“I’m a better fighter than either of you,” Cup said. Which was the dead god’s truth.
“That’s your last warning,” Ursala said.
Cup give it up with a shrug of disgust. Ursala went back to the monitor, bringing the drone round for another pass up and down the slope before she called it home and packed it away at last.
“I think we should go over the shoulder of the hill, that way,” she said, pointing. “Koli, does your imaginary friend agree?”
Monono spoke up in my ear. “So rude! Tell her yes, little dumpling. That keeps us on track. Also, tell her she can increase the density of those bullets by culturing red blood cells in the drudge’s mini-lab, applying a surfactant to break down the cell membranes, then baking and filtering the raw mass to extract the iron. She can add it to the cultured bone as an amalgam.”
“You can tell her your own self,” I said. “I’m not like to get any of them words out halfway straight.” Also, I thought, they was not words that Monono would of used before she went into the internet and come out with that autonomy. I asked her if the making of bolts – or bullets, as she called them – was a skill she found in there.
“I suppose it must have been,” she said. “I told you I accessed some military databases. I thought I was just doing handshake protocols, but you can catch some nasty diseases by shaking hands.”
That was not something I knowed or ever thought about, so I said nothing. I only hoped it wasn’t true.
We went around the shoulder of the hill and come down on its other side. A little stream run by us there, collecting every few strides in pools about the size of my foot. The water looked so clean, I would of liked to stop and fill our water bottles, but the tanks inside the drudge was full, both the one that was for water it had already made safe and the one that was for water it was still working on. Ursala had not told me how the drudge made the water safe, but I guess it was by sieving out the bad stuff and boiling it, the same way we did in Mythen Rood. Only the drudge didn’t get hot, so far as I could tell, so maybe it had got some other way.
The day stayed clear, with just a few clouds piled up like towers over to the east of us, so we stuck to the scree and scrub as far as we could. We made good time, at least at first. The steepness and the uneven ground slowed us, but not as much as the trees would of done. You didn’t see many trees at all this high up a mountain’s side. They couldn’t root theirselves in deep enough among the rocks and stones, so they give way to bushes and wild grass and then to nothing much growing at all, which was what I liked best.
The longer we went without seeing the shunned men, the more certain I was that we had give them the slip. My spirits rose, and as we walked I talked a lot about the strange sights there was to be seen. The face of a cliff all covered in birds’ nests, with a million bellfeathers and swallows coming and going between them (a million being a word that Monono had teached me, meaning a number too big to count). A tower made of metal, that was like a lot of ladders all laid together, only the ladders would of had to be for giants to climb. A thing we found lying on the mountainside, all et up with rust, that looked like a big cattle trough with a roof to it. It had wheels like the wheels on a barrow or a child’s hobby horse. These wheels was metal, though, so maybe they was more like the pulleys we used to haul wood up to the tops of the stacks in my mother’s workshop.
“That was called a car,” Monono said, when we seen that last thing. “People rode inside them, Koli. They used to run everywhere in my time. The first Monono’s time, I mean.”
Monono had took her name and most everything else from a singer of the old days whose thoughts and rememberings had been poured into the DreamSleeve when it was made. It was a thing she didn’t like to talk about much, so I didn’t answer nothing when she said this.
Ursala, who had not heard her speak, told me the same thing. “It’s a car, Koli. I’m surprised you haven’t seen one before. There are quite a few hulks in your valley, although they’re mostly on the north side of the river. You’ll see plenty when we get to Birmagen, I promise you.”
“What’s Birmagen?” I asked.
“It’s a city almost as big as London, that lies right across our path. Actually, it would have been easy enough to go around, but I steered towards it. I’m hoping the contaminants in the soil will be more concentrated there, so we’ll get a respite from the forest.”
It was a good thing to hope for, and it kept that happy mood in me through the morning. The other thing I was hoping for was a change in the weather, but the sky stayed clear, with just a few scuds of cloud chasing each other right at the edge of what we could see. We was heading down now, out of the highest hills. Mile after mile, the slopes got less steep and the trees come up to meet us. Around the end of the morning, we had got no choice but to stop at the forest’s edge and see what the sky decided to do.
Long before then, though, our hopes of being free and clear from the shunned men was throwed down. Being up on the hillside like we was, we could see a long way off, and any movement at all drawed the eye in all that dumb-struck stillness. Men and women got their own way of moving that’s different from bears and dogs and tree-cats and such. Again and again, when I looked back the way we had come, I seen a little of that movement in the scrub or on the edge of the treeline. The shunned men was making the best use of what cover there was, but they could not go all the way into the trees no more than we could, so they was there to be seen if you looked hard.
I thought there had got to be four of them at least, for they was flanking us on both sides while staying a long way back. When we done that in Calder, on a hunt, we worked in twos so one could follow the trail while the other kept a weather-eye for what might threaten. But maybe these people had got a different way of doing it. We was a long way from Calder, after all.
“You seen them?” I asked Ursala, with a nod over my shoulder to show who I meant.
“Of course,” she said without looking.
“We’re fearful exposed here.”
“Yes, we are. But I think we’re safe for now. As long as the sun shines, they’ve only got two choices. Come at us over the hill, in which case we’ll see them coming and the drudge will pick them off. Or brave the forest, and get crushed to paste.”
“Yeah, Ursala, but if a cloud comes over…”
“If a cloud comes over, we’ll move before they do.”
“Into the trees?”
“Of course, into the trees. We’ll make the best speed we can and take our chances. Otherwise we risk having them get down below us and cut us off.”
“They won’t wait that long,” Cup said. Her voice was a growl, kind of, all angry like we was talking stupid and she was sick of hearing it.
Ursala didn’t even make no show of listening to her, but I figured the more ideas we had, the better. “What do you mean, Cup?” I asked her.
She nodded down towards the trees, then up towards the ridge behind us. “They got us in a bottle. Why wouldn’t they come in and finish us before we get clear again?”
“The drudge—” Ursala gun to say.
“They got range on the drudge!” Cup all but shouted. “You said it yourself. You think they don’t know that? That was why they come at us last night. To measure your iron horse’s gun against their bowshots, and take the range when we wasn’t in no shape to chase them off. It’s what anyone would do, if they wasn’t stupid. And these people is soldiers of Half-Ax, so they know damn well what they’re doing.”