Pathfinder's Way

by T. A. White

  That hadn’t happened though, even when she had started taking them in a sweeping crisscross pattern for most of the last day, checking the back trail for signs of people they may have missed.

  “What’re you talking about?” Buck asked riding up beside them. “Pip squeak could find his way blind.”

  Eamon shook his head and snorted before mounting his horse. “Signs say they went west. Looks like the camp fire was from last night so we’re only about half a day behind them. They’ll be moving slower than us, so if we ride hard, we’ll be able to catch them before the sun sets.”

  “Finally,” Buck said. “Maybe we’ll get a hot meal tonight.”

  “At the very least we’ll get to eat something besides hard tack and this damn jerky,” Eamon returned as they went single file down the hill.

  “That’d be nice,” Sam said dreamily. After eleven days of trail food, everyone was ready for something new. Even Shea felt her mouth water at the thought of something besides jerky.

  Conversation dropped off as they rode, each keeping an eye on their surroundings.

  The group encountered more and more signs that people had come this way. From the excrement a horse left to hoof prints to the occasional piece of manmade goods. The path was easy to follow for anyone able to read it.

  A man stood from an outcropping of rocks and leveled a bow at them. “Halt and state your business.”

  Eamon pulled on his reins and held up one hand. “We’re scouts from the Dawn’s Rider Company here to see your commander.”

  The cross bow dipped slightly but stayed pointed in their general direction. “The moon rises over the summer plains.”

  “But sets over the burning snakes,” Eamon returned.

  At Eamon’s response, the man pointed the cross bow to the ground and waved them past. Eamon took lead and the rest followed. Shea looked back once to see the guard settle into position behind a tangle of bushes that hid him from view. She turned forward again.

  A challenge and response. An effective way of determining friend from foe.

  How often did those codes change and were there different ones for different companies? If someone knew the codes, they could slip in and out of camps with little trouble.

  They cantered around a copse of trees and came upon a campsite filled with their quarry. The group, numbering at two hundred, was much smaller than those they left in the valley. This was a short term camp, meant only for the night. There were no tents, but they’d set up crude pallets for sleeping and several campfires dotted the clearing. From the smell of things, someone had already started dinner.

  Eamon and Buck dismounted. Shea followed their lead, unsaddling her horse and tying it next to theirs. A hand landed on her shoulder, startling her.

  “You’re with me,” Eamon told her.

  Sam slipped up to her and slid her pack and saddle from her hands. “I’ll set your things next to ours for when you’re done.”

  “Thanks,” she said softly.

  Wiping sweaty palms on her pants, she followed Eamon’s broad back as he strode through camp. What did he want from her? Had he discovered she was a woman?

  That would not be good.

  She started scanning for the best possible escape routes. Her secret was probably still safe, but it was best to be prepared.

  “Scout Master Eamon Walker of Dawn’s Riders with an urgent message for the commander of Saw Grass,” Eamon said after coming to a stop in front of a trio hunched over a map.

  A sandy haired man with a week’s worth of stubble and a broad forehead straightened. His clothes were just as lived in as the rest of the men and nothing pointed to him as the leader except the slight look of authority resting on his stern countenance.

  “What do you have for me master scout?” he asked.

  The other two didn’t bother standing. The woman on the left stayed leaning on her elbows while looking over the two of them. The man on the right chewed busily at a stick and folded his arms.

  Shea kept her eyes from settling on any person for too long, not wanting to draw any more attention. Why was she here? Eamon could have handled the report just fine on his own.

  She would have been much happier seeing to her sleeping arrangements. Or finding a way to escape.

  “There’s been a change to your orders,” Eamon said.

  “Figures,” the stick chewer muttered. The woman curled her lip in disgust, while the leader looked like he had bit into something sour.

  Ignoring the comments, Eamon continued, “You’re to hook up with another element and provide support while they investigate Ram’s Crossing, a small village about thirty miles west of here.”

  “Where?”

  “May I?” Eamon asked, pointing at the map.

  The leader gestured for him to go ahead. Eamon bent over, peering at it closely before pointing to a spot that was about a day’s ride north west of their current position.

  The stick chewer caught Shea’s eye when she lifted her eyes from the map and raised his eyebrows. She dropped her gaze quickly not quite sure of the protocol for someone in the position she was currently occupying.

  “This is bad,” the woman said, looking up at the leader. “This will take us past the revenants.”

  Shea flinched. Revenants. She hated revenants. Everybody loathed the foul creatures.

  The beast was hella intelligent and vicious as a wolverine after a long winter. Not a couple of qualities you wanted combined in one animal. Though only about the size of a dog, it had thick reptilian skin that was damn near impossible to penetrate and wicked sharp fangs and claws.

  That wasn’t the worst part, though. Practically every beast had sharp claws and fangs. That was nothing to get worked up about. What made them so terrifying was the fact they hunted in packs and had a humanlike intelligence. They learned from their mistakes, and they never made the same one twice.

  Shea had four scars on her thigh from her last encounter.

  “Who’s your lad?” stick chewer asked, looking her over.

  Eamon reached back and pulled Shea up to stand next to him. “My second, Shane.”

  Stick chewer whistled while Perry’s eyebrows rose. Shea stiffened as she found herself under the regard of the three. Her eyes flickered from face to face trying to find a safe place to settle when she finally just gazed over the woman’s head.

  “Kind of young to be a second, isn’t he?” the woman asked. “Looks like a Daisy.”

  “Fiona’s right. Kid doesn’t look like much.”

  “His appearance is a little misleading. Fucker’s crazier than a stallion in heat and has balls as big as one.”

  “Oh?” Perry asked.

  Eamon nodded. “You notice we numbered six when we rode into camp. We started with eleven.”

  The stick chewer spat on the ground. “Unlucky number.”

  Eamon agreed with him. “We probably wouldn’t have made it at all if it weren’t for the lad’s mischief.”

  Perry looked her over slowly, noting her slim limbs, less than impressive height and smooth skin that had never seen a razor. “I find that hard to believe.”

  “Took down one of those huge beetles by himself. He’s also the one who found you lot. If not for him, we would have been wandering for a lot longer.” Eamon nodded at her. “He might be young, but he knows his craft.”

  “A beetle, huh?” stick chewer asked. “Most don’t walk away from an encounter like that.”

  “Can’t be far out of being a Daisy,” Fiona said.

  “He was a Daisy when we started,” Eamon confirmed.

  Shea’s hands curled into fists at her side, while she tried to keep all expression off her face. Please, please, please, find something else to talk about.

  “Battlefield promotion then,” stick chewer said.

  “We’ll need your assistance dealing with the revenants,” Perry informed Eamon. “We’re down to three scouts since our last encounter. Damn things took apart three parties before we could get aw
ay from them. Thought I’d lose my men in battle. I was prepared for that. Instead it’s these damn creatures wearing us down.”

  “Understood. I’ll prepare my men for the change in plans.”

  “We’ll leave at first light.”

  Dismissed, Eamon turned on his heel, heading for his men gathered around one of the fires. Shea trailed in his wake.

  The sun had begun to sink behind the mountains while they were giving their report to Perry, but little fingers of amber light fought off the deepening gloom.

  Shea’s stomach growled at the smell of food, but she didn’t let that distract her. She needed to speak to Eamon before they reached the others.

  “Eamon?”

  Eamon stopped, looking over in question.

  Shea gathered her courage, knowing that she was about to piss him off. Oh well, it needed to be said. If he called her a coward, so be it. “It’s suicide trying to travel through revenant territory.”

  “Oh?” He didn’t say anything else, just that.

  “Revenants are smart,” Shea said. “And they learn from every encounter with humans. If these guys had trouble with them earlier, they’re going to have twice as much now. Whatever tactics they used last time won’t work because the beasts have already adapted.”

  “I see your point, but that doesn’t change the fact our destination is on the other side of their territory.”

  “We could go around it,” Shea offered.

  Eamon crossed his arms and shook his head. “Not enough time.”

  “It’s better than losing half the company to an attack.”

  “They’re that dangerous?”

  “A small pack? No. But if there are several packs in this area, they’ll call for reinforcements. That wouldn’t be good for us.”

  “Perry would never go for it.”

  “But-“

  “I understand what you’re saying, but we’ll be going through their territory tomorrow. We’ve got orders now. We have to follow them. End of story.”

  Shea bit her lip and crossed her arms in front of her defensively, looking miserably down at the ground. His response wasn’t exactly a surprise. She’d known he was going to say something to that effect, but she’d hoped she could change his mind.

  Seeing the dejected expression on Shane’s face, Eamon sighed. “I understand your concerns. I even share them, but there’s not much we can do besides make the best of the situation. Share with the boys what you know of these beasts. That’s all you can do right now. You never know, it might save their lives tomorrow.”

  He patted her on the shoulder and headed for their men. Shea followed, mumbling a reply to Flint’s greeting as she took a seat beside the campfire. Leaning against her pack, she stretched her legs out and fished inside the front pocket, pulling out a small notebook with a pen tied to it. Luckily for her, she had it stashed in her jacket when Darius and his men took her captive. Otherwise it would have been lost to her like the maps.

  The notebook’s cover was leather and solid black. Enough nicks and dents had accumulated on it through the years to give it an entirely new texture. Rough and pockmarked. Crumpled loose pages worn smooth from being handled too often threatened to spill onto the ground. Shea shoved them back into place before flipping through the entries to the one she wanted. She flattened the page in question, gazing at the crude sketch of a shadow beetle.

  Pathfinders specialized in many areas. Some were guides, like Shea, who were embedded into a community and expected to provide whatever skills it needed. This mostly entailed leading trading expeditions or acting as the go-to person when it came to knowledge about beasts, other villages, and the easiest routes. This was the most common type of position a pathfinder undertook.

  Then there were those who led expeditions into the furthest reaches of the Highlands to gather knowledge and perfect the guild’s maps. Only the most talented pathfinders rose to this station.

  Next were the pathfinders who recorded and safe guarded knowledge from both the current world and the past. These were the rarest type and even they were broken further down into subcategories according to the type of information they recorded.

  A younger Shea had once dreamed of being the last type of pathfinder, what her people called a keeper. As the brightest apprentice in years, she’d been well on her way to achieving that dream. She would have been granted access to archives containing endless knowledge and would lead her own research expeditions, until the fiasco in the Badlands had burned away her ambitions. One mistake cost her the position and served to demote her to a simple village pathfinder.

  She might never be able to gain access to the guild libraries or contribute her own observations for future generations. That didn’t mean she couldn’t create her own catalog. It was unlikely anyone would ever see it, but she couldn’t fight the need to record things. She likened her hobby to a magpie collecting shiny treasure, only her treasure came in the form of knowledge gleaned from the world around her.

  She read through the entry before adding her latest observations. Next to the hypothesis of a weak spot at the back of a beetle’s neck she wrote ‘confirmed’. Under it she gave a brief description of her encounter and added a few nuggets Eamon had given her about the beetle’s offspring, including the fact they used a hard sticky substance to keep their food trapped and fresh.

  “What’re you doing?” a curious voice asked next to her ear.

  Shea’s head snapped up, and she shifted back, the book held like a club in her hand.

  The boy, not much older than seventeen, held up his hands in a peaceful gesture. He had wide brown eyes and an engaging grin. Spotty patches on his chin said he was trying to grow the beginnings of a beard.

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.” He folded his legs and sat next to the spot Shea had just vacated. “I’m Clark.”

  Shea relaxed, letting the notebook rest on her knee. The boy looked expectantly at her and then down at the book.

  “Can I see it?”

  Her grip tightened on the leather, not wanting to share this piece of her. He looked so hopeful, though, that she didn’t have it in her heart to deny him. Hesitantly, she opened it to the page she’d been working on and handed it to him.

  He examined the entry quietly, flipping the page to read the back and then the next entry. Shea found herself holding her breath but released it quickly, chastising herself. What exactly did she expect from this boy? Whatever reaction he had wouldn’t matter in the long run.

  “This is amazing,” he said, looking up at her while he flipped slowly through.

  “Thanks,” she mumbled. It was ridiculous to feel a sense of accomplishment from a few words of thoughtless praise. He’d never seen the archives in the Wayfarer’s Keep. He didn’t know what amazing was.

  “I mean, really. This is amazing. I’ve never even seen some of these beasts and wouldn’t know the first thing about dealing with them. You’ve cataloged what types of environments they like to live in, strengths, possible weaknesses. Here you have a section on what worked against,” he squinted at the writing, “an Anzo Scorpion. Nasty creature. Where did you get the idea to do this?”

  Shea shrugged noncommittally. She couldn’t very well tell him she’d been training to do this since she was younger than him.

  He didn’t hesitate to continue, his words running together in an endless stream. “The possibilities with something like this are endless. If even one scout in a party had something like this, it would make things so much easier. We could save lives. We might even have a chance against some of these beasts.”

  Shea plopped her chin on her knee, wondering if he would even notice if she left. He didn’t seem to need anyone to carry on a conversation, happy to just talk and talk and talk.

  He finally looked up and noticed her attention had wandered. He laughed and handed her book back to her. “Sorry about that. I tend to ramble when I get excited. You’re Shane, right?”

  She blinked at him and leaned back. How
did he know her name?

  Seeing the distrust in her expression, he laughed again. “Relax. Buck’s been bragging about this amazing Daisy who saved all their asses from death. Said that you got a battlefield promotion to full scout. I just got rid of my yellow ribbon a few weeks ago so I know how exciting that is.”

  Shea’s eyes began to glaze over again at this onslaught of information.

  “Just tune Clark out, lad. He’s a good boy but tends to let his mouth run away with him when he gets excited,” Eamon advised, setting his pack down next to Shea’s.

  “Eamon!” Clark cried, jumping to his feet and bounding over to clap Eamon on the back. Eamon grinned and slapped him on the back in return. “It’s good to see you. I hear you and your boys are going to be helping us tomorrow.”

  “You heard right. We’ll be traveling with you for a spell before we head back to the main body.”

  “That’s a relief. I don’t want to think what might happen if we attempted this with what remains of our company.”

  “How bad was it?” Eamon asked, his voice low.

  Clark suddenly seemed older and more mature as a shadow crossed his face, signaling a deep grief. “Bad. We lost four scouts and nearly twenty soldiers before we could put enough distance between us and them.”

  Eamon looked pained at this news, and he shook his head in sympathy, giving Clark’s shoulder a squeeze.

  “They won’t say it, but the men are uneasy,” Clark said quietly. “They’re saying these things aren’t natural. That they’re demons from the underworld.”

  “They say that whenever they encounter something new.”

  “Maybe. But you didn’t see the way these things hunted. It was like they learned from us. They were intelligent.”

  Eamon’s were troubled as they met Shea’s. The lines bracketing his mouth deepened.

  “I hear you had your own problems on the trail,” Clark said, breaking the silence.

  Eamon nodded slowly and this time it was his turn to have his face pulled tight at the thought of friends who hadn’t made it. “We lost five.”