'Does it burn?' I ask him, feeling around the wound for a barb that might have detached. 'How do you feel?'
'I feel weak,' he said. 'The heat…' He turns over so he's sitting on the slope of the riverbank, and in his expression I can read all the terror of the past few minutes. I have my chants, he has his philosophies, but in the end we're both the same and we're both scared rigid.
I kneel down next to him and put my arms around him, gathering his head into my collarbone. A moment later, I feel him return the hug, hard, as if clutching me is the only thing to stop him from being swept away. I can smell the bitter oil on his skin, feel his pulse through his forehead and wrists.
I miss my son. I miss him so badly.
'Hoy!' calls Nereith, and I hear him crunching up the riverbank from downriver. He crouches down next to us, panting, and grins. 'Where's my hug?'
I can't help laughing, because if I didn't I'd start to cry and I don't have time for that shit right now. Nereith is watching the spike-rays, but they've lost interest. We look back across the river, where Farakza glowers in the dark of the cavern, its shinehouse a beacon of pale light.
Nereith slaps me gently on the shoulder. 'Good job.'
A slow clang rings out from Farakza's bell tower, pulsing over us.
'End of shift,' I say quietly.
But the bell rings again, and again, and my heart and guts begin to squeeze tight. Not yet, not yet!
When Nereith speaks, he's saying what we all know. 'That's not the end of the shift,' he says. 'That's an alarm.'
17
Peering through the hide flap of the wagon I get my first glimpse of Farakza from the outside, as we bump and jolt away. The walls seem enormous from here, and though they're crumbling at the edges and battle-scarred, they don't look like they'll be coming down anytime soon. The fort crouches in the centre of its rocky island, solid and unadorned in contrast to the Gurtas' usual delicacy. It's built of the same black stone as the island, its interior buildings speckled with lighted windows.
The shinehouse at its centre is the highest point, casting the shadows of the watchtowers outward, splaying dark fingers across the island and the river beyond.
Feyn and Nereith join me at the back of the wagon, moving carefully to avoid disturbing anything. I can practically smell their adrenaline; even Feyn is excited now. As we are carried further from the walls, the oppressive weight of the prison lifts from me. Suddenly I feel more alive than ever. I feel unstoppable.
The guards on the battlements are watching the wagon as we go, eyes drawn to the movement. The ground has been chthonomantically flattened around the fort, to provide clear ground for archers to take down any troops that approach the walls. But beyond that, the island returns to its usual state: scrubby crevasses and thin ridges, a pile-up of stone crushed together by some ancient subterranean peristalsis.
'If we get no further than this,' Feyn whispers, 'then what you have done is wonderful.'
His words and his tone provoke a flood of warmth. Without thinking, I reach out and gently clasp his upper arm. 'We're going much further than this.'
He lays his hand on top of mine.
'What about him?' Nereith asks quietly. He's looking at the corpse of the man I killed. There's a strange hunger in his gaze, and I realise he hasn't had anything palatable to his kind since he's been here. Now he's faced with a fresh dead body, blood still cooling in the veins. Nereith wants to eat him.
'Pick him up,' I say. 'Carefully. Keep it quiet.'
'We're throwing him out?'
'In a few minutes we'll be at the bridge. You want them to find a dead body inside?'
'The driver will realise he's not here.'
'They won't raise the alarm for one missing worker. If we're lucky, the driver will go back and look for him.'
'The guards can see us from the walls,' Feyn points out.
'There's a dip in the road. I saw it from the tower balcony. We'll be out of sight for a short time. That's when we get off. Now help me.'
Nereith and I manage to lift the body off the metal rods with only a small amount of noise. If the driver hears, he doesn't care.
The terrain has become rocky again by the time the wagon tips into a slope and the road rises behind us, blocking our view of Farakza. Then we push open the back flaps of the wagon and drop him out as gently as we can. The dull thump of the corpse hitting the road is barely louder than the creaking of the wheels.
The three of us follow him, dropping to the road as the wagon climbs out of the dip and heads towards the bridge. Our driver is none the wiser as to the passengers he carried.
The road is simply a smoothed path, scattered with pebbles. The island stretches away to either side, its black skin pleated and folded in innumerable valleys and gullies. We've been carried past the flattened zone by our wagon, and now we're free to slip along the hot, secret kinks in the land. I motion to Nereith to lift the corpse, and we hide it.
'Follow me,' I tell them, and they do, though Nereith casts one last hungry look at the body before he abandons it for good.
The terrain provides good cover, but sharp rocks catch at my clothes and score my skin. Fungi caps suck themselves back into their stems at our approach. There are chi-rats here, their huge eyes red points in the gloom. They scuttle away with a clicking of claws and chitin armour as we approach, dragging their segmented tails behind them. It's not the little scavengers that worry me, it's the larger predators that follow them. But though we hear haunting wails in the distance, we're not troubled by anything bigger than vermin.
I take us away from the road and the bridge towards the river, heading for a point where our crossing won't be observed. We can hear the crack and grind of spume rock as we get closer.
It's here that our escape stands or falls. The part I couldn't plan for in the slightest. We make it over, or die trying.
The rock gullies give out onto the lip of a cliff. I look down and there it is: a river of spume rock, scalding, the heat pushing against me.
This is never going to work, I say to myself, but it has to. There's no choice now. My heart sinks as I think of the task we have ahead of us. It's so much worse than I thought.
The river is a jigsaw of stony plates, crammed together, sliding inexorably past us. The slow-moving, brittle surface floats on the sluggish, viscous liquid beneath, tugged along by it. Spume rock hardens on contact with air, turning crisp and black; but underneath it's molten, hot enough to kill through proximity alone. The surface creaks and snaps noisily, and every so often a plate splits and a geyser of steam blasts into the air. The river glows with its own red light, shining up through the cracks, lighting our faces from below.
But there's more. We're not alone here.
How anything can live and thrive in this kind of environment is beyond me, but Reitha has told me of many species, not least the Craggens, that exist in environments far more hostile than this. I'd already seen the spike-rays from afar, hanging on the thermals, dipping and banking in the semi-dark. Their manta-shaped bodies end in deadly, barbed tails which they use to impale their prey before carrying it off to be eaten.
But now I can see why they've gathered. The near wall is a cliff, dropping about thirty spans to the river. And it's covered in tarracks. Six-legged things, the size of an infant, built like spiders but armoured like crabs. They're squat and silvery. In place of a head, there's only a bulge at the junction of their thick limbs. The pointed tips of their claws are strong enough to punch a hole through a breastplate, and their acidic venom dissolves internal organs, causing an agonising death. I should know; I've employed it once or twice.