I closed my eyes and let the darkness fall, dragging me down with it.
I woke to a hand roughly shaking my shoulder and to a different shade of gloom, this one lit by the last dying embers of our fire. My eyes ached with fatigue; my mouth felt like it had been salted and left to dry for a week. It seemed a preposterous act of cruelty that anyone should have dragged me out of sleep, even such muddled and comfortless sleep as mine had been. I registered Navare to my left — it was he who was manhandling my shoulder — and when I tried to look away, realised Estrada was kneeling to my other side.
“Are they attacking?” I mumbled. It seemed the least alarming explanation of why those two should by hemming me in like hungry vultures.
“Not yet,” Navare said, “but it’s only a matter of time.”
“Then what?” I racked my tired brain for a reason anyone would wake me before dawn that didn’t involve imminent death. “Do you want me to collect more firewood?” I tried.
“We have a mission for you, Damasco,” Estrada said. “I won’t pretend it’s not dangerous… but it’s a better chance at surviving than anyone else has.”
I swung my head in her direction, took a moment to let my eyes focus. It was maybe an hour before sunrise, I realised, the light already beginning to turn just faintly. “A mission?” I repeated, for want of anything useful or intelligent to say.
Estrada’s face was grimly set. I suspected that whatever she was about to ask, however arduous the task she had in mind, she expected to be demanding far more of better men that me before this day was done. “You and Saltlick climb out,” she said. “You follow the coastline north. Once you reach Kalyxis’s camp, you try and persuade her to send help for us. There’s a chance we can hold out for a couple of days; a boat could be back here before then. But whether or not she’ll do that, you have to get aid for Altapasaeda… before it’s too late.”
A dozen things had gone through my mind as Estrada spoke, and half of them had almost made it to my lips. It was all I could do not to point out what a weight of responsibility this was to heap on the shoulders of one poor, mostly-retired thief and his wounded giant friend: the lives of everyone around me and the fate of a city and its people, possibly all of the Castoval.
Then there was the most obvious question: why me? Yet I’d guessed the answer to that one almost before I’d thought to ask it. I was no fighter. Neither, for all his strength, was Saltlick. When push came to shove and shove came to swordplay, we’d be more of a hindrance than a help. This way at least we stood a tiny chance of being useful. In any case, the greatest likelihood was that we’d plummet to our deaths, adding our corpses to the makeshift defences, and that too would be usefulness of a sort.
There was one more thought, though — and if it was hardest to ignore, it was the easiest not to give voice to.
Because Estrada’s plan had occurred to me too, as I’d drifted fitfully in and out of sleep. It had started when I’d seen the netting strung on the rocks, so reminiscent of the rider’s harness Saltlick had worn when I first met him, and had gained form through the long night. If Estrada hadn’t suggested it, I would have myself.
And, though I couldn’t have said why, I’d never felt more guilty for anything in my life. It was such a powerful torrent of emotion that I almost declined — almost suggested that she, or Navare, or anyone go in my place, almost said that I’d sooner stay and fight and die so that someone other than me could take this slender chance at safety.
I didn’t, though. Of course I didn’t.
What I actually said was, “Fine. How soon can we leave?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Any idea that I might be getting the safe or painless option lasted fully as long as it took Alvantes’s men to prepare the harness Saltlick would be wearing.
Its essential elements were gathered in a predawn raid on the beach by three of Navare’s men: the net, some straggling lengths of rope and a broad timber plank that had recently been part of our boat’s flank. The remaining components, mostly metal rings and leather straps, were pillaged from a pair of bags and a torn brigandine that had been rescued during our unexpected landing.
The end result, prepared hastily without proper tools or any great skill, was a pale imitation of the elaborate harnesses that Moaradrid’s army had saddled the giants with. Wearing it with clear discomfort, Saltlick looked dejected and somehow less giant than usual. I felt sorry for him — but his humiliation was hardly the worst of it. No, the worst part was that I’d be hanging off that junk pile while Saltlick attempted his death-defying climb.
“This is a terrible idea,” I pointed out, trying my best to make the observation sound constructive.
“It is,” agreed Estrada. “Absolutely. If you have any better suggestions, I’ll be glad to entertain them.”
“Well… I was thinking. On his back, Saltlick might make a serviceable raft.”
“And you might make serviceable ammunition for a catapult,” said Estrada, “but we haven’t a catapult, Easie, and we haven’t any more time to waste. If you’re going to do this then please, do it now, while there’s still a chance you’ll make it back in time to help us.”
I looked up at the rugged cliff side, and then over Estrada’s shoulder, through a gap in the boulders, to where the second boat waited on the water’s edge, black as a beetle in the scant light before sunrise. “All right,” I said, “I’m going. I just wanted to make my position clear. That way, when Saltlick falls off and we crush you all, you won’t waste your last breath blaming me.”
Estrada reached out suddenly, wrapped her hand around my forearm and pressed her wrist against my own, in something between a handshake and an embrace. “Tell yourself what you like, Easie. I know you can be brave when you need to be. I’m asking you to do this because I trust you to do it.”
For a moment, my heart swelled. Then I remembered who I was talking to. Speeches were Estrada’s weapon of choice, and self-delusion had also proved high on her list of talents. “Let’s hope you’re right,” I said, pulling my arm free, “because I don’t much like the idea of walking home.”
Of everything, it was the wind that bothered me the most.
I’d hardly noticed it on the beach, where the boulder wall had sheltered us; but halfway between ground and summit, hanging from a giant, it was harder to ignore. A gale howled and whistled over the cliff face, and the gully we were in seemed particularly to provoke it, as though the rock had crumbled in that particular place just to frustrate it. Currents whipped at the netting I clung to, made it quiver like unsettled water. Breezes plucked at my clothing — and if I hadn’t already felt like a target for those two crossbows I knew were somewhere below, their strings undoubtedly dry by now, then my cloak whirling behind me would surely have done it.
All told, however, wind-chilled, scared and uncomfortable though I was, it was safe to say that I had it easy. Saltlick was the one with the truly demanding part to play — and it was only a shame that my survival relied so completely on his.
If the sloping gully was shallower than the cliffs to either side, it was still a difficult ascent; difficult, that is, for an uninjured human. I knew Saltlick was agile. I knew he could climb, for I’d seen him do it. But though the surface was uneven, rare was the gap or ledge that was wide enough for a giant’s hands. In their absence, he was forced to rely on brute strength — and from the caution with which he moved, from the way he kept off his hurt leg, I could tell that was a commodity he had far less of than usual.
The last thing he needed was the weight of the harness, or the weight of me for that matter. I could tell he was suffering. And the more he suffered, the more he slowed; the slower he went, the harder it became. The pain coming off him was almost tangible, as though it were radiating through strained muscles, steaming from his pores.