“You needn’t look like the world fell on you, chorek. All I did was take a little blood from you.” She clicked the sampler into its slot on the spraycopeia. “I don’t want to kill you too soon.” She glanced at the readout, sighed. “In a laboratory with a much wider range of… mm… ingredients, I could probably guarantee not to kill you at all. As things are…” she touched the sensor, made a few fine adjustments, “the least this brew will give you is a course of boils from hell. Now. Such ethics as I have tell me I must ask if you will answer our questions freely and without stint. Well?”
He spat, the glob of spittle landing on the toe of her boot.
“Sit on him a moment, will you, Maorgan?” She detached the canister from the spraycopeia. “Hold his head so I can get at his neck.”
In spite of his struggles, she got the injector against his carotid and triggered the jolt of babble. She straightened. “That’s good. You can get off him now, Maorgan. Don’t talk to him yet, wait till I tell you.”
Glancing now and then at the chorek, she repacked the medkit, set the sampler in the sterilizer, and closed the lid. By the time she was finished, the chorek had gone limp, his face greenish white under the tan, his eyes closed, his breathing deep and slow.
“Good. Maorgan, let me talk first, then you can ask your questions. It might be a good idea to make a note of his answers.” She moved along the road, knelt when she was just beyond his head. “What is your name?” She almost sang the words, her voice soft and unthreatening. “Tell me your name.”
“Ferg. Fergal Diocas.” His voice was dragged and dreamy, the syllables mushy.
“Ferg. You have a friend in Dumel Minach. Tell me your friend’s name. What is your friend’s name?”
“Paga. Her name is Paga Focai.”
“That’s a pretty name. Is she pretty, Ferg?”
He laughed. It was an ugly sound, mocking and angry. “That silly bitch? Big as a dammalt with a laugh like a band saw. Always at you. Chel Dй\, I have to be drunk as a dog to get it up when I do her.”
“I see. It was her gave you news about the Ard and the rest of them?”
“Oh, yeah, and wetting herself because she knows I’ll come do her when I finish the scum. She gets off on blood, nothing gets her hotter.”
“And how does she get word to you? How does she do that, Ferg?” She kept her voice soft and insinuating, slipping the words in between the rustle of the leaves and the dirt grains rattling along the road as the wind picked up strength with the waning of the day.
He snickered. “Leaves me notes, doesn’t she. Silly kueh. Games! Love post she calls it like she was some just blooded girl. Hollow in a tree down by river. Ties a bit a yellow rag on branch when she put something in hole.”
His eyelids flickered, his eyes darted side to side, a buried awareness worked the muscles of his face. Shadith stopped the questions and sang to him, a low, wordless croon like a mother singing a child to sleep. After a moment he relaxed and the smug grin twisted his mouth again. “Kueh,” he said.
“No doubt. You had a weapon. A strange looking thing.”
“Cutter,” he said after a while. “Ol’ frogface he say, point it at a stinking jelly and you got yourself one krutchin’ Summerfire tree high and mountain wide. Hoooeeeshhh!”
Shadith heard a scuffling behind her, curses. She ignored them, crooned a bit more to settle the chorek again. “Old Frogface, hmm, I think I know him, tell me what he’s like.”
“Ugly anglik. Shorter’n me but twice as wide. Skin’s like lehaum bark. Made me want to see ‘f I could peel him like them there.” He waved his bound hands at the nearest tree. He blinked at the hands, waggled them, started snickering. “Peel ‘um. ‘Ould d’t too, he come back at me. Peel ‘um. Peel…” He let his hands drop, scowled at the branches arching high above the road. “Mesuch, filthy…”
Shadith leaned closer to him, began one of the Shalla croons, drawing him back into dream with the help of the drug. “Tell me about his hands. What were they like?”
“Cursed claws, black as his stinking soul.”
“Tell me about his eyes. Was there anything odd about his eyes.”
“Stuff crawled over ‘um sometimes, made ‘um shine.”
“What did he say to you? Tell me exactly what he said to you.”
His eyelids flickered again, then closed completely, the energy drained from his voice as he droned what he’d been told about how to recharge the cutter, about the price on the heads of the University team. Toward the end of the speech he started getting agitated again and this time the crooning only seemed to exacerbate the disturbance. Words drooled from his mouth as he jerked his head back and forth and tried to pull his wrists apart, jerking so hard the tape cut into his wrists. He ignored the blood and kept jerking, as if he meant to saw off his hands and set himself free.
His face got redder and redder, his eyes glassy, his mouth hung open, working, working… until, abruptly his body spasmed, arced up from the ground, then went limp.
“He dead?”
She looked round. Danor was hunched over, his legs drawn up, his head buried in, his arms. Maorgan stood beside him. It was he who’d spoken. “I think so, but I’d better be sure. Bring me the kit, would you?”
Shadith keyed the locktights loose, rolled the comealongs up, and shoved them into a saddlebag. “You heard what he said. There’ll be dozens of others out there hungry for that gold. We’d better start pushing the caцpas as hard as we dare. We’re targets till we get over Medon Pass.”
13. Ploy and Counterploy
1
Ceam, Heruit, and his cousin Bothim squatted in the shadows under the trees at the edge of the Meklo Fen watching the Chav get off their floatcart and walk toward the swampie Porach who was sitting cross-legged on a thick mat woven from reeds, reed baskets placed around him, filled with fresh fish, herbs, nuts and the round red fruit of the bilim tree that grew deep inside the Marish.
The damp heavy breeze coming off the grass brought the snake-smell of the mesuch to Ceam. His stomach knotted and he felt himself getting hot; it didn’t seem to him he could take his eyes off that massive form with its oddly bobbly walk.
As if the mesuch could feel his gaze, the creature turned his head and stared at the group of men.
Ceam fought his eyes down and stared at the black muck he could see through the grass. After watching the techs up in the mountains, he hadn’t expected them to be so formidable and so quick to notice up close. And he hadn’t expected the smell and what it would do to him. The rage it would rouse in him. It was all he could manage to squat there with his eyes on the ground.
No more game. No more detachment. This was the Enemy. The things that had slaughtered his friends and burned the Eolt, who’d stolen his peace and his joy from him.
The smell got stronger as the mesuch inspected the fish, bit into one of the bilim fruits.
Eolt Kitsek had slid through the clouds last night to tell them the mesuch and their crawlers were back eating the hearts of the mountains. Fewer of them, though, and cautious. A roving tiogri paddling through the ash for roasted carrion set off an alarm, a squalling oogah and a firewand from the crawler singed the spots off the tiogri’s tail, though he got away alive, his only hurt a bare behind. That was briefly satisfying, making them waste supplies and their own peace on a danger that wasn’t there. No one was interested in the miners, the new target was their home fort.
Heruit moved slightly, dropped his hand on Ceam’s shoulder, squeezed. It was both a comfort and a warning. And it helped and did not help, it warmed Ceam with fellow feeling and it irritated him that the older man could read him so easily. I’m not meant to be a spy. At least, not this kind. This feels so useless, hanging about listening to that beast haggling over how many needles for needlefish.