As much as I could understand what Mavortian thought he was doing, his idea was to sort of slide along the northern border of the duchies, where we were kind of at the edge of where the Bastion could see us, but not far enough south that the dukes were much more than puffed-up mayors. One thing for sure, the Duke of Yehergod was strictly small potatoes. No ducal palace in Yehergod, and the militia was made up of the blacksmith, the miller, the hotelkeeper, and as many farmboys as they could round up in any given month. The duke was the town banker, and the only way you could tell him apart from the rest of the crowd in the bar was the gold rings in his ears.
So we figured we were safe, and we kept on figuring we were safe until about the septad-night, when we suddenly found out we weren't safe at all.
And now I got to explain how it is that I was still awake at the septad-night, which in turn is the only reason me and Felix got out of Yehergod without about three pounds of iron apiece on our wrists. See, when they backed the curse off me in Hermione, it wasn't what you might call a howling success. I mean, sure, I wasn't dead, and I wasn't having those fucking cramps, and believe me, I was grateful. But things got weird. I can't put it no better than that. Colors got funny, like there were too many of them packed in behind your basic blue or green or whatever. Sometimes I almost thought I could see the colors around people that Felix was always yammering about. And my hearing got sharper, to the point that Mavortian and Bernard yelling at each other was actually painful. I mean, it was a pain and I was used to that, but now it
hurt
. And I couldn't sleep.
That was the kicker. That was the absolute bitchkitty Queen of Swords. I'm a light sleeper at the best of times, and I don't need a lot of sleep, but now I wasn't sleeping at all. I mean, maybe an hour a night, maybe two. And my dreams were fucking awful. It was like Cerberus Cresset had set up an appointment with the inside of my head, so that every time I went to sleep, there he was, his hands clutching my knife in his chest, his eyes opening wider and wider and his mouth stuck in this prissy little circle, like he died not yet believing that somebody like me could do that to somebody like him. So I'd get to sleep around about the tenth hour of the night, and I'd thrash things through with my old pal Cerberus, and then I'd wake up and it wouldn't quite be dawn yet. And I'd lie there and wonder if it really would have been so bad, dying of cramps. I was tired all the time now. And not just tired, worse than tired, like somebody'd hung this fucking invisible lead chain on me, and I had to drag it around everywhere I went.
So it was the septad-night in Yehergod. The town was dead as a drowned dog, and I was sitting in the room I shared with Felix—along of how basically the others had said, you're the one said you were going with him, so
you
deal—looking out the window because it was better than staring at the lump on the bed that was Felix, and he might be asleep or he might be laying there staring at me. And since we were on the top floor of the hotel and it was the tallest building in Yehergod by a good stretch, I actually had a pretty nice view of the town all asleep and peaceful, and I was sitting there trying to convince myself that looking out at all that peace was making me sleepy. And then I saw something, namely a bunch of goons in chain mail heading for the hotel. Like I said, you could put the Yehergod militia in a string shopping bag and still have room for two heads of cabbage and a parsnip. That wasn't them, and that was enough to say as how these guys were bad news.
"Fuck," I said.
Next second I was across the room. For once, Felix was asleep, so I shook him awake in a hurry and said, "Get your shoes on 'cause we got to bail."
I didn't have time to see if he was with me. I was out the door and into the next room, where Bernard
woke up when I was halfway through the door and said, "What the fuck do you want?"
"There's a bunch of soldiers closing in. Time to clear out."
"Fuck. You got the freakshow?"
That was Bernard's ever so fucking tactful way of referring to Felix. "Yeah," I said.
"Then I'll manage the others. Meet at the next milestone outside of town."
"Gotcha," I said and dove back into our room, where Felix was sitting like a tailor's dummy with his eyes eating up his face.
"Come
on
!" I said, dragged his shoes out from under the bed, and shoved them on his feet. "We don't got time for this."
But he was someplace else, and we really
didn't
have time. I looked out the window and the goons were still heading for the hotel, and they were close enough they could've seen me if they looked up. I knew that the duke was downstairs in a game of Long Tiffany with the hotelkeeper and a couple merchants. They'd invited me to join them. Clearly the goons knew where to find the duke, too, and about a centime's worth of my head was wondering about who'd sold him out and why, even while the rest of me was in that cold, nasty, clear place I get to when a job's gone bad. I can't help it. It's just the way I'm made.
I yanked Felix up off the bed, and the only thing I remember for certain about the next quarter hour is the death grip I had on his wrist. We went down the back stairs loud enough to wake the dead. The hotelkeeper's door was open as we went past, with the hotelkeeper and the duke peering out wondering who was dropping trunks down the stairs, and I sort of said in passing: "Soldiers coming!" The last I saw of the Duke of Yehergod, he had pure scarlet murder on his face, and I figure he knew who the snitch was and what he was going to do about it, assuming he got the chance.
We got out into the stableyard and up onto the stable roof, and I really can't tell you how I managed that, because by then Felix was coming apart at the seams, and I was swearing at him under my breath and just about turning myself inside out dragging on his dead weight. But we got up there somehow, and over the gable, and then we. slithered down into the street. I took a quick glance at the stars to figure out where the fuck east was, and then I started dragging Felix out of town. We'd gone maybe a block and a half at a dead run when things got really loud back behind us. I hoped Bernard and them were okay, but all I could do was get Felix the fuck out of the picture. Mavortian was a good liar, but that wouldn't help with the Mirador's fucking carnival tattoos.
So we booked it out of town, along their nice wide flat paved Kekropian road and headed for the milestone like Bernard had said. The Kekropians mark their miles off in fives, which is a little weird, but their milestones are the size of small ponies, and they got a bust of the Emperor on them, looking a little funny along of how the Emperor's only got about a septad and two. We slowed down once I was sure nobody was chasing us, but it turned out we'd got away clean. Nobody in the hotel had caught on that Felix was a Cabaline, and I was betting them goons in their chain mail had other fish they wanted to fry.
The moon was near full and cast enough light that I felt safe to keep walking. Like I said, the Kekropians know all about roads, so there ain't no potholes to break your ankle in or nothing like that. And I was worried about how ambitious the goons might be and how far out they might be thinking they wanted to sweep, so I made Felix keep going, even though he was in one of his really bad spells and didn't even seem to know who I was.
I got to say, straight out, that I didn't have the hang of what was wrong with him. I mean, I knew he was crazy, because any fool could see that. And I knew him being crazy had something to do with his magic and why it wasn't working right—I was just as glad of that, actually, because the thought of walking around with a crazy
and
magic-working hocus was enough to completely spook me out. But I couldn't get my head around the rest of it, even though Mavortian had tried to explain it once or twice while Gideon sat there and sneered at him. Gideon understood it better than Mavortian did, and he might've been able to lay it out so as I could follow him, but Gideon wasn't about to do me no favors, and I hadn't thought it mattered enough to go crawling to him about it.
Some days I think I'm too stupid to be let out on my own, and then there's the days that prove it.
We made it to the milestone finally—I don't know what time it was, but by then I was practically staggering anyway and didn't rightly care. So I dragged Felix off the road and behind the milestone, where we wouldn't be spotted right away by anybody who happened to be looking. I would've liked to get farther, but I couldn't see enough of what the land was like to think that was a good idea. So I just sat down where I was and said, "We're gonna wait for Mavortian and them, okay?"
Felix sat down, too, and I finally felt like I could let go of him. He didn't say nothing, but that was normal.
"I'm gonna sleep," I said. "Are you tired?"
"No."
"Then will you watch? Either for Mavortian or for goons. Either way, you wake me up as soon as you see 'em, okay?"
"Okay," he said.
I curled myself up against the milestone. I was just about to fall asleep when I realized Felix had said "Okay," like any pack-brat out of the Lower City, and I hadn't known him long, but I'd figured him out enough to know that
couldn't
be a good sign. But I was too fucking tired even for that, and I fell asleep before I'd got a grip on what I was worried about.
I came awake all at once, with a kind of a jump. I'd slept longer and heavier than I'd expected, so now it was probably the third or fourth hour of the morning and there were wagons rumbling past on the road. Felix was a little ways off, watching the road like I'd asked him to, but he whipped around as soon as I moved.
"Anything?" I said.
"No soldiers. There have been a few wagons from the west, but the drivers didn't look like they'd have been at all amenable to the suggestion of passengers."
He was talking flash, and that meant he'd made it up out of the funk he'd been in when I went to sleep. His madness was like that. Sometimes he'd be okay, and sometimes it was like he'd fallen down a well and there was no rope handy. I could never tell when he was topside if he had any idea about what was going on with him down there in the dark, and I was too much of a coward to ask, and it was this great big ugly thing we never talked about, sitting there sometimes like you could almost see it between us. So what I said was, "Fuck. Looks like they didn't get out."
"I guess," he said, sounding kind of wobbly, like maybe he wasn't as up as I'd thought, and that's when I woke up enough to take a good look at him.
"Hey, you're hurt."
"Am I?"
"Yeah. What did you do to your forehead?"
He put his hand up to touch it and looked at the dried blood that came off on his fingers like he hadn't known blood was that color. "I don't know," he said.
"I must've banged you into something last night. Fuck, I'm sorry."
"Oh, that's all right. I'm clumsy enough that you shouldn't blame yourself."
"You feeling okay? Seeing double? Head hurt much?"
"No more than usual," he said and gave me a kind of an almost smile.
"Small favors," I said, thinking we'd better be grateful for all of them we could find, and stood up. "It don't look like much, but we'd better get it cleaned up anyway. Let's find the river."
"The river?" he said, and if I hadn't had a Great Septad and a septad and six things bumping around in my head like birds in a panic, I might've heard that funny note in his voice, and I might've said something better than what I did say—or maybe there wasn't no right thing to say just then. Dunno. But what I said was, "You know, the Sim. I don't want people asking—"
"I'm not going near the Sim!" he said in this kind of shrieky little voice I'd never heard out of him before. I looked down at him, where he was still sitting next to the milestone, and Kethe, he was right back down the fucking well, only worse. He was about two inches this side of a good old-fashioned fit of hysterics.
I did the only thing I could, seeing as how what we most desperately didn't want right then was anybody noticing us special, and maybe remembering us to mention to them goons in Yehergod. Especially as it was right then that I realized one of the things we'd left behind in that hotel was Felix's gloves. So I grabbed him, scruff of the neck and one wrist, and dragged and shoved and all but carried him back off the road and down into a drainage ditch. And it was probably the standing water that really set him off.
He got about half a scream out before I slapped him, hard as I could. It was the only thing I knew to do for hysterics, and I probably don't need to say how shitty I felt when it worked. But I was scared and mad, and like I said, I had these panicking birds throwing themselves around in my head, and so I kind of hissed at him, "What the fuck is wrong with you?"
His eyes were big as bell-wheels, and he was breathing in these huge kind of sobbing gasps, but he got out, "The Sim… I can't. Please. Not the Sim."
"Okay," I said. "Then we won't. No big deal."
And then I felt even worse, because he was staring at me like I'd said I was going to get myself upholstered in pink chintz.
"There must be a stream or something around here. That okay?"
After a moment, he nodded.
"Okay. You done with the opera?"
He went five different shades of red, but he gulped and nodded, and I said, "Then let's get out of this fucking ditch."
We climbed out on the side away from the road and sat down to get the water and mud and stuff out of his shoes and my boots. The grass was brown and brittle, but big handfuls of it still worked okay to get the worst of the muck off our feet and trousers. I figured I wouldn't worry about my socks just yet. If we could find a stream, I could take care of them and Felix's cut at the same time. His socks were still in Yehergod along with everything else we didn't happen to be wearing, and I added that to the list of things we'd have to get somehow before we went too much farther. He already had blisters on his heels and raw patches on his toes, and I felt like even more of a shit because if I'd taken half a second to think once we'd got clear of Yehergod, I'd've realized that was a problem and done something about it. I did at least have the sense not to ask him why he hadn't told me.