Sighing, the Enchantress eyed the wreckage of their vessel.
Her own uselessness in the encounter drove Ina to murmur, ‘And I am hardly a bodyguard.’
The Enchantress raised a finger. ‘Oh, but you are, my dear. You are vitally important. You have no idea what pause that mask of yours gives people. That you are here accompanying me is quite necessary. Spite would never have believed a sorceress alone. While you, a Seguleh, are the perfect guard.’
So – I am nothing more than the perfect accessory. So much for my vaunted ambitions. Rightly is she named the Queen of Dreams
. One further question plagued her, yet she did not know whether it mattered now at all. In the end, her role as bodyguard – if humiliatingly illusory – demanded that she broach the subject.
‘Is she your enemy?’
‘My enemy?’ The woman’s thick brows rose. She nodded thoughtfully for a time. ‘Well … let us just say that she has grounds for resentment.’ She gestured. ‘This way. One good thing has come of this interruption, Ina.’
‘Yes?’
‘I do believe that we are close now. Very close.’
* * *
They pursued for four days, Jatal stopping only to throw himself down to attempt to catch a few hours of sleep before the dawn – though what he experienced could hardly be called sleep: his haze of exhaustion was more a delirium of nightmare images that flayed him worse than the agony of his lingering wounds. He often awoke feeling more tortured than when he threw himself to the ground.
Two days before, they had passed the corpse of a horse beside the jungle trail; it had been scavenged by predators but the majority of the carcass remained. The locals, it seemed, were unwilling to touch it. It was an Adwami mount. If the men and women they’d questioned along the way were accurate, the Warleader now had only two mounts remaining. Jatal led a string of four; he was confident they would overtake the man soon.
Scarza, of course, did not ride. Instead, he loped next to a mount, a hand on its cantle to help pull himself along. The half-Trell’s iron endurance was a wonder to Jatal.
They did not talk. Jatal had nothing more to talk about. Occasionally, as they rested their few hours in the predawn light, he thought he caught Scarza watching him with a worried look.
But he would shut his eyes. It was too late for talk. It was too late for everything. He was already a dead man. Through his weakness, his envy, childishness and petulance, he’d killed himself. He was dead inside.
The next dawn, when the light streamed down through the canopy in a dappled greenish glow, they were off once more. This day they passed close to a village, a small collection of bamboo, grass and palm frond huts standing on tall legs. Here, Jatal dismounted stiffly and waved the nearest villager to him. The old woman, almost black from her decades beneath the sun, all bones and sinew in a cloth wrap, approached and bowed.
‘Yes, noble born?’ she asked in a quavering voice, her head lowered.
In the Thaumaturg tongue, a dialect not too dissimilar to the Adwami, Jatal said: ‘We seek word of a man who may have ridden through here ahead of us. Has anyone seen such?’
The old woman shook her head. ‘No, noble born. No one has ridden past us here.’
Jatal cursed his luck. Had the Warleader turned off somewhere? Yet this was the most direct track east.
‘That is, no man, noble born,’ the woman added; then she paused as if thinking better of continuing.
‘Yes? Go on.’
The old woman bowed even lower. ‘Forgive us our ignorant superstitions, great one, but some nights ago one of our children claimed to have seen on this very trail a … a portent of death. Perhaps even – so the child claimed – death itself.’
‘Riding east?’
‘Yes, m’lord. A ghost, she thought it. A vision of her own death. A shade riding a horse that steamed like smoke in the night.’
‘Thank you, woman.’ Jatal tossed a coin into the dirt before her.
By this time Scarza had caught up. He ambled over, rubbing his legs and breathing heavily.
‘Still has a good lead on us,’ Jatal said. ‘Can’t understand it. He may be down to only one mount.’
Puffing, Scarza straightened to his full inhuman height, stretching his back. He blew out a great breath. ‘The man has strange elixirs and potions. Perhaps he is doping the animals so that they run on past their exhaustion and know no pain.’
‘Perhaps,’ Jatal grudgingly allowed. He gestured ahead. ‘See there, through the trees? The mountains?’
Still drawing in great lungfuls of air, the giant squinted. ‘Call
those
mountains? Those would be regarded as no more than pimples back where I come from. Boils, perhaps, those taller ones.’
Jatal almost ventured a smile, but did not. He frowned instead, and his jaws clenched. ‘Well, that is his destination for certain. The Gangrek Mounts. He is fleeing to Himatan. He cannot know we are after him.’
‘He would not care,’ the giant said. ‘No, he must be in a rush to get somewhere – or reach someone. Remember what these villagers are saying. After the army of the Thaumaturgs passed there came a train of wagons. Huge wagons. Each pulled by eight oxen. The train guarded by fifty yakshaka. That is what he pursues. That I swear by my mother’s remaining teeth.’
‘Alone? What could he hope to accomplish?’
The half-Trell gave an indifferent shrug. ‘Perhaps he thinks himself their match? Who knows. It matters not if we catch him first.’
Jatal nodded. ‘Indeed. It matters not, as you say.’ And he added, more to himself, ‘Nothing matters any more.’ He threw himself back up on his mount though foaming sweat streaked its sides and its muscles still quivered and jumped. He slapped his blade to its wet flank to set onward once again.
Scarza watched him gallop off and shook his head, frowning. ‘Ah, lad. It hurts now, I know it. But don’t go throwing yourself away.’ He drew in a great breath and hacked up a mouthful of phlegm, spat, then took hold of the cantle of his horse and set off in the prince’s wake.
After the foreigners had gone the rest of the nearby villagers gathered round the old woman.
‘What were they?’ one asked.
‘What did they want of us?’ another demanded.
‘The first was a noble,’ she answered. ‘From the south, I believe, if tales be true. The other was his monster servant. Summoned perhaps by the shamans of the south.’
The villagers were silent in wonder at this news. They knew it must be so, for Rhyu was their birthing-woman, their healer and fortune-teller.
‘They pursue death,’ she continued, peering after them with her milky half-blind gaze. ‘And will meet him soon.’
* * *
Scarves of mist coiled among the trees and stands of ferns and brush and for this Golan was grateful. Unfortunately, the day’s gathering heat would soon burn it all off. Then little would be left to disguise the shattered and trampled wreckage that used to be the encampment of the Thaumaturg Army of Righteous Chastisement.
Golan stood beneath his canted awning surrounded by his guard of yakshaka. It had been a night of complete and utter terror and chaos – terror for his troops and labourers, gut-twisting shame for himself. What would he tell the Circle of Masters now? How could he continue the march? And yet … what other option was there? Turn round? The river was behind them now. Not at sword-point did he think he could force the troops back over that river.
No. They were trapped. They—
The truth of what he’d just realized struck him with the clarity of a mathematical solution and he was stunned by its simplicity and its beauty. Elegant. So very elegant. It was a trap. The entire jungle, all Himatan, was a trap for all those who would seek to invade.
The jungle naturally defends itself
.
There was more to this as well – he was certain of it. A deeper truth. Yet he could not quite reach it. His mind was dulled by his fatigue. His thoughts tramped heavy and laboured. He refocused his attention outwards, rubbed his gritty aching eyes, and took a deep breath of the warm close air.
The last of the rain was drifting down as the clouds moved off to the southwest. Shafts of gold sunlight stabbed through the canopy. The cries of the wounded had diminished through the night. Now, only a low constant moaning sounded over the field that had been a scene of insane slaughter, suicide, horror and sick revulsion. Strangely enough, though they had been rained on all through the night, the surviving wounded now called for water. Low slinking shapes still haunted the verges of the surrounding jungle. The screams and the stink of blood had drawn every night hunter for leagues around. They had gorged themselves on choice viscera – sometimes while the victims still lived. What few cohorts and phalams could be organized had done their best to chase them off. The wreckage of the encampment was emerging now through the dissolving mist and Golan looked away.
He awaited the awful news. The butcher’s bill. He steeled himself to expect the worst – all the while suspecting that even that would come nowhere near the truth of it. First to dare approach was Second-in-Command Waris. The man came dragging himself up the
slight
rise, quite obviously exhausted and no doubt rather traumatized by all they had gone through.
The yakshaka allowed him entrance – over the course of the last day and night they’d had to cut down several soldiers who, in their agony, panic, or plain rage, had thrown themselves at Golan. Waris knelt to one knee.
‘I offer my head, Master,’ he began.
Golan cleared his throat of the thick sticky coating of catarrh that had gathered there. He spat aside. ‘No need for that as yet, Second. This is not of your making. I take full responsibility. Your report, please.’
Waris bowed even further. ‘A portion of those troops that fled into the woods are returning even as we speak – though much diminished. Creatures attacked them there. Yet ranks are being reordered. Surviving labourers are being put to work salvaging equipment. I estimate that we will be ready to march by noon.’
Golan found himself breathing more easily. ‘Well done, Second. Well done. You have my compliments. So enter it into the records.’
‘Yes, Master.’ He remained bowed, silent.
Golan felt his chest tightening once again. ‘Yes? What else?’
‘The bodies, Master. It would take a great deal of time to bury them all. And … well, the men may refuse to touch them.’
‘Ah. I see. Well?’
‘Might I suggest we dispose of them in the river?’
Relieved that the matter was so trivial, Golan waved his switch. ‘Yes, of course. Proceed, Second.’ Waris backed away, still bowed, until clear of the circle of yakshaka, when he turned and jogged off.
Good
, Golan congratulated himself. The army reconstitutes itself. Shaken and much diminished, yes. But not shattered. We march on. We must. There is no alternative.
Golan’s improved mood was short-lived. Another figure approached, this one gangly and stick-thin, with a long curved neck that somehow managed to support an improbably oversized head. Golan drew a deep steadying breath and awaited the arrival of Principal Scribe Thorn.
‘You live still, Master!’ Thorn announced as he closed, a quill tucked behind one ear, the heavy bag of papers swinging at his side. ‘I rejoice. Here so many you lead have passed on yet still you remain! Thank the fates.’
‘Your joy is noted, Principal Scribe. Have you an accounting?’
The scribe drew a sheet from his shoulder bag, squinted low over it. ‘I am hardly done, of course. It will take a long time to count all
those
fallen. So many! Such a catastrophe. Yet you have emerged unhurt, I see. That alone makes a victory of the night, yes?’
False gods! This man does not spare me
. Golan pinched the bridge of his nose and rested his gritty eyes. ‘You do have an estimate?’
‘Yes, Master.’
‘Well?’
As he studied the sheet, the man’s black tongue poked out as if it too was curious. ‘I estimate a force of some three thousand remaining serviceable labourers. Of the troops, eighteen hundred are able to march.’
Golan’s breath fled him. Their remaining labour force had been halved again. Who would carry all the stores? Cook and break camp? How could they advance?
‘Sobering numbers indeed,’ Thorn continued, peering further down the sheet. ‘Yet encouraging news exists.’
Golan could hardly credit his ears.
Encouraging news?
‘What possible good news could emerge from this disaster?’
‘There are now more than enough stores for those surviving!’
‘Yet none to carry them.’
Thorn did not miss a beat: ‘You anticipate me.’
‘I believe I am beginning to, Principal Scribe. You have a report?’
‘Quite.’ Thorn replaced the sheet and withdrew another. He peered at it myopically, pronounced: ‘Once again the Army of Righteous Chastisement emerges victorious.’
Golan found that he had to turn away, his fists clenched rigidly round the Rod of Execution. A long low breath summoned the proper Thaumaturg-taught calm. ‘At the rate of these victories we shall soon have the entire jungle conquered,’ he remarked aloud, acidly.
He heard the scraping of the quill on paper and he spun. Thorn peered up from the sheet, quill poised, mild innocence upon his narrow pinched features. ‘You have more to add, Glorious Leader?’