Chapter 8
She’d brought a horse for me to ride. As I think I mentioned, I’m not really comfortable with anything bigger than a moorland pony.
This was no pony. Glue a couple of canvas wings on it and you’d have had a dragon.
I spent the next six hours clinging to its mane, beseeching the non-existent Almighty to make it slow down.
“It’s no good,” she said, when eventually we stopped. “It’s getting too dark for me to follow their trail, we’re going to have to stop here until first light.”
It had begun to rain. “Fine by me,” I said. “I know where they’re going, because Grimhild told me.”
“Then she was lying. To throw you off the scent.”
I shook my head. “She didn’t tell me in so many words.
What she said, actually what she implied, was that she was taking Svangerd somewhere where she could extract the demon without hurting the host. And it wasn’t something she could do in a hut at the seaside.
Also, she told me she’d send someone to collect me in three days.
” I smiled. “A day and a half there, a day and a half back. Where’s there a major seat of ecclesiastical learning a day and a half from the Lax estuary? ”
“Ontae. The Southern Rose monastery.” She considered it, like a crane swallowing a frog. “That makes sense.”
“She’s going to Ontae. Furthermore, she’s going to Ontae with Svangerd trussed up like a chicken and struggling like mad, so they’ll need a cart, so they’ll have to stick to the road.
We, on the other hand, can go overland, leaving the road at Skeltings Eye, fording the river just before the waterfall and nipping up through the valley so as to rejoin the road ten miles or so out of Ontae and arriving some time before they do.
” I yawned. “And we can do it at a safe, sensible pace, instead of hurtling around like lunatics and breaking our necks. There, you see? It’s amazing what you can pick up if you take the trouble to listen to people.
” I paused, then added, “One other thing.”
“What?”
“Your chainmail shirt,” I said. “You’ve got it on inside out. The laces should be on the outside.”
It was too dark for me to see the expression on her face, but I didn’t need to.
It’s fine to talk airily about fording rivers at waterfalls when you’re doing your best to be perfectly obnoxious to someone you don’t like.
What we should have done was go on an extra three miles and crossed the bridge at Hoffen.
Instead, we both got soaked to the skin, and I could easily have been swept away and smashed to pieces in the waterfall if she hadn’t waded in and grabbed my horse’s bridle.
I reconciled myself to that by saying that I wouldn’t have been in the river at all if she wasn’t trying to trick me, which meant I could go on despising her regardless.
“There’s legitimate tactical advantage,” I said, as we rode down into the valley, “and there’s fashion statements. Like, for example, your chainmail. You do realise it’s useless.”
“Is it really.”
“Yes,” I said. “Because you’re not wearing a padded coat under it. The object of your mailshirt is to defeat cutting edges. It won’t stop arrows, and it does nothing to dissipate blunt force trauma. That’s why you need the padded coat. Right now—”
“What does blunt force trauma mean?”
“Getting hit,” I said. “Right now, if someone were to whack you between the shoulder blades with an axe, you wouldn’t get cut, but the force of the blow would probably break your spine, because you haven’t got anything to cushion the impact.
But I imagine you said to yourself, it’d be as hot as hell in that thing and, besides, it’d make me look fat, so the hell with it.
Result, you’re weighing yourself down with nigh on twenty pounds of useless metalwork, which slows you down and drains your strength and serves no useful purpose.
Why? Because you reckon the warrior princess look, which incidentally went out about ten years ago—” I paused to swat a wasp.
“Svangerd never bothers with armour,” I went on.
“She tried it once and swore, never again, it nearly got her killed. She always says the best way not to get wounded is not to get hit in the first place.”
“I think you made your point,” she said. “I’ll take it off when we stop.”
“You suit yourself. I just thought I’d mention it, since obviously you’re new to this kind of work. Talking of which, have you asked yourself if this is really the sort of thing you want to do with your life? Because, no offence, I don’t honestly think you’re cut out for it.”
“You reckon.”
“Not really, no. You don’t know about armour, it didn’t occur to you to familiarise yourself with the geography, or you couldn’t be bothered, and you’re not a very good liar. You’re good with horses, I’ll give you that, but is that really enough?”
And so on, hour after hour and mile after mile, until I ran out of obnoxious things to say and had to stop and think of some more.
By which point, I could just make out the silhouette of the old imperial roadhouse on the skyline, telling me we were nearly back to the road.
“Bet you,” I said, “you don’t know where you are. ”
“Not a clue.”
“That’s another thing, you’re not very observant. That over there is an old empire period way station. They shipped in basalt all the way from northern Blemmya to build them, which is why they’re still standing, eight hundred years later.”
“Hooray,” she said. “So what?”
“So it means we’re about half a mile from rejoining the road,” I said. “And the ruins of the station are just the place to hide while we’re waiting for Grimhild and the cart. Svangerd wouldn’t have needed to be told that.”
She looked at the way station. “Ideal,” she said. “We go inside and—”
“No, of course not, because that’s what they’ll be expecting.
We find somewhere to hunker down where we won’t be seen about twenty yards short of the ruins.
They’ll slow down when they see the building, to take a look and maybe send a couple of men ahead to check it out, at which point we come at them from behind.
That’s what Svangerd would do. She’s good at this sort of thing. ”
We hid the horses inside the ruins, then found a dip in the ground where we couldn’t be seen from the road.
I knew there’d be one, because there always is; I think it’s where the way station latrine used to be, or the pit they dug to bury their garbage.
I’d know for sure if some clown hadn’t sanded all the writing off the last surviving copy of Tellemund’s Military Architecture to reuse for a psalter.
That was only a hundred years ago, practically yesterday, and idiots are still doing it, scraping down old books to save a few gulden on parchment.
Worse than murder, in my opinion. Killing the past means the future will be stillborn. But nobody listens to me.
We crouched in our dip for a very long time, and then a bunch of horsemen showed up, escorting a two-wheeler cart. I pushed her head down into the couch grass so she couldn’t look up over the lip of the hollow and give us away. I went by the sound of the cartwheels. Svangerd taught me that one.
“Right,” I whispered. “Quiet as little mice.”
The riders and the cart had stopped, just like I’d predicted.
There were two horsemen behind the cart, and a man on the cart box beside the carter.
I’d borrowed a knife from her, and I stuck it in the arse of the horse closest to me.
The horse didn’t like that one bit, and while it was making its feelings known, I dashed past, jumped up on the cart and kicked the man beside the carter off the box.
The idea was that she’d be right beside me to deal with the carter himself, but for some reason she wasn’t there, so I had to deal with him as well.
I gave him a shove and he went sprawling; then I dropped into his seat, grabbed the reins and the whip and got the cart moving.
The horsemen in front of me were yelling their heads off, pulling their horses round; I charged through them, trusting the horses to have the sense to get out of my way.
I only needed about twenty yards clear start, which I got without any trouble.
Then I dropped the reins and scrambled into the back of the cart.
There was Svangerd, lying on her back wrapped in blankets so only her eyes were showing.
I still had my borrowed knife. As the riders surged up around me, I lifted my arm and gave the knife a little waggle, so they could see it. “Stop there,” I said, “or she gets it.”
They stopped. A rider came up behind them, dismounted and walked up. “What the hell,” Grimhild said, “do you think you’re doing?”
Which, I realised, was a very good question. “Sorry,” I said. “I’ve had a bit of time to think about it, and I’m not sure I believe what you told me. I’d like to talk about it some more, if that’s all right with you.”
She looked at me. “Are you going to cut her throat? No, I thought not. Put it down, before you have an accident.”
I threw the knife into the grass. I was all played out and had nothing left. If they killed me now, I’d die knowing that the Loyal Opposition woman had been right all along, and Svangerd was about to be murdered, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it.
Grimhild clambered up into the cart and sat down next to me. “We talked about this,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “But maybe you weren’t telling me the truth. Maybe you want Svangerd’s demon to use as a weapon.”
She sighed. “It doesn’t work like that,” she said. “Nobody can force them to do things. You can’t tame them, like breaking a horse. All you can do is extract them, and then they go away and torture someone else.”
“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know. It sounds plausible, but I’ve only got your word for it.”
“Quite true,” she said.