Brink (The Ruin Saga Book 2) (50 page)

No amount of reconnaissance would make up for their ignorance of this place, even if they had time for that. Their enemy knew this place, and they didn’t. It was go in blind or turn back for home. And they had come too far to stop now.

Robert was still beside him, somehow sitting up straight and alert despite the chill and the fact that they had been riding over twenty straight hours. It had been days since they had stopped properly, a restless and tense night shacked up in a barn on the outskirts of Leeds. Remnant gangs had prowled the night, thrown into turmoil after being decimated by the passing army, looking for blood and self-destruction. They had come close to opening fire several times, and few of them had slept at all.

Robert looked as indefatigable as ever, scanning the moorland below them with his hawk eyes, his jaw working.

Norman waited until the others had passed before leaning over in the saddle. “You see something?”

“No.” His working jaw clicked. “That’s the problem.”

Norman frowned. “Why?”

“They called for help. They’d have made it easy to find them.”

“They said they were pinned down on the mountain. That’s why they’re up here in the first place instead of back by the radio tower.”

“If they were pinned down, we’d see the people pinning them down.”

He turned and continued after the others, leaving Norman to look again with a touch more dread. He followed after, suppressing a shiver.

Just get it done. Get it done and go home.

“Wait!”

Lucian threw himself against the side of the cliff and cursed under his breath. His arms trembled, clinging to the dewy crumbling rock, and the bones of his fingers gave way little by little. It was early morning, and they had finally managed to slink away from the camp.

A gust of wind buffeted him and the others as they each pressed themselves flat against the flat rock and, under the cover of moonlight, looked down in search of the voice beneath them.

“What?” he hissed.

A strangled cry, then a grunt. A shadow writhed somewhere below in the darkness, amongst the glint of campfires spread across the moor. Lucian squinted, gritting his teeth as the racket of tumbling pebbles rang out in the night. He picked out one of the men clinging on to a ledge by the fingertips of one hand, the rest of him hanging out into space.

“I’m slipping!” the man hissed.

Lucian spat a mouthful of curses and swung his head up to Max, ten feet above him. Max’s eyes twinkled in the penumbra, inky pits that confirmed Lucian’s own thoughts.

They couldn’t stop. By now they had surely been missed back at the camp, and the cover of darkness wouldn’t last. They had to be on the ridge by morning, when they were betting on the guards being changed.

He locked eyes with each of the others in turn and nodded firmly, so that they would all see it. A blackness slithered in him, something that was a part of him but which he had tempered all the long years he had been part of the mission and lived under Alexander’s rule. He had played house, organised celebrations and sat on committees, and he had been what his friends and family had needed him to be. But that wasn’t what he was, not really.

Inside there was a wildness that not even Alexander and all his books and talk of destiny could temper. Deep down he was all grit and blood and the smell of the earth. And here, right now, hanging hundreds of feet above Radden Moor with a barbaric horde below him and his insane brother high above, he felt something give way—the last mental barrier that had bottled up the real him all this time.

“Climb,” he said.

The others began scrabbling upward once again, and he was left looking down at the lone man flailing in mid-air. For a moment, he picked out a pair of shocked white eyes below him, capped underneath by the blackness of a gaping mouth. But then he had turned and he too was climbing.

Together they hauled themselves higher, armed with scant knives and the one unreliable pistol, a thread of burly, bloodied muscle clinging to the rock face. Only another hundred feet and they would reach the lip of the cliff and they would be a mere dozen yards from the lone tent atop it.

And then?
Lucian thought.
Just what is it you plan to do when you get up there? You really think you can put a gun to James’s chest and pull the trigger?

He grunted at his own thoughts and kept on climbing, blinking soil from his eyes and ignoring the deep ache in the bones of his fingers and toes. They had to get there first. The night was wearing on, cooling toward a wet glistening morning, and it would be all too easy for the rest of them to slip too.

And don’t go getting ahead of yourself. James’s dog won’t be far away. That tent is going to be guarded.

Despite the slab of granite-hard determination resting on his chest, he felt a quiver of anxiety. Somehow he couldn’t quite shake the feeling that all this was too easy.

They all froze as a single cry rang out from below, accompanied by a shower of falling scree. They remained still in the night air until an almost inaudible thump rose up from far below, then they began climbing once more. None of them spoke.

All the while, the fires of the camp burned on the moorland floor, and the slaves continued forging weapons. Now that they were higher, they could see the campfires in detail. They carpeted the land for as far as the eye could see. Lucian’s heart skipped a beat every time he laid eyes on the vast tracts of conflagrations, like bobbing fireflies. He had no idea that there were so many people out there.

There must have been at least ten thousand people, and they were all fixing to march south. Time was running out.

The riders from New Canterbury crested a rise and came to a plateau cut into the mountainside, still some thousand feet from the summit. Norman half expected fanfare. The other half expected a hail of gunfire.

But there was nothing over that ridge but more black sparkling rock, petrified tree stumps, and rivulets of melt water from the higher snowdrifts.

Robert had corralled them into a rigid tactical formation with the marksmen at the front and the fastest riders at the rear. Rifles had been raised, shoulders tensed, foreheads greased with sweat.

Norman had been ready to find the emissaries of their saviours, or death. But to find nothing threw him completely. It felt as though somebody had planted a fist squarely in the seat of his stomach.

“Tell me we haven’t been had,” Richard whined.

“The distress call was broadcast. Somebody sent it,” John said, though hurriedly. He plucked at his sleeve while his bushy eyebrows twitched in spasm. “Are we sure these are the coordinates?”

“Yes, I’m bloody sure!”

“Calm down,” Norman said. “They could still be here.”

“Like arsing hell they could. Those campfires down there can only be one thing. The army is here, Norman. We’ve walked right into the hornets’ nest.”

“We don’t know that.”

“Stop playing, Norman. I haven’t seen a friendly light since we left Leeds—and that place was the terminus of the train to fucking nowhere.” Richard spat at the ground under him and snarled. Norman had never seen him like this. He’d put Richard down as a petal of a man.

It seemed he wasn’t quite like his master. While John looked terrified of all that moved, every windswept leaf, and every shadow thrown down by the passing clouds, Richard looked fit to tear the world a new one.

“We didn’t ride out here into the middle of nowhere just so that we could turn around and go back home empty handed.” Richard was breathing deep, almost hyperventilating. “We didn’t leave everyone back home wide open when those bastards could be coming to kill—”

He caught himself, his lip trembling, and looked away.

The others shifted uncomfortably as Norman urged his mount and cantered forward, milling to and fro as he scanned the mountain. But Richard was right. There was only the black rocks and mossy scree. No sign of an encampment, nor any sign that anybody had come this way. Not even a message scrawled in the dust.

It was as though nobody had been up here for centuries.

For all we know, that could be the truth of it
.
No, it can’t be. It can’t!

He bit his tongue to keep the very same lamentations as Richard’s from spilling out, but he could do nothing to stem the fitful, raging thoughts from shooting through his mind.

We have to find them—find them or die. I can’t go back to those faces, all those staring faces, and tell them we found nothing
.

Suddenly, he realised he had been relying on this so much that he had no idea what to do. He had assumed that they would either succeed or die. He hadn’t anticipated that they might have to lope all the way home and stand beside their brothers and sisters and await the coming droves after all.

The thought of that was enough to drive bile into his throat.

I can’t go back to Allie with nothing.

He couldn’t watch the hope fade from her eyes.

“I hate this place,” he muttered.

The others were muttering audibly now, their formation breaking. Cries of frustration and disgust were carried on the wind—the deep, gurgling murmur of unrest from a crowd about to abandon good sense.

John was attempting to talk Richard down, pulling the map toward him and consulting their notes. But his apprentice was inconsolable, and in a sudden surge of rage, Richard tore the map to shreds, throwing it to the wind before John could utter a wail of dismay.

The muttering quietened and turned to sighs that were so much worse than anger, for they were sighs of resignation.

Norman’s heart leaped.

No. I can’t let them go. I have to keep them with me. If they go now, I’ll never get them back.

And that would be so much worse than returning home empty handed—returning unscathed but with half their number scattered and the other half ready to give up.

Time to play the Chosen One
.

“Listen to me. Listen, all of you.”

They turned to him grudgingly.

“We’re going to check this place out. As soon as we’re sure there’s nothing here, we ride for home. We can still make a difference back there.”

Grumbling.

He spoke over them. “They need us. We can’t afford to feel sorry for ourselves.”

“We just rode hundreds of miles to look at a pile of rocks!” Richard roared.

“Yes, we did. And now we know that we did everything we could. We know where we stand.”

“In fucking quicksand.”

Norman surged forward and gripped Richard by the lapels. “You’re a good kid, but don’t think I won’t beat you blue,” he growled.

Where did that come from?

But he knew. It came from the place Alexander had been moulding inside him all these years, the piece of him that they all needed.

Richard’s eyes were wet and wide. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Norman let go of him and turned to the others. “Look around. Make sure there’s nothing that can help us. Be ready to move. Our people are counting on us.”

The muttering stopped. Norman didn’t break his act until he had reached Robert’s side and the formation had broken to scout the area.

“How did I do?” Norman tried a smile.

Maybe there’s hope for me after all
.

But Robert had barely blinked. His gaze was fixed on the ridge. “Don’t let them ride,” he muttered. His tone was low and fierce.

Norman felt his thin smile slide from his face. “What?”

“Don’t move. Keep your eyes down.”

Norman tensed, but couldn’t help glancing into the corners of his field of vision. “Why?”

“They’re here.”

“The Scots? You’re sure? Why didn’t you say anything—?”

“No. Not them.
Them
.”

Fire-hot liquid dread coagulated in Norman’s mouth. “You’re sure?”

“We’re beaten.”

Norman turned to all two hundred and fifty pounds of his rippling tower of a body, and gaped. To hear those words come from that mouth stung like a slap to the face. “If you’re so sure then why haven’t the rest of us noticed anything?”

But before he could finish his sentence he caught a whiff of something in the wind: a rotten note that denuded the crispness of the breeze. He had smelled that before, in the woods around Canterbury. He would have known it anywhere—the smell of sweat and dirt and old blood.

“We have to put our guns down,” Robert said. His voice didn’t waver a note, but there was a sheen to his eyes that took all the fight out of Norman. It was like looking at the button eyes of a china doll.

“We can fight, Robert.” Norman was thinking fast, desperate to claw back some good fortune from this mess. “We could capture one of them and make them tell us what they’re planning, their strategy—”

“Tell them to put their hands up.”

“So what if they’re close? We could still get to cover. We can make a stand.”

“Norman.” Robert blinked once. Those doll eyes were blank. “Time’s up.”

And in that moment he knew it was true. As though rising up from the ground itself, myriad figures crested the ridge. And right in front of him, billowing in the wind atop a rusted flagpole, was the sigil of the pigeon.

The breath whistled out of him. He slumped, and for the first time since arriving in Radden, a bolt of pain ran through his fractured ribs.

Doesn’t matter how special this place is. I’m betting bullets still kill here.

“Put your hands up,” Norman said, turning slowly to the others.

Their faces were all drawn, eyes bulging. They had each frozen in place at the sight of the creeping ragged figures. For a moment, they sat stupefied on their saddles, but then Norman saw just how many figures surrounded them—they were outnumbered threefold, at least—and suddenly he was barking with a voice that didn’t belong to him. “I said put your hands up, now! Weapons on the ground. Do it or die.”

I hope that puts a stupid smile on Alexander’s face, wherever he is
.

A great clatter kicked up as the others shrugged their rifles to the ground and laced their fingers over their heads just as Norman had. Norman was ready to follow Robert’s lead, but the great tree of a man hadn’t moved, not even to drop his own weapon. Norman waited as the sigil came closer and the figures became men and women with sunken, starved faces and skeletal bodies, bearing all manner of firepower—the kind of heavy-duty military gear that could tear them all to shreds. They didn’t stand a chance.