The physickers flock around them like sparrows, fluttering with news.
He waves a hand over her shoulder, gestures. The room clears.
He kisses her again and feels a disordered world slotting into place as she lingers on his lips. They sit. He smooths the tangles from her hair with thick fingers. She rests her fingertips on his lips, his neck, his sides.
‘Riss,’ he says.
She turns to look at him. Shehears her name. He only now notices that he can speak it. The oil, the weight on his tongue, gone. He kisses her again. She tastes of spice and warmth. The light hangs golden around them.
He takes her face in his hands. ‘I’ve missed you,’ he says. He breaks as he says it, his voice fracturing into something smaller. Relief takes him like a soft wave and he falls forwards into her.
After the relief, sorrow, dug from the heart of him. She cradleshim as he weeps, as he comes back from the shadowed places, brushes the dust from his heart and takes it like a bird into the light.
He holds her as if she was a treasure, a gift, a memory. ‘Is it real?’ he finally asks, and the question is almost too sharp to bear.
She shushes like a lullaby and pulls him close. ‘It’s real, love,’ she says, and her hands run down his broad back. She looks down at him, and smiles. ‘I’ve had the most beautiful dream.’
72
in the end, there is only the blade
and the body that becomes its home
—Bladedrinker’s writ, archaic
A week later, the army of the Crowkisser comes to Thell.
Slickwalker watches them advance across the Barrowlands, his whole body alive with tension. Tries to take a headcount.
He flicks his eyes to the mountain ahead. Thell. The last of the old cities to hold any real threat. Hesper, back down there, clinging to the coast, was an afterthought.
The people of Thell had always been godless – conquerors; Empire-eaters. They’d weathered the horrors of the south from deep inside the mountain, washed clean of their names by Crowkisser’s ritual, like everyone else, but left free to rebuild afterwards. Unlike most everyone else, they’d seen worse. Bringing them to heel would bring peace, at last.
With Thell, Crowkisser would control the land from north to south, from the blackened glass of the Rim to the great mountain glaciers, and everything in between.
What came after that, he didn’t know. He’d heard talk of things beyond the mountains, spires, other cities too, perhaps, off to the west.
Slickwalker shifts numb feet. He didn’t need to worry about the future yet. Seeing tomorrow would be good enough.
His eyes move towards the distant gate, tracing the covered holes he’s bored in at the glacier lines, the shivers sleeping tightly beneath. He’s been watching the mountain day and night for days now, counting heads and memorising troop movements like lyrics. Getting a sense of exactly how many they’re up against. That sense is not good.
He feels like a shiver himself, thin brittle skin stretched tight over something explosive. Just waiting for the moment of release. His whole body’s itching with it. The adrenaline’s enough to make him sick, to double his vision into dizzying spells of excitement and terror.
His attention is caught by the glimmer of metal on the battlements; one of the morning patrols. There are five of them in all, six soldiers in each. They’ll switch off with the noon patrol once the sun’s high enough. One of them has a cold, sniffling his way around his shield grip. Another, older, has a limp, lifting his hip high every time he turns at the end of his quarter mile route. His counterpart on the western side likes a smoke, arrives early to breathe out a few puffs of something dark against the ice, before her friends join her and she covers her vice with a bluster of orders.
He observes their small vices, small flaws. It’s not much, but it’s all he needs.
He feels like they’ve talked this over a hundred times while looking at sketches of the mountain, of the Barrowlands in front. Shaping the course of the assault in their minds.
The Barrowlands themselves aren’t the problem. If anything, the swarm of cairns that pocks the landscape gives them more cover than they might have hoped for. Couple that with the outbuildings, those strange cottages with their cauldrons and pits, and the approach to the mountain isn’t the death trap he’d originally feared.
That’s assuming Thell doesn’t have people in the buildings, or between the cairns.
He doesn’t think so. His forays into and under the Barrowlands have become more frequent since that first tentative exploration of the burial chambers, still more twisting passages opening up beneath the plain like half-dug trenches. Nothing as wild as that first night, but enough hollow land winding beneath the earth to make for unsteady footing.
The real problem is that the gate is the only way in. They’d considered other options, sending long men up the side of themountain, to cut throats and create gaps. But that’ll only work on the far edges. There are too many eyes on the rest of the mountain, and getting a few blades up on its east and west extremities won’t save them if they can’t roll the rest of the army in through the main door. Crowkisser was adamant she wanted as little bloodshed as possible. So, they’d tried to find ways to make the siege as quick and clever as they could.
Part of the problem was the scale of the damn thing. He’d seen Thell often enough on maps and charts, but mostly as a symbol, a strange half-scratch that looked like a hooded eye. Nothing to give a sense of its true dimensions. And for all that Kisser claimed to have flown into and over it on crow wings, it turned out crows were slipshod surveyors.
