CHAPTER NINE

 

TRICKY WATCHED THE party of the Fernreame Slayer, her Yorughan and her bard vanish slowly as they made headway against the wind and dropped below the hilltop ahead of her. She moved casually to the side of the road, a figure wrapped up against the weather in a heavy oilskin cape, hooded, of no exceptional feature at all save for the boots which, if anyone had been looking at them, could be seen to be fine and strangely undamaged by the mud. She hopped over a few low shrubs and climbed up onto a flat boulder beside the track where a stand of thin trees sheltered her from sight. Next to her the figure of an old man, raggedly dressed, a poor creature of no consequence, shivered.

She turned to him. “So, what news? I couldn’t hear anything over the stink of all that drying peasant.”

Deffo wrinkled his nose. “They’re sold on it. They’re off to the hill.”

“Wanderer?”

“Might show up. But if he doesn’t I can probably explain it.” He glanced at her. “Did you make them?”

She reached into her cape and brought out a fine silk purse. Tugging it open she held it up and tipped out a cascade of brown nuggets etched with runes into the palm of her calfskin glove.

Deffo flinched back a little as he looked down at the fingerbones of their dead brother, the Kinslayer. “I suppose you haven’t…”

With a flourish of her wrist she cast the bones out before them where they rolled and tumbled before settling in the air, some high, some low, their carved faces dull and lifeless in the light of the coming storm. She studied them intently, reading.

The Undefeated shivered. “What do you…”

He was interrupted again by her, “But seriously! Fuck him.”

“What did it say?”

She turned to look him in the eye, her own gaze coming from under a heavy frown. Without looking she snaked her hand out and gathered the bones up in her fist, before dropping them back into the bag and secreting it under her cloak. “Said it’s all part of the plan. Whatever you do, you’re doing Reckoner’s business and that business is still in business, all that kind of thing.”

“But he’s definitely dead.”

“Oh yeah. Definitely. Unless you count living on through events he laid in motion.”

They both sat for a moment in a little fug of relief, perhaps a twinge of guilt and a greater sense of anxiety.

After a second or two Deffo said. “You found something, didn’t you?”

“There was this mission he had, one he wouldn’t share with me other than in name. He was determined to locate The Book of All Things. I think it was code for something. I could never get out of him why he was so determined to have it. I tried pressing him but he started to get suspicious of me and that’s when he put me on ‘research duties’ scouring all his stolen junk for relics. Hoo hoo! Happy days!” She chuckled, a covetous sparkle in her eyes which soon vanished as she returned to her story. “Obviously he didn’t trust me. Before I went however, I got the impression he wanted to destroy the Book, it was that kind of interest he had. He wanted it gone. It was shortly after that he sent one of his elite legions north. I thought he was making a play for Tzarkand, but later they joined the main force pushing east into the Middle Kingdoms.” Tricky paused, an extensive, dramatic pause in which she took out a long stemmed pipe with a curling flourish to its shape and a small bowl delicately carved with flowers. It lit itself, apparently. As a fine curlicue of smoke began to wind up from the bowl, violet on the glum air of the day, a scent of herbs and sweet long afternoons of summer twined into Deffo’s nose. There was an unmistakable calm and harmony surrounding them.

He sneezed. “Where’d you get that?”

“I borrowed it from Dr Catt,” she said. She didn’t puff on the pipe, just held it as if she was in the midst of smoking and continued to talk about the two things. “Number one, the Kinslayer cut a deal with the Tzarkomen, I’m sure of it. And, number two, my informants say that five of them were seen on the road moving south towards Hathel Vale a day ago.”

As she spoke the violet smoke shifted, sculpted by unseen fingers into a chiaroscuro illustration of the scene before their eyes. Five male figures in the unmistakable feather and bone-garb of the Tzarkomen elite were jogging a two-wheeled stretcher along a road fanged with tall trees, a moon overhead glowing down to pick out the large container they were hauling and the grim markings that covered its surface. For a moment that image held, then swirled and rearranged itself into the face of a single man. He was painted with the black and white Gorecrow Clan marks, as though a wing shadow crossed his face, but none of the design nor the sharp splinters of bone that poked through his bloody cheeks could hide the fact that he was scared witless, his gaze fixated with a grim determination on something ahead.

The smoke furled away, ordinary again, and beneath the floral notes a sickly twist of putrefying flesh wafted about, and a strange metallic odour. That smell—it was gone almost before it existed but in the split second that it was present it evoked an unmistakable moment in both their lives. The first moment. It was the smell of the gods’ forge, their cradle.

“You burned all the bits of him. All. You’re sure,” Deffo said. It was so difficult to feel secure even with the Reckoner bodily removed from the world. At such a moment, how easy it would have been to be fooled, all one’s hopes and fears so close to reality.

“All the bits I could find. Except these.” She patted the hidden pouch of bones.

“I think that bears further investigation,” Tricky said, pointing at where the smoke image had been.

“Tzarkomen necromasters, scared?” He found it hard to imagine. As long as he wasn’t doing the investigating, though, that was the main thing. “I trust you’ll be able to discover what’s going on.”

Tricky shrugged. The pipe had ceased smoking. She put it away. “A good excuse to revisit Fury and get into his tomes. I need something to bring him in return, though. Some trinket to pay with. I’m not exactly his favourite. And by that I mean we are at daggers drawn.” A restless and preoccupied look took over her face. She tapped her finger on her chin.

“Look for the book,” Deffo said. “Where there are lots of dead there might be treasure.”

“I hate grave robbing.” She wrinkled her nose. “It’s the pits.”

“Like your jokes.”

“At least I do jokes instead of being one.”

“Uncalled for.”

“Very called for. Anyway, there is some merit in your suggestion. Let’s meet again soon.” She jumped down from the boulder and rubbed her bottom vigorously with both hands through the heavy drape of her cloak. “Numb as a politician’s sympathies.”

“I couldn’t have put it better myself.”

When she looked up to snipe back he had already gone. She turned towards the road and then sighted off to the West. From a pocket of the cloak she took out a ball of wool of various colours and deftly unwound the end of one black, green and blue speckled line. As soon as she had done so the entire ball lost all the other colours. It jumped out of her hand and rolled about in the grass at her feet like a bit of popping corn on a hot plate, unravelling. Within a few moments it had all come free. The two ends of the yarn found one another and reached out with individual strands, respinning themselves into a single endless line which coiled, reared up and whipped around her, moving faster than the eye could see until she was covered in a loose-knit net. With a whispering sound like feathers brushing across the bone of an old skull the net drew suddenly tight and squeezed her into another shape entirely.

A carrion crow hop-jump-fluttered up onto the boulder and then with a leap took to the air, heavily flapping for a few yards until it got up some momentum before it climbed into the grey skies, circling once before turning to the distant Tzarkona Gate.