The Spirit Rebellion (18 page)

“I could get used to this,” Eli said, jumping up after her. “Remind me to thank Slorn again.”

“Don’t get too happy,” Josef said, climbing in last and taking the driver’s seat. “We’re not out yet.”

He took off the Heart and laid it gently in the cart. Next, he undid all of his scabbards, handing his blades one by one to Nico. Finally, he pulled up his collar and buttoned his cuffs, hiding the scars on his arms and jaw, and slouched over the horses with a petulant expression on his face. Eli nodded in approval. If it wasn’t for the strange, watchful look in his eyes, even he would have been hard-pressed to label Josef as anything other than a big farmer with a bad temper.

Their ride out of town was uneventful. If the guards had any suspicions about how a merchant cart that had been driven into town by an old woman the night before was now being driven out by a surly man in his twenties, one look at Josef’s shoulders was enough to convince them it wasn’t really important. They rode in silence for about twenty minutes before Eli tapped Josef on the shoulder and the swordsman pulled the cart over to the side of the empty road.

“Cover for me,” Eli said, hopping down. “I’m going to see if I can’t speed things up.”

Josef nodded and leaned back, undoing his cuffs and flipping his collar back to its usual flat position. Nico started handing him his belts of knives as Eli undid the harnesses on the cart horses and let them wander over toward the clumps of grass that grew between the wagon ruts.

“There,” Eli said, tossing the harness on the ground. “Either they’ll find their way home or some deserving soul gets new horses. Never let it be said that I never gave back to the people.”

“You’re a regular public servant,” Josef grumbled, belting on his swords. “What now?”

“Now,” Eli said, “we get moving.”

He crouched down beside the right front wheel and gave it a friendly pat. “Good morning,” he said cheerily.

For a few moments, nothing happened. Then, slowly, the wheel began to creak as it finally woke up. “What’s good about it?”

“Well,” Eli said, looking around, “to start, it’s a lovely dry day on a nice even road with a downward slope. Doesn’t get much better, I’d think.”

The wheel wobbled. “That’s because you’re not down here being dragged along by those cloppy-cloppy beasts, going so slowly you got moss in your joints, having mud kicked at you morning, noon, and night. No day’s a good day when you’re in the rut, I tell ya.”

“Ah,” Eli said, keeping his voice low so the other wheel wouldn’t wake up too soon and spoil the plan. “Today’s a bit different, friend. You see, the horses are gone, and I’ve got a bit of a challenge for you, if you’re interested.”

“Challenge?” The wheel perked up. “What do you mean?”

“Well,” Eli said, “you see that wheel over there?” He pointed at the left front corner of the cart. “He told me, just now, that you’re over your prime, off circle, and that he can outroll you any day of the year.”

The wheel creaked with fury. “Oh, he did, did he? Put on only last winter and already looking to replace me, eh? Well, I’m sound as any wheel you’ll find, and if he wants to try me, tell him he can go ahead. I’ll match any horse he cares to try!”

“Oh, we’re not talking horses, friend.” Eli shook his head. “This is an open challenge. The two of you in a flat-out race, no horse, just you, him, and the open road, winner take all.”

“No horses?” The wheel balked. “How’m I supposed to roll, then?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” Eli said. “You just roll forward.”

“What, you mean like downhill?”

“Or uphill,” Eli said. “Anywhere! Just roll.”

“Don’t know ’bout that,” the wheel said. “Last time I tried that I fell over. I hate falling over.”

“No worries there,” Eli said. “The cart will keep you up, and I’ll be in the seat acting as the referee and laying out the course. What do you say, want to try a race? Prove who’s the better wheel?”

“Won’t be much of a competition,” the wheel cackled. “Just give the signal and I’ll show you how a cart’s supposed to move.”

“Excellent,” Eli said, standing up. He left the wheel muttering threats at its axlemate and leaned toward Josef, dropping his voice to a whisper. “I’m just waking the front two for now. When they catch on, we’ll switch the wheels and start again with the pair in the back.”

“I have no idea what that means, but all right,” Josef said, pulling himself back into the cart. “Just don’t get the cart too excited. It’s a long trip.”

“Won’t be when I’m done,” Eli said, walking around the cart to the left wheel to start the process again.

A few minutes of excited whispering later, the whole cart began to shake. Eli leaped into the driver’s seat and grabbed hold of the bench. “Hang on,” he said, grinning at Nico and Josef. “Here we go.”

He’d barely finished speaking before the cart launched forward, rattling down the overgrown road at a breakneck pace.

Josef clung to the cart for dear life as the trees flew by and the sky danced overhead. Eli was laughing and shouting directions and encouragement to the wheels, who were spinning as though their lives depended on it as they screamed insults at each other.

“Don’t you think this is a little conspicuous?” Josef shouted over the wheels.

“Not at all!” Eli shouted back. “This is nothing
compared to how some Spiritualists travel. If we’re lucky, people will think we’re Shaper wizards. No one’s stupid enough to mess with Shapers, and they ride stuff like this all the time, though their horseless carts are a lot nicer, not to mention smarter. I could never pull this stunt on Shaper goods. Ah,” he said, breathing deeply, “I love common, sleepy spirits. They’re so open to suggestion.”

Josef looked at him blankly, but Eli just grinned wider.

“What? No point in going slow through that if we don’t have to, right? Don’t worry so much.”

Josef had an answer for that, but experience told him to save his breath. The thief would do what he wanted, and this
was
faster. So he made himself as comfortable as he could in the pitching cart and dug out one of his throwing knives. At least the cart gave him a good chance to practice catching his knives in an unstable environment, and Josef wasn’t the kind to let opportunity pass.

From her place in the back of the cart, Nico watched Josef as he flipped the razor-sharp knife, catching it first with his right hand, then his left. Behind her, the green forest whirled by in a blur as they bounced at full speed down the road toward Gaol.

T
hey had to switch the wheels only once before they reached the border of Argo. The roads had been quiet and empty, barely more than cart tracks as they skimmed the northern edge of the Council Kingdoms. They had seen no one and, more important, no one had seen them.

“Well, it makes sense,” Josef noted as their cart rolled to an exhausted stop by the signpost marking the official border. “That glorified goat track was the worst excuse for a road I’ve ever seen.”

“Why should they keep it up?” Eli said, climbing stiffly off the cart. “It’s not like anyone with money goes through there. Who’d take a narrow road through the middle of nowhere now that the Council’s opened the rivers? Still”—he patted the exhausted wheels—“across the top of the Council Kingdoms in three days. I’d like to see a riverboat do that.”

“No one would ever accuse us of traveling normally.”
Josef shrugged, helping Nico down. “Can the cart keep going?”

“No,” Eli said. “They’ve earned their rest. Help me out,” he said, leaning down. “After all that, the least I can do is leave them free.”

They undid the wheels and left them propped in the rocks beside the cart. Then, with a thankful farewell, Eli, Nico, and Josef set out down the overgrown path into Argo.

“All right,” Josef said, setting a brisk pace. “What now?”

“Now, we make for Gaol.” Eli reached into his pack and pulled out his map. “Argo is divided into four autonomous duchies, each about the size of a small kingdom itself. Argo’s really more like a collection of kingdoms than somewhere like Mellinor, where one king calls all the shots. That’s probably why it was one of the first major players to join the Council of Thrones. It was already used to the idea of governance by committee. Anyway, Gaol is the southernmost duchy, taking up the whole of the Fellbro River Valley just before it joins the Wellbro and they both change their names to the Whitefall River as the water enters Zarin’s territory. That’s part of why Gaol is so rich. The Fellbro River connects the northwest quarter of the Council Kingdoms with everything else. There’s enough trade coming down that waterway to keep even the greediest merchant happy, and not so much as a kernel of wheat passes through without Gaol levying some kind of tariff. Now, we’re currently in Eol, the northernmost and relatively poorest duchy of Argo. All the attention’s on the river traffic, so I expect that if we can stay on foot and on the border here we can just walk into Gaol with no questions asked.”

Josef shot him a look. “That simple, eh?”

“With us? Never,” Eli said, laughing. “If we can get into Gaol’s capital, which, I might add, is also called Goal, thanks to the stupid and confusing naming conventions of the northwest kingdoms. Anyway, if we can get in unmolested, we’ll have Slorn’s sword and be out of here in a week, tops.”

“A week?” Josef said. “You said kidnapping the King of Mellinor would take a week.”

“Give or take a major inconvenience,” Eli said, shrugging. “Kidnapping was a new area for us. There were bound to be slip-ups. This is good old-fashioned theft, and no Spiritualists in sight to mess it up. I think we’ll be all right.”

Nico and Josef exchanged a look behind Eli’s back as they followed the thief south, down the overgrown road and into the rolling hills of Argo.

It took them two days to reach Gaol’s border, mostly because on the second day it began to rain. It was a drenching, cold rain blown down from the mountains, and it made the going miserable. Eli, drowned and sulking with his blue jacket wrapped tight around him, mentioned something about stopping every mile or so, but nothing came of it. The mountain forests had stopped at the Argo border, logged to make room for sheep and cattle grazing, but it was poor land up here and the ranchers’ homes were spread thin. They passed a few farmhouses, their inviting plumes of smoke smelling of cooking and warmth, but the travelers didn’t stop. Eli had learned his lesson about nosy farmers on multiple occasions, and even a miserable, wet walk wasn’t enough to make him try one of those doors.

“Not much farther,” he said, tilting his head so the water would have a harder time going down his neck.

“So you keep saying,” Josef said. The swordsman paid no more attention to the rain than a bull does, and the water rolled off him with scarcely a notice. Nico kept in step with him, kicking her thin feet so the mud wouldn’t build up on her boots. Eli grumbled something about traveling with monsters and kept his own pace, moving his feet carefully so as not to lose a boot in the quagmire the road had become. It was a complicated process, which was why he didn’t notice that Josef and Nico had stopped until he ran face-first into Josef’s back.

“Powers!” he muttered, stumbling back. “What
now
?”

Josef just nodded at the road ahead of them. Eli squinted into the rain, confused; then he saw it too. About ten feet ahead of them, the rain stopped. The road went on, the hills went on, but the rain didn’t. Eli walked forward, sloshing through the mud until he was on the edge of where the weather suddenly cut off. There, in the middle of the road, was a line. On one side, it was a miserable, cold, wet rain; on the other, the weather was sunny and the road was dry.

Squinting through the rain, Eli leaned forward until his nose was almost touching the invisible barrier separating rain from sun. “Well,” he said softly, “that’s odd.”

“That’s one way to put it,” Josef said.

Eli tilted his head back and squinted at the sky. The disconnect seemed to go all the way up. Even the gray clouds stopped at the line, swirling and turning over on each other at the border as if they’d hit an invisible wall.

“Very odd,” Eli muttered.

Josef glared at the division. He didn’t like unexplainable things. “Any ideas on what could cause something like this?”

“Well,” Eli said, tapping his fingers against his wet chin. “It could be some kind of agreement between the local spirits. I doubt it, though. Spirits have their own politics, but something this precise smacks of human interference.”

Josef frowned. “A wizard who likes sunshine, then?”

“That’d be my guess,” Eli said, poking at the line between wet and dry with his boot. “Not a Spiritualist, though. They’d consider something like this, I don’t know, rude. Not their style at all.”

Josef nodded, and they stood there staring at the anomaly for a moment longer. Then Eli shook himself.

“Well,” he said, “no point in standing in the drink when we don’t have to. That’s our road, so we might as well stop worrying and enjoy the sunshine.”

He strode forward, crossing the border between rain and sun with only a tiny hesitation. He felt nothing as he crossed, just the welcome warmth of sunlight on his wet shoulders. Now that he was on the dry side, the air was cool and bright and the dry road was solid and even, a welcome change from the rutted mud slick they’d been shuffling through all day.