Red Country (55 page)

A shape came flying from the shadows in the archway, the flash of a knife as it sprang on Lamb and he staggered back towards the brink, wrestled with it, flung it off and into the wall. A
shaven-headed girl crumpled against the floor. Changed, so changed, but Shy knew her.

She threw her bow away and ran, no thought for the drop to either side, no thought for anything but the space between them.

Lamb plucked the knife out of his shoulder along with a string of blood and flicked it away like a spent toothpick, face still locked in that red smile, bloody as a new wound, seeing nothing,
caring for nothing. Not the man who’d sat beside her on that wagon so many swaying miles, or patiently ploughed the field or sang to the children or warned her to be realistic. Another man,
if he was a man at all. The one who’d murdered those two bandits in Averstock, who’d hacked Sangeed’s head off on the plains, who’d killed Glama Golden with his hands in the
Circle. Death’s best friend indeed.

He arched back with that length of metal in his fists, cuts and notches from the Maker’s sword all angrily glinting, and Shy screamed out but it was wasted breath. He’d no more mercy
in him now than the winter. All those miles she’d come, all that ground struggled over, and just those few paces left were too many as he brought the bar hissing down.

Waerdinur flung himself on top of Ro and the metal caught his big forearm and snapped it like a twig, crashed on into his shoulder, opened a great gash down his head, knocked him senseless. Lamb
raised the bar again, screaming froth on his twisted lips, and Shy caught hold of the other end of it as she hurtled off the bridge, whooped as she was jerked into the air. Wind rushed, the glowing
cavern flipped over, and she crashed upside down into stone.

Then all quiet.

Just a faint ringing.

Shuffling boots.

Get up, Shy.

Can’t just lie around all day.

Things need doing on a farm.

But breathing was quite the challenge.

She pushed against the wall, or the floor, or the ceiling, and the world spun right over, everything whirling like a leaf on a flood.

Was she standing? No. On her back. One arm dangling. Dangling over the edge of the drop, blackness and fire, tiny in the distant depth. That didn’t seem a good idea. She rolled the other
way. Managed to find her knees, everything swaying, trying to shake the fog from her skull.

People were shouting, voices vague, muffled. Something knocked against her and she nearly fell again.

A tangle of men, shuffling, wrestling. Lamb was in the midst, face wild as an animal’s, red wet from a long cut right across it, squealing and gurgling sounds that weren’t even
halfway to swearing.

Cosca’s big sergeant, Friendly, was behind him with one arm around his neck, sweat standing from his forehead with the effort but his face just faintly frowning like he was teasing out a
troubling sum.

Sweet was trying to keep a grip on Lamb’s left arm, getting dragged about like a man who’d roped a crazy horse. Savian had Lamb’s right and he was croaking, ‘Stop! Stop,
you mad fucker!’ Shy saw he had a knife drawn and didn’t think she could stop him using it. Didn’t even know if she wanted to.

Lamb had tried to kill Ro. All they’d gone through to find her and he’d tried to kill her. He would’ve killed Shy, too, whatever he’d promised her mother. He
would’ve killed all of them. She couldn’t make sense of it. Didn’t want to.

Then Lamb went rigid, near dragging Sweet off the edge of the cliff, whites of his eyes showing under flickering lids. Then he sagged, gasping, whimpering, and he put his bloody three-fingered
hand over his face, all the fight suddenly put out.

And Savian patted Lamb on the chest, drawn knife still held behind his back and said, ‘Easy, easy.’

Shy tottered up, the world more or less settled but her head throbbing, blood tickling at the back of her skull.

‘Easy, easy.’

Right arm hard to move and her ribs aching so it hurt to breathe but she started shuffling for the archway. Behind her she could hear Lamb sobbing.

‘Easy . . . easy . . .’

A narrow passageway, hot as a forge, black but for a flaring glow up ahead and glimmering spots across the floor. Waerdinur’s blood. Shy limped after, remembered her sword, managed to get
it drawn but could hardly grip the thing in her numb right hand, fumbled it across to her left and went on, getting steadier, halfway to jogging now, the tunnel getting brighter, hotter still, and
an opening ahead, a golden light spilling across the stones. She burst through and slid to a sudden stop, went over on her arse and lay still, propped on her elbows, gaping.

‘Fuck,’ she breathed.

They were called Dragon People, that much she knew. But she’d never guessed they actually had a dragon.

It lay there in the centre of a vast domed chamber like the big scene from a storybook – beautiful, terrible, strange, its thousand thousand metal scales dull-glistered with the light of
fires.

It was hard to judge its size, coiled about and about as it was, but its tapered head might’ve been long as a man was tall. Its teeth were dagger-blades. No claws. Each of its many legs
ended in a hand, golden rings upon the graceful metal fingers. Beneath its folded paper wings gears gently clicked and clattered, wheels slowly, slowly turned, and the faintest breath of steam
issued from its vented nostrils, the tip of a tongue like a forked chain softly rattling, a tiny slit of emerald eye showing under each of its four metal eyelids.

‘Fuck,’ she whispered again, eyes drifting down to the dragon’s bed, no less of a child’s daydream than the monster itself. A hill of money. Of ancient gold and silver
plate. Of chains and chalices, coins and coronets. Of gilded arms and armour. Of gem-encrusted everythings. The silver standard of some long-lost legion thrust up at a jaunty angle. A throne of
rare woods adorned with gold leaf stuck upside down from the mass. There was so much it became absurd. Priceless treasures rendered to gaudy trash by sheer quantity.

‘Fuck,’ she muttered one last time, waiting for the metal beast to wake and fall in blazing rage upon this tiny trespasser. But it didn’t stir, and Shy’s eyes crept down
to the ground. The dotted tracks of blood became a smear, then a trickle, and now she saw Waerdinur, lying back against the dragon’s foreleg, and Ro beside him, staring, face streaked with
blood from a cut on her scalp.

Shy struggled up, and crept down the bowl-shaped floor of the chamber, the stone underfoot all etched with writing, gripping tight to her sword, as though that feeble splinter of steel was
anything more than a petty reassurance.

She saw other things among the hoard as she came closer. Papers with heavy seals. Miners’ claims. Bankers’ drafts. Deeds to buildings long ago fallen. Wills to estates long ago
divided. Shares in Fellowships, and companies, and enterprises long deceased. Keys to who knew what forgotten locks. Skulls, too. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Coins and gemstones cut and raw spilling
from their empty eye sockets. What things more valued than the dead?

Waerdinur’s breath came shallow, robe blood-soaked, shattered arm limp beside him and Ro clutching at the other, Shy’s broken arrow still lodged near the shoulder.

‘It’s me,’ Shy whispered, scared to raise her voice, edging forward, stretching out her hand. ‘Ro. It’s me.’

She wouldn’t let go of the old man’s arm. It took him reaching up and gently peeling her hand away. He nudged her towards Shy, spoke some soft words in his language and pushed again,
more firmly. More words and Ro hung her shaved head, tears in her eyes, and started to shuffle away.

Waerdinur looked at Shy with pain-bright eyes. ‘We only wanted what was best for them.’

Shy knelt and gathered the girl up in her arms. She felt thin, and stiff, and reluctant, nothing left of the sister she’d had so long ago. Scarcely the reunion Shy had dreamed of. But it
was a reunion.

‘Fuck!’ Nicomo Cosca stood in the entrance of the chamber, staring at the dragon and its bed.

Sergeant Friendly walked towards it, sliding a heavy cleaver from inside his coat, took one crunching step onto the bed of gold and bones and papers, coins sliding in a little landslip behind
his boot-heel and, reaching forward, tapped the dragon on the snout.

His cleaver made a solid clank, as if he’d tapped an anvil.

‘It is a machine,’ he said, frowning down.

‘Most sacred of the Maker’s works,’ croaked Waerdinur. ‘A thing of wonder, of power, of—’

‘Doubtless.’ Cosca smiled wide as he walked into the chamber, fanning himself with his hat. But it wasn’t the dragon that held his eye. It was its bed. ‘How great a sum,
do you think, Friendly?’

The sergeant raised his brows and took a long breath through his nose. ‘Very great. Shall I count it?’

‘Perhaps later.’

Friendly looked faintly disappointed.

‘Listen to me . . .’ Waerdinur tried to prop himself up, blood oozing from around the shaft in his shoulder, smearing the bright gold behind him. ‘We are close to waking the
dragon. So close! The work of centuries. This year . . . perhaps next. You cannot imagine its power. We could . . . we could share it between us!’

Cosca grimaced. ‘Experience has taught me I’m no good at sharing.’

‘We will drive the Outsiders from the mountains and the world will be right again, as it was in the Old Time. And you . . . whatever you want is yours!’

Cosca smiled up at the dragon, hands on hips. ‘It certainly is a remarkable curiosity. A magnificent relic. But against what is already boiling across the plains? The legion of the dumb?
The merchants and farmers and makers of trifles and filers of papers? The infinite tide of greedy little people?’ He waved his hat towards the dragon. ‘Such things as this are worthless
as a cow against a swarm of ants. There will be no place in the world to come for the magical, the mysterious, the strange. They will come to your sacred places and build . . . tailors’
shops. And dry-goods emporia. And lawyers’ offices. They will make of them bland copies of everywhere else.’ The old mercenary scratched thoughtfully at his rashy neck. ‘You can
wish it were not so. I wish it were not so. But it is so. I tire of lost causes. The time of men like me is passing. The time of men like you?’ He wiped a little blood from under his
fingernails. ‘So long passed it might as well have never been.’

Waerdinur tried to reach out, his hand dangling from the broken forearm, skin stretched around the splintered bones. ‘You do not understand what I am offering you!’

‘But I do.’ And Cosca set one boot upon a gilded helmet wedged into the hoard and smiled down upon the Maker’s Right Hand. ‘You may be surprised to learn this, but I have
been made many outlandish offers. Hidden fortunes, places of honour, lucrative trading rights along the Kadiri coast, an entire city once, would you believe, though admittedly in poor condition. I
have come to realise . . .’ and he peered discerningly up at the dragon’s steaming snout, ‘a painful realisation, because I enjoy a fantastic dream just as much as the next man .
. .’ and he fished up a single golden coin and held it to the light. ‘That one mark is worth a great deal more than a thousand promises.’

Waerdinur slowly let his broken arm drop. ‘I tried to do . . . what was best.’

‘Of course.’ Cosca gave him a reassuring nod, and flicked the coin back onto the heap. ‘Believe it or not, so do we all. Friendly?’

The sergeant leaned down and neatly split Waerdinur’s head with his cleaver.

‘No!’ shrieked Ro, and Shy could hardly hold on to her, she started thrashing so much.

Cosca looked mildly annoyed at the interruption. ‘It might be best if you removed her. This really is no place for a child.’

Greed

T
hey set off in a happy crowd, smiling, laughing, congratulating one another on their work, comparing the trophies of gold and flesh they had
stolen from the dead. Ro had not thought ever in her life to look upon a man worse than Grega Cantliss. Now they were everywhere she turned. One had Akarin’s pipe and he tooted a mindless
three-noted jig and some danced and capered down the valley, their clothes made motley by the blood of Ro’s family.

They left Ashranc in ruins, the carvings smashed and the Heartwoods smoking charcoal and the bronze panels gouged up and the Long House burned with the blessed coals from its fire-pit, all
forever stained with death. They despoiled even the most sacred caves and tipped the Dragon over so they could steal the coins that made its bed, then they sealed it in its cavern and brought down
the bridge with a burning powder that made the very earth shake in horror at the heresy.

‘Better to be safe,’ the murderer Cosca had said, then leaned towards the old man called Savian and asked, ‘Did you find your boy? My notary salvaged several children.
He’s discovered quite the talent for it.’

Savian shook his head.

‘A shame. Will you keep searching?’

‘Told myself I’d go this far. No further.’

‘Well. Every man has his limit, eh?’ And Cosca gave him a friendly slap on the arm then chucked Ro under the chin and said, ‘Cheer up, your hair will grow back in no
time!’

And Ro watched him go, wishing she had the courage, or the presence of mind, or the anger in her to find a knife and stab him, or rip him with her nails, or bite his face.

They set off briskly but soon slowed, tired and sore and gorged on destruction. Bent and sweating under the weight of their plunder, packs and pockets bulging with coins. Soon they were jostling
and cursing each other and arguing over fallen trinkets. One man tore the pipe away and smashed it on a rock and the one who had been playing it struck him and the great black man had to drag the
two of them apart and spoke about God, as if He was watching, and Ro thought, if God can see anything, why would He watch this?

Shy talked, talked, different than she had been. Pared down and pale and tired as a candle burned to the stub, bruised as a beaten dog so Ro hardly recognised her. Like a woman she saw in a
dream once. A nightmare. She blathered, nervous and foolish with a mask of a smile. She asked the nine children to tell their names and some gave their old names and some their new, hardly knowing
who they were any more.