Page 51 of The Book that Broke the World

“You should not have gone after Evar,” Clovis grunted. “You are frail and have no sense of self-preservation.”

“I suppose I should have left you to bleed in the dark too?” Arpix counted himself as slow to anger. Glacial, Carlotte had been fond of saying. But something about this warrior canith was getting under his skin even as her hot breath puffed across his neck.

“Yes,” Clovis snarled. “There’s an order to these things. Secure what can be saved first. Recover the wounded later if they are still a problem.”

Arpix hefted Clovis up higher, trying to compensate for the height difference with Kerrol as they entered the taller tunnels near the entrance. His own snarl was half from the effort of lifting her and half anger. “You are not a problem. And the wounded will always be at the top of any list I write!”

“Well, you shouldn’t be writing any lists, human—”

“Awww, your first fight!” Kerrol snorted and helped his sister towards the daylight.

“We’re not fighting!” Both of them said it together.

Kerrol shrugged and they advanced a few paces before he added, “It seems as if I’m to be the last one to get a pet human. I have my eye on the Meelan, or perhaps the Salamonda. She seems capable and comes with an able guardian.”

—

As soon as they got Clovis outside, Arpix set to checking her injuries.

“This needs to come off.” He indicated the torn leather armour that seemed, on closer inspection, to be made of book covers meticulously sewn together and reinforced with metal bands that turned out to be book hinges.

Clovis snarled. Causing him to snatch his hand back. “If more enemies come—”

“If more enemies come, you’ll be no more use against them in armour than out of it,” Arpix said sternly. “From the amount of bleeding I’d say that you’ve got at least one wound that needs stitching. And if it’s not cleaned it will probably sour and poison your blood.” He frowned at the armour. “It would be better if we could cut this off. I don’t want to move your shoulder.”

The growl in Clovis’s throat was blood-curdling, her eyes narrow and aimed squarely at him. Kerrol leaned over and pulled Clovis’s knife from the sheath on her hip. “Here, use this.”

Arpix glanced from the proffered blade to Clovis’s terrifying scowl. “Are you sure you don’t want to...”

Kerrol shook his head. “I’m good, thanks. She bit me last time I tried to help her.”

Arpix looked around at the others. Normally Salamonda would pitch in to help with something like this, but it seemed that being cornered by half a dozen enraged cratalacs and then watching as Wentworth turned them into a collection of cratalac pieces had been as much gore as the woman could cope with in one day. Jella was looking after her, both of them huddled out of the wind against a tumbledown wall.

“Meelan, could you get me some water? A lot. And some cloth.” Arpix knew the last request would mean trimming some from someone’s clothing. They really had next to nothing, even after the years they’d spent trying to build up their supplies.

Next, Arpix met the challenge of Clovis’s fierce, grey-eyed stare. “Don’t bite me.” He knelt beside her with the knife. “It’s not sanitary.”

He worked methodically, unpicking the armour’s stitching and setting it in the sun for later when he would take their bone needle and try to repair the damage done by cratalac claws. He tried to avoid Clovis’s eyes though he could feel her stare burning on his neck as he worked.

Cover by cover, he exposed her shoulder and followed the wound down towards her ribs. Some of the thick, leather rectangles still bore traces of the original decoration and titles. “Observations on the mating rituals of the apterygiformes,” Arpix translated from Wegian.

“The what?” Clovis panted through her teeth, wincing as he pulled the cover away. The flesh below was torn and sticking to her armour.

“Apterygiformes,” Arpix repeated. “A genus of flightless birds, I believe.”

“You know too much.” She put her head back.

Arpix studied Clovis’s injuries. The cratalac had done a lot of damage. Without the armour it would have torn through her ribs and pierced her lung. Ripped the entire thing out, probably.

Meelan set down a bucket of water and handed Arpix a square of grey cloth. Arpix did his best to clean the cloth then turned to consider the jagged, black-crusted tear that ran from high on Clovis’s shoulder to past her ribcage. She really was magnificently muscled, lithe rather than bulked up like some of the library guards had been. The basic canith body structure didn’t seem that different from his own: proportionately narrower in the chest, a higher and longer ribcage, a barely visible covering of short fur, in Clovis’s case shading from the almost crimson of her mane to something between golden and tan. The lower legs were the main structural difference, the feet elongated and only the toes making contact with the ground. There was a word for that...

“Digitigrade!” He only knew it in his own tongue and then only from an obscure book on anatomy.

“What?” Clovis growled.

Arpix shook his head. “This is going to hurt a bit.” He reached forward with the damp cloth.

“You don’t scare me, human boy.” Clovis showed her teeth.

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