“Don’t. Fucking. Touch her!” he spat through clenched teeth. The blood beat red waves of pressure behind his eyes.
A high-pitched whine reached his ears. He pushed harder to quiet the sound.
“Basuz!” a voice boomed.
“Stop!” another said almost simultaneously—a voice Vedas barely recognized in his fury. A giant hand closed around his torso and lifted him into the air. Iron-hard fingers flowed under his arms and pried them open, forcing him to drop the mewling creature. Somewhere in the back of Vedas’s mind, he knew Berun held him, yet he thrashed wildly in the constructed man’s grip, roaring like a man possessed.
The single, ragged note held and then fell into silence. He stopped flailing and held his body still, fists clenched, every muscle rigidly defined on his shuddering frame. After a handful of seconds, his chin dropped onto his chest and his body sagged in Berun’s gigantic fingers. His jaw throbbed.
“The child?” he said. “She’s okay?”
A hand slapped his face lightly, and then lifted his chin. Vedas focused on Churls’s face.
“Who are you talking about?” she asked.
“The girl they attacked.” Vedas located the two dwarfish men, whose bodies still radiated a warm orange light. He met one’s eyes, and the look they returned shocked him. Horror. Fear etched the man’s rough features, and he made a warding sign in Vedas’s direction, left fist held to forehead and then thrown forward. Adrashi, obviously.
Vedas looked at Churls again. “Where is she?”
She shook her head, eyes locked on his. “Vedas, there is no girl. What we do have are two miners, their slave, and a thief.”
‡
Powerful muscle shifted under the slave’s hairless skin. He growled menacingly, yet somehow managed to look pathetic. The “creature” Vedas had fought was obviously a man, despite the changes sorcery had wracked upon his body. His lower jaw had been elongated so that it hooked under his nose, cheeks cut so that his mouth could open wider. Saw-edged ridges of metal lined his lipless maw. Limping upright, his broken arms hung uselessly at his sides. He turned on his leash, revealing the scars where his sex had once been.
Now that Vedas saw the man, he pondered how he could have so mistook him for a beast.
It had not been his only blunder.
Indeed, the thief was no girl. Standing a bit above Churls’s waistline, the woman’s face was a map of wrinkles. Clearly, she did not view Vedas as any kind of savior, for she stood behind her captors as they talked to Berun. She stared at Vedas, expressionless, but he imagined a challenge in the way she held his gaze.
Berun let Vedas down, and told him to unmask himself—to show that he was a man, not a demon. The constructed man explained that, before he and Churls had engaged in the fight, one of the miners had pointed to the fourth and yelled, “Thief!” Berun had understood the Ulomi word immediately, and surmised their identities.
“These are Baleshuuk men,” he explained to Vedas. “Corpse miners.”
Despite himself, Vedas breathed in sharply.
Churls nodded at his astonishment. “If I wasn’t staring at them, I wouldn’t have believed it either. No matter who told me.” She shook her head and spoke in a softer voice. “I don’t know what I was expecting, but somehow they aren’t it.”
Too stunned to agree or disagree, Vedas simply grunted. His mother had told him tales of the Baleshuuk, the near-mythical suppliers of elder corpses. She described them as impossibly thin like the elders themselves, yet he had heard others describe them as thick or egg-shaped, not men at all. Though few if any of the tale-tellers had ever seen one, the existence of the Baleshuuk could not be denied, as the world continued to receive a steady—though ever more expensive—supply of bonedust and other elder materials. Nos Ulom had become rich by exporting these hard, dwarfish mountain men to Stol and Knos Min, the world’s most elder-rich nations.
According to legend, the Baleshuuk extracted elder corpses from solid rock as easily as midwives coaxed newborns from their mothers’ wombs. It was said the miners used magic like ordinary men used forks and spoons. Vedas stared at their pickaxes and wondered.
“How can we make this right?” Berun asked.
Vedas struggled to catch the miners’ response. They spoke in a thick Ulomi dialect, full of rolled R’s and long vowels. Every word Vedas caught—one out of every two or three—seemed a syllable too long. Only superficially similar to Berun’s dialect, the Baleshuuk’s speech contained numerous alien words that confounded even the constructed man. He shook his immense head, furrowing the shelves of his brows in confusion.
Vedas did not need a translation to read the miners’ expressions, however.
“They’re very angry,” Berun finally confirmed. “They’re threatening to return with a full company of their brethren. I’ve tied to explain our mistake, but they don’t seem to understand. She is a thief, they keep telling me. It’s their right to punish her as they see fit.”
“I agree,” Churls said. “Can we pay them off?”
The taller of the two miners spoke up.
“‘You ruined our slave,’” Berun translated. “‘He is worth four ounces.’”
“Shit,” Churls said. “We don’t have that much to give. Do we have anything else of value?”
A sound came from within Berun’s body, as of glass clinking. He reached down and plucked a handful of objects from his thigh. He lumbered forward and bent, presenting them to the miners. Vedas recognized them even from a distance. A collection of spells, the largest of which was a tiny porcelain jar sealed with wax.
“Where did he get those?” Churls whispered.
“A witch attacked us on a pass between the Sawbuck Mesas. I told him not to take her spells, but he did it anyway.”
The shorter miner took the spells. He held them up to his ear and recited seven words slowly. Names. He handed six of the spells to his companion, who stored them in a pack hanging from his belt. The stoppered jar remained in the short one’s hand. He examined it from every angle before closing his eyes and sniffing its seal.
Suddenly, he grinned. “Yesh,” he said. “Yesh. Okee.”
The two miners conferred briefly, and then the taller one spoke to Berun. The constructed man’s hand engulfed the smiling miner’s, a ritual of agreement Vedas recognized from his time at the river docks in Fishertown.
“They’ve agreed to part ways peacefully,” Berun said.
Frowning, Churls said, “They seem happy.”
Vedas watched the two miners, faces nearly split with grins. Berun had given away something extremely valuable, apparently.
A tight feeling spread outward from Vedas’s chest, observing their cheer. They were still going to kill the thief, he knew. And why should they do otherwise? An old woman with no use? Surely, few would miss her around the cooking fires, the laundry buckets.
Yet he recalled how fast she had run from the howling slave. The way she stared at him even now, unafraid. She had never cursed him with a gesture. He tried to compare her to anyone he had known in his life, and came up empty. A tiny old Baleshuuk woman. Not Churls, nor a little girl with a black sash tied around her arm. Not the drunk he had helped push from the Physickers’ Bridge when he was only nine years old.
“We’ve overpaid them,” he told Berun. “Tell them to spare the thief.”
BERUN
THE 14th TO 21st OF THE MONTH OF PILOTS, 12499 MD
THE APUSHT VALES TO THE CITY OF BITSAN, KINGDOM OF STOL
They made their way northwest toward Lake Ten under the cover of night, avoiding any sign of man. Churls, the least likely member of the party to elicit an aggressive response from the Adrashi men of the Apusht, walked point over the more exposed ground. Berun caused his eyes to revolve around his head, constantly vigilant.