Aren ducked as another arrow flew out of the rain. It nicked his shoulder, cutting through several layers of fabric but missing the meat by a hair’s width. Now he saw the archer, up on the walkway near the cliffs, nocking another arrow. Only the darkness and rain had ruined his aim thus far, but Aren didn’t want to try his luck a third time.
There was a short, sharp tearing of fabric, a cry and the thump of a body hitting the ground. Aren, heart in his mouth, rushed to look out over the edge of the stockade and saw the tattered edge of the blanket rope flapping loose beneath him. The knots may have held, but the cheap material had torn beneath the weight of Grub and Cade. He searched for signs of his friend, but his night vision had been destroyed by the nearby torches and he could see nothing down there.
‘Jump, Aren!’ Cade called from the dark. ‘I ain’t hurt! Jump!’
The guard with the sword had almost reached him. The archer was drawing his bow. Aren couldn’t see the ground, but he knew from memory that the stockade was high, the fall enough to break a limb or worse.
He jumped anyway.
Air roared in his ears. His clothes flapped against him as he plunged through infinite dark. Then his feet hit the earth and his knees buckled hard, slamming him onto his side, his head whiplashing down after. It was an impact that would have killed him, if not for the rain. Soil had turned to spongy mud in the downpour, and though the impact almost knocked his wits out of him, it wasn’t hard enough to prove fatal.
Cade dragged him up, frantic in the bloody half-light. ‘Come on! Move!’ Grub was already sprinting for the trees further along the riverbank. An arrow whipped through the air and hit the earth with a wet thump. ‘Aren, run!’
The urgency in his voice cut through Aren’s daze. Despite the pounding in his head, he was whole. He was alive. And he could run.
He forced his muscles into motion, and with Cade’s arm round him, he found his feet. Stumbling at first, then faster and surer, the fugitives fled into the rain, the sound of alarm bells clanging in their ears.
28
The mountains lit up from horizon to horizon as lightning cracked the sky and thunder tumbled away across the peaks. The wind whistled and howled, flinging rain where it went, and the clouds raced overhead. What had started as a downpour had become a storm of rare fury.
‘I might have prayed a bit too hard for bad weather,’ Cade muttered as he clung to the slippery rock face with freezing fingers and tried not to think about falling. Above him, Aren was grimly focused on the next handhold, the next ledge, while Grub was almost at the top already; that ugly bastard climbed like a spider. Cade, stronger than Aren but never as nimble, came slowly and steadily behind, choosing his way with care.
He found a position to rest in for a few moments and looked over his shoulder at what they’d left behind. Between the folds in the mountainside, he could see all the way back to the camp, where torches marked the perimeter. Beyond it, across the black absence of the river, lights glowed in the village. It was still dishearteningly close. They’d run for what felt like for ever, but they hadn’t come half so far as he’d imagined.
Between them and the camp was a pine forest covering the slopes, a sea of branches thrashing in the wind. Lanterns moved among the trees, carried by the guards that chased them. The barking of skulldogs drifted up into the reddened night.
‘Cade!’
He looked up to see Aren frowning at him.
‘Alright?’ Aren asked.
Cade wiped rain from his face. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘I’m alright.’ And he reached up and found his next grip, and then the next.
When he got to the top, Aren helped him over, and the three of them crouched together in a brake of ferns at the base of some shivering pines. Cade breathed into his hands to warm them and put his gloves on. Cold as he was, climbing in gloves was a recipe for disaster.
‘Grub see hundreds down there,’ said Grub. The tattoos round one side of his mouth curved as his lips twisted into a smile. ‘But they not catch Grub!’
Cade figured that a wild exaggeration; there were dozens of lanterns at best. He wondered what else Grub had exaggerated. Despite Aren’s insistence that Skarls weren’t allowed to lie, Cade had doubted Grub’s boasting from the start. Could be that ice bear he’d slain was more like an ice squirrel.
‘We keep heading up, straight as we can,’ Aren said. He was all stern efficiency, the way he got when he had a plan. ‘The storm’s on our side; it’ll put the dogs off our scent.’ He sniffed, wiped his nose with the back of his hand. ‘The further we get, the better our chances. They’ll call off the search eventually. We just have to outlast them.’
Cade took heart in that. No one did dogged persistence quite like Aren. When he set his mind to something, he was unstoppable. They’d outlasted prison; they could outlast this pursuit as well.
They set off again beneath the dripping trees, following Aren’s lead. The branches moved restlessly. Shadows wavered and darted. They saw phantoms all around them, their minds conjuring soldiers from the rain. Cade fixed his eyes on Aren’s back and forged ahead.
At last, they came to a wide trail cutting across their path. Aren waved them back and they hunkered down among the foliage as two mounted soldiers galloped past them. Once they were gone, Cade stuck his head out and peered up the trail, which climbed steadily towards a narrow defile, a pass between the cliffs. Four men waited there, blocking the way.
‘They’re ahead of us,’ Aren said. ‘Trying to cut us off.’ On the other side of the trail, the slope was thickly forested, rising towards a bare peak. ‘Keep going. We’ll find a way up. Climb if we have to.’
‘Grub say only idiots follow trails anyway,’ the Skarl sneered.
To their left, they could see lanterns approaching, and they heard the barking of dogs.
‘Huntsmen. Best be elsewhere before they get here,’ said Cade. He thumbed at Grub. ‘Don’t need to be a dog to smell this feller.’
‘Grub hope your razor wit come in very handy when skulldog eating your face.’
‘Shut up and move,’ Aren snapped.
An ill-timed bolt of lightning lit them up as they scampered across the trail. They crowded breathlessly into the foliage on the other side, listening to the thunder as it rumbled away into the distance.
‘Nine, I thought the storm was on our side,’ Cade complained. ‘You reckon those huntsmen saw us?’
‘Grub think they didn’t,’ the Skarl opined.
The lowing of a horn came to their ears, carried on the wind.
‘Aren think they did,’ said Aren. ‘Go!’
They fled through the trees, half-blind in the dark, their feet finding the ground more by instinct than sight. Twigs grabbed at their clothes as they slipped and stumbled on wet roots and muddy rocks. Behind them, they heard shouts from the huntsmen. The horn sounded again and the skulldogs barked eagerly, sensing prey.
The slope steepened and they began to struggle. None of them was at their strongest, and Cade had spent a week idle in the infirmary, hardly moving. The sounds of pursuit drove them all on. The pain in Cade’s chest and limbs would be nothing to the pain if they were caught.
Soon they heard running water over the rain and came to a narrow, rocky channel, a trench in the mountainside that crossed their path. There was a shallow stream at the bottom, shin-deep and several paces wide. Aren was climbing down into the channel and was about to cross when Cade, stumbling after, grabbed his arm.
‘Upstream,’ said Cade, pointing. ‘It’ll help throw off the dogs.’
Aren saw the sense in it. ‘Upstream,’ he agreed, and he stepped into the water and splashed up the channel. Cade and Grub followed, slipping and sliding on the loose rocks underfoot. It was hard going, and Cade went over on his hands and knees more than once; but the next time the horn blew, it sounded further behind them.
The stream ended at a sheer cliff. A thin waterfall spewed down from high above. There was no hope of scaling it, so they started to ma
ke their way along the foot of the cliff.
Cade was shivering despite the exertion, his waterlogged clothes weighing him down and his feet squishing in his boots. A stitch was growing in his side and he could still hear the dogs, too close for his liking. Staggering, nearing exhaustion, he blundered through the branches, following glimpses of Aren and Grub as they moved in the shadows.
Those guards ain’t much fitter than we are. And they’re weighed down by armour. We just need to outlast them.
Then suddenly the trees ended, and they came out into the open with stone beneath their feet. Lightning flashed the scene and showed them the bare lip of a gorge, a ragged slash in the land with steep sides and a river at the bottom: the same river that flowed past Suller’s Bluff. They could see the lights of the camp downstream. Somehow they’d got turned around, come back on themselves. Beyond the gorge, the mountains rose crooked and wild, a savage, empty land under the storm. Savage, empty and utterly beyond their reach.
Aren swore, looking about like a hunted animal. Cliffs rose to their left, barring progress along the gorge. The only choice was to go back, or to follow the gorge downslope – back towards Suller’s Bluff and the camp again.
‘Which way, Mudslug?’ Grub demanded.
Aren didn’t have an answer for him. He was still trying to find one when his eyes fixed on something over Cade’s shoulder. Cade turned, heart sinking, knowing what he’d see when he did.
Men were moving through the trees. Soldiers with bows and swords, huntsmen with skulldogs straining at their leashes. There was a shout as they spotted the fugitives.
Cade’s guts turned to water. He backed towards Aren, and the lip of the gorge. There was nowhere to run now. They were trapped.
Grub bared his teeth and pulled his knife as the guards reached the edge of the trees. There were six of them, and two dogs. The archers covered them with their bows; the swordsmen drew their blades.
Cade looked to Aren, hoping for signs of a plan, but there was only devastation in his friend’s eyes. It was a look Cade had seen once before, when Aren was being dragged from his house with his dead father lying in the dining room. Here was defeat, and it was final. He hadn’t even drawn his stolen sword.
‘I won’t go to the dogs,’ said Aren, and he looked over his shoulder into the depths of the gorge.
Cade felt sick with terror as he realised what Aren was saying. But there was death coming either way, quick or slow, and he found it hard to argue with Aren’s line of thought. He remembered Deggan’s fate and feared to share it.
‘There’s a river. Maybe we’ll live,’ he heard himself say.
‘Maybe,’ said Aren with a wan smile, but there was a farewell in his voice.
‘Not Grub!’ Grub cried. ‘Grub not ready to go to the Bone God yet!’ He raised his knife in the bloody light, and at the top of his lungs he roared a challenge in Skarl. ‘Aqqad Urgotha jegg kaumm!’ Then he ran at the guards, screaming like a mad thing.
The guards let slip their leashes and the skulldogs burst from the undergrowth, racing across open ground to meet Grub’s charge. Lightning flashed and they were frozen in tableau: the tattooed Skarl, veins bulging at his neck and insanity in his eye, his pitiful blade held aloft; the skulldogs wearing masks of death, saliva spooling from their fangs.
Bowstrings thrummed and the dogs folded mid-stride, crashing to the ground. They threw up fins of rainwater as they rolled and skidded to a halt in two heaps, one with an arrow in the back of its head, the other pierced through the ribs.
Grub stumbled to a stop as he saw movement in the trees behind the guards. A sword swung out of the shadows and cleft an archer from collarbone to pelvis. Bowstrings snapped again and blades met flesh. Half the guards were dead before they knew they were under attack; the others had a heartbeat to make peace with the Primus before they followed their companions.
In moments, it was over. Grub stood bewildered in the storm, staring at the skulldogs as if uncertain whether their deaths had been his doing. Aren and Cade shivered by the lip of the gorge, their backs to the abyss as they waited to know the nature of these strangers.
Four figures stepped from the trees. Two held bows: a well-dressed, handsome young man with a neat moustache and a stern young woman with ginger hair tied back from her face. The other two carried swords and had the bulk and the walk of warriors. One wore his hair in a strip along the centre of his skull, falling to one side of his face in the manner of the whalers of the Bitterbracks. His companion had a thick black beard and wore an expression darker than the thunderheads piled at his back.
‘That him?’ asked the Bitterbracker, pointing his sword at Aren.
They walked past Grub, ignoring him, and stood before Aren and Cade. The bearded man looked hard at Aren.
‘It’s him,’ he said at last, with something like disgust in his voice. ‘He’s got the look of his father.’
Lightning flickered and revealed a wide, puckered scar that ran across his throat, where no hair grew and which his beard couldn’t quite hide.
‘Aren of Shoal Point,’ the Hollow Man said. ‘I’ve been looking for you.’
29
The wind skirled up from the gorge at Aren’s back, flapping his wet clothes against him. His limbs had no strength in them. Shock had stolen it away. He stared at the face of the Hollow Man and was frozen in place by the sight of a childhood nightmare come to life.
‘Going to jump, eh?’ said the Bitterbracker in Ossian. He peered over the edge. ‘Wouldn’t recommend it.’
‘You know who I am, boy?’ the bearded man growled. His voice was deep and damaged, gargly with phlegm.
‘You’re the Hollow Man,’ Aren whispered.
The Bitterbracker gave a surprised bark of a laugh while his companion’s expression became darker still.
‘Is that what your father called me? Well, it’s as good a name as any, and I’ve gone by a lot. But you’ll call me Garric. This is Keel.’
Aren belatedly remembered the sword at his belt. His hand moved towards it, but his fingers had barely closed on the hilt before Keel’s blade was at his throat.
‘Wouldn’t recommend that, either,’ said Keel.
Aren’s eyes roved frantically, looking for escape. More strangers had moved up on Grub while their companions covered him with bows: a tall, black-haired woman carrying a shield and broadsword; a whip-thin young man wielding a slender blade. Hanging back was a small, studious-looking youth in spectacles, clutching a wet pack to his chest.
Sense overcame his panic. They were outnumbered and fighting was hopeless. He took his hand slowly from the sword hilt.
‘Have you come to kill me?’ he asked, his voice as firm as he could make it.
Garric glowered at him with enough hate that Aren could guess the answer.
‘Had I the choice, perhaps I would,’ said Garric. ‘But I don’t.’
Before Aren could puzzle that out, a horn blew in the forest, near at hand. ‘Garric …’ warned the last of the strangers, a squat, thickset old warrior with a bushy brown beard and an axe in each hand.
‘If you want to keep drawing breath, come with me now!’ Garric snapped at Aren. He glanced at Cade, then back at Grub. ‘Those two can go their own way.’
Cade stepped forward in alarm. ‘Hoy, no! Wait!’
‘Cade comes with me,’ Aren said, grabbing Cade’s arm.
‘We don’t need the baggage,’ Garric said impatiently, and seized Aren to drag him away; but Aren twisted and tore free from his grip, violently enough that he almost went over the edge of the gorge. Keel grabbed him with his free hand and pulled him back.
‘You do have a death wish,’ Keel said in amazement.
Aren shook him off and glared defiantly at Garric. ‘Cade comes, or I don’t.’
‘Garric …’ said the axe-wielding man, with less patience than before.
‘Alright, Tarvi,’ said Keel, waving a hand at him. ‘It’s not worth the argument, Garric. Let’s go.’
&n
bsp; Aren looked past the two men to Grub, crouched at bay in the rain and red darkness, looking like a beast surrounded by hunters. He met Aren’s eye across the distance and his lips pulled back in a slight snarl. Aren remembered the feel of his fists, the anger and humiliation, the insults, the petty viciousness. Grub was a vile bully, a fool and a liability.
‘Him, too,’ said Aren, motioning with his hand. Cade stared at him in surprise.
‘Garric!’ Tarvi snapped.
Garric turned away with a curse and stalked towards the others, jamming his sword back in its sheath. Keel frowned slightly at Aren, as if trying to work him out; then he took him by the shoulder and pushed him after Garric.
‘Varla! Otten! Dox! Let him be!’ Keel called to the men and women watching Grub. ‘We’re leaving. Fen?’
The slender red-headed girl pointed off into the trees.
‘Good. You’re in the lead. Osman, bring up the rear.’
‘Understood,’ said the other archer, the handsome man with the moustache.
Aren went ahead of Keel through the rain, the Bitterbracker staying close at his shoulder. Was he a prisoner again, or had he been freed? It had all happened too fast to be sure. At least Cade was still with him; he felt his friend clutch his arm, though whether he was offering reassurance or seeking it, Aren didn’t know.
The others had left Grub alone and melted back into the treeline. The Skarl watched them go, likely calculating whether he’d be better off on his own or sticking with this well-armed group of strangers. At least he had that choice now, Aren thought. Wretch though he was, he deserved more than to be abandoned to the Krodan dogs.
As Aren passed him, Grub blew a plug of snot from his nose, squared his shoulders and followed, away from the gorge and into the trees.
Thunder grumbled distantly as they hustled through shadowed ways beneath the pines. The worst of the storm was over but rain still splashed and trickled about their feet, pooling in the imprints of their boots. Aren was surrounded by strangers, their faces flashing in and out of the darkness, caught in moonlit moments and gone again. Some were grim with purpose, like the swordswoman Varla. Others looked as nervous as Aren was, and almost as young: the spectacled youth, and the thin one with the coif covering his head. Otten and Dox, but he didn’t know which was which.
The Ember Blade Page 22
