“I don’t feel no kindness towards you,” I told her. “Why should I? You fired on us with no warning and killed three of ours. If I could get them back by sticking a knife in you, you’d be bleeding even now.”
Sil Hawk sneered. “Go on, if you’ve a mind to. You’ve put me underground. Shut me in a hole and turned the key. Since I’m buried, I might as well be dead.”
“The Underhold is the onliest place we had to shut you in. Most of our houses don’t even have locks on the door. But I’ll see what can be done to move you.”
“I asked to be shriven. You’ve not sent no priest to me.”
“We don’t know what shriven is. Or what a priest might be.”
Sil Hawk bared her teeth and made a harsh sound in her throat. I think she would have spit, only her mouth was too dry. “Godless bastards,” she said. “I’m fallen in with shunned men that don’t know their saviour’s face.”
I took out the database, that Perliu had lent to me for the questioning. I saw how Jarter and Shirew stiffened when they saw it – Rampart Remember’s name-tech. Not too long since, I had been beaten and dragged before the Count and Seal for touching it. Now it was a part of my story, which was getting bigger all the time. Rampart Fire, Rampart Remember, Rampart Challenger, Rampart What-might-be-next?
“What’s a priest?” I asked the database.
“It’s a person who’s been trained to carry out religious duties,” the database said. “Someone who knows all the relevant rules and rituals, and can lead a service.” Sil stared at the little sliver of black metal through narrowed eyes.
“That belongs to the Peacemaker,” she said.
“He’ll get it if he can take it from us. Them that pray in Mythen Rood pray mostly in their own houses, or their friends’ houses. I guess they take turns at being priests, if priests is needed. The saviour you was speaking of, is that Dandrake or the dead god?”
“Dandrake. The dead god was just his messenger.”
“I’ve heard the same thing said the other way around,” Jon said.
Sil Hawk only stared and flexed her tied-up arms again.
“It’s hard,” I said, trying once more, “to be alone among strangers. To see only them that hate you, or else feel nothing for you at all, and yet have got power over you.” I was thinking of the time, not long before, when it was me that was sitting down in the Underhold while the Count and Seal decided whether I should live or die. Jarter Shepherd, that was now watching Hawk so close and would put her down quick as a needle if she laid a hand on me, had been one who called the loudest for me to hang.
“You got no power over me,” Sil Hawk said. “Only two has got that – Dandrake, that shields my soul, and the Peacemaker, that took my oath. A fuck and a fart on you and all yours. I’ll watch you burn.”
“Only if you start eating again,” I said. “Otherwise I’ll watch you starve.” She made no answer to that. I nodded to Jon, who reached into a sack at his feet and took out what was in it. Jarter and Shirew let out a held-in breath when they saw, though they already knew what was there. It was the Half-Ax rifle, a thing like Rampart Arrow’s bolt gun except that it was longer than a man’s arm. Jon laid it on the floor in front of Sil Hawk. Then he reached into the sack again and took out the scatter-gun, which he set next to the rifle.
“These are your weapons, Sil Hawk,” he said. “Taken from your people in the fight at Calder’s ford. Can you show us how to use them?”
I kept my face as still and calm as I could at those words. It was a dangerous question Jon was asking. In Mythen Rood, tech only woke and worked for Ramparts. That was what made you a Rampart, and it was believed by all and some that you either were one or you were not. The tech reached out to something that was inside you, and if it didn’t find what it needed, it would not wake. That was a lie – the tech worked for anyone it was told to work for – but it was a lie that had a lot of things leaning on it. This was not a good time to snatch it away.
But the rifle and the scatter-gun were Half-Ax tech, and Half-Ax was a strange and distant place – twenty miles or more on a good road, if there were any good roads left. You couldn’t expect Half-Ax tech to work like Mythen Rood tech, or Half-Ax Ramparts to be the same as ours.
Jon picked his words carefully, bearing all these lies and half-truths in mind. “This tech of yours is strange to us. We know there’s lots of your fighters can use it. We seen that our own selves. If you tell us how to make it wake for us, we’ll ask the Count and Seal to vote on letting you go. And we’ll give our voices in your favour, which will carry others.”
“The righteous need no shield but god,” Sil Hawk said.
“Then you got nothing to fear by showing us,” I said.
Sil Hawk twisted her head to the left, and then to the right, like her neck had got a crick in it, and then came back to staring at us – a stare that spoke only coldness and contempt. “I’m not afraid,” she said. “It’s you should be afraid. The Peacemaker will come for you, and he won’t forgive. Everything you think is yours is only borrowed from him. He wants it back.”
I saw there was no profit to be had in talking longer. I signed to Jarter and she came forward.
“Take her back down, Jarter,” I said, “if you don’t mind.”
“And bring the boy up?”
“Please.”
After Jarter and Shirew took Sil Hawk away, I got up and walked around a little to take the cramp out of my legs. My heavy belly made my back ache like a hot poker was pressed to it if I sat still for too long.
“I don’t think either of the two of them will talk to us,” Jon said. “They’ll hang first. And my aunt Fer is already measuring the rope.”
“We’ve got to go about it a better way then,” I said.
“What way would that be?”
I didn’t have an answer to that, but I wasn’t obliged to give one just then for Jarter came back with the other prisoner. His hands were tied, like Sil Hawk’s had been, behind his back. He was dazzled by the daylight and weak from days of sitting in the dark, but he gave us the best he could do by way of a glare. And when Jarter tried to put him in the chair, he pulled free of her and said he would stand.
He was a strange sight. Men of Half-Ax wore their hair different from us, letting it hang long on the one side and shaving their scalp on the other. They decorated it too. Morrez had rings and beads and braids in his, all in bright and gaudy colours like streamers at a Summer-dance. He was of middling height, but pulled himself up as tall as he could. His armour of stiff leather was torn and bloodied, but he had refused to take it off.
He was so scared he was like to piss his breeks right there in front of us – and trying so hard to hide it that his scowl was like a devil in a story.
“Are you well, Morrez?” I asked him.
“I didn’t come here to answer your damn questions,” he said. I think he had already decided to say it, but meant it for some serious matter like how many fighters Half-Ax had. Now he had wasted it on a pleasantry, and his face fell a little.
“We’d like you to be comfortable,” I said. “So far as that’s possible.”