North Star Guide Me Home (5 page)

‘I’ll look after him,’ Rasten said. ‘I owe him that much.’ He laid his hand on hers, a gentle touch. A few months ago such a thing would have been unthinkable. ‘Go,’ Rasten said. ‘We’ll be here when you return.’

‘Can’t you feel it? That odd little hum? It fades away when you try to concentrate on it, but turn away and it’s back. Don’t tell me you can’t feel it!’

‘You’re clutching at straws, Trelian. There’s nothing here.’

‘I’m serious. It’s like when a mouse dies in the roof and the smell spreads through the house — you can tell it’s there, but it’s never strong enough to track it to the source.’

‘A mouse? What rot are you talking? Listen, I’m a mage of the fifth rank, and you’re only a third. Shut your wretched trap! There’s nothing here!’

‘Then cursed well ride back to Major Korias and tell him we lost those two in a wretched hill that’s been surrounded since sunrise. Go on.’

The other mage snarled in frustration. ‘Fine then. Go and find them, you street-born cur. It’s all you’re good for.’

Footsteps came towards them again, and Cam reached for the hilt of his knife.

It was the higher-ranked mage. He’d stalked past their hiding place a dozen times. Head bowed and glaring at the dusty path beneath his feet, the mage tramped past again. Cam started to relax, but after a handful of paces took him out of sight, Cam heard the man halt.

He turned to Delphine. He couldn’t see her eyes beneath the brim of her straw hat, but her hands hovered over the three bulges in her sash.

With slow steps, the man came back, his head high this time, his eyes wide and alert. He was of fair stock, like Cam, and the summer sun had baked his skin to a deep tan, even on his closely shaven scalp.

The man stopped a few paces away from them and gazed steadily into their little niche. He raised his face, and sniffed.

They’d been trapped for hours with the sun beating down on them. Cam’s shirt was drenched with sweat, and they hadn’t bathed in days.

The man sniffed again, wrinkling his nose. He took a step towards them.

Cam slowly, silently, drew his knife.

It was possible for an ordinary man to kill a mage. A century ago his ancestors had wiped out the mages in Ricalan. It took surprise and a hefty dose of luck, but it could be done.

The mage crept closer. Delphine shrank back against the stone, plastering herself to it. Cam shifted his grip on the knife, holding it between thumb and forefinger just below the hilt. He nudged Delphine, and saw her gulp and hastily nod. If his strike went wide, it would be up to her to follow up the attack. He would have only one chance.

Cam threw the knife. It flipped over once in the air, turning hilt-over-blade, and then hit the mage’s throat with a meaty
thunk
.

The shock of it made the man stumble. He tried to cry out, a strangled sound, but most of his breath escaped through the bubbling wound in his neck.

Cam darted forward, grabbing the mage by neck and shoulder and dragged him into their tiny shelter. The fellow tried to fight, but his hands were weak and clumsy as Cam brushed them aside. Power flared around them, a bright sputter of light, but it died away like drifting sparks on wet grass.

Delphine bit back on a yelp as Cam shoved the dying man to the ground at her feet, and held him there until he stopped struggling before pulling the knife free. Had anyone heard the strangled cries? He couldn’t tell if the other mage had moved away, but they couldn’t stay here. If the dead man’s blood didn’t give them away, the stink that came when the corpse voided itself surely would. Crouching low, Cam crept out of the shelter of the enchantment’s shield.

From somewhere amid the rocks, someone shouted an echoing cry. Heart pounding in his chest, Cam heard the cry pass along, until someone just above him picked up the call. ‘Rider! Rider from the east!’

Cam retreated as men thundered along the path above their niche and Delphine caught his shoulder. ‘Look! That horse down there. Is that her?’

She’d climbed onto a rock to see. Shading his eyes with a bloody hand, he could just make out a grey horse and rider with long, dark hair, both coated with yellow dust.

‘Maybe,’ Cam said, ‘or maybe they’re trying to flush us out. Either way, we need to move.’

Crouching low, and keeping Delphine hard against his back, Cam crept out of the niche and led her along the path away from the direction the men had run.

‘Halt!’ a deep voice boomed out below, too distant to be directed at them. Cam kept moving, doubled-over, until they reached another outcrop, this one angled so as to shield them from the sun. It felt deliciously cool in that patch of shade.

This vantage point gave them a clear view of the men spreading out in a scattered line ahead of the approaching figure who had reined the sweating horse to a trot. As Cam watched, the figure lifted one hand from the reins, and a thick bolt of blue light arced from the fingers down to the ground.

‘Now look,’ the figure said, and at the sound of her voice, Cam sighed with relief. ‘I honestly don’t care whether I kill you or not. I just want my friends.’

As she spoke, the men at the ends of the line moved to enclose her. Sierra didn’t appear to notice.

‘I’m giving you one chance,’ Sierra called. ‘Get out of my way.’

While her weary horse pawed at the gravel, one of the men raised a crossbow trained on her back.

They were too far away to see him pull the trigger — all Cam saw was the blue glow that sprang up, flickering with lightning, while the bolt flashed to ash and flame.

Sierra turned her head. She dropped the reins, and with a gesture, loosed a wave of jagged blue light that spread out around her like ripples in a pond. It washed over the men and they fell, collapsing like an undercut bank with barely a cry.

The horse danced beneath her, but Sierra’s seat never shifted as she gathered up the reins again.
By the Black Sun,
Cam said to himself in a disjointed thought.
She’s come a long way in handling a horse since last winter.

He shook himself, and turned to Delphine. ‘Can you shield us? I’d wager the men above have bows.’

‘Of course,’ Delphine said. Her eyes grew distant for a moment, and he saw a faint shimmer as the shield sprang up around them.

‘Is that other mage likely to give us trouble?’

‘A third rank Battle-Mage?’ she said with a snort. ‘None at all. They must have called out the novices if they’re fielding a third rank against her.’ Cam only realised she had deactivated the camouflage when there came a cry from the rocks above. An arrow streaked down, sending Cam shying away instinctively, but it simply bounced off in a flash of light.

‘Let’s go and meet her,’ Delphine said. She took a step, and swayed. ‘And I hope by the Good Goddess herself that she has some water.’

When they reached the bottom of the path Sierra had halted at the foot of the track and was frowning up into the rocks. At the sight of them she swung a leg over the horse’s neck to slip down. ‘Cam! Fires Below, it’s been so long!’

She flung her arms around his neck and as Cam returned the embrace he couldn’t help but notice the knotted tangles of her hair and the feeling of her ribs and spine pressing against his arms. ‘Sirri, by all the Gods … what happened? Is Kell dead? Is Issey with you? What about Rasten, is he still plaguing you?’

She pulled back, scraping sweaty hair away from her face. There was a splatter of dried blood across her brow. ‘Kell’s dead. We killed him in the ruins near the water-hole. Rasten’s still with us and Isidro … he …’

‘Oh, dear Gods, please tell me he’s alive,’ Delphine said.

Sierra cut her a glance through narrowed eyes. ‘He is. But the fight with Kell … he was hurt, badly … but Rasten thinks he’ll live.’

Cam tried to speak, but his voice cracked and died in his throat.
You left him with
Rasten
? What in the Fires Below were you thinking?
But he couldn’t say that, he knew perfectly well why she’d done it. Their call for help gave her little choice. ‘How bad is he?’ he croaked out at last.

Sierra handed him a water-skin hanging across her shoulder. ‘We had to take the arm off.’

‘Oh, Gods,’ Delphine said. ‘Is he alright? If he was so weak, the shock —’

‘Look, I don’t know, alright,’ Sierra snapped. ‘I had to hurry here to find you. Rasten’s looking after him. He’ll tell me if he takes a turn for the worse.’

Cam felt his eyes track to the spray of dried blood on her forehead. It must be Isidro’s.

‘Do you really trust Rasten to watch over him?’ Delphine said.

‘Rasten hasn’t been Kell’s puppet since the Greenstone Fort fell.’ She tossed her head, and then her gaze tracked to the rocks above them. ‘We ought to get back,’ she said, ‘but there are more men up there, aren’t there?’

‘Yes,’ Cam said, taking a deep swig from the skin and passing it to Delphine. ‘Lots.’

She heaved a sigh. ‘I suppose I ought to kill them. They’ll only follow us otherwise, but by the Fires Below, I just don’t care. Where are your horses?’

‘We had to abandon them when we took shelter,’ Cam said.

‘Will any beasts do? It’s too far to reach the others on foot.’

‘To be honest, I doubt ours could go much further, but they had all our gear.’

‘And your supplies?’ Sierra said.

‘What was left of them,’ Cam replied, thinking of her stark ribs and the knobs of her spine.

‘Alright,’ Sierra said, and turned back to her weary horse, standing still with its head hanging down. ‘Delphine, come here,’ she said. ‘I’ll give you some power to keep you both shielded while I look for the horses. In the meantime, pick over this lot and see if they have anything we can use.’ She nodded to the dead men laid out in a circle. ‘I’ll try to be quick.’

After Sierra left, Rasten spent time by Isidro’s side, studying the rapid rise and fall of his chest and the blue tint of his lips. Every so often he dug fingers into the hollow of Isidro’s jaw to feel his pulse and checked on the bandages wrapped over his stump. The seep of blood had spread, but not far. Rasten breathed a sigh of relief at the sight. If he
had
slipped up in tying off the blood vessels, Isidro wouldn’t have the strength to survive him opening the wound up again. He was warmer, too, Rasten noted before he pulled the blankets up.

He felt … strange. He’d done this many times, watching over a weak and wounded subject and doing all he could to keep the wretch alive. There had been many times he’d fretted over a pallid, shivering figure bundled beneath thick furs, but his anxiety was rooted in what Kell would do to him if he let a prisoner die.

It was behind him now. Kell was gone. Rasten held the words in his mind like a mantra. Kell was dead. He’d seen his skull shattered by the axe, his brains spread to paste. Kell was gone, but there was one more way Rasten could spit upon his memory: he’d do whatever he could to make sure Isidro lived, freed from the lingering pain of his shattered arm.

That set him thinking about the severed limb. After a while, curiosity won out and he pulled out the bundle wrapped in bloody cloth. He exposed the cut he’d made days ago, in a futile effort to save the ruined hand, and sliced deeper. What he found was interesting — some of the shards had attempted to knit, surrounded by spongy masses of bone. Towards the wrist, however, there was no sign of healing and mired deep between the fragments he found the stinking suppuration of infection. It had been there a long time, he judged, and explained why Isidro had been prone to falling ill whenever he pushed himself too hard.

Rasten bundled the limb up again and washed his hands and the knife both. He checked on Isidro again, and gave him some water, trickling it through his lips a few drops at a time. Then he reheated the rocks and cast a shield over the still form.

Then Rasten set off to climb the cliff above their little camp. The soldiers may have tracked down Cammarian and the woman, but it seemed to Rasten they had no idea where to find their true targets — though that would change when Sierra snatched her friends back and laid a fresh trail into the canyon.

At the top of the bluff, Rasten lay down in the dust and crawled to the highest point on the cliff. He had a good view to the north and west and could just make out a low ridge which could be where Sierra’s allies were pinned. Rasten reached for Sierra and found her kicking her weary horse onwards with the sun behind her right shoulder.

He moved around to the eastern face of the bluff. The land dropped away to the east, leading to a sunken basin that was even more arid and parched than the dry grasslands they’d crossed on Kell’s trail. Beyond the ridges and gorges was a plume of yellow dust, a dirty cloud that clung low to the ground.

He stayed there for some time, watching and thinking. The cloud did not appear to move. Did that mean it was too far away to register any progress? Or was it heading straight towards them? He touched Sierra’s mind again, and found her still riding as before. After a moment’s debate he decided against telling her — there was no sense making her worry. Whatever came this way, Rasten could deal with it. He’d promised to keep Isidro safe, and she’d be back soon enough.

He scrambled down from his perch and checked on Isidro. There was no change, but at this point that was still good news. He pinched the skin on the back of the unconscious man’s hand — still somewhat slow to smooth out again — and gave him more water. With a blanket and a few stout branches, Rasten built a lean-to over Isidro and left a bowl of water and a charged lantern-stone beside his head. He watered the horses and saddled one of them, and then set fresh wards around the remaining two plus Isidro’s shelter.

Once everything was secure, Rasten swung into the saddle and turned the horse to the east.

He wasn’t sure what he ought to do if that cloud truly meant soldiers were marching towards them. For all his power and skill, he was no warrior. When he’d faced men on a battlefield, he’d always been under Kell’s orders, or else guided by men who’d trained as warriors since they could hold a wooden sword. He’d have to consult with Sierra, he supposed, and with Cammarian, if she’d met up with him by then.

Whatever happened, and whatever they decided to do next, they’d have to fight through a step at a time. Going back to Ricalan seemed an impossible journey, a huge distance when both they and their horses were exhausted and worn thin, and supplies running out.