by Tim Lebbon
“You and she were good friends?”
He shook his head. “Not really. More like lovers who never loved.”
“A simpler life is better,” Lulah said.
Ramus glanced up, but it seemed that she had already said enough. He did not want to push her. They had a long way to go, and plenty of time for talk.
“You're sure about this?” Ramus asked.
“About a simple life?” Her eye glittered with defiance, as though he had issued a challenge.
“No, no. About this. Coming with me instead of staying with your friends.”
Lulah shook her head. “I don't have friends. I like my own company. Voyaging with you may be the next best thing.”
“I will pay you,” Ramus said, the lie burning still.
“I believe you.”
“After what you heard back there? I'm surprised you can trust Nomi or me.”
“I said I believe you. I don't trust anyone.” Lulah knelt beside Ramus and started looking at the map. She pointed to a spot southeast of Long Marrakash, where two valleys met and the hills faded away toward the Pavissia Steppes. “So we're here?”
“Near enough,” Ramus said. He picked up a small twig and leaned over the map. “We've just come down this valley. Maybe five miles to go until we reach the beginning of the plains, and then thirty more until the border.”
“It's guarded,” Lulah said. “We'll get news from the guards about any recent marauder activity, and that should help us plan a route.”
Ramus nodded, his eyes drawn back the way they had just traveled, to the approximate location of last night's camp. He wondered whether the others were still there, eating breakfast or perhaps packing and preparing to set out. He thought not. Nomi was no fool, and she'd appreciate that the race was on.
He had already decided what to do. “We need to hang back.”
“What? Make your mind up.”
“We need an advantage. And I can't just have her think she drove me away.”
“Surely we're past all that?” Lulah asked.
“I need her to know I'm not beaten.”
Lulah shook her head and sighed.
“And it's not just about Nomi and me, I promise you,” Ramus said. “You don't know what we're going to find when we get to the Great Divide.”
“And you do?”
“I have a suspicion.”
“So why is it more important for us to get there before the others? Is it simply competition and revenge?”
“No,” he said. “It's a lot more than that.”
“Then tell me.”
He looked at the Serian, unnerved as ever by her single eye, her unwavering gaze. It was as if losing an eye had given the one remaining twice the intensity, melting through his skin and seeing the dark heart of him.
“I can't,” he said. He expected protestations, but Lulah simply shrugged.
“Maybe later,” she said. “But you won't be able to do anything to Nomi, not with Beko and the others guarding her.”
“I don't want to do anything to Nomi.”
“Really?”
He thought about that for a while and could not answer.
“You're not dead yet,” the Serian said, and the hint of compassion in her voice surprised him.
He laughed, short and harsh. “Maybe not, but time belongs to my sickness now, not me.” There was so much more to say—what the illness did to him, why he was undertaking this final voyage, the dangers he saw in its aims—or nothing at all. For now he chose nothing. Just as there would be time later for Lulah's secrets, so, perhaps, he would tell his own campfire tale.
Lulah looked around, and indicated a place high on the hillside to the east. “Cover there,” she said. “I don't like this.”
“I told you, nothing too bad. I just want to slow Nomi down for a while.” Ramus folded the map and returned it to his backpack.
“So what's on the parchment?” Lulah asked.
She was surprising Ramus more and more. He had assumed her to be cool and uninterested, here for the voyage and little more. But away from the others, she seemed to be developing an intense curiosity. Maybe she realized that this was riskier than she'd first thought.
“They're from an old book. Do you read?”
Lulah shook her head. “What do they say?”
Perhaps if she'd asked six hours ago he would have told her about the Divide and the Sleeping God. Encased in the night and the dark memories of what it had brought, his sadness and pain may have urged the truth from him. But now dawn was here, and the sun seemed to have burned some of the badness away. Given him hope.
“That's what I need to find out,” he said. Only a small untruth, because though he recognized some of the images on the parchment pages, the language was still a mystery.
He would have many evenings to examine the pages by campfire light.
LULAH LED THEM up the hill, and as they approached the cover she had spotted they had to dismount and guide the horses by their reins. They reached a rocky overhang, its flattened top home to small trees and a tangle of undergrowth. The horses were easily tethered out of sight, and Ramus and Lulah lay on the thin mountain grass and kept watch along the valley.
“We could have all stayed together,” Lulah said after a long silence.
Ramus stared at her eye patch and the stud that decorated it. “You came with me for a reason. When will you tell me what it is?”
Lulah smiled. “We both have secrets. That's good. It's not healthy to know your traveling companions too well.”
“Why not?”
“Boredom can be deadly on the trail.”
“Here's a deal,” Ramus said, intrigued by this warrior woman. “When I can translate the pages and tell you what they say, you tell me how you lost your eye.”
Lulah nodded. “Fair enough. Though the real tale is in how I gained this stud.”
They waited for a long time. The sun rose and passed its zenith, drawing steam from the valley's hidden places, which drifted and eddied on unseen draughts. Ravens floated down from the north, out of the hills and into the valley that petered out into plains just visible to the south. They circled Ramus and Lulah for a while, until Lulah loosed an arrow in their direction. Then they soared down into the valley, crying their upset at the sun, and some of them settled on a large dead thing by one of the streams. Ramus concentrated, but he could not make out what the dead thing was.
“Too far away,” he said.
“I see it well enough,” Lulah said. “Mountain goat.”
Maybe my eyesight is fading already, he thought. He looked elsewhere in the valley, seeing blurs where perhaps he should have defined trees, but he commented on it no more.
Mid-afternoon came and went, and Ramus began to fear that the others had somehow passed them by. He consulted his map again to check. If they had taken a different route it would have added at least a day to their journey, and there was no reason for them to do that. They would have nothing to fear from Ramus and Lulah, after all.
“I'm stiff as a corpse,” he said to Lulah. “I need to walk. I'll be gathering some stuff, back there past where the horses are tethered. If they appear, please come to get me.”
“What are you planning?”
I trust no one, Lulah had said. And yet she came with him, hid with him, waiting for her old comrades, asked after the pages he had and what they meant. And it was not even that he could promise her more pay than Nomi had offered. She felt some link to him, and whether she trusted him or not, he would have to respect that if they were to carry on together.
“I'm going to poison their horses,” he said. “Slow them down for a day or two, and that will give us the head start we need. After that we ride hard for the Great Divide. Camp only at night; during the day we even eat as we ride.”
Lulah nodded slowly, weighing what he had said. “They'll buy more horses at the border.”
“Maybe. But we'll be well ahead by then.”
“You know I can
't help you harm Nomi?”
“I know that,” Ramus said. “I don't want to harm her.”
“Why?”
The question, blunt and brutal, surprised him. And he could not answer. Because considering a response confused him even more, and melted away the comfortable afternoon sun that had been soothing his nerves. Ramus wondered whether, come dusk, his anger would rise again.
HE CHECKED ON their horses and then passed them by, clambering up the slope and looking for signs of rock ants.
On his voyages into the unnamed mountains he met with the Widow, though he was unsure whether she had ever been wed beneath the moons, or in the eyes of any other god. Widow was what she called herself, and though he had probed, she had never offered any other name. He had come to believe that she had none. She practiced magichala and displayed a knowledge of the herbs, spices, roots, plants, animals, poisons and balms of the land more extensive than any he had ever known. When he uttered his astonishment, she had scoffed, saying that she knew nothing. Real magic is beyond plants and charms, she had said. It's in the land, and perhaps one day it will be in me. She hunted and haunted those mountains—the peaks, she said, would belong to her, given time—and she had imparted huge knowledge to Ramus. Not everything she knew, he was sure. In fact, the last time he left her for home she had smiled at him for the first time ever, and in that smile he had seen the superiority of a hawk over a dust sparrow.
She knew so much more.
From the Widow, he had learned how shred and snowspit could be combined to make a tincture that would clean wounds and stop bleeding. Flail, used in its basest form in Long Marrakash, could be dried and refined into a chewable paste, suitable for calming tensed muscles and nerves, without all the side effects of the pure, untreated form. Certain rocks, found only in the Widow's Peaks, could be bled of a useful tonic by long immersion in salty water and then distillation to remove the salt. The resultant fluid would ease coughs and clear thick chests.
And for every good drug, tonic or balm, the Widow told him, there were poisons, toxins and pollutants of the soul.
He moved through the rocks, looking for the telltale shimmering that would show where rock ants were active.
The land is far richer than anyone knows, the Widow had told him. We live upon it, plant our crops in its skin, but deeper down there are more worlds, places where secrets lie hidden, awaiting discovery. And even up here, there are wrinkles in that skin, layers upon layers, fake sheens overlying the true reality which most people will not understand, or cannot bear to believe.
Have you been down? Ramus had asked.
The Widow had given him her customary glare, as though considering whether he was suitable to hear truths. There are depths and there are depths, she had said. I've barely been farther than the sunlight can still kiss.
Ramus had asked why. She was the Widow, after all, dweller of these peaks and an explorer of Noreela as much as he, though she chose to explore without covering great distances.
This time, she did not answer. And he had seen the fear in her eyes.
Things down there, he had thought, and sometimes he dreamed of what those things could be.
On his way home from that last voyage, he had already been planning his next: a journey back to the Widow's Peaks and then below, following the caves, finding routes deeper and deeper still. He would burrow beneath the false skin of the world that the Widow so mocked.
But then his illness had struck, and his planned voyage had never come about.
He paused, balancing with his feet against one rock and his back against another. The sun did not find its way here, and in the narrow crack below him he could hear the subtle rustlings and hissing that could reveal what he sought. He moved sideways, trying not to let his feet slip down and damage the rock ants' structures. When he reached a larger rock, he slid onto it and lay down, lowering the upper half of his torso into the crack. And there it was, the silvery trace-work of the rock ants' nest, their extruded silk marking the paths of minute cracks and fissures in the rock. The Widow had told him she could read a language in the structure of their nests, but she never told him what that language was, nor what it said. He supposed it was the language of the land, the vague idea of order behind chaos that she alluded to on occasion. But though he changed his angle of viewing, narrowed his eyes and turned aside so that the nest was almost out of sight, he could read nothing.
Across the larger cracks were more elaborate structures, providing bridges and tunnels for the ants, solid as the rock itself. The creatures were as long as his little fingernail, abdomens swollen with the poison he sought.
“So now to find some berry bugs,” he said. He stood from the nest and climbed the rocks, glancing down at the grassed ledge where Lulah still lay. He whistled briefly and she looked back.
“Any sign?”
Lulah shook her head and turned away from him again.
Behind the rocky overhang and farther up the hillside, he found a swathe of yellowberry bushes, their fruits still small and hard. He examined the berries until he found what he wanted—fruits fattened by the larvae laid inside. Splitting the skin, pulling the small larvae out and letting them squirm on his hand, Ramus felt the thrill of forbidden knowledge coursing through him. It was as though the Widow was looking over his shoulder, and he was certain she would be pleased.
He found no more than thirty berry bugs; he hoped that would be enough. He might not be able to infect every horse in Nomi's group, but if only two or three of them were sick, Nomi and the Serians would still be delayed.
Back at the ants' nest, he lay on the rock again, reached down and scattered the bugs across several of the thicker bridges.
It took a while for the creatures to react. The berry bugs squirmed in their unaccustomed exposure, twisting and flexing in a vain attempt to crawl back into darker places. A few ants stopped and examined the new arrivals, exploring their bodies with front legs, smelling and tasting them, and when these ants hurried away and disappeared into cracks in the rocks, Ramus knew that it was going to work.
The soldier ants emerged. Larger than those he had seen before—some were as long as the top segment of his little finger— their abdomens were swollen and red with poison. They swarmed from the rock nests and across silver bridges, hanging from fine threads that Ramus could not see and dropping onto the berry bugs.
As the ants' poison commenced melting the bugs' insides, the berry bugs began to squirm more violently. Ramus reached down to pick them up, dropping several deeper between the rocks as he desperately tried to avoid being stung. Slow learner, he heard the Widow saying over his shoulder, and he grinned as he dropped the bugs into a small pouch on the side of his backpack.
When he returned to Lulah, she waved him down. He dropped to his stomach and crawled to the edge of the overhang, leaving his backpack behind.
“Movement,” Lulah said. “Opposite side of the valley.”
“Level with us?” he asked, fearful they would be seen.
“No, lower.”
“Is it them?”
“I think so. Look there. See that spread of trees in the shape of a raven's wing? They'll appear south of there any time now.”
They lay and watched together, squinting against the sun as it began its slow descent into the west. The travelers emerged from the cover of trees, the group snaking its way down the hillside and toward the valley floor.
Ramus could make out no details at all. He closed his eyes, and asked.
“Yes, it's them,” Lulah said.
Ramus nodded and sighed. “So now we follow. We'll leave it until they're camped, cooking and telling tales. Then I'll do what I have to, and you and I can leave.”
“It won't be that easy,” Lulah said. “They'll post a guard. And now that we're closer to the border, I suspect they'll have two on watch at all times.”
“I'll go quietly.”
“You can barely see in the daytime. At night you'll be caught. I'll go.”
Ramus looked at Lulah, trying to see any hint of deception in her expression. We need trust, he thought, but she had already stated that she trusted no one. That made him uncomfortable.
“I can create a diversion,” he said.
Lulah nodded. “That will help.”
“Thank you for coming with me.”
She nodded again. Opened her mouth as if to say more, but instead said nothing.
LULAH RAN ON ahead and left Ramus to guide her horse. She would be more silent on foot, she said, and more in control. She knew how Beko and the others worked, and she was confident of being able to track them without being seen. Ramus remained a mile behind, always keeping a fold in the land between him and them, until dusk began to draw shadows from hiding and Nomi's group stopped moving for the night.
Lulah returned, panting hard and her face slick with sweat. “They're camping by a stream,” she said. “The stream's between us and them. It's wide, but shallow enough to cross on foot. The land's lightly wooded, so there's plenty of cover, and they've already lit a fire. They don't feel threatened.”
“Nomi probably thinks we've ridden on ahead.”
Lulah nodded, catching her breath. “How far are we from the border?” she asked.
Ramus had already consulted the map while she was away, using the last of the sunlight to try to place their position. “About twenty miles,” he said. “Southeast are the Pavissia Mountains, and directly south the Steppes begin.”
Lulah nodded, catching her breath. “You know you'll only get one chance to do this?”
“We'll only need one chance.”
Lulah mounted her horse and led them off.
THEY GAVE THE camp a wide berth, and by the time they stopped again the moons were high and the sun long gone. They tethered the horses and each took a drink. It was going to be a long night.
Ramus handed Lulah the pouch. “Don't scatter them too far or they'll get lost. We only need to get three or four horses, not all of them.”
“What will your distraction be?”
“A noise. It'll draw them long enough.”