'She did,' he was forced to admit, though he wondered whether death would have been kinder.

'Reckon she's just soft enough, then, don't you?'

Temple swilled water around his mouth. 'She certainly seems angry about something.'

'She's been often disappointed.'

'Sad to say I doubt I'll be reversing that trend. I've always been a deeply disappointing man.'

'I know that feeling.' Lamb scratched slowly at his shortened beard. 'But there's always tomorrow. Doing better next time. That's what life is.'

'Is that why you two are out here?' asked Temple, handing back the canteen. 'For a fresh beginning?'

Lamb's eyes twitched towards him. 'Didn't Shy tell you?'

'When she talks to me it's mostly about our debt and how slowly I'm clearing it.'

'I hear that ain't moving too quick.'

'Every mark feels like a year off my life.'

Lamb squatted beside the stream. 'Shy has a brother and a sister. They were . . . taken.' He held the canteen under the water, bubbles popping. 'Bandits stole 'em, and burned our farm, and killed a friend of ours. They stole maybe twenty children all told and took them up the river towards Crease. We're following on.'

'What happens when you find them?'

He pushed the cork back into the canteen, hard enough that the scarred knuckles of his big right hand turned white. 'Whatever needs to. I made a promise to their mother to keep those children safe. I broken a lot of promises in my time. This one I mean to keep.' He took a long breath. 'And what brought you floating down the river? I've always been a poor judge of men, but you don't look the type to carve a new life from the wilderness.'

'I was running away. One way and another I've made quite a habit of it.'

'Done a fair bit myself. I find the trouble is, though, wherever you run to . . . there y'are.' He offered out his hand to pull Temple up, and Temple reached to take it, and stopped.

'You have nine fingers.'

Suddenly Lamb was frowning at him, and he didn't look like such a slow and friendly old fellow any more. 'You a missing-finger enthusiast?'

'No, but . . . I may have met one. He said he'd been sent to the Far Country to find a nine-fingered man.'

'I probably ain't the only man in the Far Country missing a finger.'

Temple felt the need to pick his words carefully. 'I have a feeling you're the sort of man that sort of man might be looking for. He had a metal eye.'

No flash of recognition. 'A man with a missing eye after a man with a missing finger. There's a song in there somewhere, I reckon. He give a name?'

'Caul Shivers.'

Lamb's scarred face twisted as though he'd bitten into something sour. 'By the dead. The past just won't stay where you put it.'

'You do know him, then?'

'I did. Long time back. But you know what they say old milk turns sour but old scores just get sweeter.'

'Talking of scores.' A second shadow fell across him and Temple squinted around. Shy stood over him again, hands on her hips. 'One hundred and fifty-two marks. And eight bits.'

'Oh God! Why didn't you just leave me in the river?'

'It's a question I ask myself every morning.' That pointed boot of hers poked at his back. 'Now up you get. Majud wants a Bill of Ownership drawn up on a set of horses.'

'Really?' he asked, hope flickering in his breast.

'No.'

'I'm riding drag again.'

Shy only grinned, and turned, and walked way.

'Just soft enough, did you say?' Temple muttered.

Lamb stood, wiping his hands dry on the seat of his trousers. 'There's always tomorrow.'

Sweet's Crossing 'Did I exaggerate?' asked Sweet.

'For once,' said Corlin, 'no.'

'It surely is a big one,' muttered Lamb.

'No doubt,' added Shy. She wasn't a woman easily impressed, but the Imperial bridge at Sictus was some sight, specially for those who'd scarcely seen a thing you could call a building in weeks. It crossed the wide, slow river in five soaring spans, so high above the water you could hardly fathom the monstrous scale of it. The sculptures on its pitted pedestals were wind-worn to melted lumps, its stonework sprouted with pink-flowered weeds and ivy and even whole spreading trees, and all along its length and in clusters at both ends it was infested with itinerant humanity. Even so diminished by time it was a thing of majesty and awe, more like some wonder of the landscape than a structure man's ambition could ever have contemplated, let alone his hands assembled.

'Been standing more'n a thousand years,' said Sweet.

Shy snorted. 'Almost as long as you been sitting that saddle.'

'And in all that time I've changed my trousers but twice.'

Lamb shook his head. 'Ain't something I can endorse.'

'Changing 'em so rarely?' asked Shy.

'Changing 'em at all.'

'This'll be our last chance to trade before Crease,' said Sweet. ' 'Less we have the good luck to run into a friendly party.'

'Good luck's never a thing to count on,' said Lamb.

'Specially not in the Far Country. So make sure and buy what you need, and make sure you don't buy what you don't.' Sweet nodded at a polished chest of drawers left abandoned beside the way, fine joints all sprung open from the rain, in which a colony of huge ants appeared to have taken up residence. They'd been passing all kinds of weighty possessions over the past few miles, scattered like driftwood after a flood. Things folk had thought they couldn't live without when they and civilisation parted. Fine furniture looked a deal less appealing when you had to carry it. 'Never own a thing you couldn't swim a river with, old Corley Ball used to tell me.'

'What happened to him?' asked Shy.

'Drowned, as I understand.'

'Men rarely live by their own lessons,' murmured Lamb, hand resting on the hilt of his sword.

'No, they don't,' snapped Shy, giving him a look. 'Let's get on down there, hope to make a start on the other side before nightfall.' And she turned and waved the signal to the Fellowship to move on.

'Ain't long before she takes charge, is it?' she heard Sweet mutter.

'Not if you're lucky,' said Lamb.

Folk had swarmed to the bridge like flies to a midden, sucked in from across the wild and windy country to trade and drink, fight and fuck, laugh and cry and do whatever else folk did when they found themselves with company after weeks or months or even years without. There were trappers and hunters and adventurers, all with their own wild clothes and hair but the same wild smell and that quite ripe. There were peaceable Ghosts set on selling furs or begging up scraps or tottering about drunk as shit on their profits. There were hopeful folk on their way to the gold-fields seeking to strike it rich and bitter folk on the way back looking to forget their failures, and merchants and gamblers and whores aiming to build their fortunes on the backs of both sets and each other. All as boisterous as if the world was ending tomorrow, crowded at smoky fires among the furs staked out to dry and the furs being pressed for the long trip back where they'd make some rich fool in Adua a hat to burn their neighbours up with jealousy.

'Dab Sweet!' growled a fellow with a beard like a carpet.

'Dab Sweet!' called a tiny woman skinning a carcass five times her size.

'Dab Sweet!' shrieked a half-naked old man building a fire out of smashed picture-frames, and the old scout nodded back and gave a how-do to each, by all appearances known intimately to half the plains.

Enterprising traders had draped wagons with gaudy cloth for stalls, lining the buckled flags of the Imperial road leading up to the bridge and making a bazaar of it, ringing with shouted prices and the complaints of livestock and the rattle of goods and coinage of every stamp. A woman with eyeglasses sat behind a table made from an old door with a set of dried-out, stitched up heads arranged on it. Above a sign read Ghost Skulls Bought and Sold. Food, weapons, clothing, horses, spare wagon parts and anything else that might keep a man alive out in the Far Country was going for five times its value. Treasured possessions from cutlery to windowpanes, abandoned by naive colonists, were hawked off by cannier opportunists for next to nothing.

'Reckon there'd be quite a profit in bringing swords out here and hauling furniture back,' muttered Shy.

'You've always got your eye open for a deal,' said Corlin, grinning sideways at her. You couldn't find a calmer head in a crisis but the woman had a sticky habit the rest of the time of always seeming to know better.

'They won't seek you out.' Shy dodged back in her saddle as a streak of bird shit spattered the road beside her horse. There were crowds of birds everywhere, from the huge to the tiny, squawking and twittering, circling high above, sitting in beady-eyed rows, pecking at each other over the flyblown rubbish heaps, waddling up to thieve every crumb not currently held on to and a few that were, leaving bridge, and tents, and even a fair few of the people all streaked and crusted with grey droppings.

'You'll be needing one o' these!' a merchant screamed at them, thrusting a disgruntled tomcat at Shy by the scruff of the neck while all around him from tottering towers of cages other mangy specimens stared out with the haunted look of the long-imprisoned. 'Crease is crawling with rats the size o' horses!'

'Then you'd best get some bigger cats!' Corlin shouted back, and then to Shy, 'Where's your slave got to?'

'Helping Buckhorm drive his cattle through this shambles, I daresay. And he ain't a slave,' she added, further niggled. She seemed to be forever calling upon herself to defend from others a man she'd sooner have been attacking herself.

'All right, your man-whore.'

'Ain't that either, far as I'm aware.' Shy frowned at one example of the type, peering from a greasy tent-flap with his shirt open to his belly. 'Though he does often say he's had a lot of professions . . .'

'He might want to think about going back to that one. It's about the only way I can see him clearing that debt of yours out here.'

'We'll see,' said Shy. Though she was starting to think Temple wasn't much of an investment. He'd be paying that debt 'til doomsday if he didn't die first which looked likely or find some other fool to stick to and slip away into the night which looked even more likely. All those times she'd called Lamb a coward. He'd never been scared of work, at least. Never once complained, that she could recall. Temple could hardly open his mouth without bitching on the dust or the weather or the debt or his sore arse.

'I'll give him a sore arse,' she muttered, 'useless bastard . . .'

Maybe you're best off looking for the best in people but if Temple had one he was keeping it well hid. Still. What can you expect when you fish men out of the river? Heroes?

Two towers had once stood watch at each end of the bridge. At the near side they were broken off a few strides up and the fallen stone scattered and overgrown. A makeshift gate had been rigged between them as shoddy a piece of joinery as Shy ever saw and she'd done some injuries to wood herself bits of old wagon, crate and cask bristling with scavenged nails and even a wheel lashed to the front. A boy was perched on a sheared-off column to one side, menacing the crowds with about the most warlike expression Shy ever saw.

'Customers, Pa!' he called as Lamb and Sweet and Shy approached, the wagons of the Fellowship spread out in the crush and jolting after.

'I see 'em, son. Good work.' The one who spoke was a hulking man, bigger'n Lamb even and with a riot of ginger beard. For company he had a stringy type with the knobbliest cheeks you ever saw and a helmet looked like it had been made for a man with cheeks of only average knobbliness. It fit him like a teacup on a mace end. Another worthy made himself known on top of one of the towers, bow in hand. Red Beard stepped in front of the gate, his spear not quite pointed at them, but surely not pointed away.

'This here's our bridge,' he said.

'It's quite something.' Lamb pulled off his hat and wiped his forehead. 'Wouldn't have pegged you boys for masonry on this scale.'

Ginger Beard frowned, not sure whether he was being insulted. 'We didn't build it.'

'But it's ours!' shouted Knobbly, as though it was the shouting of it made it true.

'You big idiot!' added the boy from his pillar.

'Who says it's yours?' asked Sweet.

'Who says it isn't?' snapped Knobbly. 'Possession is most o' the law.'

Shy glanced over her shoulder but Temple was still back with the herd. 'Huh. When you actually want a bloody lawyer there's never one to hand . . .'

'You want to cross, there's a toll. A mark a body, two marks a beast, three marks a wagon.'

'Aye!' snarled the boy.

'Some doings.' Sweet shook his head as if at the decay of all things worthy. 'Charging a man just to roll where he pleases.'

'Some people will turn a profit from anything.' Temple had finally arrived astride his mule. He'd pulled the rag from his dark face and the dusty yellow stripe around his eyes lent him a clownish look. He offered up a watery smile, like it was a gift Shy should feel grateful for.

'One hundred and forty-four marks,' she said. His smile slipped and that made her feel a little better.

'Guess we'd better have a word with Majud,' said Sweet. 'See about a whip-around for the toll.'

'Hold up there,' said Shy, waving him down. 'That gate don't look up to much. Even I could kick that in.'

Red Beard planted the butt of his spear on the ground and frowned up at her. 'You want to try it, woman?'

'Try it, bitch!' shouted the boy, his voice starting somewhat to grate at Shy's nerves.

She held up her palms. 'We've no violent intentions at all, but the Ghosts ain't so peaceful lately, I hear . . .' She took a breath, and let the silence do her work for her. 'Sangeed's got his sword drawed again.'

Red Beard shifted nervously. 'Sangeed?'

'The very same.' Temple hopped aboard the plan with some nimbleness of mind. 'The Terror of the Far Country! A Fellowship of fifty was massacred not a day's ride from here.' He opened his eyes very wide and drew his fingers down his ears. 'Not an ear left between them.'

'Saw it ourselves,' threw in Sweet. 'They done outrages upon those corpses it pains me to remember.'

'Outrages,' said Lamb. 'I was sick.'

'Him,' said Shy, 'sick. Things as they are I'd want a decent gate to hide behind. The one at the other end bad as this?'

'We don't got a gate at the other end,' said the boy, before Red Beard shut him up with a dirty look.

The damage was done, though. Shy took a sharper breath. 'Well, that's up to you, I reckon. It is your bridge. But . . .'

'What?' snapped Knobbly.