With that agreed to, we traversed the next couple of miles on horses. I wanted to go about another mile east, where the woodland appeared to thicken, but our best dog wanted to go north.
To Kazuhiko, I said, “Head for the band of trees and keep everyone quiet.”
“You don’t want to take the hound?”
“I trust his nose, not his mouth.” I jumped off the horse and motioned for a villager riding behind another to take the reins. “Mae and I will take it from here.”
“Very well. We’ll protect Lady Du for you.”
“Look after yourselves first. Trust me, Lady Du can handle herself out here. Let’s get moving, Mae.”
With her quiver of arrows and her flatbow in hand, the hunter gave her horse to a villager and joined me in my dash northward. Our light feet relished sprinting in place of noisy, bumpy hooves. We slackened our pace only so we could take heedful glances at the rock-strewn hills from behind bushes or trees, looking for any sign of suspicious activity. The dribbling sky dripped a little harder, but other than making the ground slicker, I felt better about crossing the expanse in murkier conditions.
Minutes later and we reached the base of the Fulns. The amount of angles we could observe drastically decreased now that most of the hills overshadowed us rather than oversaw us. Nevertheless, we continued our scouting mission. Mae and I spoke with hand gestures, head jerking, and the lowering and raising of eyebrows more than definite words. In this way we moved toward the future sunrise, prodding for clues to the whereabouts of our objectives.
I soon found a trail winding up a large cleft between two hills. It looked just wide and level enough to allow purloined horses to clamber deeper into the Fulns. A good candidate for further exploration. However, I didn’t like how obvious the trail trumpeted itself. It was difficult not to imagine brigands aware of the overtness of the path placing sentinels at the top. I didn’t even feel comfortable staying near the base for long.
Divining my thoughts, Mae said, “We shouldn’t climb. Too exposed.”
I nodded, making a mental note of the trail’s location for future reference. For the next hundred yards we perused the margins of the Fulns. Without saying it, we ended up taking responsibilities for a different facet of the search. Mae kept her eyes downward while I examined the hill sides. Mindful of the fact that bandits could sneak up from anywhere, both of us garnered numerous glances at the woods as well.
Somewhere between a hundred and two hundred yards from the ascending trail, Mae went on her knees to reach under a hedge of thorny shrubs that grew against a steep segment of the hill. She opened her palm to reveal a golden crest ring with the engraving of a swan on it. A quick search of the immediate area did not reveal any more glaring clues, but the fact that someone either accidentally or purposefully dropped it told me we were close to a breakthrough of some kind.
As Mae looked under the bushes again, my second, slower skim over this plot of land had me taking an interest in two things. First, while mostly gone, there was a sprinkling of mud on top of the shrubs. The only place the mud could have come from was a track of dirt below the brush and which stretched out for a few yards in front of it. How would dirt have gotten on top of the shrubs?
I looked up at the hill. It was hard to tell due to the way the hill protruded around the shrubbery, but it’s possible a small ledge was nestled a dozen feet above the plants. It’s feasible someone proficient in manipulating earth used the dirt to form a temporary bridge from the ground to the ledge. The bridge material could then be packed back in the ground with few being the wiser. Well, most of it could be placed back.
I tapped Mae’s shoulder and gestured at the points of interest. I next pointed at my eyes and traced an invisible line toward the ledge. Her neutral expression dropped into a grimace of disapproval.
Pulling me a short distance away from the scene, she whispered, “It’s better if I check.”
“If that ledge leads anywhere, it’ll be inside the hill. Bows and arrows will be limited in tight spaces.”
“But your experience may limit you.”
“Aye, I’ve barely finished growing, but I assure you I’ve the experience. You can go back and ask Lady Du all about my past experiences. She might even tell you a few future ones.”
“What future ones?”
“Ah, nothing. Just stay out here and watch my back. Will you do that?”
“Very well. Be wary.”
“As much as a mortal can be. I’ll try to be quick. Give me an hour on my own. If you don’t hear anything from me after that, then do whatever you want.”
“As you wish.”
As Mae went to stand by the hill’s protrusion, I lined up with the ledge and walked backward a bit. The hill segment behind the shrubs looked too smooth to climb, so without my own bridge, I needed to jump my way to the top. I was pretty sure I could make it, or else Mae would have to brave the thorns to give me a hand.
I sent the prana to my legs and feet to hurl myself forward in a mad sprint. Right before crashing into the shrubs, I concentrated my prana to my right leg and used it to push myself off the ground. From my chest to my fingertip I extended my right side as far up as it could go. Three of my longest fingers caught the edge. It was too slippery to hold on for long, but I used what was left of my momentum to get my left hand up there. A quick adjustment of my right hand gave me the ability to lift myself up.
The ledge turned out to be as long as my body. It led into a black gap in the side of the hill no more than three feet tall and five feet wide. Above that rose a fifty-foot wall as steep as the one below. Yawning, black cracks streaked down the face of the hill here, helping to mask the existence of the gap further. Only a lucky glance from a certain distance and angle would expose this cloistered entrance to the underworld. Not a place to squeeze in stolen horses, but shoving a few bound humans was another story.
I flashed Mae a finger salute to signal my success and intention to delve deeper. I crawled toward the left corner of the dark gap. Along with every twitch of my finger and toes, my breathing became a methodical, conscious affair. For the next couple of minutes I did nothing but watch for any change to the cramped darkness, wondering if someone was watching me from the other side. I put my ear to the ground in the middle of my scuttling. I never practiced this detection technique, so I expected nothing and got nothing from the effort.
As always, going under a pile of rocks did not appeal to me, but I imagined those abducted by the slavers would find it even less pleasing than I did. Indeed, falling under a mountain helped give me the freedom I sought, not restrict it further. Perhaps going under this one would bring relief from my self-doubt—a different kind of freedom.
Not wanting it to clatter on the ground, I untied my scabbard and held it in my left hand. Like an adrift cave spider searching for a new home yet unsure of who lived in this promising abode, I crawled judiciously on my elbows and the toes of my boots. Never have I moved slower in my life. Snails dragging other snails passed me. One wouldn’t guess that human muscle could twitch so incrementally. Regardless, not every sound I made was entirely muffled in the echo friendly crevice. I waited a few moments for a response after these instances. Nothing yet.
The painstaking intensity, the all-consuming darkness that no amount of visual refinement compensated for, and my single-mindedness eradicated my sense of distance and time. This exercise might have been a good way for Raquldir to drive his servants over the edge of madness. Unfortunately fortunate for me, I already had plenty of experience losing my godsdamn mind.
I froze when I progressively inhaled a new smell. It was difficult to identify it as anything other than “not outside” at first. However, dragging myself an arm length or two farther gave me the impression that the air was not necessarily infused with a new scent, but simply drier and more compressed. A bit later and I got a somewhat mildewed whiff of something that nature would not put underground—straw.
My sight finally reacted to ligh
ter shades of blackness. I could even tell that the fissure started to become a little roomier in both height and width. My hearing also picked up scraping noises that did not come from my occasional slipups. The indefinite aura of a cowed candle outlined an irregular-shaped barricade a few scuttles ahead of me. Behind that appeared to be a space tall enough to stand in.
After a minute of acclimation, I realized the ten foot long barricade consisted of six midsized storage barrels and piles of straw around and between the containers. I headed for the leftmost one. Someone cleared their throat and sighed. They were not done with any force, but given that I had not heard a proper sound in who knows how long, a screaming monkey being stabbed right next to me would have alarmed my mentality in the exact same way.
Finishing my flinch, I arrested my muscles to wait for any more signs of human life. A couple of times I heard someone breathing and far-flung footsteps. Stretching my neck to the left gave me half a view of a tunnel opening twenty feet in front of me, which was where the hint of candlelight came from. A backless chair emerged when I stretched my neck to the right, but since the breather remained absent, I concluded he must have been even farther to the right. I curled every finger and toe before skulking onward.
The breather’s bearded head rolled from side to side in an apparent attempt to unknot his rigid neck. Unbinding my muscles from their own tense state, I pushed a foot and my fingers off the ground to spin my body behind a barrel. From there I peeked around the container to evaluate my unsuspecting foe, who wore boiled leather armor reinforced by strips of steel. The heavy-eyed twenty-something sat on a short, three-legged stool, an unsheathed short sword resting on his lap. While not too attentive a lookout, exposing anything more than my eyeball would surely be noticed.
Squatting in thought, I laid my sword down, recognizing that the enemy sat too far away to use it in a charge. I needed to get to him before he had a chance to recognize the danger and yell out for help. If I could get him to expose his neck for a moment, then I was confident I could throw one of my daggers at his throat. But how to expose it without exposing myself? What if I gave him something else to look at?
I gently patted the ground, soon picking up what I sought—a big pebble. Aiming for the ceiling above and behind my target, I threw it. When I heard it bump into the rock, I stood up with a dagger in hand. As any normal human would, the lookout fell for this simplest of distractions, the nape of his neck exposed to me. His head was just beginning to realign when a five-inch blade propelled by an entire body’s frustration plunged under his jaw.
Huge, panicked eyes briefly met mine. Then, as his body fell backward, they rolled into their sockets. The stool creaked, the dying sentinel gurgled, and the body hit the floor with a thud. What made a greater racket were the steps coming from the tunnel. I pulled out another dagger and leapt over the barrel.
Placing myself between the tunnel opening and the left corner of the room, I heard the steps say, “All I got is bread and the old mutton, but I got lots of the fresh butter.” His shadow entered the room first. “Tomo? You better not be sleeping, ya daft half-wit. Rin wouldn’t want her darling little brother to make her lo-”
My hand covered his mouth, then I buried the dagger below his chin. The tray he carried fell, creating a brief ruckus that rebounded down the tunnel. I held up the dying man for a moment, waiting to hear any reaction to the dropped items. Nothing came of it, so I hauled the dead man toward the other and laid him on the ground. I next collected my daggers and wiped them clean.
Liking the compactness of the short sword, which looked like a smaller katana, I picked it off the first dead man’s stomach and swung it a couple of times. It sang well, so I grabbed the wooden scabbard the former owner had tucked in his belt. Not caring about the most secure method, I simply slipped the scabbard between my belt and right hip. My scimitar went back to being tied to my left hip.
Stepping lightly, I went up to the tight tunnel and listened out for still living slavers. The fruits of that eavesdropping was a negligible smattering of voices. As if expecting for the stone ground to groan or squeak like wood, I looked down almost every time my foot met the rock. A mild bent had the tunnel curving to the right. Then, as soon as it faced all the way east, it took a turn to the north. A lantern stuck on a wall at the edge of this turn fed my sight with a sun-like severity.
As I waited for my eyes to adjust to a stupid little candle, I spied with my ears again. This time I heard the chatter of three or four voices, though the exact words and subject matter remained beyond me. The outer fringes of the candlelight showed me a triangular-shaped doorway on my right. Concluding that the voices came from farther up the tunnel, I hurried toward this next opening.
In the middle of my mute run I saw a circular entry ten feet ahead of the triangular opening and to the left side of the widening tunnel. This was where the voices seemed to come from. I reached the tunnel I initially aimed for and peeked inside. With three shelves, a dozen barrels of varying sizes, and a pile of straw, I figured this room to be a storage area. A modest blackness filled the back half of the room, and the only light within flowed out from the chamber where the chatter originated.
I felt the already cool cave become a tad cooler when I entered the room. Recalling similar experiences when visiting a ship’s cargo hold, I guessed many of the barrels contained frozen water. I squatted by the entrance and drew the short sword. Here I listened in on two men complaining about their leftovers to a third man, whose explanation about only being able to cook a good meal from good ingredients sounded reasonable to me.
A few minutes later, two rats scampered out from a heap of straw, sniffing their way to my boots. Finding me inedible, they both exited the room. As their little paws scampered down the tunnel, heavier footsteps stomped closer and closer.
These human created steps stopped and said, “They’re coming. Let’s go.”
“Already?” said the voice of the cook. “Don’t they usually come in the morning?”
“Nothing is ever usual with them. Come on, get your fat ass to position. Rin will see if you’re not there.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
The footsteps receded back up the tunnel.
Chairs, mugs, and plates clattered, then someone asked, “What the fuck are you doing?”
“I’m gonna take a piss,” answered the cook. “Wanna watch or something?”
“Take it outside! I don’t want piss where I eat!”
“I’m not pissing on the table!”
“Both of you shut up,” said the third man. “Piss in the tunnel, Ken. It’s two fucking steps away.”
While Ken grumbled out the room, the other two followed the man that interrupted their late supper. The cook plodded a couple of steps toward me, sighed, and then released a gushing waterfall of former water. It sounded like he was facing away from my room, though I did not want to hazard a glimpse just yet.
The stream ended half a minute later, leaving him dangerously detached from his companions. I stood up and peeked around the opening when I heard his foot hit the ground. Ken’s heavyset frame wore a simple steel cuirass over a brown tunic. No armor protected his breeches or well-worn leather boots. I saw his diminishing friends farther down the tunnel, and the distance looked to be more than adequate to do what I needed to do in peace.
Timing my steps to Ken’s ponderous strides and heavy breathing helped garble my approach. When in range, I extended my left hand forward and swung the short sword around his neck. I was unaware of a unit of time short enough to measure the interval between placing my hand over his mouth and slicing his throat open. I let his ample body fall back into mine and put my left arm under his. Taking the load, I dragged the still bleeding Ken to the room he had been eating in. As I laid him down, I wondered how quickly the rats would begin eating him. Refocusing on my own fate pushed aside the morbid thought.
Ken’s companions disappeared within an unlit section of tunnel, so I headed for this patch of shadow next. I
kept the short sword unsheathed, though I wrapped its reflective blade around the edge of my cloak. The tunnel snaked almost the whole way, but if I trusted my sense of direction, it mostly stayed a northern route.
When I became shrouded in the darkness, I saw a diffused light glowing out of another opening on the right, forcing a slowed pace. I backtracked on distinguishing two pairs of footfalls heading my way. I crouched in the deepest part of the shade, cloaking everything under my face. A pair of human silhouettes exited the lit opening. One held a longbow while the other carried a crossbow. They turned to the north.
Once they gave me the leeway, I bade farewell to the protective shadow. Considering I heard no further activity coming from it, I decided to skip the subsequent tunnel without exploring it. I could not tell where the passage led, and since everyone seemed to be heading north, I figured I would only be wasting time getting sidetracked or even risk getting lost altogether.
I eventually noted another tunnel on the right. Since this latest one didn’t even have a single candle lighting it, I almost passed it without acknowledging its existence. A yellowish-orange light more easily outlined what appeared to be the end of the north tunnel, which had widened to the point that four large oxen could walk side by side without bumping into each other. Not surprisingly, the light grew brighter and bigger the closer I got. Two familiar outlines wielding a bow and crossbow were standing at the precipice of a large open space that sank at least twenty feet.
Wishing to become one with the warren, I put my back against the wall. I knew they could probably still see my vague outline if they turned around. I could go back and blow out a candle or two to put me in total darkness, but then I chanced someone coming up behind me in total darkness. Anyway, the extra darkness would not add that much of an advantage. Unless one separated from the other, I doubted I could assassinate them in silence.
Other plans of action included calling out one of their names if I overheard it, burning straw to trick them away from their position, or making some kind of noise. However, nothing I came up with assured me that only one person investigated the bait. That left waiting for an opportunity to convince me to either strike or retreat.
The Dragon Knight and the Light Page 15
