Plamen poured a stream of powdery dust out of his boot.
‘Rath may yet lead us on,’ Savhar broached to him. ‘We have both spoken with the clerics. Numbers have been sighted on this plain.’
The Commander smacked the supple sole, then went down on one knee to put it the boot on. Standing, he shook his head and made a scowl. ‘We’ve lost advantage. The storm will have driven them back into hiding.’
‘You would depart, sir?’ said the Marszal.
‘Before dawn.’
Pelkhas they’d called it. After the wave of gloom had enclosed Calvallagh’s ridge, its squall of winds and raining dust had lasted more than an hour. Everything and everyone was now coated in that dust. Soldiers were flapping belongings, squeezing mud out of skins. An eerie fog of the dust hung over the plain, but the air was calm now and the sky clearing with coming dusk.
I sat on the top tier of the theatre, cradling my knee in both my hands while Aznath re-stitched the wound I’d broken open. She hadn’t cleaned it; said the dust and sand that had filled it would stop infection. I wasn’t sure if that was true and suspected it had more to do with saving our water.
At Plamen’s mention of “hiding” I waited until the nearest of the cavalry had moved out of earshot, then addressed the officers myself. ‘Sir?’
Marszal Savhar looked at me. As usual, Plamen didn’t.
‘Before the storm I saw something.’ I didn’t mention the Disc, assuming there could be only one reason for telling them what I’d seen.
‘Speak then,’ said Plamen.
I pointed. ‘Out there, in that big rock across the plain. Inside are tunnels and caves, but I don’t know where they lead or how far. The storm woke me up before I could see all the way in.’
Commander and Marszal regarded one another briefly before walking the short distance to the inner colonnade where they could better see the mound. Savhar pointed several times as they spoke; I couldn’t hear. Then they returned, Aznath now snipping off the ends of my fresh stitches with a knife.
‘Can you direct my men to these caves?’ Plamen asked.
‘I’d need to go with them,’ I answered.
‘Why?’
I kept the flinch out of my face as the dull blade plucked at the gut-string. ‘It’s harder to see from far away,’ I replied in all honesty. Why else would I volunteer?
Savhar looked more interested than Plamen, even eager. ‘A shelter cannot be far if the clerics report sightings,’ she urged, adding a short ‘sir’ as Plamen shot her a glance. ‘If we harry them out and block retreat back to their caves, they could lead us on to others.’
Plamen didn’t answer. He took off his headdress and shook it, but didn’t put it on again. Simply sighed and walked away.
Aznath bandaged my leg. Dusk drew in. Firelight sprang up on the torches between the columns and in the pit of the theatre where the soldiers gathered. The taps of our supply-casks were opened and Eflan gave a rowdy cheer and slapped the backs of his comrades to see clear water flow out.
But after several hours of hiding away inside their houses, maybe even waiting for us to leave, a few of the clerics could be seen around the inner colonnade. After a while some of the servants approached them. First Aznath and Rakhel. Then Issachar and Kobi. I didn’t follow: it seemed a private thing they did. But I watched them sit on the ground beside the ragged men and hold quiet conversations. Noticed by a few of the soldiers a while later, some also went to speak with them. I had no idea what they could be talking about, but did remember something Rusper had told me about ergish Vedans: that their communities still respected and revered the clerics. I ate and drank with the servants, but didn’t ask them about it.
After rations I was summoned to the roofed house. There I received orders from High Command. At daybreak I was to accompany a party of nine, led by the other Telmadh—Shafra—to investigate the mound for any caves that might exist. No sooner did I learn this than I was dismissed.
The cold was worse but the day’s heat had done its work. Sleep dragged me down before I thought to open the Sight.
----------------------------------------
The soldiers knew I wasn’t Elmine and of course they knew why I was here. Word had got around. Nine pairs of Methan eyes now pinned me with searching looks over their mouthguards. I sat in the saddle in front of Telmadh Shafra, meeting none of those eyes, and wondered what they made of it.
Riding sidelong against the broken, shifting earth of the shelf-track, we set off in early light. I looked back towards the cliffs and line of soldiers standing vigil at the edge. Since the small hours, they’d been watching the northwest passage through their scopes, but hadn’t spotted movement yet.
Across the plain I held the pommel of the saddle as I bounced and watched the mound rising towards us. The party slowed as the thick, freshly-settled dust hampered its speed, and then halted at the base. The Telmadh dismounted and lifted me down. ‘Two to watch the horses,’ he said. ‘Rest of you, get combing the rock. You find a cave, report to me.’
Seven jogged up the rise, heading in different directions.
Telmadh Shafra cut a very different kind of figure to Telmadh Eflan. Not just older but stouter, with less humour in his eyes. Thin eyes, almost seeming to mimic his pencil moustache, they darted constantly alert. In a way, he made me think of the Captain of the Guard. A young, slightly weasel-faced Captain of the Guard. ‘We’re looking for a river,’ he said to me.
I pulled my lever. ‘I know.’
Before getting distracted, I sank myself into the Sight and let it unravel. This time, completely awake, no dreams could help or guide me. My thoughts could get in the way. But here, at the foot of my target, I could focus awareness at least: push its fingers through the rock with much less chance that the plain’s vastness would overwhelm me and pull them out. Sandstone and granite: I was starting to get used to how they felt within the Sight; could recognise the shapes of spaces only they uniquely formed. I could even feel the way those spaces changed in ways too small for human eyes to see, as the soldiers upset smallest stones.
And there – on the north side, above the scarp – fissures were deeper. ‘This way,’ I said, coming out, closing the torque and heading up. Shafra followed me.
What would Jerome think of me now?
I kept my hand close to the lever all the time; as if swimming, I dipped under the surface of the Sight, in and out, as I went. It plumbed each crack as I climbed, tracing them all to shrunken ends. It pushed at walls, pressing for hollows, until the emptiness opened. Knowing I’d found it, I called back. Shafra recalled the party and the other seven regrouped close to the top of the mound.
The mouth of the cave faced the ridge of Calvallagh but would be impossible to see from those cliffs, even through scopes. Either side of the opening, two outcrops like window shutters made it look just like a shadow. Someone brought a lantern forward, its triglycerate element already hot enough to wash the floor with pale green light. As the group rallied on the threshold, I saw Shafra’s fingers twitch around his scimitar’s hilt. He prompted me with a nod and I reached in with the Sight.
An upward incline, straight ahead. And then an even descent, walls closing in, way going narrow. Not far beyond that it widened again . . .
Nothing moved. I told him so.
‘You’re certain?’
Fair question. ‘I’m only saying what I see.’ A fair answer, I hoped. Still, I saw reluctance as he turned to the seven soldiers who looked even less eager to trust a twelve-year-old’s word. But they had to.
‘Laruk, Khopin. Man the entrance,’ the Telmadh said. ‘Lantern in front with two others.’ He laid a flat hand on my chest. ‘You’ll take the middle.’
While three men scaled the cave mouth’s incline with the lantern, I dropped my hand to my belt and patted the holster of my fusil. Then I followed with Shafra, two others bringing up the rear. The floor swept up to spiky teeth at the ceiling. Sides leaned in. As if climbing a giant tongue, we surmounted the boundary and left the desert daylight behind. The soldiers skated over crumbled rocks on the downward slope, using the walls to keep them steady.
The cave shrivelled to a tunnel, its sudden closeness an assault on my heightened sense. The Sight had awakened me to limitless space and, without it, I felt like I was trapped in an airless box. ‘Steady,’ said Shafra by my ear. Not to me but those ahead whose only guidance through the passage was the lantern-light.
The tunnel shrank smaller still, snaking west, and we moved on between its sharpening edges in a careful single-file. Steps crunching. I opened the Sight again to ease the suffocating pressure of the space, but no amount of focus would stop it frisking every pock and crevice, making stark even the tiniest, most unreachable holes within the rock. Some way ahead yawned a bigger space, I sensed, still empty of life—at least life larger than a lizard.
Triglycerate sparkled over black obsidian, the group now weaving separate paths through a room of jagged stalagmites. At the farthest end of the cavern these clustered together into a tangle of spires, while beyond the tunnel burrowed on and down.
‘Boy, it stinks of them,’ grimaced Shafra. He wasn’t wrong. Although faint, it was the smell of long-confined, living flesh. ‘What I cannot smell is water.’
‘Me neither,’ I admitted. The air was dry and, on the rocks, there wasn’t sign of any moisture. Except for speckles of guano from bats. We moved on, deeper, the next tunnel squeezing more tightly than the last, scraping my arms with sharp obsidian that glittered out like keening knives.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Bearing north, it opened up into the farthest part I’d seen. Granite or dunite, the space was broad with a smooth, down-sloping floor and high ceiling; high enough for bats to flit about unseen. The smell had grown into a stench and it wasn’t the stench of the guano that now covered the rocks.
‘Stay alert,’ someone said behind me. The group spread out, though it still moved in one direction. We’d not gone far when a hand pulled me back and pointed straight at my feet. A grey stone scuttled, but I saw the plated body and spiked tail before it hid under another. ‘Alert,’ the soldier said again and prodded me forward.
The cavern sloped down, then went steep.
And then it dropped.
Shafra halted the party; I looked back. ‘It’s not so steep. We can climb it,’ I said.
‘To what exactly—can’t you smell that?’ said the Telmadh, his voice low. ‘We’re only six here. If running water is below, we would have heard it by now.’
‘The High Commander said we had to make a full search of the caves,’ I reminded him, knowing I spoke above my station but knowing too that I’d been bolder with Plamen before. ‘And I still can’t see movement.’
The party gathered near the drop, one man dislodging a pebble with his boot. It rolled, skittered and fell, Shafra himself hopping closer to share the silence. Then . . . crack.
Silence again.
I took a breath. ‘There, see, it’s—’
Akkk-k-k-k!
The clacking snarl echoed and six scimitars flashed around me. ‘Up and to the back!’ Shafra hissed.
But I ignored his order, faced the dark and pulled my lever. The drop fell less than fifty feet, curving at the bottom into the broadest of the caverns in the chain. There, fleshless carcasses took form across its floor among the bones and blood and shredded garments. Faces stared out of the litter. There were only a few; very still, but alive. Jaws weakly parted and closed like those of fish washed up on shore; a soapy film paling the eyes from beetle-black to cloudy grey; their skin as bloodless as the corpses we had burned back at the fortress. ‘Five,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘I see five. They’re sick or weak or something, not moving.’
I felt the tension ease a little. Shafra’s voice was still grave: ‘There could be others further down.’
And so I widened my Sight-sphere, reaching round the bed of Rath, the strewn remains and rotting carnage. I frisked each crevice of the walls, dunite for sure in this chamber, but . . . ‘There aren’t anymore,’ I said. Because there weren’t. No passages or outlets leading on from the lair. ‘And no water,’ I reported. ‘Just a cave.’
Without warning another movement snagged awareness in the Sight. From behind us. I sealed the torque and spun around, suddenly unsure. ‘Something’s coming, telmadekh!’
A flash of anger lit his face.
But then: ‘. . . telmadekh!’ another voice echoed through our cavern. It was our guard from the entrance, I realised on a gush of relief. Shafra sheathed his scimitar again and jogged back up the cavern’s slope. The woman entered our light, out of breath. ‘It’s the Commander,’ she said. ‘Sir, he’s moving the whole company out.’
What?
The lantern swung at the news, squeaking away, leaving me no choice but to follow the party. Less careful of the claws of the tunnel, we wormed back, crossed the room of obsidian, vaulted the tongue at the entrance.
The sunlight stung as we came out and now the morning air was baking. Shafra and two others climbed up the right-hand window shutter at the mouth of the cave and reached a ledge. I went up too, crouched there and shielded my eyes towards Calvallagh.
From the ridge, the remaining forty riders of the cavalry were coming down along the shelf-track.
‘Enemy sighted!’ came a cry under the ledge.
We looked northwest into the plain’s passage. Blanching in the heat and searing sun, I blinked away the tricks of the glare and saw it: a smudge of something moving against the bands of darker earth. A smudge of Rath about a league off. I felt my hand against the fusil in its holster on my hip. No use in that.
‘How many?’ Shafra murmured to the woman beside him.
‘Seventy, eighty. Could be them returning to the caves,’ replied the soldier.
Our party didn’t have a scope. Not that we’d need one for long.
‘Where’s the boy?’ snapped Shafra, louder.
‘Here,’ I said from his knees.
His thin eyes darted to my face, and from my face to my wrist. ‘Well?’
‘Got to be them, telmadekh,’ I nodded, completely sure. ‘The lowest cave was really big. Big enough for a hundred. The pelkhas must’ve cut them off from getting back here.’ At my use of the old Vedish word, or maybe how I’d pronounced it, he almost smiled.
Breaking eye-contact, he looked northeast to Calvallagh. So did I. The cavalry had reached the level plain; now rounding the cliffs, Plamen like a white flag at the head. One horseman parted from the column and rode towards us at the mound. As he stopped, veering his horse, I saw him throw his arm up high. A sudden flash glanced over us and then again.
‘Orders to hold position,’ said Shafra grimly. The signal was repeated three more times before the rider wheeled back again to join the moving cavalry. ‘We garrison the mound. If indeed that rabble dwells here, then it can be staved off and chased back to wherever it came from. With luck, our river.’
‘And the Commander will follow?’ I piped.
‘If he can, yes. Three more men to the scarp! Stand ready to corral and secure the horses. The rest with me. Boy, you’ll . . . boy? Hey, hey there, boy!’
I heard him well enough but didn’t stop, hopping down from the ledge, then running up across the front of the cave-mouth and climbing fast between the crags. As quick as I could, I found my way around the north-facing wall of the mound. It would be harder from higher up but I had to try. I had to master the Sight or there wasn’t any point in all of this!
Drenched by sweat at the top, I fell against the first big rock. Facing north. Even with the torque closed on my wrist, the plain wheeled round in orbit as if charged up by the thrum of distant hooves over the earth. From up here I could see everything and hear Plamen’s voice as it carried.
The cavalry was slowing in the middle of the passage, some five hundred yards or less from the foot of our mound. A mile maybe between the horses and the oncoming Rath.
My finger touched the torque-lever, my eyes slamming shut on instinct. But this time I was ready.
The vastness spun and tried to throw me, but I pinned all of my awareness to the sounds of my target—pushed it hard towards the source—until I found myself caught up in rapid, blurring movements. White, black, brown: the galloping legs of forty horses. For just a second I saw the faces of men and women in their saddles; then I was flying, shooting ahead across the dust, faster than horses. As I flew I scanned the gypsum until the black eyes blinked out.
I strained to hold them in my focus, resisting the pull of the plain.
Chalky bodies loped into my sphere of awareness. Sun-scorched and peeling, caked yellow with dust, they seemed to crawl out of the nothingness at me. They weren’t the monsters I knew: not quite dying, maybe, but withered and weakened by the heat. Fifty-four—it was felt without having to count them. More straggled behind. A dozen. I saw no spears.
My focus snapped. Spinning away through the open, I batted back the lever, clenched my teeth and swallowed vomit. Couldn’t do it.
I climbed up on the rock and looked out without the Sight. A lick of wind touched my forehead with wordless shouts from down there. It was hard to see much through the dust they’d churned.
Then they divided. The two halves of the cavalry veered, north and south, a V-shaped trail in their wake. White robes gleamed down the centre. Plamen hadn’t joined either half but rode head-on with three—no, four—riders.
When next I looked to the Rath, the bigger group had slowed and stopped, each creature suddenly seeking some escape from what was coming through the passage. Both halves of the cavalry formed and straightened as they rode, parallel with Plamen and now overtaking him. The Rath could only run back. I heard their screeches, broken gibbers, terror driving them to panic.
But they didn’t flee: they loped forward.
Plamen and his four fanned into a line. Bright metal glinted; I heard, above the drum of hooves, the shout to open fire but couldn’t see how many Rath fell through the blur of running feet. Only the line of crossbows break in two and ride to join the columns.
Up went a shout from the south column, then both the columns veered at once.
Steel flashed, hooves drummed harder. The columns passed by the rabble, brushing the Ratheine flanks. Shrieks carried up to me again. It was all too clear we could destroy them with a single head-on charge, but no—we couldn’t do that! Plamen couldn’t! We had to force them to retreat!
Taking separate directions and leaving the harried Rath behind them, the two columns withdrew from the middle of the plain.
Still the rabble didn’t flee. The Rath were terrified, confused, but moving forward all the same and now the smaller group of stragglers crossed the gap in worried twos and threes.
Choppy commands drifted up from the north column as it rounded northwest and circled back towards the Rath. Plamen had taken the frontline of the south group; now he was arcing in this direction, leading back towards Calvallagh.
The columns slowed to a halt then: one facing in from the north, the other out from southeast.
At that the rabble transformed. Seeming to bleed what was left of their strength, they broke into a feral sprint towards the southeast formation, many going on all-fours as I remembered. They closed in fast. Plamen held his ground and pointed his sword high in the air. I caught his words—‘Sidelong all columns!’ and ‘Charge now!’
They advanced. Leaving the passage wide open for the Rath to retreat, they rode hard from both ahead and behind. At less than fifty yards, I guessed, both columns narrowed and swerved to charge alongside, slashing at the edges of the group.
And the group broke. Abandoning all the safety of what was left of their desperate cluster, they scattered and fled for the mound and their caves. Towards us.
It hadn’t worked.
Below my perch, Shafra’s party quickly moved towards their horses. But even as the enemy scampered closer to the scarp, I held position on my rock. Hand on the fusil’s grip again.
‘Rally!’ a voice blared. It was now Savhar’s sword in the air. Her column rode around the escape and regrouped behind it while Plamen’s number wheeled away from its northward charge and returned. As he called out the last charge, the two half-columns reunited.
Forty riders stormed towards me over already beaten ground, a front line widening. The mound vibrated through my sandals. Rath rolled and tumbled under legs, crushed and devoured by those hooves. Others shrieked in defiance, spinning to face the wave once more before it ran them to the ground.
The charge turned east, hewing the last.
A cold disgust filled up my insides as the dust lifted. And cleared. Still on my rock, I stared down at the swathe of dark marks in the earth below the mound. They looked, from here, just like squashed ants.
My finger lifted off the trigger.