The Devoured Earth (5 page)

By mirrorlight there was only so much progress to be made. Even Sal could see that. Disturb the wrong rockpile and the whole mountainside could come down on top of them as it had for Kail not so long ago.

Wiping his dusty gloves on his outermost pants and wishing, not for the first time, for a hot bath, Sal took the tent roll from Kail and prepared to unfold it.

A rattle of stones from further uphill prompted him to look up. A pair of wide eyes gleamed back at him. Seen, the creature abandoned stealth and bounded downslope towards the camp. Barely had Sal uttered a warning cry when it lifted off all fours and leapt right for him.

Reflected light flared from sharp claws and teeth. The animal landed bodily on Sal, knocking him clear off his feet and squeezing the air from his lungs. Hot fluid gushed over him. His mouth filled with a salty copperiness that instantly made him gag. For too long he flailed helplessly at the beast before remembering the Change. He was weak after the day’s exertions, but strong enough. With a flash of burning fur and blood, the beast flew away from him and into solid stone. The smack of its flesh sickened him as much as the taste of its blood.

Hands clutched at him. ‘Sal, are you all right?’ Highson pulled him to his feet.

Sal pushed the hands away. ‘I — I think so. Goddess!’ He spat. By the light of a brightly shining mirror, he wiped at his face and chest. Blood as black as the sky above had soaked through layers of wool almost as far as his skin. ‘What happened? What is that thing?’

The body lay limp on its side five metres away. ‘It’s a Shiva bear,’ said Kail, crossing to inspect it. ‘A hungry one, by the look of it. They normally hunt on moonless nights. This one must’ve been desperate.’

Just an animal, then. Sal had feared that they’d encountered more wraiths, or worse, but this creature was little larger than a big dog, with shaggy reddish fur and a broad snout. Nothing more sophisticated than a bow and arrow could have killed it.

Highson still fussed at him, as though unwilling to accept his word that he was okay. ‘It came out of nowhere. Habryn threw something. A knife, I think.’

They both turned to look at the tracker. He had bent over the corpse and pulled a slender steel blade from its throat. Sal swallowed, amazed by the man’s speed and accuracy. ‘You know these things?’ he asked.

‘By reputation.’ The tracker ambled back, his eyes avoiding the light, taking in the night all around them instead. ‘They travel in pairs.’

‘We’d better be more careful then,’ said Highson. ‘If that thing had got its mouth around Sal’s throat…’

Sal brushed away his father’s concern, irritated by it as much as he was at his own incompetence. He should have reacted as quickly and as capably as Kail. He might need to in the future in order to survive the journey.

‘Well, it didn’t,’ he said, startled by the brusqueness of his tone, ‘so let’s not make a big deal of this. We’re tired. We were taken by surprise.’
Maybe
, he thought,
I have been pushing us too hard
. Bruises were already making themselves felt where the bear had hit him and he had fallen on his arse. ‘We won’t make that mistake again.’

‘And look on the upside,’ said Kail, his teeth gleaming. ‘We’ve gained some fresh meat. I think there’ll be enough on its bones to feed the three of us tonight. It won’t take me long to butcher it.’

Sal swallowed automatic revulsion, telling himself that cooked bear meat was bound to taste better than its blood. ‘We could light a fire,’ he said. ‘Have a proper meal, for a change.’

‘We could.’ Kail nodded. ‘You two keep watch, just in case the mate is lurking around somewhere. The fire might not keep it away for long, if it’s as hungry as this one was.’

Highson kept his pocket mirror radiating at full strength while Kail went about his grisly job away from the campsite. Once their packs were placed at the centre of their impromptu campsite, Sal began looking for something to burn. There wasn’t much, but it did exist. The bulk of the heat could come from the suitable stones he gathered, but there would certainly need to be real flames on top of them, and real smoke. They would all feel better for meat cooked properly.

The small blaze was crackling happily by the time Kail returned with the first cuts from the dismembered beast. The smell of it roasting sent saliva rushing through Sal’s mouth. He had to force himself not to look at the fire and concentrate on the darkness around them instead. He saw and heard nothing untoward. Perhaps, he thought, the scent of blood had frightened the bear’s mate off. Nevertheless, he agreed with Kail that watches should be posted through the night, just in case it found the three of them sound asleep.

Sal ate until he could physically eat no more then settled back in his bedroll. He felt warmer with the soothing sound of flames in his ears, even if the wind was cold and his cheeks and toes ached; insulating charms stitched into collars and blankets helped as well.

When Kail volunteered to take first watch, Sal had been happy to accept the offer. His body remained tender from the attack of the bear, and a headache was building in his temples. He drifted off into blackness with the thought that bear meat had been nothing like lamb or rabbit, but a vast improvement on the tough jerky they had picked up in the village below…

Highson shook him awake after midnight. The night was dark and clear. A thin wind moaned eerily through the switchbacks, setting Sal’s teeth on edge. That and a slight queasiness brought on by too much food made staying awake easy. Even when his two hours were up, he delayed a little longer to give Kail some extra rest. The tracker slept with a pinched, pained expression on his face, as though worrying in his dreams. Highson’s face was barely visible at all, with little more than his nose showing from inside the bedroll.

When Sal finally returned to bed, barely an hour remained before dawn. He fell instantly and deeply asleep, and woke only when a light rain misted over his face. He blinked, startled, and sat bolt upright in his bedroll.

The sun was up, but the camp was silent. Highson lay beside him, snoring peacefully. Kail had slumped over where he sat by the fire, which smoked thinly under the half-hearted shower. Between them, the contents of their packs lay spread out across the stony ground. Something had thoroughly rummaged through them, leaving clothes, supplies and equipment in disarray.

Sal’s cry of alarm woke Kail with a start.

‘What?’ The tracker took in the ruin of their camp with one sweeping glance. He looked equal parts haggard and appalled. ‘How did this happen?’

Sal left that question unanswered. He was already sorting through the scattered items, dividing them into three piles in an attempt to see what was missing. It seemed obvious that Kail had nodded off during his watch, leaving the camp exposed, but he didn’t want to openly accuse the tracker of anything, especially after the previous day’s discussion about blame.

‘Was it the bear?’ asked Highson, emerging sleepily from his bedroll.

‘No.’ Kail had stood on cracking limbs and was staring in puzzlement at the ground around the camp. ‘Bears don’t use charms. Not in my experience, anyway.’

Sal followed the direction of Kail’s gaze and saw too the black circle enclosing the campsite. Arcane symbols surrounded the circle, drawn, Sal realised, just outside the warm glow cast by the fire. ‘Is that charcoal?’

‘Yes.’ Kail looked angry, now.

‘I recognise these signs,’ said Highson. ‘Whoever drew them wanted to keep us quiet while they took what they wanted. What’s missing, Sal? Give us the bad news.’

That was the odd thing. ‘Nothing,’ he said, checking through their belongings one more time to make sure. ‘It seems to be all here. Even the bear meat. Nothing’s been taken.’

‘That doesn’t make sense.’ Highson squatted next to him to double-check.

‘I agree, but there it is.’ Sal ran a hand through his long hair. ‘It could be worse. We could have been murdered in our sleep.’ Despite the evidence of the charm, part of him was still annoyed at Kail for letting this happen. If Upuaut had been behind this particular gambit, or something even nastier… ‘What about tracks?’ he asked Kail. The tracker had stepped outside the circle to inspect the stone surrounding it. ‘Can you tell who or what did this?’

The tracker shook his head. ‘There are some marks over here —’ He pointed back the way they had come, where a shelf of rock overhung the path downhill. ‘I can’t tell what made them. It was big, whatever it was.’

‘A man’kin?’

Kail shrugged.

‘Do you think one of them could have doubled back on us?’ asked Highson.

‘It’s possible,’ Sal said. ‘Why, though, I don’t know.’

‘We were being tested,’ said Kail, looking now at the jagged stone surfaces above and around them. ‘Someone wanted to know more about us than they could tell at a distance.’

‘That seems an awful lot of trouble to go to,’ said Highson.

‘I can’t think of another explanation.’ The tracker sighed. ‘Not one that makes any sense.’

‘How do we stop it happening again?’ asked Sal.

‘I don’t think it’ll happen again. Whoever did this learned everything they needed to know. If they’d wanted to hurt us, they would’ve done it when they had the chance.’

‘Even so…’ Sal bit back a sharp retort. ‘They might change their mind. Or it could be someone else, next time. I don’t think we have any choice but to take precautions.’

‘Yes, that’s fair.’ Kail turned his gaze on him. ‘I’ll think about it during the day. In the meantime we should get moving again. We’ve slept in so we’re already running behind.’

‘Yes.’ The passage of time worried Sal almost as much as the violation of their security. Not only were they already late to set out, but now they had to repack everything. He set about the task with dismal determination. His fear of falling further and further behind Shilly was now compounded by this new fear: that someone was following them. A distinct feeling that he was being watched only made matters worse, and it kept him looking back the way they had come or up at the mountainside ahead, although not once did he see anything out of the ordinary.

Hardly reassured, he shouldered his burden when the others were ready and they continued on their way.

* * * *

Habryn Kail walked furiously in the footsteps of the man’kin, conscientiously noting the comings and goings of familiar tracks. The broad round feet that left deep indentations or crushed pebbles probably belonged to the Angel, the large man’kin Sal and Shilly had met in the forests. Others were smaller: clawed stone feet with three toes; flat pads that seemed to have no toes at all; at least one set of Panic prints visible in patches of soft earth; and human tracks that didn’t all belong to Shilly. It proved, as always, a challenging study, and was occasionally sufficient to distract him from the issue weighing most on his mind.

Not an hour went by in which Kail didn’t berate himself for falling asleep on his watch that morning. His lack of care profoundly unsettled him, charm or no charm. But for dumb luck, he and his companions should have been dead and cold hours ago. There was no getting around that.

Sal and Highson knew it too. That was the worst part. He had let them down in the worst possible fashion. For a while, he considered suggesting that he should turn back — beaten by age, frailty, incompetence — before convincing himself of the ridiculousness of that plan. He had only made one mistake, and they would need him in the coming days. Neither Sal nor Highson possessed the skills of tracking and foraging that he did, and they would rely on those, and more, as the path became steeper and more rugged in the days ahead. There was no getting around
that
.

Before the day was halfway done, with the sun peering over the crest of the mountains and scattering the last wisps of cloud that had dogged them all morning, the ground kicked beneath them, as it had on several occasions during their tortuous ascent. Kail froze, listening carefully. A sustained rumble that might have been thunder echoed along a nearby canyon. It grew louder instead of fading away. The ground beneath him began to shake again, and his palms broke out into a sweat.

Avalanche.

He had no memory of the landslide that had almost killed him ten days earlier, but he knew enough to be afraid. He turned to face the others. The looks on their faces told him that they had realised too. Sal looked up, seeking the source of the noise, but echoes made it hard to find. Instead, Kail looked for shelter, and found some in the form of a narrow crack between a canted slab of rock and the cliff it leaned against. Pointing, he urged Highson and Sal ahead of him, noting distractedly how similar they looked when they ran. They weren’t good sprinters but they possessed incredible stamina, as the uphill trek readily proved.

The rumble grew louder. Kail slipped into the crack after his two companions and held his breath with them. The landslide didn’t have to hit them to end their lives. Burying them in the crack would be enough, unless Sal could find a way out. The thought of being entombed again held no appeal at all.

The roar of falling stone peaked and began to ebb. They saw no sign of it from their cramped hiding place. Still, Kail waited until only echoes remained before even considering stepping outside.

He had half-expected the landscape to have completely rearranged itself — the noise had been so loud — but nothing appeared changed at all. Feeling slightly foolish, he suggested a quick stop to settle their nerves.

Sal would have none of it. ‘No,’ he said, ‘we’ve delayed enough already today.’

Kail didn’t argue, although the tightness across his chest urged him to. Warden Rosevear’s Change-rich salves were doing a good job of repairing the wound inflicted on him by the Swarm, but the endless climbing and the heavy pack he wore were taking their toll. He would never admit it to Sal — who, he was sure, had a pretty good idea of how much the wound still bothered him, since nothing much escaped those blue-flecked eyes — but the thought of sitting down for an hour sounded like a pretty good approximation of paradise.

They hiked on, following the trail of the man’kin and keeping their ears open for any secondary rockfalls that the first might have triggered. The journey was uneventful until they rounded a knife-like spur surmountable only by leaping from one smaller boulder to another. There, as Kail lifted the brim of his hat to take in the way ahead, he saw just how simply and thoroughly Sal’s plans had been thwarted.