“We’re headed east now; what do we do?” Mata asked, sensing Silas’s shock.
“We need to turn south, to head towards Barnesnob as soon as possible,” Silas replied. “The next road we find that heads that way, we’ll go.”
He pushed them forward at a determined pace, picking up speed as he felt driven by fear. No longer was his chief concern the question of Mata’s future vocation – it had become a concern for his own ability to stay alive in a nation under the control of Ivaric.
Less than half an hour after he received the message from Heathrin, they reached a crossroads with another substantial road, one that did stretch away towards the south.
As they took their first steps along the road, Silas stopped walking once again, and lifted his head once again, listening to a message that Mata’s ears couldn’t hear.
She stood impatiently waiting, until she saw his eyes begin to focus once again after the brief message.
“What did they say that time?” Mata asked.
“It was a different Speaker,” Silas said, chewing his lip as he stared off into the distance. “It was a Speaker from the capital city behind us; his name is Goan – I’ve never heard of him before. He said he was sending a message at the request of a trader we had met, and he asked us to come back to the capital to meet in the trader’s office as soon as possible. He said it was for our safety,” Silas repeated the message in an emotionless tone of voice.
His eyes finally turned to look at Mata. “I don’t know what to do.” He told her helplessly.
“Is there someone you can ask?” she suggested helpfully.
“I could ask Jimes. That’s a good idea. It’ll take a little time for the message to travel though,” he though aloud. “But we could start walking, and still have an answer before we go too far.”
“This is Silas, speaking to Jimes in Amenozume; Silas calling Jimes. Jimes, this is Silas in Avaleen, seeking your attention,” Silas began his message. He resorted to an older code after that, in the hopes that if any other Speaker were to listen, they might not understand.
“Jimes, do you know of a Speaker names Goan in the capital of Avaleen? He sent a message, that I don’t know if I should trust,” Silas asked. “I’m a day’s walk east of the capital, and awaiting your reply.”
Mata watched as he stood and faced west to send his message on its way. “It looked like your breath was colored when you did that,” she marveled.
“Some people say that happens when some Speakers use their Voice to deliver the Wind Words. Most Speakers speak with a green-colored breath,” Silas acknowledged.
“Your breath came out in yellow sometimes, and in purple sometimes,” Mata replied.
“That makes sense,” Silas answered.
“Because of the cave you were in,” Mata recollected the story Silas had told her on their very first long evening together, back in Amenozume, when they had struck up their friendship.
He nodded his agreement.
“Let’s start on the way back, and hope this is the right decision,” Silas said.
“Oh Silas, don’t be modest. You’ll make it work somehow. Look at all you’ve done. You told me the gods talk to you personally – they’ll take care of you,” Mata gave him a friendly shove with her shoulder, and a smile, as they returned along the dusty road.
Her words struck a chord with Silas, and he spend the next few miles silently mulling them over. He had done extraordinary things: he had extracted Mata from a prison, he had fought off a whole gang of thieves, he had used telekinesis once again, forcefully, in the tavern. The gods had spoken to him, and told him he was their chosen worker of deeds. They had given him so many tools that prepared him to be such a weapon on their behalf. And others, such as Ruten and Prima, had further shaped him, either by chance or also by the design of the gods.
Yet he had no real idea of what the deities wanted him to do, expected him to do. There was no evident plan. He was dawdling along in the middle of the continent, trying to run from Ivaric’s forces and trying to figure out what his future would hold.
“Silas, this is Jimes. I hope that Silas can hear this message from Jimes. My math and triangulation just aren’t as good as yours,” Jimes’s voice spoke ruefully, making Silas chuckle.
“What is it?” Mata began to ask, before Silas held up a hand to silence her.
“The Speaker you ask about, Goan, is a special – very special – member of the Guild. He works on assignments of the Guild Headquarters. We’re told to always provide any assistance he requests of us if he happens to be in our community,” Jimes explained.
“I got the message from Heathrin, I suppose you did too, about the invasion. Be careful Silas. I’m sure Goan would not work for Ivaric, but I can’t imagine what he has to tell you. Good luck, my friend, this is Jimes,” the message finished, and there was no further voice speaking inside her ear.
“Is it over?” Mata watched the changing expressions on Silas’s face.
“I heard back from Jimes. He knows who Goan is, but doesn’t know why he would summon me. He may be trustworthy,” Silas summed up.
They stopped in the road, as Silas tried to weigh the risks. There were few other travelers on the road, leaving them to stand there alone.
“What are we going to do, Silas?” Mata asked.
“We’ll take a chance,” Silas said. They started walking again, and he explained what Jimes had said about Goan’s special status as a Speaker agent.
They walked the rest of the day, and made considerable progress. They also began to see signs of the Avaleen reaction to the attack. A large squad of cavalry went riding by towards the capital, forcing the pair of pedestrians to the side of the road, where they walked upon the uneven surface of the ditch beside the road, until the soldiers passed.
They slept in a grove of trees that night, and stopped in the first village they came to in the morning, where they bought some breakfast food that they ate on their way as they hurried along. By mid-morning they reached the city limits, but struggled to advance through the streets inside the city, where a panicked populace was moving about, preparing for evacuation or siege or warfare, or whatever unexpected catastrophe might be about to befall them.
An hour later, they covered the distance of what have been a ten-minute walk two days before, and arrived back at Burr’s office.
The clerk looked up alertly when they entered the room.
“You’re back! Let me get the master,” the man said promptly, leaving his seat and exiting through the back door. Moments later, Burr appeared, along with two burly men.
“There’s not a moment to lose,” Burr spoke briskly. “These are guards I’ve assigned to take you to safety in Faralag – Erick and Petre.
“You need to leave right now, there are already Ivaric soldiers in the northern suburbs. Poe, get the packs,” Burr was bristling with orders.
“If it’s’ dangerous here, why did you call us back? We don’t want to go to Faralag. We were safely on our way heading south to Barnesnob!” Silas protested.
“Ivaric has landed troops along the southern coast, and they’re cutting off escape to Barnesnob; they already seized Heathrin, as I’m sure you know. Now they’re in the capital. They’ll have the whole country captured within a few days. You’re only hope of escape is to go east to the mountains and travel through the wild trails. Faralag will be a safe place. The guards will take you to Adams, another trader there, and then you can regroup and make your plans,” Burr had it all laid out.
Poe, the clerk, returned carrying four packs that were stuffed full. He handed them out. There was a sudden hubbub in the streets.
“You have to go now,” Burr urged.
“Let’s get moving,“ Petre spoke for the first time, holding the door open.
“What do we do, Silas?” Mata asked, looking at him.
A day earlier, Silas had thought about how the gods seemed to have plans for him. Now he felt completely lost and indecisive, with no idea w
hat to do.
“We’ll go with them,” he blurted the words out, as he slung the pack across his back, and put his hand on his knife on his hip. It was still, not vibrating or showing any signs of preparing for a struggle.
“Who are you?” he turned to face Burr.
“One of Prima’s contacts,” Burr gave a crooked smile. “Now get going.”
They hurried out the door, Petre in front and Erick in back, Silas and Mata in the middle of the short file. They forced their way through the panicked streets, moving faster – and more ruthlessly – than Silas and Mata had on their own. An hour later they broke free of the city, and joined a slow-moving stream of refugees fleeing the city. Erick moved to the front, and they swung wide around the outside of the people who were carrying belongings, pushing carts, and riding horses and mules.
The two guards set a rapid pace, one that made Silas and Mata breath heavily and perspire as they moved ahead of the rest of the refugees and then kept going along the open road in front of them.
That night they set up camp under the moonlight, behind a hedgerow.
“You two will need to speed up your pace tomorrow,” Erick told them brusquely.
“We’ll do our best, but understand Mata’s a,” Silas began.
“A girl? We noticed,” Petre grinned.
“A diver, not a runner,” Silas answered in annoyance. He placed his hand on the knife again, but there was no warning motion.
“I’ll keep up,” Mata spoke up. “You just lead us in the right direction.” She spoke with finality.
Silas observed the look of respect that the two guards exchanged in response to Mata’s assertion.
The guards set a rotation for a member of the group to stay awake and keep watch during the night.
“I’ll take the middle shift,” Silas offered. “I’ve got the best night vision.”
They kept time by the movement of the stars, and Erick awoke Silas when the great blue star was directly overhead. Silas took a seat and looked at his companions as they lay in their blankets on the cool earth. Summer was passing, and the evenings were growing cooler. He walked around the dark campsite to the other side of the hedgerow, giving him a view of the country road they were following; it was peaceful and empty. A single bird cried to break the stillness.
He didn’t understand why they needed to go to Faralag; it was the most distant of cities. Prima had been leading his caravan there when Silas had left the wagons to return to Amenozume, but other than that, Silas had never given thought to the city. Few of the Trackers of Brigamme had ever mentioned taking cases in the weakly-ruled nation, so Silas had little verbal lore, gossip, or rumor to inform him of what to expect.
He walked back around to the campsite and sat again, watching and quietly wondering what the journey would be like. The mountains might prove challenging if the group traveled at a high altitude as the seasons changed, but perhaps the route they would take would stay lower, and move faster than the chill that would unstoppably creep down upon them otherwise.
When the double yellow star eyes of the wolf constellation crept up to the top of the sky, Silas woke Petre, then crawled back into his own blankets on the ground and fell into a fitful sleep.
The next day, they started early, rising before the sun. Once they distributed breakfast rations, Erick set a brisk pace, and they jogged along the road. Shortly after the sun was fully above the horizon, they passed the location where Mata and Silas had turned around after the call from Goan, and the group continued to travel east. They ate a brief lunch in a village tavern.
As they prepared to depart, Silas and Mata picked up sticks, and playfully began fencing with one another.
“Your footwork is awkward,” Erick observed aloud.
“We were just playing,” Silas acknowledged that he hadn’t practiced the steps and reflexes that Ruten had made him practice so consistently.
Petre grunted, and the group resumed its journey.
When darkness fell, Petre moved Silas to the front of the group. “If your night vision is so good, you can take the lead. Keep the pace brisk,” he instructed.
Silas led them on through the next hour, growing more exhausted with each passing minute, and thankfully stopped when Erick instructed, as they crossed a small swale there a brook bubbled briskly. He slept that night, while Mata took a turn serving as lookout with the two appointed guards.
“Do you know where we’re going?” Silas asked the next morning, as the group was rousted before sunrise.
“We’ve been on the mountain path before,” Erick reported.
“I remember it well enough to get us through,” Petre agreed.
They set Silas in the lead in the darkness, then stopped in the early morning, after the sun had breached the horizon.
“We’re going to practice now,” Erick informed them. “If you two are going to play at swords, you’re going to learn to do it right,” he told them as Petre found two sticks that served as practice blades.
“We’re losing a lot of sunlight by doing this,” Silas pointed out after an hour of practice left him sweating, while his legs ached from all the movement and footwork he’d been forced to rehearse.
“We know now we can make it up by having you lead us along the road at night,” Peter told him with an ironic smile.
After they resumed travel, they stopped in another village for bowls of stew for lunch, stew that proved to be almost as spicy hot as Jimes’s chili had seemed to Silas back in the days when they’d been together at the Academy.
In the afternoon they had to pause their journey for a long spell, when a patrol of Ivaric soldiers appeared on the road. The quartet that had fled from the invasion blended into a field of grain that had not been harvested, and laid prone on the ground for over two hours until the patrol passed from sight. It was a sobering sight for Silas, who had concluded they were safe from any Ivaric forces; he consequently didn’t mind when Burr’s appointed guardians pressed them to keep traveling after dark.
The next day, the farms began to grow more distant from one another, with more fallow land between the steads, and Silas’s group passed through the last village they would see in Avaleen. The landscape began to turn to more pronounced rolling hills, as they entered the foothills of the Granite Range mountains. After two long days of traveling through the hills, the mountains themselves dominated the eastern horizon in front of the travelers. On the third day, they ended their walking through the forest by spending the night in a cave that Petre and Erick seemed to know about and head to.
Inside the cave, there was evidence of periodic habitation. They found a fire pit and even piles of leaves and grass that provided sleeping quarters for them.
“We’ve made good time and we’re beyond the likelihood of being found by Ivaric forces,” Petre pronounced that evening, as they warmed food over a fire for the first time on the journey. “We’ll stay here at the cave for a day to prepare for our mountain journey.”
Silas and Mata grinned at each other in delight at the prospect of a day without another laborious exercise in hiking. The reality turned out to be less relaxing than they hoped, however, as their two guides provided sustained sword work training when they weren’t out hunting for new supplies to add to the packs they carried. In the afternoon though, Silas led Mata on a hike through the mountain forests, which were very similar to the landscape he had grown up in around Brigamme.
“There aren’t any of the springs around here like we had in Brigamme,” he told the girl when they stood atop a ridge, while he fondly recollected his boyhood home. He hadn’t seen his village in nearly two years, but the memories remained crisp.
It was a new landscape for Mata, who had never been to the mountains on Amenozume or elsewhere before her long journey of escape had begun. She followed Silas as he led her upward, across game paths and along ravines, around gullies and stony outcroppings, until they reached a high point, where they sat on a fallen tree and recovered their breath.
/> “You talked about going back to your village to be the Speaker there,” Mata mentioned. “It would be like this?” she asked.
“Very much,” he agreed happily, wondering if she was willing to reconsider her objections to going north.
“It’s beautiful,” Mata said. “But I don’t think I could ever live so far from the ocean,” she sighed wistfully, shattering Silas’s momentary illusion. “I miss the smell of the salt water, and the cries of the gulls. I never thought I’d say it, but I even miss eating fish!” she chuckled.
Silas sighed at his lost momentary dream.
“I think Faralag is a port city, so when we get there, we’ll get to see the water again,” he tried to offer consolation.
“How far off is that?” Mata asked, turning to look at Silas.
He shrugged to indicate his uncertainty. “I know it’s a long distance – most of the length of the continent. I don’t know how long it will take us to travel there, walking through the mountains,” he answered.
“Let’s get back to the cave,” he suggested a moment later. He enjoyed the mountains, but was anxious to return to the guards and be ready for whatever they might have in mind or need help with.
The next day, the journey towards the south began in earnest, under a gray and rainy sky. The foursome walked slowly along a path that rose and dropped as it followed the western side of the ridges that comprised the edge of the mountain range proper. Despite the rain, Silas felt at home, surrounded by trees and stones and creatures that were similar to the world of Brigamme, and so he gamely walked along.
The progress was slow that day and the next. When the sun resumed shining the following day, the group expected to pick up their pace, but they began to encounter streams that overflowed due to the rain water that had fallen, forcing the group to detour again and again to find suitable places for crossing the water.
After the third day, they all settled into a better pace, and for the next three weeks, they walked steadily to the south. Silas attempted twice to use his Wind Word powers to speak to the outside world, but received no replies, and didn’t know why. He might have simply miscalculated the direction to send his messages; no class had ever focused on the angles and directions of Speaking from the isolated wilderness where on cities or even people lived. He might have been a moving target that the recipients could not locate or correctly direct their responses towards, for the same reason he might have a problem sending messages out – he was in an unmapped wilderness without coordinates.
The Pearl Diver Page 12
