by Kyra Halland
“Think he went up that way?” Lainie asked.
“It’s worth taking a look. A fellow who can disappear like this probably wouldn’t be worried about being caught by the A’ayimat. Let’s go as far as the markers, anyway, and see if we find anything.” Having Lainie with him gave him one possible advantage if they did run into any blueskins. The A’ayimat in the Great Sky Mountains who had cared for Burrett Banfrey and his foreman Dobay after they were shot had seemed to have an odd sort of respect for Lainie based on her own part-Wildings power; the same might hold true here, as well.
They started up into the barren, windy ravine, going on foot to be better able to spot any signs of the killer’s passage. As they went, Silas continued to reach out with his mage senses. There was A’ayimat power nearby, but he found no trace of Granadaian power or the magic he had sensed during the storm and the aftermath. Neither had any tracks been laid down over the signs of that day’s dust storm. There were ways that a mage could magically hide his physical presence and erase his tracks, but the active use of that much power would have left a clear magical trail.
About ten measures up, they came to the markers, two waist-high sticks hung with blowing strings of feathers, that indicated the border of A’ayimat territory. Silas and Lainie stopped there and waited. A moment later, a stocky, leather-clad man appeared out of the late-afternoon shadows just beyond the markers. He had dark blue-toned skin and a multitude of long white braids, and was armed with two short, curved swords and a bow slung across his back.
“That’s far enough,” the sentry said in strangely accented but understandable Granadaian; among other magics, the A’ayimat had a gift for knowing the language of anyone they spoke to.
“A man was murdered in the town today,” Silas said. “We’re looking for the killer, a wizard.”
The A’ayimat sentry shrugged. “I haven’t seen any other Grana folk except for the miners who have permission to be here.”
“If you do see him, don’t attack the town. He’s a stranger here, the settlers in the town have nothing to do with him.”
“How do you know?”
“He’s a wizard sent from Granadaia to kill other wizards. Not a settler.”
A long silence passed. Silas felt a slight, alien nudge at his power. “All right, then,” the sentry said. “I think you’re telling the truth. We won’t punish the settlers for letting him come up here.”
“Thanks,” Silas said. “Also, if you do see him, don’t kill him right away. I need to ask him some questions.”
The A’ayimat studied him with golden eyes, then turned to Lainie. Most settlers would have been terrified to come face to face with a blueskin, but she met his gaze steadily, without flinching.
“You, woman,” the sentry finally said. “You’re the one we’ve heard about, a wizard of Grana, but also somewhat akin to us.”
“I was born in the Wildings,” Lainie said. If she was surprised or unnerved that word of her had somehow spread so fast and so far among the A’ayimat, she didn’t show it. Silas himself didn’t know how they did it; little was known of A’ayimat magic and ways. He knew just enough to not be surprised by anything they could do.
The man turned his amber gaze back to Silas. “For the woman’s sake, if we find this murderer, we’ll capture him and take him to the town for you to question. Unless he tries to kill us; in that case, we’ll kill him first.”
“Seems fair,” Silas said. “I appreciate it.” It was as much as he could have hoped for, short of the sentry actually having seen the killer.
“And,” the sentry went on, “I’ll tell you that even though we haven’t seen any murderous Grana wizards, we’ve felt a wrongness lately, a wild power, restless and greedy.”
That sounded like the power Silas had felt at the scene of the murder. “Where?”
“South and west.” The sentry gestured in an arc.
“In the hills?”
The sentry shrugged. “We can’t tell. We’ve seen no outsiders but the miners.”
“He’s good at hiding himself.”
The A’ayimat man grinned, showing teeth as white as his hair. “No one can hide from us. You take your search to the flatlands, and we’ll keep watch in our own territory.” With that, he retreated back into the shadows.
Silas and Lainie mounted up and started riding back down the ravine. “That wasn’t much help,” Lainie said.
“For the A’ayimat, it was.”
“I wonder how they heard about me.”
“Maybe they can pass news along in the same way they pick up language, however that is. I wouldn’t mind knowing the trick of it myself.”
They rode out of the ravine, then stopped to look around. “Where now?” Lainie asked.
Silas surveyed the barren landscape. Behind them, the hills extended in a broken line perhaps twenty leagues or more from north to south. Ahead of them, except for the town, the land was flat and featureless as far as the eye could see. He turned to look south, in the direction the sentry had indicated. In the distance, beyond the end of the range, the shading of the land in the lengthening rays of the lowering sun suggested a rugged, broken area of washes and vegetation extending south from the west side of the hills. Creek beds running down from the hills and the surrounding scrub trees and brush would make an ideal hiding place, providing shelter and possibly water. Silas pointed in that direction. “South, like he said.”
With the hills on their right hand and the road leading southwest from the town on their left, they headed south for the watershed. Silas doubted the killer would have braved the flat, exposed road as he made for the shelter of the washes; it was much more likely that he would have kept to the rougher ground at the foot of the hills, which offered a little more concealment. They went on foot, weaving a wide path across the broad strip of land between the road and the hills, but found no sign that any other person had passed that way since the dust storm earlier that day. The killer could have been moving under the cover of the storm, but Silas didn’t think the storm had extended this far or lasted that long.
By the time they had covered about a league and a half, it was too dark to search any more, so they stopped for the night and made a cold camp. Darknight, the one night of the month when the moon didn’t show itself, when the gods hid their faces and demons and lost spirits roamed the world, was no time to be outside without a fire. But with a killer somewhere out there in the desert, it would be foolish to give away their position or dim their night vision with the brightness of a fire. They ate a cold supper in the last lingering moments of twilight, then Silas spread out the blankets. “You sleep first,” he said to Lainie. “I’ll keep watch and wake you up when it’s your turn.”
“I’m not ready to sleep yet. I’ll sit up with you.”
He didn’t argue with her. Truth was, he would be glad of some company. Darknight was not a night to be alone in the empty desert. He was sure the killer had intentionally chosen this day to carry out the murder, for the unnerving effect it would have. Lainie settled cross-legged on the ground behind him, leaning against him, to keep watch at his back.
Except for the small sounds of the horses as they grazed on the sparse scrubgrass and then settled in to sleep and the slight, whispering breeze that rolled down from the hills with the cooling night air, the night was quiet and still – too quiet and still, even for this desolate place. Even the few living creatures who made the Bads their home seemed to have gone silent, as though they feared to draw attention to themselves on this night.
Silas found himself glad of Lainie’s warmth against his back. In the stillness, knowing she was keeping watch, he let his mage senses roam far and wide, searching for traces of the power he had sensed around Horden’s body, either in active use or at rest, or shielded.
“Find anything?” Lainie asked after a while.
He drew his mage senses back into himself, and shook his head. “Nothing.”
“What if his shield is like Carden’s, and th
at’s why it’s so hard to find?”
Carden’s shield had been so strong and well-crafted it had even concealed Carden’s life force. Silas had only discovered it when he looked straight at Carden and couldn’t detect any life force around him. “It’s possible, but a shield that strong takes a lot of power. Carden was using the ore to constantly replenish and increase his power. Without some way of doing that, no mage can maintain a shield that strong for very long, not after fighting another mage and especially not if he’s also been working weather.”
“Maybe he’s using those drugs you told me about, that regenerate power.”
“Could be. But they impair your judgment and drain away your power even faster. Any mage who uses them is a fool, and whatever else this killer might be, I don’t think he’s a fool.” His frustration grew into a knot in his chest. Not even Carden had managed to evade him so thoroughly, once he had figured out what to look for. “He’s got to be out there somewhere; how far can a man get in one afternoon without leaving a single trace behind him?”
Carden hadn’t been able to hide from him forever, he reminded himself. And neither would this bastard. One way or another, Silas would get to him before he got to Silas.
“You’ll find him,” Lainie said, absolute confidence in her voice.
After that, a comfortable, companionable silence stretched out between them. Slowly, Silas’s tension eased. One thing he did like about these nights when there was no moon was that the stars, undimmed by moonlight, shone bright as jewels in the sky. Here in the low deserts they didn’t seem as close as they did in higher country, but they still showed clear and sharp in the dry air. As they moved in their paths across the sky, Silas watched his half-circle of the surrounding landscape for shifts or variations in the darkness and kept his ears open for any sounds that were out of place.
After a while, Lainie’s voice, a bare whisper above the breeze, came into the silence. “Those reasons you told me, why someone would join the… that group, you said they were all your reasons.”
He had known she would want to talk about it sooner or later. And she was his wife; she had the right to know what had made him who and what he was, what had made him the man she had married. But he had to work himself up to tell the story; even after more than twenty years, the memories still cut deep and painful.
While he hesitated, she said, “If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s okay.”
“It’s all right,” he said. He took a deep breath, looking for the words to begin. “When I was ten years old,” he said, “I ran away from home. I never got along with my tutors, and this particular tutor was the worst of the bunch. One day, we got into an argument over how I numbered my arithmetic problems, and I got my backside whipped. I decided enough was enough, so I left.
“Being ten years old, I thought I could do just fine on my own. But after about four days I was hungry and tired and lost, and it had been raining so I was wet and cold to boot. I came upon a treehouse in the woods by a farm and took shelter there. After the rain stopped, the boy who had built the treehouse, Bil, found me there. He was Plain, and it was his family that lived on the farm. In Granadaia,” he explained, “land is owned by mages, but Plains are allowed to live on and work lands that have been passed down in their families, with permission from the mage who actually owns the land.”
“Like my Pa’s family,” Lainie said. “Their farm had been in the family for generations. Then when my grandmother found out she was a mage, she took it from them and gave it to her lover’s son.”
“She would have had to buy it or get a grant from the mage who owned the land, but that wouldn’t have been difficult, especially if her lover was someone powerful or prominent. But you’re right; land is controlled by the mages, no matter how long the Plain folk on it have been living and working there, no matter if the Plains were the original owners. That’s one of the laws the Hidden Council wants to change.
“Anyway, Bil found me, and let me stay in his treehouse. He knew I was of mage blood, and I knew he was Plain, but we were both ten years old and of an ornery nature, so neither of us cared. He brought me some food and blankets, and taught me how to fish and trap rabbits and how to clean and cook what I’d caught, and other things the son of a high-ranking mage family never would have learned otherwise.
“About a nineday after I ran away, the searchers my family had sent out finally found me. I had gone a lot farther than they thought I could, and I was better at shielding my power than most children my age. But they found me –” He clenched his fists at the surge of old anger at what had happened next, and had to force himself to go on talking. “Bil’s family was punished for kidnapping a mage child. I tried to tell my parents that I was there of my own free will, but it didn’t make any difference. Bil and his family were taken from their house in the middle of the night one night, and it was burned. The guards and enforcers – mages, and also Plain folk who turn against their own kind in exchange for favored treatment – they whipped Bil and his brothers and father, and raped Bil’s sisters and mother. Then the whole family was taken away in chains, and their farm was forfeited to the mage family that owned the land.”
The bewildering, terrifying images and sounds – the raging fire, the sound of the whips striking flesh, the vicious attacks, the screams and cries, the roar of the house as it collapsed in flames – played out in his mind again, undimmed over the last twenty-two years. At the time, he had been too young to understand what the enforcers were doing to Bil’s mother and the girls, and he remembered the sick outrage he had felt when, a few years later, he had put the pieces together with his growing understanding and realized what had happened. “My parents made me watch the punishments, to learn the rightful place that Plains held in the world and the correct way of dealing with them. I knew it was my fault. I had brought it down on them by letting Bil hide me. I was only thinking of myself, and never spared a thought for what might happen to them.” The old anger and horror and remorse came back to him now, thick and bitter in his chest.
“You were just a little kid.” Lainie’s soft voice washed peacefully over his roiling emotions. “You couldn’t really have known. You didn’t mean any harm. You didn’t make those rules. And you tried to stop it – you tried to tell the truth. Now, you take my grandmother.” Though her voice remained a whisper, a hard edge entered it. “She knew damn well what she was doing, and she did it on purpose.”
Slowly, the tide of rage and sorrow and guilt ebbed, as it did more easily as the years went by, especially since he had decided to dedicate his life to working against injustices like what had happened to Bil and his family. “I know.”
“Four or five years after that, at school,” he went on, “I got my hands on some of those foreign pamphlets I told you about. The boy who smuggled them into the school was caught and Stripped, and the masters of the school confiscated and destroyed as many copies as they could find, but I hid mine, and read them over and over. I knew that what they said was right. Just because someone is born wealthy, or to a high rank, or with a certain talent, doesn’t make him any more human, any more deserving of basic rights and freedoms, than someone born without those things, and it doesn’t give him the right to take away the rights and freedoms of others. Over the next ten years or so I managed to find other people who had read those writings and believed in those ideals, and through them, I found out about the Hidden Council and pledged myself as an ally to it.”
“Why did you become a mage hunter? Did it have anything to do with all that?”
“It did. After what happened, and after reading those foreign pamphlets, I couldn’t stomach the life I was expected to live. I couldn’t bring myself to be like the people – my own family – who had destroyed Bil’s family. I wanted to take the wrong I had done and try to turn it to good. And, to be honest, life in Granadaia was boring. Suffocating. Mages in Granadaia work hard, even the most elite ones, so I wouldn’t have just been sitting around doing nothing, but it�
�s too settled there. Too many rules, too many conventions, too many restrictions and expectations. I wanted adventure, to see new places and do exciting things and live the way I wanted to without worrying about all those rules. I decided that as a mage hunter I could do a lot of good, protecting the Plain settlers in the Wildings from mages, and live the life I wanted.”
“Is this how you thought it would be?” she asked softly. “Bein’ renegade, and married to me, and with a killer after you?”
He considered for a moment. “Well. It’s not quite what I expected, darlin’. But I find it suits me okay. Except for the part about the killer. But at least I’m not bored.”
She laughed a little, then fell silent again, apparently having run out of questions. They sat in the dark, quiet desert night, watching and listening for the killer. The stillness was broken only a few times by a high-pitched, lonely howl that might have been a demon or a lost soul but was more likely a coyote. Lainie yawned hugely, then again, and again. Silas turned to her and said, “Get some sleep, darlin’.”
“All right,” she said through another gigantic yawn. She kissed him, then lay down in the blankets next to him. “Don’t sit up all night. Wake me when it’s my turn.”
“I will.” He didn’t want to leave her awake by herself, but he needed sleep to refresh and strengthen his mind and body and to regenerate the power he was using.
Before long, she was asleep. As the stars continued making their way slowly across the sky, Silas kept the watch, searching with eyes and ears and mage senses for the killer that the shiver between his shoulderblades told him had to be out there somewhere.
Halfway between midnight and dawn, when he couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer, he woke Lainie to take over the watch. He was still uneasy about leaving her to watch by herself, but she assured him that she had had plenty of rest, and her gun was loaded, and she would wake him the instant she saw or heard or sensed anything at all. “I’ll be fine,” she said in response to his repeated questions. “You sleep now.”