Camp was already breaking when our party got back. It was just as I thought: the band of Rath had been cut off from their caves by the sandstorm. Drained by exposure to the sun, they would never have fled into the open again as we’d hoped. Shirking on packing duties, I hovered by the door of the roofed house and listened.
Plamen didn’t want to waste any more time here at the temple, now saying we were camped too far away from enemy movement. Savhar wanted to wait.
‘It’s more than twenty leagues to the Empty River,’ she argued with her High Commander more bluntly than I’d heard anyone speak to him before.
With one—maybe two—exceptions.
Plamen splashed his face in a wash-bowl. ‘Shen Drumbar is closer. Be content that we may break our journey there.’
‘That’s still thirty miles, Ezra. The horses have been pushed, they have to rest.’
‘I am confident in your Methan stock, marszalekh. Three hours, that will suffice to rest your horses.’
Savhar blustered from the doorway, so I pretended to be raking through my sling-bag. She didn’t seem to notice me.
The worry deepened in my mind, now even worse after my failed attempt to control the Sight up on that mound. What if I couldn’t do this? Plamen had made exceptions for me, dangerous exceptions, only some of them now justified by my place on his mission. But if I couldn’t find the river?
Before noon we were moving. Our column passed the line of crumbling bricks around the temple and the hermits watched us go. I couldn’t help but wonder, as I looked back, how long they’d stay here. How long could they survive out on these sun-blistered cliffs all on their own? They did have water, I supposed. But I’d not seen crops or planting beds; only skinny goats. What did they eat?
And what about Laudassa and Methar? If the Builders’ Stones were truly as important to these men as they seemed, and their mystery so sacred, then what made it right that some clerics could leave one temple for another?
Perhaps, then, these last wild outcasts were the true faithful of the creed.
Back on the flat ground of the plain, I joined the servants on the carts. The pace quickened. I did my best not to look at the trampled Ratheine bodies under the mound, knowing full well that the heat of the day would be ordeal enough to handle without those screams in my head.
The northwest passage swept ahead between the hills in beige-white stripes. Calvallagh fell behind. Our column held to the centre of the league-wide plain while four of the cavalry rode either side at a distance, alert with scopes. Sometimes I saw Plamen’s white robes and horse leaving the front to ride with them, pointing his own scope to the hills. But whatever they saw there, if they saw anything at all, it stayed away.
Savhar was right about the horses. As she would be, I figured. Barely an hour of northwest travel saw steam rising off flanks. They were strong, muscular horses but some stumbled as they walked.
Mile after mile, in a kind of daze brought on by heat, I toyed with something in my sling-bag; some strip of cord down at the bottom . . . a stringy thing with bits attached. Too drained to care, I let it be whatever drifted through my mind until the sun had made its curve.
As the hills leaned farther back and away from the passage, the vanguard of four rejoined the column. The sun turned orange, casting a lengthening sheen across the wastes to the south. I overheard the two telmadhi, riding side-by-side today, say that we’d crossed into Verunia: northernmost caliphy of the desert outland.
Hunger joined my raging thirst. The Empty River must be close. . .
Thinking more clearly again, I took the string out of my bag. It was the Ratheine bracelet. And I hadn’t even realised I’d packed it.
The Empty River wasn’t close. For another hour we pressed on, slowing only a little, and turning north only as the dusk began to sap the heat and haze out of the air. We crossed Verunia’s farmlands; saw lonely houses in their midst.
Here the settlements were clustered farming steads called “shens.” I’d known that word even before coming to Antissa. In the years after my people first arrived in the borderlands, it had been the farmers of these shens who gave us grain, livestock and coal. Now what remained of their cattle wandered wild in the emptiness. Weedy remains of their crops in scraggy, mouldering lines passed under the wheels of our carts. No people lived here anymore. All of them, I knew, were right now crammed into the districts of the fortress, like my own.
As daylight faded the column slowed to what was almost a crawl. If I’d not been so exhausted—more than the horses looked almost!—I could have kept up on foot.
Shen Drumbar came into view, the upper halves of white-walled houses still gleaming in the last of the sunlight, and the column stopped above the smooth basin of farms around the shen. Through dusky haze, I saw blue domes among the rooftops. Small and neat, with none of Antissa’s roughened grandeur, it didn’t really seem much more than a market centre for the farmsteads nearby.
A horseman rode down the column and stopped beside our supply-cart. It was Telmadh Shafra. ‘You’re called up front,’ he said to me.
I caught the look on Kobi’s face: a kind of silent, fearful awe. I tried to answer with a shrug as I climbed down from my seat, not really knowing what I’d meant it to say. Shafra rode back at a canter. Behind him I jogged alongside the standing horses, the rich earth turned by the hooves sweet in my nostrils, then hopped the line of whitened shrubs that lay ahead of the column.
High Commander and Marszal sat their mounts some yards away. I circled their horses with care.
‘How near need you be?’ Plamen said, gazing bleakly at the town.
I just said: ‘Sir?’
‘To search it.’
Again I looked towards the shen. Evening shadows were sliding over the slopes over the basin, last lemon spots seeming to cling. ‘That house,’ I said, pointing to a shack at half the distance.
Plamen nodded to Savhar and soon I shared the Marszal’s saddle, her swathe-buckle biting into the small of my back with each loping stride the great black-and-grey roan made down the slope.
We both dismounted at the shack. Savhar peered in through its broken doorway with a hand on her sword, but I’d known already it was empty. Just an old, leaning barrow and a clump of dead chaparral. I pulled the lever of the torque and reached out with the Sight.
We returned; Savhar reining her roan in front of Plamen who merely grunted, ‘Report.’
‘Dead animals,’ I said. ‘Some not dead for long, I think.’
‘How many Rath?’
‘Couldn’t see them, Commander, but they’ve been here,’ I said. ‘Last night, maybe the night before. There’s a fresh carcass. A cow.’
‘Where?’
‘The big house.’
‘Below the barracks?’
I cast my mind back to what I’d seen and recalled the palisade building above the mansion. ‘Think so.’
‘Wildcats perhaps,’ offered Savhar. She helped me down from her saddle.
‘Possibly,’ Plamen sighed while adjusting the circlet of his headdress. ‘And if not, whatever Ratheine number leaves behind a single cow is a number we can handle.’
With that, he raised his arm to wave the company forward down the slope. I backed away from moving legs and, when the supply-carts approached, climbed back up next to Kobi. Who didn’t look at me now.
This one had been easy. The basin had exerted its own pull, coaxing me down among the walls of Shen Drumbar almost liquidly, as if in welcome. The homes were simple: square, white houses with flat roofs, some little granaries with domes. No streets or courts, only the shrinking, swelling gaps between the buildings. Feeling the ease with which I could reel the Sight back, I’d let it flow and reach out anywhere and everywhere it would; weaving doorway to doorway, in through the walls and out through windows. Abandoned, hollow shells with barely a broken pot for the birds and mice to nest in.
The grander house lay on the far northeast side of the shen, partly enclosed by a steeper shelf of the basin so that its roof slanted down from the overhanging barracks. With its bright white walls, red roof, ornamental fascia and latticed windows, it looked much more like an estate of Antissa’s Inner City than anything that belonged in this place. The company gathered at a water-pump a few houses from its door.
The space around the old pump could have been a market, I thought, though its tarpaulins were gone; probably blown far away now. The pump was dry but our own supply was lasting well, and with vacant dwellings all around us there was no need to raise the tents. I helped the soldiers clear their insides of litter and debris, then with Kobi set the torches in place between the houses. We tended to horses, made up the fire. The sky darkened over and I ate and drank with Kobi, who was quiet.
Plamen and Savhar spoke for several minutes at the edge of the market and I watched them, licking my fingers clean of salt from the khapent. When they finished, Savhar came back to her soldiers, the food and fire. But I kept watching Plamen, who drew a torch out of the ground and went towards the mansion. I left the fireside and followed, my hood and mouthguard both drawn up against the chill of the night air.
For a tall man in boots, he had light footfalls; I heard barely a pat on the porch steps. The dead cow was there, split open, sprawled in the doorway with its bulky, sad head facing out. I kept my distance as Plamen stood there in its aura of flies, just looking at it. Only when he stepped over its legs to go inside did I follow, padding up the steps. Then gagging on the smell as I passed the cow.
‘You should be assisting the servants.’
‘The fire’s lit, the horses fed,’ I excused myself promptly. He didn’t answer or bother turning round to glare.
The atrium I could see by the light of his torch was an elegant square. There was a round pool in the middle, overlooked on three sides by upper mezzanine balconies. Plamen waved the flame across the floor of flagstones, shattered pottery, pieces of stone. Past the line of pillars that supported the west mezzanine, I made out the shapes of a dining table and a few tumbled chairs. No death, it seemed. No bodies except two small lumps floating in the pool.
‘This was Caliph Arif’s house, sir,’ I said, ‘wasn’t it?’
‘As it will be again.’
‘Are you looking for something?’ But again he didn’t answer. Torch held high, he circled the pool and mounted the wide frontal staircase. I walked behind him and tried again. ‘Do you think the people of Verunia will come back to live here one day?’
His voice sounded distant: ‘Don’t you?’
On the wall above the stairs the torchlight waxed over the emblem of the Mooncircle. Underneath it stood four figures, each inside its own alcove, and the light that crept over their smooth bodies made it look like they were moving; turning faces towards us. Unlike their bodies, their faces were blank: no eyes or mouths or noses. In the right hand of each was a short spear. ‘They don’t have faces,’ I thought aloud, hearing Plamen’s sigh almost before I’d opened my mouth.
‘They are the early chieftains,’ he said. ‘Fathers of the Satrapy. They ruled this land centuries ago. In five hundred years no one will remember your face either.’ He brightened the figure farthest to the left along the line; a man in sinuous thobes, with a scroll in his other hand. ‘Esha,’ Plamen named him, before guiding the torch to the right. ‘Veda.’ This man in swathes, with a kind of gem laid on his palm. Then, ‘Rasha.’ Swathes too, this one, and a set of weighing scales. Lastly, ‘Dassik.’ A great tusked helmet and a shield.
‘The things they’re holding . . . show . . . what they did when they were chieftains?’ I dared, and he nodded. ‘But the spears, why are they all holding spears?’
‘These men were soldiers,’ he said. ‘Lords and leaders of their armies. What else should they be holding?’
I understood that but—‘But who were they fighting five hundred years ago?’
‘Desert tribes,’ he replied. ‘The savages and barbarians of the Lack who craved our coastline.’
Even though I’d asked it, no sooner had the question come out than I remembered Rusper’s story about the great onslaught of tribes. Idiot. As it was, Plamen treated me like a nuisance to be borne; the least I could do if I wanted his respect was remember what I did know about his country when it counted. I stammered to make amends: ‘Didn’t they . . . attack the fortress . . .’
‘Before that time those tribes would travel out of the wastes in the northeast to embrace the culture on the coast,’ he spoke over me, not caring to hear my version. ‘But even in the earliest days of the city of Antissa, there were those who had come to know themselves as Vedish and those who had not. As more emerged, armed for war, so they began to threaten the desert realm. Our nation, already shaping. Conflicts rose in due course. The desert answered with steel and drove those Lackish waves back, growing stronger with every tribe it thus repelled. The Rath,’ he added, suddenly turning away from the chieftains to look at me, ‘do not pose the same threat.’
I blinked back at him, not sure what he meant.
‘They are beasts, beneath even the Lackish tribes. Vorth will see them crushed much the same. That or driven back north.’
Or back to Naemia, I thought.
With the toe of his boot he nudged a door wider, and as it opened flashed his light over a room. As in the others, all but the furniture remained. Those who had lived here had clearly left well before the Rath marked their home.
At the end of the west mezzanine was a pair of heavy double doors. Plamen pushed them forward. Inside was what looked to be a simple study. A cupboard stood by the door and a wide desk spanned the farthest end, missing its chair but still bestrewn with sheets of parchment. Behind the desk was a stone bust on a very narrow display stand, while across the floor a patterned rug had been half dragged out and under the doors to dangle over the mezzanine. There had been a tapestry on the wall opposite the window; it now lay heaped amongst the fragments of pottery. Its golden bar still on its hooks.
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Plamen crossed the floor to the desk and I went to the window. Through a lattice, between two shutters – one ripped clean in half – it looked out onto the houses round our camp. Out there I recognised Telmadh Eflan’s giddy laughter. I couldn’t see him or the others, only the reflection of our fire on white walls. The doubts I’d had about spending the night in the shen were easing. And yet as I stood among the broken things of a home all hollowed, I felt sad. ‘Someone told me . . .’ I started but trailed off, struggling for words.
‘Did they.’
‘I heard someone say,’ I tried again, ‘that Vorth’s changed from what it was. That it’s become a lesser realm now. A . . . nation robbed by time.’ I turned away from the window.
If the torch-flame hadn’t made such a perfect silhouette of his shoulders, I might not have seen them tense just then. But his movements were measured as he hunkered down to pick up part of a broken vase. ‘Robbed by time,’ he echoed. ‘Perhaps that’s so.’ His head tilted. ‘A lesser realm?’
Rising, he stood to his full height with the shard still in his hands and looked a question at me.
‘And where, I wonder, might we find this greater realm your friend implies? Was it your own, perhaps, your Naemia? Land of the holy Celestri of Fallstone and their ever-fawning Saremin princes? Or perhaps it is Ered, of all its science and its gold and high-glittering towers?’
Nothing I said was ever good enough for him. I couldn’t answer, he knew I couldn’t.
‘The nation of Naemia is ended,’ he said firmly. ‘Wiped out. Its princes felled and your Celestri hidden away inside their mystic bastion. As for the splendour of Ered, what true nation is that? It is a vulgar empire, a mongrel cow fattened by the spoils of other lands. Lesser lands.’ His gaze held cold. ‘Vorth has stood alone from the powers of Ered and so-called faiths of your Exelcia. It has needed no holy writ or ancient wisdom to thrive and prosper on this coast, and for lack of it a nation grew strong. The Vedish Way is firmer now than ever it has been.’
Though he never raised his voice, there was rebuke here and a fierceness that gripped me; wouldn’t let me look away.
His grey eyes narrowed. ‘Of course, your friend may not know as much as he thinks about that way.’
‘Why?’ I’d said before I knew it. And wished I hadn’t.
‘He is not of this land, boy, he is Elmine. Surely he has told you this by now.’
‘His mother and father were Vedish,’ I argued.
‘Yes they were. And they bore him in Claywall,’ he replied. ‘A logging town on the mudflats of Elman.’
‘Why does it matter? His blood is Vedish just like yours.’
Eyes widening, he lowered the torch. As firelight left his face the pinprick pupils left behind in the shadow made me tremble. ‘You speak to me of blood, boy?—speak even as if something more than a foundling thrown on my people’s mercy?’ I took a backstep. ‘And what need have I to speak to you of my forebears, warriors desert-born, commanders of men? You’d dare make utterance of blood to me?’
I swallowed, daring nothing, frozen to his eyes.
He raised his chin, gaze steady. ‘As you will, then. Let it be an education. My father was a pureborn Vedan. High-ranking vortan soldier, then later vizier of our Sanhedrin. My mother . . .’ He paused a moment. ‘. . . Although she died a Vedan, she was not desert-born. Ada-Prelle was her birth-name. A gran-artésan, high trader, from the Dunfinds province of Lostor. Stock of empire. So tell me, boy. Am I to be marked as Eredian in the sight of my realm? Am I to be diminished to a half of your master?’
‘No sir.’
‘Blood,’ he said, ‘is not the true currency of this nation. Those born of this desert are those who may claim the name of Vedan and that is an honour that may be neither corrupted nor deferred. Nor may it be bought, as you have no doubt learned yourself.’
But his mother had bought it, I thought, a little shamed though I felt to have heard him speak of her to me. And yet the fact that he would tell me—me!—such things about himself seemed only to make his convictions stronger. Powerless before them, I looked at the shards on the floor and spoke small: ‘How can Rusper be the Viceroy if all that matters so much?’
‘And still the same questions,’ he scoffed. My muscles tensed as he passed me, three strides taking him to the cupboard by the doors. ‘The Satrap is indisposed. In his state of infirmity, he would sooner dig a hole in which to bury the Vedish than deal war upon his enemies. Symphin, as you know, is his finest hole-digger.’
‘Engineer.’
‘As you say.’
A sour taste was in the room now as he opened the cupboard and placed the vase on a shelf. It stood without the support of its missing half. I turned to look at the absent caliph’s desk, passing a glance over the left-behind papers, then meeting the eyes of the stone bust behind them. It was Arif, his immaculately pointed beard here almost curling to a hook.
‘We still have six days,’ I said, thinking. ‘Are you going to send the soldiers to Laudassa?’
‘Such are the Viceroy’s orders,’ replied Plamen. When I looked back at him he was regarding me with a half-smile; as always a strange and unsettling expression. ‘Would you have me disobey them?’
‘No, it’s just Laudassa’s south of here and—’
‘And tomorrow we ride for the Empty River where we will track the arc of enemy movement southwest down the bank. I will dismiss the agreed-upon cavalry when our destination is found.’
That checked me.
‘What if I can’t, Commander?’ It had popped out of my mouth all by itself, so I now gave in to the plea. ‘What if I can’t find the Rath’s river?’
The cupboard door’s hinge gave a creak as a soft draught breathed its way in. Plamen turned, just as stone-faced as the caliph behind me. ‘Then we don’t return.’
I felt a chill. ‘But the Satrap gave us—’
‘Nothing,’ he said, loud. ‘He gave us nothing. His so-called ultimatum has no meaning. Our purpose is to buy Symphin the leverage he requires to sway the viziers of the Sanhedrin. The First Circle holds the power to overrule the Satrap’s decree against war, but we need that river first. Laudassa will have its garrison soon enough, indeed – as this regiment’s caliph is an ally of the Viceroy’s – Caliph Omran may please himself to the entire cavalry of the Eighth if he so wishes! But you and I will not return until I can expect to raise an army when we do.’
He closed the cupboard.
A shadow hissed.
‘Commander!’
His torch-flame shredded a path to light black eyes before impact. The creature’s screech was cut short as the fire fell and his blade drew a line in its throat, spurting black.
Plamen shouted, ‘Get away!’
At the sight of gnashing mouths outside the door, I jumped the desk, dragging the parchment down over the side with me and hitting the display stand. The bust toppled to the floor face-first and chipped Arif’s beard off.
Plamen dropped his sword, kicked back the torch and grabbed the rug by a corner. He pulled it hard into the room, the Rath on the balcony swept clear off their feet. They madly scrambled back at him and I saw the foaming spittle at their mouths as they rushed, but Plamen had his sword in hand again. He slashed both bellies. As their blood spattered, he forced both back out of the room. I heard the gibbers in the hall, the hands and feet over the stairs—they’d come from nowhere!
Shadows launched onto the balustrade as Plamen slammed the two doors shut. With just his body’s weight to hold them, I saw his jaw muscles clench. His sword fell down again and clattered. ‘You said it was clear!’
‘It was!’ I yelled.
‘How many?’ he yelled louder.
My fingers shaking and clumsy, I pulled the lever of the torque and drove the Sight out through the doors.
Outside the study, the whole mezzanine balcony was choked and the staircase was swarming. More were coming from . . .
‘Answer me!’
‘Thirty, forty!’ I shouted. ‘But more’s still coming—they’re coming too fast!’
Forty turned to fifty. I cut the Sight.
Behind Plamen, on the floor, the torch’s flame had lit the parchments, spreading, filling the room up with smoke faster than it could escape through the window.
The window! No, that lattice was steel, no escape that way.
The doors rattled and banged. Barely noticing the tingle that had started on my wrist, I looked to the opposite wall. The tapestry’s bar!
So I circled the desk, leaned hard against it and pushed with all the strength I had until it ground towards the wall.
‘What are you doing?’ Plamen shouted a second before the black thorn of a spearhead ploughed through the timber panel near his head.
I clambered up onto the desk and perched right at its edge, reaching just high enough to knock the bar out of one hook. It slid and landed with a thud, while another spear tore through the wood this time at Plamen’s shoulder. Both doors were shaking at their hinges, raucous screeches growing louder in the hall. The spears were sucked back out again, a third then splintering through the gap between the doors.
Flames leapt up from the parchments.
I tried to lift the golden bar but it was gold and too heavy. Crying out as I heaved and swung, it landed just short of his reach. He made a lurch for it, tumbled and the doors flew wide behind him.
Three ready Rath spidered inside, one leaping onto the cupboard, the others flailing wide-clawed hands.
The tingle on my arm became a burn.
Plamen seized the bar and raised it up in an arc, wheeling to face them. It hooked the shoulder of the creature on the cupboard, pried it clear. As it hit the floor, the returning end of the bar took both the others at the legs. Dropping their spears, they staggered backward.
The shadows teemed outside the doors.
Under the chamber of the torque, my arm was burning like crazy! Pulling its lever was no more natural than scratching an itch.
White light tore free.
It made a wild loop round my body, swooped then dove into the flames. The blaze ignited in a wheel of lightning-fire and Plamen ducked as it blazed and burned over his head. Returned. Pain coursed through my forearm, then my whole body, and my knees hit the desk. I threw out my arm, somehow knowing it would release some of that pain, and it did, bursting out on a cone of fire that forced Plamen hard against the cupboard and exploded through the doors. Shadows were blasted from the balcony, through the balustrade, into the hall.
But pain still racked my body. Somehow, through it, I drove my hand down on the lever and the blaze let go, withdrew, the fire shrinking to the torch smouldering on the floor.
Unshielding his face, Plamen ran forward, slammed the doors and dropped the bar across its holds; retrieved his sword and sheathed it. Then picked up the burning torch. Face flushed, and panting, he held it right between our faces and I saw where the fire had singed his robes. Outside I heard the cavalry shouting. But his eyes were on me, wider than I’d seen them before. ‘The disc?’
I nodded, shaken through. The pain was gone but it had left my body full of spiking twitches. That and the echo of the voice inside my head: little spark!
‘You knew to make it do that?’
‘No! It protects me,’ I gasped back.
His face hardened. ‘Look again.’
‘No . . .’ I begged.
‘Do it.’
Preparing for the worst, I plunged back into the Sight and the chaos raging in the hall. The Rath had abandoned the study doors, that swarm on the stairs drawn to the entrance.
Telmadh Eflan leapt across the carcass in the doorway, Shafra behind him. Brandishing both torches and scimitars, the soldiers surged into the house and charged straight into the throng. Blades sliced pale Ratheine flesh. As I heard the clatter of hooves out on the porch, the great black-and-grey roan stormed through the front doors after them, mashing the cow carcass in its path. Savhar was in the saddle, her broader scimitar at the ready. But they were outnumbered already, Rath still pouring from somewhere just behind the frontal staircase. Sixty, seventy, and coming . . .
My Sight swept over their bald heads . . . along a narrow service passage . . . then a dark stair to the cellar . . .
. . . Out of a crack in the foundations of the house they were rising. Down I followed the crack until it gave onto a tunnel. A square tunnel of green stone, just like those under the Deep. It ran southwest at a steep slope, and on that slope like chalky spiders they were slipping, scrabbling, surging for the surface. Through teeming numbers I could see a wider space below that; a space that ended in some blockade of fallen rubble.
‘We’re right on top of them!’ I spluttered. Eyes open, lever in, I sprang from the desk. ‘The roads of the Builders are here too! I don’t know how but the Rath’ve found a way to get in—there’s hundreds down there!’
Plamen set his teeth. ‘The balcony?’
‘Clear,’ I nodded fiercely.
‘First chance you have, you drop and run. Out of the shen, away from the farmlands. We’ll find you.’
‘You mean jump?’
I felt the heat of his anger as he grabbed my swathe-collar and dragged me to the doors. ‘Yes boy! The blood of my men is on your hands. Break an ankle or die here.’
He cast aside the golden bar and pulled the doors open again, the roar of the fight hitting my face like a breaker. He pulled me out of the study and right up to the smashed-through, scorched and glowing balustrade. Watched by the four stone chieftains with their spears, the floor had all but vanished under the mass of Rath and soldiers; without looking through the Sight I could only guess at the Rath numbers. Crossbows fired at the stairs from the edge of the pool while Eflan and Shafra fought like furies at the heart of the swarm. Eflan’s shoulder was black with blood and at the foot of the stairs some men and women lay dead. Savhar’s horse was surrounded. As hellish arms dragged at her flanks, I saw her slide her blade into a Ratheine throat. Then lock eyes on our balcony—‘Orders, ekharan!’
The High Commander looked to me. Trusting me?
‘They’ll just keep coming,’ I pleaded. ‘We have to go.’
Without a moment’s hesitation, Plamen gripped a stretch of uncharred wood and belted, ‘Fall back!’
Eflan reacted. His hair swaying as he spun from his last kill, he beckoned Shafra.
‘Retreat!’ shouted Savhar. ‘Break camp and ride! Leave the carts!’
Plamen gripped my arm. ‘Go, now!’ He shoved me down between the arms of smouldering timber and I had no choice but to try make the best of my fall. Landing hard on my haunches, I let my feet go out from under me and my body tumble right at the edge of the fighting. I backed from it quickly, but not quickly enough.
Monsters.
A monster leapt the pool and skittered straight for me. I didn’t think, just pulled my lever—felt that burn—and watched the blaze. Blinding me only for a second, the whiteness opened like a wave and consumed the Rath whole before returning to my wrist. I only realised I’d been screaming when the crackling light was gone.
I stumbled back, reaching the doors, and tripped right over the cow’s leg. I sank into its trampled ribcage, smearing gorge over myself. As much from disgust as from the new black eyes that found me and legs that instantly gave chase, I launched and ran and skipped the steps to reach the foot of the porch.
The lights of camp were a blur ahead but I skidded to a stop.
My sling-bag!
Body still twitching with adrenaline and what the Disc had done in me, I looked back and saw it in the cow, slung on a rib.
As the cavalry broke in retreat, the Rath poured after them, one splashing through the atrium’s pool towards me.
I raced back up the steps, lunged across the carcass and swiped to free the bag-strap.
Bone hooked lever.
Light ripped free—
—And then ripped back.
The back of my head slammed into something hard: a metal handle. Wheelbarrow. I knew exactly where I was. Fighting free of the chaparral, I stumbled out through the doorway of the shack on the slope.
The air was freezing!
Shouts flew up. Far off, I saw the spots of torches through the dark. But there was nothing I could do but stand and listen, watch and wait. The minutes passed, my terror rising with the cold that numbed my arms, before at last the line of horses rode away from Shen Drumbar. At their backs, the Rath a shadow of wild noise.
I drew the fusil. Working quickly—cursing useless, shaking hands—I loaded schot, retracted torsion and ignited the charge of chrozite. Raised the weapon above my head, pointed to the night sky and fired.