When the drumming of hooves above them dulled, Havec ducked out from under their shelter, one hand gripping the stone abutment as he leaned out, peering north. He held still for only a moment before returning to crouch at her feet. He made a beckoning gesture, whispering, “Leg.”
She extended a leg obediently, but asked, “What are you doing?”
“Checking for broken bones.”
“How?”
“There would be swelling.” He glanced at her face. “Trust me, I may not know much about medicine, but when it comes to broken bones, I could open my own clinic.”
Once he had assured himself that her limbs were sound, he sat back a little and gestured to her chest. “Why are you hunched over like that? Did you hurt your ribs?”
She pressed her lips together and shook her head. She lifted up enough of her dark blue shirt to expose an inch of her belly, scraped raw and bleeding. “It goes all the way up.”
He made no comment but took his pack off and dug out a spare shirt. It was only when he wet it in the stream and began dabbing carefully at her face that she realized it was bleeding too. It was on fire, but she hadn’t even noticed; the pain was as nothing to that of the flesh on her belly and breasts. The rock had scraped the length of her left cheek and deep into her chin. Once he had the blood cleaned off, he took her by the jaw and turned her head side-to-side, peering intently into her eyes. No longer bothering to whisper, he asked, “It looks like you hit your head, how does it feel? Are you dizzy?”
“How do you tell the difference between a head injury and being scared death?”
He only shook his head. Dunking the shirt again in the water, he wrung it out. Then he passed it over with the words, “I’ll let you deal with the rest.”
Moving a few feet down the stream, he rinsed his hands off carefully before sitting down and yanking up one leg of his pants. Qanath watched him splashing water on his abraded knee, thinking, You are very glad I’m here, aren’t you? She had looked right into his face just now as he checked her injuries, and he had been afraid.
It was, she decided, a start. Setting the wet shirt aside, she unbuttoned her shirt. Her torso almost looked as if she had been mauled, marred by multiple parallel gouges from breastbone to waist. Her bra had been torn in one place but was still good enough to serve. Thankfully: she didn’t have a spare.
As she cleaned the scrapes off, in order to distract herself from how much she hurt, she asked, “Who were they?”
“They looked like soldiers.”
His tone was incredulous, as if this were beyond belief. “Yeah?”
“A pair of men wearing shirts of overlapping bronze disks. High-crested helms with short visors to shield their eyes. Their clothing was bird’s-egg blue and rusty red. Same for the equipage. I saw no weapons, but I only got a look at them in profile for a second before they went around the bend.”
“Those do sound like soldiers.”
He didn’t look at her but turned his chin to the side so she could see his puzzled frown. “Real soldiers, from the army.”
She had no idea what else they might have been, riding this isolated route in matching armor, flying the Empire’s colors. “…yes?”
“Is it ordinary to have them riding around out here?”
“Well yeah.”
He cast another frown over his shoulder.
“What’s the point of civilization if people aren’t safe to use the roads? Barbarian.”
Havec didn’t rise. “It’s normal for them to patrol, even in outlying areas.”
“Yes. Obviously. Why are you so worried? It’s a good thing.”
He didn’t answer immediately, and she assumed this was because there was no answer. “I didn’t want to worry you…”
“But…?”
He was silent for another moment. “I thought I saw those guys again the other night.”
“Guys?”
“The ones we met by the stream.”
This was an alarming revelation. “When did you see them?”
“The first night we spent at the tower. I woke up around sunset and saw two riders on the road. The light wasn’t great, and I wasn’t about to get closer, but it looked like them. Whoever they were, they were riding slowly, definitely looking for something.” He cast his head back and forth, miming, craning his neck.
“You think that something was us.”
He let out a breath. “I can’t be sure and I have no idea why.”
Moving gingerly, she shrugged back into her shirt and buttoned it. She should probably be swathed neck to hips in bandages, but they didn’t have bandages, so she would just have to bleed. “You can turn around.”
Havec returned to the bridge, where he reached for his pack. As he knelt beside her, he asked, “What is that noise?”
“Noise?” She heard nothing but rushing water and the distant chirping of birds.
“It sounds almost like… singing?”
Qanath still didn’t hear anything, but she saw movement over his shoulder. When her eyes went that way, her heart stopped. Downstream from them, where the cataract went around a bend, the shoulders of the ravine sank enough to let the trees grow right down to the water. A creature had emerged from amidst their boles, a thing so horrifying it was hard to accept it could stand beneath the light of the sun without evaporating. It stood on two legs like a person, its scabrous flesh a mildewed green, its pate bald, its big ears bat-like. A stripe of wiry brown fur ran from its chin uninterrupted to its groin, which didn’t have obvious genitalia.
Havec had seen the expression on her face and stood, turning around to find out what she was looking at. “Can we help you?”
