Power's Shadow

by Richard Parks

  “Blood,” he said. “No bodies buried, but there was definitely blood. Human.”

  “No bodies? Is your…servant, certain of that?” Kian asked.

  “I have a nose for such things,” Bonetapper said. “Especially for someone without a nose at all.”

  “I do trust his interpretation of the scent,” Marta said.

  Kian nodded, and sighed. “Loken smelled the blood himself, and that wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t stopped here to rest. We assumed someone was buried there, but the lack of a body makes more sense.”

  Dolan frowned. “Really? Why?”

  “Consider, Highness,” Kian said. “For a bandit group, it’s the perfect situation--isolated groups along the pilgrim trail, usually fairly small, usually carrying offerings for the monastery. From that overhang they could assess the worth of each group, pick and choose. Then descend on rope ladders or the like when the party had taken shelter for the night, slip in and slit throats, then dispose of the bodies in some fashion, perhaps there’s a crevice higher in the rock we can’t see from here. Regardless, you couldn’t bury very many in this small space and remain undetected for long.”

  Sela nodded. “But if a few groups disappear…well, it might be years before anyone came looking for them, only to find nothing. Assuming that, indeed, there was another way to hide the bodies, all the bandits need do is keep the earth turned to cover the scent of blood, which would fade soon enough.”

  “Just so,” Kian said.

  “But why risk attacking an armed party in open daylight?” Dolan asked.

  “My guess is that someone noticed our interest in the dirt,” Marta said. “The smart thing would have been to wait and see if we camped here despite that, but perhaps someone panicked. They couldn’t risk us telling anyone.”

  “I believe Lady Marta is correct. There was only one archer at first, I believe,” Kian said. “If all four had been on the line it’s quite likely that we’d already have dead or wounded.”

  “Likely Akan, possibly Sela and myself,” Marta said. She took a moment to peer outside, then ducked back in before another arrow smacked into the earth just inside the entrance. Sela glanced at it.

  “They’ll be watching that one,” she said. “I’ll wait.”

  “Our position is untenable,” Dolan said. “Suggestions?”

  “Only one,” Marta said. “Which I’d hoped to avoid.”

  “I think I know—“ Sela began, but was shocked into silence by a rumbling in the stone and then a roar like thunder. Heedless of the arrows, they all rushed to the opening of the shelter and looked out.

  Dust obscured the pass but Marta noticed several large stones where there had been none before, some of which were still rocking from the impact of falling. As the dust cleared the realized that the overhang had collapsed completely, bringing all its rock and trees down to the floor of the pass, blocking it to a height of at least ten feet and likely more than that deep, though it was impossible to tell from where they were. There was no sign of the archers.

  “You could have given us a little warning,” Sela muttered.

  “I would have gladly done so,” Marta said as the others just stared at her. “Except for one thing—I didn’t do it.”

  Akan had crawled out from under the wagon. The debris from the collapse had reached within ten feet of the pack track and the horses were close to panic. Akan seized the reins and began trying to calm them.

  “Let’s go,” Kian said. “Shields at ready and stay alert!”

  He was speaking to the other two soldiers, but Dolan, Marta, and Sela followed in their wake as they rushed toward the rock fall.

  “There’s one,” Sela said, “Or at least an arm.”

  That was the only part of the bandit they could make out. The rest of him was presumed to be buried in the landslide. About ten feet away lay a broken bow. Further up on the pile, a dead man’s head and upper torso protruded from the rocks. Soon they had spotted other signs to indicate that the archers would no longer be of concern.

  The scout Loken was the first to spot the opening in the rock. “Look up there!”

  A dark hole showed itself on the west side of the cliff face, about fifty feet up. Dolan frowned. “There’s no way we’d have been able to see that with the overhang in place.

  Kian was looking at Marta. “I heard what Lady Sela said. Could…could you really have done this?”

  “Oh, yes,” Marta said. “Easily. But I didn’t.”

  “Then who?” Dolan asked.

  “You’ll have to trust me when I say that it doesn’t matter for now, Highness. We need to make certain there are no more of them hiding up there. Bonetapper?”

  The raven, which at the moment was perched on the rocks eyeing one of the dead men speculatively, sighed. “All right, I’m going.”

  “Be careful,” Marta said.

  “Always.”

  Bonetapper launched himself off the rock and flew up toward the entrance to the cave. Once he was there he did a quick swoop past the opening, then again. On the third pass the landed on the lip of the entrance and looked into the darkness. After a few moments he called down to them. “No one in sight, but it does go back some distance. There’s a rope ladder anchored here.”

  “Throw it down, if you can,” Marta said.

  There was some rustling and squawks of complaint which drifted down, but not the ladder.

  “Bonetapper?”

  “Give me a minute. I’m only a raven and this thing is heavy.”

  “Stand clear of the edge,” Marta said. “Man.”

  “Got it,” said a less harsh and croaky voice from above. “Coming down now.”

  The rope ladder rolled off the edge of the cave. It didn’t quite reach the top of the rockfall, but close enough to grasp. “I’d really like to be a raven again,” said the voice. “This feels very strange and uncomfortable.”

  “Done,” Marta said. In another moment Bonetapper flew out of the cave.

  “I know he’s really a man,” Sela said. “And yet….”

  Marta shrugged. “A raven was the form my mother chose for him, and in that form he’s been the most useful to me. He’s had the chance to rid himself of it before, and yet here he is. Sometimes I think he’s simply a better raven than he ever was a man. Sometimes I think he knows it, too.”

  Kian spoke to Loken who then shed his helmet and hauberk. He belted his sword back in place before he took hold of the rope ladder and started to climb up.

  “Bonetapper, watch the cave. Warn us if anyone shows themselves,” Marta said.

  The raven flew back to the lip of the cave and perched there. “Still clear,” he said.

  Kian sighed. “I can see the advantages of having such a one for a scout.”

  “I can see the advantages of having a bodyguard who is not easily flummoxed by such things as witches and talking ravens,” Prince Dolan said. Marta thought he was trying not to smile.

  “I’m from Lythos, originally,” Kian said. “Such—forgive me—unusual things were not so unusual there, at least by reputation. Though I have to admit that I don’t think I believed even half of what I heard until now.”

  “Once you accept the notion of a talking raven, the walls do tend to come down,” Prince Dolan said.

  Loken reached the entrance to the cave and pulled himself over the edge. He pulled his sword and disappeared into the darkness while Bonetapper kept watch at the entrance. Loken soon reappeared at the entrance and called down to them.

  “Sir Kian? Highness? I think you’re going to want to see this.”

  Kian followed Loken’s example and removed his armor before following up the ladder, Prince Dolan close behind.

  “If they think I’m staying here....” Sela muttered before following them up the ladder, though she kept her mailshirt on. Marta sighed and climbed up next. She joined the others near the cave’s entrance.

  The cave was not a cave as Marta knew them. Instead of the rounded tunnel and st
alactites, the cave was angular with a lot of sharp edges and fissures in the walls, but there was no sign of any tool marks. A few natural alcoves were used to store weapons, including supplies of arrows, but there were no supplies of food nor any sleeping or toilet arrangements that Marta could see.

  “Whatever cataclysm created the overhang likely created the cave at the same time,” Dolan said. “Or at least the falling rock over the pass revealed this entrance.”

  “Which we—or any other traveler—could not see from the ground. Convenient for the bandits,” Kian said. “But how did they discover it in the first place?”

  “I think I’ve found the answer to that,” Loken said. “Follow me.”

  They fell in line with the scout as he continued down the tunnel. For a little while the gloom was almost complete as the light coming from the entrance began to fade, but then the light began to grow again from the opposite direction.

  Another entrance?

  So it proved, but it was rather more than that. When they stood at the opposite opening they stood on a ledge with a cut-rock stairway leading down into a canyon, almost a little valley nestled among the high peaks and ridges of the mountains. There was a small clear stream fed by a waterfall, and numerous pine and even a few beech and maple, some of which had been cut down to create crude but serviceable cabins. They approached the bandit camp with swords drawn, but the cabins were empty, save for cooking supplies, stored foodstuffs, and bedding.

  “We counted four and certainly no more than five brigands,” Loken said. “What I see here suggests the same.”

  Bonetapper had followed them through the cave rather than going ahead, but now he appeared overhead, flying in slow circles around the valley. Finally he turned back toward them and Marta signaled him to descend.

  “Did you find them?” she asked.

  “Yes. Near the north wall,” the raven said. “But there’s something else.”

  “What is it?”

  “Mistress, with all due respect and deference, I think it would be better if you saw this for yourself.”

  Marta frowned but started off in the direction Bonetapper indicated, and the others followed her past a line of trees where a pit had been dug from the earth of the valley floor. Marta was the first to peer down into it but the bottom was covered by a layer of dirt. Beside the pit was a mound of earth with three shovels sticking out of it. She sniffed the air over the pit and confirmed Bonetapper’s assessment—the smell was faint but unmistakeable. Bonetapper landed on her shoulder.

  “Their garbage pit…so to speak,” he said.

  “The bodies were buried here,” she said, as Prince Dolan, Sela, and the others reached them.

  “They left room for more bodies,” Sela said. “Each covered over by another layer of earth. You could dispose of maybe twenty more people here before you’d need a new pit, and no one would ever find them.”

  “If we were to search the rubble in the pass I’m thinking we would have found the remains of a block and tackle,” Kian said. “All they needed to do was remove the evidence from the pass and wait for their next mark. If we hadn’t come along they could have kept going for years, but from the look of things they haven’t been in operation that long.”

  “So why did I need to see this for myself?” Marta asked the raven.

  “Not this. Him,” Bonetapper said. He launched himself from her shoulder and flitted toward something she hadn’t noticed before—an iron cage hanging from a maple tree branch at the edge of the woods. It was not empty.

  “Together again,” Bonetapper said.

  Sela shook her head. “Oh, no. That can’t be….”

  There was a man sitting in the cage, a man she, Bonetapper, and Sela all recognized.

  Marta sighed. “Longfeather.”

  He stood up. “Lady Marta? What are you doing here?”

  “I would ask the same of you, but I don’t think I need to,” Marta said. “Longfeather, did you ever meet a poor choice that you weren’t willing to make? I was just curious.”

  “You should have let me kill him,” Sela said.

  Marta smiled. “No rush. There are a few hours in the day yet.”

  Ω

  14 the pilgrim trail

  “To begin a thing at all is the hard part, no matter what it is. To keep going is not, no matter how hard the going might be. This is a truth difficult to believe and harder still to remember, but no less true for that. ”

  – Black Kath’s Tally Book

  “Was that really the best course of action?” Kel asked.

  “Silence,” was Dena’s answer, and Kel had to accept that until she chose to give another, if in fact she ever did so. They had both dismounted to examine the huge berm of stone and rubble that blocked the Snake Pass. Worse, Marta and her companions were on the other side.

  “I didn’t want Marta harmed so long as she was leading me to the Fifth Law,” she finally said.

  “And Marta could not have done what you did?”

  “Of course. So why didn’t she?” Dena asked.

  “Perhaps she had another plan,” Kel said.

  “The next time we’re together for tea and cakes, you can ask her,” Dena snapped. “For now I need to know what they’re doing.”

  They led their horses back down the pass until they could move behind a bend that kept them out of sight in case anyone climbed the rockfall. Then Dena made Kel transform into a gull and he flew back down the pass. Dena waited with whatever patience she could muster until he finally returned and perched unsteadily on her should on webbed feet.

  “There is one servant remaining to guard their supplies. They went into this cave on the side of the cliff where the overhang had been but they haven’t come out yet. If I try to go in, they’ll see me.”

  “You think she doesn’t know I’m here, now?” Dena asked.

  “Well…no, now that you mention it. She certainly knows that someone is nearby, if she didn’t before, which was rather my point when I first asked about the landslide. Though, to be fair, if she doesn’t already know that she has a shadow, she’s not the witch you think she is.”

  “I’m not afraid of her,” Dena said. “I will see this through no matter what.”

  “To be honest, I’m not sure whether that fact would matter to her even if she did know.”

  Dena ignored that and sent Kel scouting back toward Conmyre to confirm that there was no one approaching from that direction. “We’ll camp here for tonight. Once Marta and her party have moved on, I can reduce the blockage enough to get us through, but I don’t dare risk it until then.”

  “As you wish, mistress.”

  They found an overhang where the softer stone had crumbled away, and it didn’t take long to clear enough space for the bedding. Kel, now human again, built a small fire and prepared a meal of hard bread and broth, then checked their provisions. “We have enough for a few days yet,” he said. “We’ll be fine as long as we’re not delayed too long.”

  “I want to know what Marta could possibly be thinking now, exploring a cave when she should be traveling to wherever she’s going.”

  “How do you know it’s not the cave?” Kel asked.

  “Would she let herself be ambushed and almost killed if she had known about it? I do not know where she’s going, but I do know that cave wasn’t her destination.”

  “And yet it presents itself, so she’s pursuing it, whatever that distraction may or may not represent to her.”

  “She needs focus,” Dena said, pausing to soften a bit of bread in the last of her broth. “This is a waste of time.”

  “And yet we’re following her,” Kel said.

  “Silence,” Dena said, and that was the answer to the question Kel had not asked.

  §

  “Longfeather, do I need to turn you into something innocuous?” Marta asked.

  “You can do with me as you like,” Longfeather said. “You say I learned nothing, but I did learn that much.”

  �
�It’s a shame you didn’t learn it before you betrayed her,” Sela said. Longfeather glared at her but held his tongue. Which, Marta thought, was probably a very good idea where Sela was concerned.

  “Please recall that I let you out of the last cage you were in and I’m getting a little weary of the repetition, considering how quickly you managed to get yourself into this one. Tell me how you got here,” Marta said. “And do us both the courtesy of telling the truth, if you don’t want to stay in that cage forever.”

  “Fine. I deemed it a good idea to leave Conmyre after…the way things turned out, shall we say, but less of a good idea to do it by way of Borasur-Morushe in case I ran into Duke Okandis again. So I went north just as, it seems, you have. I fell in with this lot at Goandel.”

  Marta frowned. “Goandel?”

  “It’s a small village along the pilgrim trail,” Prince Dolan said, “It serves as another way station, but I never knew it to be a haven for bandits.”

  Longfeather shrugged. “Normally? No. These four were there for a specific reason. It seemed that a mountaineer from Goandel had discovered this valley, and he thought it might have gold in it. He bragged about his discovery to the wrong people, so they forced him to show them where it was, then killed him. There wasn’t any gold, of course, but they found that easy—and discreet—avenue for controlling the pass and had, in their leader’s words, ‘A better idea.’ They were recruiting and I didn’t have any other options at the time.”

  “You mean you made the wrong choice, given a choice, as usual. So why did they put you here?”

  Longfeather’s face turned a little red. “A little misunderstanding, that’s all.”

  “What sort of misunderstanding?” Marta asked.

  “A misunderstanding of who would make the best leader,” Longfeather said. “I was right, of course, but wasn’t able to convince those rustic thugs of that obvious fact. They left me by the pit to think about it.”

  “Well, they won’t be returning,” Kian said.

  “I did gather that, or you wouldn’t be here now,” Longfeather said. “Good riddance to them.”

  Sela’s scowl could have curdled milk. “Now, if only we could say the same about you.”