The Stone in the Skull by Elizabeth Bear

Author:Elizabeth Bear
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

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Druja’s brother was named Prasana, and whatever strength had sustained him through scrambling into the ice-boat had apparently been his last. He had wedged himself well into the ice-boat’s bilges, and then lapsed entirely into unconsciousness from which he could not be roused. If the thin, ragged sound of his breathing had not echoed, amplified by the wooden hollow, they might have all assumed he was dead.

The Gage was strongest, but too large for the confined space. So, when the caravan was safely beyond sight of the border, the Dead Man and one of the acrobat Ritu’s slender, athletic grown sons clambered down into the bilges to attempt to retrieve him.

The space between the hold and the hull was narrow and stank of wet wood and mildew, two of the desert-bred Dead Man’s least favorite scents. The spores made him sneeze repeatedly despite the protection of his veil. The wood was slimy under his hands. The curve of the hull bent his spine as he slithered through the trapdoor. When he and Ritu’s son, who was named Amruth, finally managed to get their hands on the well-concealed alleged assassin, they had to drag him out by his ankles, far less gently than the Dead Man thought salutary to someone whose moaning and muttering could not quite be dignified with the description “consciousness.”

“Like serving a breech birth,” Amruth muttered as they maneuvered Prasana’s head around an obstruction.

“I was thinking it was like getting a terrified kitten out of a privy hole,” the Dead Man admitted.

Amruth laughed easily, leaving the Dead Man comforted, and wary of his own desire to find in this young man a friend.

They were still probably more gentle than the Dead Man, in his irritation, would have preferred if they had been handling a healthy man. But he could be tender to the wounded, despite what those who maligned his profession might think of him, and he in his own turn had spent enough time in hiding and in flight to allow a certain sympathy in leavening of his choler.

So they got the man out, bruising and scraping him and bruising and scraping themselves, and Lady Golbahar insisted on the peculiar extent of charity to offering him her “cabin,” as everyone referred to her sheet-delinated emergency boudoir. “We’re still flying the plague flags,” she insisted. “If they come after us, he’ll do for a sick man, don’t you suppose?”

The Dead Man grunted and went off to clean himself, leaving the lady and her small entourage contentedly walking beside the wallowing ice-boats. He had glanced at a map that evening, and seen the curve of the Sarathai bending close again. They would, he supposed, be back in the river soon, and picking up pace—as soon as they reached the trade town where Druja meant to sell off the current group of oxen. They were getting too far south for these hairy ones, anyway: even in the intermittent rain, the beasts were suffering visible distress from the heat. Best to

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