‘Lieutenant,’ Yusen said, his eyes still on the many garlands and lengths of string woven from human hair. ‘Might I remind you that we’ve crossed nearly half of Himatan. Been chased by damned Disavowed of the Crimson Guard. Are escorting a fragment of the Crippled God. And we’re still alive?’ He drew a heavy breath. ‘I suggest we listen to our hired mages on these matters. If I don’t miss my guess is they saw action in Genabackis. Fifth or Sixth Army.’ The blue eyes swung to Murk and Sour, and Murk thought them as bright as the deep ice he’d seen in the Northern Range.
‘Genabackis?’ Burastan repeated wonderingly. ‘But that was One Arm …’ She peered at them more closely now, her gaze sceptical. ‘You served with Fist Dujek?’
Murk didn’t answer at first; he thought it irrelevant, but Sour knuckled his brow, saying, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ Murk could almost see the speculations now circulating through the woman’s mind: just who else might these two have served beside?
For some reason the old empire carried a lot of weight with this woman for she nodded then, and saluted Yusen, murmuring, ‘Very good, Captain.’
But Murk wasn’t happy: here he’d wanted to learn more about Yusen’s history yet the man had managed to wring theirs out of them instead. Neatly done, that, he had to admit.
Yusen now eyed Sour. Murk thought he read a strange sort of affection in the man’s expression. ‘So, cadre. You have a recommendation?’
Sour straightened, pushed out his chest. ‘Yessir. Scouts report a stream to the southeast. I suggest we march in its bed. That’ll keep the troops out of all these poisonous plants and it’ll disguise our trail.’
‘What about them swarming biting fish?’ Murk objected. ‘They nearly took that trooper’s hand right off! What was his name, anyway?’
‘His name’s Bait now,’ Sour answered. ‘Anyways, they only like the shallows and the shores. We keep to the middle and we’ll be fine.’
Yusen was frowning his consideration, thinking it through. ‘Yet you didn’t like the river …’
Sour nodded eagerly. ‘Yeah. That was cloudy water. Clear water’s fine. You keep away from cloudy water. Ain’t healthy.’
The captain studied Sour for a time longer, his lips pursed. Then he nodded, slowly and thoughtfully. ‘Very good. Lieutenant?’
‘Sir?’
‘We have our marching orders. See to it.’
To her credit, the woman saluted quickly and smartly. ‘Sir.’ Seemed an order was an order, no matter what. She waved for Murk and Sour to follow her. They walked away together.
Yusen watched them go. Then, once he was alone, he reached into his gambeson, where the loops and horn catches tied the front, and gently drew a small object from under the shirt. It was a flattened and bruised blue blossom. He held it cradled in the palm of one hand. His gaze went to where the mages and the lieutenant had disappeared among the thick stands of drooping fronds.
He shook his head, snorting lightly. ‘Wondered why he gave me the silly thing …’
* * *
They came to a river and so abrupt was its appearance, so silently did it course, that Ina thought it some sort of a conjuration. She let fall the frayed switch she’d been using to beat a path through the leaves and fronds – some as tall as she – and wiped her hands over the bark of a thick curving root to remove the worst of the sticky sap.
The Enchantress had asked only once why she did not employ her sword to hack her way through the undergrowth. That day she’d been particularly vexed by the hanging lianas, while the dry scimitar-like grasses had cut the back of her hand to bloody ribbons and she had snapped, ‘Why don’t you use your powers to blast us a route?’
T’riss had been quiet after that. Ina mentally castigated herself for her failure of patience and composure – not to mention any possible blasphemy.
Now she faced a river. A wide ribbon of muddy reddish water moving so smoothly it was almost impossible to detect any flow. Her first thought was to throw herself in and luxuriate in the washing away of the layer of sweat-adhered dust and dirt that she could scrape from her arms with a fingernail. In fact, it appeared as if she could jump right in from the undercut slope she stood on overlooking the river’s edge.
A hand took her arm from behind and so startled was she that she reacted automatically: instead of yanking forwards to free herself – as any untrained person would do – she shot her elbow backwards and up, straight towards the throat or face of the attacker.
A meaty crack rewarded her, and the hand slipped from her arm. She spun, blade emerging at the same instant ready to thrust or block, only for it to fall from her hand as she saw the Enchantress lying sprawled unconscious behind her.
‘Good gods!’ she cried. She fell to her knees to scoop the woman up, intending to take her to the river’s edge to resuscitate her. Grunting with the effort – for T’riss was a solid woman – she rose. Then she remembered her blade. How could she abandon her blade?
But the Enchantress was a more pressing matter so she carried her to where she could bull her way through the brush down the slope to the shore. Here she laid her burden in the grass then padded out into the river to wet her robes. She returned to squeeze the cloth over the woman’s face.
T’riss coughed and spluttered, then turned her head aside.
Ina found she could breathe deeply once more as a great pressure eased itself within her chest. Thank the First! To think I’d almost concussed the Queen of Dreams! Yet … how could I have done so?
She watched the woman sit up and press both hands to her head as if testing its soundness, then she went to retrieve her sword. When she returned T’riss was still sitting, but had a wet fold of cloth pressed to her forehead. When Ina went to her knees before her she raised a hand to forestall any protestations.
‘I should have known better than to lay hands on a Seguleh,’ she said.
‘M’lady – I am stricken. Name your punishment.’
T’riss held the cloth to her brow while nodding thoughtfully. ‘Your punishment is to continue to accompany me.’
‘M’lady mocks.’
‘I hope that I do.’
Ina was quiet for a time. Has she foreseen my death?
The Enchantress attempted to rise, unsteadily. Ina offered an arm. The woman straightened carefully. Close now she peered up at Ina’s masked face. ‘You are wondering how it was you could strike me?’
Ina gave a curt answering nod. ‘Yes. I was … startled.’
‘You were startled,’ the woman muttered, rubbing her forehead. ‘Well. I come to Ardata completely unguarded and open. It is the only way. She would not have accepted me otherwise.’
Ina frowned behind her mask. ‘Unguarded?’
‘Ah. I speak of my own powers, of course. I do not know what you would name it. My aspect. My manifestation. My territory. An area of concern that, through general neglect and laziness, has become my responsibility.’
‘I am sorry, m’lady … but you have lost me.’
The Enchantress smiled. ‘Of course. I am thinking aloud – to the jungle. Now,’ and she let go of Ina’s arm, ‘a river. Good. We are moving far too slowly while events elsewhere overtake us. Clearly the best way to move through this region is by water. Let us do so.’
She gestured. Off through the surrounding bush there came a noise as of branches snapping, or dragging, brushing against one another in a rising storm of noise. Bits and pieces of driftwood and fallen branches cast up along the shore came sliding towards them. They ranged in size from sticks and branches all the way up to medium-sized logs. They came grating and slithering together into a heap. They twined, moulded and flattened, and before Ina’s amazed vision there took form a long slim open hull of woven wood.
‘I thought you said you had abandoned your powers,’ Ina said, without thinking.
‘I did not say I had abandoned them,’ the Enchantress objected, a touch impatient. ‘I only said that I was unguarded.’
She waved to invite Ina to go first
. Still rather dazed by the demonstration, Ina awkwardly stepped on to the slim craft and edged forward towards the bow. Her patron took the stern. Then the Queen of Dreams gently pushed her hands forward, as if parting a cloth, and the vessel slid off the mud into the current. She directed it downstream. The craft sliced through the water at what to Ina was a rather alarming rate. But the Enchantress had said they’d been making slow progress and that events were moving ahead of them; the Queen of Dreams, it seemed, was in a hurry.
They raced for days and nights continuously along the river. Ina slept through the nights while the Enchantress appeared to need no rest. This amused Ina – the Queen of Dreams never slept. It seemed somehow appropriate. When she hungered, Ina had a small nibble from the bag of dried stores that remained. Her lifelong training in privation and restraint served her well here. Water was their sole problem. The Enchantress forbade her to touch the river. Occasionally they passed small clear rivulets draining into the main channel. The Enchantress would direct the craft to the shore here and Ina would collect what she could in the one waterskin that had yet to rot away.
Now that they were without the constant shade from the jungle’s canopy the new problem Ina had to deal with was sunstroke. During the day no cloud cover softened the sun’s driving rays. She draped her robes over her like a blanket but to begin with neglected her head, and now peeling burnt skin came off in her nails when she probed her scalp.
So great was their speed that when they swept round a river bend they sometimes startled flocks of tall wading birds that swept skyward in great swaths of white and brilliant yellow. The gangly birds cawed their raucous complaints and found temporary perches in the trees along the shore until the branches bowed down almost to the murky surface of the water, festooned with what resembled tall slim flowers.
Ina spent much of her time treating her blade against the constant bite of the humidity. Long ago the Seguleh smiths had found that adding charcoal to their furnaces yielded an iron that was superior in flexibility, while also being particularly resistant to corrosion. Yet it remained an uncertain process and no blade was perfectly impervious. She had run out of the plant oils she usually carried and was now reduced to smearing her own skin’s sweat and secretions on to the blade, which, though harmful, were better than nothing.
They raced on, careering round the twisting bends. The river appeared to be widening as they went, gathering tributaries and creeks at every snaking curve.
Then one day Ina was adjusting the cloth of the robe draped over her head when something came screaming down from the sky above. She had one stunning glimpse of a great draconic shape, golden-red, claws extended, stooping, snarling teeth agape, before those claws clamped on to the craft and she was plunged beneath the clouded ochre-hued water.
She came up, gasping and thrashing, yet gripping the hilt of her sheathed sword to make certain it was safe. She swam one-handed for shore. Here she found a woman in nothing more than a ragged loincloth standing over her mistress. She drew immediately.
‘Stand aside.’
The woman turned on her and Ina was shaken to see that her eyes churned like twin furnaces of molten gold. ‘And what is this?’ she asked. ‘A Seguleh?’ She pointed to Ina’s face. ‘Your mask is sorely in need of repainting.’
‘Please let us go,’ the Enchantress said from where she lay sodden and muddy on the shore. ‘We are no threat to you.’
‘I will be the judge of that,’ the woman answered, though she did seem to relax somewhat, lowering her arms. ‘Just what are you then?’
The Enchantress shrugged. She wiped her mouth, leaving a smear of blood-red mud across her face. ‘I am a sorceress,’ she said. ‘Out of Tali. Quon Tali.’
‘I know Tali,’ the woman snarled impatiently. ‘More to the point – what are you doing here?’
Again an easy shrug from the Enchantress. ‘The power and wisdom of the Queen of Witches is legendary. I would seek her out.’
The woman actually laughed aloud at that. It was a very cruel and scornful laugh. ‘For a sorceress, your foresight is remarkably poor.’
‘And you?’ the Enchantress challenged, quite unintimidated. ‘Why attack us?’
The woman snarled anew. Her hands worked as if eager to tear and rend. ‘That is my business.’
‘It would seem you have made it our business as well. Spite, daughter of Draconus, sister to—’
The woman threw a hand up. ‘Not that name! If you wish to live.’
The Enchantress inclined her head, acquiescing.
Spite seemed to think on the Enchantress’s words, for she waved a hand dismissively. ‘If you must know … I am seeking something. Something stolen. You must have a presence, sorceress, for I sensed you and I thought I glimpsed … well, I was mistaken.’ She turned and walked off, then stopped, facing them once more. ‘Take my advice, sorceress. Go back home. Do not seek out Ardata. Only death resides in Jakal Viharn.’
‘I hear that Ardata kills no one.’
‘That is true. For that she has Himatan.’
Spite then leaped into the air and before falling she transformed into the great terrifying shape Ina had glimpsed. Wide massive wings elongated above them to blot out the sun’s rays. They flapped once, heavily and powerfully, propelling Spite skyward and casting up a storm of dust, leaves and twigs that drove Ina to turn her face away. When she looked back, blinking, her gaze shaded, she glimpsed a russet writhing shape disappearing into the distance over the tree-tops.
Ina turned to the Enchantress. She extended an arm to grasp the woman’s hand and pull her up. Red and grey mud smeared the woman’s robes. ‘She did not know who you are?’ Ina asked.
‘No. As I said, I have lowered my, ah, manifestation. It would appear that without it I am nothing more than an ageing sorceress.’
Sighing, the Enchantress eyed the wreckage of their vessel.
Her own uselessness in the encounter drove Ina to murmur, ‘And I am hardly a bodyguard.’
The Enchantress raised a finger. ‘Oh, but you are, my dear. You are vitally important. You have no idea what pause that mask of yours gives people. That you are here accompanying me is quite necessary. Spite would never have believed a sorceress alone. While you, a Seguleh, are the perfect guard.’
So – I am nothing more than the perfect accessory. So much for my vaunted ambitions. Rightly is she named the Queen of Dreams. One further question plagued her, yet she did not know whether it mattered now at all. In the end, her role as bodyguard – if humiliatingly illusory – demanded that she broach the subject.
‘Is she your enemy?’
‘My enemy?’ The woman’s thick brows rose. She nodded thoughtfully for a time. ‘Well … let us just say that she has grounds for resentment.’ She gestured. ‘This way. One good thing has come of this interruption, Ina.’
‘Yes?’
‘I do believe that we are close now. Very close.’
* * *
They pursued for four days, Jatal stopping only to throw himself down to attempt to catch a few hours of sleep before the dawn – though what he experienced could hardly be called sleep: his haze of exhaustion was more a delirium of nightmare images that flayed him worse than the agony of his lingering wounds. He often awoke feeling more tortured than when he threw himself to the ground.
Two days before, they had passed the corpse of a horse beside the jungle trail; it had been scavenged by predators but the majority of the carcass remained. The locals, it seemed, were unwilling to touch it. It was an Adwami mount. If the men and women they’d questioned along the way were accurate, the Warleader now had only two mounts remaining. Jatal led a string of four; he was confident they would overtake the man soon.
Scarza, of course, did not ride. Instead, he loped next to a mount, a hand on its cantle to help pull himself along. The half-Trell’s iron endurance was a wonder to Jatal.
They did not talk. Jatal had nothing more to talk about. Occasionally, as they rested their few hours in the pred
awn light, he thought he caught Scarza watching him with a worried look.
But he would shut his eyes. It was too late for talk. It was too late for everything. He was already a dead man. Through his weakness, his envy, childishness and petulance, he’d killed himself. He was dead inside.
The next dawn, when the light streamed down through the canopy in a dappled greenish glow, they were off once more. This day they passed close to a village, a small collection of bamboo, grass and palm frond huts standing on tall legs. Here, Jatal dismounted stiffly and waved the nearest villager to him. The old woman, almost black from her decades beneath the sun, all bones and sinew in a cloth wrap, approached and bowed.
‘Yes, noble born?’ she asked in a quavering voice, her head lowered.
In the Thaumaturg tongue, a dialect not too dissimilar to the Adwami, Jatal said: ‘We seek word of a man who may have ridden through here ahead of us. Has anyone seen such?’
The old woman shook her head. ‘No, noble born. No one has ridden past us here.’
Jatal cursed his luck. Had the Warleader turned off somewhere? Yet this was the most direct track east.
‘That is, no man, noble born,’ the woman added; then she paused as if thinking better of continuing.
‘Yes? Go on.’
The old woman bowed even lower. ‘Forgive us our ignorant superstitions, great one, but some nights ago one of our children claimed to have seen on this very trail a … a portent of death. Perhaps even – so the child claimed – death itself.’
‘Riding east?’
‘Yes, m’lord. A ghost, she thought it. A vision of her own death. A shade riding a horse that steamed like smoke in the night.’
‘Thank you, woman.’ Jatal tossed a coin into the dirt before her.
By this time Scarza had caught up. He ambled over, rubbing his legs and breathing heavily.
‘Still has a good lead on us,’ Jatal said. ‘Can’t understand it. He may be down to only one mount.’
Puffing, Scarza straightened to his full inhuman height, stretching his back. He blew out a great breath. ‘The man has strange elixirs and potions. Perhaps he is doping the animals so that they run on past their exhaustion and know no pain.’
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