The Trials of Trass Kathra (11 page)

“Kali, I don’t even know what my ultimate destination will be.”

“Then,” Kali said, stroking Horse’s snout and refusing to turn around and face the old man, “when you no longer need him, let him go. It may not be the Drakengrats but it is the mountains, and he’ll feel at home there.” She stroked the bamfcat’s snout again. “One thing’s for certain – he can’t come with me.”

Moon didn’t move for a second but simply stared at Kali’s back, understanding that she didn’t want to prolong this any more than he did. The bamfcat snorted softly, plaintively, and it was clear that he, too, knew what was going on.

The old man rose, kicked out the remains of the campfire, and slung his bags across Horse’s back. But he kept one small bag back, handing it to Kali.

“A few toys I salvaged from the shop’s cellar that might help to keep you safe,” he said. “Also something I found in that trap. And my notebook, incomplete but –” Moon shrugged.

Kali nodded, took the saddlebag. Again, she did not look at Moon as the old man heaved himself up into the saddle, seemingly trying to close off the world. She did, however, start involuntarily as the bamfcat began to move off.

“Old man,” she said after a second, staring after him. The physically altered Moon looked so
natural
on Horse’s back, and Horse beneath him, as if somehow they had always belonged together. “Take care of yourself.”

Moon smiled and then aimed his gaze at the rising slopes ahead.

“You, too, my daughter. You, too.”

But what he thought was,
Please let there be someone out there, so you don’t have to go through this alone
.

CHAPTER FIVE

T
HE ROAR OF
the crowd, the smell of greasepaint and everything covered in shit. All the fun of the fair. While the towering, brightly-lit wine-glass that was Miramas’s famous Theatre of Heaven dominated the stormy horizon, the Big Top drooping in a sodden field a couple of leagues outside the city was another class of venue entirely. Rain hammered down here as it had for hours, battering the already unstable looking canvas and threatening a blow-down, while the muddy footprints of those who had risked life and limb by venturing inside the tent for the night’s performance splashed and popped incessantly, flooded to overfilling.

Among the sideshow stalls, freak cages and calliope music machines of the abandoned midway, pigrats – the usual inhabitants of the field – snuffled up half-eaten mool kebabs and sugarfloss, which they chewed greedily before adding to the mire. Attending to their toilet, they had no interest in the occasional cheers from inside the tent but looked up briefly when, from the other side of a candle-lit stretch of canvas, came the sharp snap of a thong followed by a pained hiss and a word that sounded like “
nyyyyyynnnhg
.” A moment later they scattered, farting and honking, as a shadowy mass stumbled into the canvas, making it bulge out like an oversized balloon animal gone wrong.

The strange shape emitted a rumbling burp and attempted to right itself, stumbling again not once but twice. The pigrats were not to know it but the player in this unusual piece of shadow theatre went by the name of Killiam Slowhand.

And Killiam Slowhand was shit-faced.

The archer was taking another slug from his bottle of twattle when it was snatched from his hand, pouring beer down his bare torso and washing away the glitter he had half-heartedly rubbed on only minutes before. He blinked, and then the sound of the bottle being slammed onto his dressing table made him start.

“Started early again, I see?” Shay Redwood said. The petite, dark-haired Oweilaun woman kept her voice low but it was no less cutting for it. “Or is it that you just haven’t stopped?”

The archer regarded his interrogator with half-focused eyes, wobbling backward slightly. Hands planted firmly on her hips, Shay stared solidly back up at him, though her expression was not so much accusing as concerned.

“The second one,” Slowhand burped after a second. In all their time together he still hadn’t worked out why he couldn’t help but be honest with the woman. “The ‘not having stopped’ bit, I guess.”

“Fark, Slowhand. You know this can’t go on.”

“Can’t see any reason why not.”

“No?” Shay said. She plucked the archer’s quiver from the dressing table and extracted one of the arrows. She used the tip of one to prick the soft flesh of her thumb, which took no pressure at all. “These things aren’t toys.”

Something flared in Slowhand’s head, an old memory, but he kept control of it. “I know that,” he said steadily.

“I’m no toy, either,” Shay responded, unphased. “Slowhand, it’s me out there, in front of your arrows, and the only thing that stops me dying at the hands of a drunk is that what you do comes naturally to you, like breathing. You’re just too good an archer to ever miss.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“
You
. You’re the problem, can’t you see that? Look at you! You’re stagnating here. You jump through the same old hoops every day, not because you enjoy it but because it stops you thinking of anything else.”

“The only thing I’m thinking of is paying my keep.”

“Yeah? That’s not what I hear when you talk in your sleep. Talk of traps and treasure, of long lost secrets. And night after night, without fail... Kali Hooper.”

Slowhand hesitated. “Sorry. It... she... doesn’t mean anything. It was a long time ago.”

“It was a
year
ago, Liam. Only a year. And I think you have unfinished business.”

“Shay, I promise you, I’m not –”

Shay placed a hand on his cheek. “I know you’re not, lover. But clearly you were involved in
something
back then that just isn’t letting you go. Think about it, eh? Maybe it’s time for you – for both of us, if you’d like the company – to find out what.”

“I’d have no idea where to go.”

“Maybe you’ll know when you get there.” She cocked an ear as there was an announcement from the ring. “But for now, Mister Thongar, what say we get this show on the road?”

She went on before him, disappearing through the vorgang with a smile and a flourish that was greeted with rapturous applause. A few moments later, the chanting began. And then the drums. And then the screaming.

The screaming was his cue and – glancing at the bottle but forsaking it – Slowhand pulled in his stomach, put on his best heroic grin and followed his partner into the ring.

There, Shay was already in the grip of the orcs. They weren’t real orcs, of course, but Griffin, Mosk, Thane and the rest of the crew in moth-eaten and less than convincing orc costumes, but that didn’t matter as neither he nor, he was willing to bet, anyone in the audience had ever encountered a real orc in their lives. It was a matter of debate whether the creatures existed on Twilight at all.

The whole act was the grand finale to the show and presented as a set piece in which he, Thongar, had to rescue Shay from a sacrificial ritual orc-estrated, as it were, by the supposed beasts of the mountains. To his surprise, it had become a runaway success. Maybe with that thing – the Hel’ss – hanging in the sky people, despite what the Filth told them, needed to believe they could still cope with the unknown and, in however small a way, he was satisfying that need. Despite the scenario’s pure fiction, it had, ironically, been only a few performances in when he’d realised he’d gladly sacrifice himself in order to rescue Shay for real. Ever since they’d met in that tavern in Scholten – she persuading him to run away to the circus, just for fun and just like kids, that very night – the pair had grown closer and closer, their relationship blossoming until he had begun to think of them as soulmates. He would have been more than happy to forget that he had even
had
a previous life, if it hadn’t been for the dreams.

The dreams.

As he’d had to night after night for months, Slowhand quashed the lingering images of the dreams by throwing himself into his act with gusto. As the crowd cheered him on, he leapt from papier-mâché rock to papier-mâché rock, despatching the monsters who threatened Shay with a dazzling display of bowmanship. As Shay struggled against the bonds on the sacrificial frame built on the highest rock, his arrows thudded into the orcs from all directions, and Griffin and the others made their pratfalls on cue, roaring as they clutched the shafts embedded in the thick padding of their costumes, tumbling to their deaths. That they, as much as Shay, trusted him to deliver his arrows with unwavering accuracy said a lot about the bond he had developed with them all and, as usual as the climax of the act approached, Slowhand was concentrating so much as to not let them down that he had forgotten his dreams completely.

The last of the marauding orcs fell and the climax of the performance arrived. It was the most difficult shot of the evening, one that required him to be static, and he struck a suitably heroic but steadied pose on a rock halfway up the fake mountainside.

In his sights was an orc shaman dancing directly behind Shay, and the arrow he was about to fire was firstly to sever the chain holding Shay’s arms aloft, and then continue to strike the taller shaman in the chest, punching him off the rocks and ‘killing’ him triumphantly.

Slowhand tensed. Despite the gap of only inches between Shay, chain and shaman, it wasn’t the aiming of the arrow that presented problems but the power with which it was delivered. Too little and the chain would not shatter; too much and it would puncture the padding of Thane, his friend. Slowhand’s grip on his bowstring tightened. His eyes narrowed. On the summit of the fake mountainside, Shay winked and smiled.

Her eyes were filled with the same absolute trust when they jerked wide in shock, and then almost instantly glazed over. As Shay slumped on her chains, she did not react at all to the pulse of dark blood that ran down from the centre of her forehead and over the bridge of her nose to drip onto the papier mache rock.

A rumble of unease ran through the audience, and then came deafening silence. All eyes stared at the projectile embedded firmly in the centre of Shay’s forehead, registering part disbelief and part expectation, benumbed by the fact that the shot had been so perfect, so unwavering, so exact, that it couldn’t be a mistake. In other words, it had to be part of the act, and the great Thongar had amazed them again, if only they could work out how.

Slowhand himself simply stood there, Suresight hanging at his legs. The sights and sounds of the ring – that place of smoke and mirrors, of unreality – seemed suddenly painfully loud and vivid. He saw crew and fellow performers move to him from backstage and through the crowd, their movements slowed as if in a dream, cries of shock coming as drawn out drawls. Bent Dez Fagin, Little Jack The Giant, Five Ropes Lucy, none of them could believe what had happened.

Slowhand didn’t know what to think. All he knew was that Shay had trusted him, and had died at his hand. He raised that same appendage, his arrow hand, palm up, before his eyes, and stared at its shaking form as if it were nothing to do with him at all. It took him a second to realise that in his other hand, hanging as limply as Suresight, the arrow remained.

Did it matter? Shay wasn’t to know that, was she? She would have had no time to realise that the projectile that had instantly snuffed her life and thoughts had not been unleashed by him, for there was no reason why she would think there should be another. In one stunned moment his love would have gone to her grave believing, however infinitesimally fleetingly, that he’d failed her and the drink within him had let them both down.

But it hadn’t.
He
hadn’t. The arrow was still in his hand.

Slowly, with a rush of pressure in the ears, the world about him returned to normal. The first thing he heard were the screams from the audience – screaming not because of what had just happened but because they, like his friends, were being manhandled out of their seats and propelled towards the exits. The people doing the manhandling were strangers, but there were a lot of them, and all dressed in black. It wasn’t difficult to guess who they were but, if further proof were needed, the black spheres that moved through the air between them provided it.