Snare (24 page)

‘North is where Jezro Khan is?’

‘In Burgunee Canton, yes.’

Warkannan waited, but Soutan let no more information slip. Warkannan found himself wondering how big this Canton was, and if he could possibly find the khan without Soutan’s help, once they were safely out of ChaMeech country. Unfortunately, he knew only a few words of Vranz. He got up and walked out to meet Arkazo, who was leading the horses back to camp.

‘Tell me something,’ Warkannan said. ‘Did you study any Vranz in that university of yours?’

‘No. I wish I had,’ Arkazo said. ‘I only took Hirl-Onglay.’

During their morning meal, Warkannan began to worry about his nephew. Ever since Tareev’s death, Arkazo had withdrawn into a silence punctuated only by flashes of anger, but that morning he babbled constantly, rehearsing every horrible rumour and old folktale he’d ever heard about the strange lands beyond the khanate.

‘So I was wondering about the Cantons, just supposing we live through this ride.’ Arkazo came to the end of his breath just as Warkannan was reaching the end of his patience. ‘Do you think everyone in the Cantons really is an evil sorcerer like they say?’

‘No, I most certainly don’t!’ Warkannan said. ‘That’s just the kind of nonsense people make up about places they don’t know.’

‘For a change, Captain,’ Soutan said, ‘you’re quite right. My kind of skills are quite rare, but useful, especially when it comes to crossing the Rift. I’m not making light of the real difficulties, mind, but I have things with me that will ease our path considerably.’

‘Magic, I suppose?’ Arkazo started to sneer, then hesitated. ‘I shouldn’t – I mean, ever since you started finding comnees out here, I –’

‘You started to believe in magic?’ Soutan smiled more warmly than Warkannan had ever seen him do before. ‘What if I told you that some of the things we call magic are just clever devices, like your uncle’s pocket watch?’

‘One of my teachers at university said the same thing, but he never mentioned the crystals like you showed us.’ Arkazo looked away, chewing on his lower lip. ‘He talked about pottery that couldn’t be broken. Some people said it was forged by spirits, but he made fun of the idea.’

‘Good for him. What else did he tell you?’

‘Not much. He didn’t want to get caught teaching us heresies.’

‘Heresies.’ Soutan rolled his eyes. ‘I am amazed at how blindly you Kazraks believe –’

The earth shuddered beneath them, a weak tremble only, but Soutan swore and clutched the ground with spread fingers as if he could steady it by brute force.

Warkannan laughed. ‘I think the Lord is sending you a message.’

‘Spare me your superstitions, Captain,’ Soutan remarked with some asperity. ‘Your god has nothing to do with it.’

As if to agree, the earth stayed quiet for the rest of the morning. Once they were finally in the saddle and riding east, Arkazo’s nerves seemed to settle down as well, until, at noon, they came across a reminder of worse dangers than earthquakes. They’d stopped to rest their horses, and Arkazo wandered off down a small gully to look for water, then shouted. Warkannan drew his sabre without thinking and ran while Soutan followed more slowly. Arkazo was standing by a rivulet in the purple grass and pointing to a pile of human bones, stacked up like firewood with a flat stone on top.

‘ChaMeech work,’ Soutan remarked. ‘That stone is supposed to keep the dead man’s ghost from wandering. I wonder who was stupid enough to ride this close to the Rift alone?’

‘Don’t they ever eat their own kind?’ Warkannan said.

‘Only rarely. Generally they bury their dead, and there aren’t enough bones in this pile to make up a ChaMeech skeleton. This was either a comnee man or someone from the Cantons. Notice there’s no skull. They eat the brains first, you see, to get an enemy’s magic, then grind the skull up for potions.’

Arkazo made a retching sound deep in his throat. Warkannan laid a hand on his arm.

‘We’ve got a sorcerer with us,’ Warkannan said. ‘Magic is the one thing that terrifies these creatures.’

‘Creatures again.’ Soutan shook his head. ‘They can also, my dear captain, be reasoned with.’

‘Huh!’ Warkannan said. ‘As long as a man has cold steel in his hand, maybe. Now let’s get some food in our bellies. The faster we get out of here, the better.’

In the middle of the morning the comnee had started to break camp. The men and women who were going east to trade cut horses out of the herd or stowed a spare selection of their belongings into saddle packs. Those who would stay behind began loading the wagons for their trip south to new grazing.

Off to one side, Apanador and his wife, Gemmadin, stood confer-ring. She would stay behind and lead the comnee while he took the trading party east. They each held a calendar stick – the dry white leg-bone of a saur. Every day at dawn, they would each cut
a notch into their sticks. Gemmadin would bring her people back to this camping ground in twenty days, while Apanador would try to return with the trading party in the same amount of time. If he should be late, Gemmadin would move the comnee a day’s ride west for fresh grazing, and he would know to catch up with her there. If he were early, he would wait for her until he had to move to the fresh grazing.

Ammadin started over to join them, but Zayn came hurrying up to her. He was carrying a lead rope in one hand.

‘I’ve roped the two geldings into the pack train,’ he said. ‘Do you want to take that young buckskin mare?’

‘Yes, I do,’ Ammadin said. ‘She’s never been accepted by the bell-mares. We might as well sell her.’

‘We?’ He smiled, his head cocked a little to one side.

Ammadin found herself utterly tongue-tied. She really had started thinking of them as a ‘we’, she realized, not as ‘myself and my servant’.

‘Just go get the horses,’ she said.

Zayn laughed, but he jogged off, heading for the herd. She reminded herself that such thoughts could be dangerous, especially about a man who kept secrets. She realized that morning that if Zayn weren’t constantly lying to her – or speaking on the edge of lying, at any rate – she might well have given in to her attraction and slept with him. As it was, she had no intention of letting him close to her.

When the time came for the two halves of the comnee to separate, everyone felt a profound reluctance to do so. People went back and forth, saying farewells and reassuring their tearful children. Packing up the last of the gear caused squabbles within families over who was going to take what. All of this cost the travellers hours. The pale sun had climbed high above the purple horizon before the long line of horses and riders formed up, followed by a single wagon carrying Ammadin and Apanador’s tents. Twenty-two humans and three times that many horses set out, heading due east, to one last round of goodbyes from those left behind.

Every time Sentry chimed, Ammadin would get out her crystals and scan for Zayn’s enemies, but she learned nothing of interest until the next morning. In the first light of dawn, Warkannan and his nephew still slept, but Soutan was sitting out in the grass, bent over something he held in his lap – a thin slab
of slate, she thought at first, but a peculiar blue light flickered on its surface in what looked like random patterns. Although she watched for some while, she could make no sense of them. Finally, when she heard Maradin calling her from camp, she gave the puzzle up and shut down her crystals.

‘What the hell are you doing now?’ Warkannan said.

From his seat in the tall grass, Soutan looked up, swore, and clutched some flat thing to his chest with both arms.

‘Sorry,’ Warkannan went on. ‘But we’ve got the camp struck. We’re just waiting for you to come back so we can load the pack horses.’

‘Surely you don’t expect –’

‘You to do some actual work? May the Lord forbid!’ Warkannan resisted the urge to heap up sarcasm. ‘I want to wait till the last possible minute to saddle up, is all. We can’t afford to be caught out here with galled mounts.’

‘That’s true, yes.’ Soutan laid the object into his lap again. ‘I’ll just shut down.’

‘Good. What’s that? A writing slate?’

‘No, of course not! Do you see a pen in my hand?’ Soutan ran a finger along the long edge of the slate. ‘This was a gift from Nehzaym, may your god bring her joy. It produces visions, and I was hoping to get a vision of how to fix my injured crystal.’

This explanation sounded even more peculiar than most of Soutan’s chatter. The sorcerer frowned at the slate, tapped the short edge with one finger, then picked up a length of black cloth from the ground beside him.

‘I’ll wrap this up and put it away,’ Soutan said. ‘Then we can ride out.’

‘Good. I’ll get the horses saddled.’

They set off on a morning so achingly hot that a pale gold mist hung at the horizon. No matter how badly he wanted to make speed, Warkannan coddled the horses. Every time they reached water, he called a halt to let the stock drink, and at the top of every low rise they paused for a brief rest. Warkannan would dismount and walk a little away from the others to look back, shading his eyes against the sun. In the middle of the afternoon he saw the sign he’d been looking for – a plume of dust rising. He pointed it out to Arkazo and Soutan.

‘The comnee,’ Warkannan said.

‘It must be, yes,’ Soutan said. ‘I cannot tell you how infuriating this is. That wretched witchwoman has a living crystal, and I don’t. Good god, she can spy on us whenever she feels like it, and there’s not a thing I can do about it.’

‘That worries me, too, but you’re right. There’s nothing we can do about it, so it’s in God’s hands.’

‘Inshallah,’ Arkazo murmured.

Soutan pursed his lips in a scowl, then shrugged.

‘I suppose that’s as good a way to think about it as any,’ Soutan said. ‘We should reach the Rift tomorrow, if they don’t catch up with us, anyway. That would be a damned nuisance.’

‘Can’t we go across by a different route?’ Warkannan said.

‘There’s only one way across. The Riftgate. You’ll see when we get there.’

‘Will I? Then we’d better get moving.’

Warkannan kept up his rearguard watch all afternoon. Some three hours before sunset, the dust plume disappeared. He could assume the comnee had made camp. A soft wind sprang up, bringing with it cooler air. Warkannan decided to risk pushing his own stock and kept his men riding for another couple of hours. When they camped, though, he found a spot well out of sight of the trail.

After they ate their evening meal, Soutan carried his mysterious slate out into the grass to mutter spells where they couldn’t overhear. Warkannan and Arkazo unloaded the canvas packs to take an informal inventory. They had food left, dry hardtack, cheese, some flasks of oil, some saur jerky. Charcoal they still had as well, and cracked wheatian for the horses.

‘We could travel another week easily,’ Warkannan said. ‘Soutan tells me we’ll reach the trading precinct before then.’

Arkazo nodded, then looked away, his eyes full of tears. War-kannan found himself remembering the time Arkazo had fallen off a pony – he must have been no more than six – and broken his wrist. He had stood the same way, desperately trying not to cry, afraid to catch his uncle’s eye for fear he would.

‘Kaz?’ Warkannan said. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘I was just thinking.’ His voice shook badly. ‘We’ve got extra because Tareev isn’t –’ He broke off.

‘Isn’t here to eat his share. Yes, that’s true.’ Warkannan laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Are you?’ Arkazo spun around and looked him in the face. ‘You don’t act like it’s bothering you in the least. You’ve forgotten all about it, I’d say.’

‘I’m a soldier, Kaz. I don’t think you realize what that means. I’ve lost friends out on the border. I’ve seen plenty of dead men who weren’t friends. You never get used to it, never that. But you learn to keep it inside and get on with the jobs that need doing.’

Arkazo caught his breath with a noise that might have been a sob, might have been a sigh.

‘I’m sorry,’ Warkannan repeated. ‘This is why I didn’t want you to come. This is why I didn’t want Tareev to join us.’

Arkazo concentrated on wiping his eyes on his shirt sleeve. Warkannan waited, saying nothing more. At last Arkazo looked his way.

‘We’d better get this stuff packed up.’ Arkazo’s voice was steady again.

‘I’ll do it. You build a fire, and make it bright if you’d like. We’ve got the fuel.’

In the last of the daylight Warkannan repacked the supplies, distributing the weight among all the packs so that no one horse carried more than the others. Arkazo laid a fire; when the light rose up, he crouched in front of it, but Warkannan stayed standing, looking off to the long purple grass where Soutan sat hidden. Against the darkening sky a flock of cranes flew overhead, soaring on naked wings – he could see the dotted stripes of phosphorescence along their thin necks and dangling legs. They shrieked, banked and wheeled, then flew off back the way they came. Arkazo shuddered at the sound.

‘I have a bad feeling about this place, too,’ Warkannan said. ‘Tell you what. Go bring the horses into camp. Hobble and double tether them.’

Arkazo got up and trotted off to follow orders. When he returned, and the horses were secure, Warkannan brought their weapons over to the campfire and laid them within easy reach.

Not more than two hours later, Warkannan’s intuition proved itself true. They were just thinking of putting out their fire when Warkannan heard a cry that sounded like a distant howl of laughter out in the dark downs. He and Arkazo were on their feet in an instant, but Soutan knelt and began fumbling in his saddlebags.

‘What is it?’ Arkazo said.

‘What do you think?’ Warkannan said. ‘ChaMeech.’

In little bubbling shrieks, the cries came closer, circling round the camp, calling back and forth, closer, ever closer, ringing them round before they could think of running. Warkannan drew his sabre and made a silent pledge that they’d pay high before they brought him down.

‘Grab that axe,’ he snapped at Soutan. ‘It’ll be better than nothing.’

‘I have all the weapons I’m going to need.’

Soutan got up, holding a long tube of silver metal. When he barked a nonsense word, one end of the tube glowed with a warm yellow light. Soutan twisted a metal band at the other; the glow turned into a beam. He flung up his hand and sent a spear of light into the sky. Out in the dark grass the ChaMeech fell abruptly silent. The ruby on Soutan’s headband flared red as it caught a splinter of the unnatural glare.