered against the side of one of the other tents, sprinkled the mud, drooped to a dribble and stopped. The flap closed.

Majud gave vent to a heavy sigh. ‘In return for your help in constructing the edifice discussed, I would be prepared to pay you the rate of one mark a day.’

Temple snorted. ‘Curnsbick has not chased all charity from the Circle of the World, then.’

‘The Fellowship may be dissolved but still I feel a certain duty of care towards those I travelled with.’

‘That, or you expected to find a carpenter here but now perceive the local workmanship to be… inferior.’ Temple cocked a brow at the building beside the plot, every door and window-frame at its own wrong angle, leaning sideways even with the support of an ancient stone block half-sunk in the ground. ‘Perhaps you would like a place of business that will not wash away in the next shower. Does the weather get harsh here, do you suppose, in winter?’

A brief pause while the wind blew up chill and made the canvas of the tents flap and the wood of the surrounding buildings creak alarmingly. ‘What fee would you demand?’ asked Majud.

Temple had been giving serious consideration to the idea of slipping away and leaving his debt to Shy South forever stalled at seventy-six marks. But the sad fact was he had nowhere to slip to and no one to slip with, and was even more useless alone than in company. That left him with money to find. ‘Three marks a day.’ A quarter of what Cosca used to pay him, but ten times his wages riding drag.

Majud clicked his tongue. ‘Ridiculous. That is the lawyer in you speaking.’

‘He is a close friend of the carpenter.’

‘How do I know your work will be worth the price?’

‘I challenge you to find anyone less than entirely satisfied with the quality of my joinery.’

‘You have built no houses here!’

‘Then yours shall be unique. Customers will flock to see it.’

‘One and a half marks a day. Any more and Curnsbick will have my head!’

‘I would hate to have your death upon my conscience. Two it is, with meals and lodging provided.’ And Temple held out his hand.

Majud regarded it without enthusiasm. ‘Shy South has set an ugly precedent for negotiation.’

‘Her ruthlessness approaches Master Curnsbick’s. Perhaps they should go into business together.’

‘If two jackals can share a carcass.’ They shook. Then they considered the plot again. The intervening time had in no way improved it.

‘The first step would be to clear the ground,’ said Majud.

‘I agree. Its current state is a veritable offence against God. Not to mention public health.’ Another occupant had emerged from a structure of mildewed cloth sagging so badly that it must have been virtually touching the mud inside. This one wore nothing but a long grey beard not quite long enough to protect his dignity, or at least everyone else’s, and a belt with a large knife sheathed upon it. He sat down in the dirt and started chewing savagely at a bone. ‘Master Lamb’s help might come in useful there also.’

‘Doubtless.’ Majud clapped him on the shoulder. ‘I shall seek out the Northman while you begin the clearance.’

‘Me?’

‘Who else?’

‘I am a carpenter, not a bailiff!’

‘A day ago you were a priest and cattleman and a moment before that a lawyer! A man of your varied talents will, I feel sure, find a way.’ And Majud was already hopping briskly off down the street.

Temple rolled his eyes from the earthbound refuse to the clean, blue heavens. ‘I’m not saying I don’t deserve it, but you surely love to test a man.’ Then he hitched up his trouser-legs and stepped gingerly towards the naked beggar with the bone, limping somewhat since the buttock Shy pricked on the plains was still troubling him in the mornings.

‘Good day!’ he called.

The man squinted up at him, sucking a strip of gristle from his bone. ‘I don’t fucking think so. You got a drink?’

‘I thought it best to stop.’

‘Then you need a good fucking reason to bother me, boy.’

‘I have a reason. Whether you will consider it a good one I profoundly doubt.’

‘You can but try.’

‘The fact is,’ ventured Temple, ‘we will soon be building on this plot.’

‘How you going to manage that with me here?’

‘I was hoping you could be persuaded to move.’

The beggar checked every part of his bone for further sustenance and, finding none, tossed it at Temple. It bounced off his shirt. ‘You ain’t going to persuade me o’ nothing without a drink.’

‘The thing is, this plot belongs to my employer, Abram Majud, and—’

‘Who says so?’

‘Who… says?’

‘Do I fucking stutter?’ The man took out his knife as if he had some everyday task that required one, but the subtext was plain. It really was a very large blade and, given the prevailing filthiness of everything else within ten strides, impressively clean, edge glittering with the morning sun. ‘I asked who says?’

Temple took a wobbly step back. Straight into something very solid. He spun about, expecting to find himself face to face with one of the other tent-dwellers, probably sporting an even bigger knife—God knew there were so many big knives in Crease the distinction between them and swords was a total blur—and was hugely relieved to find Lamb towering over him.

‘I say,’ said Lamb to the beggar. ‘You could ignore me. You could wave that knife around a little more. But you might find you’re wearing it up your arse.’

The man looked down at his blade, perhaps wishing he had opted for a smaller one after all. Then he put it sheepishly away. ‘Reckon I’ll just move along.’

Lamb gave that a nod. ‘I reckon.’

‘Can I get my trousers?’

‘You’d fucking better.’

He ducked into his tent and came out buttoning up the most ragged article of clothing Temple ever saw. ‘I’ll leave the tent, if it’s all the same. Ain’t that good a one.’

‘You don’t say,’ said Temple.

The man loitered a moment longer. ‘Any chance of that drink do you—’

‘Get gone,’ growled Lamb, and the beggar scampered off like he’d a mean dog at his heels.

‘There you are, Master Lamb!’ Majud waded over, trouser-legs held up by both hands to display two lean lengths of muddy calf. ‘I was hoping to persuade you to work on my behalf and here I find you already hard at it!’

‘It’s nothing,’ said Lamb.

‘Still, if you could help us clear the site I’d be happy to pay you—’

‘Don’t worry about it.’

‘Truly?’ The watery sun gleamed from Majud’s golden tooth. ‘If you were to do me this favour I would consider you a friend for life!’

‘I should warn you, friend o’ mine can be a dangerous position.’

‘I feel it is worth the risk.’

‘If it’ll save a couple of bits,’ threw in Temple.

‘I got all the money I need,’ said Lamb, ‘but I always been sadly short on friends.’ He frowned over at the vagrant with the underclothes, just poking his head out of his tent and into the light. ‘You!’ And the man darted back inside like a tortoise into its shell.

Majud raised his brows at Temple. ‘If only everyone was so accommodating.’

‘Not everyone has been obliged to sell themselves into slavery.’

‘You could’ve said no.’ Shy was on the rickety porch of the building next door, leaning on the rail with boots crossed and fingers dangling. For a moment Temple hardly recognised her. She had a new shirt, sleeves rolled up with her tanned forearms showing, one with the old rope burn coiled pink around it, a sheepskin vest on top which was no doubt yellow by any reasonable estimation but looked white as a heavenly visitation in the midst of all that dirt. The same stained hat but tipped back, hair less greasy and more red, stirring in the breeze.

Temple stood and looked at her, and found he quite enjoyed it. ‘You look…’

‘Clean?’

‘Something like that.’

‘You look… surprised.’

‘Little bit.’

‘Did you think I stunk out of choice?’

‘No, I thought you couldn’t help yourself.’

She spat daintily through the gap between her front teeth, narrowly missing his boots. ‘Then you discover your error. The Mayor was kind enough to lend me her bath.’

‘Bathing with the Mayor, eh?’

She winked. ‘Moving up in the world.’

Temple plucked at his own shirt, only held together by the more stubborn stains. ‘Do you think she’d give me a bath?’

‘You could ask. But I reckon there’s about a four in five chance she’d have you killed.’

‘I like those odds. Lots of people are five in five on my untimely death.’

‘Something to do with you being a lawyer?’

‘As of today, I will have you know, I am a carpenter and architect.’

‘Well, your professions slip on and off easy as a whore’s drawers, don’t they?’

‘A man must follow the opportunities.’ He turned to take in the plot with an airy wave. ‘I am contracted to build upon this unrivalled site a residence and place of business for the firm of Majud and Curnsbick.’

‘My congratulations on leaving the legal profession and becoming a respectable member of the community.’

‘Do they have such a thing in Crease?’

‘Not yet, but I reckon it’s on the way. You stick a bunch of drunken murderers together, ain’t long before some turn to thieving, then to lying, then to bad language, and pretty soon to sobriety, raising families and making an honest living.’

‘It’s a slippery slope, all right.’ Temple watched Lamb shepherd a tangle-haired drunkard off the plot, few possessions dragging in the muck behind him. ‘Is the Mayor going to help you find your brother and sister?’

Shy gave a long sigh. ‘Maybe. But she’s got a price.’

‘Nothing comes for free.’

‘Nothing. How’s carpenter’s pay?’

Temple winced. ‘Barely enough to scrape by on, sadly—’

‘Two marks a day, plus benefits!’ called Majud as he dismantled the most recently vacated tent. ‘I’ve known bandits kinder to their victims!’

‘Two marks from that miser?’ Shy gave an approving nod. ‘Well done. I’ll take a mark a day towards the debt.’

‘A mark,’ Temple managed to force out. ‘Very reasonable.’ If there was a God His bounty was only lent, never given.

‘I thought the Fellowship dissolved!’ Dab Sweet pulled his horse up beside the plot, Crying Rock haunting his shoulder. Neither of them appeared to have ventured within spitting range of a bath, or a change of clothes either. Temple found that strangely reassuring. ‘Buckhorm’s out of town with his grass and his water, Lestek’s dressing the theatre for his grand debut and most of the rest split up to dig gold their own way, but here’s the four of you still, inseparable. Warms my heart that I forged such camaraderie out in the wilderness.’

‘Don’t pretend you got a heart,’ said Shy.

‘Got to be something pumps the black poison through my veins, don’t there?’

‘Ah!’ shouted Majud. ‘If it is not the new Emperor of the Plains, the conqueror of great Sangeed, Dab Sweet!’

The scout gave Lamb a nervous sideways glance. ‘I’ve made no effort to spread that rumour.’

‘And yet it has taken to this town like fire to tinder! I have heard half a dozen versions, none particularly close to my own remembrance. Most recently, I was told you shot the Ghost from a mile’s distance and with a stiff side wind.’

‘I heard you impaled him on the horns of an enraged steer,’ said Shy.

‘And in the newest version to reach my ear,’ said Temple, ‘you killed him in a duel over the good name of a woman.’

Sweet snorted. ‘Where the hell do they get this rubbish? Everyone knows there’s no women o’ my acquaintance with a good name. This your plot?’

‘It is,’ said Majud.

‘It is a plot,’ said Crying Rock solemnly.

‘Majud has contracted me to build a shop upon it,’ said Temple.

‘More buildings?’ Sweet wriggled his shoulders. ‘Bloody roofs hanging over you. Walls bearing in on you. How can you take a breath in those things?’

Crying Rock shook her head. ‘Buildings.’

‘A man can’t think of nothing when he’s in one but how to get back out. I’m a wanderer and that’s a fact. Born to be under the sky.’ Sweet watched Lamb drag another wriggling drunk from a tent one-handed and toss him rolling into the street. ‘Man has to be what he is, don’t he?’

Shy frowned up. ‘He can try to be otherwise.’

‘But more often than not it don’t stick. All that trying, day after day, it wears you right through.’ The old scout gave her a wink. ‘Lamb taking up the Mayor’s offer?’

‘We’re thinking on it,’ she snapped back.

Temple looked from one to the other. ‘Am I missing something?’

‘Usually,’ said Shy, still giving Sweet the eyeball. ‘If you’re heading on out of town, don’t let us hold you up.’

‘Wouldn’t dream of it.’ The old scout pointed down the main street, busier with traffic as the day wore on, weak sun raising a little steam from the wet mud, the wet horses, the wet roofs. ‘We’re signed up to guide a Fellowship of prospectors into the hills. Always work for guides around Crease. Everyone here wants to be somewhere else.’

‘Not I,’ said Majud, grinning as Lamb kicked another tent over.

‘Oh no.’ Sweet gave the plot a final glance, smile lurking at the corner of his mouth. ‘You lot are right where you belong.’ And he trotted on out of town, Crying Rock at his side.

Words and Graces

Shy didn’t much care for pretension, and despite having crawled through more than her share was no high enthusiast for dirt. The dining room of Camling’s Hostelry was an unhappy marriage of the two uglier by far than either one alone. The tabletops were buffed to a prissy shine but the floor was caked with boot-mud. The cutlery had bone handles but the walls were spattered hip high with ancient food. There was a gilt-framed painting of a nude who’d found something to smirk about but the plaster behind was blistered with mould from a leak above.

‘State o’ this place,’ muttered Lamb.

‘That’s Crease for you,’ said Shy. ‘Everything upside down.’

On the trail she’d heard the stream-beds in the hills were lined with nuggets, just itching for greedy fingers to pluck them free. Some lucky few who’d struck gold in Crease might’ve dug it from the earth but it looked to Shy like most had found a way to dig it out of other folks. It weren’t prospectors crowding the dining room of Camling’s and forming a grumpy queue besides, it was pimps and gamblers, racketeers and money lenders, and merchants pedalling the same stuff they might anywhere else at half the quality and four times the price.

‘A damn superfluity of shysters,’ muttered Shy as she stepped over a pair of dirty boots and dodged a careless elbow. ‘This the future of the Far Country?’

‘Of every country,’ muttered Lamb.

‘Please, please, my friends, do sit!’ Camling, the proprietor, was a long, oily bastard with a suit wearing through at the elbows and a habit of laying soft hands where they weren’t wanted which had already nearly earned him Shy’s fist in his face. He was busy flicking crumbs from a table perched on an ancient column top some creative carpenter had laid the floorboards around. ‘We try to stay neutral but any friend of the Mayor’s is a friend of mine, indeed they are!’

‘I’ll face the door,’ said Lamb, shifting his chair around.

Camling drew out the other for Shy. ‘And may I say how positively radiant you are this morning?’

‘You can say it, but I doubt anyone’ll be taking your word over the evidence o’ their senses.’ She levered her way to sitting, not easy since the ancient carvings on the column were prone to interfere with her knees.

‘On the contrary, you are a positive ornament to my humble dining room.’

Shy frowned up. A slap in the face she could take in good part but all this fawning she didn’t trust in the least. ‘How about you bring the food and hold on to the blather?’

Camling cleared his throat. ‘Of course.’ And slipped away into the crowd.

‘That Corlin over there?’

She was wedged into a shadowy corner, eyeing the gathering with her mouth pressed into that tight line of hers, like it’d take a couple of big men with pick and crowbar to get a word out.

‘If you say so,’ said Lamb, squinting across the room. ‘My eyes ain’t all they were.’

‘I say so. And Savian, too. Thought they were meant to be prospecting?’

‘Thought you didn’t believe they would be?

‘Looks like I was right.’

‘You usually are.’

‘I’d swear she saw me.’

‘And?’

‘And she ain’t given so much as a nod.’

‘Maybe she wishes she hadn’t seen you.’

‘Wishing don’t make it so.’ Shy slipped from the table, having to make room for a big bald bastard who insisted on waving his fork around when he talked.

‘. . there’s still a few coming in but less than we hoped. Can’t be sure how many more’ll turn up. Sounds like Mulkova was bad…’ Savian stopped short when he saw Shy coming. There was a stranger wedged even further into the shadows between him and Corlin, under a curtained window.

‘Corlin,’ said Shy.

‘Shy,’ said Corlin.

‘Savian,’ said Shy.

He just nodded.

‘I thought you two were out digging?’

‘We’re putting it off a while.’ Corlin held Shy’s eye all the time. ‘Might leave in a week. Might be later.’

‘Lot of other folks coming through with the same idea. You want to claim aught but mud you’d best get into them hills.’

‘The hills have been there since great Euz drove the devils from the world,’ said the stranger. ‘I predict that they will persist into next week.’ He was an odd one, with bulging eyes, a long tangle of grey beard and hair and eyebrows hardly shorter. Odder yet, Shy saw now he had a pair of little birds, tame as puppies, pecking seed from his open palm.

‘And you are?’ asked Shy.

‘My name is Zacharus.’

‘Like the Magus?’

‘Just like.’

Seemed a foolish sort of thing to take the name of a legendary wizard, but then you might have said the same for naming a woman after social awkwardness. ‘Shy South.’ She reached for his hand and an even smaller bird hopped from his sleeve and snapped at her finger, gave her the hell of a shock and made her jerk it back. ‘And, er, that’s Lamb over there. We rolled out from the Near Country in a Fellowship with these two. Faced down Ghosts and storms and rivers and an awful lot of boredom. High times, eh?’

‘Towering,’ said Corlin, eyes narrowed to blue slits. Shy was getting the distinct feeling they wanted her somewhere else and that was making her want to stay. ‘And what’s your business, Master Zacharus?’

‘The turning of ages.’ He had a trace of an Imperial accent, but it was strange somehow, crackly as old papers. ‘The currents of destiny. The rise and fall of nations.’

‘There a good living in that?’

He flashed a faintly crazy smile made of a lot of jagged yellow teeth. ‘There is no bad living and no good death.’

‘Right y’are. What’s with the birds?’

‘They bring me news, companionship, songs when I am melancholy and, on occasion, nesting materials.’

‘You have a nest?’

‘No, but they think I should.’

‘Course they do.’ The old man was mad as a mushroom, but she doubted folk hard-headed as Corlin and Savian would be wasting time on him if that was the end of the story. There was something off-putting to the way those birds stared, heads on one side, unblinking. Like they’d figured her for a real idiot.

She thought the old man might share their opinion. ‘What brings you here, Shy South?’

‘Come looking for two children stole from our farm.’

‘Any luck?’ asked Corlin.

‘Six days I been up and down the Mayor’s side of the street asking every pair of ears, but children ain’t exactly a common sight around here and no one’s seen a hair of them. Or if they have they ain’t telling me. When I say the name Grega Cantliss they shut up like I cast a spell of silence.’

‘Spells of silence are a challenging cloth to weave,’ mused Zacharus, frowning up into an empty corner. ‘So many variables.’ There was a flapping outside and a pigeon stuck its head through the curtains and gave a burbling coo. ‘She says they are in the mountains.’

‘Who?’

‘The children. But pigeons are liars. They only tell you what you want to hear.’ And the old man stuck his tongue in the seeds in his palm and started crunching them between his yellow front teeth.

Shy was already minded to beat a retreat when Camling called from behind. ‘Your breakfast!’

‘What do you reckon those two are about?’ asked Shy as she slipped back into her chair and flicked away a couple of crumbs their host had missed.

‘Prospecting, I heard,’ said Lamb.

‘You ain’t been listening to me at all, have you?’

‘I try to avoid it. If they want our help I daresay they’ll ask. ’Til then, it ain’t our business.’

‘Can you imagine either of them asking for help?’

‘No,’ said Lamb. ‘So I reckon it’ll never be our business, will it?’

‘Definitely not. That’s why I want to know.’

‘I used to be curious. Long time ago.’

‘What happened?’

Lamb waved his three-fingered hand at his scar-covered face.

Breakfast was cold porridge, runny egg and grey bacon, and the porridge weren’t the freshest and the bacon may well not have derived from a pig. All whisked in front of Shy on imported crockery with trees and flowers painted into it in gilt, Camling with an air of smarmy pride like there was no finer meal to be had anywhere in the Circle of the World.

‘This from a horse?’ she muttered to Lamb, prodding at that meat and half-expecting it to tell her to stop.

‘Just be thankful it ain’t from the rider.’

‘On the trail we ate shit, but at least it was honest shit. What the hell’s this?’

‘Dishonest shit?’

‘That’s Crease for you. You can get fine Suljuk plates but only slops to eat off ’em. Everything back to bloody front…’ She realised the chatter had all faded, the scraping of her fork about the only noise. Hairs prickled on the back of her neck and she slowly turned.

Six men were adding their boot-prints to the mud-caked floor. Five were the kind of thugs you saw a lot of in Crease, spreading out among the tables to find watchful places, each wearing that ready slouch said they were better’n you ’cause there were more of them and they all had blades. The sixth was a different prospect. Short but hugely wide and with a big belly on him, too, a suit of fine clothes bulging at the buttons like the tailor had been awful optimistic with the measurements. He was black-skinned with a fuzz of grey hair, one earlobe stretched out around a thick golden ring, hole in the middle big enough almost for Shy to have got her fist through.

He looked pleased with himself to an untold degree, smiling on everything as though it was all exactly the way he liked it. Shy disliked him right off. Most likely jealousy. Nothing ever seemed to be the way she liked it, after all.

‘Don’t worry,’ he boomed in a voice spilling over with good humour, ‘you can all keep on eating! If you want to be shitting water all day!’ And he burst out laughing, and slapped one of his men on the back and near knocked him into some fool’s breakfast. He made his way between the tables, calling out hellos by name, shaking hands and patting shoulders, a long stick with a bone handle tapping at the boards.

Shy watched him come, easing a little sideways in her chair and slipping the bottom button of her vest open so the grip of her knife poked out nice and perky. Lamb just sat eating with eyes on his food. Not looking up even when the fat man stopped right next to their table and said, ‘I’m Papa Ring.’

‘I’d made a prediction to that effect,’ said Shy.

‘You’re Shy South.’

‘It ain’t a secret.’

‘And you must be Lamb.’

‘If I must, I guess I must.’

‘Look for the big fucking Northman with the face like a chopping block, they told me.’ Papa Ring swung a free chair away from the next-door table. ‘Mind if I sit?’

‘What if I said yes?’ asked Shy.

He paused halfway down, leaning heavy on his stick. ‘Most likely I’d say sorry but sit anyway. Sorry.’ And he lowered himself the rest of the way. ‘I’ve got no fucking graces at all, they tell me. Ask anyone. No fucking graces.’

Shy took the quickest glance across the room. Savian hadn’t even looked up, but she caught the faintest gleam of a blade ready under the table. That made her feel a little better. He didn’t give much to your face, Savian, but he was a reassurance at your back.

Unlike Camling. Their proud host was hurrying over now, rubbing his hands together so hard Shy could hear them hiss. ‘Welcome, Papa, you’re very welcome.’

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘No reason, no reason at all.’ If Camling had rubbed his hands any faster he might’ve made fire. ‘As long as there’s no… trouble.’

‘Who’d want trouble? I’m here to talk.’

‘Talk’s how it always begins.’

‘Talk’s how everything begins.’

‘My concern is how it will conclude.’

‘How’s a man to know that ’til he’s talked?’ asked Lamb, still not looking up.

‘Exactly so,’ said Papa Ring, smiling like it was the best day of his life.

‘All right,’ said Camling, reluctantly. ‘Will you be taking food?’

Ring snorted. ‘Your food is shit, as these two unfortunates are only now discovering. You can lose yourself.’

‘Now look, Papa, this is my place—’

‘Happy chance.’ Of a sudden Ring’s smile seemed to have an edge to it. ‘You’ll know just where to lose yourself.’

Camling swallowed, then scraped away with the sourest of expressions. The chatter gradually came up again, but honed to a nervous point now.

‘One of the strongest arguments I ever saw for there being no God is the existence of Lennart Camling,’ muttered Ring, as he watched their host depart. The joints of his chair creaked unhappily as he settled back, all good humour again. ‘So how are you finding Crease?’

‘Filthy in every sense.’ Shy poked her bacon away, then tossed her fork down and pushed the plate away, too. There could never be too great a distance between her and that bacon, far as she was concerned. She let her hands flop into her lap where one just happened to rest right on her knife’s handle. Imagine that.

‘Dirty’s how we like it. You meet the Mayor?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Shy, ‘did we?’

‘I know you did.’

‘Why ask, then?’

‘Watching my manners, such as they are. Though I don’t deceive myself they come close to hers. She’s got graces, don’t she, our Mayor?’ And Ring gently rubbed the polished wood of the table with one palm. ‘Smooth as mirror glass. When she talks you feel swaddled in a goose-down blanket, don’t you? The worthier folks around here, they tend to move in her orbit. Those manners. That way. The worthy folks lap that stuff up. But let’s not pretend you all are two of the worthy ones, eh?’

‘Could be we’re aspiring to be worthier,’ said Shy.

‘I’m all for aspiration,’ said Ring. ‘God knows I came here with nothing. But the Mayor won’t help you better yourselves.’

‘And you will?’

Ring gave a chuckle, deep and joyful, like you might get from a kindly uncle. ‘No, no, no. But at least I’ll be honest about it.’

‘You’ll be honest about your dishonesty?’

‘I never claimed to do anything other than sell folk what they want and make no judgements on ’em for their desires. Daresay the Mayor gave you the impression I’m quite the evil bastard.’

‘We can get that impression all by ourselves,’ said Shy.

Ring grinned at her. ‘Quick, aren’t you?’

‘I’ll try not to leave you behind.’

‘She do all the talking?’

‘The vast majority,’ said Lamb, out the side of his mouth.

‘Reckon he’s waiting for something worth replying to,’ said Shy.

Ring kept grinning. ‘Well that’s a very reasonable policy. You seem like reasonable folks.’

Lamb shrugged. ‘You ain’t really got to know us yet.’

‘That’s the very reason I came along. To get to know you better. And maybe just to offer some friendly advice.’

‘I’m getting old for advice,’ said Lamb. ‘Even the friendly kind.’

‘You’re getting old for brawling, too, but I do hear tell you might be involving yourself in some bare-fist business we got coming to Crease.’

Lamb shrugged again. ‘I fought a bout or two in my youth.’

‘I see that,’ said Ring, with an eye on Lamb’s battered face, ‘but, keen devotee though I am of the brawling arts, I’d rather this fight didn’t happen at all.’

‘Worried your man might lose?’ asked Shy.

She really couldn’t drag Ring’s grin loose at all. ‘Not really. My man’s famous for beating a lot of famous men, and beating ’em bad. But the fact is I’d rather the Mayor packed up nice and quiet. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind seeing a little blood spilled. Shows people you care. But too much is awful bad for business. And I got big plans for this place. Good plans… But you don’t care about that, do you?’

‘Everyone’s got plans,’ said Shy, ‘and everyone thinks theirs are good. It’s when one set of good plans gets tangled with another things tend to slide downhill.’

‘Just tell me this, then, and if the answer’s yes I’ll leave you to enjoy your shitty breakfast in peace. Have you given the Mayor a certain yes or can I still make you a better offer?’ Ring’s eyes moved between them, and neither spoke, and he took that for encouragement, and maybe it was. ‘I may not have the graces but I’m always willing to deal. Just tell me what she’s promised you.’

Lamb looked up for the first time. ‘Grega Cantliss.’

Shy was watching him hard and she saw Ring’s smile slip at the name. ‘You know him, then?’ she asked.

‘He works for me. Has worked for me, at times.’

‘Was he working for you when he burned my farm, and killed my friend, and stole two children from me?’ asked Lamb.

Ring sat back, rubbing at his jaw, a trace of frown showing. ‘Quite an accusation. Stealing children. I can tell you now I’d have no part of that.’

‘Seems you got one even so,’ said Shy.

‘Only your word for it. What kind of a man would I be if I gave my people up on your say-so?’

‘I don’t care one fucking shit what kind of man y’are,’ snarled Lamb, knuckles white around his cutlery, and Ring’s men stirred unhappily, and Shy saw Savian sitting up, watchful, but Lamb took no notice of any of it. ‘Give me Cantliss and we’re done. Get in my way, there’ll be trouble.’ And he frowned as he saw he’d bent his knife at a right angle against the tabletop.

Ring mildly raised his brows. ‘You’re very confident. Given nobody’s heard of you.’

‘I been through this before. I got a fair idea how it turns out.’

‘My man ain’t bent cutlery.’

‘He will be.’

‘Just tell us where Cantliss is,’ said Shy, ‘and we’ll be on our way and out of yours.’

Papa Ring looked for the first time like he might be running short of patience. ‘Girl, do you suppose you could sit back and let me and your father talk this out?’

‘Not really. Maybe it’s my Ghost blood but I’m cursed with a contrary temperament. Folk warn me off a thing, I just start thinking on how to go about it. Can’t help myself.’

Ring took a long breath and forced himself back to reasonable. ‘I understand. Someone stole my children, there’d be nowhere in the Circle of the World for those bastards to run to. But don’t make me your enemy when I can every bit as easily be your friend. I can’t just hand you Cantliss. Maybe that’s what the Mayor would do but it ain’t my way. I tell you what, though, next time he comes to town we can all sit down and talk this out, get to the truth of it, see if we can’t find your young ones. I’ll help you every way I can, you got my word.’

‘Your word?’ And Shy curled back her lip and spat onto her cold bacon. If it was bacon.

‘I got no graces but I got my word.’ And Ring stabbed at the table with his thick forefinger. ‘That’s what everything stands on, on my side of the street. Folk are loyal to me ’cause I’m loyal to them. Break that, I got nothing. Break that, I am nothing.’ He leaned closer, beckoning like he had the killer offer to make. ‘But forget my word and just look at it this way—you want the Mayor’s help, you’re going to have to fight for it and, believe me, that’ll be one hell of a fight. You want my help?’ He gave the biggest shrug his big shoulders could manage, like even considering an alternative was madness. ‘All you got to do is not fight.’

Shy didn’t like the feel of this bastard one bit, but she didn’t like the feel of the Mayor much more and she had to admit there was something in what he was saying.

Lamb nodded as he straightened out his knife between finger and thumb and tossed it on his plate. Then he stood. ‘What if I’d rather fight?’ And he strode for the door, the queue for breakfast scurrying to part for him.

Ring blinked, brows drawn in with puzzlement. ‘Who’d rather fight?’ Shy got up without answering and hurried after, weaving between the tables. ‘Just think about it, that’s all I’m asking! Be reasonable!’

And they were out into the street. ‘Hold up there, Lamb! Lamb!’

She dodged through a bleating mass of little grey sheep, had to lurch back to let a pair of wagons squelch past. She caught sight of Temple, sitting high up astride a big beam, hammer in hand, the strong square frame of Majud’s shop already higher than the slumping buildings on either side. He raised one hand in greeting.

‘Seventy!’ she bellowed at him. She couldn’t see his face but the shoulders of his silhouette slumped in a faintly heartening way.

‘Will you hold up?’ She caught Lamb by the arm just as he was getting close to the Mayor’s Church of Dice, the thugs around the door, hardly to be told from the ones who’d come with Papa Ring, watching them hard-eyed. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

‘Taking the Mayor up on her offer.’

‘Just ’cause that fat fool rubbed you the wrong way?’

Lamb came close and suddenly it seemed that he was looming over her from quite the height. ‘That and ’cause his man stole your brother and sister.’

‘You think I’m happy about that?’ she hissed at him, getting angry now. ‘But we don’t know the ins and outs of it! He seemed reasonable enough, considering’

Lamb frowned back towards Camling’s. ‘Some men only listen to violence.’

‘Some men only talk it. Never took you for one of ’em. Did we come for Pit and Ro or for blood?’

She’d meant to make a point not ask a question but for a moment it looked like he had to consider the answer. ‘I’m thinking I might get all three.’

She stared at him for a moment. ‘Who the fuck are you? There was a time men could rub your face in the dung and you’d just thank ’em and ask for more.’

‘And you know what?’ He peeled her fingers from his arm with a grip that was almost painful. ‘I’ve remembered I didn’t like it much.’ And he stomped muddy footprints up the steps of the Mayor’s place, leaving Shy behind in the street.

That Simple

Temple tapped a few more shavings from the joint, then nodded to Lamb and together they lowered the beam, tenon sliding snugly into mortise.

‘Hah!’ Lamb slapped Temple on the back. ‘Naught so nice as to see a job done well. You got clever hands, lad. Damn clever for a man washes up out of streams. Sort of hands you can turn to anything.’ He looked down at his own big, battered, three-fingered hand and made a fist of it. ‘Mine only ever really been good for one thing.’ And he thumped at the beam until it came flush.

Temple had expected carpentry to be almost as much of a chore as riding drag, but he had to admit he was enjoying himself, and it was getting harder every day to pretend otherwise. There was something in the smell of fresh-sawn timber—when the mountain breeze slipped into the valley long enough for one to smell anything but shit—that wafted away his suffocating regrets and let him breathe free. His hands had found old skills with hammer and chisel and he had worked out the habits of the local wood, pale and straight and strong. Majud’s hirelings silently conceded he knew his business and soon were taking his instructions without a second word, working at scaffold and pulleys with little skill but great enthusiasm, the frame sprouting up twice as fast and twice as fine as Temple had hoped.

‘Where’s Shy?’ he asked, offhand, as though it was no part of a plan to dodge his latest payment. It was getting to be a game between them. One he never seemed to win.

‘She’s still touring town, asking questions about Pit and Ro. New folk coming in every day to ask. Probably she’s trying Papa Ring’s side of the street by now.’

‘Is that safe?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘Shouldn’t you stop her?’

Lamb snorted as he pushed a peg into Temple’s fishing hand. ‘Last time I tried to stop Shy she was ten years old and it didn’t stick then.’

Temple worked the peg into its hole. ‘Once she has a destination in mind, she isn’t one to stop halfway.’

‘Got to love that about her.’ Lamb had a trace of pride in his voice as he passed the mallet. ‘She’s no coward, that girl.’

‘So why are you helping me not her?’

‘’Cause I reckon I’ve found a way to Pit and Ro already. I’m just waiting for Shy to come round to the cost.’

‘Which is?’

‘The Mayor wants a favour.’ There was a long pause, measured out by the tapping of Temple’s mallet, accompanied by the distant sounds of other hammers on other more slovenly building sites scattered about the town. ‘She and Papa Ring bet Crease on a fight.’

Temple looked around. ‘They bet Crease?’

‘They each own half the town, more or less.’ Lamb looked out at it, crammed thoughtlessly into both sides of that winding valley like the place was an almighty gut, people and goods and animals squeezing in one end and shit and beggars and money squirting out the other. ‘But the more you get the more you want. And all either one o’ them wants is the half they haven’t got.’

Temple puffed out his cheeks as he twisted at the next peg. ‘I imagine one of them is sure to be disappointed.’

‘At least one. The worst enemies are those that live next door, my father used to tell me. These two have been squabbling for years and neither one’s come out on top, so they’re putting on a fight. Winner takes all.’ A group of half-tame Ghosts had spilled from one of the worse whorehouses—the better ones wouldn’t let them in the door—and had knives out, taunting each other in common, knowing no words but swearing and the language of violence. That was more than enough to get by on in Crease. ‘Two men in a Circle,’ murmured Lamb, ‘more’n likely with a considerable audience and a fair few side bets. One comes out alive, one comes out otherwise, and everyone else comes out thoroughly entertained.’

‘Shit,’ breathed Temple.

‘Papa Ring’s brought in a man called Glama Golden. A Northman. Big name in his day. I hear he’s been fighting for money in pits and pens all across the Near Country and done a lot of winning, too. The Mayor, well, she’s been searching high and low for someone to stand up for her…’ He gave Temple a long look and it was easy enough to guess the rest.

‘Shit.’ It was one thing to fight for your life out there on the plains when the Ghosts were coming at you and offering no alternatives. Another to wait weeks for the moment, choose to step out in front of a crowd and batter, twist and crush the life from a man with your hands. ‘Have you had any practice at… that sort of thing?’

‘As luck would have it—my luck being what it is—more’n a little.’

‘Are you sure the Mayor’s on the right side of this?’ asked Temple, thinking of all the wrong sides he had taken.

Lamb frowned down at the Ghosts, who had evidently resolved their differences without bloodshed and were noisily embracing. ‘In my experience there’s rarely such a thing as a right side, and when there is I’ve an uncanny knack of picking out the other. All I know is Grega Cantliss killed my friend and burned my farm and stole two children I swore to protect.’ Lamb’s voice had a cold edge on it as he shifted his frown to the Whitehouse, cold enough to bring Temple out in gooseflesh all over. ‘Papa Ring’s standing by him, so he’s made himself my enemy. The Mayor’s standing against him, and that makes her my friend.’

‘Are things ever really that simple?’

‘When you step into a Circle with the intention of killing a man, it’s best if they are.’

‘Temple?’ The sun was low and the shadow of one of the great columns had fallen across the street below, so it took a moment to work out who was calling from the swirling traffic. ‘Temple?’ Another moment before he placed the smiling face tipped towards him, bright-eyed and with a bushy yellow beard. ‘That you up there?’ Still a third before he connected the world in which he knew that man to the world he lived in now, and recognition washed over him like a bucket of ice-water over a peaceful sleeper.

‘Bermi?’ he breathed.

‘Friend of yours?’ asked Lamb.

‘We know each other,’ Temple managed to whisper.

He slipped down the ladder with shaky hands, all the time tingling with the rabbit’s urge to run. But where to? He had been beyond lucky to survive the last time he fled the Company of the Gracious Hand and was far from sure his divine support would stretch to another effort. He picked his way to Bermi with reluctant little steps, plucking at the hem of his shirt, like a child that knows he has a slap coming and more than likely deserves it.

‘You all right?’ asked the Styrian. ‘You look ill.’

‘Is Cosca with you?’ Temple could hardly get the words out he felt that sick. God might have blessed him with clever hands but He’d cursed him with a weak stomach.

Bermi was all smiles, though. ‘I’m happy to say he’s not, nor any of those other bastards. I daresay he’s still floundering about the Near Country bragging to that bloody biographer and searching for ancient gold he’ll never find. If he hasn’t given up and gone back to Starikland to get drunk.’

Temple closed his eyes and expelled a lungful of the most profound relief. ‘Thank heaven.’ He put his hand on the Styrian’s shoulder and leaned over, bent nearly double, head spinning.

‘You sure you’re all right?’

‘Yes, I am.’ He grabbed Bermi around the back and hugged him tight. ‘Better than all right!’ He was ecstatic! He breathed free once again! He kissed Bermi’s bearded cheek with a noisy smack. ‘What the hell brings you to the arse of the world?’

‘You showed me the way. After that town—what was the name of it?’

‘Averstock,’ muttered Temple.

Bermi’s eyes took on a guilty squint. ‘I’ve done things I’m not proud of, but that? Nothing else but murder. Cosca sent me to find you, afterwards.’

‘He did?’

‘Said you were the most important man in the whole damn Company. Other than him, of course. Two days out I ran into a Fellowship coming west to mine for gold. Half of them were from Puranti—from my home town, imagine that! It’s as if God has a purpose!’

‘Almost as if.’

‘I left the Company of the Fucking Finger and off we went.’

‘You put Cosca behind you.’ Cheating death once again had given Temple a faintly drunken feeling. ‘Far, far behind.’

‘You a carpenter now?’

‘One way to clear my debts.’

‘Shit on your debts, brother. We’re heading back into the hills. Got a claim up on the Brownwash. Men are just sieving nuggets out of the mud up there!’ He slapped Temple on the shoulder. ‘You should come with us! Always room for a carpenter with a sense of humour. We’ve a cabin but it could do with some work.’

Temple swallowed. How often on the trail, choking on the dust of Buckhorm’s herd or chafing under the sting of Shy’s jibes, had he dreamed of an offer just like this? An easy way, unrolling before his willing feet. ‘When do you leave?’

‘Five days, maybe six.’

‘What would a man need to bring?’

‘Just some good clothes and a shovel, we’ve got the rest.’

Temple looked for the trick in Bermi’s face but there was no sign of one. Perhaps there was a God after all. ‘Are things ever really that simple?’

Bermi laughed. ‘You’re the one always loved to make things complicated. This is the new frontier, my friend, the land of opportunities. You got anything keeping you here?’

‘I suppose not.’ Temple glanced up at Lamb, a big black shape on the frame of Majud’s building. ‘Nothing but debts.’

Yesterday’s News

‘I’m looking for a pair of children.’

Blank faces.

‘Their names are Ro and Pit.’

Sad shakes of the head.

‘They’re ten and six. Seven. He’d be seven now.’

Sympathetic mumbles.

‘They were stole by a man named Grega Cantliss.’

A glimpse of scared eyes as the door slammed in her face.

Shy had to admit she was getting tired. She’d near worn her boots through tramping up and down the crooked length of main street, which wormed longer and more crooked every day as folk poured in off the plains, throwing up tents or wedging new hovels into some sliver of mud or just leaving their wagons rotting alongside the trail. Her shoulders were bruised from pushing through the bustle, her legs sore from scaling the valley sides to talk to folk in shacks clinging to the incline. Her voice was a croak from asking the same old questions over and over in the gambling halls and husk-dens and drinking sheds until she could hardly tell them apart one from another. There were a good few places they wouldn’t let her in, now. Said she put off the customers. Probably she did. Probably Lamb had the right of it just waiting for Cantliss to come to him, but Shy had never been much good at waiting. That’s your Ghost blood, her mother would’ve said. But then her mother hadn’t been much good at waiting either.

‘Look here, it’s Shy South.’

‘You all right, Hedges?’ Though she could tell the answer at a glance. He’d never looked flushed with success but he’d had a spark of hope about him on the trail. It had guttered since and left him greyed out and ragged. Crease was no place to make your hopes healthier. No place to make anything healthier, far as she could tell. ‘Thought you were looking for work?’

‘Couldn’t find none. Not for a man with a leg like this. Wouldn’t have thought I led the charge up there at Osrung, would you?’ She wouldn’t have, but he’d said so already so she kept her silence. ‘Still looking for your kin?’

‘Will be until I find ’em. You heard anything?’

‘You’re the first person said more’n five words together to me in a week. Wouldn’t think I led a charge, would you? Wouldn’t think that.’ They stood there awkward, both knowing what was coming next. Didn’t stop it coming, though. ‘Can you spare a couple o’ bits?’

‘Aye, a few.’ She delved in her pocket and handed him the coins Temple had handed her an hour before, then headed on quick. No one likes to stand that close to failure, do they? Worried it might rub off.

‘Ain’t you going to tell me not to drink it all?’ he called after her.

‘I’m no preacher. Reckon folk have the right to pick their own method of destruction.’

‘So they do. You’re not so bad, Shy South, you’re all right!’

‘We’ll have to differ on that,’ she muttered, leaving Hedges to shuffle for the nearest drinking hole, never too many steps away in Crease even for a man whose steps were miserly as his.

‘I’m looking for a pair of children.’

‘I cannot assist you there, but I have other tidings!’ This woman was a strange-looking character, clothes that must’ve been fine in their time but their time was long past and the months since full of mud and stray food. She drew back her sagging coat with a flourish and produced a sheaf of crumpled papers.

‘What are they, news-bills?’ Shy was already regretting talking to this woman but the path here was a narrow stretch of mud between sewer-stream and rotten porches and her bulging belly wasn’t giving space to pass.

‘You have a keen eye for quality. You wish to make a purchase?’

‘Not really.’

‘The faraway happenings of politics and power are of no interest?’

‘They never seem to bear much on my doings.’

‘Perhaps it is your ignorance of current affairs keeps you down so?’

‘I always took it to be the greed, laziness and ill-temper of others plus a fair share of bad luck, but I reckon you’ll have it your way.’

‘Everyone does.’ But the woman didn’t move.

Shy sighed. Given her knack for upsetting folk she thought she might give indulgence a try. ‘All right, then, deliver me from ignorance.’

The woman displayed the upmost bill and spoke with mighty selfimportance. ‘Rebels defeated at Mulkova—routed by Union troops under General Brint! How about that?’

‘Unless they been defeated there a second time, that happened before I even left the Near Country. Everyone knows it.’

‘The lady requires something fresher,’ muttered the old woman, rooting through her thumbed-over bundle. ‘Styrian conflict ends! Sipani opens gates to the Snake of Talins!’

‘That was at least two years before.’ Shy was starting to think this woman was touched in the head, if that even meant anything in a place where most were happy-mad, dismal-mad, or some other kind of mad that defied further description.

‘A challenge indeed.’ The woman licked a dirty finger to leaf through her wares and came up with one that looked a veritable antique. ‘Legate Sarmis menaces border of the Near Country? Fears of Imperial incursion?’

‘Sarmis has been menacing for decades. He’s the most menacing Legate you ever heard of.’

‘Then it’s true as it ever was!’

‘News spoils quick, friend, like milk.’

‘I say it gets better if carefully kept, like wine.’

‘I’m glad you like the vintage, but I ain’t buying yesterday’s news.’

The woman cradled her papers like a mother hiding an infant from bird attack, and as she leaned forward Shy saw the top was tore off her tall hat and got a view of the scabbiest scalp imaginable and a smell of rot almost knocked her over. ‘No worse than tomorrow’s, is it?’ And the woman swept her aside and strode on waving her old bills over her head. ‘News! I have news!’

Shy took a long, hard breath before she set off. Damn, but she was tired. Crease was no place to get less tired, far as she could tell.

‘I’m looking for a pair of children.’

The one in the middle treated her to something you’d have had to call a leer. ‘I’ll give you children, girl.’

The one on the left burst out laughing. The one on the right grinned, and a bit of chagga juice dribbled out of his mouth and ran down into his beard. From the look of his beard it wasn’t his first dribble either. They were an unpromising trio all right, but if Shy had stuck to the promising she’d have been done in Crease her first day there.

‘They were stolen from our farm.’

‘Probably nothing else there worth stealing.’

‘Being honest, I daresay you’re right. Man called Grega Cantliss stole ’em.’

The mood shifted right off. The one on the right stood up, frowning. The one on the left spat juice over the railing. Leery leered more’n ever. ‘You got some gall asking questions over here, girl. Some fucking gall.’

‘You ain’t the first to say so. Probably best I just take my gall away on down the street.’

She made to move on but he stepped down from the porch to block her way, pointed a waving finger towards her face. ‘You know what, you’ve got kind of a Ghosty look to you.’

‘Half-breed, maybe,’ grunted one of his friends.

Shy set her jaw. ‘Quarter, as it goes.’

Leery took his leer into realms of facial contortion. ‘Well, we don’t care for your kind over on this side o’ the street.’

‘Better quarter-Ghost than all arsehole, surely?’

There was that knack for upsetting folk. His brows drew in and he took a step at her. ‘Why, you bloody—’

Without thinking she put her right hand on the grip of her knife and said, ‘You’d best stop right there.’

His eyes narrowed. Annoyed. Like he hadn’t expected straight-up defiance but couldn’t back down with his friends watching. ‘You’d best not put your hand on that knife unless you’re going to use it, girl.’

‘Whether I use it or not depends on whether you stop there or not. My hopes ain’t high but maybe you’re cleverer than you look.’

‘Leave her be.’ A big man stood in the doorway. Big hardly did him justice. His fist up on the frame beside him looked about the size of Shy’s head.

‘You can stay out o’ this,’ said Leery.

‘I could, but I’m not. You say you’re looking for Cantliss?’ he asked, eyes moving over to Shy.

‘That’s right.’

‘Don’t tell her nothing!’ snapped Squinty.

The big man’s eyes drifted back. ‘You can shut up…’ He had to duck his head to get through the doorway. ‘Or I can shut you up.’ The other two men backed off to give him room—and he needed a lot. He looked bigger still as he stepped out of the shadows, taller’n Lamb, even, and maybe bigger in the chest and shoulder, too. A real monster, but he spoke soft, accent thick with the North. ‘Don’t pay these idiots no mind. They’ve got big bones for fights they’re sure of winning but otherwise not enough for a toothpick.’ He took the couple of steps down into the street, boards groaning under his great boots, and stood towering over Leery.

‘Cantliss is from the same cloth,’ he said. ‘A puffed-up fool with a lot of vicious in him.’ For all his size there was a sad sag to his face. A droop to his blond moustache, a sorry greying to the stubble about it. ‘More or less what I used to be, if it comes to that. He owes Papa Ring a lot of money, as I heard it. Ain’t been around for a while now, though. Not much more I can tell you.’

‘Well, thanks for that much.’

‘My pleasure.’ The big man turned his washed-out blue eyes on Leery. ‘Get out of her way.’

Leery gave Shy a particularly nasty leer, but Shy had been treated to a lot of harsh expressions in her time and after a while they lose their sting. He made to go back up the steps but the big man didn’t let him. ‘Get out of her way, that way.’ And he nodded over at the stream.

‘Stand in the sewer?’ said Leery.

‘Stand in the sewer. Or I’ll lay you out in it.’

Leery cursed to himself as he clambered down the slimy rocks and stood up to his knees in shitty water. The big man put one hand on his chest and with the other offered Shy the open way.

‘My thanks,’ she said as she stepped past. ‘Glad I found someone decent this side of the street.’

The man gave a sad snort. ‘Don’t let a small kindness fool you. Did you say you’re looking for children?’

‘My brother and sister. Why?’

‘Might be I can help.’

Shy had learned to treat offers of help, and for that matter everything else, with a healthy suspicion. ‘Why would you?’

‘Because I know how it feels to lose your family. Like losing a part of you, ain’t it?’ She thought about that for a moment, and reckoned he had it right. ‘Had to leave mine behind, in the North. I know it was the best thing for ’em. The only thing. But it still cuts at me now. Didn’t ever think it would. Can’t say I valued ’em much when I had ’em. But it cuts at me.’

He’d such a sorry sag to his great shoulders then that Shy had to take pity on him. ‘Well, you’re welcome to follow along, I guess. It’s been my observation that folk take me more serious when I’ve a great big bastard looking over my shoulder.’

‘That is a sadly universal truth,’ he said as he fell into step, two of his near enough to every three of hers. ‘You here alone?’

‘Came with my father. Kind of my father.’

‘How can someone be kind of your father?’

‘He’s managed it.’

‘He father to these other two you’re looking for?’

‘Kind of to them, too,’ said Shy.

‘Shouldn’t he be helping look?’

‘He is, in his way. He’s building a house, over on the other side of the street.’

‘That new one I’ve seen going up?’

‘Majud and Curnsbick’s Metalwork.’

‘That’s a good building. And that’s a rare thing around here. Hard to see how it’ll find your young ones, though.’

‘He’s trusting someone else to help with that.’

‘Who?’

Normally she’d have kept her cards close, so to speak, but something in his manner brought her out. ‘The Mayor.’

He took a long suck of breath. ‘I’d sooner trust a snake with my fruits than that woman with anything.’

‘She sure is a bit too smooth.’

‘Never trust someone who don’t use their proper name, I was always told.’

‘You haven’t told me your name yet.’

The big man gave a weary sigh. ‘I was hoping to avoid it. People tend to look at me different, once they know what it is.’

‘One o’ those funny ones, is it? Arsehowl, maybe?’

‘That’d be a mercy. My name’ll make no one laugh, sad to say. You’d never believe how I worked at blowing it up bigger. Years of it. Now there ain’t no getting out from under its shadow. I’ve forged the links of my own chain and no mistake.’

‘I reckon we’re all prone to do that.’

‘More’n likely.’ He stopped and offered one huge hand, and she took it, her own seeming little as a child’s in its great warm grip. ‘My name’s—’

‘Glama Golden!’

Shy saw the big man flinch a moment, and his shoulders hunch, then he slowly turned. A young man stood in the street behind. A big lad, with a scar through his lips and a tattered coat. He had an unsteady look to him made Shy think he’d been drinking hard. To puff his courage up, maybe, though folk didn’t always bother with a reason to drink in Crease. He raised an unsteady finger to point at them, and his other hand hovered around the handle of a big knife at his belt.

‘You’re the one killed Stockling Bear?’ he sneered. ‘You’re the one won all them fights?’ He spat in the mud just near their feet. ‘You don’t look much!’

‘I ain’t much,’ said the big man, softly.

The lad blinked, not sure what to do with that. ‘Well… I’m fucking calling you out, you bastard!’

‘What if I ain’t listening?’

The lad frowned at the people on the porches, all stopped their business to watch. He ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, not sure of himself. Then he looked over at Shy, and took one more stab at it. ‘Who’s this bitch? Your fucking—’

‘Don’t make me kill you, boy.’ Golden didn’t say it like a threat. Pleading, almost, his eyes sadder’n ever.

The lad flinched a little, and his fingers twitched, and he came over pale. The bottle’s a shifty banker—it might lend you courage but it’s apt to call the debt in sudden. He took a step back and spat again. ‘Ain’t fucking worth it,’ he snapped.

‘No, it ain’t.’ Golden watched the lad as he backed slowly off, then turned and walked away fast. A few sighs of relief, a few shrugs, and the talk started building back up.

Shy swallowed, mouth suddenly dried out and sticky-feeling. ‘You’re Glama Golden?’

He slowly nodded. ‘Though I know full well there ain’t much golden about me these days.’ He rubbed his great hands together as he watched that lad lose himself in the crowd, and Shy saw they were shaking. ‘Hell of a thing, being famous. Hell of a thing.’

‘You’re the one standing for Papa Ring in this fight that’s coming?’

‘That I am. Though I have to say I’m hopeful it won’t happen. I hear the Mayor’s got no one to fight for her.’ His pale eyes narrowed as he looked back to Shy. ‘Why, what’ve you heard?’

‘Nothing,’ she said, trying her best to smile and failing at it. ‘Nothing at all.’

Blood Coming

It was just before dawn, clear and cold, the mud crusted with frost. The lamps in the windows had mostly been snuffed, the torches lighting the signs had guttered out and the sky was bright with stars. Hundreds upon hundreds of them, sharp as jewels, laid out in swirls and drifts and twinkling constellations. Temple opened his mouth, cold nipping at his cheeks, turning, turning until he was dizzy, taking in the beauty of the heavens. Strange, that he had never noticed them before. Maybe his eyes had been always on the ground.

‘You reckon there’s an answer up there?’ asked Bermi, his breath and his horse’s breath smoking on the dawn chill.

‘I don’t know where the answer is,’ said Temple.

‘You ready?’

He turned to look at the house. The big beams were up, most of the rafters and the window and door-frames, too, the skeleton of the building standing bold and black against the star-scattered sky. Only that morning Majud had been telling him what a fine job he was doing, how even Curnsbick would have considered his money well spent. He felt a flush of pride, and wondered when he had last felt one. But Temple was a man who abandoned everything half-done. That was a long-established fact.

‘You can ride on the packhorse. It’s only a day or two into the hills.’

‘Why not?’ A few hundred miles on a mule and his arse was carved out of wood.

Over towards the amphitheatre the carpenters were already making a desultory start. They were throwing up a new bank of seating at the open side so they could cram in a few score more onlookers, supports and cross-braces just visible against the dark hillside, bent and badly bolted, some of the timbers without the branches even properly trimmed.

‘Only a couple of weeks to the big fight.’

‘Shame we’ll miss it,’ said Bermi. ‘Better get on, the rest of the lads’ll be well ahead by now.’

Temple pushed his new shovel through one of the packhorse’s straps, moving slower, and slower, then stopping still. It had been a day or two since he’d seen Shy, but he kept reminding himself of the debt in her absence. He wondered if she was out there somewhere, still doggedly searching. You could only admire someone who stuck at a thing like that, no matter the cost, no matter the odds. Especially if you were a man who could never stick at anything. Not even when he wanted to.

Temple thought about that for a moment, standing motionless up to his ankles in half-frozen mud. Then he walked to Bermi and slapped his hand down on the Styrian’s shoulder. ‘I won’t be going. My bottomless thanks for the offer, but I’ve a building to finish. That and a debt to pay.’

‘Since when do you pay your debts?’

‘Since now, I suppose.’

Bermi gave him a puzzled look, as if he was trying to work out where the joke might be. ‘Can I change your mind?’

‘No.’

‘Your mind always shifted with the breeze.’

‘Looks like a man can grow.’

‘What about your shovel?’

‘Consider it a gift.’

Bermi narrowed his eyes. ‘There’s a woman involved, isn’t there?’

‘There is, but not in the way you’re thinking.’

‘What’s she thinking?’

Temple snorted. ‘Not that.’

‘We’ll see.’ Bermi hauled himself into his saddle. ‘I reckon you’ll regret it, when we come back through with nuggets big as turds.’

‘I’ll probably regret it a lot sooner than that. Such is life.’

‘You’re right there.’ The Styrian swept off his hat and raised it high in salute. ‘No reasoning with the bastard!’ And he was off, mud flicking from the hooves of his horse as he headed out up the main street, scattering a group of reeling-drunk miners on the way.

Temple gave a long sigh. He wasn’t sure he didn’t regret it already. Then he frowned. One of those stumbling miners looked familiar: an old man with a bottle in one hand and tear-tracks gleaming on his cheeks.

‘Iosiv Lestek?’ Temple twitched up his trousers to squelch out into the street. ‘What happened to you?’

‘Disgrace!’ croaked the actor, beating at his breast. ‘The crowd… wretched. My performance… abject. The cultural extravaganza… a debacle!’ He clawed at Temple’s shirt. ‘I was pelted from the stage. I! Iosiv Lestek! He who ruled the theatres of Midderland as if they were a private fief!’ He clawed at his own shirt, stained up the front. ‘Pelted with dung! Replaced by a trio of girls with bared bubs. To rapturous applause, I might add. Is that all audiences care for these days? Bubs?’

‘I suppose they’ve always been popular—’

‘All finished!’ howled Lestek at the sky.

‘Shut the fuck up!’ someone roared from an upstairs window.

Temple took the actor by the arm. ‘Let me take you back to Camling’s—’

‘Camling!’ Lestek tore free, waving his bottle. ‘That cursed maggot! That treacherous cuckoo! He has ejected me from his Hostelry! I! Me! Lestek! I will be revenged upon him, though!’

‘Doubtless.’

‘He will see! They will all see! My best performance is yet ahead of me!’

‘You will show them, but perhaps in the morning. There are other hostelries—’

‘I am penniless! I sold my wagon, I let go my props, I pawned my costumes!’ Lestek dropped to his knees in the filth. ‘I have nothing but the rags I wear!’

Temple gave a smoking sigh and looked once more towards the star-prickled heavens. Apparently he was set on the hard way. The thought made him oddly pleased. He reached down and helped the old man to his feet. ‘I have a tent big enough for two, if you can stand my snoring.’

Lestek stood swaying for a moment. ‘I don’t deserve such kindness.’

Temple shrugged. ‘Neither did I.’

‘My boy,’ murmured the actor, opening wide his arms, tears gleaming again in his eyes.

Then he was sick down Temple’s shirt.

Shy frowned. She’d been certain Temple was about to get on that packhorse and ride out of town, trampling her childish trust under hoof and no doubt the last she’d ever hear of him. But all he’d done was give a man a shovel and wave him off. Then haul some shit-covered old drunk into the shell of Majud’s building. People are a mystery there’s no solving, all right.

She was awake a lot in the nights, now. Watching the street. Maybe thinking she’d see Cantliss ride in—not that she even had the first clue what he looked like. Maybe thinking she’d catch a glimpse of Pit and Ro, if she even recognised them any more. But mostly just picking at her worries. About her brother and sister, about Lamb, about the fight that was coming. About things and places and faces she’d rather have forgotten.

Jeg with his hat jammed down saying, ‘Smoke? Smoke?’ and Dodd all surprised she’d shot him and that bank man saying so politely, ‘I’m afraid I can’t help you,’ with that puzzled little smile like she was a lady come for a loan rather’n a thief who’d ended up murdering him for nothing. That girl they’d hanged in her place whose name Shy had never known. Swinging there with a sign around her twisted neck and her dead eyes asking, why me and not you? and Shy still no closer to an answer.

In those slow, dark hours her head filled with doubts like a rotten rowboat with bog water, going down, going down for all her frantic bailing, and she’d think of Lamb dead like it was already done and Pit and Ro rotting in the empty somewhere and she’d feel like some kind of traitor for thinking it, but how do you stop a thought once it’s in there?

Death was the one sure thing out here. The one fact among the odds and chances and bets and prospects. Leef, and Buckhorm’s sons, and how many Ghosts out there on the plain? Men in fights in Crease, and folk hung on tissue-paper evidence or dead of fever or of silly mishaps like that drover kicked in the head by his brother’s horse yesterday, or the shoe-merchant they found drowned in the sewer. Death walked among them daily, and presently would come calling on them all.

Hooves in the street and Shy craned to see, a set of torches flickering, folk retreating to their porches from the flying mud of a dozen horsemen. She turned to look at Lamb, a big shape under his blanket, shadow pooled in its folds. At the head-end she could just see his ear, and the big notch out of it. Could just hear his soft, slow breathing.

‘You awake?’

He took a longer breath. ‘Now I am.’

The men had reined in before the Mayor’s Church of Dice, torchlight shifting over their hard-used, hard-bitten faces, and Shy shrank back. Not Pit or Ro and not Cantliss either. ‘More thugs arrived for the Mayor.’

‘Lots of thugs about,’ grunted Lamb. ‘Don’t take no reader of the runes to see blood coming.’

Hooves thumped on by in the street and a flash of laughter and a woman shouting then quiet, with just the quick tap-tap of a hammer from over near the amphitheatre to remind them that the big show was on its way.

‘What happens if Cantliss don’t come?’ She spoke at the dark. ‘How do we find Pit and Ro then?’

Lamb slowly sat up, scrubbing his fingers through his grey hair. ‘We’ll just have to keep looking.’

‘What if…’ For all the time she’d spent thinking it she hadn’t crossed the bridge of actually making the words ’til now. ‘What if they’re dead?’

‘We keep looking ’til we’re sure.’

‘What if they died out there on the plains and we’ll never know for sure? Every month passes there’s more chance we’ll never know, ain’t there? More chance they’ll just be lost, no finding ’em.’ Her voice was turning shrill but she couldn’t stop it rising, wilder and wilder. ‘They could be anywhere by now, couldn’t they, alive or dead? How do we find two children in all the unmapped empty they got out here? When do we stop, is what I’m asking? When can we stop?’

He pushed his blanket back, padded over and winced as he squatted, looking up into her face. ‘You can stop whenever you want, Shy. You come this far and that’s a long, hard way, and more’n likely there’s a long, hard way ahead yet. I made a promise to your mother and I’ll keep on. Long as it takes. Ain’t like I got better offers knocking my door down. But you’re young, still. You got a life to lead. If you stopped, no one could blame you.’

‘I could.’ She laughed then, and wiped the beginnings of a tear on the back of her hand. ‘And it ain’t like I got much of a life either, is it?’

‘You take after me there,’ he said, pulling back the covers on her bed, ‘daughter or not.’

‘Guess I’m just tired.’

‘Who wouldn’t be?’

‘I just want ’em back,’ as she slid under the blankets.

‘We’ll get ’em back,’ as he dropped them over her and laid a weighty hand on her shoulder. She could almost believe him, then. ‘Get some sleep now, Shy.’

Apart from the first touch of dawn creeping between the curtains and across Lamb’s bedspread in a grey line, the room was dark.

‘You really going to fight that man Golden?’ she asked, after a while. ‘He seemed all right to me.’

Lamb was silent long enough she started to wonder whether he was asleep. Then he said, ‘I’ve killed better men for worse reasons, I’m sorry to say.’

The Sleeping Partner

In general, Temple was forced to concede, he was a man who had failed to live up to his own high standards. Or even to his low ones. He had undertaken a galaxy of projects. Many of those any decent man would have been ashamed of. Of the remainder, due to a mixture of bad luck, impatience and a shiftless obsession with the next thing, he could hardly remember one that had not tailed off into disappointment, failure or outright disaster.

Majud’s shop, as it approached completion, was therefore a very pleasant surprise.

One of the Suljuks who had accompanied the Fellowship across the plains turned out to be an artist of a roofer. Lamb had applied his nine digits to the masonry and proved himself more than capable. More recently the Buckhorms had shown up in full numbers to help saw and nail the plank siding. Even Lord Ingelstad took a rare break from losing money to the town’s gamblers to give advice on the paint. Bad advice, but still.

Temple took a step back into the street, gazing up at the nearly completed façade, lacking only for balusters to the balcony and glass in the windows, and produced the broadest and most self-satisfied grin he had entertained in quite some time. Then he was nearly pitched on his face by a hearty thump on the shoulder.

He turned, fully expecting to hear Shy grate out the glacial progress of his debt to her, and received a second surprise.

A man stood at his back. Not tall, but broad and possessed of explosive orange sideburns. His thick eyeglasses made his eyes appear minute, his smile immense by comparison. He wore a tailored suit, but his heavy hands were scarred across the backs by hard work.

‘I had despaired of finding decent carpentry in this place!’ He raised an eyebrow at the new seating haphazardly sprouting skywards around the ancient amphitheatre. ‘But what should I find, just at my lowest ebb?’ And he seized Temple by the arms and pointed him back towards Majud’s shop. ‘But this invigorating example of the joiner’s craft! Bold in design, diligent in execution and in a heady fusion of styles aptly reflecting the many-cultured character of the adventurers braving this virgin land. And all on my behalf! Sir, I am quite humbled!’

‘Your… behalf?’

‘Indeed!’ He pointed towards the sign above the front door. ‘I am Honrig Curnsbick, the better half of Majud and Curnsbick!’ And he flung his arms around Temple and kissed him on both cheeks, then rooted in his waistcoat pocket and produced a coin. ‘A little something extra for your trouble. Generosity repays itself, I have always said!’

Temple blinked down at the coin. It was a silver five-mark piece. ‘You have?’

‘I have! Not always financially, not always immediately, but in goodwill and friendship which ultimately are beyond price!’

‘They are? I mean… you think they are?’

‘I do! Where is my partner, Majud? Where is that stone-hearted old money-grubber?’

‘I do not believe he is expecting your arrival—’

‘Nor do I! But how could I stay in Adua while… this,’ and he spread his arms wide to encompass swarming, babbling, fragrant Crease, ‘all this was happening without me? Besides, I have a fascinating new idea I wish to discuss with him. Steam, now, is the thing.’

‘Is it?’

‘The engineering community is in an uproar following a demonstration of Scibgard’s new coal-fired piston apparatus!’

‘Whose what?’

Curnsbick perched eyeglasses on broad forehead to squint at the hills behind the town. ‘The results of the first mineral investigations are quite fascinating. I suspect the gold in these mountains is black, my boy! Black as…’ He trailed off, staring up the steps of the house. ‘Not… can it be…’ He fumbled down his eyeglasses and let fall his jaw. ‘The famous Iosiv Lestek?’

The actor, swaddled in a blanket and with several days’ grey growth upon his grey cheeks, blinked back from the doorway. ‘Well, yes—’

‘My dear sir!’ Curnsbick trotted up the steps, caused one of Buckhorm’s sons to fumble his hammer by flicking a mark at him, seized the actor by the hand and pumped it more vigorously than any piston apparatus could have conceived of. ‘An honour to make your acquaintance, sir, a perfect honour! I was transported by your Bayaz on one occasion back in Adua. Veritably transported!’

‘You do me too much kindness,’ murmured Lestek as Majud’s ruthlessly pleasant partner steered him into the shop. ‘Though I feel sure my best work still lies ahead of me…’

Temple blinked after them. Curnsbick was not quite what he had been led to expect. But then what was in life? He stepped back once again, losing himself again in happy contemplation of his building, and was nearly knocked onto his face by another slap on the shoulder. He rounded on Shy, decidedly annoyed this time.

‘You’ll get your money, you bloodsucking—’

A monstrous fellow with a tiny face perched on an enormous bald head stood at his back. ‘The Mayor… wants… to see you,’ he intoned, as though they were lines for a walk-on part badly memorised.

Temple was already running through the many reasons why someone powerful might want him dead. ‘You’re sure it was me?’ The man nodded. Temple swallowed. ‘Did she say why?’

‘Didn’t say. Didn’t ask.’

‘And if I would rather remain here?’

That minuscule face crinkled smaller still with an almost painful effort of thought. ‘Wasn’t an option… she discussed.’

Temple took a quick glance about but there was no help in easy reach and, in any case, the Mayor was one of those inevitable people. If she wanted to see him, she would see him soon enough. He shrugged, once more whisked helpless as a leaf on the winds of fate, and trusted to God. For reasons best known to Himself, He’d been coming through for Temple lately.

The Mayor gazed across her desk in thoughtful silence for a very long time.

People with elevated opinions of themselves no doubt delight in being looked upon in such a manner, mentally listing the many wonderful characteristics the onlooker must be in dumbstruck admiration of. For Temple it was torture. Reflected in that estimating gaze he saw all his own disappointment in himself, and wriggled in his chair wishing the ordeal would end.

‘I am hugely honoured by the kind invitation, your… Mayor… ness,’ he ventured, able to bear it no longer, ‘but—’

‘Why are we here?’

The old man by the window, whose presence was so far a mystery, gave vent to a crackly chuckle. ‘Juvens and his brother Bedesh debated that very question for seven years and the longer they argued, the further away was the answer. I am Zacharus.’ He leaned forward, holding out one knobbly-knuckled hand, black crescents of dirt ingrained beneath the fingernails.

‘Like the Magus?’ asked Temple, tentatively offering his own.

‘Exactly like.’ The old man seized his hand, twisted it over and probed at the callus on his middle finger, still pronounced even though Temple had not held a pen in weeks. ‘A man of letters,’ said Zacharus, and a group of pigeons perched on the window sill all at once reared up and flapped their wings at each other.

‘I have had… several professions.’ Temple managed to worm his hand from the old man’s surprisingly powerful grip. ‘I was trained in history, theology and law in the Great Temple of Dagoska by Haddish Kahdia—’ The Mayor looked up sharply at the name. ‘You knew him?’

‘A lifetime ago. A man I greatly admired. He always preached and practised the same. He did what he thought right, no matter how difficult.’

‘My mirror image,’ muttered Temple.

‘Different tasks need different talents,’ observed the Mayor. ‘Do you have experience with treaties?’

‘As it happens, I negotiated a peace agreement and trimmed a border or two last time I was in Styria.’ He had served as a tool in a shameful and entirely illegal land-grab, but honesty was an advantage to carpenters and priests, not to lawyers.

‘I want you to prepare a treaty for me,’ said the Mayor. ‘One that brings Crease, and a slab of the Far Country around it, into the Empire and under its protection.’

‘Into the Old Empire? The great majority of the settlers come from the Union. Would that not be the natural—’

‘Absolutely not the Union.’

‘I see. Not wishing to talk myself into trouble—I do that rather too often—but… the only laws people seem to respect out here are the ones with a point on the end.’

‘Now, perhaps.’ The Mayor swept to the window and looked down into the swarming street. ‘But the gold will run out and the prospectors will drift off, and the fur will run out and the trappers will drift off, then the gamblers, then the thugs, then the whores. Who will remain? The likes of your friend Buckhorm, building a house and raising cattle a day’s ride out of town. Or your friend Majud, whose very fine shop and forge you have been chafing your hands on these past weeks. People who grow things, sell things, make things.’ She gracefully acquired a glass and bottle on the way back. ‘And those kinds of people like laws. They don’t like lawyers much, but they consider them a necessary evil. And so do I.’

She poured out a measure but Temple declined. ‘Drink and I have had some long and painful conversations and found we simply can’t agree.’

‘Drink and I can’t agree either.’ She shrugged and tossed it down herself. ‘But we keep on having the argument.’

‘I have a rough draft…’ Zacharus rummaged in his coat, producing a faint smell of musty onions and a grubby sheaf of odd-sized papers, scrawled upon with the most illegible handwriting imaginable. ‘The principal points covered, as you see. The ideal is the status of a semi-independent enclave under the protection of and paying nominal taxes to the Imperial government. There is precedent. The city of Calcis enjoys similar status. Then there is… was… what’s it called? Thingy. You know.’ He screwed up his eyes and slapped at the side of his head as if he could knock the answer free.

‘You have some experience with the law,’ said Temple as he leafed through the document.

The old man waved a dismissive and gravy-stained hand. ‘Imperial law, a long time ago. This treaty must be binding under Union law and mining traditions also.’

‘I will do the best I can. It will mean nothing until it is signed, of course, by a representative of the local population and, well, by the Emperor, I suppose.’

‘An Imperial Legate speaks for the Emperor.’

‘You have one handy?’

Zacharus and the Mayor exchanged a glance. ‘The legions of Legate Sarmis are said to be within four weeks’ march.’

‘I understand Sarmis is… not a man anyone would choose to invite. His legions even less so.’

The Mayor gave a resigned shrug. ‘Choice does not enter into it. Papa Ring is keen for Crease to be brought into the Union. I understand his negotiations in that direction are well advanced. That cannot be allowed to happen.’

‘I understand,’ said Temple. That their escalating squabble had acquired an international dimension and might well escalate further still. But escalating squabbles are meat and drink to a lawyer. He had to confess some trepidation at the idea of going back to that profession, but it certainly looked like the easy way.

‘How long will it take you to prepare the document?’ asked the Mayor.

‘A few days. I have Majud’s shop to finish—’

‘Make this a priority. Your fee will be two hundred marks.’

‘Two… hundred?’

‘Is that sufficient?’

Most definitely the easy way. Temple cleared his throat and said in a voice slightly hoarse, ‘That will be adequate but… I must complete the building first.’ He surprised himself with that even more than the Mayor had surprised him with the fee.

Zacharus nodded approvingly. ‘You are a man who likes to see things through.’

Temple could only smile. ‘The absolute opposite but… I’ve always liked the idea of being one.’

Fun

They were all in attendance, more or less. The whole Fellowship reunited. Well, not Leef, of course, or the others left in the dirt out there on the flat and empty. But the rest. Laughing and backslapping and lying about how well things were going now. Some misting up at rose-tinted remembrances of the way things had been on the trail. Some observing what a fine building the firm of Majud and Curnsbick had to work with. Probably Shy should’ve been joshing away with the rest. How long since she had some fun, after all? But she’d always found fun was easier talked of and looked forward to than actually had.

Dab Sweet was complaining about the faithlessness of those prospectors he’d guided into the mountains and who’d stiffed him on the payment before he could stiff them. Crying Rock was nodding along and grumbling, ‘Mmm,’ at all the wrong moments. Iosiv Lestek was trying to impress one of the whores with tales of his heyday on the stage. She was asking whether that was before the amphitheatre got built, which by most estimates was well over a thousand years ago. Savian was swapping grunts with Lamb in one corner, tight as if they’d known each other since boys. Hedges was lurking in another, nursing a bottle. Buckhorm and his wife still had a fair old brood running about folks’ legs despite the ones they’d lost in the wilderness.

Shy gave a sigh and drank another silent toast to Leef and the rest who couldn’t be there. Probably the company of the dead suited her better right then.

‘I used to ride drag behind an outfit like this!’

She turned towards the door and got quite the shock. Temple’s more successful twin stood there in a new black suit, all tidy as a princess, his dusty tangle of hair and beard barbered close. He’d come upon a new hat and a new manner besides, swaggering in more like owner than builder.

Wasn’t until she felt a sting of disappointment to see him so unfamiliar that she realised how much she’d been looking forward to seeing him the same.

‘Temple!’ came the merry calls and they crowded round to approve of him.

‘Who’d have thought you could fish such a carpenter from a river?’ Curnsbick was asking, an arm around Temple’s shoulders like he’d known him all his life.

‘A lucky find indeed!’ said Majud, like he was the one did the fishing and lent the money and Shy hadn’t been within a dozen miles at the time.

She worked her tongue around, reflecting that it surely was hard to get even the little credit you deserved, leaned to spit through the gap in her teeth, then saw Luline Buckhorm watching her with a warning eyebrow up and swallowed it instead.

Probably she should’ve been glad she’d saved a man from drowning and steered him to a better life, her faith justified against all contrary opinion. Let ring the bells! But instead she felt like a secret only she’d enjoyed was suddenly common knowledge, and found she was brooding on how she might go about spoiling it all for him, and then was even more annoyed that she was thinking like a mean child, and turned her back on the room and took another sour pull at her bottle. The bottle never changed unexpectedly, after all. It always left you equally disappointed.

‘Shy?’

She made sure she looked properly surprised, like she’d no idea he’d be in the room. ‘Well, if it ain’t everyone’s favourite chunk o’ driftwood, the great architect himself.’

‘The very same,’ said Temple, tipping that new hat.

‘Drink?’ she asked him, offering the bottle.

‘I shouldn’t.’

‘Too good to drink with me these days?’

‘Not good enough. I can never stop halfway.’

‘Halfway to where?’

‘Face down in the shit was my usual destination.’

‘You take a sip, I’ll try and catch you if you fall, how’s that?’

‘I suppose it wouldn’t be the first time.’ He took the bottle, and a sip, and grimaced like she’d kicked him in the fruits. ‘God! What the hell’s it made of?’

‘I’ve decided it’s one of those questions you’re happier without an answer to. Like how much that finery o’ yours cost.’

‘I haggled hard,’ thumping at his chest as he tried to get his voice back. ‘You would’ve been proud.’

Shy snorted. ‘Pride ain’t common with me. And it still must’ve cost a fair sum for a man with debts.’

‘Debts, you say?’

Here was familiar ground, at least. ‘Last we spoke it was—’

‘Forty-three marks?’ Eyes sparkling with triumph, he held out one finger. A purse dangled from the tip, gently swinging.

She blinked at it, then snatched it from his finger and jerked it open. It held the confusion of different coinage you usually found in Crease, but mostly silver, and at a quick assay there could easily have been sixty marks inside.

‘You turned to thievery?’

‘Lower yet. To law. I put ten extra in there for the favour. You did save my life, after all.’

She knew she should be smiling but somehow she was doing just the opposite. ‘You sure your life’s worth that much?’

‘Only to me. Did you think I’d never pay?’

‘I thought you’d grab your first chance to wriggle out of it and run off in the night. Or maybe die first.’

Temple raised his brows. ‘That’s about what I thought. Looks like I surprised us both. Pleasantly, though, I hope.’

‘Of course,’ she lied, pocketing the purse.

‘Aren’t you going to count it?’

‘I trust you.’

‘You do?’ He looked right surprised about it and so was she, but she realised it was true. True of a lot of folk in that room.

‘If it ain’t all there I can always track you down and kill you.’

‘It’s nice to know that’s an option.’

They stood side by side, in silence, backs to the wall, watching a room full of their friends’ chatter. She glanced at him and he slowly looked sideways, like he was checking whether she was looking, and when he got there she pretended she’d been looking past him at Hedges all along. Tense having him next to her of a sudden. As if without that debt between them they were pressed up too close for comfort.

‘You did a fine job on the building,’ was the best she could manage after digging away for something to say.

‘Fine jobs and paid debts. I can think of a few acquaintances who wouldn’t recognise me.’

‘I’m not sure I recognise you.’

‘That good or bad?’

‘I don’t know.’ A long pause, and the room was getting hot from all the folk blathering in it, and her face was hot in particular, and she passed Temple the bottle, and he shrugged and took a sip and passed it back. She took a bigger one. ‘What do we talk about, now you don’t owe me money?’

‘The same things as everyone else, I suppose.’

‘What do they talk about?’

He frowned at the crowded room. ‘The high quality of my craftsmanship appears to be a popular—’

‘Your head swells any bigger you won’t be able to stand.’

‘A lot of people are talking about this fight that’s coming—’

‘I’ve heard more’n enough about that.’

‘There’s always the weather.’

‘Muddy, lately, in main street, I’ve observed.’

‘And I hear there’s more mud on the way.’ He grinned sideways at her and she grinned back, and the distance didn’t feel so great after all.

‘Will you say a few words before the fun starts?’ It was when Curnsbick loomed suddenly out of nowhere Shy realised she was already more’n a bit drunk.

‘Words about what?’ she asked.

‘I apologise, my dear, but I was speaking to this gentleman. You look surprised.’

‘Not sure which shocks me more, that I’m a dear or he’s a gentleman.’

‘I stand by both appellations,’ said the inventor, though Shy wasn’t sure what the hell he meant by it. ‘And as ex-spiritual advisor to this ex-Fellowship, and architect and chief carpenter of this outstanding edifice, what gentleman better to address our little gathering at its completion?’

Temple raised his palms helplessly as Curnsbick hustled him off and Shy took another swig. The bottle was getting lighter all the time. And she was getting less annoyed.

Probably there was a link between the two.

‘My old teacher used to say you know a man by his friends!’ Temple called at the room. ‘Guess I can’t be quite the shit I thought I was!’

A few laughs and some shouts of, ‘Wrong! Wrong!’

‘Not long ago I barely knew one person I could have called decent. Now I can fill a room I built with them. I used to wonder why anyone would come out to this God-forsaken arse of the world who didn’t have to. Now I know. They come to be part of something new. To live in new country. To be new people. I nearly died out on the plains, and I can’t say I would have been widely mourned. But a Fellowship took me in and gave me another chance I hardly deserved. Not many of them were keen to begin with, I’ll admit, but… one was, and that was enough. My old teacher used to say you know the righteous by what they give to those who can’t give back. I doubt anyone who’s had the misfortune to bargain with her would agree, but I will always count Shy South among the righteous.’

A general murmur of agreement, and some raised glasses, and he saw Corlin slapping Shy on the back and her looking sour beyond belief.

‘My old teacher used to say there is no better act than the raising of a good building. It gives something to those that live in it, and visit it, and even pass it by every day it stands. I haven’t really tried at much in life, but I’ve tried to make a good building of this. Hopefully it will stand a little longer than some of the others hereabouts. May God smile on it as He has smiled on me since I fell in that river, and bring shelter and prosperity to its occupants.’

‘And liquor is free to all!’ bellowed Curnsbick. Majud’s horrified complaints were drowned out in the stampede towards the table where the bottles stood. ‘Especially the master carpenter himself.’ And the inventor conjured a glass into Temple’s hand and poured a generous measure, smiling so broadly Temple could hardly refuse. He and drink might have had their disagreements, but if the bottle was always willing to forgive, why shouldn’t he? Was not forgiveness neighbour to the divine? How drunk could one get him?

Drunk enough for another, as it turned out.

‘Good building, lad, I always knew you had hidden talents,’ rambled Sweet as he sloshed a third into Temple’s glass. ‘Well hidden, but what’s the point in an obvious hidden talent?’

‘What indeed?’ agreed Temple, swallowing a fourth. He could not have called it a pleasant taste now, but it was no longer like swallowing red-hot wire wool. How drunk could four get him, anyway?

Buckhorm had produced a fiddle now and was hacking out a tune while Crying Rock did injury to a drum in the background. There was dancing. Or at least well-meaning clomping in the presence of music if not directly related to it. A kind judge would have called it dancing and Temple was feeling like a kind judge then, and with each drink—and he’d lost track of the exact number—he got more kind and less judging, so that when Luline Buckhorm laid small but powerful hands upon him he did not demur and in fact tested the floorboards he had laid only a couple of days before with some enthusiasm.

The room grew hotter and louder and dimmer, sweat-shining faces swimming at him full of laughter and damn it but he was enjoying himself like he couldn’t remember when. The night he joined the Company of the Gracious Hand, maybe, and the mercenary life was all a matter of good men facing fair risks together and laughing at the world and nothing to do with theft, rape and murder on an industrial scale. Lestek tried to add his pipe to the music, failed in a coughing fit and had to be escorted out for air. Temple thought he saw the Mayor, talking softly to Lamb under the watchful eyes of a few of her thugs. He was dancing with one of the whores and complimenting her on her clothes, which were repugnantly garish, and she couldn’t hear him anyway and kept shouting, ‘What?’ Then he was dancing with one of Gentili’s cousins, and complimenting him on his clothes, which were dirt-streaked from prospecting and smelled like a recently opened tomb, but the man still beamed at the compliment. Corlin came past in stately hold with Crying Rock, both of them looking grave as judges, both trying to lead, and Temple near choked on his tongue at the unlikeliness of the couple. Then suddenly he was dancing with Shy and to his mind they were making a pretty good effort at it, quite an achievement since he still had a half-full glass in one hand and she a half-empty bottle.

‘Never thought you’d be a dancer,’ he shouted in her ear. ‘Too hard for it.’

‘Never thought you’d be one,’ her breath hot against his cheek. ‘Too soft.’

‘No doubt you’re right. My wife taught me.’

She stiffened then, for a moment. ‘You’ve got a wife?’

‘I did have. And a daughter. They died. Long time ago, now. Sometimes it doesn’t feel so long.’

She took a drink, looking at him sideways over the neck of the bottle, and there was something to that glance gave him a breathless tingle. He leaned to speak to her and she caught him around the head and kissed him quite fiercely. If he’d had time he would’ve reasoned she wasn’t the type for gentle kisses but he didn’t get time to reason, or kiss back, or push her off, or even work out which would be his preference before she twisted his head away and was dancing with Majud, leaving him to be manhandled about the floor by Corlin.

‘You think you’re getting one from me you’ve another think coming,’ she growled.

He leaned against the wall, head spinning, face sweating, heart pounding as if he had a dose of the fever. Strange, what sharing a little spit can do. Well, along with a few measures of raw spirits on a man ten years sober. He looked at his glass, thought he’d be best off throwing the contents down the wall, then decided he put more value on the wall than himself and drank them instead.

‘You all right?’

‘She kissed me,’ he muttered.

‘Shy?’

Temple nodded, then realised it was Lamb he’d said it to, and shortly thereafter that it might not have been the cleverest thing to say.

But the big Northman only grinned. ‘Well, that’s about the least surprising thing I ever heard. Everyone in the Fellowship saw it coming. The snapping and arguing and niggling over the debt. Classic case.’

‘Why did no one say anything?’

‘Several talked of nothing else.’

‘I mean to me.’

‘In my case, ’cause I had a bet with Savian on when it would happen. We both thought a lot sooner’n this, but I won. He can be a funny bastard, that Savian.’

‘He can… what?’ Temple hardly knew what shocked him more, that Shy kissing him came as no surprise, or that Savian could be funny. ‘Sorry to be so predictable.’

‘Folk usually prefer the obvious outcome. Takes bones to defy expectation.’

‘Meaning I don’t have any.’

Lamb only shrugged as though that was a question that hardly needed answering. Then he picked up his battered hat.

‘Where are you going?’ asked Temple.

‘Ain’t I got a right to my own fun?’ He put a hand on Temple’s shoulder. A friendly, fatherly hand, but a frighteningly firm one, too. ‘Be careful with her. She ain’t as tough as she looks.’

‘What about me? I don’t even look tough.’

‘That’s true. But if Shy hurts you I won’t break her legs.’

By the time Temple had worked that one out, Lamb was gone. Dab Sweet had commandeered the fiddle and was up on a table, stomping so the plates jumped, sawing away at the strings like they were around his sweetheart’s neck and he had moments to save her.

‘I thought we were dancing?’

Shy’s cheek had colour in it and her eyes were shining deep and dark and for reasons he couldn’t be bothered to examine but probably weren’t all that complicated anyway she looked dangerously fine to him right then. So, fuck it all, he tossed down his drink with a manly flick of the wrist then realised the glass was empty, threw it away, snatched her bottle while she grabbed his other hand and they dragged each other in amongst the lumbering bodies.

It was a long time since Shy had got herself properly reeling drunk but she found the knack came back pretty quick. Putting one foot in front of the other had become a bit of a challenge but if she kept her eyes wide open on the ground and really thought about it she didn’t fall over too much. The hostelry was way too bright and Camling said something about a policy on guests and she laughed in his face and told him there were more whores than guests in this fucking place and Temple laughed as well and snorted snot down his beard. Then he chased her up the stairs with his hand on her arse which was funny to begin with then a bit annoying and she slapped him and near knocked him down the steps he was that surprised, but she caught him by the shirt and dragged him after and said sorry for the slap and he said what slap and started kissing her on the top landing and tasted like spirits. Which wasn’t a bad way to taste in her book.

‘Isn’t Lamb here?’

‘Staying at the Mayor’s place now.’

Bloody hell things were spinning by then. She was fumbling in her trousers for the key and laughing and then she was fumbling in his trousers and they were up against the wall and kissing again her mouth full of his breath and his tongue and her hair then the door banging open and the two of them tumbling through and across the dim-lit floorboards. She crawled on top of him and they were grunting away, room reeling, and she felt the burn of sick at the back of her throat but swallowed it and didn’t much care as it tasted no worse than the first time and Temple seemed to be a long way from complaining or probably even noticing either, he was too busy struggling with the buttons on her shirt and couldn’t have been making harder work of it if they’d been the size of pinheads.

She realised the door was open still and kicked out at it but judged the distance all wrong and kicked a hole in the plaster beside the frame instead, started laughing again. Got the door shuddering shut with the next kick and he had her shirt open now and was kissing at her chest which felt all right actually if a bit ticklish, her own body looking all pale and strange to her and she was wondering when was the last time she did anything like this and deciding it was way too long. Then he’d stopped and was staring down in the darkness, eyes just a pair of glimmers.

‘Are we doing the right thing?’ he asked, so comic serious for a moment she wanted to laugh again.

‘How the fuck should I know? Get your trousers off.’

She was trying to wriggle free of her own but still had her boots on and was getting more and more tangled, knew she should’ve taken the boots off first but it was a bit late now and she grunted and kicked and her belt thrashed about like a snake cut in half, her knife flopping off the end of it and clattering against the wall, until she got one boot off and one trouser-leg and that seemed good enough for the purpose.

They’d made it to the bed somehow and were tangled up with each other more naked than not, warm and pleasantly wriggling, his hand between her legs and her shoving her hips against it, both laughing less and grunting more, slow and throaty, bright dots fizzing on the inside of her closed lids so she had to open her eyes so she didn’t feel like she’d fall right off the bed and out the ceiling. Eyes open was worse, the room turning around her loud with her breath and her thudding heartbeat and the warm rubbing of skin on skin and the springs in the old mattress shrieking with complaint but no one giving too much of a shit for their objections.

Something about her brother and sister niggled at her, and Gully swinging, and Lamb and a fight, but she let it all drift past like smoke and spin away with the spinning ceiling.

How long since she had some fun, after all?

‘Oh,’ groaned Temple. ‘Oh no.’

He moaned a piteous moan as of the cursed dead in hell, facing an eternity of suffering and regretting most bitterly their lives wasted in sin.

‘God help me.’

But God had the righteous to assist and Temple could not pretend to be in that category. Not after last night’s fun.

Everything hurt him. The blanket across his bare legs. A fly buzzing faintly up near the ceiling. The sun sneaking around the edges of the curtains. The sounds of Crease life and Crease death beyond them. He remembered now why he had stopped drinking. What he could not remember was why it had felt like a good idea to start again.

He winced at the hacking, gurgling noise that had woken him, managed to lift his head a few degrees and saw Shy kneeling over the night pot. She was naked except for one boot and her trousers tangled around that ankle, ribs standing stark as she retched. A strip of light from the window cut over one shoulder-blade bright, bright, and found a big scar, a burn like a letter upside down.

She rocked back, turned eyes sunken in dark rings on him and wiped a string of spit from the corner of her mouth. ‘Another kiss?’

The sound he made was indescribable. Part laugh, part belch, part groan. He could not have made it again in a year of trying. But why would he have wanted to?

‘Got to get some air.’ Shy dragged up her trousers but left the belt dangling and they sagged off her arse as she tottered to the window.

‘Don’t do it,’ moaned Temple, but there was no stopping her. Not without moving, and that was inconceivable. She hauled the curtains away and pushed the window wide, while he struggled feebly to shield his eyes from the merciless light.

Shy was cursing as she fished around under the other bed. He could hardly believe it when she came up with a quarter-full bottle, pulled the cork with her teeth and sat there gathering her courage, like a swimmer staring into an icy pool.

‘You’re not going to—’

She tipped the bottle up and swallowed, clapped the back of her hand to her mouth, stomach muscles fluttering, and burped, and grimaced, and shivered, and offered it to him.

‘You?’ she asked, voice wet with rush back.

He wanted to be sick just looking. ‘God, no.’

‘It’s the only thing’ll help.’

‘Is the cure for a stab-wound really another one?’

‘Once you set to stabbing yourself it can be hard to stop.’

She shrugged her shirt over that scar, and after doing a couple of buttons realised she had them in the wrong holes and the whole front twisted, gave up and slumped down on the other bed. Temple wasn’t sure he’d ever seen anyone look so worn out and defeated, not even in the mirror.

He wondered whether he should put his clothes on. Some of the muddy rags scattered across the boards bore a faint resemblance to part of his new suit, but he could not be sure. Could not be sure of anything. He forced himself to sit, dragging his legs off the bed as if they were made of lead. When he was sure his stomach would not immediately rebel, he looked at Shy and said, ‘You’ll find them, you know.’

‘How do I know?’

‘Because no one deserves a good turn of the card more.’

‘You don’t know what I deserve.’ She slumped back on her elbows, head sinking into her bony shoulders. ‘You don’t know what I’ve done.’

‘Can’t be worse than what you did to me last night.’

She didn’t laugh. She was looking past him, eyes focused far away. ‘When I was seventeen I killed a boy.’

Temple swallowed. ‘Well, yes, that is worse.’

‘I ran off from the farm. Hated it there. Hated my bitch mother. Hated my bastard stepfather.’

‘Lamb?’

‘No, the first one. My mother got through ’em. I had some fool notion I’d open a store. Things went wrong right off. Didn’t mean to kill that boy, but I got scared and I cut him.’ She rubbed absently under her jaw with a fingertip. ‘He wouldn’t stop bleeding.’

‘Did he have it coming?’

‘Guess he must’ve. Got it, didn’t he? But he had a family, and they chased me, and I ran, and I got hungry so I started stealing.’ She droned it all out in a dead monotone. ‘After a while I got to thinking no one gives you a fair chance and taking things is easier than making ’em. I fell in with some low company and dragged ’em lower. More robbing, and more killings, and maybe some had it coming, and maybe some didn’t. Who gets what they deserve?’

Temple thought of Kahdia. ‘I’ll admit God can be a bit of a shit that way.’

‘In the end there were bills up over half the Near Country for my arrest. Smoke, they called me, like I was something to be scared of, and put a price on my head. About the only time in my life I was thought worth something.’ She curled her lips back from her teeth. ‘They caught some woman and hanged her in my place. Didn’t even look like me, but she got killed and I got away with it and I don’t know why.’

There was a heavy silence, then. She raised the bottle and took a couple of good, long swallows, neck working with the effort, and she came up gasping for air with eyes watering hard. That was an excellent moment for Temple to mumble his excuses and run. A few months ago, the door would have been swinging already. His debts were settled, after all, which was better than he usually managed on his way out. But he found this time he did not want to leave.

‘If you want me to share your low opinion of yourself,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid I can’t oblige. Sounds to me like you made some mistakes.’

‘You’d call all that mistakes?’

‘Some pretty stupid ones, but yes. You never chose to do evil.’

‘Who chooses evil?’

‘I did. Pass me that bottle.’

‘What’s this?’ she asked as she tossed it across. ‘A shitty-past competition?

‘Yes, and I win.’ He closed his eyes and forced down a swallow, burning and choking all the way. ‘After my wife died, I spent a year as the most miserable drunk you ever saw.’

‘I’ve seen some pretty fucking miserable ones.’

‘Then picture worse. I thought I couldn’t get any lower, so I signed up as lawyer for a mercenary company, and found I could.’ He raised the bottle in salute. ‘The Company of the Gracious Hand, under Captain General Nicomo Cosca! Oh, noble brotherhood!’ He drank again. It felt good in a hideous way, like picking at a scab.

‘Sounds fancy.’

‘That’s what I thought.’

‘Wasn’t fancy?’

‘A worse accumulation of human scum you never saw.’

‘I’ve seen some pretty fucking bad ones.’

‘Then picture worse. To begin with I believed there were good reasons for what they did. What we did. Then I convinced myself there were good reasons. Then I knew there weren’t even good excuses, but did it anyway because I was too coward not too. We were sent to the Near Country to root out rebels. A friend of mine tried to save some people. He was killed. And them. They killed each other. But I squirmed away, as always, and I ran like the coward I am, and I fell in a river and, for reasons best known only to Himself, God sent a good woman to fish my worthless carcass out.’

There was a heavy silence, then. She raised the bottle and took a couple of good, long swallows, neck working with the effort, and she came up gasping for air with eyes watering hard. That was an excellent moment for Temple to mumble his excuses and run. A few months ago, the door would have been swinging already. His debts were settled, after all, which was better than he usually managed on his way out. But he found this time he did not want to leave.

‘If you want me to share your low opinion of yourself,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid I can’t oblige. Sounds to me like you made some mistakes.’

‘You’d call all that mistakes?’

‘Some pretty stupid ones, but yes. You never chose to do evil.’

‘Who chooses evil?’

‘I did. Pass me that bottle.’

‘What’s this?’ she asked as she tossed it across. ‘A shitty-past competition?

‘Yes, and I win.’ He closed his eyes and forced down a swallow, burning and choking all the way. ‘After my wife died, I spent a year as the most miserable drunk you ever saw.’

‘I’ve seen some pretty fucking miserable ones.’

‘Then picture worse. I thought I couldn’t get any lower, so I signed up as lawyer for a mercenary company, and found I could.’ He raised the bottle in salute. ‘The Company of the Gracious Hand, under Captain General Nicomo Cosca! Oh, noble brotherhood!’ He drank again. It felt good in a hideous way, like picking at a scab.

‘Sounds fancy.’

‘That’s what I thought.’

‘Wasn’t fancy?’

‘A worse accumulation of human scum you never saw.’

‘I’ve seen some pretty fucking bad ones.’

‘Then picture worse. To begin with I believed there were good reasons for what they did. What we did. Then I convinced myself there were good reasons. Then I knew there weren’t even good excuses, but did it anyway because I was too coward not too. We were sent to the Near Country to root out rebels. A friend of mine tried to save some people. He was killed. And them. They killed each other. But I squirmed away, as always, and I ran like the coward I am, and I fell in a river and, for reasons best known only to Himself, God sent a good woman to fish my worthless carcass out.’

‘As a point of fact, God sent a murdering outlaw.’

‘Well, His ways are damned mysterious. I can’t say I took to you right away, that’s true, but I’m starting to think God sent exactly what I needed.’ Temple stood. It wasn’t easy, but he managed it. ‘I feel like all my life I’ve been running. Maybe it’s time for me to stick. To try it, at least.’ He sank down beside her, the creaking of the bedsprings going right through him. ‘I don’t care what you’ve done. I owe you. Only my life, now, but still. Let me stick.’ He tossed the empty bottle aside, took a deep breath, licked his finger and thumb-tip and smoothed down his beard. ‘God help me, but I’ll take that kiss now.’

She squinted at him, every colour in her face wrong—skin a little yellow, eyes a little pink, lips a little blue. ‘You serious?’

‘I may be a fool, but I’m not letting a woman who can fill a sick pot without spilling pass me by. Wipe your mouth and come here.’

He shifted towards her, someone clattering in the corridor outside, and her mouth twitched up in a smile. She leaned towards him, hair tickling his shoulder, and her breath smelled foul and he did not care. The doorknob turned and rattled, and Shy bellowed at the door, so close and broken-voiced it felt like a hatchet blow in Temple’s forehead, ‘You got the wrong fucking room, idiot!’

Against all expectation, the door lurched open anyway and a man stepped in. A tall man with close-cropped fair hair and sharp clothes. He had a sharp expression too as his eyes wandered unhurried about the place, as if this was his room and he was both annoyed and amused to find someone else had been fucking in it.

‘I think I got it right,’ he said, and two other men appeared in the doorway, and neither looked like men you’d be happy to see anywhere, let alone uninvited in your hotel room. ‘I heard you been looking for me.’

‘Who the fuck are you?’ growled Shy, eyes flickering to the corner where her knife was lying sheathed on the floor.

The newcomer smiled like a conjuror about to pull off the trick you won’t believe. ‘Grega Cantliss.’

Then a few things happened at once. Shy flung the bottle at the doorway and dived for her knife. Cantliss dived for her, the other two tangled in the doorway behind him.

And Temple dived for the window.

Statements about sticking notwithstanding, before he knew it he was outside, air whooping in his throat in a terrified squeal as he dropped, then rolling in the cold mud, then floundering up and sprinting naked across the main street, which in most towns would have been considered poor form but in Crease was not especially remarkable. He heard someone bellow and forced himself on, slipping and sliding and his heart pounding so hard he thought he might have to hold his skull together, the Mayor’s Church of Dice lurching closer.

When the guards at the door saw him they smiled, then they frowned, then they caught hold of him as he scrambled up the steps.

‘The Mayor’s got a rule about trousers—’

‘Got to see Lamb. Lamb!’

One of them punched him in the mouth, snapped his head back and sent him stumbling against the door-frame. He knew he deserved it more than ever, but somehow a fist in the face always came as a surprise.

‘Lamb!’ he screeched again, covering his head as best he could. ‘La—ooof.’ The other’s fist sank into his gut and doubled him up, drove his wind right out and dropped him to his knees, blowing bloody bubbles. While he was considering the stones under his face in breathless silence, one of the guards grabbed him by the hair and started dragging him up, raising his fist high.

‘Leave him be.’ To Temple’s great relief, Savian caught that fist before it came down with one knobbly hand. ‘He’s with me.’ He grabbed Temple under the armpit with the other and dragged him through the doorway, shrugging off his coat and throwing it around Temple’s shoulders. ‘What the hell happened?’

‘Cantliss,’ croaked Temple, limping into the gaming hall, waving a weak arm towards the hostelry, only able to get enough breath for one wheezing word at a time. ‘Shy—’

‘What happened?’ Lamb was thumping down the steps from the Mayor’s room, barefooted himself and with his shirt half-buttoned, and for a moment Temple was wondering why he came that way, and then he saw the drawn sword in Lamb’s fist and felt very scared, and then he saw something in Lamb’s face that made him feel more scared still.

‘Cantliss… at Camling’s…’ he managed to splutter.

Lamb stood a moment, eyes wide, then he strode for the door, brushing the guards out of his way, and Savian strode after.

‘Everything all right?’ The Mayor stood on the balcony outside her rooms in a Gurkish dressing gown, a pale scar showing in the hollow between her collar bones. Temple blinked up, wondering if Lamb had been in there with her, then pulled his borrowed coat around him and hurried after the others without speaking. ‘Put some trousers on!’ she called after him.

When Temple struggled up the steps of the hostelry, Lamb had Camling by the collar and had dragged him most of the way over his own counter with one hand, sword in the other and the proprietor desperately squealing, ‘They just dragged her out! The Whitehouse, maybe, I have no notion, it was none of my doing!’

Lamb shoved Camling tottering away and stood, breath growling in his throat. Then he put the sword carefully on the counter and his palms flat before it, fingers spreading out, the wood gleaming in the space where the middle one should have been. Savian walked around behind the counter, shouldering Camling out of the way, took a glass and bottle from a high shelf, blew out one then pulled the cork from the other.

‘You need a hand, you got mine,’ he grunted as he poured.

Lamb nodded. ‘You should know lending me a hand can be bad for your health.’

Savian coughed as he nudged the glass across. ‘My health’s a mess.’

‘What are you going to do?’ asked Temple.

‘Have a drink.’ And Lamb picked up the glass and drained it, white stubble on his throat shifting. Savian tipped the bottle to fill it again.

‘Lamb!’ Lord Ingelstad walked in somewhat unsteadily, his face pale and his waistcoat covered in stains. ‘He said you’d be here!’

‘Who said?’

Ingelstad gave a helpless chuckle as he tossed his hat on the counter, a few wisps of stray hair left standing vertically from his head. ‘Strangest thing. After that fun at Majud’s place, I was playing cards over at Papa Ring’s. Entirely lost track of time and I was somewhat behind financially, I’ll admit, and a gentleman came in to tell Papa something, and he told me he’d forget my debt if I brought you a message.’

‘What message?’ Lamb drank again, and Savian filled his glass again.

Ingelstad squinted at the wall. ‘He said he’s playing host to a friend of yours… and he’d very much like to be a gracious host… but you’ll have to kiss the mud tomorrow night. He said you’ll be dropping anyway, so you might as well drop willingly and you can both walk out of Crease free people. He said you have his word on that. He was very particular about it. You have his word, apparently.’

‘Well, ain’t I the lucky one,’ said Lamb.

Lord Ingelstad squinted over at Temple as though only just noticing his unusual attire. ‘It appears some people have had an even heavier night than I.’

‘Can you take a message back?’ asked Lamb.

‘I daresay a few more minutes won’t make any difference to Lady Ingelstad’s temper at this point. I am doomed whatever.’

‘Then tell Papa Ring I’ll keep his word safe and sound. And I hope he’ll do the same for his guest.’

The nobleman yawned as he jammed his hat back on. ‘Riddles, riddles.

Then off to bed for me!’ And he strutted back out into the street.

‘What are you going to do?’ whispered Temple.

‘There was a time I’d have gone charging over there without a thought for the costs and got bloody.’ Lamb lifted the glass and looked at it for a moment. ‘But my father always said patience is the king of virtues. A man has to be realistic. Has to be.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘Wait. Think. Prepare.’ Lamb swallowed the last measure and bared his teeth at the glass. ‘Then get bloody.’

High Stakes

‘A trim?’ asked Faukin, directing his blank, bland, professional smile towards the mirror. ‘Or something more radical?’

‘Shave it all off, hair and beard, close to the skull as you can get.’

Faukin nodded as though that would have been his choice. The client always knows best, after all. ‘A wet shave of the pate, then.’

‘Wouldn’t want to give the other bastard anything to hold on to. And I reckon it’s a little late to damage my looks, don’t you?’

Faukin gave his blank, bland, professional chuckle and began, comb struggling with the tangles in Lamb’s thick hair, the snipping of the scissors cutting the silence up into neat little fragments. Outside the window the noise of the swelling crowd grew louder, more excited, and the tension in the room swelled with it. The grey cuttings spilled down the sheet, scattered across the boards in those tantalising patterns that looked to hold some meaning one could never quite grasp.

Lamb stirred at them with his foot. ‘Where does it all go, eh?’

‘Our time or the hair?’

‘Either one.’

‘In the case of the time, I would ask a philosopher rather than a barber. In the case of the hair, it is swept up and thrown out. Unless on occasion one might have a lady friend who would care to be entrusted with a lock…’

Lamb glanced over at the Mayor. She stood at the window, keeping one eye on Lamb’s preparations and the other on those in the street, a slender silhouette against the sunset. He dismissed the notion with an explosive snort. ‘One moment it’s a part of you, the next it’s rubbish.’

‘We treat whole men like rubbish, why not their hair?’

Lamb sighed. ‘I guess you’ve got the right of it.’

Faukin gave the razor a good slapping on the strap. Clients usually appreciated a flourish, a mirror flash of lamplight on steel, an edge of drama to proceedings.

‘Careful,’ said the Mayor, evidently in need of no extra drama today. Faukin had to confess to being considerably more scared of her than he was of Lamb. The Northman he knew for a ruthless killer, but suspected him of harbouring principles of a kind. He had no such suspicions about the Mayor. So he gave his blank, bland, professional bow, ceased his sharpening, brushed up a lather and worked it into Lamb’s hair and beard, then began to shave with patient, careful, hissing strokes.

‘Don’t it ever bother you that it always grows back?’ asked Lamb. ‘There’s no beating it, is there?’

‘Could not the same be said of every profession? The merchant sells one thing to buy another. The farmer harvests one set of crops to plant another. The blacksmith—’

‘Kill a man and he stays dead,’ said Lamb, simply.

‘But… if I might observe without causing offence… killers rarely stop at one. Once you begin, there is always someone else that needs killing.’

Lamb’s eyes moved to Faukin’s in the mirror. ‘You’re a philosopher after all.’

‘On a strictly amateur footing.’ Faukin worked the warm towel with a flourish and presented Lamb shorn, as it were, a truly daunting array of scars laid bare. In all his years as a barber, including three in the service of a mercenary company, he had never attended upon a head so battered, dented and otherwise manhandled.

‘Huh.’ Lamb leaned closer to the mirror, working his lopsided jaw and wrinkling his bent nose as though to convince himself it was indeed his own visage gazing back. ‘There’s the face of an evil bastard, eh?’

‘I would venture to say a face is no more evil than a coat. It is the man beneath, and his actions, that count.’

‘No doubt.’ Lamb looked up at Faukin for a moment, and then back to himself. ‘And there’s the face of an evil bastard. You done the best a man could with it, though. Ain’t your fault what you’re given to work with.’

‘I simply try to do the job exactly as I’d want it done to me.’

‘Treat folk the way you’d want to be treated and you can’t go far wrong, my father used to tell me. Seems our jobs are different after all. Aim o’ mine is to do to the other man exactly what I’d least enjoy.’

‘Are you ready?’ The Mayor had silently drifted closer and was looking at the pair of them in the mirror.

Lamb shrugged. ‘Either a man’s always ready for a thing like this or he’ll never be.’

‘Good enough.’ She came closer and took hold of Faukin’s hand. He felt a strong need to back away, but clung to his blank, bland professionalism a moment longer. ‘Any other jobs today?’

Faukin swallowed. ‘Just the one.’

‘Across the street?’

He nodded.

The Mayor pressed a coin into his palm and leaned close. ‘The time is fast approaching when every person in Crease will have to choose one side of the street. I hope you choose wisely.’

Sunset had lent the town a carnival atmosphere. There was a single current to the crowds of drunk and greedy and it flowed to the amphitheatre. As he passed, Faukin could see the Circle marked out on the ancient cobbles at its centre, six strides across, torches on close-set poles to mark the edge and light the action. The ancient banks of stone seating and the new teetering stands of bodged-together carpentry were already boiling with an audience such as that place had not seen in centuries. Gamblers screeched for business and chalked odds on high boards. Hawkers sold bottles and hot gristle for prices outrageous even in this home of outrageous prices.

Faukin gazed at all those people swarming over each other, most of whom could hardly have known what a barber was let alone thought of employing one, reflected for the hundredth time that day, the thousandth time that week, the millionth time since he arrived that he should never have come here, clung tight to his bag and hurried on.

Papa Ring was one of those men who liked to spend money less the more of it he had. His quarters were humble indeed by comparison with the Mayor’s, the furniture an improvised and splinter-filled collection, the low ceiling lumpy as an old bedspread. Glama Golden sat before a cracked mirror lit by smoking candles, something faintly absurd in that huge body crammed onto a stool and draped in a threadbare sheet, his head giving the impression of teetering on top like a cherry on a cream cake.

Ring stood at the window just as the Mayor had, his big fists clamped behind his back, and said, ‘Shave it all off.’

‘Except the moustache.’ Golden gathered up the sheet so he could stroke at his top lip with huge thumb and forefinger. ‘Had that all my life and it’s going nowhere.’

‘A most resplendent article of facial hair,’ said Faukin, though in truth he could see more than a few grey hairs despite the poor light. ‘To remove it would be a deep regret.’

In spite of being the undoubted favourite in the coming contest, Golden’s eyes had a strange, haunted dampness as they found Faukin’s in the mirror. ‘You got regrets?’

Faukin lost his blank, bland, professional smile for a moment. ‘Don’t we all, sir?’ He began to cut. ‘But I suppose regrets at least prevent one from repeating the same mistakes.’

Golden frowned at himself in that cracked mirror. ‘I find however high I stack the regrets, I still make the same mistakes again and again.’

Faukin had no answer for that, but the barber holds the advantage in such circumstances: he can let the scissors fill the silence. Snip, snip, and the yellow cuttings scattered across the boards in those tantalising patterns that looked to hold some meaning one could never quite grasp.

‘Been over there with the Mayor?’ called Papa Ring from the window.

‘Yes, sir, I have.’

‘How’d she seem?’

Faukin thought about the Mayor’s demeanour and, more importantly, about what Papa Ring wanted to hear. A good barber never puts truth before the hopes of his clients. ‘She seemed very tense.’

Ring stared back out of the window, thick thumb and fingers fussing nervously behind his back. ‘I guess she would be.’

‘What about the other man?’ asked Golden. ‘The one I’m fighting?’ Faukin stopped snipping for a moment. ‘He seemed thoughtful. Regretful. But fixed on his purpose. In all honesty… he seemed very much like you.’ Faukin did not mention what had only just occurred.

That he had, in all likelihood, given one of them their last haircut.

Bee was mopping up when he passed by the door. She hardly even had to see him, she knew him by his footsteps. ‘Grega?’ She dashed out into the hall, heart going so hard it hurt. ‘Grega!’

He turned, wincing, like hearing her say his name made him sick. He looked tired, more’n a little drunk, and sore. She could always tell his moods. ‘What?’

She’d made up all kinds of little stories about their reunion. One where he swept her into his arms and told her they could get married now. One where he was wounded and she’d to nurse him back to health. One where they argued, one where they laughed, one where he cried and said sorry for how he’d treated her.

But she hadn’t spun no stories where she was just ignored.

‘That all you got to say to me?’

‘What else would there be?’ He didn’t even look her in the eye. ‘I got to go talk to Papa Ring.’ And he made off up the hall.

She caught his arm. ‘Where are the children?’ Her voice all shrill and bled out from her own disappointment.

‘Mind your own business.’

‘I am. You made me help, didn’t you? You made me bring ’em!’

‘You could’ve said no.’ She knew it was true. She’d been so keen to please him she’d have jumped in a fire on his say-so. Then he gave a little smile, like he’d thought of something funny. ‘But if you must know, I sold ’em.’

She felt cold to her stomach. ‘To who?’

‘Those Ghosts up in the hills. Those Dragon fuckers.’

Her throat was all closed up, she could hardly talk. ‘What’ll they do with ’em?’

‘I don’t know. Fuck ’em? Eat ’em? What do I care? What did you think I was going to do, start up an orphanage?’ Her face was burning now, like he’d slapped her. ‘You’re such a stupid sow. Don’t know that I ever met anyone stupider than you. You’re stupider than—’

And she was on him and tearing at his face with her nails and she’d probably have bitten him if he hadn’t hit her first, just above the eye, and she tumbled into the corner and caught a faceful of floor.

‘You mad bitch!’ She started to push herself up, all groggy, that familiar pulsing in her face, and he was touching his scratched cheek like he couldn’t believe it. ‘What did you do that for?’ Then he was shaking out his fingers. ‘You hurt my fucking hand!’ And he took a step towards her as she tried to stand and kicked her in the ribs, folded her gasping around his boot.

‘I hate you,’ she managed to whisper, once she was done coughing.

‘So?’ And he looked at her like she was a maggot.

She remembered the day he’d chosen her out of all the room to dance with and nothing had ever felt so fine, and of a sudden it was like she saw the whole thing fresh, and he seemed so ugly, so petty and vain and selfish beyond enduring. He just used people and threw them away and left a trail of ruin behind him. How could she ever have loved him? Just because for a few moments he’d made her feel one step above shit. The rest of the time ten steps below.

‘You’re so small,’ she whispered at him. ‘How did I not see it?’

He was pricked in his vanity then and he took another step at her, but she found her knife and whipped it out. He saw the blade, and for a moment he looked surprised, then he looked angry, then he started laughing like she was a hell of a joke.

‘As if you’ve got the bones to use it!’ And he sauntered past, giving her plenty of time to stab him if she’d wanted to. But she just knelt there, blood leaking out her nose and tapping down the front of her dress. Her best dress, which she’d worn three days straight ’cause she knew he’d be coming.

Once the dizziness had passed she got up and went to the kitchen. Everything was trembling but she’d taken worse beatings and worse disappointments, too. No one there so much as raised a brow at her bloody nose. The Whitehouse was that kind of place.

‘Papa Ring said I need to feed that woman.’

‘Soup in the pot,’ grunted the cook’s boy, perched on a box to look out of a high little window where all he got was a view of boots outside.

So she put a bowl on a tray with a cup of water and carried it down the damp-smelling stair to the cellar, past the big barrels in the darkness and the bottles on the racks gleaming with the torchlight.

The woman in the cage uncrossed her legs and stood, sliding her tight-bound hands up the rail behind her, one eye glinting through the hair tangled across her face as she watched Bee come closer. Warp sat in front at his table, ring of keys on it, pretending to read a book. He loved to pretend, thought it made him look right special, but even Bee, who weren’t no wonder with her letters, could tell he had it upside down.

‘What d’you want?’ And he turned a sneer on her like she was a slug in his breakfast.

‘Papa Ring said to feed her.’

She could almost see his brain rattling around in his big fat head. ‘Why? Ain’t like she’ll be here much longer.’

‘You think he tells me why?’ she snapped. ‘But I’ll go back and tell Papa you wouldn’t let me in if you—’

‘All right, get it done, then. But I’ve got my eye on you.’ He leaned close and blasted her with his rotting breath. ‘Both eyes.’

He unlocked the gate and swung it squealing open and Bee ducked inside with her tray. The woman watched her. She couldn’t move far from the rail, but even so she was backed up tight against it. The cage smelled of sweat and piss and fear, the woman’s and all the others’ who’d been kept in here before and no bright futures among ’em, that was a fact. No bright futures anywhere in this place.

Bee set the tray down and took the cup of water. The woman sucked at it thirstily, no pride left in her if she’d had any to begin with. Pride don’t last long in the Whitehouse, and especially not down here. Bee leaned close and whispered.

‘You asked me about Cantliss before. About Cantliss and the children.’

The woman stopped swallowing and her eyes flickered over to Bee’s, bright and wild.

‘He sold the children to the Dragon People. That’s what he said.’ Bee looked over her shoulder but Warp was already sitting back at his table and pulling at his jug, not looking in the least. He wouldn’t think Bee would do anything worth attending to in her whole life. Right now that worked for her. She stepped closer, slipped out the knife and sawed through the ropes around one of the woman’s rubbed-raw wrists.

‘Why?’ she whispered.

‘Because Cantliss needs hurting.’ Even then she couldn’t bring herself to say killing, but they both knew what she meant. ‘I can’t do it.’ Bee pressed the knife, handle first, into the woman’s free hand where it was hidden behind her back. ‘Reckon you can, though.’

Papa Ring fidgeted at the ring through his ear, an old habit went right back to his days as a bandit in the Badlands, his nerves rising with the rising noise in a painful lump under his jaw. He’d played a lot of hands, rolled a lot of dice, spun a lot of wheels, and maybe the odds were all stacked on his side, but the stakes had never been higher. He wondered whether she was nervous, the Mayor. No sign of it, standing alone on her balcony bolt upright with the light behind her, that stiff pride of hers showing even at this distance. But she had to be scared. Had to be.

How often had they stood here, after all, glaring across the great divide, planning each other’s downfall by every means fair or foul, the number of men they paid to fight for them doubling and doubling again, the stakes swelling ever higher. A hundred murders and stratagems and manoeuvrings and webs of petty alliances broken and re-formed, and it all came down to this.

He slipped into one of his favourite furrows of thought, what to do with the Mayor when he won. Hang her as a warning? Have her stripped naked and beaten through town like a hog? Keep her as his whore? As anyone’s? But he knew it was all fancy. He’d given his word she’d be let go and he’d keep it. Maybe folk on the Mayor’s side of the street took him for a low bastard and maybe they were right, but all his life he’d kept his word.

It could give you some tough moments, your word. Could force you into places you didn’t want to be, could serve you up puzzles where the right path weren’t easy to pick. But it wasn’t meant to be easy, it was meant to be right. There were too many men always did the easy thing, regardless.

Grega Cantliss, for instance.

Papa Ring looked sourly sideways. Here he was, three days late as always, slumped on Ring’s balcony as if he had no bones in him and picking his teeth with a splinter. In spite of a new suit he looked sick and old and had fresh scratches on his face and a stale smell about him. Some men use up fast. But he’d brought what he owed plus a healthy extra for the favour. That was why he was still breathing. Ring had given his word, after all.

The fighters were coming out now with an accompanying rise in the mood of the mob. Golden’s big shaved head bobbed above the crowd, a knot of Ring’s men around him clearing folks away as they headed for the theatre, old stones lit up orange in the fading light. Ring hadn’t mentioned the woman to Golden. He might be a magician with his fists but that man had a bad habit of getting distracted. So Ring had just told him to let the old man live if he got the chance, and considered that a promise kept. A man’s got to keep his word but there has to be some give in it or you’ll get nothing done.

He saw Lamb now, coming down the steps of the Mayor’s place between the ancient columns, his own entourage of thugs about him. Ring fussed with his ear again. He’d a worry the old Northman was one of those bastards you couldn’t trust to do the sensible thing. A right wild card, and Papa Ring liked to know what was in the deck. Specially when the stakes were high as this.

‘I don’t like the looks of that old bastard,’ Cantliss said.

Papa Ring frowned at him. ‘Do you know what? Neither do I.’

‘You sure Golden’ll take him?’

‘Golden’s taken everyone else, hasn’t he?’

‘I guess. Got a sad sort o’ look to him though, for a winner.’

Ring could’ve done without this fool picking at his worries. ‘That’s why I had you steal the woman, isn’t it? Just in case.’

Cantliss rubbed at his stubbly jaw. ‘Still seems a hell of a risk.’

‘One I wouldn’t have had to take if you hadn’t stole that old bastard’s children and sold ’em to the savage.’

Cantliss’ head jerked around with surprise.

‘I can add two and two,’ growled Ring, and felt a shiver like he was dirty and couldn’t clean it off. ‘How much lower can a man stoop? Selling children?’

Cantliss looked deeply wounded. ‘That’s so fucking unfair! You just said get the money by winter or I’d be a dead man. You didn’t concern yourself with the source. You want to give me the money back, free yourself of its base origins?’

Ring looked at the old box on the table, and thought about that bright old gold inside, and frowned back out into the street. He hadn’t got where he’d got by giving money back.

‘Didn’t think so.’ Cantliss shook his head like stealing children was a fine business scheme for which he deserved the warmest congratulation. ‘How was I to know this old bastard would wriggle out the long grass?’

‘Because,’ said Ring, speaking very slow and cold, ‘you should have learned by now there’s consequences when you fucking do a thing, and a man can’t wander through life thinking no further ahead than the end of his cock!’

Cantliss worked his jaw and muttered, ‘So fucking unfair,’ and Ring was forced to wonder when was the last time he’d punched a man in the face. He was sorely, sorely tempted. But he knew it would solve nothing. That’s why he’d stopped doing it and started paying other people to do it for him.

‘Are you a child yourself, to whine about what’s fair?’ he asked. ‘You think it’s fair I have to stand up for a man can’t tell a good hand of cards from a bad but still has to bet an almighty pile of money he don’t have on the outcome? You think it’s fair I have to threaten some girl’s life to make sure of a fight? How does that reflect on me, eh? How’s that for the start of my new era? You think it’s fair I got to keep my word to men don’t care a damn about theirs? Eh? What’s God-fucked fair about all that? Go and get the woman.’

‘Me?’

‘Your bloody mess I’m aiming to clean up, isn’t it? Bring her up here so our friend Lamb can see Papa Ring’s a man of his word.’

‘I might miss the start,’ said Cantliss, like he couldn’t believe he’d be inconvenienced to such an extent by a pair of very likely deaths.

‘You keep talking you’ll be missing the rest of your fucking life, boy. Get the woman.’

Cantliss stomped for the door and Ring thought he heard him mutter, ‘Ain’t fair.’

He gritted his teeth as he turned back towards the theatre. That bastard made trouble everywhere he went and had a bad end coming, and Ring was starting to hope it’d come sooner rather than later. He straightened his cuffs, and consoled himself with the thought that once the Mayor was beaten the bottom would fall right out of the henchman market and he could afford to hire himself a better class of thug. The crowd was falling silent now, and Ring reached for his ear then stopped himself, stifling another swell of nerves. He’d made sure the odds were all stacked on his side, but the stakes had never been higher.

‘Welcome all!’ bellowed Camling, greatly relishing the way his voice echoed to the very heavens, ‘To this, the historic theatre of Crease! In the many centuries since its construction it can rarely have seen so momentous an event as that which will shortly be played out before your fortunate eyes!’

Could eyes be fortunate independently of their owners? This question gave Camling an instant’s pause before he dismissed it. He could not allow himself to be distracted. This was his moment, the torchlit bowl crammed with onlookers, the street beyond heaving with those on tiptoe for a look, the trees on the valley side above even carrying cargoes of intrepid observers in their upper branches, all hanging upon his every word. Noted hotelier he might have been, but he was without doubt a sad loss to the performing arts.

‘A fight, my friends and neighbours, and what a fight! A contest of strength and guile between two worthy champions, to be humbly refereed by myself, Lennart Camling, as a respected neutral party and long-established leading citizen of this community!’

He thought he heard someone call, ‘Cockling!’ but ignored it.

‘A contest to settle a dispute between two parties over a claim, according to mining law—’

‘Get the fuck on with it!’ someone shouted.

There was a scattering of laughs, boos and jeers. Camling gave a long pause, chin raised, and treated the savages to a lesson in cultured gravity. The type of lesson he had been hoping Iosiv Lestek might administer, what a farce that had turned out to be. ‘Standing for Papa Ring, a man who needs no introduction—’

‘Why give him one, then?’ More laughter.

‘—who has forged a dread name for himself across the fighting pits, cages and Circles of the Near and Far Countries ever since he left his native North. A man undefeated in twenty-two encounters.

Glama… Golden!’

Golden shouldered his way into the Circle, stripped to the waist, his huge body smeared with grease to frustrate an opponent’s grasp, great slabs of muscle glistening white by torchlight and reminding Camling of the giant albino slugs he sometimes saw in his cellar and was irrationally afraid of. With his skull shaved, the Northman’s luxuriant moustache looked even more of an absurd affectation, but the volume of the crowd’s bellows only increased. A breathless frenzy had descended upon them and they no doubt would have cheered an albino slug if they thought it might bleed for their entertainment.

‘And, standing for the Mayor, his opponent… Lamb.’ Much less enthusiastic cheering as the second fighter stepped into the Circle to a last frantic round of betting. He was likewise shaved and greased, his body so covered with a multitude of scars that, even if he had no fame as a fighter, his familiarity with violence was not to be doubted.

Camling leaned close to whisper, ‘Just that for a name?’

‘Good as another,’ said the old Northman, without removing his steady gaze from his opponent. No doubt everyone considered him the underdog. Certainly Camling had almost discounted him until that very moment: the older, smaller, leaner man, the gambler’s odds considerably against him, but Camling noticed something in his eye that gave him pause. An eager look, as though he had an awful hunger and Golden was the meal.

The bigger man’s face, by contrast, held a trace of doubt as Camling ushered the two together in the centre of the Circle. ‘Do I know you?’ he called over the baying of the audience. ‘What’s your real name?’

Lamb stretched his neck out to one side and then the other. ‘Maybe it’ll come to you.’

Camling held one hand high. ‘May the best man win!’ he shrieked.

Over the sudden roar he heard Lamb say, ‘It’s the worst man wins these.’

This would be Golden’s last fight. That much he knew.

They circled each other, footwork, footwork, step and shuffle, each feeling out the other, the wild noise of the crowd and their shaken fists and twisted faces pushed off to one side. No doubt they were eager for the fight to start. They didn’t realise that oftentimes the fight was won and lost here, in the slow moments before the fighters even touched.

By the dead, though, Golden was tired. Failures and regrets dragging after him like chains on a swimmer, heavier with each day, with each breath. This had to be his last fight. He’d heard the Far Country was a place where men could find their dreams, and come searching for a way to claim back all he’d lost, but this was all he’d found. Glama Golden, mighty War Chief, hero of Ollensand, who’d stood tall in the songs and on the battlefield, admired and feared in equal measure, rolling in the mud for the amusement of morons.

A tilt of the waist and a dip of the shoulder, a couple of lazy ranging swings, getting the other man’s measure. He moved well, this Lamb, whatever his age. He was no stranger to this business—there was a snap and steadiness to his movements and he wasted no effort. Golden wondered what his failures had been, what his regrets. What dream had he come chasing after into this Circle?

‘Leave him alive if you can,’ Ring had said, which only showed how little he understood in spite of his endless bragging about his word. There were no choices in a fight like this, life and death on the Leveller’s scales. There was no place for mercy, no place for doubts. He could see in Lamb’s eyes that he knew it, too. Once two men step into the Circle, nothing beyond its edge can matter, past or future. Things fall the way they fall.

Golden had seen enough.

He squeezed his teeth together and rushed across the Circle. The old man dodged well but Golden still caught him by the ear and followed with a heavy left in the ribs, felt the thud right up his arm, warming every joint. Lamb struck back but Golden brushed it off and as quickly as they’d come together they were apart, circling again, watching, a gust swirling around the theatre and dragging out the torch flames.

He could take a punch, this old man, still moving calm and steady, showing no pain. Golden might have to break him down piece by piece, use his reach, but that was well enough. He was warming to the task. His breath came faster and he growled along with it, his face finding a fighting snarl, sucking in strength and pushing out doubt, all his shame and disappointment made tinder for his anger.

Golden slapped his palms together hard, feinted right then hissed as he darted in, faster and sharper than before, catching the old man with two more long punches, bloodying his bent nose, staggering him and dancing away before he could think of throwing back, the stone bowl ringing with encouragements and insults and fresh odds in a dozen languages.

Golden settled to the work. He had the reach and the weight and the youth but he took nothing for granted. He would be cautious. He would make sure.

This would be his last fight, after all.

‘I’m coming, you bastard, I’m coming!’ shouted Pane, hobbling down the hall on his iffy leg.

Bottom of the pile, that’s what he was. But he guessed every pile needs someone on the bottom, and probably he didn’t deserve to be no higher. The door was jolting in its frame from the blows outside. They should’ve had a slot to look through. He’d said that before but no one took no notice. Probably they couldn’t hear him through that heap of folks on top. So he had to wrestle the bolt back and haul the door open a bit to see who was calling.

There was an old drunk outside. Tall and bony with grey hair plastered to one side of his head and big hands flapping and a tattered coat with what looked like old vomit down one side and fresh down the other. ‘I wanna get fucked,’ he said in a voice like rotten wood splitting.

‘Don’t let me stop you.’ And Pane swung the door shut.

The old man wedged a boot in it and the door bounced back open. ‘I wanna get fucked, I says!’

‘We’re closed.’

‘You’re what?’ The old man craned close, most likely deaf as well as drunk.

Pane heaved the door open wider so he could shout it. ‘There’s a fight on, case you didn’t notice. We’re closed!’

‘I did notice and I don’t care a shit. I want fucking and I want it now. I got dust and I heard tell the Whitehouse is never closed to business. Not never.’

‘Shit,’ hissed Pane. That was true. ‘Never closed,’ Papa Ring was always telling ’em. But then they’d been told to be careful, and triple careful today. ‘Be triple careful today,’ Papa had told them all. ‘I can’t stand a man ain’t careful.’ Which had sounded strange, since no one round here was ever the least bit careful.

‘I want a fuck,’ grunted the old man, hardly able to stand up straight, he was that drunk. Pane pitied the girl got that job, he stank like all the shit in Crease. Usually there’d be three guards at the door but the others had all snuck off to watch the fight and left him on his own, bottom of the bloody heap that he was.

He gave a strangled groan of upset, turned to shriek for someone just a little higher up the heap, and to his great and far from pleasant surprise an arm slipped tight around his neck and a cold point pressed into his throat and he heard the door swing shut behind.

‘Where’s the woman you took?’ The old man’s breath stank like a still but his hands were tight as vices. ‘Shy South, skinny thing with a big mouth. Where is she?’

‘I don’t know nothing about no woman,’ Pane managed to splutter, trying to say it loud enough to get someone’s attention but half-swallowing his words from the pressure.

‘Guess I might as well open you up, then.’ And Pane felt the point of the knife dig into his jaw.

‘Fuck! All right! She’s in the cellar!’

‘Lead on.’ And the old man started moving him. One step, two, and suddenly it just got to Pane what a damn indignity this was on top of everything else, and without thinking he started twisting and thrashing and elbowing away, struggling like this was his moment to get out from under the bottom of that heap and finally be somebody worthy of at least his own respect.

But the old man was made of iron. That knotty hand clamped Pane’s windpipe shut so he couldn’t make more’n a gurgle and he felt the knife’s point burning across his face, right up under his eye.

‘Struggle any more and that eye’s coming out,’ and there was a terrible coldness in the old man’s voice froze all the fight right out. ‘You’re just the fool who opens the door, so I reckon you don’t owe Papa Ring too much. He’s finished anyway. Take me to the woman and do nothing stupid, you’ll live to be the fool who opens someone else’s door. Make sense?’

The hand released enough for him to choke, ‘Makes sense.’ It did make sense, too. That was about as much fight as Pane had showed in his whole life and where’d it got him? He was just the fool who opened the door.

Bottom of the pile.

Golden had bloodied the old man’s face up something fierce. Drizzle was streaking through the light about the torches, cool on his forehead but he was hot inside now, doubts banished. He had Lamb’s measure and even the blood in his mouth tasted like victory.

This would be his last fight. Back to the North with Ring’s money and win back his lost honour and his lost children, cut his revenge out of Cairm Ironhead and Black Calder, the thought of those hated names and faces bringing up the fury in a sudden blaze.

Golden roared and the crowd roared with him, carried him across the Circle as if on the crest of a wave. The old man pushed away one punch and slipped under another, found a hold on Golden’s arm and they slapped and twisted, fingers wriggling for a grip, hands slippery with grease and drizzle, feet shuffling for advantage. Golden strained, and heaved, and finally with a bellow got Lamb off his feet, but the old man hooked his leg as he went down and they crashed together onto the stones, the crowd leaping up in joy as they fell.

Golden was on top. He tried to get a hand around the old man’s throat, fumbled with a notch out of his ear, tried to rip at it but it was too slippery, tried to inch his hand up onto Lamb’s face so he could get his thumbnail in his eye, the way he had with that big miner back in the spring, and of a sudden his head was dragged down and there was a burning, tugging pain in his mouth. He bellowed and twisted and growled, clawed at Lamb’s wrist with his nails and, with a stinging and ripping right through his lip and into his gums he tore himself free and thrashed away.

As Lamb rolled up he saw the old man had yellow hairs caught in one fist and Golden realised he’d torn half his moustache out. There was laughter in the crowd, but all he heard was the laughter years behind him as he trudged from Skarling’s Hall and into exile.

The rage came up white-hot and Golden charged in shrieking, no thoughts except the need to smash Lamb apart with his fists. He caught the old man square in the face and sent him staggering right out of the Circle, folk on the front row of stone benches scattering like starlings. Golden came after him, spewing curses, raining blows, fists knocking Lamb left and right like he was made of rags. The old man’s hands dropped, face slack, eyes glassy, and Golden knew the moment was come. He stepped in, swinging with all his strength, and landed the father of all punches right on the point of Lamb’s jaw.

He watched the old man stumble, fists dangling, waiting for Lamb’s knees to buckle so he could spring on top of him and put an end to it.

But Lamb didn’t fall. He tottered back a pace or two into the Circle and stood, swaying, blood drooling from his open mouth and his face tipped into shadow. Then Golden caught something over the thunder of the crowd, soft and low but there was no mistaking it.

The old man was laughing.

Golden stood, chest heaving, legs weak, arms heavy from his efforts, and he felt a chill doubt wash over him because he wasn’t sure he could hit a man any harder than that.

‘Who are you?’ he roared, fists aching like he’d been beating a tree. Lamb gave a smile like an open grave, and stuck out his red tongue, and smeared blood from it across his cheek in long streaks. He held up his left fist and gently uncurled it so he looked at Golden, eyes wide and weeping wet like two black tar-pits, through the gap where his middle finger used to be.

The crowd had fallen eerily quiet, and Golden’s doubt turned to a sucking dread because he finally knew the old man’s name.

‘By the dead,’ he whispered, ‘it can’t be.’

But he knew it was. However fast, however strong, however fearsome you make yourself, there’s always someone faster, stronger, more fearsome, and the more you fight the sooner you’ll meet him. No one cheats the Great Leveller for ever and now Glama Golden felt the sweat turn cold on him, and the fire inside guttered out and left only ashes.

And he knew this would be his last fight indeed.

‘So fucking unfair,’ Cantliss muttered to himself.

All that effort spent dragging those mewling brats across the Far Country, all that risk taken bringing ’em to the Dragon People, every bit repaid and interest too and what thanks? Just Papa Ring’s endless moaning and another shitty task to get through besides. However hard he worked things never went his way.

‘A man just can’t get a fair go,’ he snapped at nothing, and saying it made his face hurt and he gingerly pressed the scratches and that made his hand hurt and he reflected bitterly on the wrong-headed stupidity of womankind.

‘After everything I done for that whore…’

That idiot Warp was pretending to read as Cantliss stalked around the corner.

‘Get up, idiot!’ The woman was still in the cage, still tied and helpless, but she was watching him in a style made him angrier than ever, level and steady like she’d something on her mind other than fear. Like she’d a plan and he was a piece of it. ‘What d’you think you’re looking at, bitch?’ he snapped.

Clear and cold she said, ‘A fucking coward.’

He stopped short, blinking, hardly able to believe it at first. Even this skinny thing disrespecting him? Even this, who should have been snivelling for mercy? If you can’t get a woman’s respect tying her up and beating her, when can you fucking get it? ‘What?’ he whispered, going cold all over.

She leaned forwards, mocking eyes on him all the way, curled her lips back, pressed her tongue into the gap between her teeth, and with a jerk of her head spat across the cage and through the bars and it spattered against Cantliss’ new shirt.

‘Coward cunt,’ she said.

Taking a telling from Papa Ring was one thing. This was another. ‘Get that cage open!’ he snarled, near choking on fury.

‘Right y’are.’ Warp was fumbling with his ring of keys, trying to find the right one. There were only three on there. Cantliss tore it out of his hand, jammed the key in the lock and ripped back the gate, edge clanging against the wall and taking a chunk out of it.

‘I’ll learn you a fucking lesson!’ he screamed, but the woman watched him still, teeth bared and breathing so hard he could see the specks of spit off her lips. He caught a twisted handful of her shirt, half-lifting her, stitches ripping, and he clamped his other hand around her jaw, crushing her mouth between his fingers like he’d crush her face to pulp and—

Agony lanced up his thigh and he gave a whooping shriek. Another jolt and his leg gave so he tottered against the wall.

‘What you—’ said Warp, and Cantliss heard scuffling and grunting and he twisted around, only just staying on his feet for the pain right up into his groin.

Warp was against the cage, face a picture of stupid surprise, the woman holding him up with one hand and punching him in the gut with the other. With each punch she gave a spitty snort and he gave a cross-eyed gurgle and Cantliss saw she had a knife, strings of blood slopping off it and spattering the floor as she stabbed him. Cantliss realised she’d stabbed him, too, and he gave a whimper of outrage at the hurt and injustice of it, took one hopping step and flung himself at her, caught her around the back and they tumbled through the cage door and crashed together onto the packed-dirt floor outside, the knife bouncing away.

She was slippery as a trout, though, slithered out on top and gave him a couple of hard punches in the mouth, snapping his head against the ground before he knew where he was. She lunged for the knife but he caught her shirt before she got there and dragged her back, ragged thing ripped half-off, the pair of them wriggling across the dirt floor towards the table, grunting and spitting. She punched him again but it only caught the top of his skull and he tangled his hand in her hair and dragged her head sideways. She squealed and thrashed but he had her now and smacked her skull into the leg of the table, and again, and she went limp long enough for him to drag his weight on top of her, groaning as he tried to use his stabbed leg, all wet and warm now from his leaking blood.

He could hear her breath whooping in her throat as they twisted and strained and she kneed at him but his weight was on her and he finally got his forearm across her neck and started pressing on it, shifted his body and reached out, stretching with his fingers, and gathered in the knife, and he chuckled as his hand closed around it because he knew he’d won.

‘Now we’ll thucking thee,’ he hissed, a bit messed-up with his lips split and swollen, and he lifted the blade so she got a good look at it, her face all pinked from lack of air with bloody hair stuck across it, and her bulging eyes followed the point as she strained at his arm, weaker and weaker, and he brought the knife high, did a couple of fake little stabs to taunt her, enjoying the way her face twitched each time. ‘Now we’ll thee!’ He brought it higher still to do the job for real.

And Cantliss’ wrist was suddenly twisted right around and he gasped as he was dragged off her, and as he was opening his mouth something smashed into it and sent everything spinning. He shook his head, could hear the woman coughing what sounded like a long way away. He saw the knife on the ground, reached for it.

A big boot came down and smashed his hand into the dirt floor. Another swung past and its toe flicked the blade away. Cantliss groaned and tried to move his hand but couldn’t.

‘You want me to kill him?’ asked an old man, looking down.

‘No,’ croaked the girl, stooping for the knife. ‘I want to kill him.’ And she took a step at Cantliss, spitting blood in his face through the gap between her teeth.

‘No!’ he whimpered, trying to scramble back with his useless leg but still with his useless hand pinned under the old man’s boot. ‘You need me! You want your children back, right? Right?’ He saw her face and knew he had a chink to pick at. ‘Ain’t easy getting up there! I can show you the ways! You need me! I’ll help! I’ll put it right! Wasn’t my fault, it was Ring. He said he’d kill me! I didn’t have no choice! You need me!’ And he blathered and wept and begged but felt no shame because when he’s got no other choice a sensible man begs like a bastard.

‘What a thing is this,’ muttered the old-timer, lip curled with contempt.

The girl came back from the cage with the rope she’d been bound with. ‘Best keep our options open, though.’

‘Take him with us?’

She squatted down and gave Cantliss a red smile. ‘We can always kill him later.’

Abram Majud was deeply concerned. Not about the result, for that no longer looked in doubt. About what would come after.

With each exchange Golden grew weaker. His face, as far as could be told through the blood and swelling, was a mask of fear. Lamb’s smile, by terrible contrast, split wider with every blow given or received. It had become the demented leer of a drunkard, of a lunatic, of a demon, no trace remaining of the man Majud had laughed with on the plains, an expression so monstrous that observers in the front row scrambled back onto the benches behind whenever Lamb lurched close.

The audience was turning almost as ugly as the show. Majud dreaded to imagine the total value of wagers in the balance, and he had already seen fights break out among the spectators. The sense of collective insanity was starting to remind him strongly of a battle—a place he had very much hoped never to visit again—and in a battle he knew there are always casualties.

Lamb sent Golden reeling with a heavy right hand, caught him before he fell, hooked a finger in his mouth and ripped his cheek wide open, blood spotting the nearest onlookers.

‘Oh my,’ said Curnsbick, watching the fight through his spread fingers.

‘We should go.’ But Majud saw no easy way to manage it. Lamb had hold of Golden’s arm, was wrapping his own around it, forcing him onto his knees, the pinned hand flopping uselessly. Majud heard Golden’s bubbling scream, then the sharp pop as his elbow snapped back the wrong way, skin horribly distended around the joint.

Lamb was on him like a wolf on the kill, giggling as he seized Golden around the throat, arching back and smashing his forehead into his face, and again, and again, the crowd whooping their joy or dismay at the outcome.

Majud heard a wail, saw bodies heaving in the stands, what looked like two men stabbing another. The sky was suddenly lit by a bloom of orange flame, bright enough almost to feel the warmth of. A moment later a thunderous boom shook the arena and terrified onlookers flung themselves down, hands clasped over their heads, screams of bloodlust turned to howls of dismay.

A man staggered into the Circle, clutching at his guts, and fell not far from where Lamb was still intent on smashing Golden’s head apart with his hands. Fire leaped and twisted in the drizzle on Papa Ring’s side of the street. A fellow not two strides away was hit in the head by a piece of debris as he stood and knocked flying.

‘Explosive powder,’ muttered Curnsbick, his eyeglasses alive with the reflections of fire.

Majud seized him by the arm and dragged him along the bench. Between the heaving bodies he could see Lamb’s hacked-out smile lit by one guttering torch, beating someone’s head against one of the pillars with a regular crunch, crunch, the stone smeared black. Majud had a suspicion the victim was Camling. The time for referees was plainly long past.

‘Oh my,’ muttered Curnsbick. ‘Oh my.’

Majud drew his sword. The one General Malzagurt had given him as thanks for saving his life. He hated the damn thing but was glad of it now. Man’s ingenuity has still developed no better tool for getting people out of the way than a length of sharpened steel.

Excitement had devolved into panic with the speed of a mudslide. On the other side of the Circle, the new-built stand was starting to rock alarmingly as people boiled down it, trampling each other in their haste to get away. With a tortured creak the whole structure lurched sideways, buckling, spars splintering like matchsticks, twisting, falling, people pitching over the poorly made railings and tumbling through the darkness.

Majud dragged Curnsbick through it all, ignoring the fighting, the injured, a woman propped on her elbows staring at the bone sticking out of her leg. It was every man for himself and perhaps, if they were lucky, those closest to him, no choice but to leave the rest to God.

‘Oh my,’ burbled Curnsbick.

In the street it was no longer like a battle, it was one. People dashed gibbering through the madness, lit by the spreading flames on Ring’s side of the street. Blades glinted, men clashed and fell and rolled, floundered in the stream, the sides impossible to guess. He saw someone toss a burning bottle whirling onto a roof where it shattered, curling lines of fire shooting across the thatch and catching hungrily in spite of the wet.

He glimpsed the Mayor, still staring across the maddened street from her balcony. She pointed at something, spoke to a man beside her, calmly directing. Majud acquired the strong impression that she had never intended to sit back and meekly abide by the result.

Arrows flickered in the darkness. One stuck in the mud near them, burning. Majud’s ears rang with words screeched in languages he did not know. There was another thunderous detonation and he cowered as timbers spun high, smoke roiling up into the wet sky.

Someone had a woman by the hair, was dragging her kicking through the muck.

‘Oh my,’ said Curnsbick, over and over.

A hand clutched at Majud’s ankle and he struck out with the flat of his sword, tore free and struggled on, not looking back, sticking to the porches of the buildings on the Mayor’s side of the street. High above, at the top of the nearest column, three men were silhouetted, two with bows, a third lighting their pitch-soaked arrows so they could calmly shoot them at the houses across the way.

The building with the sign that said Fuck Palace was thoroughly ablaze. A woman leaped from the balcony and crumpled in the mud, wailing. Two corpses lay nearby. Four men stood with naked swords, watching. One was smoking a pipe. Majud thought he was a dealer from the Mayor’s Church of Dice.

Curnsbick tried to pull his arm free. ‘We should—’

‘No!’ snapped Majud, dragging him on. ‘We shouldn’t.’

Mercy, along with all the trappings of civilised behaviour, was a luxury they could ill afford. Majud tore out the key to their shop and thrust it into Curnsbick’s trembling hand while he faced the street, sword up.

‘Oh my,’ the inventor was saying as he struggled with the lock, ‘oh my.’

They spilled inside, into the still safety, the darkness of the shop flickering with slashes of orange and yellow and red. Majud shouldered the door shut, gasped with relief as he felt the latch drop, spun about when he felt a hand on his shoulder and nearly took Temple’s head off with his flailing sword.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ A strip of light wandered across one half of Temple’s stricken face. ‘Who won the fight?’

Majud put the point of his sword on the floor and leaned on the pommel, breathing hard. ‘Lamb tore Golden apart. Literally.’

‘Oh my,’ whimpered Curnsbick, sliding down the wall until his arse thumped against the floor.

‘What about Shy?’ asked Temple.

‘I’ve no idea. I’ve no idea about anything.’ Majud eased the door open a crack to peer out. ‘But I suspect the Mayor is cleaning house.’

The flames on Papa Ring’s side of the street were lighting the whole town in garish colours. The Whitehouse was ablaze to its top floor, fire shooting into the sky, ravenous, murderous, trees burning on the slopes above, ash and embers fluttering in the rain.

‘Shouldn’t we help?’ whispered Temple.

‘A good man of business remains neutral.’

‘Surely there’s a moment to cease being a good man of business, and try to be merely a good man.’

‘Perhaps.’ Majud heaved the door shut again. ‘But this is not that moment.’

Old Friends

‘Well, then!’ shouted Papa Ring, and he swallowed, and he blinked into the sun. ‘Here we are, I guess!’ There was a sheen of sweat across his forehead, but Temple could hardly blame him for that. ‘I haven’t always done right!’ Someone had ripped the ring from his ear and the distorted lobe flopped loose as he turned his head. ‘Daresay most of you won’t miss me none! But I’ve always done my best to keep my word, at least! You’d have to say I always kept my—’

Temple heard the Mayor snap her fingers and her man booted Ring in the back and sent him lurching off the scaffold. The noose jerked tight and he kicked and twisted, rope creaking as he did the hanged man’s dance, piss running from one of his dirty trouser-legs. Little men and big, brave men and cowards, powerful men and meagre, they all hang very much the same. That made eleven of them dangling. Ring, and nine of his henchmen, and the woman who had been in charge of his whores. A half-hearted cheer went up from the crowd, more habit than enthusiasm. Last night’s events had more than satisfied even Crease’s appetite for death.

‘And that’s the end of that,’ said the Mayor under her breath.

‘It’s the end of a lot,’ said Temple. One of the ancient pillars the Whitehouse had stood between had toppled in the heat. The other loomed strangely naked, cracked and soot-blackened, the ruins of the present tangled charred about the ruins of the past. A good half of the buildings on Ring’s side of the street had met the same fate, yawning gaps burned from the jumble of wooden shack and shanty, scavengers busy among the wreckage.

‘We’ll rebuild,’ said the Mayor. ‘That’s what we do. Is that treaty ready yet?’

‘Very nearly done,’ Temple managed to say.

‘Good. That piece of paper could save a lot of lives.’

‘I see that saving lives is our only concern.’ He trudged back up the steps without waiting for a reply. He shed no tears for Papa Ring, but he had no wish to watch him kick any longer.

With a fair proportion of the town’s residents dead by violence, fire or hanging, a larger number run off, a still larger number even now preparing to leave, and most of the rest in the street observing the conclusion of the great feud, the Mayor’s Church of Dice was eerily empty, Temple’s footsteps echoing around the smoke-stained rafters. Dab Sweet, Crying Rock and Corlin sat about one table, playing cards under the vacant gaze of the ancient armour ranged about the walls.

‘Not watching the hanging?’ asked Temple.

Corlin glanced at him out of the corner of her eye and treated him to a hiss of contempt. More than likely she had heard the story of his naked dash across the street.

‘Nearly got hanged myself one time, up near Hope,’ said Sweet. ‘Turned out a misunderstanding, but even so.’ The old scout hooked a finger in his collar and dragged it loose. ‘Strangled my enthusiasm for the business.’

‘Bad luck,’ intoned Crying Rock, seeming to stare straight through her cards, half of which faced in and the other half out. Whether it was the end of Sweet’s enthusiasm, or his near-hanging, or hanging in general that was bad luck she didn’t clarify. She was not a woman prone to clarification.

‘And when there’s death outside is the one time a man can get some room in here.’ Sweet rocked his chair back on two legs and deposited his dirty boot on the table. ‘I reckon this place has turned sour. Soon there’ll be more money in taking folk away than bringing ’em in. Just need to round up a few miserable failures desperate to see civilisation again and we’re on our way back to the Near Country.’

‘Maybe I’ll join you,’ said Temple. A crowd of failures sounded like ideal company for him.

‘Always welcome.’ Crying Rock let fall a card and started to rake in the pot, her face just as slack as if she’d lost. Sweet tossed his hand away in disgust. ‘Twenty years I been losing to this cheating bloody Ghost and she still pretends she don’t know how to play the game!’

Savian and Lamb stood at the counter, warming themselves at a bottle. Shorn of hair and beard the Northman looked younger, even bigger, and a great deal meaner. He also looked as if he had made every effort to fell a tree with his face. It was a misshapen mass of scab and bruise, a ragged cut across one cheekbone roughly stitched and his hands both wrapped in stained bandages.

‘All the same,’ he was grunting through bloated lips, ‘I owe you big.’

‘Daresay I’ll find a way for you to pay,’ answered Savian. ‘Where d’you stand on politics?’

‘These days, as far away from it as I can…’

They shut up tight when they saw Temple. ‘Where’s Shy?’ he asked.

Lamb looked at him, one eye swollen nearly shut and the other infinitely tired. ‘Upstairs in the Mayor’s rooms.’

‘Will she see me?’

‘That’s up to her.’

Temple nodded. ‘You’ve got my thanks as well,’ he said to Savian. ‘For what that’s worth.’

‘We all give what we can.’

Temple wasn’t sure whether that was meant to sting. It was one of those moments when everything stung. He left the two old men and made for the stairs. Behind him he heard Savian mutter, ‘I’m talking about the rebellion in Starikland.’

‘The one just finished?’

‘That and the next one…’

He lifted his fist outside the door, and paused. There was nothing to stop him letting it drop and riding straight out of town, to Bermi’s claim, maybe, or even on to somewhere no one knew what a disappointing cock he was. If there was any such place left in the Circle of the World. Before the impulse to take the easy way could overwhelm him, he made himself knock.

Shy’s face looked little better than Lamb’s, scratched and swollen, nose cut across the bridge, neck a mass of bruises. It hurt him to see it. Not as much as if he’d taken the beating, of course. But it hurt still. She didn’t look upset to see him. She didn’t look that interested. She left the door open, limping slightly, and showed her teeth as she sank down on a bench under the window, bare feet looking very white against the floorboards.

‘How was the hanging?’ she asked.

He stepped inside and gently pushed the door to. ‘Very much like they always are.’

‘Can’t say I’ve ever understood their appeal.’

‘Perhaps it makes people feel like winners, seeing someone else lose so hard.’

‘Losing hard I know all about.’

‘Are you all right?’

She looked up and he could hardly meet her eye. ‘Bit sore.’

‘You’re angry with me.’ He sounded like a sulking child.

‘I’m not. I’m just sore.’

‘What good would I have done if I’d stayed?’

She licked at her split lip. ‘I daresay you’d just have got yourself killed.’

‘Exactly. But instead I ran for help.’

‘You ran all right, that I can corroborate.’

‘I got Savian.’

‘And Savian got me. Just in time.’

‘That’s right.’

‘That’s right.’ She held her side as she slowly fished up one boot and started to pull it on. ‘So I guess what we’re saying is, I owe you my life. Thanks, Temple, you’re a fucking hero. Next time I see a bare arse vanishing out my window I’ll know to just lie back and await salvation.’

They looked at each other in silence, while outside in the street the hanging crowd started to drift away. Then he sank into a chair facing her. ‘I’m fucking ashamed of myself.’

‘That’s a great comfort. I’ll use your shame as a poultice on my grazes.’

‘I’ve got no excuse.’

‘And yet I feel one’s coming.’

His turn to grimace. ‘I’m a coward, simple as that. I’ve been running away so long it’s come to be a habit. Not easy, changing old habits. However much we might—’

‘Don’t bother.’ She gave a long, pained sigh. ‘I got low expectations. To be fair, you already exceeded ’em once when you paid your debt. So you tend to the cowardly. Who doesn’t? You ain’t the brave knight and I ain’t the swooning maiden and this ain’t no storybook, that’s for sure. You’re forgiven. You can go your way.’ And she waved him out the door with the scabbed back of her hand.

That was closer to forgiveness than he could have hoped for, but he found he was not moving. ‘I don’t want to go.’

‘I’m not asking you to jump again, you can use the stairs.’

‘Let me make it right.’

She looked up at him from under her brows. ‘We’re heading into the mountains, Temple. That bastard Cantliss’ll show us where these Dragon People are, and we’re going to try and get my brother and sister back, and I can’t promise there’ll be anything made right at all. A few promises I can make—it’ll be hard and cold and dangerous and there won’t even be any windows to jump out of. You’ll be about as useful there as a spent match, and let’s neither one of us offend honesty by pretending otherwise.’

‘Please.’ He took a wheedling step towards her, ‘Please give me one more—’

‘Leave me be,’ she said, narrowing her eyes at him. ‘I just want to sit and hurt in peace.’

So that was all. Maybe he should have fought harder, but Temple had never been much of a fighter. So he nodded at the floor, and quietly shut the door behind him, and went back down the steps, and over to the counter.

‘Get what you wanted?’ asked Lamb.

‘No,’ said Temple, spilling a pocketful of coins across the wood. ‘What I deserved.’ And he started drinking.

He was vaguely aware of the dull thud of hooves out in the street, shouting and the jingle of harness. Some new Fellowship pulling into town. Some new set of forthcoming disappointments. But he was too busy with his own even to bother to look up. He told the man behind the counter to leave the bottle.

This time there was no one else to blame. Not God, not Cosca, certainly not Shy. Lamb had been right. The trouble with running is wherever you run to, there you are. Temple’s problem was Temple, and it always had been. He heard heavy footsteps, spurs jingling, calls for drink and women, but he ignored them, inflicted another burning glassful on his gullet, banged it down, eyes watering, reached for the bottle.

Someone else got there first.

‘You’d best leave that be,’ growled Temple.

‘How would I drink it then?’

At the sound of that voice a terrible chill prickled his spine. His eyes crawled to the hand on the bottle—aged, liver-spotted, dirt beneath the cracked nails, a gaudy ring upon the first finger. His eyes crawled past the grubby lacework on the sleeve, up the mud-spotted material, over the breastplate, gilt peeling, up a scrawny neck speckled with rash, and to the face. That awfully familiar, hollowed visage: the nose sharp, the eyes bright, the greyed moustaches waxed to curling points.

‘Oh God,’ breathed Temple.

‘Close enough,’ said Nicomo Cosca, and delivered that luminous smile of which only he was capable, good humour and good intentions radiating from his deep-lined face. ‘Look who it is, boys!’

At least two dozen well-known and deeply detested figures had made their way in after the Old Man. ‘Whatever are the odds?’ asked Brachio, showing his yellow teeth. He had a couple fewer knives in his bandolier than when Temple had left the Company, but was otherwise unchanged.

‘Rejoice, ye faithful,’ rumbled Jubair, quoting scripture in Kantic, ‘for the wanderer returns.’

‘Scouting, were you?’ sneered Dimbik, smoothing his hair down with a licked finger and straightening his sash, which had devolved into a greasy tatter of indeterminate colour. ‘Finding us a path to glory?’

‘Ah, a drink, a drink, a drink…’ Cosca took a long and flamboyant swig from Temple’s bottle. ‘Did I not tell you all? Wait long enough and things have a habit of returning to their proper place. Having lost my Company, I was for some years a penniless wanderer, buffeted by the winds of fate, most roughly buffeted, Sworbreck, make a note of that.’ The writer, whose hair had grown considerably wilder, clothes shabbier, nostril rims pinker and hands more tremulous since last they met, fumbled for his pencil. ‘But here I am, once more in command of a band of noble fighting men! You will scarcely believe it, but Sergeant Friendly was at one time forced into the criminal fraternity.’ The neckless sergeant hoisted one brow a fraction. ‘But he now stands beside me as the staunch companion he was born to be. And you, Temple? What role could fit your high talents and low character so well as that of my legal advisor?’

Temple hopelessly shrugged. ‘None that I can think of.’

‘Then let us celebrate our inevitable reunion! One for me.’ The Old Man took another hefty swig, then grinned as he poured the smallest dribble of spirit into Temple’s glass. ‘And one for you. I thought you stopped drinking?’

‘It felt like a perfect moment to start again,’ croaked Temple. He had been expecting Cosca to order his death but, almost worse, it appeared the Company of the Gracious Hand would simply reabsorb him without breaking stride. If there was a God, He had clearly taken a set dislike to Temple over the past few years. But Temple supposed he could hardly blame Him. He was coming to feel much the same.

‘Gentlemen, welcome to Crease!’ The Mayor came sweeping through the doorway. ‘I must apologise for the mess, but we have—’ She saw the Old Man and her face drained of all colour. The first time Temple had seen her even slightly surprised. ‘Nicomo Cosca,’ she breathed.

‘None other. You must be the Mayor.’ He stiffly bowed, then looking slyly up added, ‘These days. It is a morning of reunions, apparently.’

‘You know each other?’ asked Temple.

‘Well,’ muttered the Mayor. ‘What… astonishing luck.’

‘They do say luck is a woman.’ The Old Man made Temple grunt by poking him in the ribs with the neck of his own bottle. ‘She’s drawn to those who least deserve her!’

Out of the corner of his eye, Temple saw Shy limping down the stairs and over towards Lamb who, along with Savian, was watching the new arrivals in careful silence. Cosca, meanwhile, was strutting to the windows, spurs jingling. He took a deep breath, apparently savouring the odour of charred wood, and started to swing his head gently in time to the creaking of the bodies on their scaffold. ‘I love what you’ve done with the place,’ he called to the Mayor. ‘Very… apocalyptic. You make something of a habit of leaving settlements you preside over in smoking ruins.’

Something they had in common, as far as Temple could tell. He realised he was picking at the stitches holding his buttons on and forced himself to stop.

‘Are these gentlemen your whole contingent?’ asked the Mayor, eyeing the filthy, squinting, scratching, spitting mercenaries slouching about her gaming hall.

‘Dear me, no! We lost a few on the way across the Far Country—the inevitable desertions, a round of fever, a little trouble with the Ghosts—but these stalwarts are but a representative sample. I have left the rest beyond the city limits because if I were to bring some three hundred—’

‘Two hundred and sixty,’ said Friendly. The Mayor looked paler yet at the number.

‘Counting Inquisitor Lorsen and his Practicals?’

‘Two hundred and sixty-eight.’ At the mention of the Inquisition, the Mayor’s face had turned positively deathly.

‘If I were to bring two hundred and sixty eight travel-sore fighting men into a place like this, there would, frankly, be carnage.’

‘And not the good sort,’ threw in Brachio, dabbing at his weepy eye.

‘There is a good sort?’ murmured the Mayor.

Cosca thoughtfully worked one moustache-tip between thumb and forefinger. ‘There are… degrees, anyway. And here he is!’

His black coat was weather-worn, a patchy yellow-grey beard had sprouted from cheeks more gaunt than ever, but Inquisitor Lorsen’s eyes were just as bright with purpose as they had been when the Company left Mulkova. More so, if anything.

‘This is Inquisitor Lorsen.’ Cosca scratched thoughtfully at his rashy neck. ‘My current employer.’

‘An honour.’ Though Temple detected the slightest strain in the Mayor’s voice. ‘If I may ask, what business might his Majesty’s Inquisition have in Crease?’

‘We are hunting escaped rebels!’ called Lorsen to the room at large. ‘Traitors to the Union!’

‘We are far from the Union here.’

The Inquisitor’s smile seemed to chill the whole room. ‘The reach of his Eminence lengthens yearly. Large rewards are being offered for the capture of certain persons. A list will be posted throughout town, at its head the traitor, murderer and chief fomenter of rebellion, Conthus!’

Savian gave vent to a muffled round of coughing and Lamb slapped him on the back, but Lorsen was too busy frowning down his nose at Temple to notice. ‘I see you have been reunited with this slippery liar.’

‘Come now.’ Cosca gave Temple’s shoulder a fatherly squeeze. ‘A degree of slipperiness, and indeed of lying, is a positive boon in a notary. Beneath it all there has never been a man of such conscience and moral courage. I’d trust him with my life. Or at least my hat.’ And he swept it off and hung it over Temple’s glass.

‘As long as you trust him with none of my business.’ Lorsen waved to his Practicals. ‘Come. We have questions to ask.’

‘He seems charming,’ said the Mayor as she watched him leave.

Cosca scratched at his rash again and held up his fingernails to assess the results. ‘The Inquisition makes a point of recruiting only the most well-mannered fanatical torturers.’

‘And the most foul-mannered old mercenaries too, it would appear.’

‘A job is a job. But I have my own reasons for being here also. I came looking for a man called Grega Cantliss.’

There was a long pause as that name settled upon the room like a chilly snowfall.

‘Fuck,’ he heard Shy breathe.

Cosca looked about expectantly. ‘The name is not unknown, then?’

‘He has at times passed through.’ The Mayor had the air of choosing her words very carefully. ‘If you were to find him, what then?’

‘Then I and my notary—not to mention my employer the noble Inquisitor Lorsen—could be very much out of your way. Mercenaries have, I am aware, a poor reputation, but believe me when I say we are not here to cause trouble.’ He swilled some spirit lazily around in the bottom of the bottle. ‘Why, do you have some notion of Cantliss’ whereabouts?’

A pregnant silence ensued while a set of long glances were exchanged. Then Lamb slowly lifted his chin. Shy’s face hardened. The Mayor graced them with the tiniest apologetic shrug. ‘He is chained up in my cellar.’

‘Bitch,’ breathed Shy.

‘Cantliss is ours.’ Lamb pushed himself up from the counter and stood tall, bandaged left hand sitting loose on the hilt of his sword.

Several of the mercenaries variously puffed themselves up and found challenging stances of one kind or another, like tomcats opening hostilities in a moonlit alley. Friendly only watched, dead-eyed, dice clicking in his fist as he worked them gently around each other.

‘Yours?’ asked Cosca.

‘He burned my farm and stole my son and daughter and sold ’em to some savages. We’ve tracked him all the way from the Near Country. He’s going to take us up into the mountains and show us where these Dragon People are.’

The Old Man’s body might have stiffened down the years but his eyebrows were still some of the most limber in the world, and they reached new heights now. ‘Dragon People, you say? Perhaps we can help each other?’

Lamb glanced about the dirty, scarred and bearded faces. ‘Guess you can never have too many allies.’

‘Quite so! A man lost in the desert must take such water as he is offered, eh, Temple?’

‘Not sure I wouldn’t rather go thirsty,’ muttered Shy.

‘I’m Lamb. That’s Shy.’ The Northman raised his glass, the stump of his middle finger plainly visible in spite of the bandages.

‘A nine-fingered Northman,’ mused the captain general. ‘I do believe a fellow called Shivers was looking for you in the Near Country.’

‘Haven’t seen him.’

‘Ah.’ Cosca waved his bottle at Lamb’s injuries. ‘I thought perhaps this might be his handiwork.’

‘No.’

‘You appear to have many enemies, Master Lamb.’

‘Sometimes it seems I can’t shit without making a couple more.’

‘It all depends who you shit on, I suppose? A fearsome fellow, Caul Shivers, and I would not judge the years to have mellowed him. We knew each other back in Styria, he and I. Sometimes I feel I have met everyone in the world and that every new place is peopled with old faces.’ His considering gaze came to rest on Savian. ‘Although I do not recognise this gentleman.’

‘I’m Savian.’ And he coughed into his fist.

‘And what brings you to the Far Country? Your health?’

Savian paused, mouth a little open, while an awkward silence stretched out, several of the mercenaries still with hands close to weapons, and suddenly Shy said, ‘Cantliss took one of his children, too, he’s been tracking ’em along with us. Lad called Collem.’

The silence lasted a little longer then Savian added, almost reluctantly, ‘My lad, Collem.’ He coughed again, and raspingly cleared his throat. ‘Hoping Cantliss can lead us to him.’

It was almost a relief to see two of the Mayor’s men dragging the bandit across the gaming hall. His wrists were in manacles, his once fine clothes were stained rags and his face as bruised as Lamb’s, one hand hanging useless and one leg dragging on the boards behind him.

‘The elusive Grega Cantliss!’ shouted Cosca as the Mayor’s men flung him cringing down. ‘Fear not. I am Nicomo Cosca, infamous soldier of fortune, et cetera, et cetera, and I have some questions for you. I advise you to consider your answers carefully as your life may depend upon them, and so forth.’

Cantliss registered Shy, Savian, Lamb and the score or more of mercenaries, and with a coward’s instinct Temple well recognised quickly perceived the shift in the balance of power. He eagerly nodded.

‘Some months ago you bought some horses in a town called Greyer. You used coins like these.’ Cosca produced a tiny gold piece with a magician’s flourish. ‘Antique Imperial coins, as it happens.’

Cantliss’ eyes flickered over Cosca’s face as though trying to read a script. ‘I did. That’s a fact.’

‘You bought those horses from rebels, fighting to free Starikland from the Union.’

‘I did?’

‘You did.’

‘I did!’

Cosca leaned close. ‘Where did the coins come from?’

‘Dragon People paid me with ’em,’ said Cantliss. ‘Savages in the mountains up beyond Beacon.’

‘Paid you for what?’

He licked his scabbed lips. ‘For children.’

‘An ugly business,’ muttered Sworbreck.

‘Most business is,’ said Cosca, leaning closer and closer towards Cantliss. ‘They have more of these coins?’

‘All I could ever want, that’s what he said.’

‘Who said?’

‘Waerdinur. He’s their leader.’

‘All I could ever want.’ Cosca’s eyes glimmered as brightly as his imagined gold. ‘So you are telling me these Dragon People are in league with the rebels?’

‘What?’

‘That these savages are funding, and perhaps harbouring, the rebel leader Conthus himself?’

There was a silence while Cantliss blinked up. ‘Er… yes?’

Cosca smiled very wide. ‘Yes. And when my employer Inquisitor Lorsen asks you the same question, what will your answer be?’

Now Cantliss smiled, too, sensing that his chances might have drastically improved. ‘Yes! They got them that Conthus up there, no doubt in my mind! Hell, he’s more’n likely going to use their money to start a new war!’

‘I knew it!’ Cosca poured a measure of spirit into Lamb’s empty glass. ‘We must accompany you into the mountains and pull up this very root of insurrection! This wretched man will be our guide and thereby win his freedom.’

‘Yes, indeed!’ shouted Cantliss, grinning at Shy and Lamb and Savian, then squawking as Brachio hauled him to his feet and manhandled him towards the door, wounded leg dragging.

‘Fuckers,’ whispered Shy.

‘Realistic,’ Lamb hissed at her, one hand on her elbow.

‘What luck for all of us,’ Cosca was expounding, ‘that I should arrive as you prepare to leave!’

‘Oh, I’ve always had the luck,’ muttered Temple.

‘And me,’ murmured Shy.

‘Realistic,’ hissed Lamb.

‘A party of four is easily dismissed,’ Cosca was telling the room. ‘A party of three hundred, so much less easily!’

‘Two hundred and seventy-two,’ said Friendly.

‘If I could have a word?’ Dab Sweet was approaching the counter. ‘You’re planning on heading into the mountains, you’ll need a better scout than that half-dead killer. I stand ready and willing to offer my services.’

‘So generous,’ said Cosca. ‘And you are?’

‘Dab Sweet.’ And the famous scout removed his hat to display his own thinning locks. Evidently he had caught the scent of a more profitable opportunity than shepherding the desperate back to Starikland.

‘The noted frontiersman?’ asked Sworbreck, looking up from his papers. ‘I thought you’d be younger.’

Sweet sighed. ‘I used to be.’

‘You’re aware of him?’ asked Cosca.

The biographer pointed his nose towards the ceiling. ‘A man by the name of Marin Glanhorm—I refuse to use the term writer in relation to him—has penned some most inferior and far-fetched works based upon his supposed exploits.’

‘Those was unauthorised,’ said Sweet. ‘But I’ve exploited a thing or two, that’s true. I’ve trodden on every patch of this Far Country big enough to support a boot, and that includes them mountains.’ He beckoned Cosca closer, spoke softer. ‘Almost as far as Ashranc, where those Dragon People live. Their sacred ground. My partner, Crying Rock, she’s been even further, see…’ He gave a showman’s pause. ‘She used to be one of ’em.’

‘True,’ grunted Crying Rock, still occupying her place at the table, though Corlin had vanished leaving only her cards.

‘Raised up there,’ said Sweet. ‘Lived up there.’

‘Born up there, eh?’ asked Cosca.

Crying Rock solemnly shook her head. ‘No one is born in Ashranc.’ And she stuck her dead chagga pipe between her teeth as though that was her last word on the business.

‘She knows the secret ways up there, though, and you’ll need ’em, too, ’cause those Dragon bastards won’t be extending no warm welcomes once you’re on their ground. It’s some strange, sulphurous ground they’ve got but they’re jealous about it as mean bears, that’s the truth.’

‘Then the two of you would be an invaluable addition to our expedition,’ said Cosca. ‘What would be your terms?’

‘We’d settle for a twentieth share of any valuables recovered.’

‘Our aim is to root out rebellion, not valuables.’

Sweet smiled. ‘There’s a risk of disappointment in any venture.’

‘Then welcome aboard! My notary will prepare an agreement!’

‘Two hundred and seventy-four,’ mused Friendly. His dead eyes drifted to Temple. ‘And you.’

Cosca began to slosh out drinks. ‘Why are all the really interesting people always advanced in years?’ He nudged Temple in the ribs. ‘Your generation really isn’t producing the goods.’

‘We cower in giants’ shadows and feel our shortcomings most keenly.’

‘Oh, you’ve been missed, Temple! If I’ve learned one thing in forty years of warfare, it’s that you have to look on the funny side. The tongue on this man! Conversationally, I mean, not sexually, I can’t vouch for that. Don’t include that, Sworbreck!’ The biographer sullenly crossed something out. ‘We shall leave as soon as the men are rested and supplies gathered!’

‘Might be best to wait ’til winter’s past,’ said Sweet.

Cosca leaned close. ‘Do you have any notion what will happen if I leave my Company quartered here for four months? The state of the place now barely serves as a taster.’

‘You got any notion what’ll happen if three hundred men get caught in a real winter storm up there?’ grunted Sweet, pulling his fingers through his beard.

‘None whatsoever,’ said Cosca, ‘but I can’t wait to find out. We must seize the moment! That has always been my motto. Note that down, Sworbreck.’

Sweet raised his brows. ‘Might not be long ’til your motto is, “I can’t feel my fucking feet.” ’

But the captain general was, as usual, not listening. ‘I have a premonition we will all find what we seek in those mountains!’ He threw one arm about Savian’s shoulders and the other about Lamb’s. ‘Lorsen his rebels, I my gold, these worthy folk their missing children. Let us toast our alliance!’ And he raised Temple’s nearly empty bottle high.

‘Shit on this,’ breathed Shy through gritted teeth.

Temple could only agree. But that appeared to be all his say in the matter.

Nowhere to Go

Ro pulled off the chain with the dragon’s scale and laid it gently on the furs. Shy once told her you can waste your life waiting for the right moment. Now was good as any.

She touched Pit’s cheek in the dark and he stirred, the faintest smile on his face. He was happy here. Young enough to forget, maybe. He’d be safe, or safe as he could be. In this world there are no certainties. Ro wished she could say goodbye but she was worried he’d cry. So she gathered her bundle and slipped out into the night.

The air was sharp, snow gently falling but melting as soon as it touched the hot ground and dry a moment later. Light spilled from some of the houses, windows needing neither glass nor shutter cut from the mountain or from walls so old and weathered Ro couldn’t tell them from the mountain. She kept to the shadows, rag-wrapped feet silent on the ancient paving, past the great black cooking slab, surface polished to a shine by the years, steam whispering from it as the snow fell.

The Long House door creaked as she passed and she pressed herself against the pitted wall, waiting. Through the window she could hear the voices of the elders at their Gathering. Three months here and she already knew their tongue.

‘The Shanka are breeding in the deeper tunnels.’ Uto’s voice. She always counselled caution.

‘Then we must drive them out.’ Akosh. She was always bold.

‘If we send enough for that there will be few left behind. One day men will come from outside.’

‘We put them off in the place they call Beacon.’

‘Or we made them curious.’

‘Once we wake the Dragon it will not matter.’

‘It was given to me to make the choice.’ Waerdinur’s deep voice. ‘The Maker did not leave our ancestors here to let his works fall into decay. We must be bold. Akosh, you will take three hundred of us north into the deep places and drive out the Shanka, and keep the diggings going over winter. After the thaw you will return.’

‘I worry,’ said Uto. ‘There have been visions.’

‘You always worry…’

Their words faded into the night as Ro padded past, over the great sheets of dulled bronze where the names were chiselled in tiny characters, thousands upon thousands stretching back into the fog of ages. She knew Icaray was on guard tonight and guessed he would be drunk, as always. He sat in the archway, head nodding, spear against the wall, empty bottle between his feet. The Dragon People were just people, after all, and each had their failings like any other.

Ro looked back once and thought how beautiful it was, the yellow-lit windows in the black cliff-face, the dark carvings on the steep roofs against a sky blazing with stars. But it wasn’t her home. She wouldn’t let it be. She scurried past Icaray and down the steps, hand brushing the warm rock on her right because on her left, she knew, was a hundred strides of empty drop.

She came to the needle and found the hidden stair, striking steeply down the mountainside. It scarcely looked hidden at all but Waerdinur had told her that it had a magic, and no one could see it until they were shown it. Shy had always told her there were no such things as Magi or demons and it was all stories, but out here in this far, high corner of the world all things had their magic. To deny it felt as foolish as denying the sky.

Down the winding stair, switching back and forth, away from Ashranc, the stones growing colder underfoot. Into the forest, great trees on the bare slopes, roots catching at her toes and tangling at her ankles. She ran beside a sulphurous stream, bubbling through rocks crusted with salt. She stopped when her breath began to smoke, the cold biting in her chest, and she bound her feet more warmly, unrolled the fur and wrapped it around her shoulders, ate and drank, tied her bundle and hurried on. She thought of Lamb plodding endlessly behind his plough and Shy swinging the scythe sweat dripping from her brows and saying through her gritted teeth, You just keep on. Don’t think of stopping. Just keep on, and Ro kept on.

The snow had settled in slow melting patches here, the branches dripping tap, tap and how she wished she had proper boots. She heard wolves sorrowful in the high distance and ran faster, her feet wet and her legs sore, downhill, downhill, clambering over jagged rock and sliding in scree, checking with the stars the way Gully taught her once, sitting out beside the barn in the dark of night when she couldn’t sleep.

The snow had stopped falling but it was drifted deep now, sparkling as dawn came fumbling through the forest, her feet crunching, her face prickling with the cold. Ahead the trees began to thin and she hurried on, hoping perhaps to look out upon fields or flower-filled valleys or a merry township nestled in the hills.

She burst out at the edge of a dizzy cliff and stared far over high and barren country, sharp black forest and bare black rock slashed and stabbed with white snow fading into long grey rumour without a touch of people or colour. No hint of the world she had known, no hope of deliverance, no heat now from the earth beneath and all was cold inside and out and Ro breathed into her trembling hands and wondered if this was the end of the world.

‘Well met, daughter.’ Waerdinur sat cross-legged behind her, his back against a tree-stump, his staff, or his spear—Ro still was not sure which it was—in the crook of one arm. ‘Do you have meat there in your bundle? I was not prepared for a journey and you have led me quite a chase.’

In silence she gave him a strip of meat and sat down beside him and they ate and she found she was very glad he had come.

After a time he said, ‘It can be difficult to let go. But you must see the past is done.’ And he pulled out the dragon scale that she had left behind and put the chain around her neck and she did not try to stop him.

‘Shy’ll be coming…’ But her voice sounded tiny, thinned by the cold, muffled in the snow, lost in the great emptiness.

‘It may be so. But do you know how many children have come here in my lifetime?’

Ro said nothing.

‘Hundreds. And do you know how many families have come to claim them?’

Ro swallowed, and said nothing.

‘None.’ Waerdinur put his great arm around her and held her tight and warm. ‘You are one of us now. Sometimes people choose to leave us. Sometimes they are made to. My sister was. If you really wish to go, no one will stop you. But it is a long, hard way, and to what? The world out there is a red country, without justice, without meaning.’

Ro nodded. That much she’d seen.

‘Here life has purpose. Here we need you.’ He stood and held out his hand. ‘Can I show you a wondrous thing?’

‘What thing?’

‘The reason why the Maker left us here. The reason we remain.’

She took his hand and he hoisted her up easily onto his shoulders. She put her palm on the smooth stubble of his scalp and said, ‘Can we shave my head tomorrow?’

‘Whenever you are ready.’ And he set off up the hillside the way she had come, retracing her footprints through the snow.