Eliar’s dagger around. She’s a total savage, and she’s the ruler of Osthos now.’
‘A woman?’ That startled Althalus.
‘She’s no ordinary woman, Althalus. That one’s made out of steel. She was the Aryo’s only child, so they’re probably all bowing to her and calling her “Arya Andine”. If Eliar’s lucky, she just had him killed outright. I sort of doubt that, though. More probably, she’s been carving pieces off him with his own knife and making him watch while she eats them. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear that she’s trying to come up with a way to cut out his heart so fast that he’d still be alive long enough to watch her eat it right in front of his face. Stay away from that one, Althalus. I’d advise you to give her forty or fifty years to cool down before you go anywhere near her.’
‘Why should we care if she kills him, Em?’ Althalus asked. ‘It’s the Knife we want, not some half-grown little boy from Arum.’
‘When are you going to learn to look beyond the end of your nose, Althalus?’ Her tone was a bit snippy, and there was enough condescension in it to be offensive.
‘That’s about enough of that, Em,’ he told her crisply.
‘Sorry, pet,’ she apologized. ‘That was a little nasty, wasn’t it? What I’m getting at is that everything is connected. Nothing happens in isolation. Eliar’s probably some crude, unschooled barbarian from the back country of Arum, but he did pick up that Knife back in Albron’s arms-room. It might have been a whim, but we can’t be sure of that until we test him. If he can’t read what’s written on the blade, we’ll pat him on the head and tell him to run along home. If he can read it, though, he’ll have to come with us.’
‘What if he’s like I was before I came to the House? I couldn’t even read my own name back then.’
‘I noticed. It won’t matter whether he can read or not. If he happens to be one of the selected ones, he’ll know what the writing means.’
‘How will we know if he’s got it right?’
‘We’ll know, pet. Believe me, we’ll know.’
‘Why don’t you enlighten me? Tell me what the word on the blade is.’
‘It varies. It’ll mean something different to each person who reads it.’
‘Emmy, that doesn’t make any sense at all. A word’s a word, isn’t it? It’s supposed to have one specific meaning.’
‘Does the word “home” have a specific meaning?’
‘Of course it does. It means the place where a man lives – or maybe the place he originally came from.’
‘Then it has a different meaning for each person, doesn’t it?’
He frowned.
‘Don’t beat yourself over the head with it, pet. The word that’s carved into the Knife-blade is a command, and it tells each one of the people we have to locate to do something different.’
‘It can’t just be one word, then.’
‘I didn’t say that it was. Each reader will see it differently.’
‘It changes, then?’
‘No. It’s permanent. The writing stays the same. It’s the reading that changes.’
‘You’re starting to give me a headache, Em.’
‘Don’t brood about it, Althie. It’ll make more sense to you once we get the Knife. Our problem right now is getting the Knife – and Eliar – away from Andine.’
‘I think I’ve already got the answer to that one, Em. I’ll just buy them from her.’
‘Buy?’
‘Pay her to give them to me.’
Althalus, Eliar’s a person. You can’t buy people.’
‘You’re wrong about that, Em. Eliar’s a captured soldier, and that means that he’s a slave now.’
‘That’s disgusting!’
‘Of course it is, but that’s the way things are. I’ll have to rob a few rich people to get enough gold to buy Eliar and the Knife. If Arya Andine’s as dead-set on butchering Eliar as Sergeant Khalor seems to think she is, I’ll need lots of gold to persuade her to sell him to me.’
‘Maybe,’ she murmured, her green eyes going distant. ‘But then again, maybe not. If we use the Book right, she’ll be more than happy to sell him to us.’
‘I’ve come across vindictive ladies before, Em. Believe me, it’ll take a lot of gold. If Sergeant Khalor was anywhere at all close to being right, she’s developed a strong appetite for Eliar’s blood by now. Let’s see if we can find some rich man’s house. I’ll rob him and then we can go and make Andine an offer.’
‘There are other ways to get gold, Althalus.’
‘I know – mining it out of the ground. I don’t care for doing it that way. I’ve seen a lot of deep holes in the mountainsides of Kagwher, and from what I hear, only about one in a hundred has turned up even a speck of gold.’
‘I believe I can improve on those numbers, pet.’
‘I still don’t like chopping at the ground, Em. It makes my back hurt.’
‘That’s because you don’t get enough exercise. Let’s move right along. We have several days’ travel ahead of us before you get to start digging.’
‘There isn’t any gold down here in the low-country, Em.’
‘There is if you know where to look. Ride on, my brave boy, ride on.’
‘Was that supposed to be funny?’
They rode south across the parched grainfields of Perquaine for the next several days, moving at a steady canter. It was about mid-afternoon on the third day after their meeting with Sergeant Khalor when Althalus reined in and dismounted.
‘Why are we stopping?’ Emmy asked.
‘We’ve been pushing the horse a bit. I’ll walk alongside to give him a rest.’ He looked around at the sun-baked fields. ‘Skimpy,’ he observed.
‘What is?’
‘This year’s crop. It looks to me as if it’s hardly going to be worth the trouble to harvest it.’
‘It’s the drought, pet. It doesn’t rain much any more.’
‘We should be getting close to the coastline, Em. It always rains along the coast.’
‘We’re a long way from where the coast is now, pet. We talked about that back in the House, remember? The ice locks up more of the world’s water every year. That causes the drought and lowers the sea-level.’
‘Are we going to be able to repair that?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Melt the ice so that things go back to the way they’re supposed to be.’
‘Why do men always want to tamper with the natural order of things?’
‘When something breaks, we fix it, that’s all.’
‘What gave you the absurd idea that it’s broken?’
‘It’s not the way it was before, Em. To our way of looking at things, that means that it’s broken.’
‘Now which one of us is thinking the way Daeva thinks?’
‘Drying