Evening the Third

Draw close. No — closer than that; the wind's up off the dunes tonight and it's putting grit in my throat, and I've a long road to walk you down before the lamps gutter.

You there, by the door. Yes, you, who came early and sat where you sat last night and the night before. You have a full cup. Good. I told you to bring one.

Now — I promised you a black ship rotting in a swamp that never had a sea, and a captain still aboard who has taken men off this very street. Set that promise down on the table between us where you can see it. It is still standing. It is not paid tonight.

Hear me before you groan. A skald who lies to fill a night is a man selling water out of the wrong end of the well, and I am not that. Strabo Nagi did not go east. On the thirteenth day off the cross he turned the other way entirely, and Crom help me, what he walked into instead is worth the cup. The black galleon sits where it sits. It is not going anywhere; a thing that has rotted that long has learned patience. The captain will keep. So will my promise — and you will know why the delay was Crom's own mercy on the man, when you hear what came out of the ground first.

Drink. Here is the thirteenth day.

He came up the sinkhole road at first light with the cold still on him — you know that cold, the desert night that wants your fingers — and he was going nowhere in particular, which is when the land does its worst work.

He heard it before he saw it. Laughing.

Now you know that laugh. You've heard the striped ones out past the fences, cackling over something they didn't kill themselves. But you know as well as I do that a hyena's laugh comes out on breath, and breath is a wet thing, and this — this came out dry. Like a stick dragged along a fence. Like somebody working a laugh out of a bag of nails.

It came around the rock at him with its ribs open to the air.

Hear that plainly, because I want you sitting with it: the beast had no belly left. Hide gone to strips along the flank, the barrel of it hollow as a broken pot, and you could see the sun come through the far side between the bones. The head still had the whole grin on it — they keep the grin, that's the joke — and the eyes were two dry holes with something moving at the back of them. It ran wrong. Front legs going faster than they had any business going, because there was nothing in the middle of it to slow them down.

And Strabo Nagi did not raise his shield.

He'd met this thing twice before, out at the southern altar and out in the dark under the sinkhole, and both times it had cost him skin. So he did not back and circle and learn it a third time. He walked at it. Took the shoulder-check on his forearm, went in past the grin where the jaws couldn't fold, and put the iron down through the neck-bone into the dust beneath. Twice. Once for the spine and once for the temper.

The laughing stopped. His arm was bleeding where the ribs had opened it — dead bone is sharper than live bone, that's a thing to know — and he stood there a moment breathing hard and looking annoyed, the way a man does when the third telling of a joke finally lands on him.

He didn't skin it. Nothing on it worth taking. He wiped the iron on his thigh and went on.

Out where the dune breaks into flats he came on the spotted ones, and these were alive.

Bigger than the striped kind. Heavier through the head, sand-coloured with the dark blots scattered over them like something spilled and dried, and they did not laugh. That's the thing. The striped ones laugh because they're arguing amongst themselves. The spotted ones came at him in a wedge with their heads low and quiet, four of them, working like men who've done it before, one going wide for the back of his knee while the others held his eyes.

He put his back to a rock and made them come one at a time. Three of them learned. The fourth was slow to learn and did not need to learn anything after.

And then — Crom's grey humour — a hundred paces on, the birds.

You've seen them, some of you. Long neck, small stupid head, and a body like a feathered barrel on two legs that end in a kick that will open a man's chest. Blue ones down in the low ground, the neck gone that dark blue you see on a bruise three days old, and the red ones up on the ridge with the throat flushed like a drunk in an argument. They ran from him. Then one thought better of it, turned around, and came back to make a point.

I will say this for the man: he was still angry from the hyenas. That bird chose badly.

Now. The mining.

He wanted iron — he'd learned what iron does at the smith's furnace and now he wanted a great deal more of it — and the ore lies where the river cliffs come down to the water, rounded boulders, reddish-grey, sitting there like eggs some enormous thing forgot. He worked them with a pick under a sun that came up off the water twice, once from the sky and once off the river, so a man cooks from both sides. Dust in the sweat on his back. The bank stinking of river mud and hot stone.

A crocodile came up the shallows at him while he worked. He killed it and went back to swinging the pick. That is the whole of that story and it is the measure of how far he's come — a thing that would have been the pride of a lesser man's year is now an interruption of the morning's work.

Down the bank he passed the Exiles' camp, the ones on the river with the cast-off of nine nations sitting round a mean fire. They watched him come. They always watch — a people made of the cut-down are dangerous the way a cornered dog is dangerous, out of fear, not out of appetite. He took one off the ropes there, another Exile fighter, and the man came away with him and stayed. You know the shape of that by now. I'll not sing it again.

He took the ore back. He kept working. Sensible man. And that is the last sensible thing he did that day.

There is a cut in the rock on the river bank, past the reeds, where the ground opens into the dark.

He'd walked by it before. Everybody walks by it. And this day, with a full pack of ore on his back and no good reason on the earth, he went down into it instead.

The first thing was the air. Not the desert's hot-metal air — something still, and thick, and it stuck to the roof of his mouth. The second thing was the ground, which was not ground. It gave under the boot and came up with the boot, in long grey strings.

Then he got the torch high and saw the walls.

Every surface. Floor to roof, wrapped and wrapped again in that grey rope, and hung in the wrap — bundles. Man-sized, some of them. Wrapped tight and neat with the arms in, the way you'd bind a corpse for burning if you were tidy and had all the time in the world. And they moved a little. Not all of them. Some.

He went in anyway. Understand me: no god was going to stop him and no god was going to help, and the man's whole religion fits in that one sentence.

The brown ones came first, in from the sides, hand-sized and fast and clever about angles, running the walls to get above him. He learned to swing high and early. Then the grey ones, which you have heard of and which are worse. Then something dropped — and hear this, because he'd met the yellow kind before and thought he knew the family — this one was black. Black as wet coal, black with no shine at all except the belly-mark, and the mark was red as a coal that's still hot. Legs longer than his splayed hand. It came down on its thread and landed on his shield and he broke it against the rock with the shield still on his arm, and the stuff that came out of it went through the boiled leather of his bracer and started eating.

And the red ones. Crom. The red ones came in a pack, low along the floor, the whole body the colour of a butcher's block at day's end, and they do not drop — they run at your feet where you cannot see them past your own shield.

He fought his way three chambers in with his forearms swelling and one eye going bad from the swelling.

And in the last chamber the ceiling was too high, and he stood in that too-high dark and understood he was inside something's house.

She came down the wall.

The men who know the caves have a name for that one and it is not a boast and it is not a jest. The End of All Hope. That is her name. That is what she is called by men who saw her and got out and could not think of anything else to call her afterward.

She was the size of a cart-horse and she came down head-first, and there is nothing in the world built to see a thing that big move that fast downward and stay standing. The legs went out past the torchlight on both sides — you never saw the whole of her at once, only the near half and the knowledge of the rest. Eight eyes in two rows, and the torch went into all eight at once and came back out at him doubled. And under the eyes, the fangs, held folded like a man holds a knife behind his forearm.

She hit him and he went down in the webbing and the webbing held him.

Now here is the thing I want you to have, and then I'll let you drink.

He did not pray. There was no one to pray to and he knew it, and I have told you before what Crom gives a man and what he does not, so I'll not preach it twice. What he had was one arm free and a great deal of iron. He cut himself loose at the shoulder, took a fang in the shield-arm hard enough that the shield came off, and went under her — down flat in that filth in the strings and the husks of everything she'd ever wrapped — because the belly is where a thing that big has nothing.

He opened her from underneath while she was still trying to find where he'd gone.

She came down on him. All of it, all that weight, folding legs and all, and he lay under her in the dark for a while with his ribs creaking, and when he got out from under he had to sit down. He sat there in her house and looked at his hands until they stopped.

Then he took the key off her nest. There's always a key. That's a different night.

He came up out of that cave into evening light and desert wind, and he was not done.

North of the cave mouth is a hollow in the rock where the shalebacks go — you know the place, you know the beasts, get low and get under. Except the things that came out of that hollow at him were wrong.

They came up out of the hollow slow, and the plates on their backs were split and lifted like tiles off a roof in a wind, and under the tiles there was nothing but dry dark. Green they had been, once. Now grey-green like something left in the sun three seasons. No wet at the eye. No hiss — a shaleback hisses, it's the one warning they give you and it's an honest one. These came in silence with their jaws already open and their tongues gone.

And they did not care about being hurt.

That is the whole difference and it nearly killed him. You fight a living shaleback by making it not want to be there. These wanted nothing. He'd hammer the flank and take the plate off and the thing would keep coming with its side open. He backed up the slope and made them climb to him, and killed them one at a time on the high ground, and when the last one stopped he was on his knees with the iron point-down in the sand holding him up.

Thirteen days off the cross. A dead thing's ribs in his forearm, a black spider's poison in his wrist, a cart-horse of a spider's fang-hole in his shield-arm, and his own two hands shaking again.

So. You want to know why he didn't go east to the black ship.

Look at what I've just told you and count the holes in him. The galleon in the wet country is still there, and the captain is still aboard, and he still has men on ropes who walked out of this very street — I have not taken that back and I do not take it back now. Some of you have kin on that deck. I know which of you. I see you.

But a man goes to a ship like that whole, or he goes to it as cargo.

He's coming back tomorrow with a bad arm and a key and thirty stone of iron. And what he does with the key — and where the road out of that cave turns him — that is the fourteenth day, and I have not got the throat for it tonight.

Full cups again. And you, by the door — you keep the seat.