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13Monkey-Monkey

We walked toward the plains to the west for a good while, to get away from the birds, as well as to get out of the boxed and sunken temple courtyard. We needed to get a good look around us.

We marched out onto the dry, grassy, stony hills that looked to grow flatter going west, and when we reached the top of one gentle rise, we turned around.

We had a choice to make now.

The temple and the quarry with its devil-flowers and kark-birds lay to the east, perched at the foot of a stony hill, past which more and larger hills, past which the grim and snow-crowned Thralls. These stood tall and numerous against a bright gray sky, an imposing bunch even if you’d never seen a map to know how impossibly deep the range went. I called to mind the armies of Old Kesh. It was said one general of the Beltians wept so hard to see the Keshite ranks in their uncountable numbers that he broke his mind and never spoke again.

To the north, a column of smoke rose from the Thralls, quite distant. I thought it must be the same one we had seen before we found the God of Threes, but if so, we had come far south of where we started. Unless of course it was another column entirely, in which case we had come much, much farther.

I looked west now, squinting. The land betrayed nothing of itself. Just grassy hills, the odd tree, and past that, nothing.

Of course, there was south, but, like north, that looked like more of what we had here, which was also nothing, but with a bit more morning shade.

“What do you reckon?”

“I do not like those mountains,” she said. “They have a bad heart.”

“Yeah, they are bastards, aren’t they. Better the hand with nothing in it than the one holding a knife.” She liked that. Spanths are full of old sayings, when they talk at all.

We both looked west again.

“Well, it’s west we wanted to go,” I said.

The big, dry nothing in that direction looked no more appetizing for my declaration. But what had I expected? Inns and winehouses, just giant-sized? A nice university where I could rent a room with a desk and have hot stew brought to me while I wrestled the Book of the Full Shadow for its secrets?

We had bought ourselves time, aye, but maybe too much time.

Maybe an eternity.

We both turned and looked at the Thralls again.

They seemed to tease us.

Yes, my darlings, come back into our arms. We have brigands and snow owls and avalanches. We have strange gods and stranger devils. And who knows? You may even meet yourselves coming the other way.

That thought chilled me more than it had a right to, and I had the impression Galva might have shared it. She seemed to shudder, it was barely noticeable, and then she said, “South?”

“Fuck it,” I said. “Why not.”

And so we started the march south, away from the temple and its weird deity and its horrid garden, and toward we knew not what.

We had to find a way back to Manreach, and we would.

By all the gods, we would.

You’re a failure, Kinch Na Shannack, my mind told me, and I told it to go fuck itself. Even though, with everything gambled and lost on a book that helped us not at all, I had to admit it might be right. But it could still go fuck itself.

“Better a whole failure than just the self-loathing inner voice of a failure. You’re half a failure. A failure’s ghostly fart, with neither weight nor rank. Now just fuck completely off, please.”

“What?” Galva said, in that annoyed way that said she wished I’d stop gibbering.

“Nothing,” I said.

That’s what I felt like. A nothing. A loser on the empty side of the world. A wretch of a fugitive for whom things couldn’t get worse.

One day later, a monkey stole my water.