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“Only you can reach the donkey and get the book and our food.”

I sighed.

“Yah,” I said. “I suppose that’s so. And what then?”

“I was hoping you would have some idea.”

“My head hurts.”

“You are the one with the thief’s training. This is all you have to say?”

“Yah, it fucking is.”

“Then I suppose we wait and hope they lose their interest in us.”

I looked up, and they were staring at us like dogs at sausage.

“Not fucking likely,” I said.

We sat in grouchy silence for a moment.

“One other thing,” she said.

“What?” I said, rubbing at my temples.

“How bad is your head?”

“Bad.”

“Don’t go to sleep.”

“Or what?”

She thumbed one of my eyelids back, looked close at my eye.

Grunted.

“If you sleep, I think you will not wake up.”

My head was banging like a drunkie with an empty tankard when I walked the ridge to the spike of rock from which the donkey hung. Poor donkey. Murdered by giant fucking owls with shyte little wings. He dangled from his baggage kit, which was hung on the rock-spear like a hat on a hook, his guts decorating the slope I had to navigate. I had taken off my boiled-leather pattens so my soft-leather, split-toed undershoes would let my feet grip the ridge proper. This meant I was spared the feel of neither sharp rock nor soft donkey-bits, but it also meant I was not like to fall again. I was well trained in climbing; you might say it was my strongest discipline.

Now how the kark were we going to get our gear up to ground level from this spiky, long-drop crevasse, never mind the thrice-damned owls? Plenty of rope in those packs, at least. That’s one provision I never skimp on. I had some claw-hooks, too. I could work with that if I could clear the shyte-birds off.

I had gotten up where I could reach the saddles, sitting with my arsebone on one heel, the other leg out, pinching in with the flat of my foot against the bad angle I found myself in. I spared a look at the donkey’s face, though I knew better. His blind eyes frozen wide in the terror of his fall and sudden death, his big, gawpy teeth offset from some distress to his jaw, tongue lolling.

“I miss your hee-haws, sprumlet,” I said to him.

Hooooooooo-oooo!

“Not your hooos, ya whores, his hee-haws. I wouldn’t piss on you lot if you was burning, unless I had a knob full a’ lamp oil.”

Probably burn my knob right off that way, though. I looked at the owl-things bobbing their heads at me. Might be worth it. Clearly, I was thinking about anything else but about how to get out of this mess.

My mind went back to lamp oil.

There was one lamp in the pack, a horn lamp, and a little flask of oil.

How was that going to help?