Chapter 21
There’s always a bigger fish. And sometimes it’s not a fish.
Competitive Angling , by Posey Idon
CHAPTER 21
Arpix
Between them Kerrol and Arpix helped Clovis back out of the mine workings. The cratalacs were all dead, torn apart in some inexplicable way by Wentworth, who although huge for a house cat, seemed no more dangerous than a biggish dog. Salamonda had not yet given an account of how Yute’s pet had managed to defend her to such devastating effect.
Arpix explained this to Clovis as she slumped against him, one arm around his shoulders, the other around her brother’s. He told her that Evar was scouting the perimeter. That brought her first, pained response.
“At least someone’s doing something sensible.”
“Kerrol and I are not?” Arpix felt rather aggrieved.
“You should not have gone after Evar,” Clovis grunted. “You are frail and have no sense of self-preservation.”
“I suppose I should have left you to bleed in the dark too?” Arpix counted himself as slow to anger. Glacial, Carlotte had been fond of saying. But something about this warrior canith was getting under his skin even as her hot breath puffed across his neck.
“Yes,” Clovis snarled. “There’s an order to these things. Secure what can be saved first. Recover the wounded later if they are still a problem.”
Arpix hefted Clovis up higher, trying to compensate for the height difference with Kerrol as they entered the taller tunnels near the entrance. His own snarl was half from the effort of lifting her and half anger. “You are not a problem. And the wounded will always be at the top of any list I write!”
“Well, you shouldn’t be writing any lists, human—”
“Awww, your first fight!” Kerrol snorted and helped his sister towards the daylight.
“We’re not fighting!” Both of them said it together.
Kerrol shrugged and they advanced a few paces before he added, “It seems as if I’m to be the last one to get a pet human. I have my eye on the Meelan, or perhaps the Salamonda. She seems capable and comes with an able guardian.”
—
As soon as they got Clovis outside, Arpix set to checking her injuries.
“This needs to come off.” He indicated the torn leather armour that seemed, on closer inspection, to be made of book covers meticulously sewn together and reinforced with metal bands that turned out to be book hinges.
Clovis snarled. Causing him to snatch his hand back. “If more enemies come—”
“If more enemies come, you’ll be no more use against them in armour than out of it,” Arpix said sternly. “From the amount of bleeding I’d say that you’ve got at least one wound that needs stitching. And if it’s not cleaned it will probably sour and poison your blood.” He frowned at the armour. “It would be better if we could cut this off. I don’t want to move your shoulder.”
The growl in Clovis’s throat was blood-curdling, her eyes narrow and aimed squarely at him. Kerrol leaned over and pulled Clovis’s knife from the sheath on her hip. “Here, use this.”
Arpix glanced from the proffered blade to Clovis’s terrifying scowl. “Are you sure you don’t want to...”
Kerrol shook his head. “I’m good, thanks. She bit me last time I tried to help her.”
Arpix looked around at the others. Normally Salamonda would pitch in to help with something like this, but it seemed that being cornered by half a dozen enraged cratalacs and then watching as Wentworth turned them into a collection of cratalac pieces had been as much gore as the woman could cope with in one day. Jella was looking after her, both of them huddled out of the wind against a tumbledown wall.
“Meelan, could you get me some water? A lot. And some cloth.” Arpix knew the last request would mean trimming some from someone’s clothing. They really had next to nothing, even after the years they’d spent trying to build up their supplies.
Next, Arpix met the challenge of Clovis’s fierce, grey-eyed stare. “Don’t bite me.” He knelt beside her with the knife. “It’s not sanitary.”
He worked methodically, unpicking the armour’s stitching and setting it in the sun for later when he would take their bone needle and try to repair the damage done by cratalac claws. He tried to avoid Clovis’s eyes though he could feel her stare burning on his neck as he worked.
Cover by cover, he exposed her shoulder and followed the wound down towards her ribs. Some of the thick, leather rectangles still bore traces of the original decoration and titles. “Observations on the mating rituals of the apterygiformes,” Arpix translated from Wegian.
“The what?” Clovis panted through her teeth, wincing as he pulled the cover away. The flesh below was torn and sticking to her armour.
“Apterygiformes,” Arpix repeated. “A genus of flightless birds, I believe.”
“You know too much.” She put her head back.
Arpix studied Clovis’s injuries. The cratalac had done a lot of damage. Without the armour it would have torn through her ribs and pierced her lung. Ripped the entire thing out, probably.
Meelan set down a bucket of water and handed Arpix a square of grey cloth. Arpix did his best to clean the cloth then turned to consider the jagged, black-crusted tear that ran from high on Clovis’s shoulder to past her ribcage. She really was magnificently muscled, lithe rather than bulked up like some of the library guards had been. The basic canith body structure didn’t seem that different from his own: proportionately narrower in the chest, a higher and longer ribcage, a barely visible covering of short fur, in Clovis’s case shading from the almost crimson of her mane to something between golden and tan. The lower legs were the main structural difference, the feet elongated and only the toes making contact with the ground. There was a word for that...
“Digitigrade!” He only knew it in his own tongue and then only from an obscure book on anatomy.
“What?” Clovis growled.
Arpix shook his head. “This is going to hurt a bit.” He reached forward with the damp cloth.
“You don’t scare me, human boy.” Clovis showed her teeth.
He bent to the task, starting around the edges, setting the cloth to the bloody fur over the hard muscle of her abdomen.
An hour later the wound was clean and the bucket full of reddish water.
“It’s getting a bit dim for stitching.” Arpix felt as if he was making excuses. He’d never sewn up such a large wound and the prospect daunted him. “Better to wait for dark and do it with the firepot close by.”
He stood, stretching the ache out of his back. Evar, who had passed by the mine entrance to check on Clovis a few times during his scouting, was standing about thirty yards off. He beckoned Arpix over. Wearily, Arpix went to him.
“You should be careful.”
It wasn’t the greeting Arpix had been expecting. “I should?”
“With Clovis.”
“I... I’m doing the best I can. I’m not a doctor. I got all this from books. This place... everything’s dirty, I’ve got no equipment... if she gets sick it won’t be because I didn’t try.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Arpix frowned. “I don’t understand then...”
Evar snorted. “My sister is... She’s had a hard life. Her family was taken from her, violently, at a young age, and she never forgets it. It makes it difficult for her to trust others. And. Well. Let’s just say, these things have ended poorly in the past.”
Arpix looked back at the hollow and the small group gathered there, then back at Evar. He felt as if he’d started a book on page two hundred in the middle of a complex plot twist that stood on a long story to which he was not privy. “Honestly, Evar.” He struggled for the right words in canith and growled them through an increasingly sore throat. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
It was Evar’s turn to frown. “She likes you. You know that?”
“Me?” Arpix took a step back in surprise.
Evar rolled his eyes. “You didn’t notice her sniffing you?”
“Sniffing?”
Evar shook his head. “Or the fact you’ve had your hands all over her and still own the same number of fingers?”
“I’m saving her life !” Arpix protested. “If the wound’s not cleaned, she’ll die!”
“And you’re the only one who can clean a wound, are you?” Evar showed his teeth in amusement.
“Oh,” Arpix said.
“ Oh , indeed.”
Arpix felt his face colouring. All of him was suddenly too hot despite the reaching shadows and the wind’s chill.
“And you?” Evar asked. “What do you think of my sister?”
“W-well...” Arpix stuttered, his throat dry. This was territory he’d never trodden. Rarely even thought about. “I mean... she’s magnificent, of course. But...” He couldn’t really think of a “but.” He waved his hands about a bit, hoping some explanation might drop into them. Perhaps Wentworth would appear out of nowhere again and drag him off, saving him from his current mortification.
“Just be careful.” Evar turned and walked off. “And don’t hurt her, because Livira will be cross with me if I have to beat you.”
—
The sun had slipped low to the horizon by the time that everyone was gathered in the hollow before the mine opening. The shadow of the forgotten queen stretched across them, and the sky became a bruise.
Evar finally returned from his scouting to report that the skeer had retreated to three camps that were evenly spaced around the plateau.
“Perhaps they think the cratalacs have us trapped underground,” Meelan said.
“They’ll want to see them leave before they’ll believe we’re dead,” Jella speculated.
“They probably want to capture them again. The creatures seem like a formidable asset,” Kerrol said.
Translating for both parties kept Arpix too busy to add his own thoughts to the mix.
“Can you eat a cratalac?” Salamonda asked. “I feel like you should be able to. You are what you eat, after all, and they were going to eat us.”
That was enough for Arpix to interject, “I’m as tired of beans as any of you, but those things looked like a spider’s nightmare and smelled worse on the inside than they did on the outside. I wouldn’t want to risk it. I mean if we poison ourselves out here—”
“Too salty,” Evar said.
“You tried some?” Arpix looked at the canith in faint horror. “Raw...?”
Jost, sitting opposite him in the circle, gagged.
Evar shrugged. “I’ve never tasted anything that wasn’t grown around our pool. I was curious.”
Meelan shook his head. “The real question is, What are we going to do now?”
“Do? What is there to do?” Librarian Jost had been uncharacteristically quiet since the attack, muted by the horror of it all no doubt. “We need our visitors to leave. They’ve clearly angered the skeer. We never had any of this before. What’s next? More monsters? Rocks catapulted at us? Spears dropped from the sky? These sabbers can take themselves elsewhere and the skeer will follow.” She ran her fingers through her long hair, thinner and paler than it used to be, then nodded as if agreeing with herself in the absence of other support.
Meelan scowled at her. “I meant that this all has to mean something. The canith that Livira found centuries in our future have found us, out here, in all this nothing.”
“Well, we did shine a light for them,” Jella said. “And they made a dust cloud...”
Meelan turned his hard stare her way, but she just gave him a weary smile. “It’s not just the canith. There’s Wentworth too. Yute sent him.” Jost snorted and started a retort, but Meelan carried on, talking over her dismissal. “Yute knows where and when we are. He’s watching over us. He expects something from us. All of us, canith and humans. Something more than huddling here in the dust and eating beans until we die. We didn’t just drop here at random. The library sent us. We thought it was so the skeer couldn’t eat us. But maybe there’s more to it. Maybe there’s something important here. Something we need to do.”
“He’s right.” Arpix wasn’t sure that he was, but he understood that what they needed more than the truth was a purpose. Yute had said something about that years ago. The deputy head librarian and former assistant had extolled the virtues of the gift of purpose. They needed a direction, even if it pointed to exactly where they were. Direction would draw them together. With direction there would be no talk of the canith being sent away—not that they could be sent away, and not that Arpix would send Clovis wounded into the wilds even if he could. “He’s right. We’ve been missing something this whole time. Clovis was right when she wanted to search the mine for whatever it was holding back the skeer. That might not be what we need to find, but we need to find something, and we won’t if we don’t look.”
Evar had been squatting beside Kerrol, not slumped like the rest of them but poised for action. For some while now he’d been gazing up at the queen’s head as the last rays of the sun played across the time-worn stone, throwing the features into a sharp relief of crimson and shadow. Arpix wasn’t sure the canith had heard a word of what was probably the most impassioned speech he’d ever given.
“She...” Evar got slowly to his feet, frowning deeply. He raised a hand to shade his eyes. “...looks... familiar...” He turned to look down at the others. “No?”
“What are you talking about? Who looks familiar?” Arpix stood too, trying to see if out past the giant head and shoulders emerging at a slant from the plateau’s surface there was someone approaching.
“Oh dear gods...” Jella’s voice shook with barely checked emotion. “The nose... It’s the nose.”
“What’s the nose?” Arpix wondered if everyone had gone mad. Or perhaps it was him. He’d read that quicksilver caused insanity when it poisoned you.
“The statue,” Meelan said faintly. He was catching it too, whatever the madness was.
“There’s never been a nose,” Arpix said crossly. The nose, or at least the end of it, had been knocked off the statue. “What? You think we’re supposed to be looking for the nose?” It was ridiculous. “A magic nose? You think that’s what holds the skeer back?”
“I think you’re right.” Jost had stopped tugging her hair and was peering at the statue with her head to one side. “How did a sabber see it when we didn’t?”
“What are they all staring at?” Clovis snarled, sounding as impatient as Arpix felt. “Who’s familiar, Evar? How can you even tell? They all look the same to me, at least until I’ve had a good sniff of one.”
Then Arpix saw it too. It hit him in one sudden moment, like a fist that ghosted through all his ribs and struck him square in the heart. It really was the nose. It was big, but not that big, yet somehow it had been the key to recognising her.
“Damn...” Arpix didn’t even chide himself for swearing. “Is that... it’s Carlotte, isn’t it?”