A Home in the Hills

by Robert J. Crane

  “I can walk.”

  Scourgey loosed a very low whine, encouraging him upon her back, perhaps, in her own way.

  But he would walk. He would not ride in to a final battle with Baraghosa, unable to hold himself high.

  The few vendors in stalls seemed more than surprised. Their wide eyes were almost comical, staring at the party clambering from the rowboat and pushing toward the place where Tarratam reached its apex … staring at Huanatha, leading the procession.

  The peak of the city, at the top of a high, rolling hill, was a huge, sprawling building complete with many high towers. This was the castle that Huanatha had once ruled from, and where Trattorias now sat upon the throne, Baraghosa whispering to him. It looked less like the castles of his imagination, though, than a fortress, blocky and unbeautiful and

  utterly imposing.

  Looking upon it, Jasen had no trouble believing that this was where Baraghosa could be found.

  The few Coricuanthians out this morning were as shocked as the vendors at the docks. Most stared in open-mouthed wonder before creeping back into the shadows. Though their eyes alighted on the exiled queen, they dared not hail her.

  So Huanatha hailed them instead.

  She shouted something in her own language, to a woman swaddled in a dark blue cloth, the bottom edges of which had gone to rags. The woman spun, a look of purest horror on her face. A baby was swaddled close to her chest, and she clutched it tight, as though afraid the exiled queen would steal it from her very arms, and she hurried into the nearest open doorway and out of sight.

  Huanatha growled.

  “Why do they run?” Alixa asked.

  “Trattorias has them living in fear,” Kuura said. “Once Huanatha was exiled, he positioned guards to police the people. If any were even to mention the former queen, they were … ‘removed from society.’ At least, that is how I heard it was put.” Kuura’s lips thinned into a narrow line. “One can only imagine the punishment for speaking to her.”

  “But there are no guards out here,” said Alixa, peering about. “There’s almost no one at all.”

  “It does not matter. Fear is a very powerful thing,” Kuura said.

  Huanatha hailed a pair of men. But they just as quickly went scurrying off.

  Huanatha growled. “What has my cousin done to these people that they are terrified to speak to their former queen?”

  “With Baraghosa at his side, it is likely he has only sown more discord while you have been gone,” muttered Longwell. “Relent with your shouting; it will only drive them off further.”

  Huanatha held her tongue at that. She stalked silently up the dusty roads cut between buildings, many stone—but many more, Jasen saw now, only wood. These little hovels were nested amongst the sturdier buildings, with fat, dried leaves stitched together to form walls and awnings against the sunlight. From the sea, they’d been well hidden, either by the blocky stone buildings, or just by blending into the ground’s dry brush.

  Jasen peered into the little hovels as they passed. Despite the brightness of the sun, they were dim inside. At first, Jasen could not make out the interiors of the small, single-room homes they passed by. But the more they passed by, the more his eyes were able to adjust. And he saw they were all empty. Plenty of them were littered with rags and other odds and ends, yet none were occupied.

  The ground seemed to eat up the heat and radiate it out, so even though they had traveled hardly any distance south these past few days, the temperatures had soared. Jasen felt himself baking, less from the morning sun and more from the warmth beamed up at him from the dry, cracked earth underfoot. Which settlers had decided to make a toehold here, Jasen hadn’t the faintest clue. Certainly they were not around for him to ask them.

  “Where is everyone?” he muttered to Alixa.

  Her answer was grim: “I don’t know.”

  Up the hill they went, and the higher they went, the fewer people they saw. Even the guards that Kuura mentioned were nowhere to be seen—although Jasen had a sinking feeling that as they came closer to their destination, that would change.

  At least, he hoped so. Because the sheer quietness, so still and eerie, raised in him a fear that Trattorias’s usefulness to Baraghosa had passed. If the king was not here, if Baraghosa had moved on, then Jasen did not know what he would do; he wasn’t sure he had it in him to stay alive many more days, let alone fight.

  Though, to be fair, the question of how he would fight Baraghosa was still unanswered anyway.

  The roadway wound through blocky buildings. All the windows were slits, tall and thin, and Jasen realized whatever purpose they served in the day-to-day of life in Tarratam, these stone buildings were built for defense. And dry and cracked though the earth was, the vast hill on which the fortress was built made it a veritable stronghold, positioned right on the coast for maximum access to goods via trade.

  On and on, up and up …

  His eyes tracked past empty hovel after empty hovel. So many were in disarray. At first, Jasen had believed their occupants had simply left in a hurry. But the more he saw, they more he began to think they’d been ransacked.

  On closer inspection, some of the hovels themselves had been damaged. The wide open entryways had been pushed wider. The roofs hung a little lower where wooden beams had cracked. The dried leaves were ripped and battered, as if a storm had come by. But storms did not affect some huts and not others.

  No, people had done this.

  He was just about to say so, when—

  Something stirred in the hovel he was peering into.

  “Huanatha,” he said, voice rising.

  She pivoted, eyes wide.

  “Someone is in there.”

  She followed his pointed fingers, stalking past him to look through the empty doorway Jasen indicated.

  Whatever had moved had ceased. Damn—a false alarm. Possibly an animal, or a trick of the eye.

  Then Huanatha strode in, reached down to a bundle of dark blue cloth piled against the interior wall of the hut. She gripped it in a hand, lifted it clear—

  And there lay a woman.

  She cowered, her eyes closed, one arm thrown over her head. And though Jasen could not understand the words she spoke, he understood the meaning: “Please do not hurt me!”

  Huanatha spoke to her, her tone kind.

  The woman slowly opened one of her closed eyes.

  She stared in amazement at Huanatha’s face, for a long, long moment, her eyes wide. Jasen thought it was another level of terror entirely that now gripped her at the sight of the queen.

  Then she burst into tears and gripped Huanatha into a fierce embrace.

  Huanatha jerked, taken aback. But she wrapped an arm around the woman nevertheless, holding her as she cried and talked and cried in her ear, words flowing in a mad flood. They appeared more like a mother consoling a child than an armored warrior comforting one of her countrymen.

  The woman, who could not have been much older than Jasen, at most twenty, was youthful, with beautiful brown eyes and hair the shade of deepest night. She spoke in a quick, heady stream. Huanatha interjected, asking questions, and receiving long answers.

  “What is she saying?” Alixa asked Kuura. He, Jasen, Burund, and Longwell remained outside of the hovel, looking in.

  “She speaks of Trattorias’s reign since Huanatha’s banishment,” said Kuura. “The king has been … ‘unkind,’ she says, but to call his cruelty that is no justice.”

  “What has he done?” asked Longwell.

  “First thing he did after Huanatha’s exile was build a contingent of guards. They have policed the city into a fearful silence. All mentions of Huanatha are punishable by solitary confinement or beatings, to start with. But there is more. Rumors of Trattorias’s rise to power, and Huanatha’s exile, spread in whispers, and when they made their way to the king, he ordered his guards to silence any talk of it. Any citizen found murmuring was taken away … ‘removed from society,’ she says, as I heard in
my own village.”

  “Did he kill them?” Alixa asked.

  “It seems to be the implication, yes. She mentioned … pyres, I believe, but she did not say exactly what for, just that they burned at night … she moved on too quickly. So … it would appear so, yes.”

  Jasen looked up at the fortress on the hill. He had flashes of Nonthen and the great fires erected around the devastated city as the dead were disposed of in the only fashion that was available given the great numbers of them. It was a gruesome way to dispose of the dead. And to think that this supposed “king” had willingly built those pyres, had given the orders that loaded the fires with bodies converted to ash and dust … it was sickening.

  Of course, the king did not rule alone. He had Baraghosa at his elbow, whispering advice, commanding Trattorias’s actions more than Trattorias did himself.

  It was just another reason why the sorcerer needed to be wiped from the face of the earth.

  “It became a crime to speak ill of Trattorias,” Kuura went on. “By then, the population of Tarratam had been halved, and another half of all who remained had either fled or were making preparations to leave. But Trattorias did not like that either, and so he ordered his guards to ransack houses like these ones, wresting anything of value from the people so they could not charter a boat from the city. Of course, that was not how he put it—he called it ‘confiscating illegal paraphernalia.’ But the people knew the purpose behind the ransackings.”

  “Why is he so desperate to keep the people here?” Alixa asked.

  Kuura shook his head. “I do not know. And I do not believe she does, if Huanatha asks her.”

  “She will not,” said Longwell. “She will challenge Trattorias on that directly.”

  “If all these people had their possessions taken from them,” said Jasen, “then where is everyone?”

  “Many simply fled on foot,” said Kuura. “Others swam out at night, hoping to be carried by the current to the next city along the coast. And others sought refuge in the boats that docked here, swimming out and hoping that the sailors upon them would take them away. But word of Trattorias’s attacks on his people spread, and so the boats came less and less frequently—and now, the only people who remain are those too terrified to leave.”

  “That’s awful,” said Alixa.

  “And so you see,” said Longwell grimly, “why it is imperative that Baraghosa be stopped.”

  “How can he have so much power? How can he twist people so?” Jasen asked.

  “He finds a weakness, and he pushes upon it until it yields,” Longwell said. “It may take years, decades even … but that is what he does. It is simple, almost too simple to work over and over, and yet it does. He is far too cunning.”

  “But why?” Alixa asked. “What purpose does all this serve?”

  “I do not know,” said Longwell. “But we will find out.”

  The woman’s tears had petered out now. She’d released her hold on Huanatha and pulled back so the armored warrior could speak to her face to face. And now it was Huanatha’s turn to speak, quick words that the woman nodded along to, over and over. Her eyes were glazed—but there was a hope in her face that hadn’t been there before, a hope that Jasen suspected she had not felt for quite some time.

  Finally, Huanatha took her by the shoulder. She squeezed it, said one final thing, and then the woman rose. She bustled past Jasen and Longwell and all the others, her eyes sparkling, then she was off, her quick walk turning to a jog, then a sprint as she hurtled down the hill toward the port—and she shouted, her voice rising into the hot, dry sky.

  Huanatha strode out the hovel. She hardly glanced at the woman’s receding back before moving past, sights set on the fortress. Her stride was so quick that even Longwell had to hurry to keep up.

  Jasen gripped Scourgey, moving along as best he could, fighting against the aches deep within him and the pressing fatigue to reach Huanatha’s side.

  “Where is she going?” he asked.

  “To alert the people who remain here,” Huanatha growled back, “that the rightful queen has returned to take back her throne.”

  24

  They went up the hill, the earth so dry and cracked that it was almost impossible to believe there an ocean just a mile or so away. Closer to the fortress, the hovels were replaced with defensible stone buildings, orange-brown and square, their only decoration the rubber-leaved plants around them or the fabrics hanging from windows, making awnings above the doorways.

  Here, there were people. Not many, and like those near the dock, they stayed mostly out of the open. But they watched, with wide eyes and open mouths, as the former queen climbed the rise with death upon her face.

  But as the number of people increased, so too did the guards. Clad in partial armor, with deep blue fabric showing in the places where metal did not cover them, they were milling about idly in the streets. As Huanatha led her group closer, though, they stopped to watch.

  When they were close enough to make out expressions, Jasen saw fear upon many of them. They exchanged glances. Hands went to the hilts of swords. None were drawn though; a man slightly taller than the others waved them off with a hand, and they released their grips.

  He had a look of great alarm upon his face too.

  If Huanatha knew him, she did not let on. The guards, she paid no heed at all. She just kept striding, up and up the rise, toward the fortress and the imposing outer wall separating its inner courtyards from the rest of Tarratam. Her face was set.

  If sheer rage alone could be the death of a man, Trattorias and Baraghosa should be dead the moment she laid eyes upon them.

  “Why aren’t they stopping us?” Alixa asked. “They can’t want Huanatha to get close to the king.”

  Longwell pointed behind her. “That is why.”

  Jasen and Alixa both turned.

  Alixa gasped.

  A crowd had gathered. The remaining men and women of Tarratam, and even their children, massed, spurred on, Jasen suspected, by the woman to whom Huanatha had spoken. Dozens and dozens of citizens came up the hill, an army in the making. Though they lingered a couple of hundred feet back, it was clear they were there in support of the former queen.

  And with every step, more joined them. Word had spread. The former queen was back, come to take her throne again—and to free them from a cruel man who had brought them only fear and pain.

  “The people rally to her,” Burund mused.

  “I can only hope I see the same,” Longwell muttered, “on the day I return to Reikonos.”

  “You will,” said Kuura. “I have no doubt of it.”

  “Thank you for your confidence.”

  Jasen couldn’t help but watch, clutching onto Scourgey so he was guided forward even without turning to see where he walked. The massive crowd, all of them there to support Huanatha, was an awe-inspiring sight.

  And for the first time, he really believed that this was the end. Today, Baraghosa would be defeated.

  “How are you feeling?” asked Burund, from close behind him.

  How was he feeling? There were all sorts of answers he could give to that. Afraid for what Baraghosa would do to them. Defiant. Uncertain, for he still did not know how he would fight—adrenaline, perhaps, could blot out those dark, rootlike tendrils weaving their way through him. This, though, he doubted: his heart was pumping hard already, yet the liquid energy it pulsed through him hadn’t been able to cut through the growing fog. He could walk, yes—but he had had four days of conserved energy behind him to help with that. And he had Scourgey. She pulled him forward far more than his own legs could.

  He chose to answer with the strongest emotion of all: “Determined.”

  Longwell gave him a sidelong look, a smile. “I would expect nothing less of you, Jasen Rabinn.”

  “You believe the sorcerer will be in there?” Burund asked, nodding ahead at the fortress, its huge outer walls, and the gate manned by guards who were steadily becoming clearer—and who, it
appeared, were disturbed by the sight of the mob climbing the hill. They stared in clusters. Some of them seemed to bounce on their feet—preparing to engage, perhaps.

  But the dozen or so of them were vastly outnumbered.

  Trattorias’s guards could no more stop this mob than they could a landslide.

  “He may have moved on from Muratam already,” Longwell mused slowly. “But do I believe that to be so? No. And sure as I am that he is here, I am also sure that he will be in that fortress. It is the center of everything—and that is always, always, where he can be found.”

  Jasen hoped he was right.

  He is, a voice whispered.

  His own?

  He could not be sure.

  The mob following Huanatha numbered in the hundreds by the time they reached the outer wall. Massive and imposing, it looked as if it had been hewn directly from a mountain. Guards stood behind the parapet that ran along the top, bows in their grips, looking down at the army arrayed before them.

  Yet they did not nock arrows.

  Nor did the guards about the gate draw their swords. They could only stare, a dawning horror on their faces, as the people of Tarratam drew nearer, led by Huanatha, Longwell at her side, Kuura, Burund, and Alixa close behind, with Jasen draped over Scourgey, all moving with purpose—to the gate.

  Though Jasen and Alixa had overlooked the mob as it first amassed, there was no ignoring it as they drew closer to the fortress. The sound of footsteps on the earth grew. So too did the voices. Beginning with a quiet muttering, as if afraid to be overheard, the voices became louder with every step, and by the time the people had arrived at the fortress, they were shouting.

  This was their land. The guards had been allowed to rule it—but no longer.

  First, though: to cut the head from the snake.

  Huanatha stepped forward. She surveyed the arrayed guards about the gate, her lip curled. Her gaze moved over the parapets too, to the guards who stood, in a nervous sort of limbo, looking down at the mob.

  She shouted something.

  Jasen did not understand the words.

  His vision clouded with white spots. A stabbing pain ran through his head—