Chapter 114: A Price Check In The Ash

Theo came to the gate at six.

He had thought about it most of the night, lying on a bed in a house with nineteen staff in it who all wanted to bring him things, and he had come back to the same place every time.

’Three women with the same note under their names, a man with eleven parties in nineteen months, and one of them told me not to come... and if I don’t come, that’s four people I walked away from.’

’I’ve done that once already this week.’

The Cinderfall sat in a bowl of ground an hour north of the city, and the gate stood in the middle of it on its own, a ring of grey stone twelve feet high with nothing behind it but more field.

Donzo was leaning against the ring with his arms folded when Theo came up the track, and he pushed off it grinning.

"He came."

The nineteen-year-old clapped. The other two did not.

Names came out on the walk in, Donzo giving them the way a man reads a list.

Yura was the oldest, twenty-four, ribs, a spear across her back and a coil of climbing line at her hip. Sivvy was the nineteen-year-old, daggers, and did all the talking Donzo did not want to do himself. Bethe was the one with the hand, and she carried a shortbow she could no longer draw properly and had not told anybody that.

Theo had all three of those facts off a panel and none of them off a mouth.

They went through the ring at ten past.

Inside, it was burnt.

That was the first thing and it went on being the thing. A pine forest, standing, every trunk carbonised black to the top and no needles anywhere, and ash over the ground eight inches deep and soft as flour. It took the sound out of their boots. It came up in slow grey clouds at every step and hung there instead of settling, and it went into the seams of Theo’s coat and stayed.

And it was dusk. A permanent held dusk with no sun anywhere in it, the light the colour of a dirty coin.

Sivvy struck a torch off her belt and got it going, and the flame stood up bright and yellow and honest.

It lit about four feet.

Theo turned round with his hand up in front of the fire and watched the light stop, an arm’s length out, the way water stops at the side of a glass.

’The whole place is eating it...’

He looked past the torch into the burnt pinewood, and he could see every single trunk out there, and the fallen one across the gully, and the way the ash lay in a long scuffed drift where something heavy had gone through it sideways, and the four sets of prints coming back out.

He put his hand down and pretended to see just as much as they could see, and it was the hardest work he did all morning.

They came at them at the second gully.

Theo heard it two full seconds before anyone else, ash being loud if you have been taught to listen to snow, and he made himself wait.

The first one came out of the drift on Bethe’s blind side.

It was the size of a large dog and it was black all the way through, hide and eye and tooth, and along its spine and down the length of its jaw there was fire, and the fire was black too. It threw no light. It moved like fire and it burned like fire and it came out of that animal’s mouth as a dark that was somehow hotter than the air.

Bethe got her bow up and could not draw it.

Theo was already moving.

He hit the wolf side-on with his shoulder before it landed and took it into the gully wall, and he felt his own coat go up where the jaw came round, and put Raindrop through the underside of the throat and out the top of the skull.

It came apart into ash and black smoke and went into the ash on the ground, and the ash did not care.

Then there were nine more.

"PACK!" Yura’s spear came down off her back. "It’s never one, it’s never one—"

Theo went to Bethe’s shoulder without deciding to.

’Right hand’s broken, she can’t draw, and she’s standing furthest from anybody.’

He got in front of her, and he could see every one of the nine, and he had to fight like a man who could see three.

That was the whole of that fight, and it went on for six minutes and took a great deal out of him, and none of it was the wolves.

He let one get past him that he should have taken in the air, since taking it in the air meant turning to a thing behind his own shoulder that a blind man could not have known was there.

He killed the next two slow and ugly and on the back foot. He took a set of teeth through the meat of his left forearm because the alternative was a sidestep that only made sense with Dark Sight, and he stood there and let it happen and let Limitless Body deal with it afterwards.

Yura was extraordinary. He noticed that in the middle of it. She fought the spear like a woman who had been taught properly by somebody who was dead now, and she put herself in front of Sivvy twice without a word.

And Donzo stood eleven feet back with both swords still on his hips and watched.

He did not draw once.

When the last of them was ash, he came forward, rolled a skull-plate over with his boot, and looked pleased.

"That was a good one."

Theo, on one knee in eight inches of ash with his arm open to the bone and closing, made his voice come out flat.

"You didn’t move."

"You had it." Donzo crouched down in front of him and put a hand on his good shoulder, warm and companionable and heavy. "That’s what I like about you, Theo. You go forward. Most of them go sideways."

’...He was measuring how much I’d take. That whole fight was a price check.’

They camped in a burnt clearing after the fourth pack, and Donzo took first watch, which meant he sat with his back to a stump forty feet off and did not watch anything.

Sivvy came and sat down next to Theo with the water.

She was very good. That was the sad part. She had the bright face on and she leaned her shoulder into his while she poured, and her hand came over his wrist to steady the cup, and she looked up at him from under her hair the way somebody had taught her to.

"You fight like you’re angry at something."

"I fight like a man with a cheap sword."

"That isn’t a cheap sword."

"No," Theo agreed. "It isn’t."

She laughed and let it go a beat too long, and she put her hand flat on his forearm, over the place the wolf had been, and the panel in the corner of his eye had not changed one line since the Hall.

[Note: Elevated stress response. Source is within four feet.]

Theo took the cup with his other hand and moved his arm out from under hers, gently, the way you move a sleeping cat.

"How old are you?"

"...Nineteen."

"Right." He drank the water. "My wives would like you."

Sivvy’s whole face stopped working.

"Your what."

"Three of them. It’s a long story and most of it is about money." Theo handed the cup back and got up to put wood on the fire, and did not look at her while he said the rest of it. "Sit on the other side of Yura tonight. Not because of me. Because if one of my wives were to find out you sat this close to me, there’s no telling what she could do."

Grinning up at him, Sivvy tried it once more.

"Well, you’re not going to tell her, are you?"

Theo looked at her seriously.

"Of course I will."

She gave him a dumbfounded look and shifted along the log.

Then, behind him, very quietly, in a completely different voice from the one she had been using all day:

"...He’s going to make you walk point tomorrow."

Theo put the wood down on the fire.

"I know."

"You don’t. Nobody knows until they’re doing it." Sivvy had her arms round her knees and she was looking at the flames and not at him at all. "There’s a Dire in here. There’s always a Dire on the third level. He’ll put you at the front and he’ll come off your left when it turns, and then he won’t be there."

’...There it is.’

"How many times have you watched that happen?"

Sivvy did not answer.

Across the clearing Donzo laughed at nothing, and the sound came flat across the ash, and every one of the three women went quiet at exactly the same moment, the way birds do.