The drudge’s gun spun and stopped, spun and stopped. Each time it stood still, it spit out a bolt that ripped through the air quicker than any arrow. We couldn’t see what them bolts hit, if they hit anything at all, but there was no more arrows after them first three. By and by I heard a woman shout from the bottom of the slope – a barked word I couldn’t make out, like as it was one hunter calling others to them, speaking up loud because she knowed she was out of covert already and there was no point, any more, in hiding. A quick patter of footsteps come to me as the wind turned around, then nothing again.
“Are you all right, Koli?” Monono asked me. Her voice made me jump, it was so loud. But it was only loud to me. The induction field stopped anyone else from hearing it.
“I’m fine, Monono.” I said, and went to check on Cup. She had not been hurt. She had been tied to the drudge the whole time, but the drudge had turned itself at once to face the incoming arrows and she had got yanked round to the back of it. She had probably had the best shield out of all of us.
“Who was they?” I asked, which was a foolish question if ever there was one.
“Shunned men, most like,” Ursala said, and I seen Cup’s pale face turn around as she said it. I heard the breath she let out too, and the tremor that was in it. “Not yours, girl,” Ursala said bluntly. “We’re forty miles from Calder. I doubt your people ever went half that distance.”
“They come to find me, is what, and you’re a damn liar,” Cup said. They was the first words she had said in a long while, and they spilled out of her in a rush like the first water from a pump once you’ve got it fairly primed. “They come to bring me home.”
Ursala didn’t bother to answer. She had gone over to where the first arrow was sticking out of the ground. She pulled it up and looked at it, holding it high and turning it so the moonlight fell on its tip, its shaft, its dark fletching.
“Lantern,” she said. “Here.”
A yellow-white beam of light shot out of the drudge’s flank, aimed just right to touch the arrow. It stayed with the arrow as Ursala kept turning it in her hands and staring at every part of it. Cup flinched away from the beam, which passed right by her face and lit it up in passing.
“Crow feathers,” Ursala murmured.
“We always used crow feathers,” Cup said. She come in quick, like she didn’t want to leave no room for doubt or question.
“I saw enough of them to know that. But your arrows were tipped with knapped stone. This is a metal tip, made in a forge.”
“A forge is a really hot fire where you can work metal,” I told Cup. “The heat softens it, and then you can make it into new shapes. Did you have one in your village? I mean, before you come to Senlas?”
“I didn’t come from no village, yokel boy,” Cup snarled. “And I know what a damn forge is.” She turned away and said no more.
“Should we move our camp?” I asked Ursala.
Ursala shaked her head. “We’d break our necks in the dark,” she said, which it was hard to deny. “We’ll stay here until daybreak and then send up the drone to scout the area before we break camp. It troubles me that these people, whoever they are, were tracking us without me knowing about it.”
I blinked. “They was? Are you sure?”
“Koli, they didn’t climb a mountain in the dark just to see what was up here. They knew exactly where we were, and they bided their time until we were asleep.”
It was not a comforting thought, nor it didn’t make me inclined to curl up by what was left of the fire and try to go back to sleep. Then Ursala kicked the fire to pieces anyway, and stamped on the few branches that was still glowing until the last sparks gusted away on the wind. I missed the warm and comfort of it, but I knowed full well it had got to be done. Them shunned men couldn’t see in the dark any better than we could, so when they shot at us they most likely was aiming at the fire.
I settled myself down on a patch of ground that was still a little warm, and wrapped my blanket around me. But I didn’t sleep, and I don’t think anyone else did either. When the sun come round the bottom edge of the sky – and it come bright and clear, which was still more bad news – we all sit up at more or less the same moment.
We et without a word, our breakfast being the same as our supper had been. Then I stowed what was left of the food in the drudge’s store space, while Ursala sent up her drone to see what she could see. The drone was one she brung down herself, back in Mythen Rood, and then repaired so it was good as new. Only the stinger part of it was gone. That had got broke when Ursala brung the drone down, so it was just a spy now, and not a weapon.
Ursala could see whatever the drone saw, on a window in the drudge’s belly that she called a monitor. And she could tell it which way to go with her mote controller. The drone went zipping off down the slope, and the monitor showed us all what it was seeing. Trees, mostly, and the other side of the hill that we was on, and – a few miles further – some scrubby grassland that seemed to be holding its own against the forest.
But there was no shunned men with bows, lying in wait for us down the slope or at the treeline. It seemed our attackers was gone some way off. It might be that they lost interest in us after the drudge fired back at them. Then again, the drudge hadn’t found its mark no better than they did, for there was no bodies lying on the slope nor no marks where bodies might of been dragged away.
I was somewhat surprised at this. Only a few days before, I seen the drudge shoot down a half-dozen of Senlas’s people without missing a shot. I thought it could not miss, and said as much to Ursala.
“Depends on range,” she muttered, her eyes all on the monitor and what it was showing her. “The way it’s configured right now, that gun can only fire bone.”
“Bone?” I said. I thought I must of heard wrong, but Ursala said it again.
“Yes, Koli. Bone. A combat drudge would synthesise steel and aluminium, but my drudge is medical. A lot of things were left out of it in order to make room for the diagnostic unit. Bone does the job just fine when it hits, but it’s nowhere near as dense as metal bullets or bolts would be. So the drudge’s gun is spectacularly accurate over short distances, and pretty much useless beyond thirty yards or so.”
Cup spoke up suddenly. “I want a knife,” she said.
Ursala give her a quick, cold look, then turned back to the screen. “Against bows? I like your optimism.”
“I’ll take a bow if you’ve got one. I’m better with a bow.”
“That’s true,” I said. “She’s a dead shot with a bow.”
“I’m not giving her either one,” Ursala said.
Cup bared her teeth. “I won’t use it on you,” she said. “I’ll swear it on Senlas’s name, if you want me to. I want to be able to fight, if they come back.”
“No.”
“Untie my hands, then. I’ll fight with rocks, if I’ve got to.”
Ursala had had enough. She huffed out a sigh and turned on Cup. “Not too long ago, you were saying these were your own people come to rescue you. Now, suddenly, you want to defend yourself. Or perhaps what you want is to make sure they win next time.” She brung her face up close to Cup’s, staring right into her eyes. “You don’t get a knife. You don’t get a bow. You don’t get a rock, a rope or a pointed stick. You get to watch, is all. And if you keep talking while I’m trying to think, I’m going to put a gag on you.”