‘Think he’ll smell it?’ Sinn asked.
‘He who?’
‘The lizard. My blood.’
‘Gods below!’
Her eyes were bright. ‘Do you like this place? The air, it makes you drunk, doesn’t it? We’re back in the age when everything was raw. Unsettled. But maybe not, maybe we’re from the raw times. But here, I think, you could stay for ten thousand years and nothing would change, nothing at all. Long ago, time was slower.’
‘I thought you said-’
‘All right, change was slower. Not that anything living would sense that. Everything living just knows what it knows, and that never changes.’
She was easier when she never said anything, Grub decided, but he kept that thought to himself. Something was stirring, out in the swamp, and Grub’s eyes widened when he studied the waterline and realized that it had crept up by a full hand’s span. Whatever it was, it had just displaced a whole lot of water. ‘It’s coming,’ he said.
‘Which flickering eye,’ Sinn mused, ‘is us ?’
‘Sinn-we got to get out of here-’
‘If we’re not even here,’ she continued, ‘where did we come from, except from something that is here? You can’t just say, “Oh, we come through a gate,” because, then, the question just shows up all over again.’
The breathing had stopped.
‘It’s coming!’
‘But you can breed horses-and you can see how they change-longer legs, even a different gait. Like turning a desert wolf into a hunting dog-it doesn’t take as long as you’d think. Did someone breed us to make us like we are?’
‘If they did,’ hissed Grub, ‘they should’ve given one of us more brains!’ Snatching her by the arm, he pulled her upright.
She laughed as they ran.
Behind them, water exploded, enormous jaws snapped on empty air, breath shrieking, and the ground trembled.
Grub did not look behind them-he could hear the monstrous thrash and whip of the huge lizard as it surged through the undergrowth, closing fast.
Then Sinn tore herself free.
His heels skidded on wet clay. Spinning round, he caught an instant’s glimpse of Sinn-her back to him-facing a lizard big as a Quon galley, its elongated jaws bristling with dagger-sized fangs. Opening wide and wider still.
Fire erupted. A conflagration that blinded Grub, made him reel away as a solid wall of heat struck him. He stumbled to his knees. It was raining-no, that was hail-no, bits of flesh, hide and bone. Blinking, gasping, he slowly lifted his head.
A crater gaped before Sinn, steaming.
He climbed to his feet and walked unevenly to her side. The pit was twenty or more paces across, deep as a man was tall. Murky water gurgled, filling the basin. In that basin, a piece of the lizard’s tail thrashed and twitched. Mouth dry, Grub asked, ‘Did you enjoy that, Sinn?’
‘None of it’s real, Grub.’
‘Looked real enough to me!’
She snorted. ‘Just a memory.’
‘Whose?’
‘Maybe mine.’ Sinn shrugged. ‘Maybe yours. Something buried so deep inside us, we would never have ever known about it, if we weren’t here.’
‘That makes no sense.’
Sinn held up her hands. The one that had been streaming blood looked scorched. ‘My blood,’ she whispered, ‘is on fire .’
They skirted the swamp, watched by a herd of scaly, long-necked beasts with flattened snouts. Bigger than any bhederin, but with the same dull, bovine eyes. Tiny winged lizards patrolled their ridged backs, picking at ticks and lice.
Beyond the swamp the land sloped upward, festooned with snake-leafed trees with pebbled boles and feathery crowns. There was no obvious way around the strange forest, so they entered it. In the humid shade beneath the canopy, iridescent-winged moths fluttered about like bats, and the soft, damp ground was crawling with toads that could swallow a man’s fist and seemed disinclined to move aside, forcing Grub to step carefully and Sinn to lash out with her bare feet, laughing with every meaty impact.
The slope levelled out and the trees grew denser, gloom closing in like a shroud. ‘This was a mistake,’ muttered Grub.
‘What was?’
‘All of it. The Azath House, the portal-Keneb must be worried sick. It wasn’t fair, us just leaving like that, telling no one. If I’d known it was going to take this long to find whatever it was you think we need to find, I’d probably have said “no” to the whole idea.’ He eyed the girl beside him. ‘You knew from the very start, didn’t you?’
