Big Leo bellowed a curse, picking up the man and shaking him. “That message would have been really fucking helpful three weeks ago!”
Tisis put a hand on Big Leo’s arm, and he put the man down, but he continued to breathe heavily, as if on the very point of murderous rage.
It was an act—the warm, kindly Tisis and the murderous brute—but it was surprisingly effective.
“When were you sent?” Tisis asked gently.
“My lady sent me more than a month ago. I, uh, got caught behind enemy lines.”
“Which enemy? Us?” Cruxer demanded.
“Yes?” the man said, pained. But then his eyes became haunted. “There were these huge dogs, but not dogs. Dogs that were more and less than dogs, more and less than men. Dogs like hounds straight from hell. They gave signals to each other like men, searched in grids like disciplined soldiers, and then—I saw them run a man down with speed and tear him apart with a fury and savagery that no snarling dog has ever matched. I saw it from afar, and I ran, and I couldn’ t—I couldn’t . . .”
He could say no more.
He didn’t have to.
It was sometimes easy to lose perspective on what Kip’s army had become. His will-casters called themselves Night Mares. A joke, if a grim one.
But it was no joke to the men and women who fought an armored war dog the size of a horse.
“She messed up,” Tisis said. “She tells us exactly what she means to do? But also without worrying we might take offense at it. Who does that? She doesn’t try to mislead us into hoping she’s still your friend, Kip? Why? Because she thinks the deal itself is clearly good enough. This is the hyperrationality of a superviolet wight lost deep in her color. She’s still there, but she’s not in control anymore. Because if you weighed them on a scale, the power of a dog is nothing compared to the power of a god; she sends a man without considering that phobias are irrational.”
“I dunno that I’d call war-dog-o-phobia irrational,” Ferkudi said. “I’ve seen what those dogs can do.”
“I’d side with Ferk on this—pray to Orholam that never happens again,” Ben-hadad said. “The dog was here, she’s not. A man afraid of both is going to react to his fear of the one that’s closest.”
“Is a goddess ever really absent?” Tisis asked. “You remember that superviolet lux storm last year that was, like, looking for you? She sent that from Orholam alone knows how far away. What might she do now when she’s so much closer?”
“Well,” Ferk said, “so much for that.”
“So much for what?” Kip asked. You never knew what brilliant insight Ferkudi might offer.
“Looks like I’m going to have to change underwear. Again. Third time today.”
Or not offer.
“Third time?” Winsen asked.
“Eh, I’ve been timing exactly how fast I can empty my bladder when it’s totally full. You know, to make marching more efficient—”
“Forget I asked,” Winsen said.
But Ferkudi went on. “See, you scratch a trench parallel to the line of march and have the men relieve themselves in ranks as they reached it. Eliminate bathroom breaks or soiled clothing altogether. I had it down to a count of twelve this morning . . . I thought.”
Tisis was rubbing her face.
“Yeah,” he said to her, “more like a fourteen count.”
“What do we do with this one?” Big Leo asked, rattling his thick fighting chain that was looped around the messenger’s thin neck.
“Bad form to kill a messenger,” Cruxer said.
“He didn’t come as a messenger,” Big Leo said. “We captured him. He didn’t come under a flag of truce, nor openly, nor unarmed. Why should he get covered by those rules? I think he’s more like a spy.”
“I suppose it all depends on how we frame the problem, huh?” Cruxer asked, pensive.
“Liv is gone,” Kip said, mostly to himself.
“In more than one way,” Ben-hadad muttered.
“She’s sailed,” Kip said to the messenger, but mostly thinking aloud. “So we have no mistress to send you back to. And I can’t let you go without risking it costing me lives. You’re a Blood Robe, albeit one the White King would hang as a traitor with that message you’ve told us. Maybe you’d try to bring him back some intelligence valuable enough that you’d hope would make him spare you.”
The man said, “No, I wouldn’t. I swear—”
He stopped as soon as Kip started talking, though. Power means never having to shout to be heard. Kip said, “You’re a man alone with no friends and many enemies, a soldier of a pagan rebel you betrayed, the servant of an absent goddess you failed. And now you’re a problem for me.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Winsen said emotionlessly.
Kip took a deep breath, thinking.
“Wait, wait, wait—” the man said, sinking to his knees, staring at Winsen with horror.
“You don’t get a voice in this,” Big Leo said, his voice a low rumble.
“One last part of the message!” the man said. “Look! This is valuable!”
“Get on with it,” Big Leo said.
Desperate, the messenger talked, tripping over himself. “She said—she said if you could draw them into a fight at, at, at Paedrig’s Field near Apple Grove that you could win. Demolish them. She said she’d activated the Great Mirror there for you. And she said if you made it by . . . hold on, I can remember this. She said you needed to provoke the battle by um, two hundred twelve days after the Festival of Ambrose Ultano.”
Kip squinted. “What the hell, Liv?” It was a minor local festival in Rekton celebrated by little more than the cooking of fruit pies. Obviously, she’d picked the date in order to obscure it from anyone who might get the messenger to talk. Worse, it was a floating date based on the lunar calendar.
“Well, that doesn’t sound like a trap at all,” Winsen said.
“Shut up, Win,” Cruxer said.
“Is that an order, sir?”
“Just shut up.”
After doing the arithmetic in his head, twice, Kip called Ferkudi over and whispered to him for a bit.
“Yep, yep,” Ferkudi said too loudly—the man was utterly guileless. “That’s either tomorrow, or more likely yesterday, depending on how you calculate it. And if we push, and the river is passable all the way—unlikely, right?—but we could get to Apple Grove in . . . two days. More likely three or four.”
“So there’s no way we can get there by tomorrow?” Kip asked.
Ferkudi laughed. “No. Unless you can steal Orholam’s own chariot like Phaethon or make a machina like a skimmer for the skies.”
He’d meant them both as similar impossibilities, but it made Kip think of his father and the condor he’d made. Too bad he’d never told Kip how to construct one. Nor did Kip have his father’s mind of how to invent things. Besides, the condor had needed a vast body of water to build up the requisite speed to glide. Kip didn’t have that, either.
Low curses were muttered all around. No one trusted Aliviana Danavis, but if she was on their side, she’d just told them it was too late for them to win.