Students of the Order

by Edward W. Robertson

  The next town, Avowtres, was a ways away, and they hoped that if they rode briskly, and did not stop for any length of time, they might reach it an hour or two after nightfall.

  Wit's horse died an hour after noon, collapsing in a heap, never to rise again. Wit somehow ended up on the ground, next to the dead horse, where he burst into an uncontrollable fit of laughter.

  The road was deserted as far as they could see, bordered by a scraggly forest. They had not seen any other travelers for several hours. Wit and Wa'llach took the bags and saddle off of the dead horse, unloaded Wa'llach's horse, and used it to drag the dead horse off of the road. Wa'llach was ready to stop once it was clear of the roadway, but Wit had them drag it further, into a small clearing, just in view of the road. He untied the dead horse from the living one, drew his dagger, and cut open the dead horse's stomach.

  "What in all the hells are you doing?"

  Wit laughed. "I want to see if I was right about anything." He briefly recounted the story of how he had acquired the late horse, and when Wa'llach was done laughing he helped Wit butcher it, although by that time Wit had largely finished.

  They started a fire and opened a bottle of ale.

  "We might abandon some of the supplies, and put you on the pack horse."

  Wit nodded. "We were overloaded as it was, thanks to all those villagers. But whatever we do, there's no way we make Avowtres today, unless someone shows up and helps us. We might as well load the stores on the horses and go on foot—we'll get to Avowtres tomorrow in any event."

  They cooked some meat, and opened another bottle of ale.

  "You might be a slimy squid of a conjuror, but you do know your horses."

  "Well, what they taste like."

  "It's true, in all my years I don't think I've had half a dozen horses better than this one…and when you're hiding from an army of dragars in the Angwysh Mountains, you eat plenty of horses, my friend." Wa'llach licked his fingers. "No sense in carrying all those bottles of ale with us, is there?"

  "I don't suppose there is." They drank a third bottle and then opened a fourth.

  They heard men coming through the woods. Wit got up and Wa'llach shrugged himself into a position where his hand was slightly closer to his axe. A group of timber cutters appeared in the clearing, sniffing the fire and the cooking meat. They were hauling a small cart of wood with the aid of two mules.

  "Would you like some horse?" asked Wit. "We have lots."

  The head of the timber cutters, a short man with a gray beard, inspected Wa'llach, the dead horse, and the empty ale bottles. "What do you want in return?"

  "Nothing," said Wit, "either you eat the horse or the worms will. My companion and I were journeying to Avowtres and if you could help us carry our things in that direction we would appreciate it."

  The man nodded. "I'm Mollet. We're going down the road in your direction for another five miles, and we'd be happy to help you carry your packs, but then we turn east to Plawki, which is two miles off the road."

  "Could we find a bed and buy a horse there? Perhaps one that might live for a week or two?"

  A grin suddenly crossed Mollet's face and he slapped Wit on the back. "You've been horse-trading with that innkeeper's daughter, haven't you? Haha, that little tart is the worst cheat in five kingdoms! Her eyes must have fallen out of her head when she saw you: everyone around here has been wise to her tricks for years. Haha, yes, we will surely treat you more fairly than she did, I have a horse that will carry you for a month, at least, haha!"

  Wit helped Mollet cut more meat out of the horse, and Wa'llach built up the fire.

  "Wa'llach, perhaps they would like a drink of the spirits that those villagers gave you," said Wit.

  "I don't think there's any left."

  "That's not true: there's another bottle in your saddlebags."

  Wa'llach gave Wit a look of pure hatred and grudgingly passed around the jug.

  The lumberjacks ate what they could, and butchered the rest of the horse, which they brought, with Wit and Wa'llach's things, down the road. Wit picked up his staff and Mollet noticed it for the first time.

  "You're a wizard?"

  "I am."

  "A merchant we met on the road said that a wizard had killed twenty bandits in a town to the east of here, boiled their brains right in their skulls."

  Wit looked painfully at the ground.

  "A thousand pardons, I did not mean to speak out of turn."

  "You did not; there is nothing to pardon."

  They walked in silence for a while.

  "If it is not disrespectful of me to ask: is what the merchant said true?"

  Wit nodded. "It is not disrespectful at all. I have not seen twenty bandits, much less killed them."

  "But…"

  "I met two—one of them is dead, from magic that I used on him."

  "The merchant also said that the bandits had murdered a dozen children."

  "They had kidnapped four of them."

  "Kidnapped?"

  "They hid them in a cave with a wyvern."

  "Good lord! I have heard of that happening, but never in these parts…were the children lost?"

  "No, they were recovered."

  "Praise the gods! Did you have a hand in that?"

  Wit nodded.

  "Well, that's something to feel right proud of, my lad!"

  "Yet, I do not."

  "Would you rather the children died?"

  "No. But I had rather the man had lived."

  "A wretch who would do a thing like that?"

  "I don't mourn his passing, but nor do I feel any pride for my role in it. It had to be done, I suppose, but it was a disgusting thing—much more wretched than gutting the horse. I am somewhat proud of having gutted the horse; I am not of having killed the man."

  The woodcutter nodded gravely, and they walked on in silence.

  There was no inn, as such, in Plawki, but there was a trading post with some cots set up in a store room and a few tables in the front where the people seemed to gather and drink. The trading post had a stable attached to it, and Wit helped Wa'llach and a few of the lumberjacks unload the remaining horses, rub them down, and feed them.

  When they were done, Wit told Wa'llach to look over the other horses in the stable and see if he thought that any of them would survive the trip to the mines, while Wit went into the trading post and sat in a quiet corner.

  Dusk was falling. Physically, Wit felt very tired. He realized that he had no very clear idea where he was: they had taken a winding path off of the main road, and he did not know when they would reach Avowtres or how long after that they would get to the mine at Reading. This imprecision was foreign to him, and in its own way, as exhausting as the days spent on the road.

  A thin, nearly expressionless man with weak-seeming light gray eyes approached Wit and stood watching him for a very long time. Wit looked up at him expectantly, but the man merely continued to watch Wit, who eventually looked away. After what seemed like a very long time, Wit looked back up, to find the man still staring at him, still with the same vacant expression. Wit met his dead gaze for a moment, and then looked away.

  After an even longer while the man spoke. "What'd you have to kill that man for?"

  Wit choked. He thought about saying something about the Order and the Power, but the words died in his mouth. "I don't know." He looked into the weak, gray eyes and they looked back at him, unchanging. "I was afraid… afraid that I was too weak for the Order, and that the Order was too weak for the Alliance. I was afraid of being weak. I couldn't bear it…I wanted the world to know that I was strong, that the things I believed were right…I'm sorry."

  The man's expression did not change at all as Wit spoke. When Wit was finished he kept watching him. Finally, he said, "If you hadn't of killed him, I coulda maybe made it out that you weren't really a wizard, just a fraud with a staff. But you had to go kill that bandit and now everyone knows you are a wizard for sure. She'll never let me hear the end
of it."

  "I beg your pardon, but I do not follow you at all. Who are you talking about?"

  He looked at Wit as if he was a simpleton. "The innkeeper's daughter."

  "What won't she let you hear the end of?"

  "That she traded a broken down nag to a real wizard of the Order, in return for a perfectly good horse. It would be bad enough that she got your horse from you in an even trade for one that would not live another four hours, but you had to be a wizard of the Order to boot."

  The man's name was Snopes, and he had been fighting a losing battle for the coveted title of "most treacherous horse dealer" with the innkeeper's daughter for quite some time. If he did anything else, he did not consider it important enough to mention; and Wit quickly decided that Snopes was completely insane. Presently Wa'llach entered with Mollet, and they sat down at Wit's table along with Snopes. Wa'llach had identified three horses that might do for a trip to the mountains, and two of them belonged to Snopes. Snopes and the dwarf began to negotiate and Wit stopped paying attention.

  When he resumed listening to the conversation, Wa'llach and Snopes were arguing about whether a gray horse was worth ten or fifteen gold coins. "I'll tell everyone in the next village that I paid thirty gold for it," Wit said suddenly, "in exchange for the horse."

  "How much will you give me for the horse?" Snopes asked suspiciously.

  "Nothing."

  Snopes considered this offer seriously. "See here," he said after a while, "that won't get me ahead of her. Getting your good horse for a dead one is more impressive than making an extra twenty gold on a sale of a good one."

  "True," said Wit, "but she won't exactly be able to lord that over you, if you also cheated me. It will take most of the sting out of it. I'll just be a simple-minded wizard who didn't know horses, and you will have both got the best of me."

  Wa'llach had been confused at first, but was now caught up. "Yes," he slapped Wit on the back, "and if you don't give us the horse, we'll tell everyone that we got it from you for five! Haha! How will you live that down, losing to simpletons like us? And who are people going to believe? A hero of the Order who saved a town from bandits? Or a stinking, low-life horse thief like yourself?"

  A bargain was quickly struck, and they left with the horse in the morning.

  They traveled for two more uneventful days, through higher and rockier terrain. At the end of the third day, they arrived at a lonely inn a little after sunset. A man emerged from the inn, unloaded their bags and helped Wa'llach lead the team of horses around to the stable. The main room in the tavern was deserted when Wit walked in, aside from three men sitting around a table. A fourth was apparently standing behind the door, because Wit did not see him, or what he used to hit Wit in the back of the head with.

  9

  On that day, every Yatto childhood came to an end.

  On that day, Joti and Hako ran back to the camp as fast as they could. They found the entire tribe agape, puzzling over the thunder that had shocked them during their morning chores, and at the blanket of darkness smothering the morning.

  On that day, Hako and Joti led the chieftains of all sixteen families into the hills, and they stared into the fire spilling from the mountain to the southeast.

  Back at the camp, while the chieftains and warriors gathered in the great tent to talk, Joti found Drez bringing her younger siblings in from the field.

  "What do you think it is?" Joti said. "Alliance wizards?"

  "Doing what? Invading the mountains?"

  "Why not? The Har-Dak raid them all the time."

  "If Alliance wizards could bash up whole mountains, they wouldn't be letting the Har run wild across their borders." Drez swatted her young brother and sister on the head, sending them scampering for her family's tents. "Whatever it is, we'll have to move on. I doubt we'll ever be back."

  That afternoon, the chieftains declared that they had consulted with each other, with Grint, and with the beasts of the field and the birds of the air. They had decided that the orcs of the Drag Nir had provoked the wrath of the gods. Any tribe stupid enough to stay would be smashed by the hammer of Kard.

  As far as Joti knew, the Yatto had always lived between the prairie to the north and the coastal hills to the southwest. As his people packed up their things and left their lands behind, he didn't know whether to feel sad for their loss, or excited to see something new.

  ~

  Mile by mile, the tribe pushed north into the unknown.

  The Half Soldiers weren't yet warriors, but there was no more time for them to gradually learn their role through running in the woods and wrestling in the training ground. Some of them were assigned to follow behind the tribe and watch for pursuit. Others were tasked with fishing and foraging to keep up supplies during the march. Others still were given over to the shepherds to make sure none of the wozzits ran off.

  As one of the youngest Half Soldiers, Joti feared he'd be turned over to pig duty. Instead, Kajo declared that, since he'd been first to witness the gods' wrath, allowing the Yatto to escape it before it could swallow them up, he would have his choice of assignments.

  "I want to scout," Joti said. "And I want Drez as my partner."

  Drez moved to stand beside him, suppressing a grin. Kajo looked them over, then glanced at the other scouts, who were uniformly older, taller, and broader of shoulder. Kajo pressed his lips together and nodded.

  That day, Joti and Drez set down their staffs for good. Instead, as they followed the tribe from several miles behind, they carried steel-tipped spears. A bone whistle hung from their necks. If they spotted danger, the whistles' shriek could be heard halfway to the horizon.

  Their third day on duty, Drez stopped in the shade of an elm on the side of a hill and smiled at the distant train of wagons and people. "Did you ever think we'd be here? You and me?"

  "You didn't?"

  "Are you kidding? I was too slow, you were as small as a mouse's dagger, and we both had too many older siblings."

  "But you always seemed so sure. Whenever it got too tough, or I got too tired, I looked at you and I knew you'd never quit—and that I couldn't, either."

  Drez grinned out at the fields. "Maybe you have to believe in someone else before you can believe in yourself. Good thing you had me around, wasn't it?"

  He nodded, because it was. "And it's a good thing we weren't any smarter, or one of us might have known better."

  They stood side by side. Joti thought about reaching for her hand, but by the time he decided to do so, she was already on her way down the hill, headed for the next lookout to watch over their people.

  Each day was gray and chilly. The sun was a vague red smudge. Sometimes, the haze was so thick the sun rose and set without being seen at all.

  The tribe came to the stream on the plains where they spent springs and summers. The chieftains stopped to burn offerings for the gods: trout, venison, a single human liver, which made everyone drool to see. The tribe moved on. Days later, they entered an enveloping forest. The scouts scrambled to find high ground to survey what lay around them.

  Two mornings after entering the woods, Joti and Drez arose for their morning patrol. A chilly drizzle sifted through the branches, many of which were only starting to sprout their first leaves. The rain grew heavier by the minute. By the time the tribe was on the move, and Joti and Drez were in position two miles behind them, the rain was pounding the ground like a million little fists, raising the smell of fresh dirt and old leaves.

  Generously greased with wozzit fat, Joti's cloak was doing a good job keeping him dry, but it was doing an even better job getting snagged in the brush and dragged through the mud. As it caught itself in another thorn bush, he stopped to untangle himself for what felt like the hundredth time.

  Drez crouched over a patch of mulch. "Joti. Come take a look at this."

  He tugged his cloak free and moved to join her. In the sloppy ground, a shallow oval print was pooled with water. Two or three tracks extended before and aft
er before disappearing into firmer ground.

  "Whose are these?" he said. "Last night's scouts?"

  "The rain's already starting to erode them. They can't be more than an hour old."

  "Someone's here who doesn't belong. We have to warn the others."

  Drez' eyes glinted within her hood. "The tribe is counting on us to protect them. We can't do that by running off while strangers watch them from the shadows. We have to follow the tracks before they wash away."

  Joti stared into the forest. Rain, mist, and tree trunks cut visibility on all sides. There could be anything out there. With a chill running down his neck, he crouched over the track. Its toes pointed northeast. Following this, Joti found that the tracks disappeared over a splay of roots, but picked up again on the other side of the tree. When he lost the trail on a shelf of bare rock, Drez, who'd always been the better tracker, pointed out a scuff in the lichen. Using that as a signpost, she found another print, following the trail further into the forest.

  Joti shot out his arm and grabbed her shoulder. She froze. Slowly as they could, the two of them eased into the cover of a shrub. Fifty yards away, two men in drab cloaks muttered to each other beneath the shelter of a tree, words too soft to hear over the hiss of the rain.

  Each carried a pair of hand axes and an unstrung bow. Their faces were deep green. One gestured to the northwest, the direction of the tribe. They got up and moved northeast.

  "Tuskers," Drez said, voice deep with dread. "We should circle ahead and ambush them."

  Joti shook his head. "When you see a toe beetle, you don't smash it then and there. You follow it back to the nest. That's the only way to be rid of them all."