His sense of smell was deadened from so many years among ghouls, and his adolescent years among the few remaining resistance fighters had not restored it.
If something went wrong and the great jaws closed, he would be crushed. It comforted him. “Now what?” His voice echoed oddly in the space of the skull.
“How are you supposed to see anything from in there?” Sakera said. He couldn’t tell whether she was laughing or exasperated. “Come down again and we’ll learn to ride the giants properly. Then, when we have paper, I can show you how to scribe your own patterns.”
Tamim lingered a moment longer, drawn to Ifayad in spite of himself. Despite the restricted field of vision, he appreciated that the skull would provide protection against enemy fire.
Tamim climbed down, bemused at himself for having any sort of faith in the necromancer. She would betray him in the end, and surrender to the sorcerer, and he would have to kill her. Until then, he would learn what he could.
Tamim had always been quick with his hands, quick of reflexes, even as a child. It had taken him a while to appreciate this. He had thought it was something ordinarily true of people, as opposed to ghouls. Ghouls were unrelenting once they had a goal, but dexterity was not one of their virtues.
Sakera was methodical in her lessons. They started with stances and moved on to simple motions—an arm lifting, a hand opening, a foot shifting—then compound motions. Familiar with the precepts of arms training, Tamim accepted this as necessary. They did everything slowly: gesture followed by the giants’ motion. Tamim’s hands became callused from clutching Ifayad’s ridged teeth to keep from rattling around inside the skull.
He and Sakera went hunting together. Sakera was good at tracking animals, even the tricky, shadow-colored animals that lived in the rimlands. “Every life is a potential death,” she said when he asked her about it, since she didn’t seem to pay much attention to the usual cues, such as tufts of fur snagged in the rimlands’ scraggly foliage, or scat, or scuffed tracks in the dirt. Tamim was good at making snares, although a certain percentage of the animals that he caught that way were half-ghoul themselves, and had to be released. The problem had only grown worse over time.
Between the two of them, they often had a full stew-pot. Sakera tended to pick at her food; sometimes he wasn’t sure she ate at all. When he pressed her on the topic, she ate the better portion of a rabbit, just to show him she could.
“I’ve been thinking about our rides,” Tamim said to her over this night’s stew. “Have you ever ridden a horse?”
Sakera shook her head. “No,” she said. “Hasn’t it been a long time since the rimlands saw anything but ghoul-steeds?”
“Probably,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking about the horses themselves, but of harnesses. Do you think we could create some kind of harness for riding the giants? That way, if something goes wrong”—he couldn’t help but think of Sakera’s unsteady hands—“you won’t be thrown.”
“Interesting,” she said.
“Something with buckles, maybe?”
“We’d have to find a smith,” Sakera said drily. They had approached a settlement last week, leaving the giants behind, crouched behind some hills. The settlement’s buildings had been intact, but corpse-colored fungus grew from all the doors, releasing pale spores. They had retreated in haste. Sakera had been withdrawn for the rest of the day. “I don’t have any power over metal. Maybe we’re better off with some carefully chosen knots.”
“With your hands?” Something else occurred to him: he had once seen a trader trapped under a fallen horse, back in the days when horses were to be found in the rimlands. “You’d want to be able to get out in a hurry, in case something went wrong.”
“A slip knot of some sort?”
He considered it. “It might work.”
Unfortunately, Sakera was not any good at finding trees. It took them several days to track down a stand of widely separated willows by following one of the rimlands’ black rivers. Sakera drank the water fearlessly, although she grimaced at its taste.
Tamim showed Sakera how to strip the bark and plait it into cords. Once they had enough rope, it took them more time to devise a system of knots that would work on the giants. Sakera knew an amazing number of knots. “They’re a kind of magic from the sea-folk,” she said. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen the sea.”
Supposedly there was a black sea