“Greens?” he asked in a murmur.
“No.” He looked down to see Loriabeth crouched at his leg, gently pulling aside a heavily stained bandage to inspect the wound. She had positioned herself so as to block his view, but from the way she stiffened he concluded the news wasn’t good.
“Festered, huh?” he asked.
She shook her head and turned, forcing a smile. “No, the Green we soaked it in seems to have warded off any infecting humours. You’ll be up and walking in no time.”
“Then let me see.”
“You need to rest some more . . .”
“Let me see, cuz!”
She lowered her gaze and shifted out of his eye-line, affording him a clear view of the wound and why she hadn’t wanted him to see it. A sizable chunk of the muscle on his lower right leg was gone or denuded, leaving bone and sinew exposed. It was the kind of injury he would have expected to see only on a corpse. His gaze shifted to his bare foot and he tried to wiggle his toes, an effort that provoked another upsurge of pain but left his toes unmoved. He stared at the wound for as long as he could, forcing himself to accept the reality of it, before a rising nausea compelled him to avert his gaze.
“Might’ve been best to just take it off,” he said as Loriabeth knelt to replace the bandage with one from her pack. He tried for a jovial tone but it came out as a strained, tremulous gasp.
“I ain’t no surgeon,” she replied. “’Sides, I seen folk come back from worse. Remember that tail-strike laid me low at Stockade? And I’m still spry as ever.”
She secured the bandage in place, Clay gritting his teeth against the pain and turning to Sigoral for a distraction. “If it ain’t Greens,” he said. “What’re you on guard against there, Lieutenant?”
“Look at the lights,” Sigoral said, maintaining his vigil.
Clay raised a hand to shield his eyes and squinted at the trio of crystal suns. At first he saw nothing then noticed the one in the centre dim a little as something passed in front of it, something with wings and long tail. “I’m guessing that ain’t a bird,” he said.
“Reds,” Loriabeth said. “They’re small, like those Greens, but they’re Reds alright. And there’s at least a dozen circling above. Ain’t seen fit to come for us as yet.”
“I think they’re waiting for us to venture out there,” Sigoral said, jerking his head to the left.
Clay turned, finding that the forest was mostly gone now, leaving a short stretch of widely spaced trees before giving way to the broad plain he had glimpsed from atop the overgrown structure. It was flat and mostly barren save for a few bushes. “How long you been carrying me?” he asked Loriabeth.
“Dragging more like,” she said. “Three or four miles from where those Greens came for us. Night came and went. The lieutenant did some counting and reckons this place gets about ten hours of light and the same of darkness a day, if you can really call it a day.”
“Why so short?” Clay wondered aloud, then grunted as Loriabeth tied off the bandage.
“Here,” she said, reaching for two branches lying near by. “We cut crutches in case you woke up. No offence, cuz, but I ain’t got the strength to drag you one more mile.”
She made him eat before they set off. It transpired they had adopted his suggestion whilst he slept, catching several birds for roasting. They made for tasty fare, reminding him of the pigeons he had resorted to trapping during his early days in the Blinds.
“Been lighting fires without any trouble,” Loriabeth said, turning a spitted bird over a healthy flame. “Greens’ve been content to leave us be.”
“We killed many,” Sigoral said. “Perhaps all of them.”
“Or they just learn faster than these birds,” Clay said, biting into a small drumstick as he cast a wary eye at the Reds circling above. “Have to hope this lot learns the same lesson if they try their luck.”
? ? ?
Loriabeth had filled a whole canteen with product harvested from the pile of dead Greens they left in the forest. Clay tasted a little before they set off across the plain. The blood was heavily diluted with water but the effects made him conclude that, tiddlers or not, the blood of the drakes in this place remained just as potent as their larger cousins’.
Progress was inevitably slowed by Clay’s infirmity. He soon managed to get the hang of the plant-and-swing motion needed to propel himself forward on his crutches, but his leg ached continually and the depredations of his injury forced him to halt every few hundred yards. Sigoral and Loriabeth displayed some muted frustration with his slowness but neither voiced a rebuke and, to his eyes, remained remarkably free of desperation or panic despite their circumstances.
Miles beneath the ice trapped in a giant cavern with wild drakes, he thought, watching Sigoral pause and raise his gaze to the Reds circling above. And yet they never thought of leaving me.
The notion stirred unwelcome thoughts of Silverpin’s ghost. Didn’t you ever wonder why they were so willing to follow you? He didn’t want to think about the question overmuch, though it nagged at him as they inched their way across the treeless plain. He had convinced all the surviving Longrifles, half the crew of a Protectorate ship and a handful of Corvantine captives to follow him to the worst place on earth. All on the promise of something he saw in a vision, a vision only he and Miss Lethridge had seen. I ain’t never been that persuasive, he knew, pausing to wipe a slick of sweat from his brow. And yet they followed me here.
The barrenness of the surrounding landscape drew his mind back to the Red Sands and that day they found the crater, the near-feverish need to find the White he had seen in his uncle’s eyes, a need placed there by Silverpin. Images of the Longrifles’ journey through the Arradsian Interior played out in his head as he stood, swaying a little on his crutches. She birthed a hunger in them. His gaze shifted to Loriabeth and Sigoral, both now halted and regarding him with deep concern. What did I birth?
“Clay?” Loriabeth asked.
He wanted to ask her if she had ever truly pondered their reasons for coming here, if the blind acceptance of so much danger ever gave her pause. And, if so, did those doubts disappear whenever she was in his company? Have I doomed you, cuz? he wondered, groaning as he looked away. He was pondering the wisdom of voicing his suspicions when his gaze caught something several miles ahead. The heat cast by the three suns produced a low hazy shimmer on the plain and he had to squint to fully make it out: a thin vertical line ascending from the tunnel floor into the black sky.
“You seeing this?” he asked, pointing. “Or did I pass out again?”
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