The Water Road

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The Water Road Page 20

by JD Byrne


  “One moment, please, Antrey,” Goshen said. He turned back to Ushan, said something in a high tone and then turned to face Antrey. “I have told Great Mother than you wish to know what is being said about you. She agrees that you should know. This will take some time, however,” he said.

  “I’m in no hurry,” Antrey said. “So what have you told her so far?”

  “I have told her that you killed Alban,” he said, as coolly as if he was describing the weather. “Shall I continue?”

  Antrey nodded. It couldn’t get any worse.

  Goshen settled into an easy rhythm of telling Ushan something in the Dost tongue, then translating it for Antrey’s benefit every few sentences. “This man Alban was not the good man Antrey said he was,” he said. Antrey flinched at that description, but decided not to stop him. Seeing her story through someone else’s eyes might be useful. “She killed him with his own weapon, called a pikti, the traditional fighting staff of the Triumvirate Sentinels.”

  Ushan interrupted with a question. “Why would she do such a thing?” Goshen translated.

  “According to her personal history,” he said, “she discovered a terrible secret about the Triumvirate. About the Sentinels and about the Neldathi. The secret angered her. That her Alban would try and justify it or defend it showed that he was not the person Antrey thought him to be. The pikti was near at hand. Antrey acted out of righteous rage and anger.”

  Antrey had to admit she liked Goshen’s gloss on the events. He focused on what motivated her, not the details of her actions themselves. And he ignored completely, for now at any rate, her later reflections on the justness of what she had done.

  Ushan looked at Antrey with weary, knowing eyes, and asked another question. “Is this true, Antrey, what Goshen has told us?”

  “Yes, Great Mother,” Antrey said.

  Ushan shook her head slowly, then leaned over towards Kajtan. They exchanged a few words. When Hirrek tried to eavesdrop on the conversation, Kajtan pushed him away forcefully, sending him off the bench backwards. It was all Antrey could do to suppress a laugh.

  When she had finished consulting with Kajtan, Ushan stood and faced Antrey. She towered over her in a way that no Sentinel on the streets of Tolenor ever did. She spoke in slow, dignified tones that conveyed an authority to anyone who heard them, regardless of whether they understood the words. When she was finished, she looked towards Goshen and nodded.

  Goshen said, “As a halfbreed, Antrey, you have no place here. Whatever others have done to you, or might do to you, the Dost will not harm you or put you in danger. But you are not welcome in our camp or in our land. When the sun reaches zenith tomorrow, you must leave. Until then, you may remain in the meeting hall or in the company of Goshen. Go nowhere by yourself.”

  Stunned by the decree, Antrey just managed to say, “Yes, Great Mother,” before Ushan walked out of the tent, with Kajtan and Hirrek closely following. The others took their leave a few moments later. Antrey simply stood where she was and wondered what she would do next.

  When all the others had gone, Goshen walked to the tent entrance, stuck his head out, and then came back inside. He walked back over to Antrey and sat down on one of the long benches in the gallery near where Antrey stood. “Come, sit,” he said, gesturing for her to sit down beside him. Antrey did, without really thinking about it. “Now that we are alone, Antrey, we have much to discuss,” he said with a sly grin.

  Chapter 16

  Traf told them it would be five days, perhaps a week—two weeks at the outside—before the Kanawha arrived in Innisport. Once the flatboat navigated the Bay of Sins and was actually churning up the Water Road, of course. To Strefer’s ears, it sounded as if there was a distinct possibility they might never reach Innisport, much less Oberton. But Rurek did not seem concerned, so she assumed he must know something she did not or had more confidence in the old captain and his boat. That was what she told herself, at least.

  So Strefer settled into a routine, as much as she could. As far as she could tell, she and Rurek were the only two paying passengers on board. In addition to Traf, she had seen three other men, all of whom were members of the crew. One of them was an Islander and Strefer thought she might track him down one night to talk about his home islands, since she knew little about them. If there was anyone else on board, Strefer had not crossed paths with them.

  That was largely due to the fact that she spent most of her time locked in what passed for her stateroom. It was unclear what function the room served under regular conditions. Surely a vessel of this size could not afford to sail up and down the river with empty rooms. It had a small hard bed and a tiny round table, but otherwise was bare. Strefer wondered if it actually belonged to one of the crew members and hoped she had not displaced anyone. When Traf showed them the room, Rurek pronounced it suitable because the door had a working lock on it. He slept in the common room across the hall, so he could be as close as possible if trouble arose. By this point Strefer thought that was unlikely, but she appreciated the way Rurek had thrown himself into his role as guardian.

  Rurek’s paranoia, or alertness, depending on one’s perspective, could be suffocating. If it were up to him, she would stay in her little room at all hours of the day until they reached Innisport. That Strefer demanded some freedom frustrated him. The small porthole next to the bed provided some idea of what was going on outside, but not much. She had extracted two concessions from Rurek. One was that she ate with him and the crew in the common room that doubled as Rurek’s quarters. As long as they were all together and Rurek was there, what could possibly happen to her? The other concession she extracted was scheduled walks up on deck three times a day—twice during the daylight and once at night. They were Stefer’s chance to get some fresh air and try and get her bearings in the world.

  The boat’s deck wrapped around the pilothouse where Traf did his work, as well as the steam engines that drove the Kanawha’s rear paddlewheel. At first, the thwapping of the wheel on the water nearly drove Strefer out of her mind, but she quickly learned to tune it out. Sometimes, when she was walking around the boat, she would stop at the stern and lose herself in the hypnotic repetition of the wheel and water.

  Generally, on her first trip around the deck, she favored the port side of the boat, which provided a view of the Neldathi lands. This was the first time she had ever really looked at and studied those mountains, which rose up out of the horizon as if they were reaching for the sun itself. The landscape was dotted, every few hours, by one of the Triumvirate forts along the river, some more impressive than others. Traf, Strefer noticed, gave the forts a wide berth. She wondered if that was standard for him, or done on behalf of her and Rurek.

  During her other trip around in the daytime, Strefer lingered on the starboard side, looking north. At first, the Endless Hills were a poor substitute for their massive cousins to the south. Once they neared the River Adon, however, the north provided signs of life that were absent in the south. That was doubly true at night, when the lands to the south remained pitch black. Islands of light showed up north, however, as the boat passed villages and other small settlements.

  On this night, she had paused to look north as the Kanawha thwapped its way past Tomondala, the first major city on their route. The city was aglow with pale light from gas lamps and other lanterns, from homes and streets. The docks were aglow as if for a holiday celebration when they passed, each pier lit up to ensure boats arriving and departing did so without incident.

  Rurek found her there, leaning against the deck railing. “Quite lovely, isn’t it?” he asked.

  Strefer jumped just a bit, startled. Although Rurek made it his job to keep tabs on her, the more time they spent on the river and the more it seemed that they were safe, the less she saw of him. “Don’t sneak up on a girl like that, all right?” she said, catching her breath. “Especially when you’ve been avoiding me the past couple of days.”

  He slid in beside her and leaned over the railing.
“I haven’t been avoiding you, exactly. I’ve been gathering information, such as I can. Besides, as long as you’re locked up in your room, you’re pretty safe. No point in bothering you.”

  Strefer smirked. “What kind of information have you been able to find on this tub?”

  “Not much,” he said, giving her the answer she expected. “But that’s not really a bad thing. There’s no talk, no gossip going around. That means none of the crew are giving us a second thought.”

  “Did you expect we would be a topic of discussion?” she asked.

  Rurek shrugged. “You never know. I’m still worried about the guys in your apartment.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “Obviously,” he said. “I keep thinking about the background. Who’s behind them? Who’s paying them? Why were they so blatant and sloppy about the break-in?”

  “Fascinating details, I’m sure,” Strefer said. Now that they were on the run, she was less worried with the motivations of those who might do them harm.

  “Maybe not to you,” Rurek said, “but they might tell me something about the resources behind them. Whether whoever is after you…after us…has the ability to move information more quickly than we can.”

  “How?” Strefer asked. “What are you talking about, mind walkers?”

  “Well, officially, only Sentinels can be active mind walkers,” Rurek said.

  That did not comfort Strefer. “What do you mean, officially?”

  “I mean if you, Strefer Quants, reporter for the Daily Register, ask the Sentinel Public Information Office about mind walkers, you will be told that only Sentinels can be mind walkers. Or, more correctly, anyone who shows a proficiency for mind walking will become a Sentinel. But if you poked around some and asked questions in other places, you’d find something different.”

  “Oh, really?” Strefer asked. Maybe once this crisis was resolved, she would move on to this story.

  He turned and faced her. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to uncover that ability in people? It’s not obvious just by looking, like with the halfbreeds. It takes testing, evaluations, and lots of time. Some people don’t show any ability for mind walking when they’re tested. Others deceive the testers, for whatever reason. Rumor has it that there are mind walkers out there beyond the control of the Sentinels. Used by criminal organizations, or legitimate ones, to give them an edge over competitors. Nobody really knows for sure.”

  “Hmm,” Strefer said.

  “But even putting that to one side for a moment,” Rurek said, “a faster boat than this one on the river or a fast horse through the hills could get someone to Innisport ahead of us. Although that assumes they know where we’re headed. If you had a network of mind walkers, however, you could send out the information to lots of places. After all, if someone wanted to make life difficult for us, they wouldn’t have to send their own minions.”

  “Just let people know there’s a price on my head, right?” Strefer asked before he got any further.

  “On our heads, you mean,” he said. “Whatever happens to the two of us, whether we make it to Oberton in one piece or if we don’t make it that far, we’re both likely to meet the same fate.”

  “Sorry,” Strefer said. It was easy to forget just what she had gotten him into. “So why didn’t we have Traf drop us off here?” she asked, waving at the glowing city in the distance.

  “Have you ever tracked anything, Strefer?” he asked with a slight grin. “Animal? A person? Anything?”

  She shot him a look. “I wasn’t born into the Guild of Hunters, you know.”

  “If you had been born into the Guild of Hunters, you would know that when you’re tracking something and you know where it’s going, the best thing to do is follow the most direct path.”

  “You think they know we’re headed for Oberton?” she asked, in a panic and much louder than she meant to. He gestured towards her to keep it down. “What makes you think that?”

  “No, no, I don’t think they know where we are headed, ultimately. But if I were them, I’d think you were headed one of two places. One would be back home, to the Guildlands. The other would be to the Arbor, somewhere. It’s such a good place to hide out.”

  “So instead of going direct to Oberton…” Strefer started to say.

  “We sail right on past the cities in the Arbor and to Innisport. Then we’ll backtrack into the Arbor and to Oberton. It should throw off anybody who’s following us.”

  Strefer sighed. She could not argue with Rurek’s logic, but it prolonged the entire process, which made her nervous. The sooner they were in Oberton, regardless of what actually happened there, the better. She decided to shift the topic of conversation to take her mind off the whole mess. “So, in your intelligence gathering, did you learn anything juicy about the crew? Or Traf?”

  Rurek shook his head. “I have a hunch, but that’s all,” he said, pausing for a moment. “Of course, my hunches are usually pretty good.”

  “I see,” Strefer said, smiling. “Do tell.”

  He leaned in close to her. “I think they’re smugglers. At least to some extent,” he whispered.

  “Seriously?” Strefer said, struggling to keep her voice down. “Wouldn’t it be beyond stupid to bring a Sentinel on board when they were smuggling something?”

  Rurek smiled, shifting his weight onto the pikti that was always in one hand. “Remember what I said before about how most people don’t really know what Sentinels do? Smugglers aren’t any different. Who’s to say that Traf knows Sentinels are law enforcement officers in Tolenor? You’d think he would know, given how often this ship docks there. Maybe he figures that by doing me a favor, I can do him one down the road somehow.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s much chance of that at this point,” Strefer said, her thoughts directed back towards Rurek’s plight since he threw in with her.

  “Don’t talk like that, Strefer,” he said. “I made the choice, not you. I made it knowing that, in a few days, I’ll be officially declared a deserter and my career as a Sentinel will be over. Most likely. So, no, I’ll probably never be in a position to actually help Traf out. Not legitimately, anyway.”

  Try as she might, Strefer couldn’t shake off the fact that she was the cause of Rurek’s trouble. She tried to change the subject again to get her mind off it. “So what’s with you and Traf? You’re from completely different cities in the Arbor, but you seem to get along well. Shouldn’t you be at each other’s throats over the honor of your homelands or something?”

  He laughed. “Is that what they taught you in that Guild school? That the Arborians are no better than the Neldathi, weighed down by violent petty squabbles? As if the rest of you didn’t go at each other over some slight or another for years and years.”

  Strefer instantly felt ashamed, not for asking the question, but for asking it in the way she did. “Well, what I meant was…” she said, before Rurek interrupted.

  “It’s been more than a hundred years, you know, since the Confederation was established,” he said. “Did we fight each other a lot before that? Of course. Do we still do it now? Of course not. We haven’t been at each others’ throats for two or three generations now. At least two, anyway. But that doesn’t mean we’ve given up all the prejudices that fueled that stuff. All that violence and political maneuvering had to be replaced with something. So we argued about the numerous and pointless ways that our home city is better than any other. But it’s all talk. Having said that, all those years of conflict made us a little more careful with our words than you lot or the Telebrians. We don’t naturally filter ourselves well.” He laughed again.

  “Correction noted,” Strefer said, nodding out at the passing riverbank. “Sorry.”

  “Will you stop saying that?” Rurek said, casting her a pleading look before continuing. “At any rate, neither Traf nor I actually live in our home cities anymore, or even in the Arbor at all. Kanawha is his home, for the most part. As for me, it’s been years since I
left Tolenor. That was home, as far as I was concerned, until a few days ago.” He turned and faced out, looking out towards the glittering lights of Tomondala.

  Strefer knew it was time to stop digging. Rather than trying one more time to shift the conversation to something lighter and more pleasant, she said nothing. They stood together in silence and watched as Kanawha glided up the river, the paddlewheel thwapping away.

  ~~~~~

  As the days wore on, Strefer set herself to a task that she should have done long ago. Sitting in her small room, she made copies of the red notebook, down to keeping the page number references and archaic spellings intact. She had no intention of giving up the original, but recognized that it might happen without her consent. Regardless of any claims of forgery or fraud if the original escaped her hands, having the content of the red notebook secure in some other way would at least mean the story would come out, one way or another.

  She made two copies, squeezing the words down as much as possible. Rangold favored the large stylized script that was popular in his day, rather than concision. It was neat, thankfully, and easy to read. It was also easy to take the words and shrink them down. After a bit of practice, Strefer had compressed things so much as to fit six of Rangold’s pages on one side of a sheet of parchment. It allowed her to take down the whole of the red notebook on ten pages. The thin sheets suited her purpose perfectly. These two copies would not be put in a bag and forgotten about. Strefer had something sneakier in mind.

  After she had completed one copy, Strefer poked around in the stores in the common room. Rurek had abandoned the room for the deck, where the afternoon sun was beating down. She found what she expected, a small kit with sewing needles and thread. She returned to her room and removed her tunic. With practiced precision that she had thought was lost to her youth, Strefer quickly sewed one copy of the red notebook under the inner layer of her tunic. The thread color was not a good match for the natural fabric’s deep brown, but that wasn’t important. If someone got so far as to look for something in that location, they would tear it apart regardless. Once the job was done, she briefly surveyed her handiwork, then slipped the tunic back on. The thread, while discolored, was of fine quality and, after a few moments, she could not feel it against her skin. She stood up and walked around the little room. Before long, she easily forgot the copy was there. She took the other copy, folded it, and put it in the satchel that she carried with her everywhere, and walked up on deck.

 

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