CHAPTER 14
SLATE HAD FOLLOWED the line of dancing rats for what she thought was over a mile.
She wasn’t used to thinking in such distances, particularly not when they twisted and turned and doubled back, but it had definitely been a long, scrambling way.
Her face had been slapped by so many pine needles that she felt as if she’d been flogged by miniature whips.
It would have been a dozen or so blocks, anyway. About the distance from the gutterside docks to Archivist Street, I’d say.
The moon was out, but she hardly needed it. The drums drew her on, and the slithering line of rodents was as clear as a signpost.
I hope I’m actually going the right way, and that this isn’t some kind of random phenomenon—the Running of the Rat Bits—that happens occasionally in this part of the world.
Seriously, though, what are the odds?
She was standing in the middle of the rune village before she actually saw it.
The sunken mud huts were so far from her idea of houses that if she hadn’t seen the rats vanish into a doorway, she would have taken them for hills.
Once she realized that she was standing in front of a door—and that there were a good dozen huts around her—she stepped back into the shadows, heart pounding.
No one seemed to be moving. If anyone had seen her, they were keeping quiet about it.
She examined the building beside her carefully. It was some kind of mud-and-straw construction, like a bird’s nest. The walls looked thick and knobbly. When she dug her fingers into one, experimentally, it didn’t give at all.
I could climb on one of these if I need to.
Slate made a careful circuit of the village. There were eighteen houses all told, although some of them were so small they looked like storage sheds rather than living quarters. There didn’t seem to be any people in the village, except for the largest earth lodge.
This final lodge was a good forty feet across. The music was definitely coming from inside, and she could see a dull red glow through the doorway. If there were people in the village, they were likely inside.
The rats had finally stopped entering the doorway. Perhaps it had filled up. Instead the newcomers formed circles around the perimeter, six or seven deep.
It didn’t follow, however, that if Brenner and Caliban were prisoners, they were inside as well. Possibly they’d been dumped in one of the other huts.
Slate slunk from doorway to doorway, peering inside. Each hut had been dug down, some of them quite deep and surprisingly spacious. A few had hide curtains in the doorways, and she had to twitch them aside a fraction to peer inside.
The smoke holes at the top of each building provided a circle of moonlight, and a good thing, too, or she would have had to go through and check by feel, and that didn’t bear thinking about.
Slate got through eleven houses, seeing nothing but firepits, bedding, baskets, and all the various flotsam of people’s lives.
No one appeared to have thoughtfully left an assassin and a paladin out.
She peered into the twelfth, saw what looked like a pile of rags in the moonlight, and was dropping the curtain back when the rags said, “Hssst!”
There was a knife in her hands. She didn’t actually remember drawing it.
“Brenner?”
“Hey, lady! Help me out here!”
Slate winced. That’s definitely not Brenner. Whatever it is, it’s seen me…
She couldn’t risk it yelling and raising the alarm. She let the curtain fall behind her and slid quickly into the circle of moonlight, where the pile of rags was sitting up.
It wasn’t human. It looked like a cross between a badger and a haystack.
It had a broad striped head, small almost-human ears, and a dozen layers of different bits of clothing.
They were wrapped and tied and bound together in an intricately knotted tangle.
Slate had never seen anything quite like it.
“Do you live here?” she whispered.
“God’s claws, lady, do I look like I live here?”
“I have no idea! What are you?”
“I’m a gnole.”
“What’s a gnole?”
“One of me! Please, lady, untie me quick before the rune come back.”
“What’re rune?”
The gnole rolled its eyes wildly and wiggled.
Its hands emerged briefly from the tangle of rags.
They looked to be roped together, although the gnole’s eccentric clothing made it hard to tell what was rope and what was more rags.
“Rune are the things that live here, and they’ve gone crazy, lady!
Now untie me and let’s get out of here!”
“I’m looking for some friends of mine—”
“You come back to Anuket City with me, lady, I’ll get you all the friends you want! Hurry up!”
Slate’s lips twitched. She crouched down and cut the creature’s bonds.
It rolled to its feet, wringing its hands frantically. “Thanks!” It was only about three feet tall, which put them at eye level when she was on her haunches.
It leaned in and a tongue swiped over her cheek, a warm, doggy kiss. Slate choked back a laugh and raised her hands to fend the gnole off. His breath stank of garbage and old meat. Also, it tickled.
“Come on!”
“I can’t leave yet, I have to find my friends.”
“Lady, you don’t want to stick around here—”
Something happened. The air seemed to change, pressing down around them. It took Slate a minute to realize what it was.
The music had stopped.
The gnole flattened himself to the floor and moaned. Fur spiked along the thick neck.
“Oh, god, she’s doing it again…”
“Who’s doing it again?”
“The rune! Rune in charge is wicked bad, got them all worked up.”
“I’ve seen it.” Slate rose, looking around the earthlodge. If they kept the prisoner here, perhaps there was something else useful. “At least, some of the magic, I think.”
“Wicked boss rune doing it. It’s bad, lady.”
Aha! A tangle of irregular shapes resolved itself into a familiar pile of weaponry. Caliban’s scabbarded sword was nearly buried under Brenner’s personal armory, and both pairs of boots.
I suppose they must not expect them to walk anywhere, then.
“What were you doing out here?” Slate asked, strapping knives to her belt.
“Oh, well, you know. Whole column of clocktaurs, so a couple gnoles go along.”
“What the hell’s a clocktaur?” Slate tried to belt the broadsword to her waist and smacked herself painfully on the ankle.
The gnole rolled its eyes at her. “God’s stripes, lady, where you been? You know, eight feet tall, coupla extra legs, made out of little fiddly machine bits?”
“A—you came with the Clockwork Boys?”
My god. My god. It works for the Clockwork Boys.
I’ve found one of the enemy.
It didn’t look like much of an enemy. It looked like a lost dog that had wandered off and didn’t know how to get home.
The tattoo on her shoulder seemed to throb. “How are they made? How do you control them? What are they made of?”
“You get me out of here, lady, a gnole will bring you a clocktaur! We don’t have time for this!”
“Right…right…” Slate grabbed for the next lump on the floor, picked it up…and paused.
It was a helmet.
Caliban didn’t wear a helmet.
She turned it in her hands, baffled. There was something familiar about it, but what was it doing here?
“Lady…!”
“Where’s this from?”
“God’s scat, lady, it was here when I got here. You want to know about the rugs, too?”
There was a shout from elsewhere in the village. It sounded like Caliban and it sounded like pain.
Slate peered out the flap of the door and thrust the helmet in front of her, into the moonlight.
It was a perfectly ordinary metal helm, round, with a short nose guard and a coat of arms stamped on the side. Slate had seen dozens of them. Hundreds. She’d looked down at the top of them from drainpipes and rooftops.
She’d had occasion to examine one most closely, recently, when the wearer had her pinned down in the Captain of the Guard’s office, while she sneezed and sneezed and sneezed.
She rubbed her nose and stared at the Dowager’s guardsman’s helmet.
She started laughing. She couldn’t help it.
Well. Now I know what happened to the last group they sent out, anyway.
She slid back inside the hut and dug through the gear on the floor. Swords, knives, a mapcase.
The mapcase was locked, but with the kind of simplistic lock that Slate could have cracked in her sleep. She popped it, one-handed, and went back to the strip of moonlight.
It opened like a clamshell to reveal a rolled map and a worn leather book. Slate flipped the book open to reveal cramped, nearly unreadable handwriting and drawings of everything under the sun.
Brother Amadai’s journal. Well, well, well.
Slate shoved the mapcase in her pack and left the rest.
I could take the gnole and run. Let these rune break their teeth on Caliban and Brenner.
By the time they crack those nuts, the gnole and Learned Edmund and I can be well out of here, and it knows something about the Clockwork Boys.
I have Brother Amadai’s journal and the scholar to translate it.
The odds of success just went up amazingly.
I could do it.
I should do it.
The tattoo eased. There was no question what course of action it approved.
She couldn’t do it.
Brenner was a rat bastard and she trusted him as far as she could throw him, and he’d still never failed her, never sold her out, never turned her in.
And Caliban was an arrogant jerk and he’d ridden down a flooding streambed with lightning crashing down around him and caught her horse and saved her life.
And he always had a handkerchief.
“I’m going after them,” she said, and winced as ink teeth dug into her flesh. “Can you wait for me outside the village?” I have to take the sword. I can’t leave it here. She slung it awkwardly over her shoulder, hissing as the straps brushed the tender flesh of the tattoo.
The gnole frowned. It had immense lower canines, like a badger, but it looked more worried than fierce. “Don’t do it, lady—if she’s got them, they’re old meat anyway. That boss rune is bad.”