“What is it?” he demanded.
“New orders from the Sea Board.” Tottleborn grimaced, wiping his mouth and rubbing at his temples before offering Hilemore the weakest of smiles. “It appears that, as of yesterday, we are at war with the Corvantine Empire.”
CHAPTER 18
Clay
The Red Sands smelled like blood. The wind carried a fine crimson haze from the shore to the Firejack, possessed of a sharp, metallic sting that stirred a faint nausea in Clay’s gut. It was late morning and the sun had risen to a clear sky, revealing just how aptly named this desert was. “It’s really red,” he commented, eyes tracking over the dunes, finding only the slightest variation in hue and no hint of any vegetation. “And it tastes like iron,” he added, scraping his tongue along the roof of his mouth.
“’Cause that’s what it’s made of,” Skaggerhill said. He held a hand up to the wind for a few seconds then showed it to Clay, tiny red flakes visible on the callused skin. “It ain’t sand, it’s rust. Educated fella I knew in Carvenport said it must’ve been a mountain range once, all filled up with iron ore. One day thousands of years ago some great catastrophe turned it into a desert. Wind carried off the rock sand, it being lighter, leaving this. Here.” He tossed Clay a pack that seemed to be two-thirds comprised of full canteens. “No water on the Red Sands. Gotta carry our own. You be sure to ration it. And tie a kerchief about your face, don’t want this shit in your lungs.”
The Longrifles crowded into one of the Firejack’s boats and rowed to shore, jumping clear in the shallows and wading the rest of the way. Clay looked back at the Firejack as the others all pulled on their packs, seeing Loriabeth raising a hand in farewell. She had accepted Braddon’s stern refusal to let her come along with a stoic calm, though Clay saw how it pained her. “He’s right, cuz,” he told her the night before as the steamer moored up close to the shallows. “You ain’t anywhere near healed enough yet.”
Braddon gave his daughter only the briefest glance before turning his back on the river and unfurling a map. “A mite over thirty miles to the Crater,” he said, aligning a pocket compass to the chart and checking his bearing against the sun. “I want to be there by noon tomorrow so we’ll be pushing hard. We move in single file. Clay, make sure you keep to the steps of whoever’s in front of you. Don’t want the Spoiled getting a notion of our numbers. Preacher, take the rear. Everyone else, eyes on the flanks. Let’s go.”
They moved in a south-westerly direction, Braddon setting a punishing pace and allowing only a five-minute stop per hour. There was little talk, Clay noting how each of his companions kept their gaze on the surrounding desert. Braddon and Preacher had their rifles ready and Foxbine marched with carbine in hand.
“How can the Spoiled live out here?” he wondered aloud when they had finally stopped for the night. They clustered round a somewhat puny fire fuelled by the small sack of coal Skaggerhill had brought along. Whilst the absence of shade made the day a heat-hammered trial, night on the Red Sands brought a cutting chill. “What’s there to live on?”
“Each other, iffen they’re hungry enough,” Foxbine grunted, her eyes roving the dunes, transformed into a dark crimson sea under the light of the moons.
“Spoiled live on the fringes,” Skaggerhill said. “Hunting Cerath and shell-backs. But they come here regular, and in numbers. No-one’s sure quite why.”
“It’s sacred to them,” Preacher said, provoking a surprised silence due to the rarity of the occurrence. “One of the early expeditions described a ceremony they witnessed here. The Spoiled come here to pray. We’re walking across their church and desecrating it in the process.”
“Fuck their church,” Foxbine said, lifting the kerchief that covered her mouth to spit on the rust grains beneath her feet. “We see any o’ those bastards, I’ll be happy to desecrate them too.”
—
They made the Crater just after noon the next day. It lay in a broad depression free of any dunes and at first it seemed like a low, flat-topped hill but soon revealed itself as a circular hole in the desert, sixty feet wide and ten deep.
“Where’s all the nesting White Drakes?” Foxbine asked, a sardonic lilt to her voice. “Stories I heard about this place, you’d think there’d be more to it.”
“Clay, Silverpin, you’re with me,” Braddon said, sloughing off his pack and hefting his rifle. “Take your shovels. The rest of you keep watch.”
Clay sighed in relief as the pack slid from his shoulders, then took a long pull from a canteen. “You want us to start digging now?”
Braddon ignored him and strode off towards the lip of the crater with Silverpin at his side, spear in one hand and shovel in the other. Clay pressed a hand to the comforting weight of Ellforth’s wallet inside his shirt, then drew the shovel from his pack and followed with a muttered curse. The crater walls were steep but had enough of an incline to allow them to slide down to the floor.
“Just more rust,” he said, kicking a small mound of the stuff as his uncle moved about, eyes roving the ground. No great skeleton to take back to Carvenport in triumph. And certainly no shiny egg. “It’d take months to dig through all this,” he called to Braddon, who didn’t seem to hear.
Clay turned to see Silverpin crouched near the centre of the crater, hand splayed on the rust. After a second she took her shovel and started scraping at the surface. Clay moved to her side, watching as she carefully worked the tool’s blade through the metallic soil. His heart took a sudden lurch at the sight of something smooth, pale and round emerging from the flaked dirt.
“Seer-damn me to the Travail,” he breathed. The egg . . . The thought died, however, as Silverpin’s shovel dug deeper, revealing a crack in the pale shape. A few more scrapes and two rust-filled eye-sockets stared up at them from the hole.
Like it would ever have been that easy. Clay straightened, calling to his uncle, “Got us a skull here.”
“Female,” Braddon said a short while later, fingers tracing over the smooth brow of the skull. “Young too, I’d guess.”
“Ethelynne Drystone?” Clay suggested.
Braddon shook his head. “There was a lady gunhand with Wittler’s crew. Madame Bondersil said Ethelynne saw her die here when the powder from the White’s bones made them all crazy.”
“Speaking of which.” Clay rose and spread his arms out to encompass the barren floor of the crater. “Where is the great mucky-muck?”
Braddon retrieved his shovel from the ground and tossed it to Clay, voice hardening with impatience. “Ain’t gonna find it without a little digging, now are we?”
They dug for an hour, finding more bones, all human. “Look at this poor bastard,” Clay said, lifting a skull from the dirt. He guessed this one was male from the heaviness of the brows, a single neat hole punched plumb between.
“Pistol-shot twixt the eyes,” Braddon surmised, glancing up from a partially exposed rib-cage. “Rules out the Spoiled doing all this.”
In all they uncovered the remains of one woman and three men, each with evidence of having suffered death by gun-shot. “Accounts for all of them ’cept Wittler and Drystone,” Braddon said. “Skaggs said he was a good deal taller than his crew. No clothing nor weapons either, which means the Spoiled must have happened by afterwards and taken it all. Stands to reason they took the drake bones too.”
“No bones, no egg.” Clay emptied the last of his canteen down his throat, glancing up at the near-dark sky. “Seems to me we came a long way to prove this thing can’t be found.”
“No, we proved it can’t be found here. And we proved Ethelynne didn’t perish with the rest of them, Wittler either maybe.” Braddon started back towards the lip of the crater. “We’ll dig proper graves for these folks in the morning. Preacher can say the words, if he’s so minded.”
“Then back to the boat, right?”
Braddon kept walking.
“
Uncle,” Clay persisted, stalking after him. “We’re going back to the boat in the morning, right?”
“We know they came via the river and Badlands to the north,” Braddon replied. “Could be more sign there.”
“And how many more miles is that . . .”
“As many as I say we walk, Clay!” Braddon rounded on him, face dark with menace. “I say we walk across this whole Seer-damn continent, we do it.” He glanced at the empty canteen in Clay’s hand, gaze softening a little. “And go easy on that. I ain’t asking the others to go short for you.”
—
He volunteered for first turn on watch, preferring to stave off fatigue for two hours in order to enjoy an uninterrupted sleep. Preacher shared the shift, sitting on the far side of the fire, rifle in his lap and staring out at the darkened dunes in customary silence. Clay found it surprisingly easy to stay awake, partly due to the icy chill. He was obliged to wrap his duster tight around him and drape a blanket across his shoulders. Unlike Preacher he stayed on his feet, pacing back and forth across the newly frosted ground, breath misting in the air. At Skaggerhill’s advice he had drawn his Stinger but kept it within the folds of his duster, close to the warmth of his body so the workings wouldn’t seize in the cold.
Thirty miles back to the boat, then . . . what? His mind had been busy with calculations since they climbed out of the crater. With a decent gulp of Green he could cover thirty miles in a couple of hours. Tell the Skipper they all perished on the Sands. Then back to Edinsmouth and on to Carvenport . . . where the Protectorate were likely to carve a smile into his throat within a day of arrival. Plus it meant leaving the Longrifles to perish in this desert, something that might not have concerned him before but, one way or another, he owed them all now, especially Silverpin. He had other options: bypass the Firejack altogether and make for the Alebond enclave at Rigger’s Bay on the coast, a plan that involved a two-hundred-mile trip through the jungle. Even with Ellforth’s product his brief exposure to the realities of traversing the Interior left him in little doubt as to the likely outcome.
Fact is, you’re stuck, he told himself. Just as stuck as you were back in that Protectorate cell.
He was pondering the gleam he had seen in his uncle’s eye in the Crater, that same hunger for the White they all seemed to share, when something moved out in the desert. The Stinger came free of his duster in a blur, the stock going to his shoulder and the sights aligned with his eye in a smooth movement that said a lot for Foxbine’s teaching. A small, upright shape stood just above the Stinger’s fore-sight. For a moment he took it for a tree-stump, surely an impossibility in these wastes, but then saw it was a man. Small and swaddled in thick coverings, his face hooded and a shoulder-high walking-stick in his hand. Unmistakably a man.
“Preacher!” Clay hissed, thumbing back the Stinger’s hammer.
He heard the scrape of the marksman’s boots as he rushed to his side, then blinked as the man with the walking stick shifted. It was just a small, jerky movement then the crimson rust around him erupted into a plume of dust that twisted and drifted to the right.
“What is it?” Preacher demanded, appearing at his side with longrifle raised.
“There’s someone out there,” Clay said, tracking the whirl of dust with the Stinger.
Preacher was silent for a moment then slowly lowered his rifle. “Just a dust-devil,” he said.
“There’s a man in it,” Clay said. “He raised it. Must be a Blood-blessed.”
The swirling plume drifted on a few more yards then split into a half-dozen smaller, whispy vortices. They faded in a few heart-beats, revealing nothing but empty air.
Clay felt the weight of Preacher’s stare as he lowered the Stinger. “He was there,” he insisted. “Spoiled maybe, come to scout us out.”
The expression on the marksman’s face indicated a realisation he may not be the only crazy man in this company. “Spoiled don’t walk alone.”
“Still, we should wake the others.”
“Feel free.” Preacher cradled his rifle between crossed arms and returned to his station on the far side of the fire. “Be sure to tell your uncle it was your idea though.”
—
In the morning he went over the ground where he had seen the swaddled man, finding only vague tracks in the flakes that could have been left by a gust of wind.
“The Sands do this, young ’un,” Skaggerhill said, watching with a faintly amused expression as Clay scoured the ground. “Play with a fella’s brain. Seen a man go crazed my last trip here, blazing away at shadows he swore were the ghosts of his kin.”
“Wasn’t no ghost,” Clay said, raising his gaze. “It was a Blood-blessed and I’m betting he’s on our trail now.”
Skaggerhill shrugged and inclined his head at the camp where the company were packing up. “Then he’s got a long walk ahead. Best not keep the captain waiting.”
As they tracked north Clay kept just as close a watch on the landscape as the others. The swaddled man, however, failed to reappear, not during the day and not at night. Clay stayed awake past his watch, wandering around the fire in a wide circle, hand clutching the Stinger beneath his duster. “Sit still awhile, will ya’, kiddo,” Foxbine said in annoyance. “That’s awful distracting.”
He sank onto his blanket, unable to shake the certainty the small man with the walking-stick was out there in the dark, watching, waiting. But for what? He knew a measure of Green might help, enhance his vision enough to pick out their pursuer amongst the dunes, but with Foxbine so close there was no way to take it without her knowing. Sleep came slowly and proved fitful, leaving him heavy of head and no less fearful come the morning.
They pressed on for three hours, trekking over a flat expanse devoid of dunes that ended abruptly in the chalk labyrinth of the Badlands. “Keep it tight,” Braddon ordered. “No more than two feet from your neighbour. Get lost in here you got lousy odds of making it out again.”
He kept his compass in hand as they made their way through the narrow maze of thin, conical tors and winding channels. The landscape often forced a deviation from true north but the compass kept them moving towards the Greychurn River. There was little warning before it came in sight, just a slight cooling in the air before the Badlands fell away into a steep slope of red sandstone, descending into dark, swift-flowing waters.
“Can see why folks tend to avoid this stretch,” Foxbine commented, looking down at the churning current.
“In full spate due to the rains,” Braddon said. “Wittler made the journey earlier in the year, when it was calmer.”
“Can’t see nowhere they coulda moored up,” Skaggerhill said, shielding his eyes to scan the course of the river.
“Well, we know for a fact they did.” Braddon pointed east. “We follow the bank. See what turns up.”
The going was treacherous, the stone forming the bank soft and liable to give way under a heavy footfall. More than once Clay found himself coming perilously close to dropping into the swift waters below. It took another two hours before they found a small inlet with a gently sloping bank, the kind of place where a company might moor up a raft if they intended to make for the Red Sands. On the bank lay the skeleton of a large drake, the bones bleached white and long denuded of flesh. At first Clay entertained the faint hope they had found the White’s bones but Skaggerhill pronounced it a male Red.
“Dead a good long while,” Skaggerhill judged, looking over the skeleton and poking a finger into the hole in its skull. “Longrifle shot took it down, but that don’t account for this.” He crouched, pointing to the creature’s shattered sternum. “Looks almost like it burst from the inside.”
“Ethelynne,” Braddon said. “In the final trance she had with her, Madame Bondersil told her to make for this corpse and use the last of her Black to draw out the heart. The blood it held was her only chance against Wittler.”
“She drank heart-blood?” Skaggerhill gave a low whistle. “Little wonder no-one’s seen her since.”
“Over here, Captain,” Foxbine called, her boot nudging at something a short ways off. It was so shrouded in chalk-dust Clay initially assumed it must be more of the drake’s bones but a quick waft of Foxbine’s duster revealed it as a human skeleton, though far from complete. Unlike those in the Crater, this one retained the long-rotted rags of its clothes and the dry, papery remnants of a boot enclosed its only foot.
“Wittler,” Braddon said, eyes tracking the body from end to end. “Too tall for anyone else. Looks like he contrived to lose an arm and a leg.”
“Drakes’ve been at him.” Skaggerhill peered closer at the arm-bones. “Got teeth marks here, too small for a full-grown. Juvenile Reds must’ve come by and had themselves a feast.”
“They ate his arm and leg off?” Clay asked.
Skaggerhill shook his head. “Reds don’t eat bones. Ain’t got the teeth for it.”
“Only cannon fire can bust up a body like that,” Foxbine said.
Braddon straightened, casting his gaze around the surrounding landscape. “Spread out. If there’s anything else to find here I want it. Sweep two hundred yards out then come back. Stay in pairs. Clay, go with Silverpin.”
The bladehand took the lead, moving with spear lowered through the narrow channels of chalk and sandstone. Clay’s eyes strayed continually to the tops of the stunted cliffs that surrounded them, wondering if the hooded head of the swaddled man might pop up. Climbing these walls would have been difficult, perhaps impossible given the softness of the stone, but not for a Blood-blessed and he remained convinced that’s what the man had been.
“I did see him,” he muttered, drawing a glance from Silverpin. “I saw a man,” he repeated. “Wasn’t just some figment.”
She nodded, face devoid of any mockery or scepticism, then moved on. At least somebody believes me, he thought.