Thirty-Nine Days: Heat for Blood

"Step back toward the draft," the voice repeated from the gloom ahead. "Move your right hand two inches away from that axe haft. If the wood taps the floor, you take two inches of square iron through your collarbone."

The warning gave Rumi-qa her elevation and center of mass.

In a basalt tunnel barely wider than two men abreast, a steel prod could not swing wide, and cocking the stirrup took twenty seconds. The speaker was crouched low, aiming by the sound of his breathing. If she intended to shoot on sight, the bolt would have struck as he crossed the threshold.

Rumi-qa did not freeze. Instead of lowering the axe, he tilted his left shoulder, letting his coarse wool mantle drag hard against the basalt wall three feet to the left. The cloth rasped over rough stone.

The arbalest cracked.

The heavy steel bolt sheared through the empty air where his sternum had been a heartbeat before, striking the granite wall behind him with a spray of sparks and chipped stone.

Before the shooter could drop the empty stock to reach for a sidearm, Rumi-qa closed the three paces. His boots drove through the pulverized slate. He caught the cold iron prod of the bow with his right hand, wrenching it sideways to pin the weapon against the rock face, and drove his left shoulder into the shooter's chest.

The body beneath the sheepskin coat was lean and wiry. She grunted as breath left her lungs, drawing a bone-handled skinning knife from her waist.

Rumi-qa trapped her wrist with his palm, slamming her arm against the rock until the knife clattered to the dirt. He hooked his boot behind her heel, tripping her onto the stone floor and dropping his knee squarely across her collarbone.

He did not draw his dagger. He kept his weight balanced on the bone, pressing just hard enough to keep her ribs from expanding for a full breath.

The woman lay pinned under his knee, her breath wheezing through clenched teeth. Her left hand clawed at his shin, but her leverage was gone.

"You have one shot in the groove," Rumi-qa said, his voice flat in the enclosed dark. "And you wasted it on stone."

"You... heavy bastard," she gasped, her voice tight against the pressure on her throat. "Get off my chest or I'll bite your kneecap off."

Rumi-qa held her down for two heartbeats, listening to the rhythm of her lungs. Her pulse was fast, but there was no panic in it—only the sour fury of a cornered trapper. He shifted his weight back onto his heels, caught the loose arbalest by the steel bowstring, and slid two paces back into a defensive crouch near the entrance.

"Get up," he said.

The woman scrambled to her feet in a single fluid motion, backing toward the deeper shadows of the fissure. She rubbed her bruised throat with one soot-stained hand. In the faint gray twilight bleeding through the crevasse mouth, Rumi-qa could make out her features: young, sharp-jawed, with narrow dark eyes and black hair chopped unevenly at the nape of her neck. Her sheepskin vest was patched with cured lizard hide, and a coil of braided hemp rope hung from her belt.

A smuggler. An ice-runner from the low canyon routes.

"You broke my stirrup latch, you ox," she spat, glaring at the arbalest in his hands. "Who taught you to duck an iron bolt in the pitch dark? Provincial levies don't move like that."

"Provincial levies are dead on the ridge," Rumi-qa said.

She went still. Her dark eyes flicked toward the entrance, then back to the ash-hafted poleaxe resting against his thigh. "The patrol at the high pass? Five men with copper buckles?"

"Four dead. One at the bottom of the gorge."

A dry, whistling laugh slipped through her teeth. "Good. The fat corporal owed me six silver bits for dried mountain sage. At least I don't have to listen to his toothless whining anymore." She paused, her gaze dropping to his left side. "You're leaking red on my floor. If you bleed out in here, the smell will bring every stray hound in the cleft."

"Then let's build a fire," Rumi-qa said.

"Fire takes fuel, soldier," she said, crossing her arms over her patched vest. "I have enough dry cedar twigs to boil half a cup of melted snow. Unless you plan to burn that heavy axe haft, you freeze in the dark like the rest of the mountain."

Rumi-qa reached into his belt pouch. He pulled out the bundle of resin-soaked pine shavings he had taken from the marker outside, tossing it onto the flat slate hearth between them.

The runner's eyes widened slightly. "My cache."

"Your cache was two paces from the wind," Rumi-qa said. Next, his hand dipped deeper into his scavenged kit. He drew out one of the two solid blocks of salted llama tallow he had taken from the dead corporal. The fat was dense, pale yellow, and stamped with the imperial grain-house crest.

In the dead winter of Tawantiyu, military tallow was hard currency. It burned hot and clean without smoke, and a single half-pound brick could keep a hearth-stone glowing through a three-day blizzard.

She stared at the block, her cynicism giving way to sharp, calculating greed. "Vanguard rations. Purified fat."

"One block," Rumi-qa said, holding it in his calloused palm. "We light the hearth. I bind my ribs. In exchange, you show me the lower canyon drainage path that cuts beneath the highway fortresses."

"Two blocks," she countered instantly.

"I carry one for the trade, and one to stay alive," Rumi-qa said. "You take the one, or I drag you outside and throw you back into the snow."

She bared her teeth in a tight, humorless grin. "You're a charming bastard, aren't you? Fine. One block. But you split the kindling."

She knelt by a natural vent in the rear basalt wall—a narrow vertical flue that pulled air upward toward the canyon rim. With practiced speed, she struck a piece of flint against a steel scraper. A bright shower of orange sparks caught the resinous pine shavings. Within moments, a thin, fragrant tongue of yellow flame rose from the hearth, illuminating the rough stone chamber.

The heat was small, but to Rumi-qa's freezing skin, it felt like boiling water.

He sat cross-legged by the hearth, laying his poleaxe across his knees. He pulled open his blood-stiffened wool tunic. The spear graze along his ribs was ugly—a jagged tear three inches long, the edges rimmed with purple frost-bruising.

The girl watched him with clinical detachment as she shaved a corner of the tallow block into an iron cup, melting the fat over the flame.

"Name's Yuraq-illa," she said, setting the cup down on a flat stone. "Most people who don't want to get shot call me Yuraq."

"Rumi-qa."

"Just Rumi-qa? No clan title? No garrison number?" She tossed him a strip of boiled linen. "You're the deserter from the Northern Wall. The one with the imperial bounty."

"The bounty is paper," Rumi-qa said. He dipped the linen into melted tallow and pressed it against his torn ribs. The burn was agonizing, but the hot grease sealed the raw flesh against the frost. He grunted, wrapping the strip tight around his torso and knotting it with his teeth and left hand.

"Paper buys soup," Yuraq said, watching him bind the wound without flinching. "Though right now, paper is about all the capital has left. The Emperor froze solid three nights back. Did you know that?"

"I know," Rumi-qa said, thinking of the cinnabar writ tucked inside his tunic. "Thirty-nine days until the convergence."

Yuraq stopped scraping the kindling. Her eyes fixed on his scarred face. "You read the herald's writ."

"I read it."

"Then you know the Council is quadrupling the wolf-tithes," she said, her voice dropping into a tense rasp. "They're clearing the valley hamlets to feed the high posts. If you think the lower canyon is a clean stroll into the western provinces, you're an idiot, soldier."

Rumi-qa pulled his mantle closed and leaned back against the warm basalt. "Where are the blockades?"

"Everywhere that matters," Yuraq said. She pointed toward the canyon mouth. "Commander Kallpa-qa brought two full squadrons of the Seventh Vanguard down from the garrison yesterday. He didn't just set iron spikes on the turnpike. He's got three dozen armored war-hounds scouring the scrub, and his men are torching the winter rot-wood along the lower riverbank to smoke out any runners trying the ravine."

Rumi-qa looked at the yellow flame dancing between them.

Kallpa-qa was on the road. The man who had trained him in the mountain cohorts, who knew every vanguard vector and every survival trick in the high snow.

"He won't leave the river road open," Rumi-qa said quietly.

"He won't leave anything open," Yuraq said, wrapping her fingers around the warm block of tallow. "You bought my route, Rumi-qa. But tomorrow morning, we're walking straight into the Hound's teeth."