“As much of it as I remember.” Darya didn’t look up, but it didn’t seem as though she was hiding from his questions, only giving her mind utterly to the business at hand. “I was two years old when they took me in.”
Amris realized he was still polishing his sword, mostly so he’d have a means of occupying his hands. He resheathed it and asked, “Is that the usual custom?”
“More or less. You get a few younger. People get careless about herbs, a woman dies in birth and nobody’s around to take the babe on, that sort of thing. Once in a while, older orphans come to the Order, or kids whose parents can’t feed them anymore, but they say it’s impossible to survive the Forging if you don’t start training before you’re past ten or so. Your body’s too fixed.”
“Dearest gods,” said Amris. He responded not to what Darya said, but to what she revealed: a band of metal about twice the width of his hand, looped all the way around the cockatrice’s neck and etched with many strange figures. “It has a collar,” he said.
“Not common in your time, huh? Not in this time either. I could almost feel sorry for the damned thing”—she paused—“especially as Gerant knows how it’d be done. Has a theory, he wants me to say, so you don’t think he’s been going around doing it himself. Ugh.”
“My sentiments precisely. When did this creature settle here?”
“Couldn’t say that for sure, but animals started going missing about a month ago. A shepherd boy vanished ten days back. It probably ate him, but the locals thought it was wolves and set a watch. They sent for me when someone saw the cockatrice grab a watchman. These things usually expand their hunting grounds gradually, so I’d say two months.”
“And you say Thyran would have been brought back no more than three months ago.”
By the way Darya’s lips thinned, Amris suspected she was thinking as he was—or that Gerant was, and speaking with her. “Either his flunky did this and rode the thing in,” she said, cleaning her own blade and backing away from the cockatrice, “or Thyran woke up, summoned it, and slapped on the collar.”
“Both, perhaps. He was ever ready to make use of the tools at hand,” Amris replied grimly.
“Must have had another ride out, then.”
“Awake, he could transport himself easily enough to one of his places of power. But he chose neither to take it with him, nor to leave it loose to pillage more freely in the countryside.” Beyond confirmation, Darya’s nod of agreement was a relief. The world was still alive enough to offer better prey than being tethered to an abandoned city would allow. “Why?”
Realization flashed in Darya’s eyes, bright as Gerant’s emerald for a heartbeat. “Watchdog,” she said. “They had to leave you behind, alive. He set a watch in case you woke, escaped.” Slowly she looked around them, turning her head from shoulder to shoulder, and although she’d never appeared truly relaxed in the short time Amris had known her, her frame strung itself like a bow again, as it had before the fight.
He was in accord with her, body and mind alike. The sun was slipping down the sky above them, gilding the ruined city with, suddenly, too much light. There on the dome, Amris could see the vast expanse of shattered buildings that lay between them and the forest. The sky was too wide, the air too open. Anything could see them.
“Can he speak to it across distances?” Darya asked. “Or would he have felt its death?”
“I don’t know,” said Amris, and the words echoed across the rooftops.
Chapter 6
“You know,” said Darya, “people of your day didn’t put nearly enough stone ornaments on their buildings.”
A distinct fault of ours, and our eternal shame.
“My home had plenty, for it was proud of its stonework,” was Amris’s reply. “I admit that’s of little help to us just now.”
Darya peered down over the rooftop. Below, all was smooth stone by design, unstable masonry where time, war, and weather had done their work. “You should’ve sent some builders up this way. Damned lack of foresight, I call it.”
Joking only helped so much. The back of her neck itched, the target of imagined scrutiny. Had the building been half its height, Darya would have jumped and damned the consequences, trusting her reflexes and Gerant’s shields. She unfurled her hands and tried to breathe in patience. Another quarter hour would likely make no difference in whether or not Thyran knew Amris was alive or not, killed them or not, brought an army swarming across human lands or not—
Patience was not working.
Tie the rope to a leg, said Gerant.
“Huh,” said Darya, and took a coil of rope out of a small bag on her belt. When she walked over to one of the cockatrice’s protruding claws, her intention was likely obvious. Amris didn’t ask, at any rate, though his silence made her unsettled enough to explain. “This thing’s heavier than both of us combined. And it’s maybe less likely to change shape when we’re midway through climbing. Did this place do that in your day?”
“Change shape?”
“Mm-hmm.” She told him about the stairs as an example while she tied the knots.
“No,” said Amris when Darya had finished, blinking but not looking completely nonplussed. He, like Darya, was probably running out of surprise. “I would have remembered.”
I think, Gerant said cautiously, that the spatial distortions are over. They were likely a product of the spell, one I didn’t intend, or of having it half-broken for a while. Now that you’ve lifted it fully, I expect that stairs and walls will remain in place.
“Well.” She filled Amris in, adding, “So all I need to worry about is a bunch of undead and oozes. And not getting my rope back. I’ve got more, but I paid a silver coin for this.”
“Perhaps you could add it to your account, next to the goat,” he suggested with a smile.
It was a nice smile: not a flashing grin, but genuine, crinkling the edges of his eyes. Nice eyes, too, when he wasn’t glaring. The contrast with his dark eyelashes was striking, and Darya knew she shouldn’t have been noticing any of that. The man’s lover had been her companion for the last ten years, he was in her sword, and while he couldn’t read her mind, he got echoes of her senses.
Darya would have apologized, but that would have only drawn attention to her gaze—particularly as she’d have had to speak aloud and then explain herself.
“It was a goat, yes?” Amris asked. Clearly she’d gone too long without responding. Oh, she was doing wonderfully today.
“It was,” she said. “With a bag of colored powder tied to one leg, so it’d leave a track when the cockatrice grabbed it. Got me here, and after that, there were only so many places to go. So.”