The Sah'niir

by Kim Wedlock

  Seemed.

  Even so, he still knew better than anyone what was happening inside and out of their borders, and he was in the best position to manage it. He wasn't about to crumble to the Crown's demands nor cater to their deluded expectations; he had his job to do, and he was doing it, by his own wits and guile. Because they hadn't failed him yet. And by sending out more phidipans, he was already improving the watch on his own terms.

  His bearing straightened.

  He threw open one of the many doors studding the walls of the second floor gallery and swept inside. Once elaborately gilded, this room, like the rest of the house, had been repurposed to the point of leaving no trace at all of its previous intent. Instead of a boudoir or some such, there was little but a curiously varied selection of rugs. All laid out flat, without scuff or overlap, the oval, circular, rectangular and octagonal tapestries in a swarm of colours and contrasting patterns appeared to be the central focus; an eccentric collection that one could admire from the comfort of a few plain chairs set beside equally small tables bearing only a quill, inkwell and ledger.

  But the purpose of the collection was not so vain.

  Such a manner of teleportation was a feat, to be sure. The Order didn't use it - presumably because they hadn't yet worked out how - and it had proven invaluable to the Arana over the thirty or so years since its conception. With the aid of a single mage, one could be transported in the near blink of an eye across country and borders to wherever a similar device of receptive enchantment had been established. That link between devices was the foundation of his own surveillance project, and since beginning, he'd gone from sparing teleportation little thought beyond a convenient tool to marvelling at its complexity. To transfer an image was one thing - a whole person was quite another.

  As he closed the door behind himself, he couldn't help wondering at the true depth of the creator's abilities - but as it had taken her almost twenty years to make it a reality and had long since died, he would surely never find out. Which was typical. She could have been a great help to him - and he wouldn't have had to go out and waste valuable time, time that could be better spent finalising the very spells that could have prevented the necessity of his use of her rugs in the first place.

  He nodded brusquely to the mage on shift, a younger blonde woman he barely took the time to notice, declared his destination, and stepped over several rugs to stop near the back upon one in particular, deep red and rectangular with a loud mess of white geometric lines.

  Her fingers flexed and twisted as she dutifully followed, signs he watched but few he recognised, and held the final form. Kneeling at the edge, she pressed her crooked fingers into the weaving.

  Salus took a breath.

  In the next moment, the room shifted around him; the light dropped, the air became stale, and the sudden and sour aroma of smoke, ale and burned soup made his eyes water. But his stomach remained settled - which, he realised, wasn't unusual. Use of the translocators didn't bring with it the same tearing nausea that either of the elves' direct relocation did. There must have been something in the weave of the enchantment. After all, why would an elf bother to have a care over his comfort?

  The stifling air chased him quickly from the cramped, dark closet and out into the keg cellar. Barrels and drums of ales lined the walls beneath a blanket of cobwebs, some taps coated in a layer of dust so thick they'd clearly not been touched for decades. The sound of drunken frivolity thrummed from above, and with every step towards the door the burning concoctions from the kitchen became stronger and more pungent, until finally offset by the more delicate scent of bread. He shut the musk of aged wood and dust away behind another creaking door and ascended towards the source that, despite his better judgement, caused his stomach to rumble.

  But that would have to wait.

  Passing the cook, who barely looked up, Salus moved through the kitchen, snatching as he passed two empty beer bottles from a collection of dozens beside the basin, and vanished quite ignored through the back door.

  The warm, early evening air coaxed a yawn. He bit it back sharply, but while he could turn a blind eye to his hunger, his fatigue wasn't so easy.

  Over the past few days his dreams had become a constant torment. The yearning he'd been plagued with for longer than he could remember hadn't diminished in the slightest, it was there while he slept and when he woke, and was all the stronger when Taliel wasn't around. The peaceful elements of his forested dreams, which themselves had become elusive as of late, had begun to overlay all kinds of imaginings, soothing him in whimsy and tearing him in half through nightmares, calm yet terrified at the same time, unable to wake himself free.

  He'd not slept for two nights, and he knew the next would be the same.

  Only Liogan's suggestion had given him any kind of welcome distraction, but even that he'd been left with little clue about. Despite two appearances, she'd told him nothing of substance, just fanciful ideas, half-finished thoughts, a plan without foundation that seemed to start at the fifth step.

  Fortunately, detail was his strong suit, and with capable mages at his call, he had the resources to fill in the blanks.

  If only he could be so confident about the capabilities of everyone else. The Crown had always been a council of fools, but now his own subordinates seemed to be lacking. And when all they were being asked to do was watch, listen and follow, there was no excuse for their constant failure.

  The phidipans, the middle and most numerous rank, were up to the job; those destroying the non-humans and those chasing out the tribes were perfectly capable. Those embedded in factions both allied and opposed were also doing their duties admirably. And portians, the highest and most elite, were so efficient they brooked no doubt at all. But regardless of being the lowest tier, even the phaeacians were trained for optimum success. So why were they suddenly slipping?

  He would discover that for himself.

  The stables behind the tavern were small but clean, and occupied by five horses. A chestnut stamped its hooves nervously as he appeared through the shadows, shook its mane and raised its head, tusks drawn forwards in threat, while another simply watched him with wide eyes, its ears laid flat. These two, unsaddled and sticking close to the bales of hay, belonged to travellers. The remaining three did not.

  He approached the nearest, a bay, neither too sleek to be a target for horse theft nor so bland as to be ideal for a butcher's sleight - it was as plain as any Aranan rider. The mare barely raised her head as he untied the hitch, gave not even a snort of protest as he stepped up into the readied stirrups and tugged the reins back towards the gate. She carried him willingly on light, patient hooves through Morton's streets, passing unmemorably through the town gates and skirting the evacuees' shanty that spewed out beyond it. And the moment the trees engulfed them, she responded to the spurring kick in a heartbeat. Erupting into a gallop, she hurtled through the trees at Salus's direction, following the map seared like pyrography into his mind.

  Drizzle fell like mist, the sky was bleak, the ground beyond saturated, but the shift of the swamp, arriving far too soon, did nothing to hamper his bearings. The trees and rocks hadn't moved, after all, and the sun, though low and concealed, still descended in the south west. Focused on such rigid details, they remained unerringly on course, and eventually began tracking along the scouts' routes.

  Salus's eyes sharpened through the rain as he pulled in the pace, and soon footprints, shallow and light, skirted the flood-water, discovered only once right upon them. But they didn't last; pools had already overflowed to consume them and before long all trace of the scouts' presence had vanished.

  Aggravation was quick to disrupt his focus, but there was a grudging awareness at the back of his mind that his expectations had been impossible to begin with on such soft and yielding ground - and even phaeacians would have chosen more phantom paths.

  He urged the horse on, his distraction slipping aside as portian training reasserted itself. The tracks continued to app
ear at close range and disappear just as abruptly, but after six more occurrences, his ire crashed back in. This time, the footprints appeared from a full six paces. Something was not right.

  The horse snorted at the sharp tug on the reins, and Salus slipped quietly from the saddle despite the sludge.

  Even before he reached them he could see that these tracks were deeper than the rest, heavier on the toes and twisted. As he followed them, the event of their creation was plain. The Aranan - he could tell by the evasive choice of route - had been startled by something. He'd turned sharply to discover it and taken two quick steps, turned away, then another few--

  A grunt, bewildered and frustrated, escaped his throat in a puff when the tracks abruptly ceased. No murky water nor fallen leaves were present to obscure them and there were no additional prints to betray a pursuer. But something had been following him.

  His eyes lifted discerningly to the boughs of the alder. No limbs were damaged, no branches bare of leaves - not a twig was out of place. And yet it was the only possibility. Unless...

  Unless magic was involved.

  The mages would've had to take a route like this to reach Nestor...

  He rose sharply and turned back for the reins, restraining the curses that sought to fly from his tongue, until a curiously smooth mound a few yards off among the trees caught his keen eyes. Caution descended. His steps became as glancing as a vole's, and though he approached with an open mind, he'd already surmised the truth.

  The body was bloated and discoloured, the face unrecognisable, its decomposition sped by the moisture of the bog despite the passing of no more than three days. But Salus had little doubt that this man was one of his phaeacians. A quick search of his boot confirmed it. He forced aside his irritation to focus his mind into an analytical silence.

  The hair at the corpse's neck was matted with blood. A strike to the base of the skull. With a knife. From above. The trees. But the cut, despite the insects and dried blood, was too clean and precise. Steel had made it, and a subtle weapon at that - not something ditchlings would be capable of fashioning from the forests nor utilising with such deadly effect had they pinched one from a man, and neither was such finesse possessed by the tribes. And though there were no clear signs of how the body had managed to teleport from its footprints several clear yards away, his guts told him that magic had played no part in it either. Had it done so, the body could just as easily have been incinerated beyond a scrap of evidence as it had been simply abandoned.

  And poorly concealed. Deliberately poorly concealed.

  Tension convulsed in his jaw. Doana. There was a camp nearby. They were playing with him - and they had helped the mages slip by unhindered. Was that part of their plan? Or just his bad luck?

  His teeth were clenched so tightly they hurt, but again he suppressed his curses and set to stripping the body of any link to the Arana. The evidence - thin but not worth the risk of leaving behind - was tucked away into a satchel, from which he dropped the two empty beer bottles to the ground beside him, disappointed that he'd needed them after all. He returned to the horse, making the slow and steady signs for fire as he went, and though the trained beast stamped uneasily at the blaze, it was too small and sputtering to truly consume the corpse. Which Salus was counting on.

  He moved on, returning to his hunt without a backward glance, and after just fifteen minutes found another far-flung and discarded corpse that had again been struck from above. He stared up into the trees for a long while, searching for any evidence of direction, but these Doanans moved like squirrels. There was nothing to find.

  The second corpse received similar treatment, but rather than an unfortunate drunk, this phaeacian was merely scorched - attacked from behind by lashes of fire.

  His route remained certain despite the thinning of the scouts' tracks, so few and far between that the murky light had diminished and what surviving shadows had merged together into twilight by the time he discovered anything more of consequence. But these newest tracks, observed now by a shaded lantern, were unlike the rest, and loosed a childish wash of hope behind his ribs. Careful treading, light and certain, but ready to dart away at a moment's notice. Which they did, several times; abrupt course adjustments that maintained a south-eastern path. A tracker - and she'd been here only hours ago.

  Salus's heart hammered like a stampede of horses in his chest. His eyes began flicking feverishly over the darkening forest, scanning every shadow, the edge of every pool, and missed twice in his haste two sets of hoof prints. He fell upon them like a hound in his third pass.

  They were parallel to the tracker's, a few yards away and just as fresh, their pressure even and steady - untroubled. Unaware. The tracker had stayed close and unseen, remained alert and unwavering, trekking over the firmest, driest ground while her quarry stamped an unwitting trail. Was it arrogance, or stupidity?

  The tracks diverged. His worry was forgotten.

  He traced the horses, ignoring the distant weeping and stinging odour of smoke and dead fires, weaving his way in a phantom silence between birch trees and puddles, eyes never wandering from the prints, never once losing them in the shifting lantern light. Where they intensified and collected at the edge of a hump in the land, upon which grew broad blades of healthy grass ripe for grazing, footprints appeared and led away. One pair booted, the other bare, both undeniably female.

  "The duelist and the tribal..." They were hardly key individuals, but they were a part of Koraaz's company and one of them had some kind of rudimentary magic. They had to know something.

  The beat of his leaping heart threatened to shatter his sternum, but his focus was too steady to allow it any notice. The footsteps moved further up the mound, among tightly-knit trees overgrown with moss, and meandered senselessly. They were waiting, most likely for the rest of their party. They could only have ventured into Nestor...

  The prints deepened. Toes suddenly twisted, screwing into the soil. Something had seized their attention.

  Salus looked up. They'd turned towards the village. The cries. The mages. His alarm settled.

  The footprints broke away, ball and heel deep in flight. They'd returned to the horses, but they hadn't mounted.

  Salus abandoned them. The tracker had kept her distance, the pair too insignificant to break her cover for, but had moved after them when they'd fled. She'd bowed around, daring to near in the pair's distraction, keeping close, allowing them to lead her to more vital targets.

  And then, quite suddenly, she branched away.

  Salus followed urgently, recognising the pressure of the movements. She'd found them.

  But a doubt rose in the back of his mind as he spotted new tracks and hoof-prints, and began to elbow its way to the front: if she'd succeeded, why had he not heard of it?

  The doubt grew louder as bare and booted prints converged on the tracker's, and all the more so when something made him look up and ahead along the trail to spot the smooth form among the rough bark and knotted grass, caught by chance in a brief bleaching of moonlight before it slipped again into the sheath of the clouds.

  A body lay where all tracks met. A female, plain, and dressed for mobility and stealth in this most bleak of Turunda's forests, if not for her bloodied rends and crimson stains.

  The remaining prints scattered but all fled in the same direction.

  His focus collapsed and a boiling rage flooded in to dissolve his composure like lye over an inconvenient corpse. The tracks were enough, he needn't have checked the wounds, the clumsy strike to the back of the head before being run through with an arming sword. Closer she had gotten to Koraaz than any other agent, but she had also failed, and in doing so had alerted them to the Arana's proximity. Phidipans were better than this! Whether they were against duelists, inquisitors, mages or not! Surely it had to be just this one, this single woman who was so inept, and Teagan had, under pressure, made a damned poor choice. Or perhaps it was his own fault for expecting results from hands other than those he could
personally guarantee. Or...perhaps he should have been taking care of the matter himself...

  No, he snarled, of course he couldn't. He was Keliceran, as Teagan relentlessly reminded him, and he had other duties - duties that were just as important, duties that simply couldn't be handled by anyone else. Though the tracks lay clear before him, only a few hours old, he had no choice but to leave someone else to chase them down. If he began following those tracks, even for a moment, he knew he'd not stop until he had them, and Koraaz had surely teleported them away by now. There was no telling how severe this phidipan's blunder had been.

  Of course he was forced to remind himself, though it seemed only to further provoke his ire, that there were countless contingency plans a phidipan was trained to enact in such a situation, some of which could only work successfully on a target that had been spooked. A cheetah, after all, relied on provoking its prey to flee if just so they could trip them up.

  No. The matter was irrevocably out of his hands.

  He snatched the blades from the woman's corpse and rose back to his feet, eyes scanning furiously through and beyond the darkened forest. His scouts were dead; two had fallen by Doana's hands, as, no doubt, had the rest, while Koraaz's lackeys had felled another, and a phidipan at that. But though the afternoon-old tracks were surely now a week's distance behind them, Koraaz's magic couldn't hide them forever. Salus didn't understand it, but if the semi-elf was capable of such consistent concealment, he'd have done so from the start, at the first hint of pursuit...

  A grim smile crept across his tightly knotted face with a grunt of abstract amusement. Evidently, Koraaz was simply not elf enough.