Chapter Two

The Ruins

The bog did not end so much as change its mind about what it was for.

For three days they had walked west, and for three days the country had stayed bog — the same brown water, the same reeds, the same business of putting a foot down and waiting to learn whether it would be allowed to stay there. Then the water began to keep things the bog had not made. A straight edge. A square corner, drowned and furred green but square — square the way nothing in nature is square. A road, when they found it, running on under the water dead level as far as the eye went, paving stones a hand's-width down and still, after who knew how long, declining to be swallowed. That was more than the bog had ever managed, and it was the first thing about the west to give Moggruk pause.

It was better walking, in the plain sense. There were walls to put a back to and broken floors to stand on out of the wet, and after a lifetime of country that wanted you under it the klan took to the ruins the way you take to a hard bed after no bed at all — gratefully, and without trusting it.

On the third morning the bog gave them fog. It came up off the water the way it always did and then, unlike always, declined to leave — standing thick and pale and patient, turning the reeds two strides off into rumours and the klan into a line of shapes each following the shape ahead. A swamp orruk does not love fog. Fog is the bog refusing to be counted, and Moggruk walked through it with his neck prickling, reading a world shrunk to ten feet in any direction and caring for none of the little it gave him.

So the gate did not announce itself. In open country a made thing that size would have stood on the skyline half a day's walk off, growing as you came, giving a body time to make its peace with it. The fog spared them the mercy. It simply produced the gate, all at once and full-grown out of the white, and stopped the whole klan where it stood — which nothing had ever done before, because nothing any of them had ever seen was built to.

It had been a gate once; you could read that much in what was left. Dressed stone reared up out of the flood on a scale that had no business existing, two towers of it still standing and the arch between them long since come down into the water in blocks the size of huts. The largest made thing any orruk there had stood beneath, and it was a ruin. Mulch said something about who'd want a door that big. Nobody answered him.

And then the fog began to lift.

It went the way bog fog goes when the day at last wins — not all at once but in long slow pulls, the white thinning and tearing and drawing back off the water in sheets — and as it drew back it uncovered the country a piece at a time, the way a hand draws a cloth off a thing to show you what has been lying under it the whole while. Drowned streets. Tumbled stone. A mile of dead city, sunk and furred and grey, opening out through the broken arch as the cloth came away.

And at the far end of it, where the fog gave up last, a second shape.

For the gate had been built to frame a thing — the way the bog-folk frame nothing and the stone-folk apparently frame everything — and the thing it had been built to frame was still there. Round, and tiered, and pale in the grey light, and where the gate was a ruin, this was not. Not fallen. Not furred. Whole. It stood over the dead city the way the gate stood over the klan, except that it dwarfed the gate as the gate dwarfed the orruks, so that the order of things came out backward and wrong: the small dead thing in front, the vast live thing behind.

Because it was alive. As the last of the fog went off the water a sound came across it — a long massed roar, countless throats, rising up out of the round shape and swelling and breaking like surf and falling away, and then, after a breath, doing it again. It was the sound of a great many things all feeling the one thing at the one moment, which is a sound a swamp orruk has simply never had occasion to hear, the bog dealing only in solitudes. Moggruk had no word for it. He stood and listened to a noise he could not name come out of a building that should not be, and felt the short hairs lift all down his spine.

And that was the smaller of his troubles. The larger one was that he could not count the place.

In the bog he had counted everything; the bog let you. It kept a fixed and knowable stock of ways to die, and he had known all of them — where they lived, what they wanted, the order they would come in. This did not. He stood in the broken gate and sent his eye out across the drowned city and tried to do the one thing it knew how to do — number the threats, rank them, line them up — and it could not even begin. There was too much. Every black window was a thing that might hold a thing. Every sunk street ran off into a dark he could not see the bottom of. The water moved in ways bog water didn't, with currents working in it; the round live shape sat on the horizon making its unnameable noise; and under all of it — he could feel it without being able to point to it — a great deal more city went down below the water and below the stone, down into a dark that had its own smell coming up through the cracks, old and sharp and wrong.

A watcher is worth only the count he can keep. Moggruk, for the first time in his life, could not keep it, and the not-keeping frightened him worse than any single thing in the bog ever had — because a thing you can count is a thing you can plan around, and he had walked into a country he could not count.

"Dis ain't a place we know, boss." It came out before he had decided to spend it, which was unlike him. "Too much 'ere I can't see da bottom of."

For a moment nobody took him up on it, and then it was Snag, of all of them, who laughed — Snag, who had spent the whole of the bog being the one who asked is dat safe, who had gone into the brass water after Drub and come out the far side of his own fear with something to prove. "Listen at 'im," he said, not unkindly, the way you rib a body you've only just decided you're allowed to. "Da watcher's gone shy. All dis dry stone an' 'e's huntin' for da catch in it." A couple of the boyz grinned. "Ain't no bog gonna pull yer under up 'ere, Moggruk. Look — solid. Dry. We can see da 'ole of it."

He could not, in fact, see the whole of it. That was the entire point. But Snag was happy, and a happy klan does not thank the one orruk insisting the floor is further down than it looks.

Moggruk let it go. He only noticed — because noticing was the one thing left him — that the klan had walked three days into a place not one of them had ever seen, and the only one with the cold feeling about it was the only one whose whole life had been the cold feeling, and that this counted for nothing here, the same as it had counted for nothing there.

"It's fat, is wot it is," said Wutzgut, who had been reading the same ruin and seeing the opposite of everything Moggruk saw: not threats but rooms, not a dark to fall into but a roof to sleep under, not a city full of unknowns but a city full of empties — standing open, waiting to be moved into. "Nobody's 'ome. Whole stone country, an' nobody 'ome but us." He said it like a landlord, and the klan warmed to it, because it was the better story, and the boss told the better stories.

They moved on into the ruins to find the getting Wutzgut had promised them. The getting was there. For a while, that was the whole of the truth.

Moggruk went with them — but a step behind, the way he always would, looking longest at the one thing in all the grey city that was not dead: the round live shape on its far horizon, making its great unnameable sound. He did not know it was called a colosseum, nor that the noise coming off it had a name, and the name was spectacle. He only stood in the broken gate with the rot coming up out of the cracks and his klan walking off toward their easy fortune, having heard, across a mile of drowned city, the first note of his own future — and taken it, sensibly and like anyone would, for noise.

They took a block three streets back from the water's edge, where the flood ran shallow over the ground floor and the second still stood dry, and they made it theirs the way orruks make a thing theirs — by sleeping in it and daring it to object. It did not object. Nothing in the stone country objected to anything, which was the first wonder of the place and, to one orruk at least, the first warning.

Brakka took to it like a thing let off a lead. He had spent his whole life rigging in a country that pulled every rig back down into itself — mud that ate foundations, water that rotted rope, a bog that suffered a built thing only until it got round to swallowing it — and here, suddenly, was stone. Stone that stayed where you set it. Corners that held a true angle. A floor that did not breathe under you in the night. Inside a day his hands had found the work they had been waiting their whole lives to do, and they did not stop to ask his leave about it. He shored a sagging beam with a cut block that might have been made for the gap. He hung a slab of hard old timber on leather so it swung true and closed the open side against the weather. He built a rack for the drying, and a thing to sit on that was not the ground, and somewhere in the middle of it he stopped, and stood a long while in front of a wall that someone had run up straight and plumb an age ago, and put his palm flat against it, and said nothing — the way another orruk might stand at the edge of a thing too big to have a feeling about all at once.

"Somebody knew wot dey woz about," he said at last, which from Brakka was an oration. He did not wonder aloud where the somebody had got to. His hands had already moved on to the next thing, and Brakka's hands did not grieve what they could not mend.

Moggruk wondered. But he kept it where he kept things now, and went to see about the getting.

The getting was everything Wutzgut had promised and a little besides. They set the bog the only way they knew, which turned out to be more than enough — deadfalls in the doorways, snares in the run-off channels, baited lines in the shallows — and the ruins paid out at once and kept paying. Eels thick as a forearm. Blind pale water-things that had never once wanted for the dark. And, coming up out of the broken floors and the black mouths where the stone had fallen in on itself, the rats.

Not bog rats. These were the rats of the under-stone, and they came up wet, always wet, as though the whole of the under they climbed from were a drowned thing. They were near the size of a grot, hunched and hand-fingered and red-eyed, and they wore scraps of stolen metal, and they looked at them — when you hauled them dripping from a snare — with a hating cleverness no dumb beast of the bog had ever owned. Soggy rat-fings, Moggruk called them the first one he pulled up, and the name stuck the way Gobber's names stuck, which is at once and forever. They came to bait without the sense the bog's least creature was born with. They died easy. The klan ate well off them, and did not ask where so many soft slow stupid things had come from, because a full belly asks nothing at all.

Moggruk asked. Not out loud, much — he had learned the price of out loud — but he stood over the snares and did not like what came up in them. They were wrong in a way he had no word for: not the high far wrongness of the live noise across the water, but a low wrongness that came up with the wet on them out of somewhere underneath, and a smell came with it, old and sharp and chemical, with nothing of honest bog-death in it. The smell lifted the hackles on his neck every time the air carried it. And there was the dying-easy itself. A thing that dies this cheap and keeps on coming is not a thing with few of itself; it is a thing with so many of itself it has stopped counting them, the way the bog had stopped counting whiskerfish. Moggruk could not see the number. He could only feel the shape of the place it would have to be — down under the eaten stone, and big, and below them — to spend its own kind so freely.

Wutzgut, who could feel the shape of nothing he could not put in his mouth, was at that moment twisting a leg off a still hissing one with the unhurried calm of a landlord collecting a rent he'd always known was owed. He bit, and chewed, and considered it.

"Tastes like easy," the boss said, pleased, and the boyz laughed, because the boss had named the flavour of their good fortune and it was a good name.

Moggruk looked at the thing in the boss's fist — the little stolen-metal scraps, the hand that was too much like a hand — and went back to his snare.

"Crab woz better," he said, not to anyone, and nobody but the rat-things heard him, and the rat-things were past caring.

It was a small thing to mutter. The crab had tasted better, but cost them Nazz and Drub's arm, and this tasted fine and cost them nothing, and only Moggruk stood there long enough to feel the wrongness in a sum that came out that way — that the bog made you pay for what it gave, every time, in the open, and a country that fed you this easy and asked nothing was not a country that had nothing to ask. It was a country that had not sent the bill yet.

He hauled the next one up, and did not like its smell, and said nothing, and put the cold feeling somewhere it would keep — the way you set a thing down out of the way without yet deciding what to do about it. Above him on the dry floor Brakka's hands went on making a home out of dead men's stone, and the rack filled, and the klan ate the flavour of easy, and the under-stone gave up its rats as freely as ever — which is the kind of generosity that, in Moggruk's long and narrow experience, only ever came from a thing that had not yet looked up from whatever it was doing to notice it was being robbed.

The first of the pale folk any of them met up close was caught in a trap meant for rats.

It was one of Brakka's — a doorway deadfall rigged for the soggy rat-things, a cut block on a hair-trigger over a baited stone — and it had been taking three and four a night without complaint. So when it went, a little after midday, nobody hurried. A sprung trap was good news, and good news could wait on a bowl.

Then the thing in it made its noise, and the bowls went down.

It was not a noise any of them had heard before, and the bog had taught them every register a dying thing owns — the pig's outrage, the bird's thin panic, the long resigned bubbling of something going under. This was none of those. It came up off the flooded street high and broken and fast, and worst of all it had shape in it: not the shape of pain but of words, a great tumbling rush of them climbing over one another — and threaded all through the middle of it, unmistakable and wrong, something that in any other throat Moggruk would have called laughing. A thing caught by the leg, gabbling and laughing at once, three streets off in the grey light. The boyz stopped where they stood. Even the rats, for a moment, seemed to listen.

Moggruk got there first, because he was always already moving toward the thing the others were only beginning to notice, and he came up on the sunk doorway alone and got his first clear sight of a pale folk, close.

It was the wrong colour all over — not the green of a proper creature nor the grey of a drowned one, but a pale that had never seen the sun, the colour of a thing kept under a stone. It was thin and long and wrong in every joint, and it wore something that had been cloth once, and when it hauled its lips back to make the sound there were too many teeth in it, fine and crowded and not a beast's teeth at all. It was working its caught leg against the timber with its hands — hands, not paws, with claws on them long enough to open an orruk throat to belt — and doing nothing with all that promise but pulling.

Then it quit the noise, and looked at him.

That was the worst of it. A trapped beast looks at you and you are weather; there is no question in the eye, only the snare. This looked at him, and the look had a question in it, and the question was why — and Moggruk had not the first idea what a creature did with a snared thing that wanted to know why, the bog never once having asked him. He stood there one breath too long, held by it.

And then there were two more.

They came along the flooded street fast, upright, out in the open — not creeping, not circling, the way every dangerous thing Moggruk had ever known came on, but straight toward the trap, calling out in the same tumbling tongue; and the caught one called back. They paid the ring of armed orruks no more mind than you'd pay the weather while your own was caught in a thing. They reached the deadfall and they did not paw at it, or bite it, or panic on it. They read it. One got its arms about the trapped thing and held it the way you hold a thing that is hurting. The other dropped straight down at the rig — and its long pale hands went past the block, past the leather, to the trigger-stick, the one piece in the whole of it that made the rig a trap, and worked at it, fast and clever and exactly right, the way a thing works a problem it understands.

Moggruk had set and sprung a thousand traps. Not one creature the wet world kept had ever understood one. They sprang it, or they died in it, or if they were lucky they tore loose and ran — but none had ever looked at a made thing and seen, first try, the one stick that mattered. This had. This thing had looked at a made thing and seen how it was made.

That was the moment the seed went in, though he could not have called it a seed nor said what it grew toward. Dey ain't beasts. The rats were clever the way a knife is clever, all edge and want. This was another thing entirely. These three were doing the one act in all the world his own people held dearest and never said out loud — coming back, into danger, weaponless, for one of their own — and the recognising of it turned something colder in him than the wrongness ever had.

Which is exactly where his gift, reaching for the only frame it owned, handed him the wrong answer.

Because in the bog a thing that organised was a thing that hunted in a pack; a thing that came for its own came in numbers; and a thing that understood your traps was the worst death in the water. He fed what he had seen into the only frame the bog had given him — thinks, talks, comes for its own in the open, mob-handed — and the frame could only do the sum one way. If this many had come this fast and this unafraid, there were more behind them: a dozen, two dozen, a whole reading, working, converging mass of them somewhere out in the dead city, and these three only the front of it. He could not have conceived the true shape of the number — it was past anything the bog had given him to imagine — and so he reached for the worst one he could hold, and spent it, loud, the thing he almost never spent.

"Boss." It came out hard and low and fast. "Dese ain't da rats. Dey fink, dey talk, dey come for deir own — an' if free of 'em come dis quick an' dis bold, dere's more out dere, a lot more, an' dey know da ground better'n us, an' we want off dis street 'fore—"

"'Fore wot," said Wutzgut.

And here a strange thing happened, the strangest of the day — stranger than the laughing, stranger than the teeth. Vragg agreed with him.

Vragg, who had spent a year making sport of the watcher for the boss's amusement, stood looking at the three pale things working the trap with an expression Moggruk had never seen him wear, which was the expression of an orruk doing a sum he did not like the look of. "...'E might 'ave summink, boss." It plainly cost him; you could hear it dragged out across the whole width of his dislike. "Dat ain't dumb. Look at da 'ands on it. Summink wot takes a trap apart dat good is summink wot sets 'em — an' I don't like a fing wot finks comin' for its own, mob-'anded, like dat." He did not look at Moggruk while he said it. But he said it, and for the length of one held breath the lieutenant who had always known the runt was clever and the runt himself stood on the one side of a thing.

Wutzgut looked at the three pale things. He saw exactly what Moggruk saw and read it precisely backward, which was the boss's own particular genius. He saw thin. He saw weaponless. He saw a leg in a trap and two soft things fussing at it with their bare hands, and a klan at his back that had eaten the flavour of easy every day for a fortnight — and he laughed, from the belly, the way he'd laughed at the crab being only a crab.

"Finks," he said, savouring it. "It finks. An' it ain't got a stick atween da lot of 'em." He was already moving, straight at the front of the thing with the whole of himself, the way he'd gone into the crab when the plan turned. "Mulch. Gnik. Gobber. Wiv me."

And he went, and they went with him, because that was the other thing the klan held dearest and did say out loud, all the time, which was that you went when the boss went.

It was not much of a fight, and that was the cruelty of it, because a real fight would at least have proved Moggruk something. The pale things were quick — quicker than thin things had any right to be, all that frantic over-wound speed — and the claws were real and the crowded teeth were real, and Mulch took a long red stripe down one forearm and Gobber a row of lines down her cheek she would wear a month; but they had no weapons, no line, not the first idea what to do about four orruks who did this for a living, and they died the way the unarmed die against the armed, which is quickly, and out of all proportion to the fright they'd caused. The caught one last of all, still in the trap, still gabbling its broken laugh to the end of it.

Then it was quiet. Three pale wrong things going still in the brown water, four orruks barely marked — and the dark past them stayed dark, and gave up nothing more.

It gave up nothing more. Moggruk stood at his wall and watched the dead city decline to produce the mass he had promised it held, and felt the whole klan feel him be wrong.

"More comin', eh," said Wutzgut, not even unkindly, wiping his hands. "Best get off da street." A couple of the boyz laughed.

Vragg laughed loudest. Vragg, who had said 'e might 'ave summink not sixty heartbeats gone, now found his whole voice and spent every coin of it on how soft they'd nearly been — three skinny pale things in a rat-trap, and the watcher had them braced for a war. He piled as much noise as he could onto the thing he'd said, because a lieutenant who sides with the runt and is shown a fool in the same minute has only the one road back, and it runs straight over the runt, and Vragg meant to keep his place at the boss's shoulder more than he meant anything at all. Moggruk watched him take that road. He understood it, and did not blame him for it, and filed it with the rest.

Then Gobber came up beside him — not unkindly; Gobber was never unkind, which was its own kind of weapon. She was winding the lines on her cheek with a strip of rag, and she considered the blood on her hand, and then considered him. "Twenty more, 'e says," she said, fond and final, laying a question to rest. "Twenty more — an' it comes out free dead an' us wearin' da kind o' scratch you get off a bramble." She shook her head. "You woz sharp in da swamp, Moggruk. Sharpest fing we 'ad, I'd say it. It's just dis place." She took in the stone, the dry, the easy with a turn of her bloodied hand. "Dem stones 'as gone an' dulled yer. 'Appens to a blade."

It was meant gently, and it landed where every gentle thing the klan said to him landed: on the growing pile of evidence that Moggruk's gift had been a bog thing, and the bog was behind them now. The boyz took it for the klan's last word on the matter, the way these things settle — the watcher was bog-clever and stone-stupid, and there was an end of it.

He did not argue. He went and looked at the dead ones while the boyz were still pleased with themselves, and could not have said why. The wrongness was all still on them — the bone, the teeth, the colour of under-a-stone — but the frantic had gone out of them, and they only looked thin now, and not very old, and they had died with their hands stretched toward the trap and toward the one they had come for. He had been wrong, and he turned it over honestly, because he always did: he had called a danger that did not come, again, on the stone, the way he kept having the wrong of it on the stone. I woz wrong about da more. He made himself hold it.

But he had not been only wrong, and that was the part he could not yet make sit with the rest. I woz not wrong about da mind. They thought. They talked. They came for their own, and they read a made trap like makers, and died understanding everything in the world but orruks. Out past this street there was a great deal more of whatever these were — he was almost sure of it still, even now, even shamed — and the looking-soft was, he would have bet his life, the bait. He had two boxes, bog and stone, and he stood over three dead things that fit cleanly in neither, and could not yet make himself build the third. That a body could be so wrong and so right in the one breath, and not know how to hold the two together — that unsettled him worse than the teeth had.

It was Brakka who closed it. He had come down with the rest but had not charged — Brakka rarely charged — and he was crouched now over the sprung deadfall, turning the trigger-stick in his fingers, the stick the pale thing had gone for first, the right one. He did not look up. What he said he said mostly to the stick.

"You can sharpen a knife on a stone too," said Brakka.

He set it down, and his hands moved on, and he had no notion he had said anything at all — Brakka's sayings being like Brakka's rigs, easy to step over, right up until the moment you found you were standing on one. Nobody else marked it. But Moggruk marked it.

And Moggruk, who had got the danger wrong and the thing itself right, who had just watched three pale things read a made trap like makers and die for understanding everything but orruks, took the cold feeling he'd been wrong about and the colder one he hadn't, and folded them both down small behind his teeth — and set about the only work the stone country had left him, which was to learn.

A season is a long time to be right, and Wutzgut spent the whole of one being right in a row.

The weeks ran together the way good weeks do — there being nothing in ease to hang a memory on, ease being the one weather the bog had never trained them to mark — and somewhere in the running-together the cold came down and the flooded streets skinned over of a morning and the getting went on getting. The rack was never empty. The rats came up and died easy. Nobody went under. For a klan whose whole history was a list of the things that had nearly killed it, a season in which nothing did was very near the strangest thing that had ever happened to them, and they bore it about as well as you'd expect: they grew fat and loud and certain, and loved the boss who'd brought them to it with a love that had hardened, over the easy weeks, into something nearer worship.

And then the others came — which was how the klan learned that Wutzgut had been wrong, that first day in the gate, when he said nobody was home.

There had been swamp orruks in the ruins the whole while. Of course there had; the abandoned margins of a drowned city are exactly the nowhere a beaten klan drifts to, and the stone country was wide enough that two outfits could work it a season and never cross. They crossed now. They crossed because a prosperous klan cannot be hidden — the smoke, the smell of the drying-racks, the plain fact of orruks eating well where orruks had only ever scraped — and what they found when they came to look spoke to them in the one tongue every swamp orruk understands without being taught.

In the bog, a boss drew followers by being the hardest thing in the water. Here was a new law, and Wutzgut had stumbled into being its first prophet without once meaning to: here, a boss drew followers by eating well. Strength you could lose in an afternoon to a bigger arm — but a klan that had cracked a whole easy country was a thing the hungry came to, and bent the knee to, and asked to be let in out of the cold. Two klans came that season, and Wutzgut took them both, and made of the taking two more victories to stand on.

Da Sunk Rod came first, under Bolg da Slow — a wide, unhurried boss who had got his name honestly and wore it without complaint, the way slow things that have outlived quicker ones generally do. His lot had worked the deepest streets, the ones that never drained; they were good in the wet and poor in the belly. Bolg looked at the Gutscrape's full rack a long, slow while, then sat down at the edge of the dry floor and did not get up, which was how Bolg said yes to a thing. He gave Wutzgut no trouble. He gave anyone no trouble. He was the easiest victory the boss ever won, and Wutzgut enjoyed it exactly as much as if it had cost him something.

Da Reekfen came after, under Mudda Ironchin, and she was the other kind. She came out of a meaner stretch of bog and she came mean — a hard old matriarch-boss with a jaw you could have moored a barge to, and a klan behind her with the lean, sideways look of orruks who had been hungry long enough to remember it. She bent the knee. She bent it because her boyz were fed for it, and a boss who will not feed her boyz is shortly not a boss — but she bent it the way iron bends, holding the shape of the grudge all the way down, and as she straightened she was counting the rack with her eyes. Moggruk, who counted everything, marked that she counted it the way he counted things: against a day. He filed Mudda Ironchin where he filed the rats and the clever dead hands — under later.

But that was Moggruk's reckoning, and no one had asked for it. To the klan, and to Wutzgut most of all, Mudda Ironchin bending her iron knee was simply the second jewel in a very good week, and the boss climbed up onto a fallen block to say so.

He was good at it. This has to be allowed him, here at the very top of his life, because everything after is the coming down. Wutzgut gave a speech the way he ran a trap — total conviction, no margin set by for doubt — and at the top of his luck, two beaten klans bending in and a season of fat at his back, conviction was the whole of what was wanted.

"Look at it," he said, and swept an arm over the dry floor and the full racks and the gathered boyz of three klans where there had been one. "Dey said da bog woz all dere woz. Scrape an' drown an' scrape, an' call it livin'. I said dere woz better — an' 'ere it is." He rode the cheer up and used it. "We come outta da mud wiv nuffin', an' now da mud comes to us. Bolg's boyz come to us. Mudda's boyz come to us. 'Cause we're da klan wot eats — an' in dis world dat's da only crown wot matters." Louder. "We ain't scrapers no more. Da bog scraped. We made da stone country pay — an' from 'ere on dey can call us by it. Da Gutscrape. Remember da name. Da 'ole grey country's gonna learn it."

And three klans roared it back at him — Gutscrape, Gutscrape — under the cold grey sky of a dead city, and for that one held moment it was entirely true.

At the back of the roar, where Moggruk could see him, Drub cheered too.

Drub, who had been grey-under-green and one-armed and not looked to last the night the bog took his arm, had lasted every night since. He was thinner than he'd been and would carry the stump to his grave, but he was upright and fed and here — and Brakka had seen to the rest. Where the arm had been there was a shield now: a curve of old roof-slate that Brakka had found and worked and bound to the stump with leather and patience, so that the worst thing the bog had ever done to Drub had been quietly turned, by a friend's hands and a dead city's rubbish, into a thing that might yet keep him alive. Drub could not clap. So he banked his spear against the slate where his arm used to be and beat the haft on it, cheering the boss with the weapon and the wound in the one gesture, and did not seem to find the two strange to hold together. Beside him Brakka was not cheering; Brakka was watching the binding with his eyes, already working out how to make the next one better.

And Moggruk stood a little apart, as he always would, and counted.

He could not help it; the count was the one thing the stone country had not managed to take from him. Three klans where there had been one. The mouths of them, and how long the racks would feed the mouths. The arithmetic of a thing getting bigger — which everyone around him read as the plain shape of safety, more boyz, more arms, safe, and which Moggruk could not read that way, because he alone had stood over the clever dead hands and smelled what came up wet out of the under-stone, and a count is only safe when you know the other side of it. He did not know the other side of this one. Nobody did. The klan had got three times as big in a country whose true numbers not one of them had ever taken, and called the getting-bigger safety, and cheered.

But a klan three times as big has three times less use for one small orruk who watches — and there was a freedom hidden in that the others would have been amazed to hear named as one. No one needed Moggruk for the muscle; no one ever had. And now there was so much muscle, so much certainty, so much noise, that no one would mark it at all if the watcher slipped off of a quiet morning to go and look at the thing he could not stop looking at.

Which stood, as it had since the gate, on the far grey horizon across the drowned city — the round live shape, louder now than it had been, for the cold had brought the spectacle season on, whatever a spectacle was, and the great massed roar came off it more days than not: swelling, breaking, falling away, swelling again, a thing the whole klan had long since stopped hearing the way you stop hearing weather.

Moggruk had not stopped hearing it. He stood in the cheering of three klans for his triumphant boss, and looked the way he always looked — at the one thing in all the grey country bigger and louder and more alive than anything his people had just built — and behind his teeth, where he kept what was his, he began, very quietly, to plan a walk.