Eleven

V A G A B O N D

 

Neythan couldn’t help but look over the satisfyingly plain terrain with a hint of giddiness, glad to finally be out of the forest. Ridges of dried molten rock jutted in small dune-like rises across the horizon, stretching out beneath a pale, colourless sky to signal their arrival to the famed Ash Plains of Calapaar. Or, as some liked to call them, the Black Lands, named for their endless stretch of dark shale where Theron the Great, the third sharíf, had extended the frontiers of the Sovereignty into the vast territories of Calapaar more than two hundred years ago, taking the shipping lanes along the western coastlands that would later fund his grandson’s conquest of the High East. Neythan could still remember the history lessons in Ilysia, Tutor Hamir slapping a stalk of willowcane across his knuckles every time he confused Tsarúth the Brave’s exploits with those of Kosyatin the Bloody. Not that any of it mattered now.

Both Neythan and Caleb were exhausted. Barely a word had passed between them since they’d departed the ravine, although that was as much to do with the sulk Caleb had slipped into along the way as it was the work of the journey. For the three days since leaving the forest he’d limited himself to the occasional mumble and tut. His protest against the way Neythan had abruptly fallen asleep at the waterfall. Never mind that Neythan had about as much control over that as when he’d been pricked by Caleb’s darts. Never mind that it was Caleb himself who’d persuaded Neythan to visit the fall in the first place.

Still, at least they were out of the forest, and after having journeyed a whole night to escape, Neythan was too tired to bicker anyway. In the end, he’d left Caleb to his stubborn silence and turned his thoughts instead to the encounter with what he’d now come to believe could only have been a Watcher.

Yes. A Watcher. It had to be. What else could she be but one of those mercurial spirits Neythan remembered from childhood chatter and Uncle Sol’s stories? From before the time of men, Uncle Sol had said. Too old to be marked by age. Although Neythan had loved every tale told about them he’d never thought them anything more than fodder for fables. Not until seeing her.

Already his memory of the whole thing – the way she’d looked, the things she’d said – was beginning to fade, turning foggier with the passing of each hour. But the blueness of the place he’d stood in, and beyond that, her counsel to reach Hanesda, remained clear. And that was enough. More than enough. Because the more he thought of it the more certain he became of what she was, and the more certain he became of that the more uncertain did everything else become. For if she was a Watcher then the very world was no longer what he’d once thought it to be, or more than he’d thought it to be. And if the world itself could be so different from what he’d always thought, then what else?

The questions felt dizzying and perilous. It was a feeling he’d usually have taken hold of and expelled quickly from his mind, the way the disciplines taught, but now…

“Look.”

Caleb’s voice startled him. Neythan glanced over to find him pointing ahead to a scant cluster of ruins in the distance.

“Shelter,” Caleb said. “Looks empty too.”

Neythan arched an eyebrow. “So, he speaks at last.”

Caleb didn’t answer. Neythan shrugged. They wandered slowly toward the broken structures. Three buildings, one beside the other, each built entirely of slagstone. The roofs were flat, the walls pebbly. In place of doorways there were small misshapen openings.

“Nomads,” Caleb muttered. He nodded at the bump in the horizon miles to the east. “In times past men would settle in places like this. They’d wait until the volcano had its say, then take a smoothing stone, driven by oxen or mules, to some plot like this while the ground was still soft, and ready it to be built upon.”

“Strange place to live.”

“No, child. They did not build to dwell here. This place was made by wanderers, men without country.”

“Well, if not to dwell, then for what?”

“Therein is the mystery. It’s no simple thing to know the mind of the dead. The only ones who would were priests, and they are gone from these lands.” He looked up at Neythan, squinting a little despite the dim sky. “You can thank your Brotherhood for that.”

They wandered around the plot but it was mostly plain. The terrain left little need for a threshing floor and whatever other tools or structures there may have once been had long since gone, taken by time or the roll of the wind. After a while they looked around the houses too. The floors were smooth and flat, as if paved. The first two had an opening for a door and another for a window, admitting little daylight. The last house had no window but was almost roofless, with segments of what had once been its ceiling scattered about the ground in polygonal slabs of stone. A rubbly stack of rocks sat in the corner next to the biggest gap.

“Perhaps some sort of temple,” Caleb said, standing beside the heap as Neythan stared up at where the roof ought to have been.

“Anyone would think you a scribe,” Neythan said.

Caleb didn’t answer.

Neythan was about to pry further when he heard the distant whinny of a horse. He went to the small doorway at the front of the building and saw a band of men approaching from the east.

“We’re not alone.”

Caleb came to the doorway and peered out to see. He stared for a long while, then grunted, took off his sack, and dumped it on the ground before pulling Neythan’s crossbow out. Neythan stared at the bow, then Caleb.

“That’s my bow.”

Caleb glanced down at it in his hands. “So it is.”

“All this time you’ve had my crossbow?”

“Where else did you think it’d be?”

“I thought it lost at the fall, when you took me.”

“Well. Think of it as payment in kind, till the bargain is up.”

“You’ve been stowing my bow this whole time and all–”

Caleb put his finger to his lips and pointed at the doorway and the approaching strangers, smiling.

Neythan glared back, then turned to the door and drew his blade.

There were four of them – three men and a woman – each dressed in long robes, all on muleback, save the leader who rode a horse. Neythan watched them as they neared, their mules loping across the dry plain with their tongues out, great long heads nodding as if in time to a rhythm only they could hear.

The woman was old; a Súnamite with dark ebony skin so cracked and sunbaked it resembled charred timber. She rode in the middle behind the leader, her head hung like a starved plant’s. The man at the front wore a pale and dirty turban. Stubbled narrow jaw. Wide shoulders. A sword’s sheath low-slung on his right thigh. A second man rode by the old woman. Heavy-set. Thick beard. Broad back. His legs dangling either side of his mule like tassels, his gut keeping him stiff and upright in the saddle. He talked and japed with the rider at the rear, a young man Neythan’s age, gangly with a long neck that made his head loll in step with his mule’s.

“Bandits, likely,” Caleb whispered as he crouched at Neythan’s elbow with the bow. “Makes sense for them to use this pass. Unlikely they’d see men or anything else for at least a day’s journey in either direction.”

The turbaned leader climbed from his horse in front of the ruins. He untied a gourd from his saddle and slowly eyed the grounds before murmuring something to the man behind him and pointing toward the broken houses. Then the man opened the gourd and lifted it to his lips. Neythan saw the woman’s eyes flicker to life, gazing at the drinking man as he poured the water down his throat.

“Captive,” Caleb whispered.

Neythan nodded, a common enough thing. Tutor Hamir had taught them of how bandits would wait on known trade routes, especially here in the north where there were fewer roads. It made it easier to guess the way a bounty might take. In the riverlands of Sumeria further south there was Qareb, Hanesda, Qadesh – each of them large market towns, which meant more merchants, more roads, and more cityguards and soldiers to watch them. Trickier work if you wanted to rob a man as he travelled, which was why bandits preferred to raid in the north.

The turbaned man wiped his mouth and stowed the flask, slipping it back among his provisions on the saddle. He smiled at the old woman, who slumped as he put it away. The man gestured again at his companions impatiently. They began to slowly climb down from their mounts. The old woman leaned forward on her beast. She looked exhausted. Neythan looked at her and decided.

“We need a horse,” he said.

Caleb glanced up at him from the shadows. That they were backed into a house with one exit would make it hard to surprise the men. That they were both weakened, having walked with little rest for three days and eaten sparingly, would make it even harder.

“Whatever you may be thinking, Neythan, you would do well to forget it. The odds do not favour us. Look. The day is not far gone. With luck they will do no more than look around then continue on their way. If we can go without disturbing them then let us try.”

“Give me the crossbow.”

Caleb hesitated, but something about the way Neythan said it – so calm, and firm – made him obey. He handed the bow to him. Neythan put his sword in its sleeve and took it. He checked the stock and selected two quarrels, fixing one snug in the groove against the whipcord and the other beside it in the spine. Caleb watched him, saw the cold stillness in his gaze as he stared out at the bandits.

Outside, the men had begun to move about the ruined plot, looking around. Neythan looked out of the doorway again and saw the broad bearded one entering the house on the far side, chatting bawdily with the lanky youngster as he went in. Neythan would have liked an arrow in the leader first. He had the horse. He’d have the choice to flee, and had the look of one able to fight. But from this angle Neythan could no longer see him.

Neythan stepped out from the small doorway and looked around. There was only the old woman on the mule, head stooped and back hunched. Her gaze rolled up from beneath her headscarf to see him. Neythan nodded. The woman said nothing, as silent as the two mountless mules beside her. Neythan moved along the wall toward the gap between the houses, and then on to the low doorway of the adjacent house. The wind picked up, rolling grit from the ashy stone slope, rattling drily against the slagstone.

Neythan guarded his eyes as he reached the doorway and crouched to peek in. Daylight streamed in through the battered roof. He went inside. He checked the corners, his feet crunching on the dislodged grit from the crumbled ceiling. No one here. The big man let loose a loud belch outside to the sound of laughter. Neythan looked through the window at the back of the house. Still no leader, only the barren, slate-coloured landscape rising up on the other side. He went back to the doorway to check the next house.

Outside, the youngster was shouting at the old woman. He’d pulled her from the mule. She lay on her ribs, groaning, her wrists still bound as the youngster muttered insults before wandering away to the far corner of the plot to urinate. Neythan stepped out and moved to the last house as the boy stood with his back to him, showering the ground. Neythan stayed close to the wall, creeping in its shadow with the crossbow cradled low.

The big man came out yawning before Neythan reached it, a sop of dry bread in one hand, his other lazily scratching his gut as he squinted east to where the boy stood. He stretched and looked idly back along the wall away from the boy and toward Neythan. Saw him approaching in the wall’s shadow and froze. He saw the crossbow in Neythan’s hand; then, the bread dropping from his mouth, he reached clumsily to his waist for his sword.

Neythan quickly stepped away from the wall and shot the man through his beard. The arrow pierced his throat and lodged there like a signpost.

The boy turned at the man’s grunt and yelped. Still moving, Neythan skipped forward and swung the crossbow, pounding the bearded man’s skull and then turning to the boy as the arrowed man crumpled to the ground, reaching feebly for the shaft in his neck as his shawl filled blood-red. Neythan thumbed the next arrow into place and moved to sight the boy.

Whisper of wind at his ear.

Neythan left off from his aim, dropping the crossbow, and turned abruptly to duck away.

The sword of the turbaned leader crashed from behind through the emptied space as he tried to plough through Neythan’s shoulder from overhead. He was turning to swing again but Neythan had already unsheathed his blade. Was already pivoting, allowing his momentum to carry through into his backswinging arm and sword. The blade swung through the turbaned man’s neck, separating his head from his shoulders in one savage swipe.

The dislodged head fell and rolled, coming to a stop between Neythan and the boy as the turban unravelled like a loose ball of thread.

Neythan remained still for a moment at the end of his follow-through, sword outstretched. He watched Caleb tentatively step out from the temple entrance and then turned to survey the carnage. The thick, bearded man lay slumped against the wall, his hand loosely clasped about the shaft in his throat as he wheezed and spluttered.

Neythan looked down at him without expression.

Then he turned his gaze to the headless body at his feet and the blood pulsing from it, puddling against the wall. The boy was still standing toward the edge of the plot, eyes wild and wide, fixed on Neythan. Neythan just looked at him. It was strange really, fascinating even, how other he was in that boy’s gaze, how alien, though they were more or less the same age.

The boy panted, his breaths snatched and jittery, like an injured bird. He was still holding his member in one hand from urinating. His legs gave out as Neythan sheathed his sword and turned to walk toward him. Then, when he saw Neythan collect the crossbow from the ground, he began to scramble backward on his hands and feet, pleading, whimpering, begging for his life to be spared. Neythan aimed the bow and shot him in the chest from no more than a few feet. He stood and watched the boy bleed and grow still before turning back to the plot to face Caleb.

“Perhaps some warning in future?” Caleb said quietly as he approached, looking over the thick man with the arrow in his throat against the wall. The man was still now, no longer breathing. “Only I like to be somewhat ready when about to witness a bloodbath. Easier on the bowels.”

Neythan walked to the beasts and took the bearded man’s flask. Then he went to the old woman and squatted where she lay on the ground. He undid her bonds and handed her the flask and rose and returned to the beasts. He began removing the supplies hung over the mule-saddles but then, remembering, looked about for the leader’s horse. He saw it idling at the corner of the front house. He threw the satchel he’d been rummaging through at Caleb.

“Only the necessities,” he said. “We cannot take too much, we must make good time.”

Caleb checked the satchel as the old woman, still on the floor, drank from the flask and watched Neythan. He approached the lone horse, talking to it softly. He stroked its long muzzle and rubbed the throatlatch. Its broad wet nostrils flared and snorted nervously as it eyed him, wary of this bloodspeckled stranger. Neythan patted its neck gently and led it toward the three mules and checked its saddlebags.

“A strange one,” the old woman said weakly, but she said no more before closing her eyes to rest on the ground.

Neythan looked at her, and then at Caleb, who eyed him back for a moment but then looked away. Overhead, a lone vulture called, marking the meal to come.

Neythan stood there in the quiet, pondering the old woman’s words, and then other things too: the way Arianna had looked back at him through the rain from her horse that night in Godswell. The way the room had smelt when Neythan awoke to find Yannick’s blood splattered across the walls and floor. Caleb’s cave. The Watcher’s sayings. All of it was so unreal, as shapeless as the outhouse doors before him. He looked at them now and the ruined buildings they invited entry to, these grey neighbourless structures built by men who’d long since turned to dust. And he wondered at what they’d known or not known about the world and whether they’d ever too felt as he did now. Then he turned back to the sacks and bags at the horse’s saddle and continued to rummage, still thinking of those nameless builders. Wanderers, Caleb had called them. Men without country.