Chapter 13
Edmund felt like old laundry—wet, wrung out, and slapped against rocks. He couldn’t believe that things had gone so bad, so quickly. He would never forget the Dervish’s eyes, like bits of broken mirror in a face gone empty and cold.
What happened to him? Why does he hate the Many-Armed God’s people so much? What did we do?
The temple was a lot of things—misogynistic, xenophobic, dismissive of anyone who wasn’t at bare minimum a genius. But calling them butchers was something else again. Edmund wracked his brain, trying to come up with some scenario that would lead the Dervish to call them that.
Maybe if there was a war zone … and scholars from the temple escaped, but wouldn’t take refugees with them because they were women? Something like that?
It was possible. But the Dervish’s venom had been so personal and so immediate that somehow Edmund doubted it.
Could it have something to do with his scars? But no, that doesn’t make any sense, those are obviously decorative.
He could still see the man’s chest and back, all lean whipcord muscle, and drawn across it, long silver lines and circles, a map that flowed from the nape of his neck down his arms, along his spine, and vanished under his waistband.
Scarification, presumably, though for ritual or aesthetics was anyone’s guess.
In other places, there were silver marks that were clearly unplanned, the result of wounds sustained and then, presumably, healed within the sword.
There had been an almost surgical thrust between the ribs on one side, a skewed line that must have punched up under the sternum, and a jagged rent down one bicep that, in someone who wasn’t supernatural, would have taken their arm and then, most likely, their life.
He flopped down next to the fire. Dog Violet had boiled another pot of water and was cleaning her fur with a damp rag. She looked up at him. “Knife-man gone?”
“He’ll come back,” Edmund said. His voice lacked conviction.
There was no real reason for the Dervish to return, was there?
If he was bound physically to the sword, not the wielder, then he could undoubtedly move farther and faster on his own.
No more need to shepherd a scholar around, no more getting injured because Edmund had foolishly tried to help. Freedom, of a sort.
Dog Violet considered this. “All humans crazy,” she said finally. “Knife-man crazier than most.”
One corner of Edmund’s mouth crooked up.
Just as some cultures were supposed to have a hundred words for snow, gnoles had a hundred meanings for the word crazy, none of which actually involved insanity.
You had to watch the ears and whiskers to figure out which meaning they intended.
In this case, it meant “doing things that made no sense to gnoles.”
Large Francis looked back and forth between them. “I-am-sorry. I-did-not-mean-to-upset-everyone.”
“It’s not your fault. It’s better to have these things out, anyway.
The longer they fester, the worse it gets.
” Which was something of an understatement.
He had been downplaying his role as a priest of the Many-Armed God, because he knew the Dervish didn’t like priests.
He’d never imagined such a virulent hatred of his god in particular.
Maybe it was a splinter group? It might have been centuries ago.
This was a comforting thought, after a fashion.
He had already left the temple for many reasons, not least because they were hoarding their knowledge instead of handing it out, but if they had been doing something monstrous and he didn’t know about it …
“Twisting your whiskers, book-man,” said Dog Violet.
Edmund was startled into a laugh, even if there wasn’t much humor in it. “A gnole friend of mine used to tell me the same thing.”
“That-gnole was wise.” Dog Violet kept scrubbing.
A season worth of grime and old grease slowly came away from her fur and left her at least two shades lighter, gray and cream instead of black and tan.
She looked down at her wrappings and put her ears back in clear annoyance.
Even by the standards of gnole hygiene, they were filthy.
“Any gnole we meet going to think a rag-and-bone gnole is a grave-gnole,” she muttered.
“When we get into the lowlands, it’ll be warmer and we can clean up more,” Edmund offered.
“A gnole will be glad.”
Edmund had always liked gnoles. He wouldn’t have written a book on gnole language and culture if he hadn’t, of course, but it went far beyond mere curiosity.
Dog Violet’s people were, by human standards, a kind and decent lot.
Probably there were gnole criminals somewhere, but he’d never met one.
Gnoles were intensely communal and working together was second nature to them.
They were also not in the least materialistic.
Job-gnoles owned the tools of their trade, hunt-gnoles had weapons, rag-and-bone gnoles might share a wagon or a dogcart, but beyond that, they didn’t accumulate great piles of things like most humans did.
When a gnole burrow had spent years alongside humans, sometimes you’d find gnoles wearing jewelry, but that was about as far as it went.
Of course, nothing was perfect. They had no written language, which Edmund had lamented more than once, and they had a strictly stratified social order.
Rag-and-bone gnoles like Dog Violet were near the bottom, superior only to the much-loathed grave-gnoles, who handled dead bodies.
Job-gnoles, who made up the bulk of gnole society, worked at trades from ox-driving to metalworking to negotiation with humans, which was considered skilled labor.
Hunt-gnoles and garden-gnoles were next up, groups that provided food to the burrow as a whole, and above them were priests and healers, who occupied a rarefied level of society and were greatly respected.
Gnoles had no kings. Leaders among them led by charisma and respect, and if those things failed, their followers would simply drift away.
There was a fair amount of flow between burrows, and complex social ties between families that Edmund knew he barely grasped at all, but with few exceptions, any gnole could walk up to any burrow in the world and be sure of food and a warm place to sleep.
He could only wish humans were so civilized. Which reminded him, unfortunately—
“Large Francis, I don’t think you should go to the Temple of the Many-Armed God. The Lord of the Book, as you call them.”
The pillbug turned her eyes and antennae to Edmund. “Was-what-friend-Dervish-said-true?”
“No, no. Not to my knowledge, anyway. But they, err … well, they don’t like women.
” He felt the familiar churn of embarrassment at their shortsightedness.
“The temple only has men and they often don’t leave, and they consider women to be …
well … inferior.” He sighed. “I did myself when I was young. Fortunately, I met some people who managed to … ah … beat some sense into my skull.”
“You-think-that-they-would-object-to-my-sex?” The music-box device did not convey emotion, but Large Francis seemed somewhat aghast. “But-I-do-not-object-to-theirs-and-in-my-species-males-are-not-sentient.”
“Yes. Well.”
“Human priests are crazy too,” muttered Dog Violet. From the position of her ears, Edmund translated crazy as “causing harm to themselves out of foolishness,” with the whisker twitch to differentiate intentional foolishness, instead of merely, say, using an axe wrong and cutting off your own foot.
“Now-I-do-not-know-what-to-do.”
“You don’t need to decide tonight,” said Edmund. He felt suddenly, extraordinarily weary. “I think I need to sleep. I just … yes. Sleep would be good.”
He went to his bedroll. He’d offered the Dervish half the blankets. For a brief moment he thought about taking them back, since it was unlikely that the Dervish would be using them, but that would mean giving up hope entirely.
He didn’t think too closely about why he would rather sleep cold than accept that the Dervish probably wasn’t coming back.
If he did, he’d have to admit to himself that he cared a great deal about seeing the other man again, and that was a thought he suspected would keep him from sleeping sound at night.
“You lot planning on sleeping all day?”
Edmund opened his eyes, suffering a moment of disorientation. He knew that voice. He stared up at the sky, seeing bare black branches and gray clouds overhead. His top half was cold and his bottom half was hot.
The Dervish’s face appeared in his line of vision. “I don’t know about you, but I’d like to put some distance between us and the snow.”
“You came back,” said Edmund. His voice cracked a little from some nameless emotion, and he swallowed, trying to pretend that his mouth was just dry. “You came back.”
“Yeah, well.” The Dervish rubbed the back of his neck. “Couldn’t let you stumble around and get killed. Anyway, if I want to meet this scholar of yours, I don’t have much choice.”
Edmund sat up. There was a bubble of lightness in his chest, singing he didn’t leave he didn’t leave, and he wanted to throw his arms around the other man but that would probably have been unwise, given how the Dervish had reacted the other night.
Also embarrassing. Edmund had very little pride, when you got right down to it, but he had enough.
The warmth on his legs turned out to be Dog Violet, who had been draped over his shins like a badgerskin rug.
She sat up and yawned, showing a set of immense teeth.
Edmund suspected that she was fairly young for a gnole, given the lack of gaps in that ivory smile, although that could also have been good nutrition.
Come to think of it, he didn’t know how far advanced dentistry was among gnoles, or whether they suffered from tooth decay …
Why am I thinking about gnole dentistry when the Dervish came back? Even though he didn’t have to?