Chapter 18 #2
Edmund made a strangled sound and tried to rise. The guard held him in place while Otto turned and left the room.
“Shouldn’t have done that,” the guard said quietly, pulling the Dervish to his feet.
“Why?” asked the Dervish, tasting blood where his lip had split. “What’s he going to do, kill me?”
The guard started to say something, then stopped, looking shamefaced, as if a teacher had asked a question that he didn’t know the answer for. He gave up and simply pushed the prisoners out the door.
They were ushered back out toward the wagon.
The horizon looked like a hangover cure the Dervish had tried once—runny red streaks and a raw egg of sun in the middle.
Frost glinted on the thin dry grass that lined the road.
The horse between the traces had the grim patience of an animal who is up too early but knows complaint would be futile.
“Right,” said Otto. “Get them in.” He turned toward the driver’s seat, just as the youngster that they had seen before ran up, panting.
“Sir! Otto, sir!”
“What is it?”
“It’s the animal, sir. The giant bug. It’s gone.”
Yes! Ancestors be praised, she got away!
Otto turned toward the Dervish, eyes narrowing. The Dervish hastily put on his most bored expression. “Did you put the cuff on her feelers?”
“What cuff?” Otto didn’t scowl, but his expression of calm rationality had definitely slipped a trifle.
“Ah, see, there’s your problem. I told you, it’s all in the feelers.” He shrugged.
“But it was inside the barn,” said the youngster.
“Yes, well. You wouldn’t think it to look at them, but they can fit through quite remarkably small cracks.” He shrugged again. “She’ll probably find her way back eventually.”
Otto shook his head and stalked to the driver’s seat. The guards looked at each other, then one said, “Well, good luck,” and retreated toward the barn.
The Dervish was able to climb into the wagon himself, but the remaining guard had to grab Edmund and roll him into the bed of the wagon, then climbed up himself. The scholar grunted, but didn’t comment.
He continued not to comment for the next hour. The Dervish didn’t think he’d ever heard Edmund go this long without either asking questions or embarking on an enthusiastic lecture about green parakeets.
Can you blame him? He thinks he’s about to be executed.
He’s probably not wrong. Maybe he’s commending his soul to the gods.
The Dervish tried to think of a god to commend his own soul to.
All he could think of was the Lord of Horses, and his contempt for Sweetness had probably put paid to that.
Was the Lord of Horses also the Lord of Mules?
No, the mules would probably demand their own god. The Dervish shuddered at the thought.
The wagon bounced northward. They had been tied by the neck again, but having his hands in front of him gave him a little more ability to catch himself.
Edmund fell against him, and he could feel the scholar shivering from the cold.
He had just enough slack to shift so that he could curl himself a little way around the other man, offering what body heat he could spare.
The guard sitting in the back of the wagon must have seen this, but didn’t interfere.
There was a hint of shame in the way he averted his eyes from the prisoners.
Damn right you ought to be ashamed, the Dervish thought, with the righteousness that only someone largely unfamiliar with the emotion could muster. I may be a right bastard but even I wouldn’t turn on someone who had saved a friend’s life. Particularly from something like that.
The werkblight had troubled him. It was so grisly and moved so fast, as if you could become a leper in a single day.
It hadn’t existed in the Dervish’s time, or in any of the other pockets of time he’d inhabited since becoming bonded to the sword.
He almost could have believed that Edmund had caused it, it had happened so conveniently, except that it was Edmund.
The notion of the scholar casually melting someone’s skin off would have been laughable if it hadn’t been so horrific.
Though if Otto wasn’t such an ingrate, it might have saved our lives.
“That werkblight was nasty,” he said out loud.
Edmund grunted.
“I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Mmm.”
“You knew just what it was, though.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Seen it a lot, I suppose?”
“Uh-huh.”
The Dervish gave up.
Pity I’m no good at encouraging people who are about to die.
Sarkis could probably have done it. Sarkis had done it, while they waited in the cell that final time, not knowing what was coming except that they had been saved for a particularly dire fate.
I thought it was just going to be torture. Ancestors, if only!
But there was no denying that the commander had made him feel better.
“We’re going to die,” Sarkis had said, “and the great god knows that none of us were perfect. But I have been honored to know both of you, and I will stand before the god and say to his face that no leader ever had such fine officers under him.” Blood had dried in a river down his face, which made the flash of his teeth all the brighter.
“And I will duel all the demons the great god commands if they try to contradict me.”
Angharad had shifted with a clink of metal.
They had all been shackled to the wall, but she had been weighted with chains like a bull elephant.
She had held the stairs long after the rest of the company had fallen, a position that rewarded neither speed nor cunning, but sheer, simple endurance.
The enemy had not forgotten how many of their number had gone down to her sword.
“I have been happier these last few years than I have ever been in my life,” she had said. Simple, unadorned, absolutely gutting, which was Angharad all over, when you got right down to it.
There was no possible response you could make to such bald emotion. The Dervish had cursed and kicked against the wall. “You’re going to make me be brave,” he said bitterly. “I was looking forward to wailing and begging for mercy and pissing myself.”
“You are brave,” the commander said, in a voice like the tolling of an iron bell.
“No, I’m—”
“You are, though,” Angharad said. “You would charge headfirst into hell, so long as you could complain the entire time.”
“But—”
“She’s right,” Sarkis said, though there was still iron under the amusement. “It’s still bravery, even if you’re screaming.”
“Fuck,” the Dervish had said, with feeling, but he’d felt better anyway, despite himself. At least until the Smith’s minions came to drag them away.
The wagon stopped, jolting the Dervish out of his reverie. Otto said, from beside the driver, “The den’s ahead.”
Their guard untied the neck ropes from the wagon, though he kept hold of them. Edmund slid down from the wagon bed, turned to the Dervish, and, before anyone could react, kissed him square on the mouth.