“It’s wet to be out walking, isn’t it, trader?”
He was genuinely startled, and for an instant a flash of rage burned hotly through him, but he contained the anger, and exaggerated his jump of surprise. Let the boy think well of his abilities, his stealth, it would be useful later.
“I figured I wasn’t getting any wetter,” he told the boy. “And at least it isn’t cold.”
“A moment.”
Parno Lionsmane caught the reins Dhulyn threw to him as she swung her leg over Bloodbone’s rump and dropped lightly to the ground next to her horse. Bloodbone rolled her eyes at Parno as if to tell him she didn’t need him holding her reins. Parno shrugged, as if to answer that he, like the mare herself, only did as he was told.
Dhulyn squatted down on her heels, forearms resting on her bent knees. Her eyes were squinted almost shut as she scrutinized the trail in front of them. After a moment she shifted to the left and sighted along the same stretch of ground from that angle.
“Two riders definitely came this way,” Dhulyn said, without raising her head.
“I don’t think even our best trackers could know such things, not for certain,” Epion Akarion said. His tone was so neutral that Parno could easily guess what the man was too courteous to say.
“Nor many Mercenary Brothers either,” he agreed. “But you’ll have noticed my Partner is also an Outlander. They say the nomads of the Blasonar Plains can track a Racha bird in flight. Never underestimate what an Outlander with Mercenary Schooling can do.”
“The horses are both geldings.” Dhulyn straightened and rested her hands on her hips. “This one,” she pointed at something not even Parno could see. “This one is either favoring his left hind, or his shoe has been attached at a slight angle. His rider is light, perhaps eleven ten-weights, not very much more. The other is carrying a larger person, fifteen or sixteen ten-weights at least.” She twisted her head around until she was looking at Epion. “The smaller person matches the size of the Princess of Arderon. What do we know of the guard who accompanied her?”
“Essio would be about that size,” Epion said, nodding.
“He carried weapons but wore no armor.” Dhulyn was studying the ground again. “Is he left-handed?”
“Yes,” Epion said through gritted teeth.
Parno, his face as solemn as he could make it, exchanged glances with Mar and Gun. When he winked, Gun looked away suddenly, and Mar covered her mouth with her hand. It was by such little tricks as these that the Mercenary Brotherhood kept its reputation. At least in part.
Dhulyn stood and looked back along the trail, her brows drawn down. In a moment Parno heard it too, the sound of hoofbeats.
“A page boy comes, Lord Epion,” he said, just as the youngster came into view. Not wanting to waste any time, the Steward of Walls had sent messengers to the other city gates; this page would be bringing Epion those reports.
“My lord,” the boy was shouting even before he drew rein. “No one left the city by any wall gate last night, nor has the princess and her escort returned by one since the sun rose.”
Parno, Dhulyn, and Epion exchanged looks. This confirmed that the princess had not ridden through the city but had left from the palace precinct.
“More likely, then, that this is our quarry. No one else has used this path since these two riders, and they have not returned along it,” Dhulyn said. “If this is indeed the princess and her guard, they are still ahead of us.” She swung herself onto Bloodbone’s back and set off again, this time much more slowly, leaning off to one side with her eyes focused on the ground ahead.
Parno hung back this time, letting Alaria and Epion Akarion follow after Dhulyn. His reins slack, Parno drummed his thumbs on the tops of his thighs. He was not looking forward to the end of this trail. If the news was good, one or the other of the riders they looked for would have been back already. If injury had come to them, it had come to them both. He wished Alaria had stayed behind, as the Tarkin had clearly wanted her to. But she came of Horse Nomad stock. Alaria of Arderon would no more shy away from unpleasantness than Dhulyn herself would.
When the trail widened, Mar and Gun came up beside him.
“I see you haven’t forgotten how to ride, Mar-eMar,” Parno said.
She smiled, her dark blue eyes sparkling in the morning sunlight. “Do you remember how you hoisted me up onto your packhorse in Navra? I swear the animal gave me such a look.” She shook her head, smiling. “It isn’t that long ago, now that I think about it, for so much to have happened since that day.”
“You mean besides your learning how to ride?”
“I don’t know how you can joke about it,” Gundaron said from Parno’s other side. “What happened in Imrion ...” The young Scholar lowered his eyes and his voice trailed away.
“We’re still alive, Gun,” Parno pointed out. “You’re back where you should be, doing what you should be, which is more than you were before.”
“And with me beside you, which is more than you had before,” Mar added.
Gun rubbed at his square face with the fingers of his free hand. Parno snagged him by the elbow and tugged him straighter in the saddle. The youngster was no horseman, he thought, and never would be if after all this time he still couldn’t keep his seat without concentrating.
“You’d best get the Wolfshead to give you some lessons,” Parno said. “Or at least let her show you how to fall off without hurting yourself.”
The entire party halted as Dhulyn dismounted once more. Parno edged Warhammer to the front. This time his Partner had wrapped Bloodbone’s reins around the leather wrist guard on her forearm and was proceeding on foot, still examining the ground as she went. Finally, she stopped and stood still, her arms crossed, her head sunk forward until her chin rested on her chest.
Movement in the sky drew Parno’s eye upward. “Dhulyn,” he said.
She must have heard the warning note in his voice, for she looked immediately out and upward, for the danger his tone said was coming. Then she too saw the carrion birds circling high in the sky a little to the west of where the trail went winding before them, and she froze.
“Parno, my soul,” she said in the nightwatch voice, so quiet that the others, waiting a few paces away, could not hear her. “Keep them away.”
Parno turned at once, catching Epion’s attention before glancing quickly at the others. “Wait here,” he said. “Best if the Wolfshead and I go ahead alone.”
“Mercenary,” Epion began.
“We’ll send if there is anything you can do.” This time the noble caught Parno’s meaning and nodded. Mar took Gun’s hand, but Alaria kneed her horse forward. At a signal from Parno, Warhammer put himself between Alaria’s smaller mount and the forward part of the trail.
“Wolfshead,” Alaria called out. “I must be with you.”
“You will see what you must,” Dhulyn assured her. “Just let us see it first.” The younger woman looked as if she would argue further, but finally she swallowed and nodded.
Dhulyn Wolfshead remounted and with a jerk of her head summoned Parno to ride alongside her.
“Whatever came upon them,” she said, more quietly than she had spoken to Alaria. “It did not come from behind.” She pointed to a telltale scuff on the trail in front of them. “There, you see? Still only the two riders, and the same two at that.”
“What do you think we’ll find?”
Dhulyn shot a sideways glance at her Partner. “Nothing good, as you very well know. The sun’s been up what, four hours? And for the carrion birds to be already circling, the bodies must have been there much longer.”
“Perhaps it’s only the horses.”
“And perhaps we’ve met Cleona and her escort walking back to the city.” Dhulyn refrained from shaking her head. It was habit, she knew, rather than any actual optimism, which led Parno to make that kind of observation. He’d often expressed what he wished were true rather that what he believed.
The road continued s
ome way flat and level. There were signs that once upon a time boulders had been moved, rocks broken and carried away, to make the trail wider in certain spots, but still it twisted and wound around larger outcroppings of rock and small clumps of trees. Around one such bend, Dhulyn could see the grove of wild quince trees the Tarkin had spoken of, where a creek formed a small bathing pool in the shade of the trees. The trail itself swung away to the right, toward what looked like a long mound of earth—not unlike the earthworks thrown up around a temporary military camp, but much overgrown. It was nearer that mound, Dhulyn saw, that the birds were swaying overhead. She slowed, looking over the ground more carefully, knowing that Parno was doing the same on the other side of the trail.
“They went into that grove,” she said, and touched her heels to Bloodbone’s sides. There was something in the shadows, there under the trees, something she had seen many times before. Her sword was hanging down her back, out of the way; she drew it now and dropped out of the saddle next to the body in the Tarkin’s colors. Even though the guard’s neck was at an awkward angle, Dhulyn pushed her fingers under his jaw. The skin was cold, the flesh hardening.
“Broken neck,” Parno said from behind her.
“Masterly observation,” she said, and then shrugged an apology for her tone. Parno would know she did not mean it. “I don’t think that’s what killed him, though,” she added. “At least not just that. He’s much stiffer than he should be, given the hour at which we know he was alive.” Parno edged up for a closer look. They had seen many corpses in their time in the Brotherhood.
“Poisoned first, and then the broken neck for certainty?” Parno suggested.
“That would be my guess also.” Dhulyn stood up and looked around what had obviously been a campsite only hours before. “One person, likely a man, on foot, though he has a horse.” She pointed out the signs as she spoke.
“Princess Cleona sat here,” Parno said. “This is her footprint, certainly. He must have poisoned them both.”
“Poisoned and killed the guard, poisoned and kidnapped the princess?”
“Wouldn’t be the strangest thing to have happened.”
Dhulyn glanced at her Partner and found him looking steadily back at her. She knew what was in his mind. It was in her own as well. “Strange when a kidnapping is the best you can hope for.”
“It would mean she is still alive.”
Dhulyn nodded. Neither of them mentioned the carrion birds, though she knew they were both thinking of them. “That way,” she pointed. “One person on foot, three horses, two bearing burdens.”
“Anything?” she said.
“If there were, would I fail to mention it?”
Dhulyn smiled her wolf’s smile, letting the small scar pull her upper lip back in a snarl. She shook herself, earning an annoyed toss of the head from Bloodbone. She felt the tightness in her neck and shoulders—unexpected, given that she felt she knew what they were going to see. Something was making the small hairs on her arms and the back of her neck stand up, and it wasn’t the knowledge that there was death in front of them.
Parno exclaimed under his breath, and Dhulyn looked over to him. He was not examining the tracks—tracks that still led clearly and cleanly ahead along the trail—but was gazing off toward the south, away from the trail and the strange mound. There the vegetation thinned even further, and the rocks that appeared out of the growth were too regular to be natural.
“The Caid ruins,” Dhulyn said.
“So that,” he said, pointing to the focus of the carrion birds’ attention, “should be just about where Gun said they came across the old Tarkin’s body.”
“Mutilated.”
“As you say.”
Dhulyn took a deep breath and urged Bloodbone forward, doing her best to relax into the horse’s easy movement. Whatever it was that both she and Parno evidently felt, it did not transfer to the horses, for which she found herself grateful.
They were still several tens of paces away when the smell hit them. Not of decomposition, not greatly, not yet, out here in the open. The sun had still to reach the middle sky. It was not that smell that brought the carrion birds. To Dhulyn it was unmistakable, almost as familiar as the smell of her own skin, of the horse under her. The smell of the battlefield, fear sweat, excrement, and above all, blood.
The smell could not prepare them for what they saw.
“Demons and perverts.” Parno’s voice came out in a tight whisper.
Dhulyn clenched her teeth and pulled back her lips as much as she could. “Smile,” she said through her teeth. “You’ll be less likely to vomit.” From the corner of her eye, she saw Parno shake his head, then put his hand suddenly to his mouth. When he lowered it, his lips were pulled back in a wretched parody of a smile.
What was spread on the ground before them resembled a human being—that much could be said for it. It had to be Cleona, but how to be sure? The body was staked on the ground, spread-eagled on its back, though even that was not obvious at first glance. All of the skin on the exposed part of the body had been flayed, spread, and held open with sticks sharpened and skewered into the ground underneath. The way the skin was spread made it seem as though it were being held open by the staked hands, the way a woman might hold open her robe for her lover.
And it was a woman, Dhulyn could see from the internal organs set to one side. Cleona then.
“Caids keep us,” Parno said. “Do you see the blood?”
“It’s hard not to,” she said.
“She must have been alive a long time to have bled so much.”
Dhulyn nodded. “Hours. There’s great skill involved here, that’s certain.” Other organs besides the purely female ones had been removed from their usual places, some completely, and cleanly, evidently after death, and some still partially attached, to keep the victim alive as along as possible. The eyes—
Dhulyn turned away and coughed, trying to force her diaphragm to loosen, to let her take deep breaths. If she was not looking at the body, she could even pretend the very air did not stink of blood. When she knew her stomach was under control, breathing carefully through her mouth to cut the worst of the smell, Dhulyn crouched down once more to what was left of the princess.
Almost at once, she saw something odd. Like the rest of the body, the skin of the arms had been flayed open but not detached. The effect was not unlike the slit sleeves of an overgown. But unlike the rest of the body, the skin of the hands, and the hands themselves for that matter, were clean and intact. She waved Parno closer.
“What do you make of this?” she said when she could take a breath without shuddering.
He crouched down beside her. Dhulyn turned and rested her forehead against his shoulder, breathing in his clean smell of sweat, the scent of almonds from the oil he’d used to shave that morning, the smell of ganje, and the wonderful, clean, living, human smell that was Parno.
“It’s definitely Cleona,” he said. “I recognize the shape of her fingers.” He pointed without touching. “And that’s her ring.”
“Good,” Dhulyn said. “If we can recognize so much, then Alaria will be able to as well. We will not have to show her anything else.”
“Wait.” Parno frowned. “Did Cleona have this scar? Here.”
Dhulyn leaned in to peer more closely, finally using the point of the dagger Falcos had given her to turn the hand. The scar Parno had pointed out extended from the ball of the thumb, around the wrist and disappeared into the skin that had been flayed from the lower arm. Dhulyn shifted to the other side of the body. There was a similar scar on the other hand.
“Cleona had no such marks on her hands and arms,” she said.
“Are you saying this is not Cleona, after all?”
Dhulyn shook her head slowly, eyes still focused on the hand. “As you said, these are the very shapes of her fingers and nail beds. This scar on her palm, that she had before. And this is her jewelry. Look.” Dhulyn pointed out a ring that matched the gold and silver a
rmlet she now wore above her left elbow. “This is Cleona,” she said. “But these,” she indicated the scars with the point of the dagger. “These are old, as if she was cut months ago and the wounds healed.”
“But we know that can’t be true,” Parno said. He rubbed at his upper lip, making Dhulyn think of Gundaron. “The alternative is, well, a Healer.”
“Can you imagine a Healer doing this?” Dhulyn stood gesturing at the remains. “Can there be a mad Healer?”
“I sincerely pray not, my heart.” Parno straightened to his feet and rested his hand on Dhulyn’s shoulder. “I’ll get our cloaks and saddle rolls to take up the body in.”
But Dhulyn raised her hand to stop him and stayed where she was, as she considered the remains once more.
“You must get Gundaron,” she said. “The Scholar must see this before we move anything.”
“I can’t bring the lad here,” Parno protested.
“He must tell us whether the Tarkin’s body was also like this,” she said. She shook herself. “And there is something familiar—”
“Don’t tell me you’ve ever seen anything like this,” Parno said.
“Not seen, no,” Dhulyn agreed. “But still there’s something ...” she shot another glance at the thing on the ground. “It looks carefully planned, like a ritual of some kind. The way the skin is only partly flayed, the hands and—” she shot a quick look. “And the feet intact and what is more, clean even of blood. Gundaron has read far more widely than I; perhaps he has read of something like this.”
“I almost hope he has not,” Parno said as he lifted himself stiffly onto Warhammer’s back. “The idea that such a thing has happened before, often enough to be written down ...” he shook his head.
“It has happened here several times already, if Gundaron is not mistaken. Bring him, but make the others stay back at the campsite. Alaria must not see this until it can be restored to something more closely resembling—” the words stuck in Dhulyn’s throat.
“A human being?”
Path of the Sun: A Novel of Dhulyn and Parno Page 10
