by Jon Kiln
“I told you I knew how to use this thing,” Jace said, but in the moment Draken could not remember exactly when he’d said as much. “Hurry, now. There are more of them than you know, all around here.”
Draken was going to tell Jace about the cage, though his still-murky mind tried to explain that Jace had to know about the cage already, when he noticed the cage door was already open.
“Later,” Jace said, seeing the confusion on Draken’s face. “Right now we run.”
Draken thought he understood. His head pounded in a dull agony, but the elation of freedom helped drive away the pain, or at least his awareness of it.
He swung his legs over the side of the cage, where they dangled, making him feel as much like a little boy as Jace had appeared when Draken first had seen him with the crossbow. For a moment, the pain peaked with his movement, but then Jace was grabbing him and pulling him into the trees, and the adrenaline and excitement of the moment again subverted the pain of his head injury.
In the trees Draken could hear them. Bear-masks all around. What could they be doing?
If Jace had been Sula, he would have known Draken’s thoughts and had an answer for him, but the monk just looked confused at Draken’s slowing.
“Come on!” Jace whispered. “What’s the hold up?”
But he didn’t want an answer. He dragged Draken though the brush. Draken was still somewhat incoherent, but he knew they were making too much noise. Far too much noise.
Without realizing he spoke his thoughts aloud, Draken asked, “Why don’t they hear us?”
“They will if you don’t close your mouth,” Jace hissed, the first time Draken could even remember the man sounding truly at the end of his patience. It was amusing, and Draken smiled, realizing he was somewhat giddy from his head injury, but he didn’t say anything else for a long time.
They continued to move through the trees. On three occasions they got close enough to bear-masks for Draken to see their figures briefly through the screen of trees. What were they doing? Milling about the woods? Out for a stroll? They couldn’t be looking for Draken, not this far out. Even if his absence had already been discovered, the searchers wouldn’t be beyond he and Jace at this point.
A stream. They were there before Draken could process the fact that they were approaching it. The pain was back, very present after their brisk dash through a half-mile or so of forest.
“Choose a number,” Jace said. “One or two?”
“Two?” Draken said, meaning to ask why there were only two numbers, and what they were for.
“All right,” Jace said decisively. He led Draken along the stream to their right. Judging from the sun and what time of day Draken thought it was, they were probably moving east along the bank. The water was flowing east as well, and the stream was about thirty-five feet across.
“I know where we are,” Draken said as he realized it. His voice sounded the way he did when he was deep in his cups. “This is Sheanna River.”
“Are you sure?” Jace said, somewhat urgently.
“It must be,” Draken said.
“We cross now,” Jace said. “Focus so you don’t drown.”
Draken surveyed the spot. “This doesn’t look like the place to cross,” he surmised, seeing it had widened here, and there were tall rocks jutting from the semi-deep water.
“That’s true.”
And then Draken understood what Jace was doing. Draken didn’t know much about battlefield tactics as so little of it applied to arena fighting, but he’d read about this somewhere. When you reached a river you flipped a coin to decide which way to travel (Jace had used Draken as his impromptu coin) so your pursuers couldn’t use logic to determine which way you’d gone. Then you crossed, as randomly as you could. Jace had probably chosen a number of steps in his head, and once they’d reached it, they would cross regardless of how the river looked. Then they would travel in as much of a straight line perpendicular from the water as they could for miles.
It was very difficult to track someone following this maneuver, since the river ruined any trail worth following, and the randomness robbed their path of sense.
“Why do you know about this?” Draken asked, just before they dipped into the moving water.
“The 10th Battle of Rada,” Jace said, and Draken recognized it as the name of an apocryphal account written in the Canon tongue but never accepted as such.
The water was swift, but not unfordable. Draken’s reflexes took over, and he swam the way he had in his training days, a good way to hone many muscles at once and enjoyable to boot. Jace held his own as well, probably just another of the odd monk’s eclectic, if not random, set of skills he’d collected in his life in the monastery. Draken remembered the moat at Merreline. What would Brother Keller have said if he’d looked out his window to see Jace swimming about like a frog in a pond?
“Quit laughing and come ashore!” Jace yelled, and the terror in his voice was plain.
Draken’s mouth filled with water, and suddenly he was beneath the waves. When had he stopped swimming?
His headache was gone. He was floating… floating…
Chapter 33
When Draken came to again, it was late evening. There wasn’t even the faintest hint of danger. He checked his instincts and found nothing. His muscles were relaxed as they hadn’t been in weeks.
He could hear the river, but it was to his south judging from the sun, so they’d at least been able to cross it. His memories of what had happened to bring them here were far from clear, but he could piece it together. Draken’s head was propped on what must have been Jace’s shirt, but he couldn’t see the monk.
“Jace?” he asked.
“I’m here.”
Craning his neck, Draken could make out Jace’s form as it approached.
“I was just listening for bear-masks. I don’t think they’ve found us. There’s a lot of ground to cover. We could have run any direction from the cage. I think we’ll be all right to stay the night, but no fires.”
“Right,” Draken said. “No fires.”
Jace knelt at his side and helped Draken sit up. He shook his wadded-up shirt several times and put it back on. “Getting cold,” he said. Draken could tell right away the man’s good-natured attitude had still not returned. He must have been shaken by Draken almost drowning. But if Draken had died, wouldn’t Jace have just accepted it as the will of the gods?
Instead of asking this, Draken said, “How did you get the crossbow?”
“I’ll tell you what I already told Pul. He’s greedy. In more ways than one.”
“He brought it with him?”
“Oh yes. They had it in a cart, just sitting there as if it wasn’t worth five times its weight in gold. I circled around camp for a while. They weren’t even looking for me. Probably thought I’d run off the first chance I got.”
“They didn’t count on how stupid you are.”
“No one ever does.” Jace smiled, but it looked a little forced. “The rest you know, more or less.”
“And how do you know the lump on my head didn’t scramble my brains worse than you thought?”
Jace only shrugged.
A moment passed, and Draken was grateful for the babbling water he could hear but not see. Its sound soothed him.
“There is something I don’t understand,” he finally said, after mulling it over.
“Just one thing? Wow. Dramm-Teskata must have touched your spirit while you slept.”
“Ha ha,” Draken said dryly. “About the bear-masks. Why didn’t they hear us? Why didn’t they see us? Why weren’t we caught bumbling away through the trees? And it looked like they were… I don’t know, looking for something.”
“I’m afraid I can’t even begin to guess. You know more about the servants of E’ghat than I do.”
“But you were the one dragging me along. Did you know they wouldn’t catch us?”
Jace seemed to think about this. “Know is a tricky word when deali
ng with promptings from the gods. Let’s just say I was obeying the voice of Dramm-Teskata. Or, if not her voice, her… call. I was told, in my heart, that it was the right time to run. I didn’t know what would happen, but I didn’t think we’d get caught.”
Draken didn’t know if he accepted this or not, but it would be foolish to question and argue it out with Jace. They’d escaped. That’s what mattered. He knew the odds hadn’t been in their favor, but they’d made it.
“Now what?” Draken said.
“It’s not obvious?”
Draken wasn’t feeling as disoriented as earlier, but still his brain felt stuffed with cloth, unable to perform the mental leap Jace was requiring of him.
“No,” he finally said, too tired to try to fake knowledge or start guessing.
“Your wife is in more danger now than ever. Whatever they were doing out there, we have to hope it’s something that will keep them occupied for at least a night. A day or two if we’re lucky. They were doing it even before I sprang you. We need to get to Figa. It doesn’t matter if you’re recognized now. There are at least three lives are at stake, including your daughters.”
“Okay, but what’s our plan? We have no food, no money. If I’m right about where we are, and I think I am, there are no roads or people for a long time. It makes sense. How else would they hide that fire pit, amphitheater, whatever you want to call it?”
“Hmm…” Jace said, eyeing a sun preparing to begin the journey of setting. “The morning often brings with it answers one cannot see in the moment. Without fire, I doubt we’ll sleep well, so maybe we should get an early start on it.”
As they made the best of the ferns and dirt, finding places to lie down not littered with roots or embedded rocks, Draken asked, “What do you think that place was? That fire pit. It was big. And old. Do you think it belongs to them?”
“I don’t know,” Jace said, turning away as if he were pulling a blanket over himself. “I don’t really know anything.”
Chapter 34
They’d been following the stream, Sheanna River, actually, though it was not nearly as wide as many of the rivers near the Western coast, for three hours, and Draken guessed it was about two hours before midday. The river ran east, and following upstream would take them to Figa in a day or so, on foot. They’d surmised there had to be a road they could travel on, perhaps a secret road, because Pul’s band had taken them to the fire-pit in a matter of hours, but it was too dangerous to look for and even more unwise to actually travel.
The sounds of birds, the bubbling water, and other animal life seemed foreign to Draken, who had lived in the city almost his entire life. He’d never spent much time in the woods but it wasn’t long before he saw the appeal.
“I’m starting to understand why some people become hermits,” he said as they passed a tree which, according to Jace, might have been over a hundred years old. It was incredibly beautiful to Draken, who’d never seen anything like it.
“Ha!” Jace said, some of his old bonhomie restored after the night of intermittent sleep. “I can actually see you in that role quite easily. From celebrity to recluse! But maybe that’s not so strange a transition, when you think about it.”
Draken tried not to worry about his daughters or Carella, knowing he’d get to Figa as fast as he could. For the time being, he let his mind wander. It almost felt like a brisk nature walk, or some other benign exercise.
Until they found the hole.
Crudely dug out with a spade, or maybe bare hands, the scoop out of the ground measured a bit more than a foot across. The dirt that had been removed, still fresh, was piled next to it.
“Something’s been taken out of this, and recently,” Jace said, kneeling at the side of the hole. He inspected it with care, and Draken thought about how little got past this monk. Perhaps he’d missed his calling. Draken could suddenly see him as a military spy, one of the great secret agents of wars’ past.
“Look,” Jace said, pulling something from the soil. He handed it to Draken, but at first there was no telling what it was. A thin piece of material, about as long as a paring knife. Draken picked the clumps of soil off it, revealing a leather strap. It was old, but not cracked or ruined. It had been treated in some way Draken wasn’t familiar with, not on all the fine clothes and ornamental gear he’d ever worn or seen. Somehow, it had lasted in the damp ground, maintained against the elements for who knew how long.
“Eda is a lot like here,” Draken said. “The same gods. The same kinds of towns. The same technology.” Jace looked confused, and it gave Draken something of a secret pleasure. It was his turn to be non-sequitur. “But the followers of E’ghat know of other things. Technologies no one knows about. I don’t know if they developed it themselves, or if these are otherwise forgotten arts, I just know they have them. The fire-bomb that destroyed the Merreline monastery is an example, and whatever they used that exploded in the second monastery. They have better methods for refining steel, more efficient lamps, all sorts of things. This leather… is finer than any I’ve seen. I don’t doubt for a moment that it was made using knowledge held only by those in the cult. Something was buried here, and they accidentally left part of it behind.”
“This must have been what they were doing,” Jace said. “Digging in the woods. Looking for whatever was hidden here. Or things like it.”
“Obviously,” Draken said, only half listening. His mind was running on overdrive. It was like he was starting to see a bigger picture. He couldn’t make it out, maybe he was standing too close to it, so to speak, but he felt there was something…
“What do you think is happening here, Draken?”
Draken shook his head. He said the only thing he could think of.
“Something bad.”
Chapter 35
They’d retrieved seventy-five of the “bear traps,” a pet name for the devices that resonated with Pul more than their real name. That was more than they’d expected, but Pul’s emotions were still in tumult. He felt like he was balancing an egg on his head, but he could not see or sense it. It could fall without him even knowing.
Jace! he thought angrily. That fool!
But Pul knew Jace was not stupid. He’d accused Pul of having impure motives. Not revenge, no, Pul knew he was better than that. But loneliness… the word crept into his mind like a head cold, and stayed there, worsening all the while. Did he really trust in E’ghat? Could it be that he simply couldn’t handle the thought of returning to Eda empty-handed?
Or did he just miss his brother?
Not to mention the fact that, instead of running, as he should have, Jace had returned, killed two bear-masks, and set Draken free. Busy with the work of digging, somehow the bear-masks had not stopped their escape. Pul knew if he were the captain of a Drammatan military group, he would have sorely punished every bear-mask in his command. But E’ghat didn’t work that way. There was no punishment aside from death for treachery. All else was based on faith. He couldn’t lay a finger on one of his men unless he was prepared to have him executed.
Pul tried to shake these thoughts from his head and put his attention on the road.
It was thin, wide enough for a horse and a cart, but only just. So the procession moved in single-file. It was a testament not only to Pul’s leadership, but to the training of the bear-masks that they had been able to so fully infiltrate the country. Soon they would be seen, certainly, but by then it would be too late for the soldier-police to do much of anything against them.
Not when they were so well-armed with weapons Drammata not only didn’t know existed but couldn’t replicate even if they did.
The late afternoon light filtered through the many tress of the forest, and Pul felt uncomfortable, as if Dramm-Teskata were trying to glimpse him between the leaves. He supposed she was, but it didn’t matter. E’ghat would eat her whole soon enough.
It was so strange for Pul to be here now, the spear-tip of a plan that had been brewing in the cult for longer than he�
�d been alive. But also, it felt natural, like he’d been born for this role as much as Draken had been born for his.
The bear-priests had received communication from E’ghat, revelations they were privy to only after a string of human sacrifices and the intaking of mind-altering chemicals. Draken was not just a scattered of E’ghat, but the key figure in E’ghat’s return. That made Pul very important, as Jace had so quickly surmised. Everyone agreed that Pul had the best shot at converting his brother to the cause of sacred terrorism, but no one had expected this level of resistance from Draken.
Curse him! Jace thought bitterly. Why can he not accept his fate!
Soon, their years of moving in the shadows would be over. If their plan didn’t work in Figa, they might very well return to total obscurity, and E’ghat would have to try again with another group a century from now. Pul wouldn’t let that happen.
He patted one of the “bear-traps” tied to his saddle. Truly, they were ingenious. A weapon so valuable and so destructive that the bear-priests had not even trusted their own followers to resist the temptation of stealing them. They had buried them in secret for decades, in many countries, if the rumors were to be believed. Only on their instruction could they be found.
The ones Pul and his band of a hundred bear-masks had dug up the day before had reportedly been there for nearly fifty years. They did look old, but no worse for the wear. Stout glass cylinders, padded with leather straps, each one could easily sell for a small fortune if the buyer knew what they were getting. But E’ghat did not allow any of his technologies to be sold for profit.
And anyway, they had a good use for these. A use which transcended the need for money.
