A pixie floated into his vision. Marius waved a finger in greeting. The pixie waved back, and came closer, closer, until it hung less than an inch from the bridge of his nose. Marius crossed his eyes as he tried to keep the beauteous creature in focus. Still it descended. Marius held his breath, hoping, hoping… land, little creature. Let my flesh join with yours. Just one touch… The pixie ended its descent, and touched down less than an inch from his eyes.
“Fucking hell!”
He leaped from the trench. The spark buried itself deeper into his flesh. He swatted at it, scraped with ineffectual fingernails, and finally, cross-eyed with the pain, flung himself back down, face first into the water. The pixie died with a hiss. Marius lay face down, hoping against hope that the soft thing gently bumping its way down the side of his face hadn’t been someone’s dinner twenty four hours ago. This was it, he decided. There could be no lower point in his life. Dead, face down in a ditch, with a suspicious by-product kissing his cheek. Nothing could make life worse.
“Enjoying your drink?”
Marius wasn’t proud of his scream, but at least he didn’t have time to feel ashamed. The scream was followed by an instinctive inhalation, drawing mud and water directly into his lungs. He reared up, choking, spraying gritty brown phlegm onto the grass, the speaker and himself. He lurched forward. His knees struck the edge of the trench and he pitched forward. His face struck the ground. His hands left his throat and clawed at the scraggly grass. Prickles sank into the soft flesh of his palms but he didn’t care. A ton of silt was caught in his throat, a great mass of riverbed balled up, an impassable dam, denying the passage of water, air, life…
Something hard thumped the middle of his back. Marius shuddered. His head snapped forward. Something loosened itself from his throat and hit the ground with a wet slap. Marius dragged in great lungfuls of air, heaving about the blackened grass like a surprised fish. When he had regained some semblance of control, he squinted past tears at the amused face leaning over him.
“Forgotten that you don’t need to breathe, then?” Gerd asked, smiling. The smile disappeared as Marius drove a fist into his exposed groin. Gerd slid gently sidewise to lie in a foetal curl.
“Forgotten,” Marius croaked, “that you don’t need your balls?”
When both men were able to stand, they made their way to the edge of the smoking bar house, and peered around the corner at the main street.
“Where are they?”
“The lower edge of the village.” Gerd pointed the way Marius had first come. “There’s a grove down there, a little spring. It’s where they draw their water.”
“Bit late now, isn’t it?”
“There’s a patch of ground on the other side where they bury their dead.”
Marius turned his stare onto his companion.
“What?”
“Look.”
He pointed across the main lane of the village. At some point, while Marius had lain insensate in the trench, the fire had escaped the confines of the building and leaped the gap. There had been houses on that side of the village. Marius remembered sneering at them as he made his way towards the bar – rude structures, rough and basic, peasant dwellings of shit and sticks with patchy thatches for shelter. No glass in their windows, no symmetry in their designs, roundhouses in name but only because no name had been invented for the haphazard approximations of circles they described. Exactly the sort of hovels Marius expected from people who scratched sixteen hour days in the dirt, just to claw together enough grain and seeds to survive until morning.
Now they were gone. All that remained was a trail of black ash and soot that stretched the length of the road and down into the first line of trees beyond. A small fire, really, to look at the trail it had left. Marius could have walked around it, and would have, if he had been walking through the wilderness and been confronted by a blaze of that size. But for a village so small –catastrophe.
“How many?” he asked, staring at the ruins.
“Three,” Gerd replied. “Two children. Their father, running in to save them.”
“Two children.”
“That doesn’t matter, does it?” Gerd asked, turning away. “They were just peasants. You didn’t even know them. What were they to you?”
“Nothing.” Marius found himself gripping the hot corner post. He snatched his hand away, wiped it against his trouser leg, spreading soot across the fabric. “Nothing.”
“Well then. Any more plans?”
“I…” Marius stared down the track, as if he could penetrate the line of trees and see the villagers in their grief. He bit at his lip, turned from the sight, and strode past Gerd quickly. Without looking to see if Gerd followed, he walked quickly up the rise away from the fire, away from the funeral gathering. There were only three standing houses left, spared destruction by the path of the blaze. He was past them and leaving the village behind before Gerd caught up to him.
“You’re going the wrong way,” he said.
Marius said nothing, simply kept moving, head bowed, staring at the ground six inches in front of each step. The path rose, slightly but steadily. It would switch back more than once, he knew, but it would go up into the foothills and on through the Spinal Ranges. He could follow the line of hills and end up going towards the coastal towns. Or he could crest them, descend the far side, and enter the Fiefdom of Tallede, then go straight through and into the wider realms of Tal itself. He would make up his mind on the way. Gerd reached out and laid a hand on his arm.
“We need to go back. The capital…”
“Don’t fucking touch me.” Marius shook his hand off.
“Marius–”
Marius was not a fighting man. A thief does not enter the profession because he wants to fight. He was a slinker, a tip-toer. He lived for the time after the fight, when the victor had departed and all that remained were the easy rewards and sightless eyes. But his father had been a King’s Man, tied to his place by loyalty and a seal of service over the door, and Marius had spent his childhood running the alleys in that part of town where addresses were known by what tavern was nearest, not by street names. Before Gerd could complete his thought, Marius had whirled around, nudged the young man’s restraining arm up with one elbow and driven his fist into the flesh underneath his jaw. Gerd’s legs deserted him, and he slumped to the ground to stare stupidly up at his assailant.
“Don’t. Fucking. Touch me!”
Marius spun away, strode stiff-legged up the trail. After several moments, Gerd followed at a distance, in silence.
They walked that way for an hour. Then Marius stopped still, staring up at the ridge running along the side of the nearest hill. Gerd managed to stop before he crashed into the older man’s back.
“Marius?”
“I don’t need to sleep.”
“Sorry?”
“I don’t need to sleep. Do I?”
“Um… no.”
Marius drew in a deep breath, released it through his nostrils.
“I need to sleep.”
“But…”
“There.”
He pointed further up the hillside. Off to one side of the path, set into the edge of a short defile, was a flaw: a cave, hollowed out by countless eons of falling rocks, rain and animals, a deep-lipped hole a few feet high. Gerd stared at the ground between them and the opening, and sighed. It was a climb of perhaps twenty feet in height, through gorse and rocks that looked specifically designed to snag and tear.
“Marius…”
“You do what you want.”
Marius set off up the incline, quickly disappearing among the grasping branches. Gerd listened to the crash of his progress for a minute or so then, sighing once more, he followed.