Page 60 of The Book That Held Her Heart

In the distance she could hear a drumbeat, and at a crossroad she glimpsed a seemingly endless column of soldiers marching down an adjoining road. She pressed on into the outskirts of a market whose stalls spread down either side of the street.

“You. Stop.” A tall canith sought to cut her off, head and shoulders above the humans thronging around streetside stalls. He wore a dark uniform of black leather different to that of the three soldiers, and on his head a black cap with a brim at the front. People got out of his way as he approached Clovis, their attention suddenly drawn to random things as if they were striving not to catch his eye. An officer of some sort then, set to policing the populace.

“Me?” Clovis tented her fingers over her breastbone.

“You.” The canith’s mane was braided and drawn back behind his head. A silver death’s head glimmered on his chest, and a similar but smaller badge adorned his cap. “Show me your papers.”

“Papers?” Clovis kept her hand away from her sword hilt.

“Papers.”

“I’m in a hurry—” Clovis began.

The officer swung a backhanded blow intended to strike Clovis’s cheek and snap her head around. Clovis caught his wrist and frowned at him.

“I really am in a hurry. Let’s not make a big fuss—”

As the man opened his mouth to shout, Clovis jerked him forward intoa savage headbutt, caught his limp form against her, and wrapped the arm she held over her shoulders. Supporting the unconscious officer as best she could, Clovis steered for the nearest alleyway, squeezing between a stall selling an array of cheeses and a stall selling a…different array of cheeses.

One fortuitous aspect of the aura of fear the man generated was that everyone turned away from the pair of them, except for one small canith boy tugging his mother’s hand on the far side of the street. Clovis dumped the man on a refuse heap a few yards behind the cheese stalls. She took a moment to rub her forehead before hurrying on down the narrow passageway. The canith had a thick skull.

A short while later Clovis had looped around and re-entered the street where she’d scented Arpix. Now though, however hard she tried, his trail eluded her, submerged beneath the aroma of cooking pots, ripe cheeses, cold sausage, and a hundred other things demanding that she put them in her stomach immediately.

Ahead of her the market spread into a large square fronted by grander buildings, though by no means palaces. On the far side, over the heads of humans and canith alike, Clovis could see a curious wooden platform with a trio of timber uprights that might be used to load market supplies onto carts, though it seemed like over-engineering. Surely, a few strong canith could heft anything the market needed on and off carts and wagons.

Clovis advanced, frustrated by the crowd, but also pleased by the anonymity. The market stalls drew New Kraff’s citizens to the sides of the square, allowing her more space as she crossed towards the centre. It seemed there had been a sizeable crowd before the curious wooden platform but that it was now dispersing. Clovis made her way towards it. A canith heading in the opposite direction shook his head as he passed her.

“You missed it. No more hangings till tomorrow.”

Something cold knotted itself in Clovis’s stomach. She suddenly understood what she was looking at. Three gallows. “More tomorrow? Where do they come from?”

The man paused and stared at her. He was richly dressed in dark velvets, older than her though she found it hard to judge by how much. A heavy silver chain hung over his shoulders and down to his large belly, the first belly Clovis had ever seen on a canith. “You’re not from around here,are you?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Mercenary?” His gaze dipped to the white hilt of her sword.

“I’m not.” The answer served for both questions.

“They always find more.” The man snorted. “I think the potentate sets a quota. If they can’t find enough rebels, they’ll hang thieves, and if they can’t find enough thieves, they’ll just smoke out some Amacars and call them thieves.” He shrugged. “Can’t say they don’t deserve it.” And with that he moved on, casting “Glory to the potentate” over his shoulder without great enthusiasm.

Clovis thought back to when she’d scented Arpix on her approach up the hill. Just the faintest detection, a half-recalled memory that might have been a dream. Her eyes found the gallows arms again, one, two, three. She started to walk towards them. A heavyset man stumbled into her path, and she deflected him to the flagstones without a glance.One. Two. Three.

It wasn’t possible. A cold, tingling sensation spread from her upper arms, across her back, down into her fingertips. A sense of detachment, of floating above her body, watching as some sixth sense concerned with self-preservation, and possessed collectively by crowds, cleared a path ahead of her more effectively than even the black-clad officer’s aura of bad news had managed.

It wasn’t possible that while she had lain, sleeping in a gutter, enfolded in the mist, Arpix had wandered into trouble. It wasn’t possible that these people had found him. It wasn’t— And yet, there by the base of the platform, still watched by a scattering of ghoulish elders and mesmerized children, was a pile of bodies poorly concealed beneath a stained tarpaulin. A canith in executioner black stood beside the dead, beckoning to a cart that looked just about large enough to carry all the corpses away.

Clovis found herself shaking, remembering Arpix’s scent so strongly that she could no longer tell if it was there around her or in just her memory, remembering his unfathomable combination of fragility and strength, the reserve that armoured him, and the smiles which sometimes cracked that armour.

“No.” It wasn’t possible that the longest pair of legs escaping the cover were his. Those were not his rag-bound feet, his tattered clothes. It would not be his face, distorted in death, that she saw if she had the strength tosnatch the tarp away. “No.” She could smell him though. The growl that escaped through her bared teeth proved sufficient to clear the last onlookers without further prompting. The man closest to her flat-out ran away as if knowing that his life depended upon it.

“No!” She found herself on her knees, nails scoring the flagstone beneath her hands. “…no…”

“Clovis?”

Her eyes fixed on the corpse pile. She’d read about madness visiting at such moments but hadn’t expected it to call on her.

“Clovis!” Coming from behind her.

She turned and rose in the same motion.

Arpix started to run towards her, only to be brought to a halt as the canith behind him, a soldier in a fancy uniform, caught hold of his shoulder. Behind Arpix and his captor came a huge canith at the head of a six-strong patrol, four canith and two humans, all in less showy uniforms than the first.

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