‘Why not?’ said Tsata. Kaiku looked at him in vague surprise. It was the first he had spoken that day.
‘It doesn’t matter why not,’ Nomoru replied, digging her heels in further. Kaiku was taken aback by the rudeness of her manner.
Tsata studied the scout for a moment. Hunkered in the shade of the rock, the pale green tattoo reaching tendrils over his arms and face, he looked strangely at home here in the Fault. His skin, which had been sallow in the dawn light, now seemed golden in the afternoon and he appeared healthier for it. ‘You have knowledge of these lands, so you must share it. To withhold it hurts the pash.’
‘The pash?’ Nomoru sneered, uncomprehending.
‘The group,’ Kaiku said. ‘We four are now travelling together, so that makes us the pash. Is that right?’ She addressed this last to Tsata.
‘One kind of pash,’ Tsata corrected. ‘Not the only kind. But yes, that is what I was referring to.’
Nomoru held up her hands in exasperation. Kaiku noted Nomoru’s own tattoos on her arms as her sleeves fell back: intricate, jagged shapes and spirals, intertwining through emblems and pictograms symbolic of allegiances or debts owed and honoured. It was the tradition of the beggars, thieves and other low folk of the Poor Quarter in Axekami to ink their history onto their skin; in that way, promises made could not be broken. In poverty, need drove them to perform services for each other, a community of necessity. Mostly, their word was their bond; but occasionally, for more important matters, something greater was required. A tattoo was an outward display of their undertaking. Usually it was left half-drawn, and finished when the task was done. The Inkers of the Poor Quarter knew all faces and all debts, and they would only complete a tattoo once they had word the task had been fulfilled. An oathbreaker would soon be exposed, and they would not survive long when others refused to aid them.
How strange, Kaiku thought, that the need for honour increased as money and possessions decreased. She wondered if Nomoru had been an oathbreaker; but the meaning of the tattooes was incomprehensible to her, and any words she could see were written in an argot of Low Saramyrrhic which she did not know.
‘Territories change,’ Nomoru said, relenting ungraciously at last. ‘But the borders aren’t defined. Between territories, it’s uncertain. Scouts, warriors sometimes, but no proper guards, no fortifications. So I’ve been taking you between the territories. Not so well guarded, easier to slip through.’ She tilted her head in the direction of the rock-strewn plain. ‘This place is a battlefield. Look at the terrain. Nobody owns it. Too many spirits here.’
‘Spirits?’ Kaiku asked.
‘They come at night,’ Nomoru said. ‘Lot of killing here. Places remember. So we come in the day. Keep our heads down, we stay safe.’
She scratched her knee beneath her trousers, and looked at Yugi. ‘The high pass got taken a month ago. There was a fight; someone lost, someone won.’ She shrugged. ‘Used to be safe. Now you’d be killed before you got a yard into it.’ She raised her eyebrow at Tsata. ‘Satisfied?’ she asked archly.
He tipped his chin at her. Nomoru scowled in confusion, not knowing that it was the Okhamban way of nodding. Kaiku did not enlighten her. She had already decided that she disliked the tangle-haired scout.
It was late evening when their luck ran out.
The sky was a dull and glowering purple-red, streaked with shades of deep blue and ribboned with strips of translucent cloud. Neryn and Aurus were travelling together tonight, and they were already hanging low in the western sky, a thin crescent of green peeping out from behind the vast waxing face of the larger sister. Nomoru was leading them along a high spine of land, rising up above the surrounding miles of thin ghylls and narrow canyons. The ground here was broken into a jigsaw of grassy ledges which rose and fell alarmingly, so that they often found themselves having to climb around dark pits or clamber up thin, dizzying slopes with a terrible drop on either side. As hard as it was, it did have one advantage: they were well hidden within its folds, and nobody was likely to see them unless they ran into them.
They had almost reached the far end of the spine, where the land loomed glowering to meet them again, when Nomoru suddenly held her hand up, her fingers