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it been a long time since the rimlands saw anything but ghoul-steeds?”
    “Probably,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking about the horses themselves, but of harnesses. Do you think we could create some kind of harness for riding the giants? That way, if something goes wrong”—he couldn’t help but think of Sakera’s unsteady hands—“you won’t be thrown.”
    “Interesting,” she said.
    “Something with buckles, maybe?”
    “We’d have to find a smith,” Sakera said drily. They had approached a settlement last week, leaving the giants behind, crouched behind some hills. The settlement’s buildings had been intact, but corpse-colored fungus grew from all the doors, releasing pale spores. They had retreated in haste. Sakera had been withdrawn for the rest of the day. “I don’t have any power over metal. Maybe we’re better off with some carefully chosen knots.”
    “With your hands?” Something else occurred to him: he had once seen a trader trapped under a fallen horse, back in the days when horses were to be found in the rimlands. “You’d want to be able to get out in a hurry, in case something went wrong.”
    “A slip knot of some sort?”
    He considered it. “It might work.”
    Unfortunately, Sakera was not any good at finding trees. It took them several days to track down a stand of widely separated willows by following one of the rimlands’ black rivers. Sakera drank the water fearlessly, although she grimaced at its taste.
    Tamim showed Sakera how to strip the bark and plait it into cords. Once they had enough rope, it took them more time to devise a system of knots that would work on the giants. Sakera knew an amazing number of knots. “They’re a kind of magic from the sea-folk,” she said. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen the sea.”
    Supposedly there was a black sea on the other side of the Pit’s boundary, with ships of rotting timbers and ghost-fabric sails. “No,” he said. “There’s nothing magical about knots, either, no more than a gun is magical.” He still had five bullets, although they were of iron rather than jade. Death and undeath were the only magic he recognized.
    Sakera flexed her fingers, grimacing. Her skin was torn from working the bark. She washed her hands in the river, then dried her hands on her coat. “If only things were that simple,” she said.
    They made more rope, just in case, and took the opportunity to bathe and wash their clothes. Sakera’s coat was beginning to look more grey than black. Tamim suspected it was losing its dye. Sakera insisted on going around in a ragged blanket while the coat dried.
    “Do you really get that cold?” Tamim said.
    “Death is cold,” Sakera said. “It’s the absence of warmth and the absence of light.”
    All Tamim could think of was the grave he had dug for the last of his caretaker ghouls. All virtue had gone from their bones, and no necromancer would raise them again. But he had wanted to do them that honor anyway, to offer them the peace that his mother had denied them. He had wanted to lower himself into the grave, too, but then no one would have been left to cover them with earth.
    “These are not entirely bad things,” she said, more kindly. “What would day be without night, a candle without the shuttered room?”
    “It’s been years since I’ve seen a candle.”
    “There we go, missing the point,” she said, but she didn’t sound offended.
    It wasn’t until Sakera was satisfied with Tamim’s control over the giant that she began to teach him the alphabet. He had been looking forward to this until he realized that the shapes she was showing him didn’t resemble the ones he knew. “They’re wrong,” he said stubbornly as he stared at the two figures she had drawn in the dirt.
    Blood welled up in the letters, as though she had cut them into the flesh of some sleeping beast. It bubbled briefly, then soaked back into the dirt. It was not an uncommon phenomenon, this deep in the