Dust of Dreams

Eighth—besides, Faradan Sort was, and she doesn’t know you. I asked. So, that leaves the Thirteenth. Which is rather . . . interesting. You served under Greymane—’
    ‘I’m afraid you got it all wrong,’ Ruthan Gudd cut in. ‘I came in on a transfer from Nok’s fleet, Skanarow. Wasn’t even a marine—’
    ‘Which ship did you serve on?’
    ‘The
Dhenrabi
—’
    ‘Which sank off the Strike Bight—’
    ‘Aye—’
    ‘About eighty years ago.’
    He eyed her for a long moment. ‘Now, that kind of recall verges on the obsessive, don’t you think?’
    ‘As opposed to pathological lying, Captain?’
    ‘That was the first
Dhenrabi.
The second one slammed into the Wall at five knots. Of the two hundred and seventy-two on board, five of us were dragged out by the Stormguard.’
    ‘You stood the Wall?’
    ‘No, I was handed over in a prisoner exchange.’
    ‘Into the Thirteenth?’
    ‘Straight back to the fleet, Skanarow. We’d managed to capture four Mare triremes loaded with volunteers for the Wall—aye, hard to believe anyone would volunteer for that. In any case, the Stormguard were desperate for the new blood. So, you can put all your suspicions to rest, Captain. My history is dull and uneventful and far from heroic. Some mysteries, Skanarow, aren’t worth knowing.’
    ‘All sounds very convincing, I’ll grant you that.’
    ‘But?’
    She gave him another bright smile, and this one he saw. ‘I still think you’re a liar.’
    He pushed himself away from the railing. ‘Lots of rats on these barges, I’ve noticed.’
    ‘We could go hunting.’
    Ruthan Gudd paused, combed his beard, and then shrugged. ‘Hardly worth the trouble, I should think.’
    When he walked off, the Kanese woman hesitated, and then followed.
     
    ‘Gods below,’ Bottle muttered, ‘everyone’s getting it this night.’ He felt a stab somewhere deep within him, an old, familiar one. He’d not been the kind of man that women chased down. He’d had friends who rolled from one bed to the next, every one of those beds soft and warm. He’d had no such fortune. The irony of the thing that visited him in his dreams was that much sharper, in how it mocked the truths of his life.
    Not that she’d been appearing of late, not for a month. Maybe she’d grown tired of him. Maybe she’d taken all she needed, whatever that was. But those last few times had been frightening in their desperation, the fear in her unhuman eyes. He’d awaken to the stench of grass fires on the savannah, the sting of smoke in his eyes and the thunder of fleeing herds ringing in his skull. Sickened by the overwhelming sense of dislocation, he would lie shivering beneath his threadbare blankets like a fevered child.
    A month of peace, but why then did her absence fill him with foreboding?
    The barge opposite had slipped ahead, riding some vagary of the current, and he could now see the eastern shore of the river. A low bank of boulders and reeds and beyond that rolling plains lit a luminous green by the jade slashes in the southern sky. Those grasslands should have been teeming with wildlife. Instead, they were empty.
    This continent felt older than Quon Tali, older than Seven Cities. It was a land that had been fed on for too long.
    On the western shore, farmland formed narrow strips with one end reachingdown to the river and the other, a third of a league inland, debouching on to the network of roads crisscrossing the region. Without these farms, the Letherii would starve. Yet Bottle was troubled by the dilapidated condition of many of the homesteads, the sagging barns and weed-ringed silos. Not a single stand of trees remained; even the stumps had been pulled from the withered earth. The alder and aspen windbreaks surrounding the farm buildings looked skeletal, not parched but perhaps diseased. Broad fans of topsoil formed muddy islands just beyond drainage channels, making that side of the river treacherous. The rich earth was drifting away.
    Better indeed, then, to be facing the eastern shoreline, desolate as it was.
    Some soldier had been making the circuit, pacing the barge as if it was a cage, and he’d heard the footsteps pass behind him twice since he’d first settled at the railing. This time, those boots came opposite him, hesitated, and then clumped closer.
    A midnight-skinned woman arrived on his left, setting hands down on the rail.
    Bottle searched frantically for her name, gave up and sighed. ‘You’re one of those Badan