CHAPTER 10
THEY STRUCK OUT NORTH, through the woods, looking for the smuggler’s road.
It was a stupid idea—they didn’t know how far it was, or what it would look like—but the other two alternatives were to go back, behind a marching column of Clockwork Boys, or forward, through territory that the Clockwork Boys were raiding, and there was just no way.
Slate had been entertaining a faint illusion that between the three of them—Caliban, Brenner and herself—they might be a match for a Clockwork Boy.
She’d never seen one, after all, and she had a lot more faith in Brenner’s knives than a soldier’s sword.
The sight of the column had squashed that flat.
It would be like trying to kill an elephant made out of stone.
She had a persistent vision, though, of Caliban standing before one of the gear-riddled monoliths, his sword held upright before him, like a hero out of an old story.
It bothered her, not least because Caliban had been just such a hero.
She could see him meeting his death that way again, on his feet, with his sword before him.
Getting maudlin. Getting sentimental in my old age. I shouldn’t care how any of us die anyway—we’re all just looking for ways to fall down. If we even make it to Anuket City, I’ll be impressed, and if we do, I’ll be dogmeat as soon as I walk through the gate.
All this time, Slate had been expecting to die in Anuket City. She had personal history there that wasn’t going to lie quiet.
They’ll be so very glad to see me. One more loose end to tie off. Messily.
For all her fatalism, it had not truly occurred to her that the Clockwork Boys might get her beforehand.
Heh. What everybody told me was the great threat actually is the great threat. Who knew?
“How the hell do we fight something like that?” asked Brenner.
Nobody had to ask what he meant.
“You don’t,” said Caliban. “You run, unless you have an army with you.”
“They do not float,” offered Learned Edmund. “Most of those who escape, I am told, have been able to get into deep water. They walk along the bottom unharmed, but they cannot reach you if you swim.”
“That won’t work for me,” said Caliban, sounding more clipped than usual.
“You can’t swim?” asked Slate, bemused.
He did not meet her eyes, which was strange. “I do not do well with deep water.”
“An exorcist afraid of drowning,” said Brenner. “There’s irony for you.” Caliban ignored him.
“I said, it’s ironic that an exor—”
“I heard you.”
“You two stop bickering or I’ll scream bloody murder and call the whole lot of them down to put me out of my misery.”
“That seems excessive,” said Learned Edmund.
“Does it? Does it really?”
Learned Edmund fiddled with the reins in front of him and said nothing, which was the way that Slate liked it.
For Caliban, the Clockwork Boys had been less revelation than confirmation. He was a temple knight, not a soldier, but he had seen siege engines before. The Clockwork Boys were living siege engines. Monstrous, like no construct of wood and metal that he had ever seen, but not profoundly shocking.
What had shocked him far more was Slate and Brenner.
If the Clockwork Boys had not come down the road when they did, he would have probably pulled his sword on the assassin. The man’s gloved hands had literally been around Slate’s neck.
And then she had ordered Caliban to stand down and the Clockwork Boys had gone stomping by and he had realized that the forger and the assassin shared some knowledge he didn’t.
If it had been left up to Caliban, they would all be crushed under clockwork by now.
Slate knew that. Slate called on the assassin to help her, not me.
Because she had trusted Brenner to do what needed to be done, and not Caliban. And she had been right to do so.
In his heart of hearts, he had been feeling superior to the two of them. Not just because they could not ride horses worth a damn, but because he was a knight and they were criminals. Slate was in command, but Caliban had always known that if she floundered, he could step in and lead.
And if I had just then, I would have killed us all.
Worse, even as he’d been silently judging the forger and the assassin for being what they were, it was Slate who had been willing to sacrifice herself to save the rest of them. Slate who’d been begging the assassin to keep her from giving them away to the enemy.
All the platitudes he’d mouthed over the years about self-sacrifice, and here he was being shown up by a forger who’d been arrested for treason.
As for Brenner…well. He still didn’t know what to think of Brenner. The assassin was a weapon and Slate clearly had no qualms about using him as such. Even on herself.
Caliban rode his horse close beside Slate’s and could hear the rasp as she inhaled. He listened to it like a penance.
I am a fool. Still.
Pride. It always came back to pride.
By now you think I’d have learned.
She glanced over at him, lips quirked. “What? Afraid I’ll fall off the horse?”
“Should I be?”
“Oh, probably.” She pressed the flat of her hand against her forehead. “My sinuses feel like they’re full of lead. But we need to get farther away from the road before I fall down.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Not your fault.”
“No. Before…” He gestured behind them. “I didn’t know what you were doing. I should have realized Brenner hadn’t just decided to murder you in the middle of the afternoon. I made it harder. I’m sorry.”
To his surprise, she laughed. “Don’t worry about it. There’s always a good chance that Brenner will decide to murder me in the middle of the afternoon.”
“I resent that, darlin’,” said the assassin, riding up on the other side. “The middle of the afternoon’s when I like a nap. I’d at least wait ‘til evening.”
“Well, I’d hate to interrupt a nap.”
Caliban shook his head in disbelief. Slate grinned at him, then sneezed again, and then Learned Edmund called that the game trail they had been following had just vanished into a tangle of branches and mud and Caliban rode ahead to see what, if anything, he could do to help.
Riding through the woods was even worse than riding along the road.
Slate got so used to having branches slap her in the face that she stopped even flinching.
It was too early for mosquitoes, which was a small blessing, but just the right time for frequent rains.
Water dripped off leaves and found its way unerringly down the back of her neck, no matter how many layers of clothes she wore, and her feet were so cold so much of the time that she started to wonder if she was wearing her socks wrong.
Don’t be stupid. They’re socks. There’s only the one option.
Still …
They had to lead the horses much of the way. Caliban led them, but even the tireless knight wasn’t used to this sort of travel. He held them on a mostly straight course, and that was all that anyone could hope for.
The horses were actually another set of problems. Slate was used to simply handing the reins to a stableboy or the farmer’s son and walking off. Apparently, there was a lot more to keeping horses around than that.
You had to take their tack off and rub them down and check their hooves and their legs and feed them and water them and make sure they were tied to something where they’d be comfortable and not break their necks trying to run in the middle of the night.
And then you had to rub the tack down, and fix bits and put oil on other bits, and by the time you were done, over an hour had elapsed when you weren’t eating and weren’t sleeping and weren’t getting any closer to your goal at all.
Then in the morning you had to get up and do it all over again, pulling saddles on and bridles and shoving things in horses’ mouths and tightening straps and then the horses would puff their bellies out so that you didn’t tighten it very tight, except that if you fell for that, Brenner generally slid off the horse an hour later, and there’d be a lot of swearing and brandishing of knives.
Mules were worse. Mules were like horses who could plan.
Caliban dealt with the animals with his usual patience, but there were seven of them, and that was a lot of horseflesh to be tending every evening. Slate started helping, which required him showing her a lot of things, usually three or four times.
She never did figure out what a horse’s hoof was supposed to look like, but that was okay, because it never actually looked like that anyway.
That aside, she actually found that she liked Caliban a lot better when they were taking care of the horses.
He didn’t mope, he didn’t overthink, and there was almost no way for the conversation to segue dangerously.
“Is this a rock in this hoof?” did not lead gracefully to “So, you over killing all those people yet?”
And he spoke to the horses the same way that he had spoken to Learned Edmund, in the gentle, trustworthy voice.
“Good girl,” he said to Brenner’s mare. “Come on…easy, easy… good girl. Such a pretty girl you are.” And the horse would let him check each leg for swelling, lift each hoof, quieter under his hands than she had ever been under Brenner’s.
Slate couldn’t blame her. There was something about that voice. I’d let him check my feet, too, if he talked like that to me.
Hell, I’d let him check a lot more than my feet.
Which was idiocy, of course. Caliban was polite. He was always polite. And when they touched—as it was nearly impossible not to touch sometimes—it was impersonal. She could imagine him treating an elderly nun exactly the same way.
She wondered if the hypothetical elderly nun would be as vaguely annoyed by it as she was.
Not that it would have done her any good if he had been interested. There were no inns. There were no farmhouses. Consequently, there was no privacy.
They slept on the ground, in bedrolls. It was cold and the fire went out a lot because nobody was particularly good at banking it.