“I take it you and your-mmm. . brother-aren’t close?”
“Son of a bitch.” I shot the Knight a baffled look. “Since when do ogrilloi get married?”
“I’m sure I cannot say. Some new Ankhanan silliness, I’d wager.” The Knight inclined his head in a sketch of a bow. “With apologies in advance for any offense, it’s well known that Ankhanans are mad.”
“Yeah.” I waved at the trusties. “All right. Open the lid. I’m going in.”
The Knight inclined his head an inch farther. “Now?”
“Unless you’re enjoying the show.”
“Erm. Please, Freeman. As you will.”
“Yeah, me neither.” I leaned over the grille. “Orbek!”
Ogrillo eyes popped open, met mine, and bugged wide. “You.”
“Me. Get off her. And for shit’s sake put your pants on.”
A long stare, fading from angry to mournful, eventually turned into a shrug. The young ogrillo’s beer-barrel chest swelled and sank: a resigned sigh. “Might as well. One big fuck-me bucket of icewater, you are.”
“I’d say I was sorry if I, y’know, was.”
“Yeah.” He grinned back his lips to expose the ivory curve of his tusks. “Shoulda figured you’d show up, little brother.”
“Yeah. You shoulda.”
The Knight murmured, “He doesn’t seem entirely happy to see you.” I shrugged. “I’m used to it.”
Going down the ladder made my head hurt worse. The gaslight from outside reached only halfway down, and the gloom below had a reddish tinge. The stone walls of the pit were gray-green with old damp. The drizzle had slackened again, but the iron grille condensed moisture from the thick foggy air; every second or two I’d get a plash from fat rusty raindrops.
The cover of the shit bucket standing in the corner didn’t quite fit, but that stink drowned in the acid reek of unwashed ogrillo: a chewy funk of sweat and pheromones and animal sex. By the time the trusties had withdrawn the siege ladder and clanged the grille back into place over his head, I was half blind with pain. I sagged against a slimy wall and tried to sort through the thousands of things I probably shouldn’t say.
Orbek was still lacing up the side of his breeches. He’d let his bristly spine ruff grow: he now had a reddish Trojan-helmet brush sticking straight up from his crest ridge. He’d gained weight, too: massive curves of new muscle rippled under the grey skin of his bare chest and shoulders, though he had still another five years or so before he’d hit full mature size.
Not much chance of that now.
When we’d met, in the Ankhanan Donjon, Orbek had been only seventeen. Three years? Was that all? Christ, we’d been through a lot since then.
I had to say something. I thought about seeing Orbek off at the Palatine station three months ago. On his way home, he’d said. Back to the Warrens for a while. Look up old friends. Take a vacation.
Visit family.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in Ankhana?”
The young ogrillo pulled his side laces tight and tied them off. “Aren’t you supposed to be dead?”
“I’d have a wiseass answer for that if my head didn’t hurt so bad.” I gazed up into the green-glowing drizzle through the grille. “I have this dream, y’know?More like a fantasy. That once, just once, somebody I care about is in trouble, and when I show up to help, they’re actually happy to see me.”
“That why you’re here?” Orbek’s voice was dark as coffee. “To help?”
Drizzle condensed to rain and dropped from the grille into the silence between us. The fist in my head thumped the inside of my skull once. And again.
I sighed. “Yeah, well, it’s a dream I have. That’s all.”
Orbek spat into his hands and slickened his spine ruff; it sprang back to vertical, wet and gleaming. “Pull up a floor, hey? Don’t look so good, little brother. Better sit before you fall.”
In those yellow eyes was a wariness that could instantly trip hostile; this somehow made everything easier. I can always fall back on being an asshole.
I squinted at the ogrillo bitch. “Kinda old for you, isn’t she?”
The bitch had slagged her way over to a bundle of soggy blankets that seemed to be the pit’s closest thing to a bed, and she lay on them now, watching incuriously, one big-knuckled hand rubbing idly between her legs. “Call her Kaiggez,” Orbek said softly. “I’d introduce you, but I dunno who you are today.”
I could feel the Knight Attendant watching through the dripping grille above. I nodded to the bitch. “Dominic Shade. Don’t get up. I don’t like hugs and there’s no fucking way I’m gonna shake that hand.” Her expression was unreadable. “Korloggil nas paggarnik, paggtakkunni? ” she said softly. “Perrlag Nazutakkaarik rint diz Etk Perrog’k?”The wet trickle down my spine got colder. I do know a few words of Etk Dag, nowadays. One of them is Nazutakkaarik. It’s a nickname. A title. The Black Knives had called me that. A few of them. Toward the end. When only a few were left.
I shifted my weight, sliding my back along the wall toward the corner. “He told you who I am.”
Orbek smirked around his tusks. “She don’t talk Westerling, little brother. Says she’s happy to meet her brother-in-law.”
“Brother-in-law my ass.” A creeping flush of anger drove off some of the chill. I squeezed my voice down to a blurred snarl, mindful of ears above. “What did she really say? ‘Tell the Skinwalker he’s welcome in the Boedecken’?”
“Hnh.” Orbek’s smirk never flickered. “We don’t call it Boedecken. We call it Our Place.”
“You got a hell of an attitude for somebody who’s gonna die tomorrow.”
“Maybe I should snivel like a human, hey? That make you happy? Because you being happy, that’s what I live for.”
“I didn’t come all this way to be fucked with, big dog.”
“Rather fuck with her, little brother.” The young ogrillo spread hands the size of frying pans. “Wanna watch some more?”
“Oh, sure. Like that horse cock of yours won’t give me nightmares already.” I shook my head. “You got nothing better to talk about than the old days? About the-what do you call it? The Horror?”
“Talk? Haven’t been talking.” White flame glowed in the back of his eyes: nighthunter retinas catching and concentrating the dim gaslight that reflected down off the rain-shined walls. “Been listening.”
“Uh.” Like any sucker punch, it didn’t really hurt. But it rocked me. It knocked me to pieces and stirred up the chunks.
Orbek lowered himself to the blankets beside her, his back against the wall, one huge arm curling protectively around her shoulders. She snuggled down into his lap and kissed the inside of his forearm.
He twitched his tusks. “Back then, she’s terkullik. Creche-maid. First bred and nursing. See this?” With his free hand, he stroked a rumpled sheet of black scar that spread up her left thigh to her flank. Where her left hind dug should have been was only a dark knot. “Know where she gets it?”
“I can guess.”
“Don’t have to. She gets it carrying pups out of the fire, little brother. You know which fire. Dead pups.”
The light in the back of his eyes shimmered like moonlit ice. “Her dead pups.”
She reached up and caressed his arm, drawing it around her face. Her thick purple tongue oozed out and licked fog-beads from the stump of his fighting claw. Her gaze held no anger. No hostility. Only a fiercely concentrated watchfulness: one predator staring down another.
Over the body of our prey.
Those stirred-up chunks suddenly clicked together into a new shape. “Oh,” I said. “I get it now.”
“Do you?”
“Sure. Got yourself a Black Knife bitch.” I lowered myself into a somewhat hip-creaking version of an ogrillo squat. “She’s up the pipe, huh?”
His tusk-display went fierce. “I’m only half eligible.”
“How many? You know yet?”
“Four. We go to a norulaggik for a sniffie before I get bagged. She says three bucks and a bitch.”