Just from the slow intake of breath at his side, Brennan could tell that Kerig did not like that. He did not much like it himself. The Free had the best warriors that years of experience and the greatest ferocity of will could shape, but they had some of the most powerful Clevers in the known world too. Without them, a truly potent weapon was being left in its scabbard.
The Orphanidon reached to his belt and unhooked an object Brennan had not noticed there before. A delicate horn of silver and ivory and ebony, as beautiful a thing as he had ever seen in the hands of a fighting man. The Orphanidon tipped his head back a touch, set the horn to his lips and blew.
The note was pure and clean. A high, wavering rise and fall which echoed from the slopes and flew like the fastest of birds across the wide lands. It was taken up and repeated after a few moments by the solitary figure out on the ridge. And then, faintly, from far beyond that. The Free listened as the cry of the horn was carried off into the distance by one silvery voice after another.
Beautiful a sound as it was, it felt very much like ill tidings to Brennan.
The Orphanidon there among them set his instrument back on his waist. He regarded Yulan impassively.
‘I have called my company. After one setting of the sun and one rising, there will be two hundred Orphanidons across your path, man of the Free. There will be no talking then.’
‘I understand,’ Yulan said quietly. ‘What I have not done in one sunset and one rise, I will leave undone.’
The Orphanidon nodded his head just once. He hauled on his horse’s reins and moved away, brushing close by Yulan as he went. The Free silently watched him ride back up towards his fellow on the ridge.
‘This is going to be interesting,’ Hamdan said after a while, loud enough for everyone to hear. ‘Hope we’ve got enough arrows.’
VII
As the Free busied themselves packing up their simple little camp, Brennan noticed a belated reappearance. Surmun came stumbling up, the case which held the contract scroll securely at his belt, his clothes speckled with dust and dirt. He had been lying somewhere. Not just staying out of the way then. Hiding.
He had a slightly sheepish look about him, but mostly he was trying–and failing–to conceal a tremble of relief. Hope, perhaps. The contract-holder approached Yulan almost eagerly.
‘Is it done?’ he asked. By which he meant, of course, that he wanted to go home.
Yulan laid one hand on his shoulder and brushed some of the dry earth from the man’s breast with the other.
‘You know, contract-holder, when the Free make an agreement, they drain the cup of that agreement to its very dregs. We do as we have pledged and been paid to do. So no, it’s not over.’
Surmun’s face fell.
‘I’ll tell you something,’ Yulan said. ‘Making bones of men who steal children from their beds and carry them off to slavery in some foreign lands… that I would do without payment. We’ve fought and slain many who deserved our wrath and our contempt less.
‘So this ends in only two ways, good Surmun: either with freed slaves and birds plucking the eyes from dead slavers, or with a whole army of Orphanidons barring our way and turning us back. I’d suggest you forget your worries and put your heart into wishing for the first of those endings. Because we’re going to be riding fast for one or other of them now.’
Surmun hung his head. Yulan was already turning away, walking towards his own bedroll. He beckoned Brennan as he went. It was something Brennan had been half expecting. Half dreading, more honestly. Lorin and Yulan had been deep in conversation for a time after the Orphanidon had departed. Brennan had not needed to hear what they had said to sense the darkening of moods which were not exactly bright in the first place.
‘I hear you lost your woman,’ Yulan said as Brennan fell into step at his side. ‘That’d be twice now she’s got the better of the Free. You mean to award yourself some of the fault for this new souring of our day?’
‘I do,’ Brennan said quietly.
‘Good. Seems you earned it this time around.’
Yulan was angry. Brennan could tell that, even though it was a quiet, controlled kind of anger. And Yulan’s anger was not a thing he would ever have wished to merit. Today, for the very first time since he had joined the Free, Brennan felt like a failure. That feeling writhed in him and would not lie still.
‘Turn your head,’ Yulan commanded. ‘Let me see that wound.’
Brennan leaned his head slightly to one side, and turned and lifted it so that Yulan could touch his fingers to the still-bloodied skin. Like a child coming marked from play being inspected by his mother.
‘It hurt?’ Yulan asked. ‘Does it spin or tremble in there?’
‘No. I mean, it hurts, but nothing more.’
‘Very well.’
Yulan lowered his hand.
‘You and your two fool-friends are going to redeem yourselves,’ he said. ‘The three of you go after your runaway. We’ve got no time left to play with, now that the Emperor’s lions are closing in, so you go this very moment. I don’t much want to see any of your faces again without hers alongside.’
‘Yes,’ Brennan nodded.
‘And don’t you let any harm come to her,’ snapped Yulan. ‘Whether she’s running to her family or just out into the waste, she’s still one of those we’re here to save. Whatever she’s done, she’s not done it of her own free choice. You remember that. No matter what happens, you keep her alive. But you make sure she doesn’t reach those slavers and their tyrant either. I’ll not have her warning him where we are and how many.’
Lorin and Manadar were more subdued than usual as the three of them rode on Marweh’s trail. Lorin was concentrating intently, leaning down from his saddle often to check footprints or sign. That did not entirely explain the mood though.
The two of them blamed him for this latest setback, Brennan understood. Reasonably enough. The waterskins–that had been less uniquely and obviously his fault alone. Mostly his, he was still inclined to think. The point was at least open to debate. This… this was all his own.
Neither one of them would hold it against him for long. He knew them well enough to be sure of that. It too would become fodder for mockery and good-humoured baiting in time. Tomorrow will mend it, as his mother used to say about so many passing ills. A finger broken clambering over slippery rocks in the stream: tomorrow will mend it. A heart broken by a girl in the next village over: tomorrow will mend it. Brothers warring over some small slight: tomorrow will mend it.
Still, today was going to be a long and probably miserable day. Perhaps more than a day. As Brennan watched the ground slowly passing beneath his horse’s hoofs, he wondered if he had not acquired a tyrant of his own. Perched at the back of his mind like a curled, bleak-hearted snake. Doubt.
He had thought he belonged in the Free. He had thought he was, or could become, worthy of riding beneath that banner. Now he was not so casually certain. In the life of the sword, mistakes killed people. Failings cost blood. Brennan had no wish to be the one people spoke of when they tried to teach that lesson to others.
‘I don’t think she knows where she’s going,’ Lorin said from up ahead.
He had drawn his horse to a halt. He was pointing out, away from the ridge and the long, low furrow of faintly moist ground they had kept to thus far. Into the emptiness.
Brennan pushed the hair back from his brow. His hand came away wet with sweat.
‘Almost like she’s just wandering,’ Lorin said.
‘If that’s what she’s doing, she’s doing it fast,’ Manadar pointed out. ‘Day’s almost half gone and we’ve not caught her yet.’
‘She’s walking quickly,’ Lorin confirmed. ‘Trotting now and again, for a little while.’
‘Sounds like there’s somewhere she wants to be,’ Brennan suggested.
‘Maybe,’ was all Lorin said.
And he led them out into the dry plain once more.
To follow the trail of a lone woman
was not as easy as it had been to follow a hundred mounted slavers and fifty or more captives. They moved slowly. Lorin paused now and again to reassure himself that he had not lost the course.
It did not help that a hot wind was starting to stir the air. Out in the far distance, Brennan could even see occasional swirling little pillars of dust dancing across the flats. They fascinated him at first. He had never seen anything quite like them. Soon enough, his thoughts turned to worry instead. If gusts of wind took away too long a stretch of Marweh’s prints, even Lorin might be left impotent. She would be gone, vanished into this endless waste. Brennan would have more failure to stew over.
Perhaps pondering the same possibilities, Lorin picked up the pace a little. The air itself had now turned against them. Time had always been their enemy. They had known it anyway, but Yulan made it clear before they rode out from the camp: one sunset, one sunrise, and whether they had Marweh or not they turned about and rode for Hommetic lands. As fast as they liked. After that dawn, more than likely the Free were going to turn from hunters to hunted. These bleak lands might well be full of Orphanidons by then.
Yulan and the rest raced against the same foretold fate, but Brennan would not be there to see what became of their quest. He would not see the tyrant’s little army run down and destroyed, if that was what happened. He would not see the slaves saved, if that was what happened. He and Lorin and Manadar would not be a part of whatever grand victory the Free might win. So be it. If it was punishment, he would never have argued against it.
‘She knows where she’s going now,’ Lorin said abruptly.
Brennan and Manadar rode up to his side.
‘Look there.’ Lorin gestured at the ground. ‘She stopped, then turned suddenly. Heads off in a pretty straight line. You see it?’
‘No,’ Brennan said honestly. The bare earth was unreadable to him.
Lorin pointed at the horizon.
‘She spotted that,’ he said. ‘She’s making straight for it.’
Brennan frowned. The subtle breeze had lifted up a sand-haze, dulling and flattening everything more than a few hundred paces in any direction. He could just make out what Lorin meant though. Way out there in the distance–it was impossible to say how far–there was a shape. A bulging rise in the land. Some kind of wide, low hill rising and falling from the featureless expanse all around it.
‘She must have been told where to go to be reunited with her husband and child,’ Lorin mused. ‘Told what to look for.’
‘It’s probably a lie,’ said Manadar. ‘There’ll be nothing there waiting for her.’
‘Probably,’ Lorin agreed. ‘Doesn’t matter.’
They turned their horses towards that distant point and moved on.
VIII
The hill was much larger than it had appeared. It was also further away than Brennan would have guessed. It took them a good two hours to get close enough to make out any details of the terrain.
Those details were not unexpected. Bare, yellowish rock. A few frail shrubs rooted in crevices and crannies. There were gullies on the lower flanks of the hill, extending out into the flat ground beyond. They shallowed and shrank the further from the slopes they reached, until they disappeared altogether. There must be downpours here, Brennan supposed. Brief, sudden storms which sent water pouring off the hard heights, scouring out channels for itself down onto the plain. Where it flowed and spread and sank away, sucked up by the parched earth.
‘I don’t much like this,’ Lorin said as they drew closer to the great rocky mound.
‘No? You amaze me,’ said Manadar sarcastically.
‘This is not so far from where I told Yulan he might find his quarry. Unless they changed course, there could be a hundred slavers on the other side of this hill.’
‘What should we do?’ Brennan asked.
‘Well, if there’re eyes up on top, they might have seen us by now,’ Lorin said, ‘but they might be careless, or tired, or not there at all. Either way, it’d do no harm to make ourselves a little harder to see.’
He angled his horse a touch to the side and led them down into the tail end of one of the long, sprawling gullies. They worked their way along the bottom of it, its sides rising higher and higher until they passed their heads. There was some dry vegetation down there in the bed of what, perhaps for only a day or two a year, must be a fierce-flowing river. Browned seed-heads that said there had been flowers here, in times past. There were no flowers now.
Soon enough, the ground beneath their feet was starting to rise. They halted, looking up the deep notch cut into the side of the hill. Lorin swung himself down from his horse. Brennan and Manadar copied him.
‘We need to walk someone up there,’ Lorin said, hooking a thumb towards the top of the hill. ‘Make sure there’s no eyes there before we take the horses up.’
‘That’ll take time,’ Manadar murmured. ‘She’s walking away from us, step by step.’
‘Do you boys listen to anything I say? Told you before: never hurts to take every care. Can you not smell it?’
Brennan looked around, puzzled. He could smell nothing but his own dried sweat, filling clothes he had been wearing for days. Manadar, similarly confounded, shrugged.
‘Trouble,’ said Lorin emphatically. ‘Bloody, bad trouble. This place reeks of it. This whole contract reeks of it. You want to see the far side of the next day or two, you’d better learn to smell the way the wind’s blowing.’
‘I’ll go,’ Brennan said, gazing up towards the rocks above.
‘Not alone. Manadar, you keep the horses here until you get some sign from us.’
Manadar started to protest as Lorin pressed reins into his hands, but the older man was far beyond any patience for debates.
‘Brennan here’s the closest thing we’ve got to an archer. I’m more likely to need him up there than you and your sword. And some time soon I’ll need my horse more than either of you, so don’t lose it.’
Brennan followed closely on Lorin’s heels as they worked their way up the gully, and then out onto the slopes of the hill. He tried to put his feet where Lorin’s went, and to keep his back bent just the same and his head bowed just as low.
There was not much by way of shelter from curious eyes out there on the higher ground. What little there was, they found. The few bushes had more or less no leaves. There were boulders here and there, most smoothed and rounded by centuries of wind-blown sand. Cracks and crevices ran up and across the flatter expanses of exposed stone. Trying to remain unseen took a great effort. A keen concentration of mind and a control of body. Lorin had that, and Brennan sought to mimic it with every step.
There were loose pebbles, most resting in crannies but some just lying there on slabs of rock. Lorin disturbed none of them. His feet made no sound on the stone. The leather of his boots did not even creak. Brennan could not quite match that silence. He could hear his own footsteps, soft as he tried to make them. He could hear the arrows in the quiver at his waist shifting against one another.
He took some comfort from the fact that the higher they rose, the more noticeably the wind flowed over them. It was blowing across the face of the hill and out onto the plain. It might carry faint sounds away with it. Unfortunately, it did not carry off much in the way of heat. Even the moving air felt drying and hot. The harsh sun was beating back off the naked rocks. Brennan imagined himself to be a ball of dough, thrust into a baker’s oven.
He heard a buzzard’s cry above and stared up at the dark bird, circling and rising. Waiting for the bread to be thoroughly cooked, he thought.
Lorin pulled him into the lee of a big, round sandy-coloured rock. There was a pool of shadow that came as the most soothing relief. Brennan would have drunk that shadow down if he could, to hold its coolness within him. That was not why Lorin had chosen the spot though.
‘Someone up above us,’ he whispered. ‘Couple of hundred paces, on the top.’
Brennan was surprised. And shamed in a way. He had seen not
hing.
‘He’s looking the wrong way,’ Lorin told him. ‘Or not. He’s watching Yulan’s likely approach, if the rest of them were coming here. Can’t really blame him for that, I suppose.’
‘I suppose not,’ Brennan said.
‘We can kill him for it though.’
Once Lorin had pointed the watcher out, Brennan did not feel quite so bad about having missed him. All that could be seen was a bent knee, jutting out from behind a low cairn someone–many someones, more likely–had built atop the rounded summit long ago. Why anyone in their right mind would spend sweat and strength to gather rocks, carry them up there and pile them in a little tower, Brennan could not guess.
‘You want to go?’ Lorin asked him.
‘Yes,’ Brennan said without hesitation.
‘Good. Draw your knife now. He might hear it leave the sheath if you wait until the last moment.’
Brennan clamped the blade between his teeth so that he would have both hands if he needed them on the ascent, and so that he could not accidentally strike metal against stone. He left his bow and sword and quiver full of arrows there with Lorin. He would not need them.
‘Come at him into the wind,’ Lorin said.
Brennan did that. He cut across the slope before turning round and up. Put the solid body of that cairn between him and the man he meant to kill. He went carefully but not as slowly as before. He trusted the breeze to drift away any slight sound he might make.
For the last hundred or more yards, there was virtually no cover. Much of the hill’s summit was just huge, open slabs of smooth rock. He covered the ground quickly, in a low crouch. His senses were sharp now that violence was coming, and his eyes took in every tiny feature of the surface before each stride. Not a pebble shifted as he passed; not a single crack tripped him.
Only for the final few footsteps up to the cairn did he slow. He measured every movement. Carefully, so carefully, he took the knife from his mouth and readied it. Even then, at the very last, with only a few yards and the stones of the cairn between him and the other, he took the time to stop and wait until his heart had slowed. He cleared his mind and felt his breath pulsing in and out. He delicately lifted his right foot and set it silently down a little further forward. Shifted his weight onto it.
Tyrant Page 5
