Chapter 49: The Quiet Road

They went by night.

It was the only way. The days were too bright, and too full of eyes. At dusk, when the shadows ran long and the birds fell silent, they slipped out of the hollow in single file, Brannoch first, with the boulder-beetle creeping along behind him on tiptoe, then Thara, then Fel, and Veyra last, with the white bow in her hand and an arrow on the string.

They said almost nothing. They had agreed on hand signals. A fist meant stop. Two fingers meant down. A flat palm meant wait, and a finger drawn across the throat meant that someone was about to be extremely sorry. Thara had added a seventh, a sort of wiggling gesture that meant I have an idea, and which everyone had agreed to ignore.

The first blockade came at midnight.

It stood on the bank of a broad black river, where the old road ran down to a stone ford. A dozen soldiers in silver-green had thrown a barricade of carts across the crossing, and torches burned at either end. A pair of banner-poles stood at the water’s edge, and from each hung a limp green flag with a white moth. Beside the barricade a horse-drawn tent had been pitched. Voices drifted over the water. Someone was singing, badly.

They lay on their bellies in the reeds, a hundred yards upstream, and watched.

“Too many,” breathed Thara.

“Eleven.”

“And two in the tent.”

“Thirteen.”

“Mm.”

Fel looked at the water. It was wide and slow, and very cold, and he could see the faint glimmer of stars on its surface. It moved sluggishly toward the ford, where it broke into a hundred little silver ripples.

“We could swim,” he said.

Everyone looked at him.

“Upstream. A mile. Where it’s narrower.” He shrugged. “They’re watching the ford. They’re watching the bank. They’re not watching the middle of the river.”

“The beetle?”

“He floats.”

“Does he?”

“He’s a beetle,” said Fel. “They float.”

It took a quarter of an hour of nervous whispers, and one quiet but highly emphatic argument with the boulder, who did not wish to get wet. In the end, it was Veyra who solved it, with a small handful of dried berries produced from her pouch and pressed against the creature’s mouthparts. The boulder shivered. A great shuddering sigh escaped it. And then, with the delicacy of a very large cat stepping into a bath, Old Clatter lowered himself into the river and began to paddle.

He did float. He floated like a cork, with only his tarpaulined back above the water, and the four of them clung to the railings of the saddle, soaked to the thighs, and drifted past the blockade in the dark like a log. A soldier on the barricade glanced at the passing shape. He frowned. He lifted a torch.

The boulder hummed, very softly, a perfect imitation of a distant frog.

The soldier shrugged and looked away.

The second blockade was a bridge, and the third was a hound patrol, and they nearly died of the weasel paste.

It was Thara’s fault. She had spilled a little of the stuff on her cloak, and by the middle of the second night, Fel was fairly sure that every living thing within half a mile had been alerted by the smell alone. But it worked. They lay in a ditch beside a deserted farm while a pack of tall, grey, rough-coated hounds went sniffing through the nettles on the far side. The animals paused. They whined. They shook their heads, sneezing and rubbing their muzzles with their paws, and then, with every appearance of disgust, they trotted away.

“Brilliant,” whispered Thara. “I’m brilliant.”

“You smell like a dead cat.”

“A brilliant dead cat.”

They lost a day to rain, and another to a roving squad of horsemen who camped, for no reason at all, in the middle of the only passable ravine. Veyra took a long, thoughtful look at the map and then led them up a goat track so steep that Old Clatter had to climb it with all six legs, grunting. At the top, they found a shepherd’s hut, abandoned, and a small spring, and for one night, at least, they slept on dry ground.

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They passed the fourth cordon at dawn, curled up in the bed of a wagon under a load of turnips. They passed the fifth by walking in single file through a flooded culvert, in water up to their chests, with Brannoch carrying Thara on his shoulders to keep her knife-belt dry. They passed the sixth by listening, for two hours, to a bored guardsman telling his friend a long and unspeakably dull story about his sister’s wedding, and slipping by while the friend was yawning.

By the fifth night, Fel had stopped being afraid, and begun to be proud.

We’re good at this, he thought. We’re really good at this.

It was a dangerous thing to think.

They entered the Weeper’s Gap at sunset on the sixth day.

It lay across the last stretch of the route, a long, narrow canyon cut by some ancient river through the red stone of the foothills. The walls rose a hundred feet on either side, sheer and smooth. The floor was a path of fine white sand, so soft that it swallowed the sound of their footsteps. A trickle of water ran along one wall. The sky overhead was a ribbon of fading gold. And it was quiet.

It was the quietest place Fel had ever been.

There were no insects. There were no birds. There was no wind. His own breathing sounded loud in his ears. Every footstep seemed to echo for ever, down the long dark corridor, and the shadows at the base of the cliffs were so thick and still that they seemed to be holding their breath.

“I don’t like it,” whispered Thara.

“You say that about everywhere.”

“I’m right about everywhere.”

Old Clatter had stopped humming. His horns were low. His great golden eyes swept the walls, from side to side, and a tremor ran down his shell.

Brannoch raised a fist.

They halted.

For a moment there was only silence. Then Fel heard it: a thin, high, silvery note, like the rim of a glass being stroked with a wet finger. It rose slowly, and hung in the air, and faded.

“Dirgekin,” said Brannoch.

It was the quietest thing he had ever said.

Veyra’s arrow came up on the string. Thara’s hatchets slid out of her belt without a sound. Fel drew both swords, the golden saber in his right hand and the black blade in his left, and felt the ring in his palm give a single slow throb.

Then the mist came.

It rolled out from the canyon walls in long grey fingers. It poured out of the cracks and crevices. It rose from the sand, thin at first, a wisp, a curl of silver, and then thick, so thick and so cold that Fel felt it on his face like wet cloth. In seconds the whole canyon was a river of fog. The golden light vanished. The cliffs faded. He could see nothing beyond the length of his own blade.

Formation, said Veyra’s hand, a short chopping gesture.

Brannoch stepped forward and locked his shield. Thara dropped to a crouch at the right. Veyra put her back against Fel’s, and he felt her shoulder blades, warm and taut, and the faint trembling of the bowstring.

And the fog laughed.

It was a soft, throaty, delighted sound, a woman’s laugh, and it came from everywhere at once.

“Oh, look,” said the mist. “They’ve made a little circle.”

Three shapes stepped out of the fog.

The first was a giant.

He stood eight feet tall if he stood an inch, and he was built like a landslide. His skin was black stone, plate over plate, fractured and layered like the face of a cliff, and every crack and seam glowed a dull molten orange, as though somewhere inside him a furnace was burning. His head was a rough boulder with two slits for eyes. His hands were as big as anvils. He carried a hammer that looked as if it had been chiseled from a mountain, a great black slab on a haft of iron.

The second was a woman who was not entirely there.

She was slender and silver-grey and elegant, in a long gown of woven cloud. Her skin had the pale shimmer of pearl. Her eyes were two blank white globes, and from the waist down she was fog, a drifting plume of vapor that trailed behind her on the sand. A thin dagger, like a sliver of ice, was held loosely in one hand. She smiled at Fel as she approached, and her teeth were very small and very sharp.

The third came last, and Fel liked him least.

He was tall, and thin, and horribly white, like something that had grown in a cellar. His neck was too long. His throat was bare, and in the skin of it, running from collarbone to jaw, was a row of slits, like the holes of a flute. A strip of black cloth was bound across his eyes. He wore a long grey coat, and he held his hands clasped at his waist, and he did not move at all. He only turned his head, slowly, from one of them to the next, and Fel had the unpleasant feeling that he was being listened to.

The giant spoke. His voice was deep and slow and courteous, like a landslide being polite.

“Good evening.”

Nobody answered.

“I am Karn Dolmar of the Cairnborn. This is Sisse of the Mist, and this is Hush, who does not speak unless he must. We are the Black Ledger Company, finest contract-takers south of the Ashen Hills.” He inclined his boulder of a head. “We hold the king’s warrant on four heads. One brill each. We have come to collect.”

There was a pause.

Then, in the stillness, somebody giggled.

It was a small sound. It was a sound Fel had heard only once before, on a bench in Veilrest, and it went through the canyon like a bell. He looked sideways. Veyra had lowered her bow. She had put one hand over her mouth. Her shoulders were shaking.

“I am sorry,” she said. “I am so sorry. The Black Ledger Company.”

“That is our name.”

“It is a very good name.” She wiped her eyes. “I have been looking forward to this for a week. I have walked six days through ditches and culverts and over a mountain, and I have been wondering all the way who would be foolish enough to try. And it is three people in a fog.” She raised the bow again. The smile on her face was not kind. “Please, go on. Say it again. I should like Brannoch to hear.”

The giant did not seem offended. He only looked at her, for a long moment, with his two slits of eyes.

“You are the huntress. The one with the white bow.” He nodded. “Yes. We have heard of you. We were told you were dangerous.”

“I am.”

“We were told that you would laugh.”

Something in his voice made Fel’s skin crawl.

“Sisse,” said Karn Dolmar, quietly.

The mist moved.