The Tracker (19 page)

The soldier had tripped and fallen over a rock almost completely concealed by a shrub. Arden came upon him holding his ankle and wincing. In his other hand, he had his sword. In terror as Arden approached, he held it out in warning. His eyes skirted around. “Did you call them off?”

“Call off what?” Arden asked, quite alarmed. “I cannot see what is after you!”

Keth, Dieter, and Volos were cutting through the trees to get to them. The cold wind followed. It had abandoned the path entirely, where leaves rested undisturbed. This part of the forest was nothing like the stretches around the other rivers they had passed through without trouble.

Master Maraudi held his sword aloft, his head wheeling around his shoulders. “The bears! How can you miss the bloody bears?”

Arden searched all of the minds around them again. None belonged to a bear. The biggest creature he discovered was an owl, and it was fast asleep within a hole high in a tree. Everyone looked at one another, to Arden, and then to Master Maraudi. He sheathed his sword and put his second hand upon his ankle. Pained, he said, “I had just found the path when a great black bear stepped upon it not twenty feet in front of me! It lifted onto its hind legs, twice the size of a man, and roared as another bear even larger than the first appeared farther down. Then they came after me! Didn’t you hear them growling and roaring, and striking the branches of trees as they ran?”

“If there’s a bear or two out here, they are beyond my reach,” Arden said.

“What do you mean,
if
?” Master Maraudi exclaimed in outrage. “They chased me all the way over here where I tripped over that bloody rock!” His look was so ferocious that Arden didn’t dare to disagree.

His ankle was either broken or severely sprained, and he could bear very little weight upon it. There was no way that he could go forward from here, nor could they waste time in going back with him. The search party would have to separate. Fashioning a splint, he got up and flinched. “I’ll double back to the tram-wood and ride my horse to the ferry. That captain can direct me to the nearest healing penchant.”

“If Arden could make the river snakes-” Dieter suggested.

“No, no, boy, there isn’t time for all of us to go back together. She’s close, isn’t she, tracker?”

“Extremely so,” Volos said.

“And on the move?”

“No. She isn’t moving at all.”

“Then this is your chance,” Master Maraudi said to Keth and Arden. “Reach her before she reaches Havanath. She could cause a terrible scene in one of their busy little towns when you try to claim her. Take her down before she gets that opportunity.”

“We will,” Keth said.

“I’ll get my ankle fixed and return to the first brother’s ferry stop to wait for you there. And I’ll buy us a ruddy new pair of cages while I’m at it,” he growled. “Come, Dieter, you’re with me.”

Dieter helped him to walk. Affixing the packs to their shoulders, Keth and Arden pushed on with Volos. Arden turned back once to look at the parting members of their company. Master Maraudi was limping with his arm over the squire’s shoulders, and the wind chilling Arden to the bone wasn’t so much as ruffling a single hair on their heads. There was no such thing as ghosts, but the ground between the second and third brother was not natural.

Keth walked with her sword out, Volos watched for problems, and Arden kept his mind attuned to the invisible life teeming all around them. Why could he feel so many animals yet not see them? It was their motion and sounds that teased at the periphery of his senses, and for this, he had no explanation.

“Can sword-weed make one hallucinate?” Arden asked Keth.

“Yes, a little,” Keth said. “That was one reason it was used in war. Should the arrow not kill outright, the toxin weakened both the body and mind of the victim. That made him easier to slay later on.”

“Master Maraudi must have raked himself on sword-weed while hunting for the path and only imagined the bears,” Arden said. “We heard no roars or chase.”

They found where the broken path went on again. There were no bear tracks in the dirt, only Master Maraudi’s. Sword-weed grew so prolifically just off the path that it was very possible this was the cause. But that did not provide a sufficient reason for Arden’s missing yet present animals, since he had not touched the plant.

“This is not how it should
be
!” Keth said when the path split later on into three. One went straight ahead and the other two curled to the right. “The barkeep would not have lied to my face with my sword already shown to her, and I warned that we would be coming back the same way.”

“Looks like she lied anyway,” Volos said blithely.

“There was nothing deceptive in her eyes when she gave me these directions. One path! One! At most to expect scratches off it to the few who call this place home.”

These could have been new paths of which the barkeep had no knowledge, Arden thought, and therefore not a deception. But the paths were greatly weathered. They were also exactly the same width, a precision of their makers that he found odd for rough paths through a forest.

Keth viewed the paths in silence and pointed out another oddity in the tufts of grass growing along their sides. “Strange, this. Three tufts of grass, two paces of dirt, and then one tuft of grass and two paces of dirt. Now look at the other paths.”

Arden stared at them and found the same pattern. Nature had not created this. He was overcome with the desire to go after Master Maraudi and Dieter. “We should travel no further here. This forest belongs to some strange power. We are trespassing.”

They shivered in the wind that only trailed upon the paths. “If only that were a choice,” Keth said. “Tracker? Breathe in these paths and locate her.”

Volos paused to breathe at each of them and shook his head. “She stepped upon none of these paths. She is that way.” He pointed ahead and to the left, where there was no path at all. However, there was a proliferation of sword-weed.

Their pace was agonizingly slow from there on. Picking through the serrated foliage, ducking under low-hanging branches from these sulking trees, shivering in the blasts of icy wind, Arden grew ever more alarmed at the invisible inhabitants of this forest. Once he put his hand to the top of a shrub where he could sense a dragon sitting. It moved under his fingers, calmed by his mind, and then the shrub dipped as it flew away. He knew every breed of dragon, and none was invisible.

Something growled once a path was again under their feet. He whirled around, knowing the sound of a bear well from the perindens. No bulky shape lurked through the trees or on the path, yet large shrubs shivered as something passed behind them.

“Command it away!” Keth barked, gripping her sword.

“I can’t! There is nothing there!” Arden exclaimed. Scooping a stick from the ground, Volos held it tightly.

A man pushed through the shrubs. He was a wild sight to behold, long hair tied in dirty rags, filth and grizzle upon his face, a belt of rabbit skulls about his waist and feet so coated in grime that it looked like boots. Armed with a bow, he drew back an arrow. It wavered between the three of them.

“Stand down,” Keth commanded. “We are only passing through.”

The arrow moved to her. Volos lifted his stick and the arrow shifted to him. The man did not say a word, but his forehead was wrinkled in anger upon them. A twig snapped behind Arden and he jerked around to see what was there. The man loosed the arrow, which shot between Arden and Volos and buried itself in the trunk of a tree. They shouted, as they were standing side by side and the arrow had missed them by inches.

Another wild man stepped out from behind a tree on the other side of the path. He also had a bow. Keth shouted, “Volos, lead us!” Then they were running madly down the path after him. The wild men were in pursuit and shooting, but the multitude of trees and shrubs were a good shield. Rarely could they get a clear shot, and never did they have it for more than a second. Arden’s heart pounded hard as he ran. Searching for animals, he shoved himself into the mind of an invisible dragon.
Attack them.

The blood quickened in the little dragon’s body. FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT! It soared off the branch and weaved through the trees, a burning in its gut building up higher and higher as its talons clenched and tail thrashed . . .

Arden looked over his shoulder. The dragon couldn’t be seen, but a spurt of fire appeared out of nowhere and struck the wild man in the lead directly in his face. He neither screamed nor ducked but ran on like nothing had happened. The dragon went to the second man to blast fire, yet the result was the same. The flames burst over his face and he just charged on without reaction or a burn. Calling the dragon back, Arden ordered it to claw the man.

He did not see what happened then, because a bear tumbled out of bushes and lunged at Keth. She shouted in fear and veered to the right, sprinting away with it on her heels and shouting for Arden to call it off. But no mind existed there for Arden to step within!

Blankness. Like it was a figment of sword-weed toxin, but this figment was crashing into bushes and swiping out for Keth, who leaped onto a boulder, leaped again onto a bigger one, and leaped a third time into the crook of a tree. The bear circled the trunk as she climbed higher and higher, and it had no
mind
. That was not possible. Arden could feel minds all around him, yet not that one.

An arrow flashed past his face. He could swear it peeled the thinnest layer of skin off the tip of his nose. It did not sting, so it was only the displaced air of a terribly close shave. Flying harmlessly into brush, it was followed by several more that went over his head, behind his back, and one that passed between his flashing legs. There were six silent wild men now darting through the trees both behind them and coming up on their right side. None were worried about the bear or even Keth. They all had their eyes on Arden and Volos, bows pointed at them and arrows whipping from quivers to be drawn back.

Volos dropped his stick, which could do nothing for them here, and Arden sloughed his heavy pack since it was slowing him down. They ran together, weaving around trees and rocks until the tree that Keth had climbed was lost to view. The men pursued them, men that could not be injured! This was not a robbery or they would have taken Arden’s pack for their own and gone away.

He was going to be robbed of his life before he had even gotten a chance to live it. He leaped a fallen log with Volos. Between the trees far ahead was a glint of purplish blue. They were coming up on the next brother and there was no ferry in sight. Not a steamboat, not a tram-wood, not an inn,
nothing
.

“Please have some magic to save us!” Volos cried, arrows riddling a tree ahead of them and causing them to swerve behind a line of bushes that would provide cover from the men on the side.

Arden sought out the living presences he could not see and then yanked at every dragon larger than a kitten. They exploded from the trees in an invisible rush, branches creaking and leaves raining down, as Volos and Arden made it to the shore.

Talons curled around their arms and shoulders and they were heaved off the ground. Their weight was too much even for the dozens of dragons holding them, so they did not go high. Over the river they soared, arrows slicing through the still water beneath them. The dragons’ talons cut through their shirts. Arden looked back to the wild men, who were standing upon the shore and lowering their bows.

Not once did they cry out to see a pair of flying men; no expression ever changed from angry. Though their clothes had small differences, their faces were almost identical. They had to belong to some strange, wild family to live in this forest, trapping bunnies and chasing out anyone who trespassed upon their land. The barkeep had been a fool to not warn Keth of this, or the bears and the conditions of the path. The soldier would no doubt have something to say upon their return to the first brother.

By the time they approached the shore, the dragons could no longer keep them aloft. Arden’s boots were dragging in the water, but he touched down to sand before they lost their strength entirely. Volos collapsed in a heap as all of his dragons released him at once. They breathed hard from the run and their panic.

“Are they . . . are they coming?” Volos whispered, fighting to brush his long hair out of his eyes.

“No,” Arden said. The wild men were no longer even standing on the shore. They had disappeared into the trees, every last one of them.

Then Arden turned to the new stretch of forest and prayed to Dagad that no wild men lived here. At first glance, everything was very normal. There was no cold wind, or movement in his peripheral vision. Three Hav blues were sitting on a branch of a tree, screeching and swatting one another with their wings. Perfectly visible, one gave off the battle to fly after an equally visible bug. There was no sword-weed anywhere.

Volos noticed it, too. “That queerness does not reach here.”

Then the ground fell away under Arden’s feet.

One moment he had been standing upon the shore, water behind him and trees to the front, and now he was hanging from rock below a mountain path. The plunge fell away into a chasm full of sword-weed. Volos cried out in shock as Arden dropped, and then the tracker threw himself to the ground. Clinging to a boulder in the path, he attempted to extend his hand. But the chain did not allow him to part his hands far enough to reach Arden.