Blood Ward

by Glynn Stewart

  Star plodded placidly through the green haze as it tingled its way across Teer. The ground was softer outside the ward. There had been rain last night, it looked like, and it had inevitably been heavier outside the magical protections.

  He pulled the mare up and dismounted, running his gaze to and fro across the tracks on the road. The horse followed calmly enough as Teer walked along, waiting patiently every so often for a wagon or another rider to pass.

  Kard hung back, his hand on the scabbarded repeater on Clack’s saddle. Outside the ward, there was no rule against longarms, but the weapon Kard carried had history Teer’s hunter didn’t.

  Short repeaters were used by Unity cavalry still, but they’d been the iconic weapon of the Sunset Rebellion led by the El-Spehari—a rebellion that Kard had been involved in to an extent Teer didn’t yet fully know.

  He did know that Kard had been present at the battle where his father had died—but it hadn’t been Kard who had decided that a records mix-up meant that the soldier’s widow didn’t get the pension she was owed.

  That had been the Unity. That had been the Spehari.

  Teer shook aside that old hate and kept his eyes and mind on the ground, looking through the mix of hoofprints for…that.

  “Here,” he called to Kard. “I found her.”

  Lora had tried to mix her track with the other trails, but she’d been riding just after the rain, and her horse’s shoes were more distinctive than most.

  “The shoe is distinctive; the other horses had ’em,” he told Kard. “Might be other people with the same horseshoes…but I only see one set of ’em in this mess.”

  The El-Spehari focused his gaze on the print that Teer was pointing to, clearly fixing the image in his mind.

  “All right,” he replied. “Let’s follow the trail and see where it leads us.”

  The trail of horseshoe prints wasn’t always entirely clear and continuous, since other riders had come through since their prey, but it was close enough that Teer and Kard were always able to find its continuation until, about a mile and a half outside of town, the trail turned toward the north and left the main road.

  It was easier to follow now, and Teer took a moment to trace out Lora’s path ahead of them.

  “She’s headed for the Carahassee,” he guessed.

  Carlon was built at the point where the Carahassee River stopped being navigable by barges coming down from the northern swamps and the Zeeanan provinces. The steam-dragon lines hadn’t reached this far east yet, which made the river the main trade link for the growing town.

  “Unless she was meeting a boat there, she wouldn’t have gone far,” Kard replied. “I wonder what she was thinking.”

  “We’ll find out, I figure,” Teer replied, urging Star to a trot. “The trail’s easier to follow now, at least.”

  “That it is.”

  They rode northeast, following her trail as it wound through rough scrubland that couldn’t support crops. There were farms around there that supported Carlon, but this section could only raise sheep and cows—and, from the state of the ground, had recently seen both come through.

  That and the last night’s rain made it easier to follow the track up to the edge of the water, where it vanished into the shallow edges of the big river.

  “Clever…except…” Kard studied where the trail ended and finally laughed.

  “Kard?”

  “Someone’s read a lot of adventure chip-novels,” the El-Spehari told him. “Riding in water to lose trackers is a great idea, yes, except that this is a terrible example of it.”

  Kard pointed west.

  “Two miles that way, she runs back into Carlon. If she’d gone that way, the Wardwatches would have seen her.” He turned his arm to point north. “And the Carahassee might not fit a barge through her, but no horse is crossing a hundred feet of deep water without training and help.”

  “So, she could only go east,” Teer concluded, looking around the river. “We can’t see her trail now, but we’ll see where she came out.”

  “Exactly. Come on,” Kard ordered. “We won’t see her trail in the dark, so let’s see if we can find it again by nightfall.”

  Teer had to feel bad for the horse they were following. A well-behaved, loyal horse could ride through shallows for a while without much difficulty, but it wouldn’t be pleasant for the poor animal. Only careful attention afterward would avoid long-term problems, too.

  They followed the river for over a mile, and Teer was beginning to question Kard’s logic when they finally saw the track they were looking for. The hoofprints were dryish now, but they could easily see that they had been wet when the horse had left the water.

  Kard dismounted to examine the prints in more detail, shaking his head and muttering under his breath. Even Teer didn’t pick anything useful out of the El-Spehari’s words.

  He waited for his boss, breathing in the fresh plains air next to the river and delighting in the quiet. He could hear wind and water and trees and grass and all of that, but there weren’t dozens of riders and wagons every way he turned.

  Teer hadn’t lived in a town since his mother had left the west coast to join a childhood friend—her now-second husband—on his ranch ten turnings of the seasons earlier. Even that had been a small fishing village, far removed from the bustle of Carlon.

  With his senses sharpened far beyond the norm, towns were not going to be his first choice of location now.

  “She’s still well ahead of us,” Kard said as he rose to his feet and brushed off his knees. “Half a dozen candlemarks, at least. We won’t catch up to her by nightfall, but her horse won’t stand up to this pace for more than a day, either.”

  “We can catch her?” Teer asked.

  Kard chuckled as he mounted.

  “Without question, Teer. Without question.”

  5

  As Kard had guessed, they hadn’t come anywhere near Lora by the time it began to get too dark to track hoofprints in the soil. They pushed it harder than anyone else could have—even a single-moon night gave enough light for Teer to see reasonably well, and two of the three moons were up tonight—but eventually, it was too dark even for them.

  The campfire went up with the ease of practice and Teer started cooking. The stew would take a while to cook; the jerky needed softening and the beans needed to pick up moisture from the water, so he stirred it and watched it while Kard rubbed down the horses and finally rejoined him.

  “I miss your mother’s soup packages,” the older Hunter said as he took a sniff of the stew. “This smells fine, but those were something else.”

  Teer chuckled. His mother had a gift—quite possibly magical, given his own talents—for assembling mixes of dried ingredients that turned into delightful meals when added to hot water.

  “I learned as best I could, but no one cooks like Ma,” he admitted. “Give it a few more to cook.”

  “I’ll watch; you set up your gear,” Kard ordered.

  When Teer returned, the older man was tasting the stew and shook his head.

  “Still needs a few more,” he admitted. “Tastes fine, but I don’t think you put a boot in here.”

  “I like my boots,” Teer countered. The jerky wasn’t that bad; it could be eaten as it was, but it could always use more softening.

  Soon enough, Teer split the stew into two bowls and they both began to eat while staring at the fire.

  “You were angry with Terino,” Teer finally said, halfway through his food. “Why?”

  “The Marked, the Bonded…” Kard took a bite of stew while he thought. “I don’t like dealing with my kin.”

  Even there, miles away from anyone else, Kard still maintained the illusion that made him look like a Merik to anyone except Teer. He would at least talk about it, though, it seemed.

  Teer took a moment to touch the brand on his shoulder. He was Bonded, but his magical Bond was to Kard. It was part of why he knew Kard was angry over the extra money they’d been promised.
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  “Everyone in the Unity is a slave, to one level or ’nother,” Kard finally continued. “The Bonded are favored slaves, but they pay for it with tighter chains.”

  The young Merik shivered at that. He knew he didn’t have any real choice in following Kard. So far, there hadn’t been any reason for him to push that, but he also tried not to think about it.

  “And the Marked?” he asked.

  “They get the privileges of being Bonded without the prices,” Kard told him. “They’re…pets. Merchants and traders who make sure the Houses get what they needed, or manage the trade in charged redcrystal after the Spehari have dirtied their hands as much as they will with it.

  “The Marked keep the Houses wealthy and keep the Houses powerful in ways their magic alone couldn’t,” the older Hunter concluded. “To be Marked means you were already powerful and useful to a House—and no one gets that way without trampling over a hundred others.”

  Teer nodded slowly as he added some soap to the cookpot. He was still eating, but it would take some time to get the dishwater ready.

  “And now we’re working for one of ’em,” he said.

  “And I hate it,” Kard told him. “In this case, it doesn’t matter much, though. We’ll bring the girl in and she’ll face a trial. Not much more to it than that for us. Writ is for her alive, which makes it clearer, too.”

  “So, we bring her in, we get the extra money, she faces a magistrate,” Teer reeled off. “Why does it feel…foul?”

  “Because this Carind added money to it, which makes me doubt everything,” his mentor admitted. “Our job is not to judge. Our job is to bring people to magistrates for judging, to face trial and punishment.”

  “And the Unity wants people alive to hang over wardstones or draft for the swamps,” Teer said, repeating a conversation they’d had before. Most wardtowns would see a non-Spehari magistrate once a season—and a Spehari magistrate, charged for cases involving Spehari interests and tasked to power up the wardstones, once a turning.

  Those magistrates could order people executed, which recharged the wardstones, or sent to the armies fighting the unending war against the now-dead Prince in Sunset’s former allies the Kott, lizard-like people who lived in the swamps at the northern edge of the Unity.

  Kard raised a hand with a long sigh.

  “I don’t like the Unity, for a long list of reasons, but their trials are mostly fair and their magistrates mostly honest,” he admitted. “That’s part of why I’m all right with doing this job.”

  “And if a Spehari is involved?” Teer asked. When his hometown had thought he’d shot at a Spehari, he’d been effectively sentenced to death long before the magistrate arrived. Only Kard acting on the specific rights of a Spehari had saved him.

  “Then any concept of justice or fairness dies,” Kard said flatly. “It may not be as bad with a mere Marked involved, though Carind had money…”

  Their dishes went in the pot of boiling soapy water and Teer set to work cleaning as Kard stared at the fire.

  “It’s not our place to judge,” he repeated with a sigh. “We deliver criminals to the courts of the Unity and leave it to the Magistrates and their truth stones to sort out the why and the what.”

  “And if we don’t trust those courts?” Teer asked.

  “Then we’re in the wrong business, my young friend,” Kard told him. “I don’t like it, but much as I hate the nation my father’s people built, it’s fair for most—and the criminals we hunt deserve their justice.”

  Kard rose.

  “I’m going to bed,” he told Teer. “We might catch up to her tomorrow and we’d better be rested. This Lora seems clever, which means she’s dangerous to us—but by the Iron Pillars, we will bring her in alive.”

  Teer snorted as he put the dishes away in their cases.

  “That was never in question.”

  6

  Their prey clearly thought she was clear of pursuit after her dip in the river. Teer and Kard found her campsite several candlemarks after setting out on the second day, easily picked out in one of the safer nooks along the river.

  “She put out the fire safely, but she didn’t try to conceal it,” Kard observed as he and Teer prowled through the site. “Did she really think the river was enough?”

  “She might not know,” Teer guessed. “Like you said, chip-novels.”

  Lora appeared to be smart enough, but she was a townswoman. She knew enough to put out a fire, but not enough to bury it or scatter the ashes to look older. There were other fire sites in the sheltered nook she’d camped in, but they were all several tendays old.

  “She took the time to rub down her horse,” Teer noted, picking up some tufts of dried horsehair. “She’s trying, at least.”

  “Maybe,” Kard agreed. The El-Spehari squatted down, pulling a paper map from out of his coat and looking over it. “She’s following the river now, but there’s nothing east of here along the Carahassee. There’s a few wardtowns, but they’ll all hear about her sooner rather than later.”

  “I didn’t know the wardtowns could talk to each other until you told me,” Teer reminded his partner. “She might not either.”

  “Or she doesn’t know anything and is just following the water for lack of a better idea,” Kard replied. “I’ve seen it before. Can at least be sure of one thing.”

  Kard whistled Clack over to him, checking the horse’s straps as he prepared to remount.

  “What’s that?” Teer asked, calling Star over as well.

  “She didn’t plan this,” Kard said flatly. “She’s running on panic and fear. She won’t make it far with that as her guiding light.”

  “Sounds like she’s better off for us bringing her in.”

  “No one is ever better off for us bringing them in,” the older Hunter told him. “World often is, but never the people we bring in.

  “Come on. She’s lost ground and is only half a day ahead of us.”

  A candlemark later, the trail finally changed. Teer and Kard were pushing their horses a bit now that the trail suggested Lora wasn’t pushing hers, but they had time. Star and Clack were healthy, capable creatures who could sustain a decent trot for a while.

  They took the two bounty hunters across the stream feeding the Carahassee without hesitation—and the trail ended there.

  Teer had to laugh.

  “Water again,” he said. “But she didn’t go into the river, I don’t think.”

  “No, not likely,” Kard agreed, turning in the saddle to look back at the Carahassee. It was shallower and narrower there than at Carlon, but it was faster, too. There were no shallows to ride along like their prey had taken closer to town.

  “Horse wouldn’t let her,” Teer told his boss as the El-Spehari observed the water. “Loyal or no, horses aren’t dumb. It wouldn’t go in that water.”

  The river would probably break the legs of any beast that tried—and the horse would realize that, even if the rider didn’t.

  “So, she went up the stream,” Kard concluded. “We follow. One of us on each side of the water, see what we see.”

  Teer nodded and turned Star south. Behind him, Kard took Clack back across the stream and turned as well.

  They rode in silence for a while, just far enough apart to make conversation difficult as they watched the ground for the tracks that would be there, sooner or later.

  Eventually, Kard started singing softly. Teer didn’t even know the language, let alone the song, but he listened carefully as they rode.

  “That song?” he asked, pitching his voice to carry. “What is it?”

  Kard chuckled and shook his head.

  “Kott riding song,” he admitted. “Sunset Brigades picked it up from our allies. Song itself was as much defiance of the Unity as anything else.”

  “What does it mean?” Teer asked.

  “I don’t actually know,” Kard said. “The Kott fought with us against the Unity, but we didn’t learn much of their language. They retreated
when the Prince in Sunset died under the Pillars. More of them made it out than the Brigades.”

  Teer was close enough to see the shadow pass over Kard’s eyes. He only knew a little bit about the end of the Sunset Rebellions—the Brigades had been lured into a trap deep in Unity territory, under the first Iron Pillars from the original Spehari landings.

  And the Spehari King in Winter had killed the El-Spehari Prince in Sunset, rumored to be his grandson, under those pillars. His armies had pinned the rebel host against the sea and ended the war in one swift stroke.

  Kard had been there. Teer knew that much…but he also knew that the El-Spehari wasn’t going to talk about it.

  “Wait,” he said, looking at the ground. “Got her again. Heading straight east.”

  The map was out by the time Kard rejoined him on the eastern bank of the stream and Kard spread it out between their horses.

  “There’s nothing out there,” he concluded. “Not that’s on the map, anyway. And I don’t think a townswoman from Carlon knows about any secret anti-Unity camps out here.”

  “Me neither,” Teer agreed. “She’s just running, isn’t she?”

  “She doesn’t know where she’s going to, just what she’s running from,” Kard said. “Dangerous route for her to take.”

  “Oh?” Teer asked.

  “We’re into wild country now. There’s a few ranches and farms out this way, but most civilization around here is on the roads between the wardtowns. We’re thirty miles from Carlon already. At least that from any of the wardtowns east of here.

  “Whatever she runs into out here, man or beast alike, it won’t be friendly.”

  Kard shook his head.

  “I might be wrong about her being better off brought in,” he admitted. “Because she’s just panicking and it may well get her killed.”

  BOOM-BOOM.

  “Stop,” Teer said sharply as he picked up the sound.

  “What?” Kard replied, but the El-Spehari pulled up his horse next to Teer.