Page 35

What had really kept them from death that first winter, though, had been what they’d come to call “Salamonda’s little helper.” Nobody ever saw their hidden benefactor but the carcasses of rats, rabbits, even wild boar, and once a deer started to be discovered around the dig site, and it seemed that almost always Salamonda was the one to find them. To deepen what was already a deep mystery, it was very hard to believe that any boar or—even less likely—any deer dwelt within several days’ march of their position. Yet the blood on the bodies was still fairly fresh, and some were even warm. The animals appeared to have met their death by way of a broken neck with some degree of laceration to the flesh around their throats or napes.

Arpix took advantage of his time alone with Clovis to practise his canith. The canith had many languages of course, but the one Clovis and her kin spoke was common on the western side of the continent.

Clovis proved taciturn to start with, offering a snarl or a snort by way of answer as often as a word or two. But her hostility did seem to mellow, a fact that Arpix attributed less to his charming personality and more to her discovery that the first human she’d seen, Livira—whom she had immediately tried to kill—had actually been present almost her whole life as part of the assistant who had raised her.

Clovis’s exploration was aimed at uncovering the source of the city’s protection, with the unspoken promise that she would steal it from them. In addition, the survey served to educate her regarding the terrain on which she might have to fight, a basic component on any military checklist. Unfortunately for her, because they had such limited reserves of fuel, all of it rather smoky, the survey had to be conducted mainly in the dark.

In the parts of the complex where some whisper of daylight reached in through fissures or reflection, it turned out that human night vision was better than that of the canith. Which left Clovis having to hold on to Arpix’s arm, her head bent to his shoulder since most of the tunnels required even him to bend double.

Out of the wind and in such close quarters, Arpix became familiar with the scent of unwashed canith. It was a strong smell close up, but not, Arpix decided, particularly unpleasant. A musty scent that made him tingle.

He was under no illusions that standing in the rain, on the handful of occasions each year that there was rain, had left him in any way close to sweet-smelling, and he found himself hoping that his unwashed stench wasn’t too foul in the famously sensitive nostrils of the canith. Clovis in particular, since she only had to dip her head a few inches more to bite him.

When Arpix and the others had first explored the passages, Meelan had joked that the digging seemed to have been done by dwarfs. Arpix found the place oppressive. The darkness always seemed to hide an enduring sadness, and despite the fact that he had never counted himself the sort to attribute emotions to places or things, Arpix was unable to shake the feeling.

“This is the end.” Arpix patted his hands across the rough wall in front of him. “I think there’s one more side tunnel back on the left. It leads to an intact chamber of the old city but anything it held was scavenged long ago, and the exits are blocked.”

“Take me there,” Clovis growled.

“Your mother never told you you get more flies with honey?”

“I don’t want flies,” Clovis said.

“Oh, it’s not about wanting—”

“And I don’t remember much about my mother except that humans slaughtered her.” Clovis’s growl grew softer but somehow more dangerous in the dark. The fine hairs covering her cheek tickled briefly against Arpix’s ear.

“My mother and father, my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins were almost certainly killed when the canith invaded and the library burned.” Arpix had never truly taken their deaths onboard. He had left his family home to come to the library, and although he could walk there from the library door in half an hour, he had felt as apart from them as if he inhabited some distant island, isolated by overwork and by experiences they couldn’t share. Even so, he had spent a slightly awkward evening with his parents once a month, all of them revisiting the same old topics for lack of overlap in their current lives. “I haven’t mourned them.” He admitted this for the first time to the darkness and a stranger who had nearly strangled him. “I don’t know how to.”

“You should cry their loss to the moons and vow revenge,” Clovis answered.

“Revenge on whom?”

Clovis made no answer.

“On the next canith I see?” Arpix asked. “On the ones I see running from the skeer? Should I have doused the light and left you to it?”

“You should still howl for them, loud enough for the moons to hear.”

Arpix felt that perhaps he should, but could only offer, “It’s not our way.” He meant it wasn’t his way. Salamonda had wailed for her lost ones, no room for shame in her grief. Arpix felt somehow lessened by the fact that his own mourning had been unable to step over such social constraints even in this forsaken wilderness. Instead, it ached inside him, along with the regret that he’d never been able to tell his quiet and reserved mother or his quiet and reserved father that their quiet and reserved son had loved them very much in his own strange way.

Clovis sniffed the air, or perhaps his neck, close enough to make Arpix shiver. “You should howl for them.” Some gentleness in her tone made him imagine she might have intuited the depth of his emotion by scent alone.

She moved away.

“You’re going?”

“I know the path back.”

“I’ll come with you,” Arpix said.

“You should stay.” Clovis’s growl became more distant. “To not speak to the moons is to poison yourself from within. You should stay.”

“I...”

Almost beyond hearing she spoke again. “Thank you for the light.”

... four grains of arsenic, two of alum, and three peppercorns. Grind and mix with water gathered in an old shoe. The resultant paste should be applied to the affected area.