Redoubt: Book Four of the Collegium Chronicles (A Valdemar Novel)

by Mercedes Lackey

  But he couldn’t blame Franse for that, any more than he could fault Franse for not helping the village that had been destroyed. Franse couldn’t even see well enough to shoot a rabbit—how was he going to defend himself? He couldn’t, of course. All he could do was run.

  He sat on the ground where they had left him, just inside the garden, which had been thoroughly trampled. They’d stuck him in the cabbages; he managed to get himself marginally comfortable, sagged forward, and plotted out a story for himself, using as much real detail as he could. He didn’t know if there were mines on the southern Border that Karse shared with Valdemar, but he’d bet the Karsites didn’t know, either. He closed his eyes, strengthened his shields and added all the little details he could think of—especially how he had gotten kidnapped. He built up the picture of his life in his mind, and the picture of the person he should be. Stolid, unimaginative, someone who just wanted to go home. Someone who was completely bewildered by everything that had happened to him until now.

  Now and again he looked up through his hair, and nothing much had changed. The black-robes had taken the one bench that had survived from inside and the two outside; they were directing the couple of soldiers that were left in sifting through Franse’s wrecked belongings, and they were fuming. The sun coming straight down through the trees told him that they had been there for several candlemarks. He forced his muscles to relax as they tried to cramp up on him, and he wondered just what the Karsites were going to do with him. What did they think he was? He was pretty certain that if they had any inkling that he was a Trainee, the end would have been swift . . .

  Unless, of course, they intended to take him to a city and make a spectacle of his execution . . .

  He broke out in a sweat all over again. He could picture that far, far too easily. From what he understood, it would be the sort of thing they would do, too. Somehow he had to convince them that he’d make a very poor show . . . though how he would do that, he had no idea. Maybe instead he could convince them that his skill with gems was too valuable to lose?

  He should definitely try to convince them he was terrified. That wouldn’t be at all difficult, since he actually was.

  More and more of the men sent to search for Franse and Reaylis came back empty-handed. The black-robes became angrier and angrier. This would be a very, very bad time to draw attention to himself, so he did his best not to.

  Then, just when he was certain things could not possibly be any worse—of course, they became worse.

  Much, much worse.

  The sound of horses interrupted another snarling match between the officer in charge of the armed men, and the chief black-robe. Both of them looked up; they clearly knew who was coming, and neither of them looked happy about it.

  Mags didn’t recognize anything about the men who rode in and dismounted until one of them opened his mouth.

  Then he recognized the voice. It was one of his kidnappers—so, presumably, the other man was the second.

  It was the first time he’d gotten a good look at either of them.

  They certainly had the look of being part of the same tribe, if not the same family. Both of them were taller than Mags, about as tall as Stone had been. Both sported a healthy tan, but nothing that would make them stand out in Valdemar, although their black hair did put them starkly at odds with all the blond and light-brown Karsites. Still, there were plenty of black-haired people in Valdemar as well. He couldn’t see the color of their eyes from here, only that they were dark, not light, and deep-set beneath heavy brows. Both were clean-shaven. The speaker’s hair was clipped closely to his head, like a newly sheared sheep, and the other wore his hair pulled back in a tail. Their garments were virtually identical to the Karsite tunics and trousers, and they wore riveted leather armor over it all. They were well muscled and clearly fighting men.

  Both of them had light swords and very long daggers. The swords seemed to have a slight curve to them.

  The first man spoke slowly, enunciating every word carefully, so Mags had no trouble following him. He stared at the black-robe as if the man were something he had just scraped off his boot. “You will turn this boy over to us. He is ours,” the assassin ordered, with his customary arrogance.

  The black-robe stared for a moment, then exploded into incoherent rage. Clearly he was not accustomed to being addressed this way.

  Mags had never seen anyone so angry in his life. The man grew purple in the face. He screamed at the assassin, spittle flying, as the assassin stood there coldly with his arms crossed over his chest. The other two black-robes were angry, but not nearly so furious as their chief. Mags huddled over his bound hands and arms, only cautiously taking peeks covertly through his hair. Right now would be a really, really bad time to attract attention.

  When the chief black-robe had reduced himself to impotent spluttering, the first assassin held out his hand behind him, and the second reached into the front of his tunic, extracted a folded paper, and set it into the waiting hand. The first one handed it to the black-robe.

  The black-robe seized it and tore it up.

  Or, to be more precise, he attempted to tear it up. Grunting with effort and struggling with what looked like a simple piece of parchment or vellum, he couldn’t manage the tiniest rip. That only made him fume more. And when he tried to wad it up and throw it at the assassin’s feet, not only would it not allow itself to be wadded, when he tried to throw it down anyway it wafted back to the assassin’s hand, and the assassin presented it all over again, with a smug smirk.

  Mags felt his mouth go dry. The hell?

  The other two black-robes behind their leader were just as startled by this and grew pale, and all the armed men stepped back involuntarily, even their captain. It was perhaps an unlikely reaction to something so outwardly harmless—but what kind of magic (and it had to be magic!) could make a fragile piece of paper act as if it were stronger than steel and fly like a feather?

  The chief black-robe was the only one who was not impressed. He spat out some words, but he snatched the paper out of the assassin’s hand and opened it. His face contorted into such a scowl it scarcely looked human as he read the paper. When he spoke again, looking up at the first assassin, his words dripped vitriol, and there was the promise of future mayhem behind them.

  “We will challenge each other one day when you are not hiding behind the robes of the Son of the Sun.” Both of the black-robe’s fists were clenched, and now his fury was mingled with frustration. A dangerous combination.

  The assassin continued to smirk and shrugged. “When our task is complete, we shall be gone. You may seek us out if you dare. Your little pets will find a warm welcome, and I should enjoy covering my books with your skin. In the meantime, I will take my property.” He pointed with his chin at Mags.

  The black-robe turned his back on the assassin; Mags assumed that he thought he was expressing utter contempt, though what he looked like was a spoiled child who wasn’t getting his way for once.

  Well, now wouldn’t be the time to tell him.

  But he gestured vaguely in Mags’ direction, as if to say “Take it, I don’t need it,” and stalked into Franse’s former home, shouting at the top of his lungs, his voice echoing out through the tunnel entrance.

  The other two black-robes followed him in, leaving Mags, his captors, and the assassins alone together.

  A most uncomfortable silence hung over them all.

  The man holding Mags’ rope dropped it abruptly, as if saying, “You take it! I don’t want it!”

  The assassin just looked at the Karsite.

  Now Mags couldn’t see the man’s expression very well from the position his head was in. But as the assassin handed the paper back to the second one, Mags actually heard his captor gulp, audibly.

  That more or less suggested whatever look the assassin had been giving the Karsite, it had been enough to frighten and intimidate a hardened soldier. One who served black-robe priests who controlled demons.

 
; It was also true that while the Karsite soldiers had been exuding an air of don’t make me kill you, the assassins had an aura of something else altogether. Something more like I just might kill you if I can’t think of anything better to do.

  The assassin continued to watch Mags’ captor. Mags could see the Karsite actually starting to shiver. Then the soldier carefully bent down, not taking his eyes off the assassin, and picked up the end of the rope. He tugged on it, and Mags clambered clumsily to his feet. It was a good thing his hands were tied in front of him, or he’d never have been able to get up.

  He tugged on it again and led Mags to the assassin. The assassin held out his hand, and the man put the end of the rope in it. Then the seemingly hardened, tough soldier actually skittered away as fast as he could, never taking his eyes off the assassin and never turning his back.

  “Good.” The assassin raked the remaining soldiers with a cold glare. “We will be going. Follow, and you die. Tell your master that if he sends his little dogs after us, I will be picking my teeth with their bones.”

  He led Mags over to the horses, but he didn’t move all that quickly, which at least meant Mags wasn’t falling over his own feet trying to keep up. He did fasten the end of Mags’ rope to the back of the horse’s harness—which was when Mags saw that both horses were still in wagon-harness and the men were riding them bareback. They must have just unhitched them and left the wagon somewhere in order to travel faster. How had they found out that the black-robes had found Mags in the first place?

  Had it been that unseen watcher?

  It was as reasonable an explanation as any.

  He was afraid when they kicked their horses into a walk that they would go too fast for him to keep up—that they would punish him for escaping by dragging or half-dragging him all the way back to where they had left the wagon.

  But they didn’t. They kept the horses to a reasonable slow walk. If he hadn’t been trussed up and in the hands of enemies, it might even have been a pleasure, since the woods were cool and they were picking an easy trail for him. He might even have felt some relief, if he hadn’t been so completely uncertain as to their motives; after all, he’d been taken out of the hands of people who absolutely would kill him, and who had means of telling when or if he used Mindspeech. Now he was in the hands of people who had at least taken some care of him and might not be able to tell . . . well, unless he used it on them. Ice and Stone—or their guardians, whatever they were—had certainly been able to tell when that happened.

  There was no obvious path away from the cave for quite some distance, as Mags had already discovered. In fact, it wasn’t until they passed by the remains of a village—scorched chimneys sticking up out of barren earth where nothing grew—that they finally came upon the remains of a road. Mags recognized it immediately; this must be the village that Franse had seen burned to the ground. He wondered what had happened to the villagers. He was afraid to even speculate.

  Mags averted his eyes. The assassins seemed indifferent to the signs of tragedy all around them. It might just have been another part of the forest.

  Because the road formed a break in the tree canopy, the undergrowth was much heavier on either side of the road than it was deeper under the trees. Strangely enough, the wildlife didn’t seem to take too much notice of them. Maybe because it had been so long since anything saw a human being that the birds and animals had mostly lost their fear.

  They walked about half the afternoon before they came to the spot where the wagon had been left, and Mags would never have known it was there if they hadn’t stopped, dismounted, tied the horses to a tree, and gone to what looked like a thicker part of growth at the roadside and begun pulling away greenery. He was astonished. So astonished, he found himself making mental notes.

  They had picked a spot where the undergrowth was set back a bit from the roadside; perhaps this had once been a wider spot in the road. They had fitted the wagon into that spot. Then, somehow, they had found and cut branches from bushes or trees that had not withered in all the time they had been gone. It looked as if what they had taken had mostly been evergreens, which meant they must have combed a good part of the forest around here to find them. He could not tell where they had cut the branches from, which meant they also must have been very careful in their pruning, either taking the entire thing off at the root, or selecting branches from the side away from the road.

  There had been some ivy vines here, and they had parked the wagon in a way as to make the best use of them without cutting or breaking them. But the real genius lay in what he only saw after they finished pulling out the branches and pulling off the vines.

  The basis for the covering was a net that covered the entire wagon and was stretched between two trees as well as thrown over the top of the wagon itself.

  It was a brilliant idea; it certainly would take up next to no room in the wagon storage, and you could easily weave vegetation into it. Working backward, he could see that they had first draped the net over the wagon, tied it up, then made use of the ivy vines, carefully disentangling them from the tree, the undergrowth, and each other and draping them over the net at irregular intervals. Many had been long enough, once untangled, to toss right over the top of the wagon, and they caught and held on the net. An hour or so, and their own natural growth turned their leaves toward the sun, making them look as if they had grown there in the first place. Then the men had tucked the branches in all over the net to fill in the look of a small thicket, complete to the dried grass and dead weeds that looked as if they had grown there at the base.

  It wasn’t just a big lump of vegetation. It blended in to the rest of the thick undergrowth on that side of the road. It just looked as if here it was a trifle thicker, but not at all unnatural.

  The two men scattered the cut branches, and while one came to get the horses, the other untied the end of Mags’ rope from the harness. He held the rope in one hand and looked at Mags meditatively.

  “I can hit you on the head again, and we can load you into the wagon,” he said. “Or you can get in on your own. Which is it to be?”

  He spoke Valdemaran with absolutely no accent, which astonished Mags so much that his jaw dropped. For a moment, all he could do was stare at the man. But when the assassin started to move, he came to his senses.

  “I’ll get in,” he said hastily.

  The man allowed him to lead the way, trussed up as he was. After a moment of study, Mags put his rump against the back of the wagon, jumped backward up onto the back, swung his legs over, and inched his way inside, scooting himself along on his rump and heels and wedging himself in to his captor’s satisfaction.

  “Now that you have seen that it is much preferable to be with us than with those sun-dogs, I expect you to behave yourself,” his captor said sternly, as the jangling of harness up front told Mags that the other man was putting the horses to the wagon, and they were probably going to be away from here soon. His eyes were very hard and very cold. The look in them warned that if there were further trouble, Mags would not like the result. “If they had known what you are, we would have arrived to find you with a slit throat. If they ever catch their other quarry and he tells them what you are, which he will, they will be looking for all of us, and not even the written shield of the head dog will protect us. So I advise you to be very quiet. We have been mandated to bring you home, boy, but that mandate does not include getting ourselves killed in the process. It takes twenty-five years to train to where we are now, and that is an expense in time and effort the Shadao does not like wasting. We will not hesitate to throw you to the sun-dogs if it becomes a question of you or us, and the Shadao will favor our decision.”

  Mags nodded vigorously to show that he understood; his mouth was too dry with fear to say anything.

  “Good. I see we understand one another.” The assassin pulled down the canvas flaps of the back and tied them closed, leaving Mags in the half-gloom of the interior. After a while, one of the men clicked to the hor
ses, and the wagon started moving.

  Mags sagged against a bag of what felt like oats and wiggled until he was marginally comfortable—although he was anything but comfortable inside. He shook with fear and reaction. He was still in terrible danger, and that little speech had left him with far more questions than answers.

  Unlike the first set of—well, what would you call them? Saboteurs, he supposed. Well, unlike them, this pair spoke flawless Valdemaran. So they must have been carefully prepared so that they didn’t stand out at all once they got into Haven. Like Ice and Stone, they were consummate professionals. Mags was beginning to suspect that catching Ice and Stone had been largely a matter of luck and the right set of circumstances; if that pair’s primary goal had been to get Mags rather than to disrupt the leadership of Valdemar . . .

  I’d’a been in a wagon heading south months ago . . .

  Instead, Ice and Stone had been faced with divided goals, and as a result, they’d failed both missions.

  Clearly these two had a single mission. Get Mags. Like an arrow loosed by an expert marksman, they’d been sent to the target, and they would hit it.

  We have been mandated to bring you home, boy.

  So they did want him alive. But not at the expense of their own lives, so if Franse was caught, and the Karsites caught up with these two, they would probably pretend they’d had no idea he was a Trainee and slit his throat themselves to prove it.

  Mags had no doubt that they were right; if Franse was caught, he’d have no choice but to tell the truth, and given everything he’d seen about the Karsite black-robes so far, Mags was not entirely sure that being dead would guarantee silence.

  Poor Franse. He devoutly hoped his friend was well away, and not just for his own sake.

  That chief black-robe was . . . terrifying. That was all on his own. Everyone, including the other two black-robes, had been afraid of him, and Mags was as certain as he had ever been of anything that it was for a very good reason.