The Sentinel Mage (45 page)

Harkeld closed his eyes and slept.

J
USTEN ROUSED HIM,
shaking his shoulder. “Sire. It’ll soon be dusk.”

Harkeld pushed up on an elbow, yawning.

They ate a hurried meal. “We shouldn’t have any problems,” Tomas said once they’d eaten. “But for the first couple of hours I want every man ready. After that, we can take it in shifts.”

Harkeld looked out over the canyon. Dusk was rapidly falling, the shadows deepening, spreading. Broken-open tombs stretched as far as he could see along the base of the cliffs. The holes looked like dark mouths.

He narrowed his eyes. Was that movement?

“I want three fires,” Tomas said, pointing. “There, there, and there. Now move; we haven’t much time.”

They built a fire at each of the three points where the outcrop jutted, prow-like, into the canyon. The light they cast illuminated the entire outcrop. Harkeld stood at the edge and looked down. Nothing would be able to climb up without being seen.

Night slowly enveloped the canyon. The shapeshifters became owls and swept up into the sky. Harkeld stood listening, his sword clenched in his hand, his ears straining for the first sound—

A stone rattled in the distance.

“Harkeld, get back,” Tomas said, from his position by one of the fires.

“But—”

“Back!” His voice was hard. “You too, Justen.”

Muttering, Harkeld obeyed.

He stood in the middle of the outcrop, sword in hand, ready. All around him, men faced outward. Firelight turned their faces ruddy. The sword blades gleamed red-gold. He heard the rattle of dislodged stones, a rustling sound like dried leaves, the whisper of wings as the shapeshifters kept watch from above.

A minute passed, and then another. Nothing changed. Several more minutes passed. Harkeld’s arm began to grow tired, holding the sword aloft. “Well?” he asked.

“Come and have a look,” Tomas said.

Harkeld lowered his sword. He walked across to Tomas and looked down.

The firelight cast its illumination over a mass of corpses. He saw gaunt, hollow-eyed faces, brittle thatches of hair, leathery skin stretched tight over bones. The creatures were in constant movement, jostling one another. Those in front scrabbled at the outcrop, plucking at the rock with bony fingers, trying in vain to haul themselves up.

“They can’t climb,” Tomas said.

The only excitement during the first hour was an unattached hand groping its way up the side of the outcrop. The soldiers watched as it climbed and chopped it to pieces when it reached the top.

Tomas turned away from the edge, sheathing his sword. “We’ll take it in shifts, six at a time, half the night each. Who wants to go first?”

Harkeld raised his hand.

“You don’t have to,” Tomas said. “We have enough—”

“I want to.” Last night, men had died for him; tonight, he would pull his weight.

“It’ll be boring,” Tomas said. “Cold—”

“Tomas, go to sleep.”

His friend grinned. “Yes, sire.”

T
OMAS HAD BEEN
correct: it was boring and, as the night progressed, increasingly cold. Harkeld alternated standing by the fire with Justen. Even so, he was shivering by the time the second shift relieved them. His fingers were numb. He almost dropped his sword, sheathing it.

Rolled in his blanket, the sandstone cold and hard beneath him, the shivering gradually eased. Justen was warm on his right.

Despite the constant, dry susurration of movement from the canyon floor, despite the cold, Harkeld slid into sleep.

“S
TILL COLD
?”
A
voice whispered. Arms came around him. A body pressed against his back.

“That feels good,” Harkeld murmured, turning, gathering her close. He didn’t open his eyes, but the scent of her black hair was familiar, the slenderness of her body.

She nestled against him, soft and warm.

Contented, Harkeld slid into sleep again.

I
NNIS WOKE AT
dawn. She sat up, rubbing her face, feeling Justen’s stubble on her cheeks. Prince Harkeld still slept. His face was relaxed, the grimness gone; he merely looked exhausted.

She looked out across the canyon. The sand was churned with thousands of footprints. Even as she watched, a breeze began to smooth the tracks. A low wail rose from the walls.

Innis pushed aside the blanket and walked to the edge of the outcrop. A few fragments littered the sand: a skull, its eye sockets staring up at the sky, a bony leg. “Any trouble?” she asked the closest soldier.

He shook his head.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

T
HEY ATE BREAKFAST
on top of the outcrop and then lowered everything to the ground. Prince Harkeld scrambled down. Innis was crouching on the edge, ready to jump, when she felt a light touch on her elbow. It was Dareus.

“Change with Petrus once you’re down.”

She nodded.

It wasn’t easy to swap places without being seen. One of the soldiers, coming around the outcrop to empty his bladder in private, almost interrupted them. Innis shrank to a lizard, hiding against the sandstone, while Petrus fumbled to pull his trews up.

She waited for the soldier to leave, then shifted into a bird. Dareus was waiting on the other side of the outcrop, gazing at the sky, a blanket over his arm.

Innis landed at his feet. He held the blanket out, shielding her as she changed. She wrapped the blanket around her shoulders and listened to his instructions: “Innis, you’re to look for the assassins. I want you to fly to Ner.”

She nodded.

“If you haven’t seen anything by the time you reach Ner, assume they survived—and be careful. Don’t let them see you.”

Innis nodded again.

“I want numbers. We need to know what we’re up against.”

“Gerit,” she heard Dareus say as she shifted into a hawk again. “I want you to fly ahead and search for a safe place for tonight.” His voice faded as she swept up into the air.

I
NNIS FLEW FOR
several hours with the sandstone cliffs towering on either side. At one point the canyon narrowed into a boulder-choked gorge—ancient rapids. Then it widened again.

For long stretches, the tombs were broken open. Innis knew what it meant: the Fithian assassins had passed through.

She looked for other signs of their passage, but found only two piles of horse manure, almost obscured by drifts of sand. Both were on the far side of the river, the side their own party hadn’t traveled on. Another few days and even those telltale piles would be buried by the sand. Of tracks, there was no sign. The assassins had taken care to hide them, and what they’d not hidden, the wind and the blowing sand had erased.

Mid-morning, the canyon began to change. Fingers of rock split from the canyon walls and others rose from the sand, long spines like the fins of gigantic, buried sea creatures. And then she burst out of the canyon. Sand stretched ahead of her—and the ruins of the city Ner.

Innis circled, climbing high into the sky. Below her, rock fins stretched out into the desert like the fingers of a delta.

The desert they’d passed through before had been almost blood red; this desert was the color of rusting iron. It stretched as far as she could see, a broad bowl surrounded by arid mountains.

Innis swooped low, until she skimmed above the sandstone fins. Some extended for furlongs; others speared up like gigantic orange-red tree trunks. It was a forest of stone planted in sand, a jungle of rocky fins and spires reaching hundreds of feet into the air.

Ahead, pillowed in sand, were the ruins. Several thousand people had lived there when the Massen Empire was at its height, a dozen or more centuries ago, but little remained of the city now—a line of columns, most of which were broken stumps; a flight of stone steps in a patch of rippled sand; a roofless tower, with one window like a staring eye. The desert had almost swallowed the ancient city.

Crouching to the east of the ruins, like a beast ready to pounce, was a massive hump of rust-orange rock. It towered out of the desert, easily the size of a palace. A slit of darkness showed at its base.

The city lay ahead, but the hulking lump of rock drew her attention. Innis altered course, arrowing towards it. The slit grew rapidly in size until it was a gash the height of a man. The darkness inside was absolute.

She knew what that darkness hid: the city’s graveyard. The catacombs of Ner, where the first anchor stone was concealed.

Innis circled in front of the opening, undecided. Should she look inside?

Oh, for pity’s sake, stop hesitating
, she told herself crossly. Justen wouldn’t vacillate; he’d
do.

She glided inside, changing form—from hawk to owl—dropping a couple of feet in the air as she shifted.

Sandstone pressed heavily down on her for a moment, and then the low ceiling of rock was gone and a cave opened out, vast and echoing.

Innis circled higher. The daylight didn’t penetrate far, but the sparse light was enough for her owl’s eyes. She’d expected something crude, simple; instead the catacombs were laid out like the spokes of a wheel. High sandstone walls radiated from the center of the cavern with deep avenues between them.

She swooped low, skimming along the top of one wall, and realized that the walls hadn’t been builtup from the floor of the cavern; the avenues had been carved down into the bedrock.

Innis glided down into one of the avenues, until she was a mere yard above the floor. It was like flying along a canyon. Sandstone reached high on either side, burrowed with niches in which corpses had been interred.

The niches had once been sealed, but now rubble littered the sandy floor—chunks of stone, drifts of crumbling mortar. Her keen owl ears caught faint rustlings of sound, no louder than the furtive scurrying of mice—the corpses were stirring in their graves. And tonight, once the sun set, they’d do more than stir; they’d walk abroad.

The passage narrowed until her wings almost brushed either side, and then she burst out into a circular open space. Precisely at its center, a squat lump of rock stood like an altar. It was basalt, black, thickly draped with curse shadows.

Innis veered away from the anchor stone. She circled upward until she saw the avenues radiating in all directions beneath her. A faint slit of daylight marked the cavern entrance.

She arrowed towards it and burst out into almost-blinding sunlight, soaring up into the sky. Masse spread itself out beneath her in dull, muted colors and shades of gray, stretching as far as she could see—desert, rock, barren mountains. To the south, the canyon meandered like a river. Below her, the ruins of Ner slumbered beneath a thousand years’ worth of sand.

Innis hung in the air and shifted from owl into hawk, barely dropping a few inches in height. The colors became vivid again, the desert rust-orange, the sky blue, the sandstone red.

She circled, examining the ruined city. If the assassins were here, they’d have found a hiding place safe from the corpses.

The only possibility was the ruined tower, sticking up out of the sand like a finger, its truncated shadow telling her it was nearly noon—but the tower, when she flew low to inspect it, was empty. The sole occupant was a lizard, sunning itself on a lip of rock.

Innis flew up into the sky again, widening her circles. If not the city, then where?

Her interest sharpened on the mouth of the canyon, where the forest of sandstone fins and spires thrust up into the sky. Where the prince had to pass on his way to the anchor stone. Where there was concealment from searching eyes—and safety from the corpses.

She found the horses first, hidden behind a long, sloping spine of sandstone. After that, it was easy. It would have been easier if she’d dared take the form of a wolf or dog and use her nose, but in the guise of a sky lark, flitting from one upthrust of rock to the next, she found the assassins eventually. They were in a cave halfway up a thick fin of sandstone. Six men. One slept, his weapons close to hand, three silently played a complicated game with small stones, another was sharpening his knives, and the sixth man sat guard, a sword laid across his knees, alert.