‘You’ll let them pass.’ He didn’t raise his voice or lift a hand. He didn’t need to. The rangers and gatemen made a path for Jac to urge his horse along, the corpse jolting across the ground and Loge’s mount wandering calmly behind. ‘I’ll inspect it in the stables. Clear them and keep everyone away until I say otherwise. Send for Grent and Rick.’
Her father might have said more to Siman and those he trusted most with the clan’s security, but Lidan moved out of earshot. The usual chatter and noise of the clan died as they dragged the beast’s corpse across the common. Lidan turned away and stared at Jac’s hands on the reins near her waist, focussed on the wall of his chest at her back and the steady rhythm of the horse’s gait. For all her talk, right now she wanted nothing more than to become invisible.
‘Loge?’ called a woman across the common. ‘Loge, is that you?’
‘Yes, Mam,’ he replied and the woman burst into tears. It was likely she had resigned to never seeing her son again, as so many other mothers never would.
‘Thank the ancestors… Wiull, he’s back! Loge’s back! Oh, thank goodness…’ She ran towards them followed by a man in a leather apron with dusty white hands. Loge’s reunion with his parents vanished behind Jac and even if he hadn’t blocked her view with his wide shoulders, she didn’t risk looking back. Her father was there, and the creature’s bouncing carcass—neither of them sights she fancied.
*
The stable doors shut with a muffled thud and strands of hay and dust billowed in the wake of the tall timber panels. Jac helped Lidan from the saddle and held her steady as her shaking knees threatened to give way beneath her weight.
‘You alright?’ he murmured, just for her to hear. Lidan nodded and blew out a trembling breath, and he squeezed her hand. ‘Get a perch on that crate and stay there. Let me sort this out.’
She obeyed his command and he turned to untie the dead creature from his horse’s saddle, releasing the mount into an empty stall. Her hands shook and her stomach rolled, her throat contracting each time she glanced at the creature’s corpse. She wanted to vomit.
What was that thing? She’d never seen or heard of anything like it.
But she had…
In the incoherent death ramblings of rangers. In the garbled screams in the night when she sat watch in the treatment rooms. None of what she’d heard had made sense at the time, but now, with this monster’s glaring eyes and hot, stinking breath still fresh on her skin, she knew what those rangers had seen.
The stable doors whispered as they opened; Grent, Rick, and Siman slipping through the gap before they shut again and smothered the noise of the common. The weariness left over from the previous night seemed all but forgotten in the commotion of their return.
The two tradesmen clasped hands with Daari Erlon before turning to the creature. They bent their heads together, voices rumbling in a low murmur, arms folded into muscled knots of worry only broken by a few sharp gestures towards the dead thing in the middle of the stable floor. Her heart hammering, Lidan shut her eyes and drew in a deep breath.
A flash of teeth and a hot, foul snarl snapped at her face.
She started and her eyes flew open.
The thing remained as it was, dead on the floor, twisted and oozing, but in her mind, it lived, stretching its jaws wide to fit her between its teeth. She shuddered and bit hard into the raw flesh on the back of her lip to keep her chin from quivering.
No tears in front of Da—no tears and no fear.
Erlon glanced at her as if he’d sensed her thought, his eyes unsure as they went from the creature to her and back again. The other men ceased muttering between themselves and followed the daari’s gaze, equally uncertain, brows creased and lips pressed into thin lines of concern.
‘Gateman Jac?’ Erlon began, his attention lingering on Lidan before turning to the gateman. ‘You saw this thing from the wall?’
‘No, sir. I saw Loge come from the bush. Didn’t see this ‘til we got out there to help him.’ Jac clasped his hands behind his back and nodded at Lidan. ‘Loge was injured and I needed a healer’s help. The First Daughter was the only one ‘round to lend a hand. Good thing too—it was her that killed it.’
‘How?’ her father frowned and stepped closer to inspect the corpse without leaning too near.
‘Shoved a stick down its throat, I believe…’ Jac glanced her way and winked. She tried to return his kindness with a smile, but she felt numb and there was no way to tell if the features on her face obeyed her instructions. They more than likely remained locked in an expression of startled horror.
‘Grent,’ Erlon waved at his bonesetter and stood back. ‘What do you make of it?’
‘Looks like a man, or perhaps it was a man once…’ He crouched over the creature and prodded its arm with a length of wood.
‘Too big and brutal to be a pankar,’ said Siman as Grent moved around the corpse. ‘Look at the size of it, and the claws…’
‘They aren’t claws, my friend.’ Rick knelt beside the corpse and yanked a mean blade from its grip. The creature’s finger bones snapped and gave way, peeling back and reluctantly giving up their prize. ‘This is a blade, not grown, but made. Northern metal, wrought in a forge like ours but from a different ore.’ Rick held the knife up to a beam of sunlight, his fingers tracing the edge and hilt. ‘Steel, worn and badly cared for, but steel.’ He threw it at a nearby timber pillar and Lidan jumped at the sound of the blade driving deep into the wood and shivering in place. ‘Sharp for all the wear. Bone or ivory handle, folded iron blade… good quality or else they wouldn’t have lasted in this condition.’
The pair of knives were long, about the length of Lidan’s forearm from tip to hilt, and the handles were half that length again. ‘Can you tell where they came from, just by looking?’ Lidan asked quietly.
‘If you know what to look for.’ The forge master glanced at the daari. ‘Imperial, most likely.’ Her father raised his brows at that and Lidan frowned. Imperial? What under all the sun and stars did imperial mean?
Catching her confusion, Rick added, ‘From way up north; across more mountains than the clans have ever seen.’
‘Not bronze?’ Erlon asked.
Rick shook his head and spat. ‘No, and not from the clans, unless they’ve got themselves a northern forge master. We’d have heard about it before now if they did. No way they wouldn’t brag about it.’
‘Like we did when you decided to stay and fire our ore?’
‘Aye, sir, just like you did,’ Rick nodded at the door. ‘Every clan this side of Fracture Pass knows I work metals for you and they’re jealous as the sun.’
‘Blood-oath they’re jealous!’ Erlon remarked proudly, ‘but they didn’t do this. This is wandering death, with weapons we hardly know how to fight.’
‘Ngaru.’ Lidan said the name the clans gave to unknown creatures like this, her voice rising into the silence left by her father. ‘Night wanderers…’
Her father glanced at his countrymen and they nodded.
‘Ngaru,’ he repeated and a heavy, considered silence settled in the air. Lidan remained sitting on a creaking timber crate of horse leathers and wished she was anywhere but here…
‘Liddy?’ Erlon asked, their eyes meeting across the stable, his brow creasing into a frown. ‘It got you with those knives, didn’t it?’
‘I...’ she glanced down, realising at the top of both arms, an inch or so below the shoulder, two gashes in her shirt shone bright red. ‘I suppose it did…’
Grent hurried to her side and pulled her shirt up over her head to expose the skin beneath the torn white sleeves. Her undershirt saved her some dignity but the pain seeping from the wounds banished any embarrassment. Grent treated her like the rangers they tended in the treatment rooms, unbothered by her gender or the presence of the others. His fingers probed the gashes and she winced, sucking air between clenched teeth and arching away.
‘These need cleaning,’ he announced and threw his jacket
over her bare shoulders before leading her towards the door.
Siman cleared his throat to get her father’s attention. ‘What’ll we do, sir?’
‘We do nothing,’ the daari replied.
Lidan baulked and turned in Grent’s gentle hands, her pain forgotten. ‘What?’
‘You heard me, Lidan Tolak—we do nothing.’
‘But Da, those things…’
He held up a hand and her protest evaporated.
‘We know what they are now. I won’t waste more men on searching them out, or risk drawing more of them towards Hummel. Until the rains come, we bar the gates, and we stay here.’ His dark brows furrowed over stern eyes. ‘They won’t get past our gates.’
The glint of sunlight on the knives caught Lidan’s eye.
Follow her, follow your father or cut your own way? The Crone’s words echoed in her mind and drew an idea from the depths of her thoughts.
‘What are you going to do with the knives?’ she asked. The thought of them ending up on the midden unsettled her stomach but she couldn’t put her finger on why. Perhaps she hesitated at the idea of throwing away something as rare as iron from the north, or perhaps… ‘Can I keep them?’
The words were out before she knew she’d said them.
They all looked at Erlon and she wished she could decipher the expression on her father’s face and read his thoughts, even for a moment.
Erlon shot a questioning glance at the forge master, and Rick inclined his head. ‘I could fix them. What’s in your mind?’
She squared her shoulders though her skin stung white-hot around the wounds the knives left in her flesh. ‘They put scars on me that I’ll wear ‘til I die. They owe me a debt.’
‘They’re weapons, First Daughter. Not toys,’ Rick remarked. ‘You’ll need training.’
It was a request that went against all of her mother’s wishes. The woman wanted her daughter to be the heir, but without risk-taking or danger, without training or ranging. Lidan knew such a thing was impossible, and perhaps if her mother had relented sooner, she might have been well on her way to showing her father that she was as worthy an heir as any son. Instead, Lidan was bound to a sickening promise, and these knives offered a chance to fulfil it.
As she watched Erlon, she saw recognition pass over his face. He understood what she was asking and why—she was challenging him to defy the dana. She was challenging him to treat her as his heir, to allow her to show him what she was capable of, despite the promise of a son, and despite the wishes of his first wife.
He watched her, his eyes taking in the way she lifted her chin in defiance and held herself proudly. She’d done the impossible and broken in Theus, and now she’d killed the creature lurking in the bush and slaughtering rangers. He had to let her prove she could be his heir.
Erlon put his hands on his hips and sighed, as if feeling the weight of the decision and the burden of the consequences. In that moment she knew he would refuse, and her heart sank. He looked back at his daughter and her hands clenched into tight fists, her teeth biting into the back of her lip to keep it from shaking.
‘To the victor go the spoils,’ her father said with a nod. ‘You killed the ngaru, so the knives are yours. You will train.’
Chapter Twenty-One
The Southern Reaches, Orthia
Voices pursued Ranoth into the darkness. They followed him as he fought his way through the trees and thick undergrowth. Their torches threw dancing shadows and revealing shafts of light into the woods which threatened to expose him at every turn.
He hurried through the night, reaching out with whatever senses hadn’t abandoned him in the cold of the dungeons, hoping to find a way through the darkness towards some sort of safety. He kept the road to his left and obscured his trail, waited for the soldiers to pass before he circled down behind them and sprinted across to the northern side of the road. If luck hadn’t abandoned him then the darkness would cover his tracks until morning, but if the soldiers found Perce’s promised horse before he did, his efforts were for naught.
A deep drain beside the road hid him from sight and he crouched, hurrying through the wet slop at the base of the ditch. For what seemed like hours he kept to that drain until a line of stones in a pile indicated the remains of an old paddock fence. Across the field in the faint moonlight, he saw the leaning structure of a low shed, the surviving timbers of a ramp at either end, and a livestock yard barely standing after many years of neglect. The building stood on stone pillars as high as Ran’s waist, though some at the northern end had crumbled.
He swallowed the memory of the last abandoned building he encountered and covered the exposed ground without taking a breath. Were it not for Perce’s guarantee of a horse, Ran would have avoided the place like the pox. In the shadow cast by the ramp at the northern end, he huddled and waited.
The sound of his pursuers had fallen away, the light of their torches fading until he felt he was quite alone, but the chances they had given up on him were close to nil. They were in the woods, hiding and hunting.
The sound of his breath and the hammer of his heart grated against his nerves, the ice cold of the night biting into his hands and fingers. Nothing moved in the woods where he’d been, no sign of men or beasts following his trail, so he slipped from the shadows and hurried down the back side of the building to its southern corner. Across the field stood the copse of trees Perce mentioned, and if his luck held, the horse and supplies. Without them, he was as good as dead.
He stepped from the shelter of the building and straight into the chest of a soldier.
Ran’s forehead smacked into the man’s nose and sent him staggering back. For a moment, Ran thought he’d run into a post. His recovery was quicker than the soldier’s, who reeled backwards then bent double, pinching his bleeding nose and cursing.
Before the other man had a chance to look up, Ran grabbed him by the shoulders and spun with him back into the shadows behind the shed. The soldier’s head hit a stone footing with a crack and Ran dropped him.
The soldier moaned as Ran stood over him, his face a mess of black blood in the pale moonlight. Ran glanced around. How many more men were in the trees? How many were waiting for him to break cover and head for the horse? If this soldier got up and went back to the city, he would reveal the direction of his escape.
Thoughts piled up in his brain faster than he could sort through them while the soldier held his head in his hands and rolled onto to his knees. He would be on his feet in a few moments, then Ran would have to deal with an armed opponent and nothing at hand to defend himself with.
A glint of light on water drew his eye and he grabbed the man by the back of his tunic. The soldier tried to stand, tried to throw his weight backwards, but Ran kept moving, dragging him the few feet across the dirt and snow to a trough.
He didn’t think about it. He didn’t reason or make excuses. He lifted the man by his clothes and shoved him face first into the icy water and held tight.
Shock hit the soldier first, a jerk through his whole body as he recoiled from the freezing water. Ran’s muscles screamed as he threw his weight down on the man’s back.
The soldier began to thrash, his legs kicking and torso bucking like a wild horse. His arms flailed and grappled for Ran, desperate for a purchase on his skin, his clothing, or his hair. Ran pressed down harder and jammed his elbows into the man’s spine, pinning him against the edge of the trough with everything he had.
The frantic lurching and heaving soon subsided to a feeble quiver, then ended entirely. The body gave a few unconscious twitches, then lay still, floating in the shimmering water as wavelets slopped over the side onto Ran’s boots.
For a while Ran didn’t move. He couldn’t.
The silence of the night filled his ears like the water filling the soldier’s lungs, and he waited. He waited for the man to move, to start fighting again. He waited for the soldier to launch up from the water and gut him, but his body lay motionless with its legs
stretched out across the dirt.
When Ran stood, his chest sucking in great gulps of air, the body stayed as he left it. His hands shook and his legs threatened to give way but he remained upright, staring at the body in the water and the ripples slowly fading from the surface. The man was dead, of that there was little doubt.
What the fuck have I done?
‘Saved yourself,’ a voice spoke from nowhere and everywhere. It filled his head and he clamped his eyes shut. It stung his ears and set off a sharp ringing he couldn’t dislodge, but the voice was right. The soldier would have alerted others and they in turn would have found his trail. He couldn’t let the man live, not after finding him at the shearer’s shed. He would lead the duke’s soldiers back here, find the horse’s tracks and follow them. The man couldn’t live…
Ran glanced around and hoped the soldier had been alone. He didn’t have the guts or the strength to kill any more of them.
He rubbed his face with quivering hands to shake off the horror, the guilt, and the memory of what had happened and crouched beside the body. He choked on some bile as he flipped the corpse onto the ground and tried not to look at the man’s face, now washed clean of blood. He rifled through pockets and pilfered coins and basic supplies; a dagger, a purse, a spare pair of boots and some gloves, a thick coat and a good leather belt with a sword and scabbard were his rewards for murder. The threat of vomit deterred him from stripping off the man’s clothes entirely.
If someone found the body it would be immediately obvious that the man was of the city guard or an Orthian soldier, but he didn’t have the time or tools to dig a grave. For want of a better option, he rolled the body under the floor of the shed between two of the stone footings. A nearby fence lent him a length of timber and he wedged it under the base of the trough. With every ounce of his remaining strength, he leaned on the timber until the trough began to lift. It eased up from its base and began to tip towards the shed until the volume of the water overcame the weight of the stone. The whole thing flipped and thumped down over the corpse, trapping it in a solid stone tomb. Unless the smell escaped the seal of the stone against the soil, there was no way a passer-by would notice the trough or suspect a body lay rotting underneath.
Blood of Heirs Page 19