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Synopsis
A world of immortals living among humans. Anyone may be immortal, but there is no way to know until you die. If you are one of the very lucky few, you will live an endless life of pleasure and power, considered to be a god. Only decapitation and the rapid separation of body and head for a few days can kill an immortal.
In the southlands, a common soldier dies and is reborn, and is inducted into the world of the immortals. But the Empire has become decadent, and what he discovers there will shock him.
In the dry lands of the west, one man has set himself up as the sun god. But there is a prophecy that he will be killed by his son—and so all of his male children are killed at birth. Until his most recent wife bears a child who is nether male nor female, and is determined to protect them from sacrifice.
In the cold north, the immortal Luck—clever, tricksy, clubfooted—harbours suspicions that many of the immortals have been killed. When he intervenes in an attack on one of his fellows, he realises something new. Someone is hunting the Gods.
For there is a fourth land. They know of the other three. And they are planning their attack.
Our three heroes—damaged soldier, protective mother, clever cripple—must find a way to unite their different lands, and defend against this new enemy.
Release date: May 16, 2019
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Print pages: 368
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Smoke in the Glass
Chris Humphreys
Separated by unclimbable mountains and by unsailable seas, for many thousands of years the people who lived in each world knew nothing of any other, thought that they ruled the planet alone. Yet eventually in every world there was a story that linked them all: of a visitor who fell from the sky or who came from the ocean, half a millennium before our present days.
The visitor brought gifts. Gifts that many, in their own tongue, would call curses.
The one who came appeared differently to the different peoples – as man, woman or child. Was called Gudrun Gift Bearer in the North, Andros the Blind in the South, Tasloc Wave Rider in the West. And the first gift given, but only in three of the worlds, was immortality. A small number amongst them would be born and live for ever. They would discover it only upon their death and their rebirth. It could be neither chosen nor willed. Old men and young, women and babes, it could come to any. It was not inherited, although from time to time immortals did bear immortals. Most would watch in sadness as the one they’d married when young or the baby they’d given birth to grew grey, passed them and died. Thus everywhere was immortality seen as both blessing and curse. And it changed each world utterly, according to their separate ways and customs.
The second gift the visitor gave to every immortal changed it more. For it was the gift of possession – possession for a time of another’s body and life – and again it was different in each of those three worlds.
In the Southern lands, that would become Corinthium, immortals could possess another person, a mortal. Dissolve into them for a time, their own flesh gone, their spirit and mind transplanted. Wise men and women over the years believed that the visitor gave this gift so that immortals would themselves grow wise, having lived in another’s skin, in their minds and hearts – felt their pains, learned their longings, discovering how another needed to live, so they could be as shepherds to the flock and help all to live well.
It is not what happened. For in that land it first became a sport, and then a way not to help but to control.
And thus the gift was squandered.
In the land of the North, that came to be known as Midgarth, the gift of possession was different – there the immortals could possess only beasts. All that ran, flew, swam or slid on their bellies across the ground were available to them. It took but sight, a moment of sinking, before their bodies were gone and human became animal. Again, for those who first received it, it appeared to be a gift for learning. To discover, for the brief time of possession, that animals were not lesser because they did not reason as man reasoned. That each – furred, feathered, scaled – deserved their place in their world as man did, with as much respect. Yet here, as in the South, this gift swiftly became a game, a chance to make a tale to be told before the hearth-fire on long winter nights.
And thus the gift was wasted.
In the third world, Ometepe, one immortal killed all others before the power of possession – which would be different there – was discovered.
And thus the gift was lost.
Yet what of that fourth world, the largest of all worlds, itself divided into four tribes, that would be known as saghaz-a, or Land of Joy? The visitor also came to it, though much later, only a hundred years ago. There she was called azana-kesh or ‘the one who comes before’. She gave each of the scattered, warring peoples of that world a different gift. Not immortality, not possession.
Hope. Hope in the form of prophecy. Of someone who would come to unite all worlds – but only if the four tribes first united themselves.
It took near one hundred years, of war and hatred. Until they were ready. When they were, azana – the One – was born. Not in their land. Far away. Yet by then a united people had found ways to climb unclimbable mountains, and sail unsailable seas.
Now is the age of prophecy fulfilled. Now is the age of the darkness that gives way to the light. The end of the dominion of the Immortal. The beginning of the dominion of Man.
The age of azana. The age of the One.
(From scrolls found in a cave on the mountain of Gorach. Attributed to Smoke, the Hermit)
1
Trial by Death
Of the two men who lay beside each other on the ridge, watching the kidnappers’ camp, one was to take a mortal wound that night, the other a wound that would make him live for ever. Neither could know it, for the gods had not cursed them with the far-seeing eye. Neither would have cared if they had known. ‘Half odds are good odds’ was a law they lived by in the hills of the Sarphardi, where death was so easy to come by. Both would have taken the bet and gone to grave or immortality with a gambler’s accepting smile.
Neither cared about anything other than what they did next. About that they cared a great deal and because of it the two men, closer than brothers, did what they rarely did: quarrelled, in short, angry whispers.
‘Because I claimed it first.’
‘Only because I did not think you would be so stupid as to do so.’
‘Stupid?’
‘As the chicken without a head. As the donkey following its tail. As the—’
‘Ashtan!’ Ferros held up his hand to halt his friend’s comparisons before he went round the farmyard. ‘How often must I prove it? I am better at the closework.’
‘Better?’ Ashtan reached to make a gap in the grasses before him and spat carefully through it. ‘You base this outrageous boast on one night in Atrau?’
‘And that other in Quba, plus the dawn raid on Temir.’
‘Pah!’
Ashtan hawked another impressive amount of phlegm, bent to spit, and Ferros used the brief interlude of silence to deploy his winning argument. ‘Besides, brother, when I run from the camp dragging the girl and the boy with five screaming Sarphardi a pace behind, who is the more likely to make at least three shots in the dark?’ He smiled. ‘For I will reluctantly concede that, at night at least, you are better with a bow than I.’
Ashtan, about to spit, swallowed instead. ‘By night, by day, in my sleep or drunk, I am better with a bow than you.’ He grunted, then shrugged. ‘Well, brother, if you are so keen to court death in the form of a spear up your arse, so be it.’ He still had the grass parted for the spit and peered through the gap again. ‘This is how it goes. I will be behind that pile of rocks there. You run straight from the fire towards me. When you reach that bush that’s shaped like a crouching leopard, you throw the kidnapped down. I take two of the bastards then, backlit by flame, you a third with your taka.’ He tapped the throwing knife, sheathed on Ferros’s forearm. ‘Drop, draw, throw. If the other two stop there long enough to wonder what is happening, I take them then. If not, see if you truly are good enough at closework to hold them off till I get there to save you. Again. Agreed?’
Ferros thought of continuing the argument – but they didn’t have time. ‘Agreed.’ He grinned. ‘Though one wonders who is the officer here, and who the mere soldier.’
‘This, in your mother’s milk.’ Ashtan spat again, and grinned back. ‘Come! Let’s go kill someone.’
‘It doesn’t worry you that they could be your cousins?’ Ferros asked, as they slid down into the gulley and checked their weapons.
‘These? Did you not note them by their fire? They are clan gelcha. Renowned fuckers of their own livestock. A disgrace. Besides,’ he inserted an arrow’s notched end into his mouth, pulled it out, its feathers now glistening and smooth, ‘one of them is Tamin the One-Eyed. He once laid his hand upon my sister Sorani’s arm.’ He placed another arrow in his mouth, drew it out. ‘Him I might just wound and make his death a long, slow pleasure later.’
‘No.’ Ferros checked that his short sword slid easily from the sheath on his back, that the knives, one on each of his forearms, the cutter and the thrower, were secure. Then he drove three arrows tip first into the soil beneath the lip of the gulley and laid his own bow beside them. ‘Do not take the risk. There are five of them to two of us. They may fuck their own goats but they are still Sarphardi warriors. Besides, the girl and boy will be terrified. We must get them back to the city and their family swiftly. No time for slow pleasures.’ He rose to a crouch. ‘And that, soldier, is an order.’
‘Sir!’ Ashtan placed his arrows in the quiver, picked up his bow by its buffalo-horn grip. His lips parted over teeth brightened by the light of Horned Saipha, the hunter’s moon, a crescent in the sky. ‘And again, in your mother’s milk.’ He spat, and rose too. ‘Go well.’
‘Give the quail’s call when you are in position. I’ll reply when I am.’
‘It had better be soon.’ Ashtan gestured with his head. ‘They have begun on the girl.’
Ferros turned. His friend’s hearing was superb but even he could now hear the girl’s faint, desperate weeping, the boy’s pleading, cut off by the back of a hand struck hard across a face. His own face went ugly. ‘Go with the gods,’ he muttered, already turning away.
‘And you, brother.’
Sounds came clearer as Ferros emerged from the gulley and, crouching low, ran in a circle around the edge of the Sarphardi camp to its far side. The girl’s pleading, the boy’s weeping, the kidnappers’ mocking laughter … which halted for a moment as one of their horses snickered when Ferros ducked into their lines, and resumed when he’d calmed the beast with his hand and a whispered word. He could see the single tent clearly now over the mount’s shoulders, a dozen paces away. The fire on its far side made silhouettes of those within – two distinct figures crouched on the ground, the five tribesmen one monstrous blob above them. Then one detached, moving to the tent’s entrance, declaring his intention to piss before he got down to anything else, more mocking laughter following him. Ferros could hear the slur in it now – the merchant’s wagon they’d stolen along with the children had carried a large barrel of date brandy. So close to the city, this girl’s father had thought he would only need one bodyguard. But the raiders had been getting bolder of late and the bodyguard would have died first and fast, the merchant swiftly afterwards.
It had been chance and a jackal’s howl that had led him and Ashtan, out for a morning hunt, to the two bodies poorly concealed in scrub beside the road. They would have buried them well enough to protect them from scavenging animals, then brought a wagon from the port – if it had not been for what the dead merchant was gripping in his right hand: the doll of a soldier in full Corinthium armour. ‘They have a child,’ Ferros had said. There had been no time to do anything for the dead now, only to chase the murderers, and hope to save the living.
The Sarphardi might have had a night’s head start but they also had the wagon with the profit and the two riders had overtaken them by sunset. Now, by the one moon’s rise and the other’s fall, they would deal with them.
This one first, Ferros thought, as the man walked a dozen paces off and lowered his breech cloth. He let him get midstream, let the ribald song start in the tent about acts to be performed in the famed brothels of Makat, before he drew his curved slicing dagger. By Saipha’s light he could make the throw with the other knife, but the man might fall noisily and he needed to be sure that Ashtan had reached his position before he startled the other four.
Slamming his hand around the man’s mouth, Ferros pulled him close, even as the blade bit. Two sprays now, one diminishing, one fountaining. The warrior was large, bigger even than him, and the man bent, braced, stood tall, lifting Ferros from the ground. For a moment Ferros thought he might lose him, pressed his hand tighter against the mouth, wrapped his dagger hand around the huge chest. The man stumbled and Ferros rode him to the ground, lying atop him till life left.
He rolled off, crouched and turned, dagger before him. But he didn’t think he’d made much noise, and the same reassuringly nasty song and sounds came from the tent. Then, from beyond it, came the quail’s cry – Ashtan, in position.
There was no point in delaying – especially since his own warrior’s blood was up with his enemy’s sticky on his hand. He tipped back his head, echoed the cry – poorly perhaps, because the men’s voices stopped within the tent, while the girl’s and boy’s sobbed on. It didn’t matter much, not when his signal was immediately followed by his comrade’s voice.
‘Attack!’ Ashtan yelled. ‘Soldiers of the Ninth, advance!’
The shout had the instant and desired effect. The four warriors snatched up weapons and ran out of the tent’s front entrance. There wasn’t an entrance at the back but Ferros swiftly made one – jabbing the tip of his curved dagger into the hide wall and slicing down fast. Pausing only to sheathe one weapon, he drew another, the short sword on his back, then stepped through the slit. The girl and the boy – she maybe fourteen, he perhaps half that – were still crouched on the floor, clutching each other. Their eyes shot wide when they saw him but they didn’t scream. He might not have been wearing the full uniform of an officer of the Ninth, but he had the breast and back-plates, decorated with the unit’s serpent gods, and the green tunic beneath. And though the desert sun had tanned his skin as dark as any tribesman’s, it had also bleached his hair near white. Unlike her black-haired captors, she could tell in an instant that he was a soldier of the empire. ‘Up!’ he commanded, in a whisper. ‘Can you run?’
The boy just stared at him. It was the girl who answered, ‘Yes! Oh yes!’
‘Then on my word, fast as hares. Straight past the fire, straight down the path.’
He stepped to the front flap and a swift glance showed him the Sarphardi half a dozen paces away staring hard into the night. Only one had a bow, with arrow nocked, the others their curved swords, the swordsmen also holding kite-shaped shields to cover them all. Ashtan began shouting more commands but even with these efforts, it would only be the matter of a moment before the tribesmen realised they faced a few men, if that, and not a squadron. The moment was his.
The shield of the man he’d already killed was on the ground. Snatching it up, thrusting his arm through its hide grip, Ferros bent to the boy and girl. ‘Wait … wait.’
An arrow, driven from short range into one of the raiders’ shields, knocked the man holding it a half-step back. ‘Now!’
They burst out, the boy stumbling, the girl fast. Ferros grasped the sword grip in his shield hand, used his freed one to grab the boy’s arm and propel him forward. They were three paces past the fire when the shouts came. ‘Faster,’ Ferros cried, shoving the boy after his sister, turning in the same moment to thrust the shield out. An arrow thumped into it. Immediately he turned and ran again. When he reached the bush that resembled the crouching leopard, he grabbed both of the children and dropped with them to the ground. As they hit it, he heard a shriek from behind him, did not turn to look, did not need to. Good shooting, brother, he thought, rising, dragging the children up, running. Another half-dozen paces and instinct made him turn again, shield braced. Another arrow hit it, and he let the force turn him to run once more.
He caught up with the children at the rise where they’d studied the camp. The children slid over it. He made a tally of the enemy: one dead at the camp, one dying on the path, three following. Three to kill. Odds nearly even. Smiling he stepped over the lip, dropped sword and shield, reached for his bow.
Which wasn’t there. Or it was, but not on the ground where he’d left it. He saw it then as it rose, with one of Horned Saipha’s moonbeams glinting on the iron arrowhead, and he realised, in the instant of life left to him, that he’d erred back in the tent. That there had been three warriors sheltering from Ashtan’s arrows, not four. And that the fourth was raising his own bow against him, the string already drawn all the way back.
As the arrow entered his right eye, his last thought within the shock and the fear was that, after all, it should have been Ashtan who had done the closework, not him. His friend would never have miscounted. And because he had, he had killed them both.
Some last thought, he thought, as he died.
Ferros woke, naked, freezing, as the second of the moons, Blue Revlas, she of Night and Morning, was chased from the sky by her would-be ravisher, the sun.
They had stripped him of his clothes and left him for dead. He understood why when he turned his head and the arrow, which had burst his right eye and gone on through his skull and stuck there, dragged across the earth beneath his head. It was the strangest sensation he’d ever felt, wood grinding on bone, accompanying the strangest sight: the feathers of a shaft the other side of his nose. Though he knew that it was his only wound, a mortal one, it was not the source of the awful pain. The rest of him was. His whole body was burning, inside and out.
He’d heard about the agonies of this second birth, far exceeding any that could have come at the first. People gossiped about it, speculating, wondering how they would face it if they were chosen. Books were written, of philosophy or tales, plays enacted in theatres exploring the theme. So few were born again, perhaps half a dozen a year it was said, to add to the small pool. Yet those few could come from anywhere, from the fleet or the army, from gutter to palace. In the central city of Corinthium, in one of the smaller cities like Cuerodocia or in his own home town of Balbek. A gift in the blood. It was said that two immortals conjoining had a better chance of having a child who was like them but it was never guaranteed. While the suicide cults that thrived and died out over the centuries were both illegal and unproductive, it was said that of all those who killed themselves in their rites only three had ever joined the immortal ranks.
It was said, he thought, sitting up, swaying with the rush of blood to the head. Not by him. His parents had certainly not been immortal, dying in the last great plague that had killed one fifth of Balbek when he was five. The army, where orphans were sent, had been his life for the eighteen years since. And there, all speculation was discouraged. Handle what’s in front of you, the drillmasters pounded into every recruit. One life is good enough for a soldier. Seize its every opportunity – for glory, riches, honour. For love, if you can find it. Nothing else matters.
He had never sought to be immortal. And now he was.
What would he do? What he always did. Handle what was in front of him – an arrow embedded in his skull. After that? Discover the source of the weeping that was coming from just over the rise.
He touched the arrow on its feathers, moved it slightly. A shudder of nausea went through him. He was tempted to pull it all the way through but he knew just enough about immortality to know he mustn’t. Pulling any blade from a wound often killed the wounded. Even if he was immortal now, he could still succumb to death as he’d done when he was first shot. Hours more would pass before his immortal body healed itself again. And waking to the agony of rebirth was not something he wished to go through twice. It would also mean he wouldn’t find out who was crying so desperately, and why.
Careful not to jog the arrow, Ferros raised his head above the lip of the rise.
They were in a group, the living, the dying and the dead, clustered around a glowing firepit. Two Sarphardi warriors were on their backs, hands crossed over their torn and bloody chests, eyes closed but with open eyes painted on their lids. Sitting beside the corpses were the ones he’d sought to rescue, the boy and the girl. They were the source of the weeping. The three other men, each one clutching a knife or a burning, sharpened stick, were standing before a fourth. He was hanging upside down from a tree branch.
Ashtan.
He was alive, barely. The wounds on his body caused by blade or fire, the blood pooling below him, showed that he had no right to be. Ferros could see his torn lips moving in prayer or curse. Curse, knowing him. He could not be far from his end, for even as he watched a warrior, the one with a single eye – Tamin, Ashtan had named him – thrust a flaming stick into the dangling man’s ear. His friend’s eyes went wide, but no sound came other than another muttered curse.
Tamin threw down the stick as if it was its fault. ‘It is time,’ he growled. ‘We eat his heart and we go. The slave market at Buzuluk starts tonight and if we ride hard we’ll make it. These two will fetch a good price.’
‘Better, since you didn’t have time to take your pleasure with her,’ said another.
‘More interesting things to do.’ Tamin leaned down to the dangling head. ‘Is that not right? Did we not do interesting things to you, jackal of the Corinthians?’
Ferros had always known that Ashtan could muster twice as much spit as any man living, and dispose of it more creatively. He did so now, expelling a wad into Tamin’s one good eye.
‘Blood of snake!’ Tamin stepped back to the others’ laughter, rubbing his eye furiously. ‘Now I think there is time for one last interesting thing.’ He turned to his men, snarling. ‘You! Cut him down. You! Bring my horse.’
Ferros heard the words but didn’t see them spoken because he was moving in a crouch along the rise using the protection it offered him. He circled swiftly to the tent. As he suspected, his armour, tunic and weapons were in it. Clothes could wait. He slipped on his two knife sheaths, picked up one of the Sarphardi kite shields, drew his sword and stepped out.
The man with the horse had just returned, holding the bridle. Tamin and the other man were attaching a rope to Ashtan’s neck. So focused were all three on this task that they didn’t notice Ferros approach, though he made little secret of it. The girl did see him and screamed. He couldn’t blame her. He could imagine what he looked like.
It was awkward, fighting with the use of only one eye. Perspective was wrong, and he missed blows he should not have, cut parts he’d not been aiming at, was cut on arm and side, not deep. Two of the warriors survived his first assault, and both had managed to get weapons into their hands. But maybe it was the fact that they believed they were fighting a dead man that weakened them. Or maybe immortality compensated for his poor vision. When he’d killed the first man, he took the second’s overhead blow on the top edge of his wooden shield, let the blade bite deep, twisted then wrenched the shield down and to the side, and so pulled the curved sword with it. Then he thrust hard and straight, driving his point through the man’s neck.
Tamin scythed a blow over his head. Ferros ducked, stepped back. Shrieking, the one-eyed man dropped his sword, turned and flung himself over his horse. ‘Yah!’ he cried, kicking his heels in. The horse, superb as all Sarphardi mounts, went straight into a gallop. But as his opponent mounted, Ferros too had dropped his sword and, even as the man’s heels dug into the horse’s flank, he drew his throwing knife. The horse had gone five paces when the taka took Tamin in the neck. He fell, though his mount kept going.
Sound, which often went away when he fought, came back to Ferros now – the diminishing fall of hooves on earth, the rising cries of the boy, the weeping of the girl. What concerned him most, though, was the softest sound there – breath on the ragged lips of Ashtan, trying to form words.
‘Quiet!’ he snapped at the girl, who obeyed instantly, drawing her brother to her, both staring at him in silent horror. In a gentler voice he said, ‘Fetch me water,’ and as they scrambled up and ran off, he turned back to Ashtan. Holding him, he used his slicing knife to sever the rope at his ankles, lifted him carefully down and laid his friend’s head in his lap. ‘Brother,’ he said, studying the havoc the Sarphardi had wrought, ‘I have to tell you, you do not look well.’
One of Ashtan’s eyes was caked shut with congealed blood. The other was missing a lid. This eye moved nonetheless, taking Ferros in. A whisper came, though the Corinthian had to bend to hear it. ‘The monkey accuses the man of having a bare arse?’
Ferros smiled. ‘How badly did they hurt you?’
‘Those inepts? Hardly at all.’ A cough came from deep inside him, pink flecked the lips. ‘But they have killed me nonetheless.’ The one-eyed gaze moved over him again. ‘Is this a wound?’
‘No. It is a death blow.’
‘And yet you live.’
‘And yet I live.’
‘So. At least one of us will.’ Ashtan shook his head very slightly, winced and wheezed. ‘I think they’ve broken all my ribs. Other things. I am not going to be much help to you, my captain.’ He swallowed. ‘You should leave me. That horse you let go may lead others back.’
‘Which is why we leave now. All of us.’
When he heard the brother and sister’s footfalls, he ripped away one of the dead warriors’ head cloths, tied it swiftly around to cover his nakedness. The girl carried a water skin. But she did not hand it over, just halted, stared … started when he reached and lifted it to squirt some water into Ashtan’s mouth, then some into his own.
‘The wagon,’ he said, ‘are the horses near it?’
It was the boy who spoke. ‘They are in the traces, sir. They were planning on leaving, when they … when they’d finished with …’ His gaze went to Ashtan and he shuddered, turned away.
‘Do you know anything of healing, girl?’
She would not look at him but she did reply. ‘I have completed my first two years with the Healers’ Guild. I hope to be a healer one day.’
‘That day is today. Do what you can. There are some unguents and herbs in my saddle rolls, wherever they may be. Cloths too. Battlefield medicine.’
He rose, took a step towards the wagon, and her voice stopped him. ‘Thank you, sir. For following, for coming back. For—’ She broke off and he turned to look at her. She regarded him directly now, not flinching from his wound. A bold girl, then. ‘Can I … can I try to help you with—’
She gestured and he lifted his hand, tapped the arrow, felt the shudder through the bones of his skull. ‘This is beyond your two years, young one. If I am to get us back to Balbek, this must stay where it is.’
He turned, kept going, even when the boy’s voice came. ‘Are you … are you an immortal, sir?’
‘I am now,’ he said, walking on. ‘May the gods pity me, but I am.’
Immortal or not, it was the limit of his strength to get the wagon and its occupants to the city. Ashtan died not far from it, as night fell, Balbek’s lights already standing out against the purple dark of the great sea beyond. The girl could have done nothing more, his wounds too severe and too hidden for even the most experienced of the Guild’s healers. She wept, nonetheless, in great wrenching sobs, and Ferros was too tired to comfort her.
The gatekeepers, two soldiers he didn’t know, tried not to show their shock, failed, let them through fast, dispatching a third to run a report ahead to the fort. They moved swiftly enough after that. It was reasonable timing, the hour of their arrival. The good citizens of Balbek were largely at home for their supper so the streets were not busy. It was the less good citizens who were about, soldiers off duty, frontiersmen, mariners, miners on leave from the copper workings at Ganhar. These spilled out before tavern or brothel doors and sometimes blocked the way. A whip flicked between the horses’ ears and close to a wine-reddened face moved most. Only once did a man, a barrel-chested docker, hold his place and curse Ferros – until he saw beneath the hood that really covered nothing. ‘Trachamea’s tits, boys, but look what we have here!’ he shouted, and others advanced to gawk and curse in turn. All could recognise a mortal wound when they saw one – an arrow through the head being one of the more obvious that any had ever seen. The resentment that immortality often caused, with immortals occupying almost every position in the highest ranks of army, temple and courts, was usually constrained by manners and the watchful eye of the state. Here, it was unconstrained by liquor.
‘By Trachamea’s tiny tits,’ the docker of big chest and limited vocabulary called again, ‘soldier boy’s not so pretty now. Gods, but look at that split apple.’
Hoots and jeers came fast. Someone seized the horses’ bridles and the twin pair jerked their heads, stamped their feet.
All I need, thought Ferros, so weary he’d have liked to lie down in the wagon beside Ashtan and sleep. But his duty was to the girl and boy quivering in the back and to his dead comrade lying beside them, to see him properly burned and his ashes scattered to the seven winds before the sun rose and set again. So he one-eyed the biggest man there, that same docker, still cursing and mocking, and considered.
Though he didn’t blame the man. He remembe
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