He’d carried Nick halfway back to his tent before the inert body on his shoulders twitched and the young man began to cough.
“Easy, Master,” said Hedge, increasing his pace. “I’ll soon have you out of the rain.”
“What happened?” asked Nick, his voice rasping. His throat felt as if he’d just smoked half a dozen cigars and drunk a bottle of brandy.
“You fainted,” replied Hedge, pushing through the flaps of the tent door. “Are you able to dry yourself and get to bed?”
“Yes, yes, of course,” snapped Nick, but his legs trembled as Hedge put him down, and he had to balance himself against a traveling chest. Overhead, the rain beat out a steady rhythm on the canvas, accentuated every few minutes by the dull bass boom of thunder.
“Good,” replied Hedge, handing him a towel. “I must go and give the Night Crew their instructions; then I have to go and . . . acquire another barge. It would probably be best if you rested here, sir. I will make sure someone—not one of the afflicted—brings your meals and empties the necessaries and so forth.”
“I’m quite able to look after myself,” replied Nick, though he couldn’t stop shivering as he stripped off his shirt and began to weakly towel his chest and arms. “Including overseeing the Night Crew.”
“That will not be required,” said Hedge. He leaned over Nick, and his eyes appeared to grow larger and fill with a flickering red light, as if they were windows to a great furnace somehow burning inside his skull.
“It would be best if you rested here,” he repeated, his breath hot and metallic on Nick’s face. “You do not need to supervise the work.”
“Yes,” agreed Nick dully, the towel frozen in mid motion. “It would be best for me to rest . . . here.”
“You will await my return,” commanded Hedge. His usual subordinate tone was completely gone, and he loomed over Nick like a headmaster about to cane a pupil.
“I will await your return,” Nick repeated.
“Good,” said Hedge. He smiled and turned on his heel, striding back out into the rain. It evaporated instantly into steam as it touched his bare head, wreathing him with a strange white halo. A few steps later, the steam wafted away, and the rain simply plastered down his hair.
Back in his tent, Nick suddenly started drying himself again. That done, he put on a pair of badly repaired pajamas and went to his bed of piled furs. His camp bed from Ancelstierre had broken days before, the springs collapsing into rust and the canvas crumbling with mildew.
Sleep came quickly, but not rest. He dreamed of the two silver hemispheres, and his Lightning Farm that was being set up across the Wall. He saw the hemispheres absorbing power from a thousand lightning strikes and, as they drew power, overcoming the force that kept them apart. He saw them finally hurtle together, charged with the strength of ten thousand storms . . . but then the dream began again from the beginning, so he couldn’t see what happened when the hemispheres met.
Outside, the rain came down in sheets and the lightning struck again and again into and around the pit. Thunder rumbled and shook as the Dead Hands of the Night Crew strained at the ropes, slowly dragging the first silver hemisphere towards the Red Lake and the second hemisphere up and out of the pit.
Chapter Seven
A Last Request
IT WAS STILL raining two days after Lirael and Sam’s all-too-successful weather working. Despite the oilskin coats thoughtfully packed by the sendings back at the House, they were completely, and seemingly permanently, sodden. Fortunately the spell was finally weakening, particularly the wind-summoning aspect, so the rain had lessened and was no longer driving horizontally into their faces, and they weren’t being assaulted by sticks, leaves, and other wind-borne debris.
On the positive side, as Lirael had to remind herself every few hours, the rain had made it absolutely impossible for any Gore Crows to find them. Though that was somehow not as cheering as it should have been.
It also wasn’t cold, which was another positive. They would have frozen to death otherwise, or exhausted themselves into immobility by using Charter Magic to stay alive. Both the wind and the rain were warm, and if there had been even an hour or two without them, Lirael would have thought their weather working a great success. As it was, misery rather tainted any pride in the spell.
They were getting close to the Red Lake now, climbing up through the lush forested foothills of Mount Abed and her sisters. The trees grew close here, forming a canopy overhead, interspersed with many ferns and plants Lirael knew only from books. The leaf litter from all of them was thick on the ground, making a carpet over the mud. Because of the rain, there were thousands of tiny rivulets of water everywhere, cascading among tree roots, down stone, and around Lirael’s ankles. When she could see her ankles, because most of the time her legs were buried up to the shins in a mixture of wet leaves and mud.
It was very hard going, and Lirael was more tired than she had thought possible. The rests, when they had them, consisted of finding the largest tree with the thickest foliage to keep out the rain, and the highest roots to sit on, to keep out of the mud. Lirael had found that she could sleep even in these conditions, though more than once she awoke, after the scant two hours they allowed themselves, to find herself lying in the mud rather than sitting above it.
Of course, once they got back out in the rain, the mud soon washed off. Lirael wasn’t sure which was worse. Mud or rain. Or the middle course: the first ten minutes after moving out of shelter, when the mud was getting washed off and running down her face, hands, and legs.
It was at exactly that time after a rest, with her total attention on getting the mud out of her eyes as they climbed up yet another gully, that they found a dying Royal Guard, propped up against the trunk of a sheltering tree. Or rather, the Disreputable Dog found her, sniffing her out as she scrabbled ahead of Lirael and Sam.
The Guardswoman was unconscious, her red and gold surcoat stained black with blood, her mail hauberk ripped and torn in several places. She still held a notched and blunted sword firmly in her right hand, while her left was frozen in a spell-casting gesture she would never complete.
Both Lirael and Sam knew that she was almost gone, her spirit already stepping across the border into Death. Quickly Sam bent down, calling up the most powerful healing spell he knew. But even as the first Charter mark flowered brightly in his mind, she was dead. The faint sheen of life in her eyes disappeared, replaced by a dull, unseeing
gaze. Sam let the healing mark go and brushed her eyelids gently shut.
“One of Father’s Guards,” he said heavily. “I don’t know her, though. She was probably from the Guard tower at Roble’s Town or Uppside. I wonder what she was doing . . .”
Lirael nodded, but she couldn’t tear her gaze away from the corpse. She felt so useless. She kept on being too late, too slow. The Southerling in the river, after the battle with Chlorr. Barra and the merchants. Now this woman. It was so unfair that she should die alone, with only a few minutes between death and rescue. If only they’d been quicker climbing the hill, or if they hadn’t stopped for that last rest . . .
“She was a few days dying,” said the Disreputable Dog, sniffing around the body. “But she can’t have come far, Mistress. Not with those wounds.”
“We must be close to Hedge and Nick then,” said Sam, straightening up to cast a wary eye around. “It’s so hard to tell under all these trees. We could be near the top of the ridge or still have miles to go.”
“I guess I’d better find out,” said Lirael slowly. She was still looking down at the dead body of the Guard. “What killed her, and where the enemy are.”
“We must hurry then,” said the Dog, jumping up on her hind legs with sudden excitement. “The river will have taken her some distance.”
“You’re going into Death?” asked Sam. “Is that wise? I mean, Hedge could be nearby—or even waiting in Death!”
“I know,” said Lirael. She had been thinking exactly the same thing. “But I think it’s worth the risk. We need to find out exactly where Nick’s diggings are, and what happened to this Guard. We can’t just keep blindly marching on.”
“I suppose so,” said Sam, biting his lip with unconscious anxiety. “What will I do?”
“Watch over my body while I’m gone, please,” said Lirael.