Barathol had no choice but to dispense with efforts at stealth and subterfuge. Chaur was bawling with all the indignant outrage of a toddler justly punished, astonished to discover that not all things were cute and to be indulged by adoring caregivers-that, say, shoving a sibling off a cliff was not quite acceptable behaviour.
He had tried calming Chaur down, but simple as Chaur was, he was quick to sense disapproval, and Barathol had been unthinking and careless in expressing that disapproval-well, rather, he had been shocked into carelessness-and now the huge child would wail unto eventual exhaustion, and that exhaustion was still a long way off.
Two streets away from the harbour, three guards thirty paces behind them suddenly raised shouts, and now the chase was on for real. To Barathol’s surprise, C haur fell silent, and the smith pulled him up along-side him us they hurried along. ‘Chaur, listen to me. Get back to the ship-do you understand? Back to the ship, to the lady,.yes? Back to Spite-she’ll hide you. To The ship, Chaur, understand?’
A tear-streaked face, cheeks blotchy, eyes red, Chaur nodded.
Barathol pushed him ahead. ‘Go. On your own-I’ll catch up with you. Go!’
And Chaur went, lumbering, knocking people off their feet until a path mirac-ulously opened before him.
Barathol turned about to give the three guards some trouble. Enough to pur-chase Chaur the time he needed, at least.
He managed that well enough, with fists and feet, with knees and elbows, and if not for the arrival of reinforcements, he might even have won clear. Six more guards, however, proved about five too many, and he was wrestled to the ground and beaten half senseless.
The occasional thought filtered weakly through the miasma of pain and confusion as he was roughly carried to the nearest gaol. He’d known a cell before. It wasn’t so bad, so long as the jailers weren’t into torture. Yes, he could make a tour of gaol cells, country to country, continent to continent. All he needed to do was start up a smithy without the local Guild’s approval.
Simple enough.
Then these fragmented notions went away, and the bliss of unconsciousness was unbroken, for a time.
xx
‘Tis the grand stupidity of our kind, dear Cutter, to see all the errors of our ways, yet find in ourselves the inability to do anything about them. We sit, dumb-founded by despair, and for all our ingenuity, our perceptivity, for all our extraor-dinary capacity to see the truth of things, we hunker down like snails in a flood, sucked tight to our precious pebble, fearing the moment it is dislodged beneath us. Until that terrible calamity, we do nothing but cling.
‘Can you even imagine a world where all crimes are punished, where justice is truly blind and holds out no hands happy to yield to the weight of coin and influence? Where one takes responsibility for his or her mistakes, acts of negligence, the deadly consequences of indifference or laziness? Nay, instead we slip and duck, dance and dodge, dance the dodge slip duck dance, feet ablur! Our selves transformed into shadows that flit in chaotic discord. We are indeed masters of evasion-no doubt originally a survival trait, at least in the physical sense, but to have such instincts applied to the soul is perhaps our most egregious crime against morality. What we will do so that we may continue living with ourselves. In this we might assert that a survival trait can ultimately prove its own antithesis, and in the cancelling out thereof, why, we are left with the blank, dull, vacuous expression that Kruppe now sees before him.’
‘Sorry, what?’
‘Dear Cutter, this is a grave day, I am saying. A day of the misguided and the misapprehended, a day of mischance and misery. A day in which to grieve theunanticipated, this yawning stretch of too-late that follows fell decisions, and the stars will plummet and if we truly possessed courage we would ease ourselves with great temerity into that high, tottering footwear of the gods, and in seeing what they see, in knowing what they have come to know, we would at last comprehend the madness of struggle, the absurdity of hope, and off we would stumble, wailing our way into the dark future. We would weep, my friend, we would weep.’
‘Maybe I have learned all about killing,’ Cutter said in a mumble, his glazy eyes seemingly fixed on the tankard in his hand. ‘And maybe assassins don’t spare a thought as to who deserves what, or even motivations. Coin in hand, or love in the heart-reward has so many… flavours. But is this what she really wants? Or was that some kind of careless… burst, like a flask never meant to be opened-shatters, everything pours out-staining your hands, staining… everything.’
‘Cutter,' said Kruppe in a low, soft but determined tone. ‘Cutter. You must listen to Kruppe, now. You must listen-he is done with rambling, with his own bout of terrible, grievous helplessness. Listen! Cutter, there are paths that must not be walked. Paths where going back is impossible-no matter how deeply you would wish it, no matter how loud the cry in your soul. Dearest friend, you must-’