The Water Road

by JD Byrne

  She shook her head again. “I snuck into the crime scene,” she said, pausing to note Rurek’s reaction. He tried to remain skeptical but was obviously surprised. No point in turning back now. “I looked around. I found things. I know what happened.”

  “Strefer, look at me,” he said, grasping her by the shoulders to ensure that she did. “Are you serious? What did you find in there?”

  She smiled and waved a finger at him. “Now that, I could tell you, but I’m not going to. The last person I told all that to took my story and burned it up right in front of me, the bastard.”

  “Who was that?”

  “Olrey,” Strefer said, annoyed at the question. “Publisher of the Daily Register. Who else would I go to if I was going over Tevis’s head, huh?”

  Rurek thought for a moment, processing this new information. “You went all the way to Sermont just to talk to your publisher?”

  “Yup,” Strefer said, nodding for emphasis. “I knew that Tevis didn’t have the guts to publish it. I thought Olrey would, but I was wrong. You know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because he doesn’t give a damn about the truth,” she said, wrenching free from Rurek’s grip. “He’s too worried about what that king of theirs might do. Too worried about keeping the paper open. Too worried about making money. It’s all about money, Rurek.”

  Rurek stood up. “Look, Strefer, I need you to tell me what you know. Let’s go down to the barracks and…”

  “And what?” Strefer said. She was angry now, well and truly worked up. “You’ll hush it up, too? You’ll tell me that there are more important things to worry about than the truth? Sorry, no deal.” She hopped off her stool and stood for a moment as the room spun around her. “You can’t make me talk. And if you try, I’ll forget everything I know.” She clutched the pouch she wore out of instinct. She now kept it with her at all times, afraid of what might happen should she leave it somewhere. Then she turned and walked towards the door.

  “Strefer, wait,” Rurek said as she walked away.

  “No deal, old friend!” she called out as she opened the door and walked out into the night. “No deal!”

  Chapter 13

  As it happened, making it across the Water Road proved to be the least of Antrey’s worries. Once on the southern shore, she made slow progress, walking across the ragged plains, then into the rugged and deserted mountains. Even though it was spring, Antrey was increasingly aware of the constant cold. Clear ground had given way to snow as she made her way up the northern face of a mountain. Evergreens crowded on small patches of flat land. Paths that had been made through the trees and rocks were still slick with ice.

  So long as she kept moving, Antrey could ignore the cold. But at nights, when she stopped and made camp, the damp chill of the dying winter sunk deep into her weary bones. The cold became more acute if she could not find anything to eat. After this time on the road, the food she had taken from Alban’s home was long gone. The bottle had proven to be a brilliant idea, however. Every morning she stuffed it full of snow, which melted through the day as she walked. At least she had enough clean water to drink.

  Food itself was more difficult to come by. Edible plants, given the season and the elevation on the mountain, were few and far between. Occasionally, she would find a spot where the ground was soft enough that she could dig for something underground. If she was lucky, a small rodent or other animal would find its way into a quickly assembled trap. Antrey would kill and clean the animal with the dagger, then cook it over an open flame. If there was no game to be found, she simply curled up next to the fire and tried to sleep.

  It had been two days since Antrey had trapped something. As the light of the setting sun made itself more and more scarce, she came to a flat spot of land on the mountainside. It was covered with evergreens, with a stream winding its way between them on its way down the mountain. The location was good for a camp and the stream might provide something to eat. She stopped and went through her regular routine of clearing a spot to sleep and gathering dry kindling for a fire. Once she was settled, she began a fruitless attempt to fish something in the stream.

  The fire provided some light nearby, but not enough to actually see anything in the stream. Hoping that some kind of instinct might do the trick, Antrey randomly thrust her hands into the frigid water, hoping they would find something. All she had to do was wrap her hands around a fish, fling it up onto solid ground, and wait for it to stop flopping. She didn’t really need to catch anything or control it. She had convinced herself it was not that hard, but she plunged her hands into the stream over and over so often that she lost count.

  Frustration grew inside her with every fruitless effort. Without realizing it, Antrey slipped from thrusting her hands into the stream to simply beating on the surface of the water with tightly clenched fists. With the fists came screams as she shouted out at the stream, the mountain, and the entire world. Even at herself.

  The reality of her situation hit her like a boulder. It had been weeks since she slept indoors or she had seen another person. Days since her last meal, many more than that since the last one that had been prepared with true care and skill. She did not know where she was and had no real idea where she was going. Eventually, the screaming stopped, so did the pounding. Antrey sat on the stream bank, drew her legs up tight to her body, and wrapped her freezing arms around them. She put her head in her lap and wept.

  “Why so sad, child?” said a slight, shaking voice from behind her.

  The sound of another voice startled Antrey out of her reflection. She leapt up and spun around towards the voice, facing the fire, but did not see anything. While scanning the trees for any evidence that she was not losing her mind, Antrey’s foot slid out from under her and she went tumbling backwards into the icy water. Cursing, she dragged herself back to her feet and climbed out of the water. Then she saw him.

  Standing perhaps thirty yards away from her, along the tree line behind the fire, was an old man. An old Altrerian man, stooped and hunched over, leaning on a long, curved stick he used as a cane. He wore layers of animal skins, a thick fur-lined hood pulled around his pale green face. Questions raced through Antrey’s head, but she was too stunned to speak. Foremost in her mind was the question of whether she was in danger. From him? This tiny old thing? At the very least, she knew she could handle herself in a fight with him.

  “I am sorry, child,” the old man said. “I did not mean to startle you. I was nearby and heard your screams. Are you hurt? Are you injured?”

  “No, thank you,” Antrey said, trying to not let surprise get the better of her. “Just a little wet, that’s all.” She walked over to the fire slowly, keeping her eyes on the old man. She crouched down in front of it, warming and drying herself. “You startled me.”

  “I was afraid of that,” he said. “That is one of the perils of traveling alone, is it not? You are always surprised by the presence of another.” His tone was light and friendly, his voice thin and high, as if exposure to the cold had caused something to shrivel. “Is that not true, child?”

  “Will you stop calling me that?” Antrey said.

  “Calling you what?”

  “Child,” she said with emphasis. “I’m not a child, much less yours.”

  He smiled and chuckled for a moment. “Then I must apologize again. From the sounds of your wails and weeping, I assumed you were a lost child, separated from her clan.”

  Antrey wasn’t sure he meant to insult her, but he had. “Before you open your mouth maybe you should take a good look next time, eh?”

  “I am afraid that would be quite impossible,” the old man said. Without Antrey noticing, he had shuffled slowly in her direction and now stood directly on the other side of the fire from her. He reached up and slipped the hood back, revealing all of his face. In the dancing light of the flames, it was plain to see he was blind. “I do not see much of anything these days.”

  Antrey flushed as a wave of embarrassment
swept over her. “I’m sorry. It was an unkind remark. Perhaps I should heed my own advice.”

  “There is wisdom in that. Now that we have established that you are no longer a child and I no longer have the gift of sight, perhaps we should begin again, eh?” A wry smile crept across his face.

  “Agreed,” Antrey said, standing and pulling on her cloak now that she was mostly dry. “You are welcome to share my fire, if you wish. Do you need…”

  The old man quickly cut her off. “Thank you, that is most gracious.” He sat down in the snow gently, as if his slight weight did not displace any of it. He laid down his cane beside him and began to rub his hands together near the hot flames. “This is quite lovely,” he said. “My name is Emkar. And who is so gracious to be sharing her fire on this cold evening?”

  “My name is Antrey,” she said, hesitating for a moment. “Antrey Ranbren,” she said, saying her full name for the first time in years. She sat down across from him.

  “Oh,” he said with a knowing lilt in his voice. “So I was not so wrong after all, was I? In a sense, you have lost your clan and your family, have you not?”

  “Not lost,” Antrey said at first, before correcting herself. “My family, yes, I suppose you could say has been lost. But I never really had a clan. I suppose that’s why I’m here in the middle of nowhere, sitting in the snow.”

  “From the sound of your voice, the chill is something you have not dealt with very much,” the old man said.

  “No, far from it,” Antrey said before she stopped herself. Why was she on the verge of opening up to a complete stranger? She decided to shift the focus. “What about you? Surely a…a…”

  “Surely a blind old man must have had something in his life before this?” Emkar said with a chuckle. “That is what you wanted to ask, yes?”

  “Yes,” Antrey said. “I was trying to be a bit more polite about it.”

  “My dear, nothing you say will make me any more blind. Or any older, for that matter. In my vast experience, honesty is far more important than being polite. Do you want to know how I came to be this way?”

  Antrey shrugged. “If we’re being honest, yes. I’m curious about why you are out wandering in these mountains alone.”

  “Oh, I am not alone, Antrey,” he said with a shake of his head. “I am by myself, yes, but I am far from alone.”

  Antrey didn’t know what to say to that. She sat and said nothing, wondering if the old man had lost his mind.

  “Are you a student of history?” he asked, breaking the silence.

  “A little bit,” she said.

  “If I was a teacher and you were my pupil and I asked you when hostilities between the Triumvirate and the Neldathi tribes ended, what would your answer be?”

  Thanks to her reading, Antrey had the answer right at hand. “The generally accepted date is 8.9.11 AU, the ninth day of the eighth month of the eleventh year after unification. The day of the Battle of Hogarth Pass.”

  “Correct!” Emkar said, in what could have been mockery or genuine praise. “That is a fine answer and would help you pass your test. It is also completely wrong.”

  “Wrong?”

  “Wrong in every way that matters. You know that the Triumvirate has all those forts set up along the Water Road, correct?”

  By instinct Antrey nodded her head, before realizing that was a pointless gesture. “Right.”

  “How many of them are there? Do you know?”

  “About twenty, if I remember correctly,” Antrey said. She felt as if she was being interrogated.

  “Twenty-one, to be exact,” Emkar said, “each spaced approximately one hundred miles apart along the river. Every one of those is home to how many soldiers, do you think?”

  She thought for a moment. “Somewhere between 1,500 and 4,000, from what I have read.”

  “Close enough,” he said. “Let us use an average of 2,500. How many is that in total? Do the math, if you were ever taught how.”

  “I can do math,” she said, shooting him a stern look that was completely wasted. She figured for a moment and then said, “That would be 52,500 troops. Not including auxiliaries and the Sentinels, of course.”

  “Yes, that sounds correct. And those numbers have been the same for the past 130 years, yes? Since the Triumvirate was founded.”

  “So far as I know,” Antrey said. She had never come across the historical numbers, but it made sense to her.

  “So would you agree with me that for the past century, plus a few decades, there have been more than fifty thousand Triumvirate troops stationed in Neldathi territory?” Emkar asked. It was like he had gone through this script more than once before.

  “I never thought of it, but yes, since you put it that way,” Antrey said.

  “Well, then,” he said, then paused to collect his thoughts for a moment. “You seem like a bright young woman, Antrey. What do you think all those soldiers stationed all those years in hostile territory are going to do?”

  Antrey shrugged, for her benefit if not his. “I don’t know.”

  “They are going to wage war!” he said, with the precision timing of a trained orator. “That is what they are trained to do. That is the only thing they can do. They are going to go out and find someone to kill, whether they are supposed to be doing so or not.”

  “I’m sorry, but that doesn’t actually follow,” Antrey said. “Why are a bunch of foot soldiers with a fairly easy deployment going to go out looking for a fight? Aren’t most of them conscripts? Don’t they just want to go home and get on with their lives? How do you know what they were thinking?”

  “I know,” he said, “because that is what we did.” He did not seem eager to provide details.

  “What? You were a soldier at one of the forts?”

  “Yes, I was,” he said. He took a deep breath. “I was part of a company that was conscripted from Vertidala and sent to a fort near Innisport, just across from the Vander Range. Those mountains were just over a day away on foot. An easy march, compared to some others. Every month, my company would deploy into those mountains. Technically, it was a scouting mission. An intelligence-gathering operation. Truthfully? We were just looking for Neldathi to kill. There is nothing more to it. I wish I could honestly say we were better than that, but it would be a lie. Honesty, remember? We went out looking for slaughter, pure and simple. Other companies did the same thing.”

  Antrey sat silent for a moment, processing the old man’s tale. “What did the commanders do about this?” she asked. “Were you acting on orders?”

  Emkar laughed. “Which commanders? The Sentinels who actually ran the fort got nothing from our expeditions and cared little about what we did. They were far more interested in the reports from their mind walkers further south. The military commanders, our superior officers, knew what went on but pretended they did not. As long as nothing was done to bring about some reprisal from the Neldathi, they were happy to let the men run wild.”

  “All right,” Antrey said, turning over his story in her mind. She had read nothing about it in Alban’s books, nor had it ever been the subject of Grand Council debate. Emkar could very well be telling the truth, but she was skeptical. “I have to take your word about all this, you know. So how did you come to be here, then?”

  “Garrisons assigned to the forts along the Water Road usually spend between a year and fifteen months there,” he explained. “My company was assigned to our fort for the full term, a year and a half. After we had been there for fourteen months, nearly done with our deployment, I started to have second thoughts about things I had seen. About things I had done. I had trouble sleeping at night. I could not eat. Where I was once eager to leave the fort and take an expedition, I had become lethargic and lost my eagerness. My comrades were not suffering from the same malaise. Their continued enthusiasm for the pointless fighting with the Neldathi escaped me.

  “Finally, on one expedition, we had a running skirmish with a small group of Neldathi across the face of the mount
ain. I was crouched behind a tree, reloading, when a Neldathi arrow slammed into the trunk right next to me. Instinct took over and I threw myself down on the ground. I buried by head in my hands and waited until I heard other men in my company run past me in pursuit of the Neldathi who loosed that arrow.

  “I should have gotten up,” he said with a heavy sigh. “I know that. Should have rejoined my company. But I did not. I could not move, could not get up out of the snow as it soaked through my uniform. So long did I lay there. Time slipped away. The next thing I remember, it was dark. At least it was to me. My sight had gone, along with my desire to fight anyone. Not to mention my career and my purpose in life.”

  Antrey waited for a moment, to make sure the old man had finished. “You’ve been wandering in the mountains ever since?” she asked.

  He nodded. “It is my penance for all the blood I shed while I could see.” He stopped, as if he was fighting back something. Then he said, “You do not believe me, do you?”

  Antrey wasn’t sure whether she believed it or not. “I have no reason to think you would lie to me, Emkar. What you say about what goes on here, in the mountains. The way,” she paused to try and find a delicate way to put it, but decided she could not, “the way you acted. It does make sense in light of what I have learned recently.” Next Antrey told him her story, from how she came to be Alban’s assistant to his death and her own exile.

  When she had finished, Emkar said, “That explains where you have been, Antrey. But what does it say about where you are going? Or why you are here, sharing your fire with a crazy, old, blind man perched on the side of a frozen Neldathi mountain?”

  “I suppose it doesn’t,” Antrey said. She had stopped her story before she got to the plan she had made before she crossed the river.

  “Then why are you here?” he asked in an insistent pleading tone. “You must have a reason to have run this way rather than some other when you left Tolenor.”

  Before answering, Antrey wondered about the wisdom of confiding in a stranger who, quite possibly, was mad. She decided the truth would come out eventually. Might as well start seeding it and see how it grows. “I want them to know?” she said.