He felt a slight flash of pride. He’d done rather well at that, if he said so himself. Slickwalker smiles as he turns through the market, his boots taking him up the winding path towards the temple.
So, a few fast, lucky months, and almost everyone they needed dealt with was now headed to, or cowering in, that blasted mountain.
Hesper could remain bristling on the Western shore. They’d just march right on by.
Crowkisser seemed to think they’d pull it all off without a hitch. For his part, he suspected there’d be a little more smoke and blood.
To that end, she’d given him a special task, a little something based on his father’s trade. Cracking open cliffs to get at the metal inside. He supposed a cliff and a mountain were mostly the same. Except he wouldn’t be pulling silver out of the clearing smoke, it’d be blood.
As he climbs the road, he slips into the small house he’s kept here and unlatches the door. He peels his gloves off, tucks the gun under an arm, and shucks off the walker’s harness onto a peg, then turns at the sound of an insistent hiss.
The small snake twining among the coats, jackets and armour flicks a tongue indignantly at him, the diamond check of its scales loose in the soft light. He chucks it under the chin and reaches for a tin by the door. A couple of unlucky crickets in its jaws and it’s much happier.
He runs a hand along its smooth back. ‘Hello, hungry.’
Skinsnips, they’d called them when he was small. On account of their little fangs scissoring out bits of finger if you got too close. Docile, and friendly enough once fed.
He’d had this one in his pocket nearly three years ago, had brought it with him unknowingly when the south had burnt.
It might be the last one of its kind, for all he knew.
He throws it another cricket, grinning. ‘It’s almost your birthday, pal.’
The skinsnip’s happy chewing follows him as he moves back through the house; the unused kitchen, the cold fireplace, and then the door with three locks.
He undoes them with practiced speed. His fingers don’t shake at all now, he notices.
They’re waiting for him in the backroom, stacked in a loose pyramid; almost a full complement. The coarse surface of their rough clay shells holds the light, the briefest glimpse of wicks amid the pile.
It had taken him weeks to get the hang of moving them through shadow – too many variations in speed and momentum. He’d almost lost a hand a few times. And he’s still not owned up to the deep midnight detonation that sent chunks of pale rock raining into the ocean and set the seabirds screaming.
His father’s legacy, that mix of powders and liquids, held just barely apart with thin walls of clay.
Commonplace enough in the south, they’d been. Common enough that he could remember his grandmother complainingas the explosions would rock out over their village shaking the tea in its cups, rattling the teeth in their heads. The noontime shivers, she’d called them. He’d always thought of the bombs as shivers since then.
Sixteen shivers left now.
Enough to crack the mountain, he hoped. Enough to send him to oblivion in chewable pieces if he got it wrong.
Distantly listening to the crunch of cricket legs, he runs his fingers gingerly over the rough surface of the topmost shiver.
This was a lot of death to bring down on a city. But he understood why Crowkisser wanted it. Thell had to die so everyone else could live. It was cruel, but life was cruel. You had to be hard to make it better.
Still, still, it wasn’t what he’d dreamt of as a child. But then, who knew what he’d dreamt of as a child. He vaguely remembered a smaller world, moving stitch-legged among the waists of taller people who dispensed cuffs and care in roughly equal amounts. There had been the flash of jewels, rings and trinkets and deft fingers moving between them. The boom of the rock split open, and the gleam of silver in their hands and hearts afterwards.
There had been boats and sails, yes, but trees as well, their trunks straight and slender. Their branches whip-thin, tempting and treacherous. There had been a fountain he thought, bright with cold water, flecked with gold.
And then, something had happened. The old world had frayed and split and the shadow had come through, and beyond the shadow, the eye. He remembered the fear. Not just fear. He remembered theterroras it fell on him. He’d shit himself, and scrabbled limp-legged against the cobbles. Fought. Choked. Gagged. Panic had covered him, swallowed him, filled him. It had slid behind his eyes, into his throat, his heart.
The world had frayed, and he had been a thread left on the seam, curled on the cobbles as men and women screamed around him and golden things with the faces of angels and the voices of lizards split and burst in streets which opened themselves to greatdepths. Until blackness had yawned under him. Until the whole world shivered.
He’d felt the gaze of the eye eat him. Inch by inch, the whispers of his mind swallowed. He’d stopped there, and given himself up to it, because what else was there to do on the frayed edge of the world?
Given himself up to it. Until she’d emerged from the slanted buildings, smoke-stained and bloody. Given himself up to it, until he’d realised that there was life beyond the shadow.
Years had passed since then. He shifts, setting the gun down. It throbs slowly as he runs fingers over the knots in his neck, feeling the frayed stitching of his collar. He slips the jacket off and finds needle and thread. Wet between the lips and then passed through the eye. Quick, economical loops.
There are a lot of little tears, now he looks, dark spots and blemishes. He moves to the workbench beyond the pile of shivers, reaches up, takes a tin from a box, wax from the tin. Works in small circles, from the inside out. His fingers straighten sleeves and seams, smoothing the lining where it has snagged from sudden, fast movement.
