Chapter the Fifth

The hunt was afoot.

Razili had watched mutely as Ildikó packed their bags with the necessary provisions – they had differed on the term necessary, as they differed always, and Razili had won fewer battles than she might have liked – and had accepted her pack, when it was her turn to accept it. It was heavier than she anticipated; she stumbled under the weight. Her chevalier was unsympathetic, and helped her into her stilts with a face like stone. The unfamiliar weight on the scion's back threatened to drag her back down to the earth; her chevalier had to steady her for a few moments extra, until she was certain that the younger girl would not fall, and still neither of them said anything at all.

There was a weight on Ildikó this grey night, about which Razili did not dare ask.

So they went out and they went on: the chevalier led and the scion followed. There was safety in second place; there was a vulnerability in forging forward. One flesh, one end, the scion thought ruefully, except for when the chevalier was made to go first. She gave no word to these thoughts, for her companion was still silent. And, still silent, they forged across the first stretch of intractable land, struggling under unfamiliar weight, stilts slipping beneath their boots, a kind of panic growing like mould between her ribs. There were plenty of dead in these miles to make use of if the night called for them, but she could not hear the night calling at all. It was all a-hush; a dignified stillness had fallen across the Land. Not even insects stirred in the grass-beneath-the-mist.

In this great quiet, they did not spot their first assassin until dawn.

Ildikó saw him first. In the dark, his silhouette resembled one of the unnumberable cragged, twisted trees which occupied the salted land of the Fifth; he had held very still, and perhaps if he had been ever stiller, Ildikó would not have seen him at all. But the dawn had risen behind them – he had not expected that, the way that the Fifth took the light and twisted it, the refraction through the smog which ever-curled around the ever-ruined remnants of ever-lost villages – yes, the dawn had risen behind them, and the assassin had moved, only fractally, the slightest twitch, as his eyes caught the glare. Maybe it had been a blink: only that.

Ildikó reached for her rosary.

The swampwater and algae churned around Razili's stilts as she stumbled backwards. She could not say why she had done so, for the arrow fired across the charland had not been intended for her. It buried itself into Ildikó's shoulder with a dull, soft sound, like a fork entering meat. The chevalier grunted, and bore it, and forged forward, dragging one stilt through the soft soil with an effort that was more than physical.

A second arrow followed, striking thigh, before a third shot across the water with a rippling aftermath like the tail of a comet. Razili screamed. The Fifth Land took the sound as it had taken the light, and tore it up, twisted it back on itself, so that when it echoed back to her, it sounded like so much languid laughter.

For her part, the chevalier swore softly, almost mildly, and slipped from her stilts entirely. It was not so far to go: she hit the land, and the land took her as quickly as it took anyone. The water rushed to cover her face as the soil parted around her limbs: then it closed back over her, suffocating and absolute. The chevalier knew better than to struggle: she had shut her eyes, and she had gone quietly.

Razili had reached for her, and Razili had nearly fallen, and then Razili had fallen, stumbling from her stilts onto a patch of solid ground and cowering from the arrow that did not follow.

The assassin had lowered his bow. In this gloom, she could tell no more about him: he was the harried, hurried, sketch of a person in the dim light, all outline and shadow, no shading.

He poised to turn, and then he did: with a parting look at the soil where Ildikó had fallen, without even a glance at Raz, the assassin moved to depart.

Razili would think later that she ought to have warned him. It would have been a fairer fight, perhaps, if she had: she might have been able to afford him a second, or perhaps two, for he had committed that great cardinal sin of the ruined lands, and he did not watch his step.

It might not have mattered if he had: the skeletal hand which had emerged from the shallow soil was grey enough on a grey morning that even Razili, who knew to look for it, could barely identify it amongst the shadows. It had wrapped long bone fingers about the man's ankle, fingertips digging into cloth, just as simple as that: he took one step, and then he tried to take another, and then he had fallen gracelessly to the ground with the dull grunt of one from whom all air has abruptly, rudely, departed.

Razili scrambled for her knife, but Ildikó clearly had no intention of being out-drawn by her little girl: the hands burst from the ground like strange hibernating flowers triggered to sudden full bloom. Ildikó was working blind, with a paltry set of bones to sort from: in places, Razili could see that a skeletal arm had come from the earth and floundered, unable to catch hold of the fallen assassin, and in other places, the limb which emerged was partial and pathetic, bone hanging from bone, weeping tiny shards with each desperate, flailing motion.

It mattered little: Ildikó was ferocious when she wanted to be. The hands found the man's arms, and fixed them to the soil, so that his fingers could only rake uselessly at the char: the hands found the man's throat, so that when he cried for mercy, it was a muffled sound Razili could interpret little; the hands found his mouth and his eyes and his fingernails, so that when the muffled cries keened and arched and coalesced, the Fifth Land took them and reflected them back to Raz as whispers: practically, she thought, intimate.

She went to the edge of the swamp on her knees, and she rolled her sleeves up, and found that she could not possibly push them high enough to keep them dry. So she put her hands into the algae anyway, and scrunched her eyes tightly shut at the feeling of things moving amongst the soil and moss that felt softer than either, and felt about with a bravery that she did not truly feel.

It was all that she could do to keep from instinctively jerking away when Ildikó's fingers fixed, warm and flesh, around hers. Razili's heels ground into the damp ruin of the land as she pulled, with all the pathetic strength in her body, to help her chevalier from the earth's awful maw. Ildikó needed so little help: just as soon as she had drawn fresh air again, she shook away Razili's paltry help and hauled herself from the gravewater, dripping algae and viscera. She tested the land on which Razili had beached them, and then, as though approving of her scion's choice, Ildikó Renáta Agócs went to her knees and retched black water onto herself, her entire body heaving with the motion.

Razili sank down to crouch beside her mentor, and put a hand gently on her neck, as though she could imbue the older woman with some small part of her small strength. Ildikó waved her off, and then vomited again, so Razili felt quite safe to ignore her, and stayed where she was, wondering what use she would ever prove in a Selection. The blood oozed from her shoulder and from her thigh, slower and more viscous than it should have been, staining Ildikó's shirt and trousers a dark, ruined brown.

Ildikó had been wearing cartillage armour over her chest, which had borne the brunt of the first arrow. It was the garment of a dread priest: Raz had been under the impression that Ildikó had buried it when she had left the church. She was glad, for her own sake, that the chevalier had not done so: as Ildikó wrenched the arrow from her shoulder, Raz could see that the armour, thin though it was, had rusted the metal and rotted the wood where they had come into contact, before Ildikó could bleed all that much.

The necromancer studied the arrow intently, and then flung it aside.

Her leg had to be bound, which Raz did with shaking hands, glad now and perhaps for the first time ever that Ildikó had been the final word on necessary provisions for this journey west.

Once Ildikó had decided that she could stand, they went to look at the body. It had been a man, Razili thought with relish, though the term was a generous one: he could not have been much older than Raz herself, still caught in adolesence's dread grip. He bore no sigil that she could see, no sign of the House who had sent him. Her spine twitched at the thought of it: judging by the way her chevalier was scanning the horizon now, they could not trust that he would be the last, or that he had been alone.

Ildikó and her necromancy had taken his eyes, and some of his teeth, and bloodied the heather around his head: Raz was torn between morbid curiosity and the curling feeling of nausea in her gut. She thought that one of the hands manacled about his biceps might have been that of her uncle or cousin.

She said, quietly, miserably, "he must have thought that you were the scion."

Ildikó shook her head. Her brows still bore a look of exaggerated focus, as though carved there. She said, "he knew who I was."

She looked at Razili very intently as she spoke. She looked at Razili as though she were saying something very important. Raz stared back at her, terrified and rapt.

"The Selection will not begin until we have assembled," Ildikó said. "That is the very first task, you see: to assemble."

She rubbed the black from her hands; she spat into the thickets of grass that lined the hidden edge of the hidden sink. Grass, Razili thought, grass – they must have been ascending to the edge of Fifth, into the comparative light of First. "And the Fifth House," she said, "is a ruined House."

"Just so." Ildikó drew her right hand across her mouth, and flicked more algae from her fingers, testing her joints. Around her left hand, she had wound her rosary tightly, so that each bead ground against a tightened, yellowed knuckle. "They wouldn't have another scion to give. The Selection would have to be called off. They're playing the game, Raz, as you must."

Razili's mouth twisted. "And you?"

"I am replaceable," said the chevalier. "Eminently, endlessly, replaceable."

She smiled. Her scion did not.