Catherine Fisher - The Margrave-crow 4

The Broken Hills

1

When the work of the Makers stopped, Halen fell silent. He answered no one. He climbed far into the hills and built a fearsome castle. He built it in a day and a night, and no one came there but himself. Throughout its dim corridors, there were mirrors.

Book of the Seven Moons

THE SLAP WAS HARD, and when she dragged her head up she tasted blood.

Breathing deeply, she stared at the Watch captain. Fury almost made her quiver. Fury and fear.

“I said, get in line,” he snarled.

Carys stepped back, giving one glance at the old woman who lay collapsed on the verge of the road. The Watch captain turned and prodded the inert body with his boot. When it didn’t move he kneeled and took out a knife.

Carys stiffened.

But all he did was slice the rope that held the woman to the rest of the prisoners.

“Are you just going to leave her there!” Carys snapped.

“She’s no good to us. You there, at the front! Walk!”

The razorhounds snarled and scrabbled at the mesh of their cages, and the small line of prisoners stumbled quickly back into motion, the jerk of the rope tugging Carys on despite her anger. The road was steep, rutted with recent cart-tracks, a great gash along the flank of the mountain, plummeting on the left to a dizzy ravine. All the hot day they’d stumbled up it, with water only once at a stream, hours ago.

Carys sucked her swelling lip. Her hair and clothes were filthy with road-dust and she was almost too tired to think. Only anger kept her going. She clenched the knotted ropes around her hands as if anger was a thing she could hold on to, tight.

Around her waist the second rope slackened, sagging as the weary group closed up, stung by the irritating dartflies that had followed all day in a buzzing cloud.

With the old woman gone, Carys was last. It was a relief not to have to hear that terrible gasping, or have the constant jerk of the rope as the woman stumbled, but the thought of the frail figure lying on the bleak road, without water, a prey to night-cats, was unbearable. Carys cursed herself for talking to the woman, for getting to know her. Her name had been Alys. At one of the pauses she had whispered to Carys that she “had a granddaughter, dear, very like you.”

She looked back. The Watch captain, Quist, was far behind, striding up fast.

“Turn around!” he yelled, and she turned, grim.

They were taking no chances with her. Not now that they knew who she was. Speaking up for the woman had been useless, she’d known that. Before she met Galen she’d never have done it. But before she met Galen she’d never have been in such a mess.

It had been three days since she’d been caught. The patrol had jumped them in seconds. How the Sekoi had gotten away she had no idea, but they’d loosed the razorhounds after it instantly, thin silver beasts streaking into the wood. An hour later their handlers had dragged them back, bloodied. They’d certainly caught something.

The line stopped; she slammed into the prisoner in front. A lanky youth, older than her, pimply and stinking of sweat, one of his teeth black. “Rest,” he gasped, crouching and clutching his side.

Carys didn’t waste breath talking. Instead she watched Quist walk past her to the front. His number was 8472. High. No child from a Watchhouse, but a volunteer, enlisting as an adult. A dangerous, agile man.

The first thing he’d done was have her searched, and he’d found the Watch insignia. Galen had warned her often enough to get rid of them, the small silver discs with her old number, name, hard-earned promotions. But they were still part of her. She hadn’t been able to let them go. Seeing them glint in the sun in Quist’s fingers had been strange; as he’d read them and looked at her curiously she’d felt as if some last protection had been snatched away.

Sitting now on the edge of the road she rubbed sweat from her neck and looked around. The road edge was sheer, plunging down to a valley far below. She couldn’t see over. Behind her was woodland, some squat, dark species; ahead, the road rose along the arduous slopes of the mountains. Where it led she had no idea, but it had seen heavy traffic lately, its surface cracked and worn.

The patrol was an eight-man standard. Three horses and a cart, with the razorhounds’ cage and various food sacks. Ten prisoners left, all roped in line.

Water was being passed back. She stood and grabbed it from the boy’s hand, clutching the dirty jug with both fists, drinking fast, then splashing the last drops on her face.

For a second, he was standing quite close to her. “Don’t worry,” he whispered, grinning slyly at her. “There’s a plan.”

She stared in astonishment. “What?”

“It’s all fixed.” He winked. “I’m in on it. I’ll see you safe, at the castle.”

He was serious.

Carys didn’t know whether to laugh or feel sorry for him. But before she had time to say another word, the jug had been snatched by a Watchman, the rope jerking her to her feet.

“What’s the rush?” she muttered, sullen.

“Orders. To be in before dark.”

“In where?”

But he’d gone, and the line was already moving.

All the hot spring afternoon and into the evening they tramped nonstop, climbing along a narrow track, so treacherous in places that loose rock slid away under their feet, rolled over the edge, and dropped for a long silent second into the distant, crashing branches. The landscape was arid; stunted lemon trees and calarna sprouting from high ravines, the road winding up under natural arches and along the very brinks of drops that made Carys dizzy to look down.

These were the Broken Hills, a shattered, convulsed highland infested with lizards and the scurrying, manyjointed purple scorpions that could kill a man with one sting. The peaks above her had slipped and shifted; it was as if some terrible bolt of the Makers’ lightning had smashed the whole range to pieces centuries before. Perhaps it had. Galen would know.

The road had been repaired. Stumbling around the flank of a vertical cliff, she passed piles of cut stone, great heaps of sand. There must be quarries up some of these side-trails. Away to the west, green foothills still glimmered with late sun, but as the road wound up a riven hillside where all the trees had been hacked and felled, far over the horizon she saw the smokes and vapors of the Unfinished Lands, amazingly close.

And on the last ridge, she saw the castle. It was black, half ruined or half built, some eerie Maker-structure. It was no ordinary Watchtower; the whole thing was more like a fortified hilltop, with immense walls and towering gates, and as the prisoners stumbled on she saw it was crowded with people, all working, hauling stone up scaffolds, dragging great blocks of mined rock, the racket of hammering and chiseling carrying clearly on the mountain air. As Carys gazed up, the curfew-horn sounded; a familiar distant blare from the highest part of the Keep. Abruptly all hammering stopped, the workmen climbing down wearily.

So she was part of a work-gang. If they needed them, the Watch dragged in criminals and outlaws to build their Towers; she seemed to have walked straight into that. Though this place was immense. And secure.

By the time the weary prisoners straggled through the main barbican, dusk had fallen; as they stood to be registered the faint smells of cooking from the shuttered huts and houses filled Carys with a groaning hunger. Behind her the sentinels dragged the heavy wooden gates shut with a hollow clang, then rattled enormous chains across. Under the vaulted arch it was suddenly dark, stinking of marset dung and woodsmoke.