“I am allergic to everything,” said Slate, with a certain grim pride.
“Including prisons, as I recall.”
“Oh, that. No, that was a family thing.” She propped herself up on her elbows, her eyes watering. “My grandmother was a wonderworker from down south. Every time there’s magic or danger or just something I’m supposed to pay attention to, I get this horrible blast of rosemary.”
“Rosemary?”
“Yeah.” She blinked blearily at him. “You reeked of it. S’why I asked you.”
“Did I? Hmm.”
“Yeah, apparently I was supposed to pay attention to you.”
The words hung in the air between them for a little too long. Slate looked away from his eyes and searched for something else to say. “You want to look at our route?”
“Will it help?”
She gazed into the bottom of the whiskey. “Realistically, no. But I suppose anything’s possible.”
He helped her unroll the map, and pinned one corner down with the bottle.
“Hand me the dog,” said Slate. Their hands touched fleetingly as he dropped the soapstone figure into it. His skin was much warmer than hers.
Must be all those baths. The man doesn’t have time to get cold.
“Right,” said Slate. “So we’re the dog here, in the Dowager’s city. Nice and surrounded by mountains, very defensible, all the ore you could want. Even a good bit of pastureland, if you don’t mind mutt on three meals a day. They’re not gonna starve us out. Only problem is that the only way out is along the river, here.” She traced the blue squiggle of the Falsefall River as it wended its way through the mountains.
“Where the Clockwork Boys are coming in,” said Caliban. “When I…ah…stopped getting regular news, they were afraid that the Clockwork Boys would bottle up the opening to the river valley.”
“Yeah, that happened last month. Jammed into the mouth of the valley like a cork in a bottle.” She gazed at the soapstone dog’s position glumly. “I wish that wasn’t such a good metaphor. We’re all stuck in the bottle and the Captain expects the lot of us to wiggle our way out around the cork.”
“Lovely.”
“The army is theoretically holding them at a ford about there.” She stabbed a finger into the map.
Caliban stared at the map. “That’s nearly a third of the valley lost!”
“Oh, more than that. There’s reports that a couple columns of the Boys got through and they’re raiding along the trade road.”
The paladin sat down opposite her and rested his foreheadagainst his fist, studying the map. “And we need to get past the… cork, as it were…to reach Anuket City.”
“Yep.” Slate made the dog walk the length of the valley and hop to the point where the Falsefall joined up to another, larger river from the north. At the Y-shaped intersection, she set the dog down. “Anuket City.”
Caliban shook his head. “That’s a lot of war zone in the way,” he admitted.
“Exciting, huh?”
“Not the word I would have chosen.”
“Well, hopefully we’ll fare better than the last group that went that way…”
He blinked at her. Slate realized that their faces were rather too close together and sat back.
“Thelastgroup?”
“What?” said Slate, with studied nonchalance. “You think we’re the first ones they’ve sent out? They had two proper groups before us. Actual military and artificers and everything.”
Caliban picked up the bottle and poured them both another drink.
