“’Sleep at the Lucky Fox’, that’s what he said, and we’d have to be crazy not to,” I said, trudging across the boggy ground towards the road with minimal wraith-assistance. “Look, it’s the middle of the day, and I’ll put shields up – there’s nothing to worry about.”
“I don’t like it,” Jaid said for the twenty-somethingth time. She was yards behind me and our brother, kicking every bit of scrub she came across.
“And I’m the moody one,” Jaroan sneered over his shoulder. “Hurry up.”
I cast him a glance, then quickly looked away again.
It’ll take time, I reminded myself.
I sighed, then stopped, letting Jaid catch up.
“Look, I’m only saying it to convince myself.” I took her hand, helping her cross a big patch of smelly, black-looking water, then once she reached my side I turned and slowly continued on. “I’ve got absolutely no interest in sleeping in the middle of a random building filled with strangers – any of them could be eyes for Zakimel and his cronies – even unwittingly. We’ve got to exercise absolute caution, until Blackice Bay, and I know if we had our way we’d be camping out in the woods.”
I kind of liked the thought of it, especially with my power trivialising the dangers posed by such exposure.
“But I’ve got to admit, there’s sense to Rath’s words. I doubt Fang’s repeated attempts to regenerate my foot’s done any wonders for my energy-levels, and I’ve got no idea how long it’s been since I last slept – weeks and weeks, as far as you measured time on the outside – but even on the inside it’s got to have been over twenty-four hours. How long was I awake, before…?”
My voice dropped away.
Before the ghost came floating down into Zyger to claim a darkmage’s soul?
Before I mentioned Neverwish by name and brought our destiny crashing down on us?
Before I sealed Temcar’s fate, the way I sealed Withertongue’s?
Before I slew Shadowcrafter?
Maybe it was all because I’d become a killer today, but it’d been a very long day indeed.
“Well, you can sleep in the woods, if you’re so tired,” Jaid protested.
I shrugged. “Who’s to know? If we camped in the wilderness, maybe something bad would happen… We’re virtually guaranteed safe passage, riding the wave of Duskdown’s foresight. Plus, I’ve got my illusions to disguise our faces. No one’s going to be looking for us specifically. Very few people have got any idea I’m not where I’m supposed to be – Xantaire and Orstrum, Duskdown and Neverwish… Fangmoon… and maybe Timesnatcher.”
It’ll take time for Zakimel’s people to pull it from Xantaire’s head – he’d have no reason to submit her to an interrogation, unless someone slipped up. The others… he can’t get in their heads, can he?
I was doing a fine job of convincing myself, but when I checked for Jaid’s reaction, she remained unpersuaded.
Chewing my lower lip, I focussed my energies, sculpting her a new face out of my imagination. I’d had the imps bury the chest then hide in the bushes so that I could safely bring Zab back into the fold, utilise his power. Now more than ever before I was in need of his abilities.
Once I’d sorted Jaid’s new face – full of freckles, fuller lips, broader nose, brown eyes and dark hair – I started on Jaroan. I didn’t need contact for this kind of work, not anymore, but I’d have to keep focussed on the illusions to maintain them. It was the same level of concentration that was required to walk up some stairs without spilling a full cup of water – I could do it while talking, thinking, even daydreaming – but it took some margin of my consciousness. Yes, it was a risk, but it wasn’t an unnecessary one. I couldn’t afford for anyone to see our real faces, not really.
I gave Jaroan red hair, made him taller, added some extra weight to his visible frame. There was no point us looking like a mage and a pair of twins. We might as well look like three different people. I made myself look older, more grizzled, without going too far – I considered adding scars to hide mine, but people would probably remember someone with a big ugly mess across his cheek. In the end I removed them all. The point was to fit in, just one more mage and his wards making our way through the town. I adjusted the colours of my robe, removed the purple and blue and silver-laced grins, making it a featureless green-grey all over. I couldn’t afford to abandon the robe entirely, though – it acted as a warning, making potential thieves, tricksters and attackers aware of what they would be facing if they decided to mess with me. If I started performing spells without a robe on, that would draw far more attention.
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We passed between the tanneries and dyers in the bogland to the side of the road. The noxious fumes did little to disturb us three – if anything, the putrid scents only reminded me of home, Sticktown, Mud Lane… More disturbing were the looks on the faces of the leather-workers and clothiers themselves. Only about half of them were native Mundic people, it seemed, with a fair few obvious outland faces amongst them. We saw them emptying buckets of pungent liquids in the swamp, eating dour lunches upwind of their huts – and they saw us. They tried to mask the suspicious glances they cast our way, but I caught them all the same. A tall, hooded mage and two children – coming not along the road, but seemingly heading out of the woods to the east? Perhaps that had been a mistake, too…
Cresting a small, treeless rise, we got our first close-up look at our destination. Irontooth Gates wasn’t exactly as intimidating as I’d expected. The slopes on either side of it were sheer, and the town was nestled in the ‘v’ between them, straddling the gap between the two upthrusting pieces of rock. Walls little higher than a fence surrounded the town, constructed from neatly-laid sandstone, the big bricks mottled yellow and mauve, red and brown, grey and orange. The guards wore watch-style uniforms, with only a single mage or magister in sight atop the battlements. Two great doors stood open to the traffic, but they were just made from thick planks of ebonwood, not iron, and the swordsmen at the sides were just waving everyone through.
We crossed the final stretch, picking our way through a field where a herd of cattle had clearly been stationed for the night. We did our best to ignore the several travellers we saw relieving themselves onto the grass, and joined the people flowing into Irontooth Gates. We ended up walking sandwiched between a group of traders and their bodyguards, leading ponies laden with saffron and truffles, and a family from Hilltown, fleeing Mund with their servants. They weren’t talking about it much, but I easily picked up on the fact it was Everseer the guildsman and his wife feared, Everseer whose wrath they were trying to outrun. By the sounds of things the Hilltowners were more scared of ‘her’ than they were of the dragons themselves.
We were waved through with the rest of the crowd, and it didn’t seem that the watchman nearest us even glanced in our direction, despite the mage’s robe I wore. Who knew what they were actually looking out for; perhaps they were just stationed there to keep everyone orderly.
Brilliant.
It was easy for the three of us to slip around the slower-moving groups once we were inside, and the amount of animal waste in the thoroughfare made me feel at home almost at once. There was even a quintet of magisters coming up the street towards us; Jaid looked at me uncertainly, but I gritted my teeth and steered us right past the five officers. I let the wraith fade out, and limped along, reminded suddenly of the uselessness of my foot. A mage with a limp was one thing, and perhaps memorable, but a mage with an insubstantiality-effect on their legs was something else – something only archmagery or unusually-specific spells might achieve.
They cared more about me than the guards, but only to the extent that one of them cast his eyes over me derisively.
Within thirty minutes of idle wandering we had the lay of the place. There was a whole range of inns, taverns and hostels, accommodating travellers from the rich merchant to the poor ranger. A street of smithies that brought back Anvil Row. A street of jewellers with the heaviest presence of non-Magisterium mages we’d seen yet – three! There were shrines to the twelve major gods, and a few other important ones like Kultemeren – most of them were no bigger than the houses surrounding them, and some of them were simple, open-air altars with little more than a hut and a statue. The temple to Brondor, King of Commerce, Money-Bags, the Shrewd Swashbuckler – his was the biggest, a miniature palace of tiny spires and arches that might’ve been impressive to outlanders whose journeys hadn’t yet brought them to Mund.
Indeed, Brondor’s temple rivalled the town hall, which overlooked ‘the Crack of the Tooth’. Running through the centre of the town there was a chasm thirty feet across and inestimably deep, slashing the full width of Irontooth Gates, with two dozen bridges of various sizes spanning the gap. The Lucky Fox, the establishment of Rathal’s choosing, was on a side road, a narrow structure with a base of basalt and upper floors of white-painted wood. The inn actually leaned over the crevasse, with struts driven into the rock underneath to support its weight; fully half of the inn’s guests staying in the upper rooms would be afforded a view of the bottomless gouge through their windows.
The proprietor was a fussy old chap who seemed to be obsessed with cleanliness – not a trait unlooked-for in a person of his profession, although one would’ve thought a man so-inclined would’ve trimmed his moustache; the thing was long enough that he’d have to lift it with a sidelong finger to sip his soup. We were shown up to our room the moment I displayed some of my stolen cash – again, no questioning of the mage and his wards – and within two minutes I had the key in my hand, sitting on the smaller of the room’s two small beds, looking down at the bridges of Irontooth Gates.
“It’s a bit like home, isn’t it?” I said, mostly to myself.
“A bit,” Jaid said.
Jaroan said nothing.
* * *