Heart thundering, he heaved to his feet and bolted, too terrified to register the complaints of his muscles or any sense of direction or caution. The very hordes of the Dark nipped at his heels, that cold remembered breath raising all the hairs on his neck.
It took nearly snapping his ankle on a sheet of loose sand—and then tumbling downhill for some distance before coming to a stop against a boulder, covered in grit and bits of crushed scrub-brush—for him to finally stay still long enough to hear through his heartbeat and realize he was not being chased. There was no Dark horde, no grasping tentacle, just a welt around his waist with a bruise where a belt-buckle would be. No more belt, no more empty scabbard.
Dazed, bloodied and still unnerved, Cob sat for a while in the lee of the boulder and tried to convince himself that it had been nothing. That the empty darkness had been his shadow on the back wall of the cave, the belt and scabbard's loss due to it catching on the cave's narrow entry. The whispers were just the fading dream—the same one he had dreamt since his injury, and thus not special. Everything was fine.
He knew better, but it was nice to pretend.
Slowly he emerged into the light, squinting, limping just a bit. The sun painted him with a baking heat, driving away the last of the cave’s chill. Every part of him hurt differently, but right now what took priority were his ankle, the dryness in his throat, and the horrible implications of his escape.
He started hobbling north, because he knew if he sat there while the worries crowded in on him, he would never get up again.
The sun hung just above the lip of the Rift, peering down on him like a burning eye. Rift-dawn, later than he was used to seeing it; this close to the titanic wall, the sky lightened enough for visibility long candlemarks before the sun actually managed to crest its edge. Even the Crimson camp would have seen the sun sooner. By the look of it, he had slept until nearly noon.
Which meant that the freesoldiers had already found the bodies and condemned him in absentia.
He did not know what to think. In fact, he did not want to think at all; he just wanted to go somewhere, anywhere, that would keep him away from the fallout of Darilan’s actions. But with the Crimson camp still practically in sight, the tug of familiarity lured him. Routine, loyalty. Faithfulness to the Light. And though he felt more lucid than last night, a vise had clamped around his skull while he slept, intensifying his headache with every step.
Still walking, he struggled to examine his options.
The simple breakdown—return and death or flee and death—had divided into multitudes. Someone might have seen Darilan with the sword, or killing Fendil, or at the slave-camp with Weshker. No one would take Cob’s word against a freesoldier’s, but if another freesoldier had seen what had happened…
He could be exonerated. Surrender to the army and be demoted to slave-soldier because of his escape, his legacy status and incipient promotion to freesoldier cancelled--a slave forever, but safe. Permitted to stay in Imperial service. Return and life.
He could be freed. Unlikely, but if Darilan was proven as the culprit--if Darilan had gone Dark--the Army might consider it merited for bringing such infiltration to their attention. Return and promotion.
More likely, he would be condemned as an accessory or as the culprit. The Army turned a blind eye to most slave-on-slave violence but his escape would have brought him into focus, and thus punishment. Return and death—a simple execution.
Or, if the Dark had truly invaded him and the Inquisitors found trace of it, he would be exorcised: sent to the Imperial Palace to have the taint scoured from every last crevice of his soul. Return and annihilation—for it was said that nothing survived the direct gaze of the Light.
Right now, he did not think it would be so bad to be condemned like that. To at least know that his destruction had purified him. But between his current vantage among the Varaku rocks and his potential fate in the Imperial Palace, there would still be the Crimson Army, the Inquisition and the General's judgment.
Not to mention Darilan and Erevard and any cutthroats in their service. A desire for purification did not matter if he was murdered before he reached it.
And if he fled? Where would he go? To Kerrindryr, where the few Light priests in the west ministered to the Low Country Kerrindrixi? They might be able to cleanse him, but he was loath to return.
To lose himself in the Heretic Lands? Maybe he deserved that for disdaining his fellow slaves yet failing to report his own Dark influence. Give up, then; succumb to the dreams and whispers, the black gauntlets. Whatever that entity wanted, it had not been the one to hurt him. Not directly.
And that was the worst thought: that his dreams were mild compared to whatever had happened to Darilan. He could not deny the madness in the scout's eyes last night. By all rights, the Dark should not be able to touch him; he was not only an Imperial soldier but a Daecian—a citizen of the territory that surrounded the Palace itself--and his bleached-fair hair marked him as one claimed by the Light. If even Darilan could fall...
Cob furrowed his brows, trying to pinpoint where the corruption had happened. Darilan had always been harsh and quick-tempered, and Cob knew that in Army parlance 'scout' really meant 'spy and assassin', but those did not seem pertinent; some measure of controlled violence was necessary in his duties, and Darilan was nothing if not controlled.
And fair. More than once, he had been the one holding the whip when Cob was led to the whipping post, and he was no gentler a hand with it than any other freesoldier. Stony, impersonal. He took such great care not to show favoritism before his fellow freesoldiers that it sometimes surprised Cob to see his expression change from public to private--callous to concerned, professionally blank to that tiny, wry smile Cob sometimes got from him.
Off-duty, he could even seem relaxed. All the slaves in their section knew that Darilan only came into the slave-camps for Cob and did not care about or report what he saw there, and usually even Weshker's jokes bounced off him without response. Likewise, his recent distance was not abnormal; he was often gone on missions and subdued when he returned, and they would spend their time just sitting in the shadow of a tent, watching the sky, neither talking. Not that they ever spoke much; sometimes Darilan seemed to like hearing about Kerrindryr--about Cob's time before his enslavement--and sometimes he would talk about what he had seen in the wider world, but most often their meetings were like mutual downtime. No slave would hassle Cob when Darilan was around, and no freesoldier would look for the scout among the slaves.
Cob could not see where it had gone bad.
His faith in the Imperial Light told him that surrender was the only option. For months he had feared what those dreams might mean--feared the evil that had claimed his father had finally come for him too. He did not want to turn against the Light that had so graciously saved him, but he knew that the Dark did not require permission; it crept in and hollowed out those who did not resist it with all their strength, until they were merely shells of men. Puppets perpetrating its will.
He had shared his dreams with Darilan alone, and Darilan had told him to stay quiet.
If Darilan had gone Dark, and had encouraged the Dark's growth in Cob in turn...
No, it can't be like that, he thought, but he felt no surety, only a hollow ache where his heart should be.
And if he went back and told the Army and the Inquisitors what he had seen, they would execute Darilan. He did not think he could stomach that. It was the right thing to do, and faithful, but a part of him was still numb--still unable to accept that he was not dreaming. He dimly recalled this sensation from five years ago, and how when the bubble of detachment had finally burst he had felt like he was drowning. Uncontrollably drawn down beneath a dead black sea.
It had been Darilan's hand that pulled him free of that undertow, Darilan's presence that stabilized him through the first few horrid months. And though the spark he had lost in that moment had never returned, there had been a kind of peace to these past few yea
rs. A stability. It made him sick to consider betraying that handclasp, even if it had betrayed him first.
They had been friends.
He could not return.
Exhaling heavily, he nodded to himself. So be it. Logic therefore dictated he go north, because the forest must have water in it somewhere, and he could not go out to the river without risking capture. It was a measure of his current crisis that the thought of the mist, and the wraiths, barely slowed him.
The only plan now was survival.
He walked on through cramps and dizziness, through transient nausea as the sun shone full-bore above him. It was late autumn—the 13th of Sebryn, seventh month of eight—but here at the belt of the world the heat was still fierce, and sweat prickled from his skin to map new rivers on his tunic. He wished he had a hat, but that was another thing the Army failed to provide.
On a flicker of memory, he checked the drawstring waist of his breeches and found Weshker’s bandana still tucked there at his hip from when he had pulled it off for roll call. The officers disapproved of slaves using anything to hide their faces, even though Cob knew they never bothered to tell them apart.
He halted on a stretch of flat ground and just looked at it. A ragged scrap of dull red cloth, all that remained of a man who could have become a friend.
Wetness rose in the back of his throat. Cob told himself it was bile; that he was sickened, not sad. That he was not about to go under. Quickly he tied the bandana over his short hair and made himself ignore it. It was useful, nothing more.
But it did not help much. He knew he should wait for the day to wane—or should have risen early so he could travel while the sun still hid behind the Rift. No water and no food had already made him weak, and the way the sun painted deep shadows beside the blindingly bright stone walls made his eyes ache, his nerves sing with paranoia. He had almost forgotten the cave and the whispers until the wind picked up, its hissing voice multiplied through the shallow canyons and standing stones.
At least his ankle stopped throbbing.
Five months, his anger said, and he let it keep talking because it pushed back the shadows. Five months left on a ten-year sentence and it all falls apart. Got through being shot, got through the riots in Fellen, got through the siege of Savinnor and the quarry and everything else, and suddenly the Dark comes calling. Suddenly the Inquisition is here and Darilan goes mad and all is lost. All that time I waited and behaved. All that time I obeyed.
I never did anything bad, never put a piking toe out of place. And now, suddenly—
Voices.
He halted and cocked his head, listening hard to the ensuing silence. The wind had settled somewhat, though it still stirred the sand around his feet; he could hear it sigh among the broken pillars ahead and uphill, but that sound had come from somewhere else. Like an echo. At his spot in the midst of a passage between broken buttes--perhaps once a riverbed—it was hard to pinpoint a source; too much weathering had cleaved the walls to pieces, forming a maze of light and darkness.
Maybe a wildcat, or some other badlands animal—
But then another echo. Voices bouncing from the rocks: militant shouts, a muffled order. A sharp bark.
Hounds.
For a moment he stood paralyzed, unable to believe it. They had sent hounds onto Varaku! After him! No one crossed the river, not even the freesoldiers; after the debacle at the logging camp, the Mist Forest and the cliffs and everything at Rift’s edge had been declared off limits, too dangerous to exploit.
And that anyone at all would come after a runaway slave, even one who had supposedly gone murderous…
No one cared what the slaves did to each other. Except, apparently, now.
Could be looking for someone else, he thought as he forced himself into motion. He knew he could not hide from hounds, and in this warren of broken stone he could turn any corner and come face to face with a soldier.
Or Darilan. Did he chase me across the river? Do they already know he’s gone Dark? They’d come after him…
But he did not think so. He had not looked back until he was far up the rocks but Darilan had been right on his heels until the river. If the scout had followed him in, he should have felt a dagger between his shoulder-blades at the moment he stopped to retch.
Flat ground. Flat ground and run for it, or fight—
Just the thought of raising a hand against an Imperial freesoldier sent a spike of nausea through him. That was his slave conditioning, the mind-work the Inquisitors reinforced each spring. Its strength had waned in the six months since its last application but from the churn of his stomach Cob knew he could not stand up to them.
Fine with him. He loved the Empire and the Army. He just wanted to get away.
A gap in the rocks rose ahead, letting in a broad knife of light from the western side. Cob heard the voices clearer—still distant but rising, the first hound-call followed by more, then a host of them baying in time. The sound filled the passage, and as he darted past the opening he saw flecks of red on the downslope beyond: glimpsed for a moment like drops of blood on brick, then gone as he turned a corner in the passage.
He scrambled up a smooth incline—definitely water-carved--toward another span of sun. How they had found him, he could not guess, because they were not coming from his backtrail; breaching into the light, he saw them below and beyond the shadowed channel he had just run, arrayed along the rocks in a direct line from the distant Crimson camp. Shouts rose as he was spotted, and the lean grey shapes of hounds surged forward, but his passageway had let out atop the high foot of a new cliff and he could see no easy way for them to get up.
So he ran.
A crossbow bolt cracked against the stone, nearly catching his right leg. He forced himself not to shy away but concentrate on his feet and the path—the needle that stabbed his ankle with each step, the slough of sand ahead, the brittle fingers of desert brush reaching from the crevices. In this moment, he was a perfect target, running parallel to them as they swarmed the wall. Ahead and eastward, the plateau rose into ridges of striated stone like a delta—cracked and labyrinthine, perhaps an escape--but he heard the scrabble of claws just below and knew he had bare instants before someone boosted a hound up to his level.
Another bolt shattered on the rock right before him. They had his measure; the next one would hit.
His foot came down on shifting gravel. Pain speared his ankle and he stumbled and tried to catch himself on a stone wall, but somehow it wobbled away. He hit the dirt, skinning knees and elbows through his threadbare clothes, then attempted to surge up only to find the ground heaving beneath him.
Riftquake, he realized in panic. Around and above, the ancient stones fractured into showers of sand and scree as cracks tore open along their weathered sides. Cob shoved forward on desperate feet, shielding his head with his arms. The delta was no longer a safe destination--nowhere on Varaku was safe—but he spied a flat span of rock that might not split beneath him. Through air thick with dust and flying debris, he pressed toward it, trying to stagger in time with the drunken earth.
Trying to ignore the screams beneath the sound of rending rock.
He had gone only a few yards before something slammed his shoulder, spinning him off-balance. Something else clipped his leg below the knee, and sharp shards of rock peppered him as he half-fell, half-knelt. A stone the size of a fist barked off the back of one hand, driving his head low. Behind him, a sound like a thunderclap magnified a hundredfold presaged the awful throaty roar of a rockslide, and he hunched as small as possible as a blast of pebbles pummeled at his back.
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the tremor ceased. Isolated stones continued to fall, and in the distance he heard the shear and crash of more collapses, but in his area it all ebbed to silence, overlaid by the heartbeat in his half-deafened ears.
He took a short breath, then gagged out grit and struggled to pull the bandana down over his face. The sky was yellowish-red with dust; he felt it on his skin like
paint, in his eyelashes, plugging his barely functional nostrils. Warmth trickled down under his tunic—sweat or blood, he could not tell. The haze was so bad he could barely open his eyes.
No sound reached him from behind. Reluctantly, he looked back.
The whole section of cliff he had just run under lay in ruins, collapsed into the shallow canyon below. The river-passage beyond it was choked with rubble. Not a scrap of red showed among the fallen stones.
The spirits of Varaku, yammered his fear. The whispers in the Dark.
A scream rose in his chest, but the dust in his lungs turned it into a crying cough. Even with the bandana tight over his mouth, he could not stop inhaling more. He had to move, but he could not help staring at the new cairn. How many were chasing me? How many—
Dizziness struck. He slumped forward; if he had not already been kneeling, he would have fallen. For a moment, in the shadow of the rocks beside him, he saw hands reaching--hard hands covered in gauntlets of black stone—and he lurched away awkwardly, stars reeling behind his eyes.
When they cleared, there was nothing. Just him and Varaku.
Got to get out. Got to go.
Gaining his feet was an exercise in pain. His clothes stuck to him at the joints; he tried not to look, knowing he had gravel embedded through the cloth but not wanting to see how much redder his hand-me-down tunic had become. His ankle screamed, and the knee above it felt no better; his opposite hand worked only sluggishly, fingers burning from the impact. But his back and shoulders felt bruised yet livable, and when he finally took a step he felt a swirl of lightheaded sickness that faded into something more like exhaustion.
Slowly but steadily, he moved forward.
The labyrinthine delta looked deadly now, a seductive trap. Riftquakes were not common, but Cob’s hackles were up, his superstitious nerves on edge, and he dared not move into their shelter. Kerrindryr’s Thundercloak Mountains never shook, and he cursed himself for ever comparing the two.
The Light of Kerrindryr (The War of Memory Cycle Book 1) Page 4