Assail (65 page)

She had their boat-master guide the vessel close along the north shore of the Sea of Gold. They had agreed upon a price for the crossing, but it was no doubt dawning upon the man that any said pay might be long in coming, if it came at all. With nightfall, she had him put in and they built a fire and lay down round it, save for Bars and Keel, who took turns guarding and sleeping in the boat. When morning came, Shimmer was surprised that the man was still with them. But then, the boat was his livelihood, no matter where he might find himself.

Bars made tea that morning. And with that familiar ritual, she felt that some sort of normality had returned.

They were packing up when footsteps sounded among the surrounding rocks and K’azz appeared in his hunting leathers, hopping from boulder to boulder. With him came Cowl, Black the Lesser, Turgal, and Blues.

Shimmer clasped each in a great hug. ‘Good to see you,’ she kept saying. ‘Good to see you.’

Blues accepted her greeting with an embarrassed flinch. ‘I’m sorry …’ he began.

‘There was nothing you could’ve done.’

He wiped his eyes. ‘Still … it galls.’

‘Yes. I’m sorry.’ She turned last to K’azz. The man appeared unchanged; same painfully thin features, same skull-like mien with pale sky-blue eyes that sometimes seemed completely colourless. His leathers, however, looked far worse for wear. ‘The ice fell on us,’ she told him.

‘Yes. Bad luck.’

She shook her head from side to side in slow negation. ‘Not good enough. It targeted us.’

He pursed his thin cracked lips. ‘The Vow, then. No doubt.’ He made a move to enter the boat but she blocked his path.

‘Not good enough any more, K’azz. What about the Vow?’

The commander glanced about and she followed his gaze. Bars was standing very close with his thick arms crossed; Gwynn stroked the snow-white beard he was growing; Lean stood nearby, truly lean now, having lost so much of her plumpness; and Blues was frowning as if troubled by his own suspicions.

K’azz did not look to Cowl, who stood behind, hugging himself, rocking back and forth on his heels, grinning crazily as usual. The mage even offered Shimmer a wink. Completely dismissive of him now, she merely pulled her gaze away.

K’azz would not look up. He drew a hard breath. ‘It concerns the Vow, Shimmer. We aren’t welcome here.’

She nodded at that. ‘Very well … that’s a beginning. What else?’

K’azz raised his eyes and she was shocked to see actual pleading in them. ‘Isn’t that enough, Shimmer? Isn’t it clear we must not continue?’

‘No.’ The denial was blunt and harsh. ‘I see that you still refuse to speak and so we must continue onward – to get the truth of this. We owe it to all who have fallen.’ She thrust an arm to the south. ‘They paid with their lives! And I will collect on it.’ She brushed past him. ‘Either speak up or stand aside.’

He was left standing alone on the shore. For a moment, she saw him as nothing more than a thin ragged figure, haunted and torn, then she hardened her heart and turned to Bars. ‘Push off.’ K’azz stepped on board at the last instant. She faced the boat’s master who held the side-mounted tiller. ‘What lies up the coast?’

‘Scattered camps, ma’am. One big one the gold-hunters established over an old town up there. They call it Wrongway. Past that they say is a fortress named Mantle.’

She eyed K’azz where he sat alone in the bow. ‘Are you going to help?’

‘The path is due north. Follow the coast for a short time then strike upland.’

‘Thank you.’ She nodded to the boat’s master. ‘You have your orders.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ He eased back, resigned to his situation, and spat over the side. ‘If you lot would step the mast that would be a big help.’

* * *

The figures came shuffling out of the deeper gloom in the middle of the broad subterranean chamber that was the no-man’s-land separating the feuding Sharr and Sheer families of Exile Keep. Othan Sharr, now the Sharr of Sharr with the death of his elder brother, paused in his gnawing of a roasted rat carcass and narrowed his own rather beady, rat-like eyes upon the strangers.

‘What Sheer trickery is this?’ he growled to his cousin/wife, Amina Sharr, on his right.

She pushed back her nest of frizzy hair, narrowed her eyes, then hissed a grating breath and gripped the battered table with both sinewy hands. ‘Didn’t I say with Geth and Turnan gone they’d try something?’

The rest of the Sharrs lined up along the table facing the no-man’s-land slowly set down their cups and crusts of bread.

‘What foolishness is this?’ Sharr of Sharr called out to the now motionless figures. ‘There can be no parley or truce between us – you know that!’ The slim shadowy shapes remained silent. The Sharr of Sharr squinted his tiny eyes even further. ‘What are they doing? I can’t quite see. Are those … costumes?’

Across the empty chamber, along the far wall, sitting at the table of the Sheer family, Gurat Sheer, the ancient Sheer of Sheers, similarly squinted into the gloom. ‘What are those asinine Sharrs up to now?’ He fumbled at the littered tabletop before him, found a stick, and hit the elderly man next to him. ‘What is this, Jatar?’

Jatar, Gurat’s eldest nephew, wiped the spilled wine from the front of his shirt and glared at his uncle before glancing out across the dusty flagstones of the chamber. His greying brows rose. ‘Looks like a full frontal assault.’

The Sheer of Sheers banged his stick against the table for attention. ‘Haven’t had one of them in generations.’ He pointed out to the chamber, shouted: ‘So desperate now are you, Othan, you dried up rat?’

The figures paced closer. Jatar pushed himself back from the table, frowning. Gurat snorted his contempt. ‘What foolish trick is this?’

Amina Sharr pushed her unruly nest of hair even further from her face to better see. The figures – they looked very thin.

‘Such costumes of bone and rags will not terrorize us!’ the Sharr of Sharr laughed.

Amina touched her cousin/husband’s arm. ‘I do not believe those are costumes, husband dear.’

The Sharr of Sharrs lost his smirk. His beady eyes narrowed to slits as he studied the bizarre skeletal apparitions. ‘Oh dear. They resemble descriptions of the dread army of bone and dust.’

As one, the skeletal figures drew long blades of stone from ragged belts and sashes of rotting uncured pelts. Shrieking her rage, Amina Sharr surged to her feet, thrust with her hands, and actinic power lit the low-roofed chamber like a blast of lightning.

Along the other wall, the Sheers kicked back their chairs, some leaping over the table. The Sheer of Sheers slammed his stick to the table, breaking it. ‘Send them back to their nether-realm, boys and girls!’

The no-man’s-land of shattered furniture and dust erupted into a firestorm of unleashed power where flurries of lancing iron shards peppered stone, the air itself solidified into sheets of rock-hard ice, the flagstones parted revealing black gulfs, and raw unleashed chaos itself roiled through the air in clouds consuming all it touched.

Through this blistering conflagration of energies the figures of bone and rag hides advanced. They threw milky brown flint knives that sliced Sharr and Sheer mages, or rebounded from defensive glyphs. A heaved stone broadsword, a full arm’s length of razor-sharp black chalcedony, arced through the air to take the head from young Manadara Sheer. Her arms fell and the channelled raw chaos she had been summoning gushed on to the table, consuming it and the flagstones beneath. The nearby Sheers scrambled in either direction.

The foremost warrior of bone and dust pushed through curtains of ice shards so impossibly keen and hard that they penetrated even its fossilized bones to stand like daggers. It reached the Sharrs’ table. A single blow from its grey flint longsword parted the timbers in an eruption of dust and slivers.

Amina Sharr confronted it. ‘To annihilation!’ she howled, and, leaping, she locked her legs about the creature’s torso and released all hold upon the arcing energies sizzling her flesh. The two burst into a cloud of ash and soot that dispersed about the coursing, contrary winds of the chamber.

The Sharr of Sharrs, coughing, waving the ash of his cousin/wife from his eyes, slid along a wall. He tried to right himself but found that for some reason he couldn’t. He peered blearily at his arm where it ended at the elbow. He remembered, vaguely, a sword flashing before him, raising an arm … Shaking his head, he continued sliding along the wall. Perhaps if he made it to the entrance to the lower regions …

His path brought him to a shadowed figure awaiting him. He pulled up short, raised his gaze.

The skeletal figure punched its stone longsword through his chest. Coughing anew, the Sharr of Sharrs smiled and dragged himself even closer. He cupped his hand against the discoloured naked bone of the skull as if caressing it and peered into the darkness of the empty sockets. ‘We will take you with us, you know,’ he promised. ‘We neither can outlive the other.’

‘Just so long as you go,’ the creature’s answer came, breathless and faint.

Hand and skull exploded into shards of bone. Both bodies fell.

*

Lanas Tog and Ut’el Anag silently watched the thick sooty smoke gush from the shattered entrance of the inner stone structure. Through the pall emerged the remnants of the warband they had sent within. They waited until no more appeared, then Lanas Tog said, ‘This deviation has cost us dear.’

‘The nest had to be extirpated.’

‘We cannot delay.’

Ut’el swung his nearly fleshless face to the south. ‘True. They are close.’ The head tilted, as if in thought. ‘Yet numbers are still with us. Perhaps we should turn upon them. This structure could provide a trap …’

Lanas Tog reached out as if she would grasp the Bonecaster’s shoulder but pulled her hand of sinew and bare bone back at the last moment. ‘Remember our task. Once it is completed, there will be no more argument between us. All shall be moot.’

The battered skull turned to her. ‘True. Why blunt our weapons upon each other when our quarry lies so near …’ He motioned the gathered T’lan onward, stepped close upon Lanas. ‘However, remember that I will allow nothing to come between me and the completion of our sworn task. I have waited far too long for this.’

‘We, you mean,’ Lanas observed, her voice even fainter than usual. ‘We have all waited far too long.’ In answer, Ut’el merely held his carious face close for a time as he stepped around her, then walked off.

After a lingering glance to the south, Lanas followed.

* * *

Reuth was not impressed by what he saw of the gold-seekers’ tent town of Wrongway. It stank, and appeared disorganized even to his inexperienced eye. Tents and huts lay all about with no clear avenues or paths, as if everyone had simply set up camp wherever they wished. And with a heavy spring rain last night, it was now a cesspool of mud tracks and overflowing latrines.

Storval went ashore, accompanied by Riggin, the nominal leader of the ten Stormguard. The rest of the Stormguard, plus the new captain’s closest supporters among the hireswords, were under orders to remain on board. It did not take him long to realize why: so that the rest of the Mare crew did not simply slip the mooring ropes and sail off.

With the evening coming, he decided that this was to be his chance. At the stern, he’d hidden a bundle of what few spare clothes he possessed. He collected a meal of old bread and dried fish and sat there close to the stern plate to wait long into the night.

Yet he was not alone. Two of Storval’s closest supporters hung about as the hours slipped by and the twilight deepened. Then he realized: Storval had set a watch upon him. He, their prisoner pilot, a valuable asset, would not be allowed to slip away.

He wanted to cry then, and he damned his lack of worldly experience. He’d never fought or trained for such things. He was a scholar! When other children were scuffling and drubbing one another he was kept indoors and forced to learn his letters.

Wiping his sleeve across his face, he leaned against the ship’s side, set his chin on his arm and watched the shore. Fires were rising all about the sprawling camp. He could hear loud voices, snatches of laughter and songs from the many informal tent-taverns.

He wondered what Whiteblade would do in this situation. The answer was clear enough: he’d swim to shore. Only, like most, Reuth couldn’t swim. It was a rare talent indeed. Yet, thinking of it, there were other ways. Wood floated, and sailors’ lives had been saved by grasping hold of such things as oars and timbers. He dropped his gaze to the mooring pole lying at his feet. That would do.

He would have to be quick. Toss it over then jump after.

But what if he missed? When then? Like any sailor, he had a terror of drowning.

Yet who said this would be easy? Of course he’d have to take a risk. No gain without it.

Very well. This would be it.

He lifted his bundle of clothes from where he’d stuffed it from sight and set it next to his feet. Then, fighting to steady his breathing, he reached down and lifted the pole from its housing and threw it overboard.

‘Hey? What’s that?’ his minder demanded across the stern deck.

Taking a deep breath, Reuth grabbed hold of his sack and vaulted over the side. The water was shockingly cold and his head sank beneath the surface. He immediately abandoned his bundle to flail blindly for the pole. His searching, grasping hands found nothing. In his panic, he inhaled a mouthful of water and then complete frenzied terror took over. He lashed the water, opened his mouth to scream, but only more water rushed in. He inhaled further, sucking the fluid deeper into his lungs.