‘No idea, Rucket.’
‘He’s gone insane.’
‘Impossible.’
‘I know,’ she replied.
They sat in silence for a time, then Rucket said, ‘Maybe I’ll just keep the padding. That way I can have it without all the costs.’
‘Is it real padding?’
‘Illusions and some real stuff, kind of a patchwork thing.’
‘And you think he’ll fall in love with you looking like that? I mean, compared to Janath who’s probably getting skinnier by the moment which, as you know, some men like since it makes their women look like children or some other ghastly secret truth nobody ever admits out loud-’
‘He’s not one of those.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I am.’
‘Well, I suppose you would know.’
‘I would,’ she replied. ‘Anyway, what you’re talking about is making me feel kind of ill.’
‘Manly truths will do that,’ Ormly said.
They sat. They waited.
Ursto Hoobutt and his wife and sometime lover Pinosel clambered onto the muddy bank. In Ursto’s gnarled hands was a huge clay jug. They paused to study the frozen pond that had once been Settle Lake, the ice gleaming in the diffuse moonlight.
‘It’s melting, Cherrytart,’ he said.
‘Well you’re just getting smarter day by day, dearie. We knowed it was melting. We knowed that a long time coming. We knowed it sober and we knowed it drunk.’ She lifted her hamper. ‘Now, we looking at a late supper or are we looking at an early breakfast?’
‘Let’s stretch it out and make it both.’
‘Can’t make it both. One or the other and if we stretch it out it’ll be neither so make up your mind.’
‘What’s got you so touchy, love?’
‘It’s melting, dammit, and that means ants at the picnic’
‘We knew it was coming-’
‘So what? Ants is ants.’
They settled down onto the bank, waving at mosquitoes.
Ursto unstoppered the jug as Pinosel unwrapped the hamper. He reached for a tidbit and she slapped his hand away. He offered her the jug and she scowled, then accepted it. With her hands full, he snatched the tidbit then leaned back, content as he popped the morsel into his mouth.
Then gagged. ‘Errant’s ear, what is this?’
‘That was a clay ball, love. For the scribing. And now, we’re going to have to dig us up some more. Or, you are, since it was you who ate the one we had.’
‘Well, it wasn’t all bad, really. Here, give me that jug so’s I can wash it down.’
A pleasant evening, Ursto reflected somewhat blearily, to just sit and watch a pond melt.
At least until the giant demon trapped in the ice broke loose. At that disquieting thought, he shot his wife and sometime lover a glance, remembering the day long ago when they’d been sitting here, all peaceful and the like, and she’d been on at him to get married and he’d said-oh well, he’d said it and now here they were and that might’ve been the Errant’s nudge but he didn’t think so.
No matter what the Errant thought.
‘I seen that nostalgic look in your eyes, hubby-bubby. What say we have a baby?’
Ursto choked a second time, but on nothing so prosaic as a ball of clay.
The central compound of the Patriotists, the Lether Empire’s knotted core of fear and intimidation, was under siege. Periodically, mobs heaved against the walls, rocks and jugs of oil with burning rag wicks sailing over to crash down in the compound. Flames had taken the stables and four other outbuildings three nights past, and the terrible sound of screaming horses had filled the smoky air. It had been all the trapped Patriotists could do to keep the main block from catching fire.
Twice the main gate had been breached, and a dozen agents had died pushing the frenzied citizens back. Now an enormous barricade of rubble, charred beams and furniture blocked the passage. Through the stench and sooty puddles of the compound, figures walked, armoured as soldiers might be and awkward in the heavy gear. Few spoke, few met the eyes of others, in dread of seeing revealed the haunted, stunned disbelief that resided in their own souls.
The world did not work like this. The people could always be cowed, the ringleaders isolated and betrayed with a purse of coin or, failing that, quietly removed. But the agents could not set out into the streets to twist the dark deals. There were watchers, and gangs of thugs nearby who delighted in beating hapless agents to death, then flinging their heads back over the wall. And whatever operatives remained at large in the city had ceased all efforts at communicating-either had gone into hiding or were dead.