The Trell emerged from the carriage, followed by the swamp witch, Precious Thimble, who looked ghostly pale as she stumbled a few steps, then promptly sat down on the sand. Seeing Gruntle, Mappo walked over.
‘I gather,’ he said, ‘we encountered something unexpected in Hood’s realm.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ Gruntle replied. ‘It was my first visit.’
‘Unexpected?’ Faint snorted. ‘That was insane — all the dead in existence, on the march.’
‘Where to?’ Gruntle asked.
‘Maybe not to, maybe
From? In retreat? Now that was an alarming notion.
‘Used to be,’ Faint mused, ‘the realm of the dead was an easy ride. Peaceful. But in the last few years. . something’s going on.’ She walked over to Master Quell. ‘So, if that’s not going to work, Quell, what now?’
The man, still on his hands and knees, looked up. ‘You just don’t get it, do you?’
‘What?’
‘We didn’t even reach the damned
‘But, then, what-’
‘
A long silence followed.
Nearby, the undead man was collecting seashells.
Jula Bole’s watery eyes fixed on Precious Thimble, dreamy with adoration. Seeing this, Amby did the same, trying to make his expression even more desirous, so that when she finally looked over she would see that he was the right one for her, the only one for her. As the moments stretched, the competition grew fierce.
His left leg still ached, from the hip right down to his toes, and he had only one moccasin, but at least the sand was warm so that wasn’t too bad.
Precious Thimble was in a meeting with Master Quell and that scary barbed man, and the hairy giant ogre named Mappo. These were the important people, he decided, and excepting Precious Thimble he wanted nothing to do with them. Standing too close to those folk was never healthy. Heads explode, hearts burst — he’d seen it with his own eyes, back when he was a runt (but not nearly as much of a runt as Jula) and the family had decided at last to fight the Malazans who were showing up in their swamp like poison mushrooms. Buna Bole had been running things back then, before he got eaten by a toad, but it was a fact that Buna’s next-to-closest brothers — the ones who wanted to get closer — all went and got themselves killed. Exploding heads. Bursting hearts. Boiling livers. It was the law of dodging, of course. Marshals and their submarshals were smart and smart meant fast, so when the arrows and quarrels and waves of magic flew, why, they dodged out of the way. Anybody round them, trying to be as smart but not smart at all and so just that much slower, well, they didn’t dodge quick enough.
Jula finally sighed, announcing his defeat, and looked over at Amby. ‘I can’t be shy;lieve I saved you.’
‘I can’t neither. I wouldn’t of.’
‘That’s why I can’t believe that’s what I did. But then she’s seen how brave I am, how generous and selfless. She’s seen I’m better because she knows you wouldn’t have done it.’
‘Maybe I would’ve, and maybe she knows that, Jula. Besides, one of them sick smelly ones was trying to open the doors, and if it wasn’t for me he’d of got in and that’s what she really saw.’
‘You didn’t scrape that one off on purpose.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because you butted him with your face, Amby.’
Amby tested his nose again and winced, and then he sneered. ‘She saw what she saw, and what she saw wasn’t
‘She saw my hands, reaching down to drag you back up. She saw that.’
‘She didn’t. I made sure by covering them with, er, with my shirt.’
‘You lie.’
‘
‘No, you.’
‘You!’
You can say what you like, Amby, whatever you like. It was me saving you,’
‘Pulling off my moccasin, you mean,’
‘That was an accident.’
‘Yeah, then where is it?’
Fell off the side.’
‘No it didn’t. I checked your bag, Jula. You wasn’t trying to save me at all, you was stealing my moccasin because it’s your favourite moccasin. I want it back.’
‘It’s against the law to look in someone else’s bag.’
‘Swamp law. Does this look like a swamp?’
‘That doesn’t matter. You broke the law. Anyway, what you found was my spare moccasin.’
‘Your one spare moccasin?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Then why was it full of my love notes?’
‘What love notes?’
‘The ones me and her been writing back and forth. The ones I hid in my moccasin. Those ones, Jula.’
‘What’s obvious now is just how many times you been breaking the law. Be shy;cause you been hiding your love notes — which you write to yourself and nobody else — you been hiding them in my spare moccasin!’
‘Not that you’d ever look.’
‘But I might, if I knew about it.’
‘You didn’t though, did you? Besides, you don’t have a spare moccasin, because I stole it.’
‘And that’s why I stole it back!’
‘You can’t steal back what you didn’t know was stolen in the first place. That’s just stealing. And stealing’s against the law.’
‘Swamp law.’
‘Your bag
‘Hahahahaha-’
And Amby grinned at his own joke, and then he too laughed. ‘Hahahahaha-’
