What do I do now? I can’t rescue them if I don’t know where they are!
She waited for Learned Edmund to say something snide, but instead he handed her a roasted potato. “No good will come of us starving ourselves, Mistress Slate.”
“No, I suppose not. Thanks.” It was indeed an excellent potato. She choked it down through a throat gone thick.
What do I do? I can’t leave them!
What if they’re already dead?
Calibanhasto be alive. He has to be alive so I can think of something really cutting to say to him, the metal-plated ass.
She gnawed on a fingernail. She wouldn’t cry, because that would be useless, and it would also confirm all of Learned Edmund’s worst fears about her.
Slate glanced at him, a slim, miserable-looking figure hunched inside his robes. Something about his posture, and the way he kept blinking, made her think that he might be worried about crying too.
Somehow that was cheering. Not because she wished him ill, but because there are few things in life as steadying as someone you have to be brave for.
“Well, a fine pair we are,” she said. “And we thought the hard part would beinAnuket City.”
He smiled weakly. “I suppose—”
The horses lifted their heads. Even the mules pricked up their ears.
“They hear something,” said Learned Edmund.
A breeze rippled through the trees, and after a moment, over the crackling of the fire, Slate heard it too.
It was music.
There were drums in there, and pipes, a low beat and a high skirling whine threaded through it. It wasn’t a pleasant music—every now and then the beat would skip, which jolted the listener as if their heart had skipped—but the fact that it was music at all, in the middle of the woods, fired Slate with relief.
“Come on.” She got up and kicked dirt over the fire.
“Where are we going?”
“After the music.”
“You think the musicians took the other two?”
“I think it’s the best lead we’re going to get.”
They left the horses tied up and picked their way down to the river. Slate wasn’t sure if the music was coming from there, or if the sound just carried better over water, but they had to start somewhere.
They got partway down the slope and the trees opened up. Learned Edmund reached out and caught her arm.
There go your bowels and your genitals, m’boy.
“Look!” he hissed. “Something’s moving!”
Something was indeed moving, a regular undulation that seemed to slither down the slope a dozen yards to their left, and move out across the rocks that spanned the river. Slate squinted. The starlight wasn’t very bright, but it looked like a thing of parts, like a column of ants, rather than a single snakelike body.
They were much bigger than ants, but still not very big. They didn’t look like anything that could overpower a man, although there were a great many of them. More streamed past, every moment, moving out of the woods and crossing the stream.
The music skirled. The drums skipped a beat, and the whole column lurched briefly, then took up the step once more.
They inched closer.
“God’s mercy,” breathed Learned Edmund, “I think they’re rats.”
