backed against a wall, facing him. There were two more with her, one with his knife pressed up under her chin, the other wielding a rifle and scanning the rim. In the last light of the day, Tsata was all but invisible as he watched from the shadow of the rocky ridge. He checked quickly for signs of any others nearby, but there was nothing, not even any sentries or lookouts on the high points surrounding the clearing. These were not warriors, however much they swaggered.
His priority was the man with the knife to Nomoru’s throat. He would have liked to try and do it in silence, but the risk was far too great. Instead, he waited until neither of them were looking at him, then took aim with his rifle. He was just weighing the possibilities of taking the man out without him reflexively stabbing Nomoru when the scout spotted him with an infinitesimal flicker of her eyes. A moment later, she looked back at him again, hard. Purposefully. The man guarding her frowned as he noticed. She glared wide at Tsata, her eyes urging him.
Tsata held his fire. Clever. She was trying to turn her enemy’s attention from her.
‘Stop mugging, you fool,’ the man hissed. ‘I’m no idiot. You won’t make me look away.’ And with that, he slapped her. But he had to take his knife away a few inches to do it, and the instant he did so Tsata blew his brains out of the side of his head.
The last man turned with a cry, raising his rifle; but Tsata was already leaping down upon him, driving the butt of his weapon into the man’s jaw. His enemy’s rifle fired wild as he fell, and a second blow from Tsata stove his skull in.
The echoes of the gunshots rang across the Fault and into the gathering night.
There was a pause as Nomoru and Tsata looked at each other in the gloom, and then Nomoru turned away and scooped up her rifle and dagger, which had been taken from her.
‘They’ll be coming,’ she said, not meeting his eye. ‘More of them. We have to go.’
FOURTEEN
The echoes of the hunt floated distantly across the peaks.
Upon her return with Tsata, Nomoru had led them off the spine of land that they had been following, taking a northwestward route that descended hard. They were bruised and scratched from sliding down steep slopes of shale, and the exertion had tired them, for Nomoru had set a reckless pace for more than an hour. She seemed furious, though whether at herself or at them it was difficult to tell. She pushed them to their limits, guiding them down into the depths of the Fault, until the dark land reared all around them.
Finally, she called a halt in a round, grassy clearing that seemed to spring out of nowhere amid the lifeless rock that bordered it. A dank mist lay on the ground, despite the night’s warmth, a sad pearly green in the light of the crescent moons. The clearing slid away down a narrow hillside to the west, but whatever was there was obscured by the contour of the land.
Yugi and Kaiku threw themselves down on the grass. Tsata squatted nearby. Nomoru stalked about in agitation.
‘Gods, I could sleep right here,’ Yugi declared.
‘We can’t stay here. Just take a rest,’ Nomoru snapped. ‘I didn’t want to go this way.’
‘We are going on?’ Kaiku asked in disbelief. ‘We have been travelling since dawn!’
‘Why break our backs over this? There’s no hurry,’ Yugi reminded them again.
‘They are tracking us,’ Tsata said. When Yugi and Kaiku looked at him, he motioned up to where they had come from with a tilt of his head. ‘They are calling to each other. And they are getting closer.’
Yugi scratched the back of his neck. ‘Persistent. That’s annoying. Who are they?’
Nomoru had her arms crossed, leaning against a wall of rock. ‘Don’t know their name. It’s an Omecha cult. Not like in the cities. These are very extreme. They think death is the point of life.’ She waved a hand dismissively. ‘Blood sacrifice, mutilation rituals, votive suicide. They look forward to their own deaths.’
‘I expect Tsata was something of a pleasant surprise for them, then,’ Yugi quipped, grinning at the Tkiurathi. Tsata laughed, startling them all. None of them had ever heard him laugh before; he had seemed utterly humourless until now. It was inexplicably strange to hear. Somehow, they had expected his expression of mirth to be different