“Only if you consider combat the easy part.”
“It is the easy part,” Loukas muttered.
“Well, I suppose it would be, when you know the cortata better than the back of your hand.”
“Says the man who rides a dragon.”
Trell had told Loukas the story of his escape from Darroyhan—the highlights, at least—to keep them alert during their night ride. He cast him a sidelong smile. “I’m not sure Náiir would appreciate your reference. He carried me. I didn’t ride him.”
“Tomato, tomahto.”
Trell pointed a finger at the mountain. “Take a look higher up there, just above the northeast wall. What do you see?”
Perhaps a hundred feet above Khor Taran’s northernmost tower ran a conduit that appeared manmade. It hugged the line of the mountain until it vanished out of view.
“I think it’s an aqueduct, or possibly a millstream.” Loukas followed the conduit’s path with his magnified gaze. “Cyrenaic, I would imagine. The water is most likely sluiced off the Taran while the river is running at a higher elevation and redirected over the mountain to power the grain mills in Abu’Dhan.”
“Are those men up there?” Trell noted some ant-like figures milling around one of the aqueduct’s supports.
Loukas found them with the spyglass. “Yes, but they don’t look like guards. Actually…I don’t see patrols anywhere near there.” He lowered the glass and looked significantly to Trell.
Trell gave him a devious smile. “Not a one.”
Midday found them on the mountain’s easterly slopes. The terrain was rocky and too steep for the horses, so they hid them near a spring and took the climb on foot.
An hour or so later, they came upon a trail that had seen heavy use. They were close enough now to Khor Taran that they could glimpse its walls through openings in the canopy of trees, and the proximity made Trell cautious.
He looked up and down the trail, which curved quickly out of view at both ends, and glanced to Loukas. “Let’s—”
“Right.”
They took cover in some tall bushes and waited, watching and listening for any movement.
After a time, Loukas muttered under his breath, “Where’s Tannour when you need him?”
Trell cast him a curious eye. “What do you mean?”
“Oh…but didn’t he—” Loukas searched Trell’s gaze, whereupon his expression became slightly chagrined. He looked back to his window of leaves, radiating a confused disconcertion. “I thought he would’ve told you.”
“Told me what?”
Loukas exhaled a slow breath. “Tannour speaks the language of Air. The Vestians call it the Blind Path. In Avatar, we call them nabhahkaranta.”
Trell recalled his Avataren. “Airwalkers?”
“Nabhas can mean sky or air, mist, vapor, clouds…Avataren is a rather indecisive language. It’s as if each one of the Fire Kings wanted his own colloquial use of the word included in the official dictionary, so one word ends up having fourteen different meanings. Fiera forbid you should use the wrong meaning in the wrong king’s court.”
“Rue the day.” Trell grinned, for he knew well the complexities of Avataren etiquette. “So airwalking…is it a form of wielding?”
“I’m not sure. Tannour’s always been very mysterious about it—all of Vest is mysterious about it, actually. The Blind Path is like some proprietary trick of hand that you have to be inducted into their brotherhood to learn the truth of. All I know is if there were men anywhere within a league of us, Tannour would know it.” Loukas looked up and down the road again. “I think it’s safe to cross.”
“I agree.” Trell pushed out of the bushes. “But I don’t want to cross it.” He set off up the road.
Loukas stared after him exasperatedly. “Has prudence never visited you?” He shoved out of the bushes and jogged to catch up.
Trell aimed him a sidelong grin. “If I’m not in two or three life-threatening situations a day, I begin to wonder if I’m still alive.”
“I wonder how you’re still alive,” Loukas grumbled.
Trell’s grin widened. “I wonder that myself sometimes. But tell me more about airwalkers.”
“I honestly don’t know much, Trell. You grow up hearing stories, but I couldn’t speak to their truth. There are long-standing animosities between Avatar and Vest. Prejudice permeates the stories on both sides of the Ver.”
“The Ver?”
“The River Ver draws the southern boundary between Avatar and Vest—at least in the part of the kingdom where I’m from.”
“So you don’t know much for certain,” Trell remitted. “What do you know?”
Loukas aimed him a look of frustration. “About airwalking…or Tannour?”
Trell smiled meaningfully. “Either, as they apply.”
Loukas puffed a grumbling exhale. He kept his green eyes on the stony path, brows slightly furrowed, as if deliberating how to answer. He was long in responding, and still seemed hesitant when he did. “Tannour described it as a calling—that is…you can’t learn the Blind Path. It has to be inside you. You don’t choose the path, the path chooses you and all that. In Avatar, there are legends of airwalkers leading legions through the sky.”
“So is it or isn’t it a form of wielding?”
“I wish I could tell you.” Loukas puffed his auburn hair out of his eyes. “Magic in the east isn’t looked upon the same as in the Middle Kingdoms or the West. Wielders, Adepts, elae, the capabilities I hear spoken of so prevalently here, it all has little correlation to the magic worked in the eastern kingdoms. In Avatar, the baddha don’t have the same training, and they certainly don’t have the same freedoms.”
They reached a section of recently broken trail where the earth looked to have simply slid off itself. Trell climbed from rock to rock with Loukas close behind. “If Avatar doesn’t look upon elae in the same way, how did you learn the cortata?”
“From the baddha talavāra that served my family.”
Trell straightened on a boulder as Loukas was gaining his footing. “‘Bound sword?’” He scrubbed at his head. “I’m a bit out of practice on my Avataren.”
Loukas aimed a shadowy smile at him. “At last—one language you don’t speak perfectly.”
“Says the man who speaks every language known to the educated races.” He made jumping steps to cross the gaping earth and started up the next section of trail.
Loukas lagged behind, staring after him. “I don’t speak Gorul.”
Trell laughed and called back over his shoulder. “Does anyone speak Gorul?”
“Some Fhorgs, I think.” Loukas jogged to catch up. “In any case…‘bound sword’ is the literal translation for baddha talavāra, but the word has many meanings and connotes much more…” Loukas looked up the trail ahead of them and slowed. “Is that—”
“Yes, a cave I think.”
The road ended in a mountain wall and a huge, jagged hole in the rock face. Fire pits, churned mud and other evidence of a large camp of men surrounded the wide opening. Beyond the clearing, the trees pressed up against the mountain wall, preventing any view of their surroundings, but Trell was betting they were within a longbow’s shot of the fortress’s lower ramparts.
The cave opening had become partially blocked by a fall of rock that looked to have tumbled recently—a reminder, perhaps, that this volcano might’ve been sleeping, but it was still very much alive.
Trell drew up short as they neared, his attention snared by a boot extending from beneath the rock fall. As he looked closer, he saw a leg still attached to it.
“Saldarians.” Loukas gave a deprecating grunt.
Trell turned him a look. “You can tell the man’s origins from his boot?”
“Who else would leave their dead so disgraced?”
Trell conceded his point.
Loukas bent to inspect the body. “He can’t have been here more than a day or two—three at the most.”
Trell cast a narrow gaze t
owards the cave. “If the cave became unstable, it would explain why they abandoned this place in such a rush.”
Loukas eyed the cave disagreeably. “I suppose you’re going to want to investigate it.” He pushed back to his feet and headed towards the opening, muttering in mimicry of Trell’s voice, “‘Don’t fret, Loukas. If the mountain falls on us, I’m sure you can figure a way to dig us out with this broken dagger and this piece of string.’”
With Loukas grumbling and Trell chuckling, they descended into the cave. Within, the opening quickly broadened to a wide cavern. Light streamed in from other openings elsewhere in the mountain wall. Trell took up a torch he found on the ground and lit it from the dying flame of a flickering oil lamp bolted into the wall.
“Do you think the Saldarians were using this for their base?”
“Could be, or at least a regular waystop. But they wouldn’t have all fit in here. By Raegus’s estimation, there were at least two hundred of them, and five villages’ worth of people unaccounted for.”
“Do you think they might be holding them in the fortress?”
“I don’t know what to think.” Trell looked around. To his right, the cavern angled down into chill darkness, but to his left…
A short walk took them into a tube of sorts, with walls almost perfectly rounded but oddly ridged.
“This isn’t manmade.” Loukas was walking close to the wall, examining the rock.
“Lava, I suspect. The legends speak of Mount Attarak spreading arms of fire.”
They followed the tube long enough for Trell’s hopes to rise…and then crash in a tumble of broken possibility as they came upon another rock fall that blocked the tunnel completely.
Loukas shoved hands on his hips and cocked his head. “Do you think this cave connects to the fortress?”
“I think it just might—or did, once. Náiir says the entire mountain is riddled with caverns. I was hoping we could use this one to get inside, but the mountain seems to have had other ideas.” He turned and started back the way they’d come. “I guess we’ll have to fall back to plan A.”
“I didn’t realize we had a plan A.”
Trell turned him a look. “We had a plan A.”
Loukas narrowed his eyes at him. “We had the barest ghost of possibility for a plan A.”
“Tomato, tomahto.”
Loukas somewhat ground his teeth. “An idea is not a plan, Trell.”
“I’m the commander, you’re my combat engineer. I have ideas, you have plans.”
“Your ideas are more like fantastical conjecture married with insanity,” Loukas grumbled.
“Which you find a way to implement practically to our extreme benefit,” Trell quipped with a grin.
Loukas puffed a dubious exhale. “I’m making no promises about that aqueduct until I see it up close. We have no idea how deep or fast that water is running.”
Trell gave him a meaningful look. “Then we’d better get up there, hadn’t we?”
Night had fallen by the time they headed back to camp, leading the horses beneath the illumination of a waning moon. Those silvery rays were captured by the singing river on their left and the snow-capped peak lording over the night, such that both glowed with luminescence. A cast of stars had taken their places in the firmament and now watched the lands of men as actors distracted by a rowdy audience, waiting to see what drama would unfold beneath heaven’s vault.
Or perhaps in wait for another’s cue? Trell thought to himself as he saw Cephrael’s Hand suddenly appear in the eastern sky, half-occluded by the volcano’s peak but sparkling vividly in a space that a heartbeat before had offered only the infinite night.
“Fiera’s breath, how does it do that?” Loukas was also staring at the constellation.
“Just appear like that, you mean?”
“Real stars don’t just appear and disappear,” Loukas growled in uneasy protest, “and they don’t move. But that constellation…one day it’s rising in the east, the next day in the west—the demon stars come and go and as they fethen please.”
As Trell continued gazing at the constellation, a smile hooked one corner of his mouth. He gave the angiel a nod of greeting. Good evening, my lord.
The stars almost seemed to blink back at him in reply.
“Did you see—” Loukas turned suddenly to Trell with the look of a man who had seen things that clearly could not be explained. “Do not tell me that you entertain a relationship with Cephrael, too.” Under his breath, he added, “That would certainly explain a few things.”
Trell let his smile spread to both sides of his face. “The constellation and I go way back.”
“Is that a fact?”
Trell shifted a sobering gaze to him. “Those stars kept me company every night during my imprisonment at Darroyhan.”
“You had long conversations, the two of you?”
Trell smiled at his dubious yet slightly unsettled tone. “In a sense, you could say we did.”
Humming along at their side, the river gurgled amusedly at them.
“Trell…” Loukas regarded him with a pensive frown, “have you ever thought about why those stars move? How they move? I mean, what motivating force could possibly be causing the stars to move? If we’re to believe each of those lights are other worlds, distant suns, yet these seven just fly themselves through the firmament on a fethen whim—”
Trell finally looked away from the constellation to meet the Avataren’s gaze. “I don’t think the angiel is prone to whimsy. His actions only seem capricious because we see but a portion of His pattern. You and I are at the tiniest tip of an arabesque, each of us but single threads in a vast tapestry. How can a thread be expected to see or understand the greater pattern it’s weaving?”
When Loukas said nothing, only stared oddly at him, Trell flashed a smile. “Was it something I said?”
Loukas looked back to the way ahead. “I’ve just never heard you speak of such things before.”
Trell grinned. “Do I sound crazy?”
Loukas’s brow constricted. “You sound like Tannour.”
They reached a bend in the river where a wide, sandy beach glinted darkly with moonlight. If the Taran hadn’t told Trell that a man was crouched there, bleeding his thoughts into the water, Trell never would’ve noticed the scout. He raised a hand, even though he couldn’t see him. “Is that you, Saran?”
A shadow separated itself from a clump of bushes. “A’dal.” Saran strode forward. Only as he neared could Trell discern his eyes amid the amalgam of shadowed cloth that wrapped him. “Inithiya blesses us to see you returned. The Avataren, our former A’dal, has been gnawing his nails.”
“Let’s get back forthwith then, shall we?”
Saran pressed a fist over his heart and went for his horse.
The moon was well past its zenith and the men abed when the scout finally led them into camp. They’d passed six sentries along the mountainous trail leading to their hidden campsite. Raegus was taking no chances, and for good reason—they were within a half-day’s ride of Khor Taran and easy prey if spotted by the wrong eyes.
The wrong eyes… Trell cracked a smile at this irony. Assuredly a spy still walked among them, still reported to the wielder on their activities, but Trell was betting the man would make no more forays against them now that they were so close. He would wait instead for them to come to him, knowing they would have to.
They sat on opposite sides of the board, Trell and this wielder whom Tannour had called Kifat, both of them wrestling over the same prize. The onus was on Trell to play the game in a way the wielder couldn’t predict.
As Trell and Loukas made their way into camp, the only light beneath the moon and stars came from Trell’s command tent, whose soft glow appeared as a cobalt radiance amid a mushroom field, their tents like man-sized versions of the giant boulders that concealed the mountainside clearing.
Trell ducked inside his tent and nearly tripped over Rami, who was lying across the narrow strip of pa
ssage like a cat in wait.
The boy sat up, rubbing one eye. Then he realized who was standing in front of him in the darkness. “Sidi, you’re back!” He scrambled to his feet. “I’ll get you some dinner.”
Trell walked into the next room and found Tannour, Raegus and Rolan dozing in low-slung chairs. The latter of the three was snoring loudly.
As Trell was heading for his desk, Raegus started awake in his chair and saw Trell. “Gods be thanked.” He gave an explosive puff and relaxed again.
Trell smiled faintly. “That exhale seemed rather weighty with relief.” He slung himself into the chair behind his desk. “Did you so fear for me?”
Raegus smacked Rolan on the arm.
Rolan snorted awake with a glare, followed Raegus’s gaze to notice Trell, and then looked momentously back to Raegus. “He’s back.”
Raegus arched both brows.
Rolan nudged a still sleeping Tannour with his boot.
Tannour blinked awake, saw Trell, and roused promptly. “Ah…you’re back.”
Trell rubbed at his forehead. “Why do all of you sound so amazed by this fact?”
“Well, we can’t exactly count on n’Abraxis to keep you out of trouble,” Raegus said at the very moment that Loukas walked in.
Loukas scowled at him. “I’d like to see you do better. I vow even the gods aren’t up to the task.”
An entering Rami returned with food for Trell and Loukas—warm stew, a loaf of bread and a chunk of hard cheese with bowls of olives and figs. Simple fare had never looked better.
Trell carried his bowl over to the map table and ate his stew while studying the map of Khor Taran and the surrounding area. The others followed him first with their eyes, then with rather resigned exhales. Soon they’d all gathered around.
Rami moved among them offering wine.
Trell lifted his gaze to Raegus. “Have we spread the word of the forces coming from Duan’Bai?”
“Aye. Quietly, as you ordered. The men were whispering widely of it on the march today.”
“Good. We can expect our spy to have told the wielder at Khor Taran. By now, they’ll be expecting us.”
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