The Trouble with Peace (The Age of Madness #2) - Joe Abercrombie Page 0,54

lock it.”

“That sounds a lot like something a mentor would say.”

“No doubt I’d be a wonderful one. But I’m not yours.”

Rikke heard crunching footsteps behind, turned with a smile thinking to see Shivers or Isern walking down the shore. Instead she saw a Shanka, coming with a lurching gait as it had one leg longer than the other, clawed foot sending a shower of shingle sideways with each step. It had fish threaded onto a spear, one still twisting and flipping, scales glinting silvery in the morning sun.

“Ah!” Caurib smiled, and the great scar through her top lip stretched about the wire in a way Rikke found most unsettling. “Breakfast.”

“How did you make the Shanka serve you?” asked Rikke as it shoved its fish-laden spear point-down near the water’s edge. Her father always talked of the flatheads as if they were animals. A plague that couldn’t be reasoned with. And here was one snuffling around for sticks to build a fire like any fisherman on the beach. Well, any fisherman with spikes hammered into his head.

“The same way you make anyone serve you,” said Caurib. “By offering them what they want.”

Rikke watched that flathead grunt and slurp to itself, tongue wedged in its great teeth as it carefully stacked twigs on a patch of shingle blackened by years of fires. “They’re like people, then?”

“Oh no.” And Rikke felt Caurib’s hand on her shoulder, light but firm, and her soft voice in her ear. “They can be trusted. It is them I have to thank for my life.”

“What, the Shanka?”

“Yes. If thanks are appropriate for what hardly seems a life.”

Rikke watched the flathead fumbling with a flint and tinder and juggling it all over the beach. “Wouldn’t think they had the fingers for pretty stitching.”

“Does this look pretty to you?”

Rikke cleared her throat and thought it best to say nothing.

“The Shanka don’t like baths and they’ve no sense of humour at all, but they understand the meeting betwixt flesh and metal. They learned that much from the Master Maker.” And the Shanka bent down, crooked lips pursed, and coaxed a flame into life with its breath.

“What happened to the others?” asked Rikke.

“The man with the steel eye and the woman with the iron temper? They sat a while beside you, each pretending to be less worried than the other, but after a few days they tired of fish. Neither would trust the other to hunt so they went off together.”

“Hold on,” said Rikke. “Days?”

“Four days you slept. They are good companions. A woman who is to be taken seriously as a seer should have some colourful folk about her.”

“I didn’t pick ’em for their colour.”

“No, they picked you, which speaks to your quality and theirs.”

“Speaks of good quality, or poor?”

Caurib didn’t answer. Just turned her bright blue eyes on Rikke and said nothing. Rikke didn’t much care for being looked at in that way, specially not by a witch, and specially not one with wire through her face.

“Reckon I’ll eat if you don’t mind sharing your breakfast.” The Shanka had his fish over the fire now and was making quite the mouth-watering smell. First time Rikke felt hungry in weeks, and she rubbed at her aching belly. Not much to rub these days. Her clothes were hanging off her like rags off a scarecrow. “When my colourful friends get back we’d best start home. Long way down to Uffrith.”

“Going so soon?”

Gave Rikke a worried feeling, the way Caurib said it. Like there was an unpleasant surprise coming. Pleasant surprises seemed to get rarer as you got older. “Aye, well… I feel better now.” Rikke put her palm a little nervously to her left eye. Cool and clammy, just like the other. Just like anyone’s. “Whatever you did worked.”

“I have painted runes about your Long Eye. Runes to keep it caged.”

“Caged, eh? Grand.” Since she woke, she’d seen no visions of things past and no ghosts of things to come. The world looked more ordinary than any time since the duel, when she’d forced the Long Eye open. Aside from standing in a magic lake with a woman sent back from the land of the dead while flatheads cooked breakfast, that was. Rikke took a long breath, puffed up her chest and blew it out. “I’m all good.”

“For now.”

Rikke felt her shoulders sag. “It’ll get worse again?”

“The runes will fade, and it will get worse again, then worse still. We must paint the runes so they will not fade. We must tattoo