'Spirits below!' Bult hissed.
Duiker smiled. 'Your soldiers, Commander.'
'Aye,' he said, suddenly beaming with pride. 'Aye.'
'I did not know what to do,' Coltaine confessed.
Lull grunted. 'You played it perfectly, Fist. That was exquisite, no doubt already making the rounds as a Hood-damned full-blown legend. If they liked you before, they love you now, sir.'
The Wickan remained baffled. 'But why? I just demoted a man for unsurpassed bravery!'
'Returned him to the ranks, you mean. And that lifted every one of 'em up, don't you see that?'
'But Mincer—'
'Never had so much fun in his life, I'd bet. You can tell, when they get even uglier. Hood knows, I can't explain it – only sappers know a sapper's way of thinking and behaving, and sometimes not even them.'
'You've a captain named Bungle, now, nephew,' Bult said. 'Think she'll be there in polish and shine next briefing?'
'Not a chance,' Lull opined. 'She's probably packing her gear right now.'
Coltaine shook his head. 'They win,' he said, in evident wonder. 'I am defeated.'
Duiker watched the three men walk away, still discussing what had just happened. Not lies after all. Tears and smiles, something so small, so absurd . . . the only possible answer. . . The historian shook himself, and looked around until he found List. 'Corporal, I recall you had something to show me...'
'Yes, sir. Up ahead, not far, I think.'
They came to the ruined tower before reaching the forward outlying pickets. A squad of Wickans had commandeered the position, filling the ringed bedrock floor with supplies and leaving in attendance a lone, one-armed youth.
List laid a hand on one of the massive foundation stones. 'Jaghut,' he said. 'They lived apart, you know. No villages, no cities, just single, remote dwellings. Like this one.'
'Enjoyed their privacy, I take it.'
'They feared each other almost as much as they feared the T'lan Imass, sir.'
Duiker glanced over at the Wickan youth. The lad was fast asleep. We're doing a lot of that these days. Just dropping off. 'How old?' he asked the corporal.
'Not sure. A hundred, two, maybe even three.'
'Not years.'
'No. Millennia.'
'So, this is where the Jaghut lived.'
'The first tower. From here, pushed back, then again, then again. The final stand – the last tower – is in the heart of the plain beyond the forest.'
'Pushed back,' the historian repeated.
List nodded. 'Each siege lasted centuries, the losses among the T'lan Imass staggering. Jaghut were anything but wanderers. When they chose a place ...' His voice fell off. He shrugged.
'Was this a typical war, Corporal?'
The young man hesitated, then shook his head. 'A strange bond, unique among the Jaghut. When the mother was in peril, the children returned, joined the battle. Then the father. Things ... escalated.'
Duiker nodded, looked around. 'She must have been ... special.'
Tight-lipped and pale, List pulled off his helm, ran a hand through his sweaty hair. 'Aye,' he finally whispered.
'Is she your guide?'
'No. Her mate.'
Something made the historian turn, as if in answer to a barely felt shiver of air. North, through the trees, then above them. His mind struggled to encompass what he saw: a column, a spear lit gold, rising ... rising.
'Hood's breath!' List muttered. 'What is that?'
A lone word thundered through Duiker, flooding his mind, driving out every thought, and he knew with utter certainty the truth of it, the single word that was answer to List's question.
'Sha'ik.'
Kalam sat in his gloomy cabin, inundated with the sound of hammering waves and shrieking wind. Ragstopper shuddered with every remorseless crash of the raging seas, the room around the assassin pitching in, it seemed, a dozen directions at once.
Somewhere in their wake, a fast trader battled the same storm, and her presence – announced by the lookout only minutes before the green and strangely luminescent cloud rolled over them – gnawed at Kalam, refusing to go away. The same fast trader we'd seen before. Was the answer a simple one? While we squatted in that shithole of a home port, she'd been calmly shouldering the Imperial pier at Falar, no special rush in resupplying when you have a shore leave worth the name.
But that did not explain the host of other details that plagued the assassin – details that, each on their own, rang a minor note of discord, yet together they created a cacophony of alarm in Kalam. Blurred passages of time, perhaps born of the man's driving aspiration to complete this voyage, at war with the interminable reality of day upon day, night upon night, the very sameness of such a journey.