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enough to be carried over rapids and past falls where need be, and held steady in
the water each by their single outrigger. These were the canoes
of the Horse Society, though they were seldom found heading
north into the teeth of the cold at this time of year. Most of their
brethren in the Crown of the World would already be ferrying
their rafts of timber back south, loaded with whatever goods and
raw materials they had been able to barter for. These three boats
did not carry traders, though, but passengers. Amidst the Horse
people were two men of the south: Asmander and Venater. The
one was an earth-dark River Lord youth with an easy smile, the
other a burly, villainous-looking estuary man, far from home.
    ‘The Horse people are saying bad things about you, because
you will not row,’ Asmander remarked. ‘They say you cannot
have been such a pirate as you tell them, if you will not set hand
to oar.’ He was bare-chested, beaded with sweat from his stint,
dashing himself with river water before pulling on his thin tunic.
    Venater eyed him balefully. ‘I didn’t see you accomplishing
much.’
‘I did enough to assuage my honour.’ Their boat shifted as it
ground its keel in the shallows; some of the Horse Society
jumped out to steady it and haul it to land. Asmander let himself
over the side, plunging to his waist in water that was blessedly
cool after the long, hot journey north up the back of the Tsotec.
He put his shoulder to the vessel’s side with the assured joy of a
man who didn’t have to, and could stop doing so any time he
liked.
Venater crouched beside him, not even bothering to get out,
let alone putting his prodigious strength to any use. ‘Well, boy,
your father has my honour by the balls, and until he looses his
grip I’ll be pissed on before I do anything for mere honour.’
‘I don’t believe you.’ Asmander was gritting his teeth at the
effort, but he was grinning around it. ‘And I can see that me
doing this work is eating you up: the soft young boy of the River
Lords callousing his hands! Unhead of! Plainly this world is
upside-down and mad.’ He was tall and lean, with the dark, dark
skin of all the River Lords, his hair cropped short save for a knot
of it gathered at the base of his skull. His features were a good
battleground for his customary expressions: amusement, mischief, high-born disdain. They had won him many hearts back
home – he was a man who could have been married three times
over, had he ever got round to returning any of his suitors’ sentiments. He was the blade of his family, though, and wielded
always – as now – to further the ambitions of his father. Dalliances and ready smiles were never allowed to turn into anything
more serious. Asmander carried responsibilities.
‘If those Horse girls didn’t make eyes at you so much, you’d
not care,’ Venater snarled. ‘Show off for them, all you like.’
‘They’re not my type.’ Asmander stepped back, clapping his
hands together at a job well done. All three Horse craft were
beached safely now on this foreign shore.
Three days before, they had left the northern edge of the Sun
River Nation behind, no matter how optimistically one drew the
maps. Since the river had taken them northwards, the land to
the west had soared steeply away, rising to the heights that were
the Stone Kingdoms. To the east lay the Plains, green where the
land met the river, but so much of it uncultivated, where in
the south there would be fields and irrigation canals to wring
the absolute most out of every hand’s breadth of soil. Here in
the drier lands the people were fierce and unfriendly, that much
was known. They held and tilled only the land around their
villages, because anything beyond that was simply setting out a
meal for raiders from other tribes. They fought each other incessantly, held no oaths sacred, followed gods who valued nothing
but blood, and ate each other’s children for