The Court of Broken Knives. Anna Smith Spark

much distance as possible between themselves and the dead dragon. In the morning heat, it had indeed begun to stink, rotten and rancid and with the dry pungency of boiled metal, and had started to draw crows. Insects. Even a scrub eagle. Small corpses now littered the ground around it.

      ‘You’d think they’d have some natural aversion to it,’ said Rate curiously. ‘Smelling like that and all. Things round my cousin’s farm know to avoid bad meat.’

      Tobias gestured around at the empty landscape. ‘Isn’t exactly too much to eat around here. Probably desperate for anything with blood in it. Meat smells like meat, if you’re hungry enough. Besides,’ – a grin and a wink at Marith – ‘I don’t suppose they’ve encountered a dead dragon very often, them being notoriously difficult to kill.’

      Two more men had died in the night from the unfortunate complication of not being able to walk well enough to keep up with the troop. One of them was Newlin. Marith felt rather sorry for him, especially as they’d been sharing a tent, but perhaps it had been for the best. Also the man had been asleep at the time, so it wasn’t like he’d realized what was happening.

      Alxine seemed surprisingly upset about it though, his deep copper-coloured face dark with concern. ‘He was a comrade,’ he said repeatedly. ‘We shared a tent. He trusted us.’

      ‘He wasn’t a comrade, he was a member of my squad,’ said Tobias shortly. ‘And he was a liability, state his leg was in. It would probably have gone bad anyway. Spared him, like.’

      True enough. Made more space in the tent, too.

      Mid-afternoon, they crested a small hill and found themselves looking down on a small, scrubby village, five houses huddled around a central barn. The largest population centre they’d encountered for days now. Several of the men cheered.

      After much discussion, Skie sent a handful of men down into the village to buy or trade for provisions. They returned with a particularly scrawny dead goat, a sack of onions and five good-sized clay bottles of something liquid. As nobody in the village spoke Immish, the last five hundred years having apparently entirely passed them by, and almost nobody outside the Empire spoke more than the most basic Literan, its grammar and syntax being possibly the most complex things known to man, the drink’s exact nature remained a mystery. It was brownish, frothy and smelled alcoholic so was declared to be beer, though it might equally well have been weed-killer from the taste of it. Though, as far as Marith could see, they were lucky to have managed to acquire anything, the foraging party having been reduced to the well-known language of pointing at their bellies and holding out a couple of coins while shouting ‘food’ and ‘money’ in Immish, Pernish and even Aen. If they were really, really unlucky, the stuff in the bottles was a local cure for the gripe.

      ‘Couldn’t buy more,’ Tobias pointed out to them in the face of grumblings, ‘village is too big to raid without drawing notice, this near, and it would rather give the game away if we start buying supplies for forty men.’ He seemed to think for a moment. ‘Thirty men, I mean.’

      The probably-beer was carefully divided up between the men in a makeshift wake for the dragon’s victims. Disgusting, but surprisingly strong: the small cup Marith had gulped down was making his head feel pleasantly muzzy after several weeks of brackish water and tea. His eyes began to itch again. Breathe, he thought desperately. It’s all right. Just breathe. He clenched his hands tightly. Concentrated on the feel of his nails digging into the skin of his palms. Pain. Calm. Breathe.

      He must have made some kind of twitching movement, because a couple of the other men turned to look at him.

      ‘You all right, lad?’ Alxine asked. Sounded genuinely concerned.

      ‘I’m fine.’ Clenched his hands more tightly, took a long sip of water.

      ‘Boy can’t take the taste of proper beer, that’s all,’ said Emit. He couldn’t be more than five years older than Marith. I’ll kill him one day, Marith thought. I’d kill him now, if Skie wouldn’t have me beheaded for it.

      He rubbed his eyes again, harder this time. Pain. Calm. Breathe. Everything will be all right. Just stop thinking these things.

      Rate burst out laughing. ‘Oh, come on, Emit, drop the whole “real beer” shtick. The stuff tastes like donkey’s piss and you know it. Goat’s ready, anyone wants some.’

      ‘Going begging, is it?’

      ‘Think this goat was past begging long before we started on it. Worse state than the porridge, this goat.’

      ‘Delicacy, in Allene, slow-roasted goat guts.’

      ‘I’m not entirely sure that’s its guts …’

      Alxine carved them all portions, serving them elegantly on beds of thin oat porridge flavoured with rotten onion. It tasted debatably worse than the beer. ‘Gods, imagine living out here, drinking donkey piss and eating rancid goat’s dick every day of your life,’ he said cheerfully. ‘At least we’ve got violent death to look forward to in a few days’ time.’

      ‘I think the beer’s making you maudlin,’ said Rate. ‘Lucky for everyone, it’s run out. Anyone know any thank-all-the-gods-I’m-no-longer-drinking songs?’

      Such empty things. Pointless. That they could live so fiercely, in the shadow of the certainty of their death. That they could live at all, and feel contentment in it. Marith got up, walked a little away from the others, out into the dark. The air was very cold, pure and dry in his mouth. He breathed it in in great gulps. Stars blazed overhead, a thousand blind eyes. Gods. Beautiful women. Dead souls. The Crescent. The White Lady. The Dragon’s Mouth. The Fire Star.

      It had been a long time since he’d looked up at the stars like this. He and Carin used to watch them sometimes, lying back side by side on mossy grass or the damp sand of a beach, hands circled together, hair entwined. Carin had known all their names. In the starlight his hair had been pale as ashes. Stars reflected in his eyes.

      ‘There’s your star, Marith, and there’s mine. Look! And there’s the Worm, and the Maiden, and the Crown of Laughing, and that big green one is the Tear. You see it?’

      ‘I see it.’ Spinning, flickering in his vision, a blizzard of light. His star.

      But he mustn’t think about Carin.

      The weight of the stars felt crushing on his body, the endless remorselessness of them, the sheer number of them. Looking up into them was like a death, an annihilation of the self. The great abyss, yawning over everything. The dark. All there really was was the dark. The one true thing. He could feel it, deep inside his skin. It knows you. Knows what you are. Stared upwards, letting his mind empty. Utterly silent, the desert. A man could walk forever out here until he went mad from thirst or loneliness. A man could live out here, in peace, away from everything. Just sit and stare up at the stars until his mind gave way. A man could die out here, slowly, painfully, burnt up by the heat of the sun and the dry dust. He pressed his hand into his pocket, where the six iron pennies still sat. I killed a dragon yesterday, he thought. The words exalted him. I killed a dragon.

      He walked back towards the campfire. In his tent, he wrapped himself in his cloak and settled down to sleep, gazing up again through the tear in the canvas at the stars. The others were still sitting by the fire talking; he could hear their voices without understanding, as though in delirium or dream. It was strangely comforting. Like being a child again, hearing voices murmuring across the room as he slept.

      Woke with a start to the feel of water. He sat up in a confused panic, momentarily uncertain where he was or why his face was wet. His movement woke Alxine, who sat up too, his hand going instinctively for his sword.

      ‘It’s only me,’ Marith hissed. ‘It’s all right.’

      Alxine muttered something unintelligible, lay down, then sat up again. ‘What’s that sound?’ he asked, a note of fear in his voice. They were all on edge, after the dragon.

      ‘Rain. It’s rain.’

      ‘Rain?’