Page 60 of The Book that Broke the World

CHAPTER 26

Arpix

Arpix didn’t know what to do with Clovis’s attention, so he did what he’d done in the past when flustered by Carlotte’s teasing and ignored it. He did not, however, cede the job of tending to her injuries to one of her brothers, or to Salamonda, who would probably have done it better now the stitching part was over. It was something he’d started, and he liked to be thorough. The library had taught him that. Master Logaris had taught him. Though the huge teacher had always said that Arpix had been born with the lesson stamped across his bones.

Clovis hissed. She lay on her back, propped against an earth bank, while he knelt beside her with cloth and bucket.

“Sorry.” Arpix moved the cloth away from the wound. “I was thinking about something else.”

“One of your human girls?” Clovis asked, artlessly.

“A teacher of mine. He died—” Arpix stopped himself. Both of them could reel off a litany of crimes that the other’s kind had perpetrated against those they’d cared for. Arpix wrung the cloth onto the thirsty ground. Perhaps the kind of healing they were both part of now was exactly what they needed if the larger, unseen wounds were ever to close. They would still be scars on their memory, but scars were meant to be lived with.

“Tell me about this weapon.” Clovis watched him, drawing a deep breath in through her nose. She licked one long canine tooth.

“You think there’s more to tell?” It had been three days since the cratalacs. Three days since the discovery that they could call Wentworth. Three days since Evar had recognised the great statue as a woman he had seen once, and they had known half their lives. “We’ve looked for it. You and I have looked for it. Or felt for it in the dark, at least. You’ve seen the boundary stones that mark how far the forbidding reaches.” Arpix had been thinking for four years now about whatever it was that kept the skeer from the plateau. He had no answer. Clovis repeating the question wouldn’t change that.

“I’ve seen that you’re the clever one.” Clovis continued to watch him, her grey eyes capturing some of the sky’s merciless blue. “The other humans listen to you even though you speak the quietest of any of them.”

“Because my throat’s sore with all this growling to you.”

“Cleverness is the key.” Clovis carried on as if he hadn’t spoken. “You just need me to turn you.” Her hand came to rest on his thigh. He frowned at it.

“Are you sure you haven’t started a fever?” Her hand felt hot against his leg. Burning, almost.

“It’s like Evar with this Carlotte of yours. He saw what you couldn’t because he looked from a new angle. You’ve looked at this too long from the same place. The Assistant—your Livira—she taught us about science. I didn’t listen. But your teacher, he gave you both the same lessons. I think you listened. Very hard.”

Arpix covered her hand with his own. He’d meant just to move it politely, but somehow his hand stayed on hers a heartbeat longer than it needed to. Two, three, four heartbeats. He lifted hers and set it on the ground. Her smile was small but victorious.

“Science prompts me to ask a series of structured questions. Investigations that will allow the formation of theories that can be tested. I have some of the questions, but the answers would be too difficult to come by.”

“What sort of questions?” The sun had edged their patch of shadow aside and found them. Clovis continued to study him from hooded eyes.

“Can the skeer cross the boundary? I know they don’t want to, but is it a wall to them, or if a giant picked one up could it be carried through? Once they’re in does the effect vanish, like climbing a wall and getting into a garden? Or does the resistance or compulsion grow stronger? Then there’s—”

“That’s a lot.” Clovis sat up a little more, wincing and pulling the remnants of her armour around her. “You’re going to need a skeer.”

“You’ve spotted the problem.” Arpix nodded. “And even if we were able to overcome one of the things, they come in packs and take their dead with them.”

Clovis shrugged then looked as if she regretted stretching her wound. “So, send your tiny monster.”

“Wentworth?” Arpix hadn’t even considered it. The cat had slaughtered five cratalacs to save Salamonda, and he’d brought them a deer and a boar in the past. Who knew what the limits of his abilities were or how likely he was to do requests... The cratalacs had certainly been a deadly foe, but they had come in single file at very close quarters. To retrieve a single skeer, something far too big for the cat in any event, Wentworth would have to kill every other skeer in its pack and every skeer that answered any cry for reinforcements. That seemed like a tall order.

“You said this Yute of yours sent him for a reason. Why not this reason?”

Arpix looked across the hollow to where Salamonda was weaving bean leaves into storage baskets. He wasn’t entirely sure that Yute really had sent Wentworth. The cat might just have had a soft spot for the woman who’d fed him for so many years.

It was a good time to approach Salamonda. Jost was still down at the mine entrance poking pieces of cratalac around with a stick. The creatures horrified her, but she seemed unable to leave their remains alone. Jost would object to what he was about to do, and perhaps she would be right to, though her objection would not be moral or scientific, just born from fear and from fearing to make any change. The same fear that had paralysed all of them for too long.

He hung his cloth on the side of the bucket and went across to sit beside Salamonda.

“You’ll be wanting Wentworth.” She growled his name the way the canith said it.

“I might,” Arpix agreed. “I only met him a couple of times. I didn’t really pay him much attention, if truth be told. But it’s hard to imagine him as something made rather than something born.”

“The world’s a strange place, right enough.” Salamonda kept up with her deft weaving, the dry leaves threatening to crack and break at every opportunity. She looked up at Arpix, her eyes seeming much brighter now that the sun had burned her face to a nut brown. “What do you need from him?”

Arpix pressed his lips into a narrow line. “When he saved you from the cratalacs, what happened? How did he... do that?”

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