“What? What is it?Nghaah!” He cursed, jumped up, and knocked over the candle. She heard steel being drawn, followed by a thud and another yelp, and the clatter of said steel hitting the floor.
You really can’t draw a sword that size in a room this size, m’boy.
Slate rolled quietly off the bed on the other side—there was about a handsbreadth between the bed and the wall, and she slid down into it—and dug around on the floor until she found the candle.
There was another thud from somewhere overhead and a curse.
She dug in her pocket for matches. Matches she always had, even if she usually didn’t have a handkerchief.
Light flared under her hands. She was half under the bed, but that seemed to be the safest spot at the moment.
Caliban was standing, looking down at her. His sword gleamed on the floor between them. There was a large dent in the plasterwhere he’d hit it with the pommel, trying to draw in the miniscule room.
“So I guess I shouldn’t poke you when you’re speaking in tongues,” she said.
“Apparently not,” he said, pulling her to her feet.
“Shall we try to get back to sleep again?”
“They say third time’s the charm.”
Whoever ‘they’ were, they were right, because there were no more allergies, no more demonic voices, and Slate slept clear on through morning.
CHAPTER 8
THE NEXT FEW DAYSpassed in much the same fashion.
The second day was worse than the first, even though they stopped much more frequently and went much more slowly. The inn had bigger rooms, however, and Slate got to sleep in a bed without a paladin sulking on the floor.
They did not ride for so long each day as they did the first. Learned Edmund chafed at the delay. Slate and Brenner merely chafed.
Caliban found them some kind of herbal gunk. It was full of comfrey, and stank to high heaven, but supposedly it healed saddle sores.
This was a difficult bit of self-medication, but Slate would have cut her own throat before asking Caliban for help—chivalry be drawn and quartered, there were limits—and Brenner would get entirely the wrong idea. She had to barricade herself in her room and engage in a series of unfortunate pantless contortions to get the stuff on.
She never asked Brenner how he managed. She was afraid he’d tell her.
The third day was really bad. Slate and Brenner took to slugging poppy milk straight out of the bottle, which meant that they alternated giggling and whimpering. After about an hour of this, Caliban took the reins away from them and tied them in a string to his saddlebow. They found this amusing.
“If you keep drinking that stuff, you’re going to wind up addicted to it,” he warned them, as he watched the small glass bottle make the rounds again.
“Oh, yeah, I’m real worried,” said Brenner. “Remind me again, what were we on? Some kind of suicide mission, was it?” Slate snickered.
He stopped talking to them.
The scenery was not interesting enough to be distracting. It was all farm fields. Slate’s mother had come from farming stock and had been determined never to go back.
Once or twice, Slate had missed having a larger extended family to belong to, but looking at the fields and the people working them with hoes and spades, she offered up silent thanks.I’ll light a candle for you, Mother. Two candles.Tencandles. I bet these people have to deal with horsesconstantly.
Slate and Brenner sang rounds of dirty songs together. Brenner had a surprisingly good voice. Slate didn’t. She did get to enjoy watching Learned Edmund twitch when she went for the high notes.
Caliban was trying to pretend he didn’t know them, which was tricky when he was the one leading their horses.
At the inn that night, they sat propped up against the wall, shoulder to shoulder, while Caliban looked at them with irritation and Learned Edmund didn’t look at them at all.
“I could kill both of them,” said Brenner. “We could get to Anuket City on our own.”
He said it rather louder than he intended. Learned Edmund’s eyes widened. Caliban simply shoved trencher bread in front of the assassin and said “You’d have to walk. The Clockwork Boys are raiding up and down the southern trade roads. No caravans unless you want to go to a completely different city-state and work your way down from there.”
