As the guards settled onto rocks around the rest stop, Roeglin came over to Marsh.
“What are you doing?” he asked, and Marsh blinked.
Up until that moment, she’d been sending feelers out into the dark, sweeping the area around them in a search for what lifeforms might be nearby.
“Sorry?”
“Your eyes: they’re green,” he said. “Bright green. What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to sense the life around us.”
“Why?”
“If there are raiders, I’d like to know they’re there before they know we’re coming.”
He looked thoughtful for a long minute and then nodded.
“How do you feel?”
His question puzzled Marsh until she thought about it, and she realized what he was really asking. She was a little weaker than she should have been.
“Oh.”
“Hm.”
Marsh blushed, feeling like she’d been caught in a rookie mistake, but then Roeglin spoke.
“I like the idea, but I need you on your feet, too. Save it until we’re an hour off the junction. I think we’ll be safe until then. After that, I want you scanning. Something tells me they’re waiting.”
Marsh wanted to know how he could be so sure, and he explained.
“It makes sense for them to be watching the fortress to make sure we don’t send reinforcements, and to make sure nothing gets through if we do. If I thought you could sustain it longer, I’d get you to keep scanning, but moving and scanning? That’s a new one for you, right?”
Marsh nodded. She’d only just thought of it, and it had been a little more taxing than she’d anticipated.
“Good. Eat something. Drink something. Take a breath. Tell me when you’re ready to get moving.”
It didn’t take long, and soon they were back on the trail. Roeglin had used the stop to partner each shadow guard with a caravan guard, and he’d paired Marsh with Clarinay.
“You’re my scouts,” he said, and Clarinay had given Marsh a doubtful look.
Roeglin caught it.
“She used to be a courier, and now she can sense a little of what lies ahead of us before we can see it. Take her with you. Teach her what she lacks.” He glanced at Marsh. “Treat it as an extension of your training.”
Marsh wasn’t going to argue. As skills went, learning how to scout sounded like a good thing. She decided she’d couple those skills with the ability to blend with the shadows, and then wondered if she’d be able to master it.
You can only try.
Marsh frowned. It was disconcerting the way Roeglin kept popping into her head like that. She wondered if there was any way she could stop him.
You want to learn?
“You’re the only mind mage I know.”
The amusement left his mind-voice.
But I’m not the only mind mage there is.
“Will the raiders have them?”
Do you want to find out the hard way?
“No.”
Then we’ll see if you can learn.
Marsh was reminded that not everyone could learn every kind of magic.
“When?”
After we reach Ruins Hall.
“I can’t stay in Ruins Hall,” Marsh told him. “I have to try to reach Kearick.”
“Why?”
“He’s working for the raiders, and he has to be stopped.” Marsh paused. When she continued, her voice was slightly softer. “And he’s already sent one assassin to retrieve the artifact. I doubt he’ll stop there.”
“You’ve signed on as a trainee at the monastery,” Roeglin told her. “You can’t just leave.”
“He needs to be dealt with.”
“Agreed, but not by you, or at least, not on your own.”
“Agreed,” Gustav said, joining the conversation with a single decisive word. “Not on your own. Monsieur Gravine will have something to say on this matter as well.”
Marsh sighed. She was about to reply when Clarinay tapped her and Roeglin on the shoulders.
“Time we went ahead,” he said. “We’re getting close.”
Roeglin nodded and slowed his pace. Clarinay signaled for Marsh to follow him into the shadows alongside the path. When they were a few steps away from the trail and out of sight around a large boulder, Clarinay turned to her, his gray eyes gleaming.
“You’re noisier than I’d like,” he said. “You need to move more quietly, like the shadows.”
His eyes turned a dark storm-gray and then went completely black. Marsh watched as his body darkened and faded, blending with the shadows, even to the way he looked when she sought heat instead of visible shapes and outlines. She started when he solidified in front of her, his heat signature growing brighter the more solid he became.
“Can you do that?” he asked, and Marsh shrugged.
“I can try.”
“Do so.”
“Care to give a girl a hint?”
“Think of yourself as part of the shadows, no more solid than the air that makes them. A beast that prowls their depths yet remains alone.”
Marsh drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. She pushed aside the thought that they did not have a lot of time. Roeglin would not have stopped. He might already have led the others well beyond the point where they stood. Taking another breath, Marsh sought the shadows.
By keeping her eyes open and on Clarinay’s face, she was able to see when she’d made it—and then she looked down at herself and saw only shadows. Clarinay did not give her time to celebrate.
“Let’s go. We can move faster this way as well.”
He did not wait for her reply but moved away, and Marsh was hard-pressed to keep up with him. She discovered that seeing as part of the shadows was different than seeing when she was solid. To her surprise, the path to the junction was clear of anything that might harm them—and nothing lay in wait on either side. Together, she and Clarinay leapt through the shadows.
They flew through the dark, sweeping around the stems of calla shrooms and leaving no mark on the patches of blue buttons and brown noses as they passed through them. The mushrooms and toadstools shivered but did not bruise, even though Marsh’s shadowy feet touched their caps. As soon as they were sure the junction was clear in both directions, Marsh and Clarinay returned to the path.
When they saw Roeglin and Gustav ahead of them, Clarinay tapped Marsh on the shoulder and steered her off the path.
“It won’t do any of us any good if we get killed by our own,” he explained as he left the shadows to become flesh and blood once more.
Taking the hint, Marsh followed his example. She hadn’t known she’d been so light as a shadow. The sudden return of the weight of what she was carrying came as a surprise, and her knees buckled. Marsh caught herself before she could fall and straightened up.
“Well,” she said, “that was new.”
She watched as Clarinay ferreted around in one of his belt pouches and was surprised when he pulled out two of Brigitte’s cookies.
“You need to eat,” he told her, passing her one, “and we have to get back to the others.”
Marsh accepted the treat, biting into it as she followed Clarinay back to the rest of the team. She was comforted that he demolished his own cookie faster than she did.
“Didn’t see a thing out there,” Clarinay reported and Marsh nodded, too busy chewing to do more.
“We’ll hit the junction then, and head toward Ruins.” Roeglin looked from Clarinay to the gathered guards. “And we’ll look for somewhere to camp along the way.”
The junction was as clear as it had been when they’d checked it before. Nothing moved in the shadows. Nothing moved amid the rocks and crevices of the tunnel walls. Nothing, that is, except Mordanlenoowar, and the hoshkat showed no sign she’d found an intruder. It was unnerving, but Roeglin wasn’t looking any gift horses in the mouth. He signaled Marsh and Clarinay to go ahead.
“Find me a campsite,” he ordered, and
Marsh followed Clarinay into the shadows again.
This time she remembered to check ahead of them for what other life might lie on the trail ahead, and just like the last time, she found nothing out of place. There were the usual insects, centipedes, a scorpion, some bats, and a rat or mouse or something equally small, but nothing big. Nothing like the hoshkat, or even remotely human-sized, waited on the road before them, and it remained that way until they reached a point where the trail widened into another small cavern.
This one held more shadows and more life than any they’d yet passed, but still, nothing that might threaten them. It was also the most likely point they’d seen for a campsite in over an hour.
That’s our camp. Wait there, Roeglin said, speaking clearly in her mind. Marsh stopped.
She was standing at the edge of a large pool of water, and she looked up and across to where Clarinay had knelt at the edge to dip his fingers into the water before raising a cautious handful to his mouth.
“Roeglin says we’ll camp here,” she told him, and he raised his eyebrows, glancing around them and nodding.
“It’s a water source, but there’s nothing else here,” he answered, then added, “Not yet, anyway.”
It was poor comfort, and a good reminder that other things moved along the glowless trails—and that creatures congregated near water. Marsh shrugged. Clarinay could be as gloomy as he liked; it didn’t alter the fact they needed a break. Even so, she said nothing when the scout melted into the shadows. Instead, she followed his example. One more check around the cave wouldn’t hurt.
It wasn’t as though they’d missed anything, but it was always possible something had moved in while they’d been stopped at the pool. Moving in the opposite direction to the one Clarinay had taken, Marsh wove through knee-high brown-nose toadstools and some kind of ferny shrub growing in the glow of a cluster of golden gleams. Emerald highlights winked and moved across its leaves, and Marsh paused to take a closer look.
The fern was covered in green-carapaced beetles, all milling and jostling for space on its long, delicate leaves, their shells glinting in the golden gleams’ glow and the dark blue outlines of their jaws shining. Marsh stepped back and made sure not to brush the leaves as she went past. Shadow form or not, she didn’t want to risk a bite.
Her circuit of the cavern meant she met Clarinay in the middle. She wasn’t sure, but she thought the scout tried to stealth his way past her, and it made her think. If she encountered another shadow mage in this form, how exactly was she going to stop him?
Intrigued by the problem and darn sure the situation would occur, Marsh tried the age-old tactic of sticking out her foot and attempting to sweep his out from under him. To her surprise, she connected with his ankles, but before she could do anything else, he hopped over her foot and took two swift steps before pivoting and coming back at her. This time, though, he pulled a blade out of the shadows and swung at her head.
Marsh responded by drawing a shield to her forearm and raising it in self-defense. Clarinay’s sword slammed against it with more power than finesse and Marsh staggered back, pulling a sword of her own from the air around them. Clarinay gave her a brief but fierce grin, looking for all the Dark like a ghost in the shadows.
Marsh grinned back.
This might not be how Roeglin would have had them spend their time waiting, but it was fun. She enjoyed sparring. Looking at the serious cast to Clarinay’s face, though, gave her second thoughts. It was sparring, wasn’t it?
You’d better hope so, Roeglin said, because Clarinay knows his way around a blade.
Hot damn! Marsh felt her grin grow wider and pretended to take a wide stroke toward Clarinay’s head. He didn’t buy it, swatting it away with a short blade he called to his other hand and reaching for her with a swift thrust.
Marsh twisted to one side, turning to bring her shield between them, and Clarinay laughed. Warily, they circled each other, then Clarinay made a lightning-fast lunge toward her, forcing her to skip back and breaking her concentration. She wasn’t paying attention to where she put her feet or the fact that she had shifted out of the shadows and tripped on a thick clump of rosebud toadies. Stumbling, Marsh recovered her balance, only to go down when her other foot caught on a stone.
What the… Her mind spun as she tried to make sense of what was happening, falling heavily and having to scramble out of the path of a swift follow-up stroke. Her shield hand landed in a patch of brown-noses, shattering their delicate caps and rewarding her with a spray of gray slime and a dusky cloud of spores. Clarinay’s sword vanished and he became solid in the blink of an eye, reaching out to grab her by the arm and pull her clear before she could breathe too many in.
“Not bad,” he said when he’d set her on a boulder covered in nothing more than crusty lichen. “Tell me, what did you learn?”
“That brown noses have gray snot?” Marsh asked, surveying her hand with regret.
Clarinay rolled his eyes.
“Be serious. What did you really learn?”
So there had been more to the sparring than letting off steam? Marsh frowned, thinking back over the battle and settling on the one point she thought he might be looking for.
“That we come out of shadow form when we fight?”
“Close,” he said. “That we have to concentrate on staying in shadow form or we return to our natural selves.”
“I was close.”
“But not right. Now, what else did you learn?”
“That we can hit each other with shadow weapons when we’re both in shadow form.”
“Exactly.” Clarinay said, looking a little bit pleased.
Given it was the happiest Marsh had seen him, she’d take that as a compliment.
“Is there anything else I need to know?” she asked, and Clarinay shook his head.
“Those were the two things I wanted you to work out,” he said. “Now you can help me dig the latrines.”
Marsh stared at him, and he gave her a brief smile.
“We’re here first. Least we can do is get that set up.”
He made a fair point, even if Marsh didn’t like the idea that it meant she’d be doing a lot of digging when she was on point. Roeglin was unsympathetic.
Quit your bitching.
Marsh rolled her eyes even though she figured he wouldn’t be able to see her.
And thank you very much.
“We’ll put them in that alcove we passed just before the pool.”
It made sense. The alcove was well away from the water, so there wouldn’t be any contamination. It was the ideal place for a latrine, and it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when they discovered they weren’t the first people to have thought so. Marsh and Clarinay stopped digging at the same time, their noses catching the unmistakable cue that this place had been used before.
Without saying a word, they filled in the shallow trench they’d just dug and studied the ground around them. Whoever had been here had passed by a couple of days ago. Now that they knew there had been someone going through, they both surveyed the area more closely. It took them several minutes of casting about to realize that their previous visitors had camped on almost the exact site they’d chosen for their own camp.
“Do we move?” Marsh asked, and Clarinay hesitated.
After a moment’s thought, he nodded, surveying the cavern.
“Over there,” he said, choosing a spot closer to the cavern’s edge and separated from the water source by several thick clusters of shrooms, as well as a few short stalagmites and clumps of boulders. “If we’re lucky, they stuck to the trail and the campsite and won’t be as familiar with that part of the cavern.
“You’re thinking they might come back?”
“Not going to risk it.”
His answer was short, and Marsh gave herself a mental kick. She should have thought of the possibility, but it hadn’t crossed her mind. Clearly, she had a lot to learn.
Clearly, Roeglin said, agreeing. Make sure you do.
Marsh wanted to come back with something sarcastic, but she couldn’t think of anything. Roeglin had teamed her up with Clarinay for a reason, and it wasn’t his good looks.
His what?
The thought had not amused Roeglin at all, and Marsh snickered.
“When you’ve quite finished.”
Clarinay had noticed she wasn’t paying attention, and he wasn’t pleased. When Marsh looked toward him, he pointed to another niche in the cavern wall.
“Put the latrines over there,” he instructed. “I’ll clear a space for sleeping here.”
“Oui,” Marsh returned, and set to work.
By the time Roeglin led the others into the cavern and along the trail, the latrines had been dug, and Mordanlenoowar was warming herself by a small fire built from dried shroom husks. Clarinay was instructing Marsh on the local flora and fauna and discussing the traces of whoever had come before.
“They left nothing in the water,” he was saying, “so there is a fair chance they’ll be returning. The way they dug in their latrine points to that, too.”
“How?”
In response, Clarinay had her remember the depth and angle at which they’d discovered the previous trenches and how it set them up for future use. Marsh had to admit he had a point. If she’d been planning on returning and re-opening the toilet pits, that would be the way to do it.
“We need to build a waystation here,” he said as the soft tramp of feet reached their ears.
Marsh couldn’t agree more, but it reminded her of something else. “Where is the next waystation?” she asked.
Clarinay gave her a shadowed look. “There isn’t one. Most caravans make the journey from Ruins Hall to the monastery without stopping.”
Even the slow ones? Marsh wanted to ask, but she didn’t, because Roeglin and the six guards chose that moment to arrive. The rest of the evening was taken up by the routine of setting up camp and eating before watches were posted and sleep was ordered.
7
Shadow Monsters
Trading into Darkness Page 6