But that was fine. They were not on the wall; they were at the door, condemned to stare at the endless warehouses and wait for morning.
Maybe since he’s down here with me and Wes is off getting punished, the others won’t try anything, he thought hopefully. He could not imagine Erevard running off without Fendil, and though he suspected that Maevor could escape at any time, the smuggler had never shown an inclination toward it. Gate watch might not be their doom after all.
The horn for the Barrow Gate sounded, signaling the start of night-watch. Cob listened as shouts came down the wall, closer and closer until it was his comrades calling "Post twenty-one set!" and him raising his voice to declare, "River Gate door set!"
"River Gate overlook set," boomed Horrum from above. "Signaling."
A breath, then the long steady note of the River Gate horn rolled over the darkened camp. As its echoes faded, the calls resumed, moving southward into silence.
Biting into his biscuit, Cob made ready for the onslaught of boredom. Most would like this better than shoveling night-soil by the light of a few lanterns, but Cob preferred the physical work; it made the time go by faster, and he had lost his sense of smell ages ago. Here, it would be difficult not to nod off. His scalp itched from sunburn and dried sweat, his shoulders ached, and his thoughts were already drifting. Hopefully Fendil's smoke would not get to him. He could do without seeing the mist tonight.
He slid the spy-panel open as he chewed. Outside, the night sky glittered with stars, the forest just vague stubble on Varaku's rocky chin; further east, the Rift rose ponderously to meet the emerging face of the child moon. Not for the first time, Cob wished he had been born on the other side of that great wall. In the Phoenix Empire, not the heretic west.
Closer, the river was a platinum ribbon winding slowly by, broad yet shallow enough to show the rocks in its belly. The dock was just out of sight to the north, not currently in use. In the rainy season, the river would likely spill up to the wall, but this summer had been long and dry and the barges had stopped arriving two months ago. Supplies came in overland now, raising all the prices.
Somewhere to the south, the horn of War Gate sounded. He wondered how they had arranged that watch.
Time passed quietly, Fendil perfuming the air with his bittersweet herb, Cob watching the moons creep slowly up the sky. As the ground cooled, a breeze began to sing down from Varaku's distant pillars and crags, and it raised the hairs on Cob's neck but soon became background music to the skitter and call of small animals in the desert scrub.
He was watching a night-bird hop among the exposed rocks when something poked him in the spine.
Lurching away from the door, he snapped his spear up only to have it swept aside by a black-clad arm. Next to him, Fendil cursed and fumbled for his own weapon, spilling pipe-embers everywhere.
"You're dead," said the shadowed figure, making snipping motions with two fingers. "Severed spine. More attention, less daydreaming."
Cob lowered his spear and scowled, heart thundering even as he recognized Darilan's voice. "Sir," he said, trying to follow protocol. "Do you need to go out?"
The scout emerged from the shadows, gaze flicking to Fendil as the grifter hid his pipe guiltily. Without a comment, he looked back to Cob and nodded at the door. "Step outside, I need to speak with you."
Cob blinked. This was already an unusually Darilan-filled day; normally the scout would pop by for a few words or a short diatribe then vanish for a week. This request, though, was against regulations. Gate guards ducked out now and then to avoid the trek to a latrine, but it was technically a whipping offense. "Can't leave my post, sir," he hedged.
"The other side is still your post. This won't take long."
Cob glanced to Fendil for support, but the lanky slave just gave him a knowing look and pulled the bar off the door, then jerked back the three bolts. Pushing the door open, he gestured out to the night beyond.
"No eavesdropping," said Darilan as he slipped through. "We'll knock. Come on, Cob."
Setting his spear to rest beside the door, Cob gave Fendil a last glower then followed. The door shut firmly behind them, bolts snicking into place.
The moons cast a two-toned light over the rough landscape, silver and gold. Darilan stood beneath the watchpost overhang just beyond the spy-panel's view, half his face in shadow, gloved fingers ticking time on the hilts of his blades. Cob suppressed a sudden chill.
"So...everythin' all right?" he said uncomfortably.
The scout just watched him. The moonlit half of his face looked like a mask, leached of color and expression, the one eye glittering oddly. Cob had never seen him like this.
"How's Wes?" he tried again.
"Dead."
"Wh--"
"I slit his throat and left him in your tent."
Cob stared, trying to squeeze sense from this. Darilan was not the type to joke, but he forced a laugh just in case. "That's... That's not so funny..."
"No."
"Because really, you wouldn't..."
Darilan smiled, an unnerving one-sided motion. "Run, Cob. Go."
For a moment he wondered if Fendil's smoke had gotten to him--if this was some horrible rashi-dream. Nothing about it felt real. He had never been afraid of Darilan before. Wary of his mood, yes, especially when he started tapping his blades, but the scout had never hurt him or threatened him, not even when they argued. They had been friends for five years, and Cob had once thought of them as brothers.
Now he was scared.
"No. You're--" He shook his head slightly, unable to look away. "There's somethin' wrong with you today. Maybe you're the one who needs the Inquisitors."
The smile faded. Darilan stepped forward and Cob tensed, ready for some kind of assault, but the scout only reached past him to rap on the door. The spy-panel snicked open. "We're not coming in," he said before Fendil could speak. "You're coming out."
"Sure, yessir," came the grifter's hazy voice.
Cob wanted to protest, but his tongue would not unstick from the roof of his mouth. A little voice insisted that this was just a prank, that if he made a scene he would look like a fool. The bolts clacked back and the door eased open just enough for Fendil to slip through, and for a moment Darilan looked away. As the gaze broke, Cob reeled, feeling weird and dizzy like he had just been released from something.
"Stand there," Darilan told the lanky slave, pointing to the wall. "Cob, give me your sword."
Oblivious to the tension, Fendil moved to lean against the bark-coated timbers, pipe smoldering between his fingers. After all, there's nothing to fear, yammered that little voice. Darilan is a friend. He wouldn't get us into trouble.
But as the scout locked his hypnotic stare on Cob again, he found his hand moving on its own to draw the sword. Like most of the common-use blades, it was chipped and pitted by negligence, but in the eerie moonlight it looked sharp as a razor.
Darilan lifted it from his nerveless grip, tested its heft, and said, "This will do."
Then he struck sideways, never looking away. Transfixed, Cob heard the muffled sound of metal biting through flesh and into wood, and the low gurgle that followed. Fendil's spear toppled forward to beat a puff of dust from the dry earth. A moment later, a spill of embers lit the ground around his feet.
Darilan released the blade and it stayed horizontal, quivering faintly. A certain satisfaction curved the lit corner of his mouth. "Now will you go?" he said gently.
Cob's world contracted to a pinspot. It had to be a nightmare, yet he knew he was awake; he felt the rocks digging into his heels through the old leather of his boots, the sweat ticking down his neck, the throat-thickening thunder of his heart. Everything real, too real, like the way Fendil's hands fluttered like weak moths at his sides.
Still paralyzed, he could only watch as the scout's hand moved to the dagger in the sheath at the small of his back. As it slid free, crimson fire kindled up the blade, limning sigils etched deep in the black surface. His eyeli
ds flickered as if something within the weapon distracted him.
And that was enough. Already straining, Cob shot into motion the instant the stare broke, bolting for the river like a frightened hare. It gleamed ahead like molten glass, and from behind he heard the light, professional steps of his best friend in pursuit.
Someone shouted from the wall. A crossbow bolt hissed down to strike by his feet, and he leapt forward, clearing the edge of the embankment to come down in a graceless tumble through pebbles and sand and then shallow, sluggish water. Wrenching to his feet, already soaked, he glanced back to see Darilan approach the verge. His dagger made a red gash in the night.
Turning, Cob splashed out toward the far shore and Varaku, a black hole opening in his heart.
Chapter 2 – Off the Leash
By the time Cob finally collapsed among Varaku’s rocks, the mother moon had sunk low in the west. He huddled there, panting and listening to the hiss of wind through dry brush and standing stones, his legs aching, boots waterlogged, breeches damp all the way to mid-thigh. Far below, the river lay like a gleaming ribbon, fires speckling the dark encampment beyond.
Like the scatter of embers.
His stomach lurched again, and had he not already retched up everything mid-river, he would have done so now.
His thoughts kept hitching on two phrases: I have to go back and they’ll execute me. Heedless of the quandary, his feet had moved him to temporary safety, across the lazy river and up the rubble-strewn foothills of Varaku. Everything seemed so unreal, but running was second nature; running he could do, until his legs or lungs or heart gave out.
He could not shake the sight of the quivering sword or the look in Darilan’s eyes. It made him want to crawl in a hole and pull the rocks down around him. Sleep for a century. Or perhaps just die.
There was nothing. He had nothing.
He sucked in a breath of dusty air and tried to regain some composure. The red stones still radiated the day’s warmth, their solidity under his hands steadying him. Two years on the flatlands, bordered by nothing more than canvas tenting and wooden walls, had left him feeling small and exposed, but being among rocks again—tall, standing shelves and overhangs of rust-colored sandstone—brought a comforting sense of confinement.
No matter that this was nothing like Kerrindryr, nothing like the granite cliffs and limestone caves he knew. He had heard all the dire tales about Varaku, but when under threat, his feet had brought him here, because it felt like home.
“Curse it,” he muttered, mouth sour and gritty. Gripping the rocks, he struggled up and looked ahead.
The Varaku Tableland rose into the east, its colors washed to grey by the wan light. Steep cliffs and jagged crags mounted mile by mile toward the chain of crumbling plateaus at its heights; beyond them, the Rift rose like a wall against the starry sky, sheer and incomprehensibly huge. In daylight, the face of the Rift would be banded by strata—ragged stripes of red and yellow in the top half, then descending to grey and black—but right now it all looked silver, as if wet or polished smooth. No matter how long he dwelt in its shadow, he knew it would still terrify him on a primal level: the evidence of the cracking of the world.
To the south, the Tableland stretched past the lights of Kanrodi and into serpent territory, ever bordered by the Rift. It was dry as bone in that direction, like the badlands that surrounded the besieged city and marked the border between Imperial-conquered Illane and serpent-vassaled Padras. How anyone could live there, Cob could not guess; it would be difficult enough to survive on this stretch of Varaku, which at least had a suggestion of plant-life and thus, hopefully, water.
To the north, the red rocks tapered down into the dark tangle of the Mist Forest—what little of it stood on this side of the Rift. In daylight, a fuzz of trees could just be seen at the top of the great cliff; according to the eastern slaves, the true Mist Forest covered the land above for thousands of miles east- and southward, leaving the forest on this side like a strip of rug accidentally sliced away from the whole. Here near the badlands it was thin and dry, unhealthy, but Cob had seen it throughout their march south; in greener territory it swelled out from the shadow of the Rift like an invading force, to lurk at the eastern edge of the Losgannon River as if contemplating the crossing.
Behind him lay the long slope of rubble and half-broken pillars he had climbed in the past few candlemarks’ panic. It was the easiest way, and the safest: to just go back. To return to the embrace of the Crimson Army and pay for what Darilan had done.
He shook himself and felt the arrowhead tick against the hollow of his throat. Away from the stones, the wind ruffled his sweat-damp hair and chilled the wet cloth against his legs; the sound as it wound through the age-worn pillars was sometimes a whisper, sometimes a moan, sometimes almost a song. He struggled not to listen. Rumor said it was Dark spirits, luring men to their doom.
This place might feel solid, like shelter, but he could not stay. It would kill him.
As might pressing on. He had no equipment, not even a canteen. The Army kept them from the slaves specifically to bind them to the camp where the water was provided in buckets, rationed daily. Already his mouth was dry, the taste of bile coaxing him to spit though he could not afford it. Come daylight, Varaku would be seared by the sun, boiling hot. Even supposing there was water somewhere, he did not know how to find it.
But he could not go back. Would not. For all that his mind screamed I was almost free! Almost aged out of slavery! he knew the rules were different now. Even without Darilan’s actions, he had run away. There could be no return.
So he forced himself to push on—eastward, upward, as if gaining altitude could get him a better vantage. A perspective that would let his eyes find sense where his mind had failed.
As if moving could keep him ahead of the intrusive images that hounded him.
With the land gone rugged, he walked and sometimes climbed, his hands remembering the old process of reading the rock and finding purchase. It had been years, but his body still knew how to sling him upward, his feet how to brace him on even the tiniest hold. He thought fleetingly of pulling off his boots and climbing bare-toed like he had as a child, but those tough calluses had faded. He did not want to leave a blood-trail.
Such exertion whittled his mind to a blessedly tight focus, so much that he barely felt the time pass. He crossed flat stretches studded with dry briar and spindly cacti and clambered up scree-littered slopes punctuated by boulders and sheets of stone, passed through shallow canyons cut by wind or long-gone water, and edged across shimmering inclines of loose sand, treacherous as ice. Sleep dragged at him, painting weird pictures behind his eyelids. More than once he blinked awake to find himself standing among unfamiliar stones, his method of arrival gone in the mists of somnambulism.
Finally, when only a sliver of the mother moon remained on the horizon, he let himself seek shelter. He did not know where he was or how far he had come, only that he could not do this by starlight, and the dark gap at the base of a nearby cliff beckoned to him. He liked caves; he had been born in one, raised in one. Lightheaded and dry-mouthed, he fumbled at the swordbelt he still wore, thinking to prod the cave's interior with the stiff leather scabbard he had nearly forgotten he had, but his aching hands would not comply; they could not make sense of the buckle. Thwarted, he picked up a rock instead and approached the cave.
Scrub-brush clung to the sand around its mouth, undisturbed. When he flicked gravel inside, he heard it rattle immediately against stone. Nothing stirred. Cautiously he knelt and peeked in.
Empty. A small natural cave, barely an armspan wide, with a floor of sand and old leaves. A thin fissure ran along the ceiling to end in a fist-sized black gap, but he heard no sound from it and no suggestion of grigs or spiders or bats. Too tired to be picky, he crawled in and crammed the rock into the gap just in case, then collapsed on his side, facing the exit.
Sleep came immediately.
*****
Lerien beckoned f
rom the ice-rimed ledge ahead, his mouth forming words that the wind took away. Bowing his head, Cob tried to shuffle forward against the buffeting gusts, but came up short a few steps from his best friend.
Something had him by the arm.
Dread clenched in his chest. Even as Lerien reached for him, fair hair whipping around his worried face, Cob looked back.
A black gauntlet encircled his wrist, the grey winter light picking out bark-like patterns etched in the material. Black armor encased the arm and shoulder beyond it, terminating in sheer cliffside granite just past the pauldron. Thin black spikes grew from the rocks above it like weird branches.
Cob scrabbled at the gauntlet but his mittened fingers slipped from it uselessly. Desperate, he yanked against it, twisting on the ledge. His boots slid on the ice and went over the verge to dangle in thin air above the mist-filled gorge, the gauntlet now the only thing that kept him from falling. With his free hand he tore at the wall for purchase, bringing down a rain of loose snow—
*****
--and sneezed, and opened his eyes.
Sunlight saturated the rock outside the cave. He squinted against it, disoriented. Another rivulet of sand and dust trickled down on his head, and he pushed up on his elbow, groaning at the aches the motion awakened. Raking the sand from his hair, he looked up at the crack in the ceiling.
And froze.
Instead of a small hole, the entire back wall of the chamber was gone, leaving a black, gaping opening mere inches away. The sand he had lain on was already sliding into it grain by grain. A musty mineral odor wafted up from the darkness on some subterranean current, and there seemed the faintest whisper…
Cob scrambled toward the light as fast as he could, heart in his throat.
As his head and shoulders came free of the cave, something yanked at his waist--a band of tension right under his ribs like some tentacle from the depths. He swallowed a shriek and swung his arms wide like a swimming stroke, catching the rock walls to either side of the entry and shoving with all his strength. The pain intensified, then something snapped and he scrambled free, nearly braining himself on the rock wall opposite the cave.
The Light of Kerrindryr (The War of Memory Cycle Book 1) Page 3
