by Kari Cordis
“The Fox brought word that Sable’s headed to the Ramparts,” Melkin said grimly, obviously wanting to change the subject.
“Against the better judgment of every Northerner I talked to,” Banion rolled his eyes. “Where would she be safer than literally surrounded by thousands of Rach? And maybe Kyr’s enthusiasm will persuade her of some of the little realities of life.”
“What’s this new Rach like?” Traive asked. “I left before meeting him.”
“Steelthirsty. All of ‘em are. Ready to join blades at the first whisper of war and wondering what’s taking so long to get to it.” He grinned wolfishly, eyes glinting with approval.
There was a moment of chicken-eating while everyone digested this. Then Banion, in a lower voice, said, “Kyr may have done a bit of convincing before Sable even left Crossing. Word is, she went behind the Council’s back and ordered Androssan directly to ready the Imperial armies.”
That produced a wide and rather chaotic variety of responses, from Rodge’s, “The North!? At war? You’ve got to be joking!” to Melkin’s thoughtful, “Androssan. Androssan…don’t know him.”
“I’ve wargamed with him,” Banion said, big voice dampening down all the background noise. “Knew him before he made Commanding General. He’s good. Got a pretty solid head for tactics—for a Northerner.” He winked at Loren and Ari. “But he’s a thinking man, careful. No gut instincts.”
“All Northerners are thinking,” Cerise said with sharp scorn. “General Androssan is an excellent officer. His Uncle on his maternal side was an Archlord and he’s got a son that will be marriageable in five years.”
Banion smacked his forehead with his hand, rolling his eyes at her. “We should’ve asked you first. All the important facts a man needs to know, and his genealogy to boot!”
Her nostrils flared and she said stiffly, “I’m only saying he’s a courteous and popular man, and very powerful.”
“Oh, well, that’s good to have on the battlefield. I’m sure the Sheelmen will be particularly impressed.”
“What of Merrani?” Traive interposed smoothly, afraid this renewing of friendships might be leading them off on a tangent.
“I should probably be there,” Banion admitted. “But if my Chevrics aren’t trained well enough to get the men ready without me nagging at ‘em, it doesn’t make me much of a Knight.” His deep-set eyes sparkled. “I’ve missed too much of this already.”
This quest, Ari thought. It really did seem to be the most important thing going.
“Lord Khrieg wasn’t very encouraging,” Banion was saying, looking somberly at Traive.
“That’s him at his best,” Rodge muttered under his breath.
“Cyrrh will be ready when she is needed,” Traive said smoothly.
Not looking overly comforted, Banion said carefully, “It’s not my place to ask, but will the Forces follow you if Khrieg will not lead?”
Traive, loyal to the end, responded simply, “Cyrrh follows her Skylord.”
Banion grunted, eyeing him coolly. He was the first person that Ari had seen not take an instant liking to the Lord Regent.
They packed up and hit the trail again, the horses fresh from weeks in the stable, the day wide open and beckoning, and time ticking in their ears.
CHAPTER 26
It was more than dark. It was a complete absence of sensory input, no light, no sound, no smell—if it wasn’t for her own ragged breathing, Sable would’ve thought she’d been killed or maybe gone mad. Her mind leaped wildly around, trying to come to grips with what had happened, what was happening.
Then there was a soft scraping, the sound of cloth brushing over cloth, and a flame sprang to life not even a yard from her. She almost screamed—which might have changed a very many things—but she was gripped by a fear so deep it seemed to have numbed her vocal cords and a terror that had wiped blank any rational thought. Her years of enforced composure as a Queen, as a Northerner, as a woman trying to play with the big boys, didn’t help any.
In the light of that little flame were the shadowy edges of bodies and two sets of eyes. Staring at her, unblinking. Beautiful, gem-clear blue and green, they flickered in the faint light, absolutely expressionless. There was a little dark skin around the eyes and reddish brows just barely visible, and everything else was swathed in folds of Sheel-colored cloth.
Tarq.
Horror, real, knowing horror that was completely different from the mindless panic of a few seconds ago, threatened to swamp her. Kyr’s words rang through her mind and she began to pant wildly, tearing her eyes from theirs and trying desperately to make something out of the pitch blackness of her surroundings.
One of them, in a very ordinary, unhurried kind of way, took out a length of rope from the folds of his clothes and reached out, capturing her shrinking hands. Before she could even think, let alone react, he’d slipped a clever knot over her wrists. Her eyes went huge and panic leaped higher.
When they brought the torch around, she backed up hard, slamming into solid wall not more than a foot away. But they just looked at her for a second, then turned away and started walking. The world faded into black again, the rope drew tight, and in disbelief she found herself being tugged along behind them.
Nothing else happened. They just walked. Relief suffused her for a second, as she realized there was at least a short reprieve from all the unspeakable torture and arcane rites that had been racing through her mind for the last few minutes. But she was still a prisoner of the Enemy of the Realms. She tested the ropes and found her captors had a firm grip. Feeling bolder as more benign seconds passed, she gave a mighty heave, trying to make a break for it—and was immediately yanked forward so hard that she fell, landing roughly on her hands and knees and tearing up her palms on the gritty surface. Clambering to her feet, she found them both looking at her. There was no malice in those eyes, no surprise or gloating…and no compassion.
She screwed up her courage. “Undo my hands! You have no right—”
One of them backhanded her, so hard that it split her lip and rocked her head back on her neck. Then, casually, they both turned away and started walking again. Days later, she looked back on this with dull amazement. To deliberately bring attention to oneself, to force them to respond, to ask for pain.
But right then, most of what she felt was astonishment. Granted, she still knew very little about the Enemy, but she’d never heard anything like this. She couldn’t remember a single story of a Realmsman taken captive by Tarq—it was popular knowledge that they barely saw them as human, their only goal to destroy them.
They walked and walked and walked. For hours. They were in hewn passageways the color of the Sheel, the walls and floor composed of compacted sand and grit and rock. There were regular stockpiles of torches, usually at intersections—it was a network down here, a pre-planned, carefully thought-out, austerely supplied web of passageways that was obviously under the Sheel itself. She could remember the sensation of sliding in the chaos of her capture. How she longed to tell Kyr; he’d be so excited. But that just reminded her of how much she loved him and she turned her mind quickly back to thoughts of escape. There were rough diagrams at the intersection walls, but though she didn’t exactly have time for close scrutiny, they didn’t make any sense to her.
Time became meaningless; there was no way to gauge it. They sat occasionally and ate a little hard, tasteless, crumbly kind of biscuit that tasted like desert. Sometimes there was a bit of jerked meat that tasted about the same. And water—there was never enough water. Hours passed and she grew thirstier and thirstier, her weariness increasing with each rest. Her captors ignored her most of the time, which she vastly preferred, because when she had their attention, they were correcting her. And they weren’t usually very gentle. She felt a surge of hope the first time the Tarq prepared for sleep, but it was quickly dashed when she realized they took turns at the activity. She couldn’t stay awake long enough to see if the guard ever got sleepy. If fact, it coul
d only have been a few hours before she was being roughly booted awake herself. Unfortunately, this seemed to be their standard procedure, for it never varied.
The torchlight, which should have been a beacon of hope in this dark nightmare, began to look oily and evil, endlessly, hypnotically bobbing and flickering in front of her, leading her deeper and deeper into terrifying unknown. She lost count of the times they stopped to rest, was usually dozing or asleep as soon as they came to a halt, and woke bleary and exhausted when they kicked her to her feet. She didn’t think there was a full day between the sleep periods, and was quite certain there wasn’t a full night.
Days passed. Days and days and days. She was certain they had become weeks. Her world was a vague living nightmare that she couldn’t wake up from. The vivacity of the Rach, her love for Kyr, her worry for Kore and all those that had unwittingly ridden out with her that fateful morning, all seemed to belong to another world, another life, and eventually to another person. It was only the remembrance of the certainty of Il that kept her going. She clung to Him, to everything she knew of Him, dwelling on that vastness that had seen a thousand centuries of everything man could come up with. It helped her keep her perspective, and she realized that maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe Il didn’t intend her to sacrifice her love for Kyr to rule the Empire…maybe He had a different sort of sacrifice in mind. She had come from heart-rending sorrow to deep, profound peace to a mind-numbing monotony of fear. She was living a life barely alive with little but survival in her thoughts. And at the end of this trail? Somehow, she didn’t have much confidence it was going to improve.
If they hadn’t been in just the right place at the right time, that first afternoon together might very well have passed in a nap for the Northerners. They’d all eaten too much chicken, they’d been up all night, this place was a playground after the jungle, and it wasn’t like they hadn’t mastered sleeping in the saddle.
But just as lids were getting heavy and heads were drooping, the sound of shouts came up the trail from their front. Kai bolted like he’d been shot from a bow, and Traive and Melkin plunged after him. Scrambling to shake the sleep from their brains and get their heels to their horses, the rest of them followed.
They weren’t far from a little community, a collection of little whitewashed houses and a cleared area in what Ari realized belatedly was ordered fields of orchards and crops. His little gelding could outsprint the other horses for short distances, so he got there in time to see several men roughing up a few women, tearing things up, bashing in windows. They looked up as the first of Ari’s party came plunging down the hill off the trail and their eyes widened.
There aren’t that many of us, Ari thought grimly. Just a Dra running like lightning with bare steel in each hand, a Lord Regent in full armor, a crazed old Wolfmaster, and a giant with a sword the size of a child roaring, “STEELMISTS!!” at the top of his lungs.
The thugs ran.
With a great sense of satisfaction, they pursued.
Unfortunately, the bushes of whatever was being raised in the area were thick, tall, and obstructive. After a few minutes, Ari reluctantly pulled up. Loren came up beside him and they grinned at each other, flushed with excitement. Even Rodge, on a Radish that had gained so much momentum coming downhill that he’d ended up on the charge, too, was there. He shook his head angrily at them, flopping his elbows and pulling all his old abusive terms for his horse out of his stock of memory. He trailed off when Melkin came back through, giving them a look that scoured both grins and grimaces off their faces.
They followed him back to the houses. Traive, coming from a different direction, was just dismounting, and crying, angry women and sobbing children began gathering around him.
Ari, spotting a little girl all wound up in some bushes by one of the houses, quickly jumped off his horse and went over to her. She was bawling and scared, but didn’t seem too hurt. He gently disentangled her from what looked like a bunch of tomato plants, putting her right side up, straightening the little home-spun shift, and smoothing her hair.
“Easy,” he said soothingly. She choked and went still when she looked in his eyes, and for a second he was sure she was going to scream, the dirty little face contort into a mask of terror, and go running off. But she threw her arms around his neck instead and sniffled into his chest.
He felt about two stories tall.
Banion rode up, trailing half of a bush and with an interesting twig décor added to his hair. “Cowards,” he groused, when Traive and Melkin looked to him.
Traive turned back to the crowd, voice strong and calm, “So they came unannounced and starting tearing things up, unprovoked. Does anybody know what they wanted?”
“A runaway!” a woman said from the back of the crowd. She was still crying, her dress ripped and two scared-looking boys clinging to her. “With red hair. And when we said we hadn’t seen any boys come through here, they started…they—” she broke down and a neighbor woman moved over to comfort her.
“All our men are out harvesting tea,” another woman cried accusingly. “They planned this!”
“They were mercs,” a woman with a face like a battleaxe said angrily. “All the runaways that come through here, this is the first in all MY years they’ve ever hired mercs to bring them back! They were just using it as an excuse!”
Ari, who’d been getting a bad feeling since the ‘red hair’ part, went cold. He met Melkin’s eyes across the crowd.
The women were starting to move around, get things back in order, and soothe the children. A few were still up around Traive, demanding answers and wanting protection, when Kai came back. He wasn’t even winded, but he had blood on one hand and wrist. Traive disengaged himself, joining the rest of them around the Dra.
Ari knew what he was going to say before he opened his mouth. “Asps,” Kai said, on cue, lean face expressionless. Ari felt Melkin and Banion staring at him. Traive was pointedly not.
“Maybe it’s coincidence,” the Lord Regent said quietly. “There have been runaway slaves from the Swamps as long as there’ve been slaves and Swamps to run from.”
“Maybe,” Melkin said flatly.
“What’s coincidence?” Loren and Rodge asked almost in unison.
“Anything else you remember about the Statue?” Melkin asked Ari suddenly. “Anything written on it? Levers, maybe, or inset pieces or secret openings?”
Ari looked at him helplessly. His memory of the Statue was more a feeling than a detailed technical draft—he probably wouldn’t even recognize it if he saw it.
“Time presses,” Kai said, and Ari threw him a grateful look.
“Yes,” Traive agreed with him briskly, and clapped Ari on the shoulder. “And after all, you were what, three or four the last time you saw the Statue? You’d tell us whatever you remembered.”
“That’s not the pattern I’ve noticed,” Rodge muttered sulkily.
They rode warily the rest of the afternoon, any desire to sleep forgotten. Ari’s mind was churning, slaves and red-heads and mercs chasing each other around the passages of his brain. A new thought had occurred to him with Melkin’s question back at that little village, one that explained everything. The mercs thought he knew something, had somehow found out that an orphaned Sheelmen had been in the Garden that held the Statue. Maybe they thought he knew where it was…maybe, like Melkin, how to activate it. That would be worse, because it would mean they already had it.
Well, they were both on the wrong track. He didn’t know how the Statue had held Raemon...but he did know, to the depths of his soul, that it hadn’t been any secret lever.
The scenery stayed the same for leagues, tea and coffee plantations stretching uphill on one side of them and down the other. When they finally made camp, heavy-eyed, at sunset, they were in the curve of the ’Spine still surrounded by them.
There was fresh food yet for dinner, but it wasn’t eaten with quite as much relish; an imminent expectation of unwanted guests hung in the air. After jum
ping at nothing for the third time, Cerise said testily, “How is it that you have all these plantations out here unprotected? I thought the Torques were ‘necessary for settlement.’”
“They’ve only been here since the Peace,” Traive said calmly. He’d just finished dismissing a Fox, the third since they’d surprised the Asps in the little village, and all of which had had their attentive ears filled with several minutes of instructions.
“This was once all jungle?” Loren asked. Having cleared an acre or two of land in his disciplinary days, he could appreciate how much work these leagues must have taken.
“All the way to the Swamps in the south.”
Ari’s ears perked up. About those Swamps, he wanted to say. About those slaves—at least now he knew where in the Realms slavery existed, which had baffled him.
But Loren cut in, “Hard to believe the Enemy could survive weeks of jungle travel, after being so accustomed to the desert, and still arrive with enough of an attack force to be a serious threat to the Torques.”
Rodge raised one black eyebrow disparagingly. “Thanks, General.”
“They’re adaptable little devils, tough as iron,” Traive said mildly. “I think it’s more surprising they took to the sea, myself.”
Banion, on his third helping and probably the only one present whose appetite hadn’t been affected by the day’s activities, looked appeased. He grunted in agreement.
“From the east…” Ari said slowly. “From the south. We know the Addahites fought them in the north in the Old Ages. But you never hear about them attacking from the west.” He looked curiously at Traive.
“Northern Cyrrh is virtually impassable—we’ve talked about it—and Western Cyrrh is home to the wild gryphons.” He grinned darkly. “They’ll kill a man on sight and have the eagle eyes to search him out.” Loren and Ari grinned back. Rodge looked queasy and put down his chicken leg.