Deep Water (34 page)

I knew the answer, knew it certain in my bones, and that was how I found I had the Sight, and I had to combine his service
with service to newer gods, and they extended my life after my sister’s daughter bore her first girl. But still, even as I
cast the stones and listened to them whisper the black rock gods’ answers, still and always I tended the fire.

H
ARD COUNTRY BY
daylight was a nightmare in the dark, and soon they were leading the horses as much by feel as by their sight, the strengthening
starlight interrupted by cloud and trees and towering rocks. Irrationally, Ash felt safer on the ground, although he would
be far safer on Mud if the dogs ever caught up to them. He had to hope that the first brother wouldn’t risk his hounds in
the wilderness, but if he did, they could be caught between two sets of claws and teeth. He distracted himself from that thought
by trying to remember the sequence of notes Doronit had whistled to send the wind wraiths away. He had stood on the cliffs
above Turvite with her and she had whistled two tunes: one to control them, so they could parley, and one to send them away.
He had tried to forget that night . . .

As they made their way upward, the slope grew steeper, the trees fewer, and the rocks slid beneath them. The horses didn’t
like it when the trail shifted under their hooves, especially Cam. She shied and slid again, pulling on the reins so often
that Flax had to swap over with Ash to give his arms a rest.

The last stretch was the steepest, the horses scrabbling for purchase, Flax and Ash on hands and knees. At the top they paused
for a moment, and Ash was sure he could hear the scrabbling sounds continue. An echo? Or… Surely the men wouldn’t follow
them up here? They’d be insane to do so.

The top of the bluff was a plateau, dangerous even in daylight, and crowned with whirling winds which ripped between boulders
and down crevices moaning unendingly. The horses didn’t like it at all. A little way forward, Mud stuck his hooves in the
thin soil and refused to go any further.

“We have to find shelter until daylight,” Ash shouted above the wind. There was a sudden silence. The wind just stopped, as
though it had heard him.

“That’s not good,” Flax said.

Wind wraiths, Ash thought in terror, just before they came. He and Flax were outside the old compact between the wind wraiths
and humans: they could not take humans unless the humans were delivered to them by an act of treachery. The agreement was
so old that some believed it had been arranged by the gods themselves, long, long before Acton’s forces had come over the
mountains. But it had force only in settled lands. He and Flax were in the wilderness, and they were fair game.

The thin, pale wraiths swerved in from all directions, around large boulders and small, screaming and moaning, sounding like
all the storms, all the evil, in the world. Close enough, Ash thought, as he tried frantically to remember the sequence of
notes that Doronit had used to send them away.

Like all the air spirits, wind wraiths liked to play with their prey. They streamed past, thin claws flicking out at the last
moment to scratch a cheek, a hand, to cut through a shirt. Although they ignored the horses, Cam and Mud had their hooves
firmly planted, shaking with frozen terror. The wind wraiths licked their claws and rounded back again, six of them, swirling
like a cloud with needles hidden in its center. Ash couldn’t remember the notes that would send them away. In desperation,
he worked his dry mouth to make saliva and began to whistle. Five notes, notes that had been burned into his brain in the
dark wind above Turvite. Five notes which controlled them.

They shrieked with displeasure, but their wild flight slowed and they came to hover in front of Ash. Flax looked from side
to side, as though he couldn’t quite see them, just hear them.

“Who calls us?”

Flax, getting the idea, was picking up the tune and whistling too. Ash waited until he was perfect in rhythm, perfectly in
pitch, and then stopped, and spoke.

“We do.”

The leading wraith spat on the ground and snarled at Ash, arms stretched toward his face, claws curling. He forced himself
to remain still. “
Name
, ignorance.”

“Ash.” Flax flicked him a look, as though to say “What about me?” but Ash didn’t know what the consequences would be of giving
your name to a wind wraith, and he didn’t want Flax to suffer if the results were bad.

“What would you have us do,
Ash
, little tree? Remember, trees can be uprooted if the wind is strong enough.” It laughed.

“Leave us alone.”

Flax gestured strongly to the horses.

“Leave us and our horses alone,” Ash amended. “Let us pass safely through this place.”

“What do you offer in exchange?” the wraith hissed. It looked consideringly at Flax.

Ash thought fast. He was certainly not going to make the kind of bargain that Doronit had. She had traded lives for information,
had told them where to find whole ships for killing so she could collect the insurance silver. He would not trade Flax’s life
for his. But he had to give them something . . .

Behind them, stones shifted and scraped each other. The wind wraiths whirled up and shrieked and Ash risked a glance behind
them. He began to whistle again, in case this was a trick to distract them. No trick. Behind them was a man, wrapping one
arm around his head to protect his face from the wind wraiths’ claws and swiping the air with his sword uselessly. The man
was hard to see in the starlight, but Ash had no doubt about who it was. He made sure Flax was still keeping time, keeping
pitch, and then he stopped whistling.

“Horst!” he called. “Come this way.”

Horst stumbled toward them, the wind wraiths following and slicing at him viciously. They plucked away the sword in his hand
and let it drop.

“You have brought us a sacrifice, friend!” the leading wraith said with satisfaction. “It is a good bargain!”

The wraith reached long claws toward Horst’s face. He stepped back, screaming, “No!”

“No!” Ash shouted at the same moment, and batted the wraith’s hands away.

The wraiths shrieked and spurted upward again, coming down a little further away. Ash had a moment to think.
Should
he sacrifice Horst?

He glanced at Flax and saw that he was just plain terrified — that he’d accept any bargain to get them out safely. Ash saw
himself on the cliffs above Turvite, whistling frantically to keep himself and Doronit safe. If someone had said to him then,
“Sacrifice someone who wants you dead and you’ll be safe,” what would he have answered?

Tactically, he knew what he should do. Probably no one, not even Martine, would blame him. But he had made this decision when
he hadn’t killed the carter, and besides that, he couldn’t, he just
couldn’t
, hand another person over to the wraiths.

“No,” he said. “This is not a sacrifice. The bargain includes his safety.”

Horst looked at him in astonishment.

“What do you offer, then,” the wraith hissed, “that is worth three lives?”

Ash cast around frantically for something, anything, he could offer them. “Information,” he said at last.

“What?”

Ash swallowed. He just hoped this news would be astonishing enough. “The barrier between life and death has been breached.
Ghosts walk the land, killing the living.”

“Sooooo.” The wraith shot up into the sky like a fountain of white and returned to hover again in front of him. “Broken by
a
human
?”

Ash nodded.

“Where?”

“South,” Ash said. “In Carlion.”

“Come, then, brothers,” it shrieked. “Come to feast.”

Laughing, cackling, screaming, the wraiths sped into the sky and headed south, a cloud traveling as no cloud could or ever
should, against the wind.

Horst sank to the ground, shivering, blood running down his face and arms from hundreds of tiny wounds. The wraiths had done
much more damage to him, thinking he was theirs.

Ash and Flax remained stock still for a long moment, until they were sure the wraiths weren’t coming back, and then checked
the horses, patting their sweating flanks and murmuring comfort, taking reassurance from their warmth and solid flesh, trying
to keep an eye on Horst at the same time.

“What have you done?” Flax asked.

Ash wondered that himself. It hadn’t occurred to him that the wraiths would react like that — he had just hoped that the information
would be enough to make a bargain. He licked his lips nervously. He knew he was going to get into trouble over this, but he
didn’t know from whom.

“I… I don’t know. But at least we’re alive. Let’s get going before they come back.”

That got through to Horst. He clambered to his feet and faced Ash. “You could have fed me to them. You’d have been safe, then.”

Ash shrugged. What could he say? In the darkness Horst’s face was hard to see, but his voice was full of emotion: confusion,
gratitude, anger. Ash would feel like that, too, if an enemy had saved him.

“I can’t let you go,” Horst said reluctantly. “It’s my duty to my lord to take you back. Or kill you.”

Ash felt very tired. “Kill me if you want, but you’re still in Golden Valley and that makes it murder, not warlord’s justice.”

Horst hestitated. Ash wished he could see better, but the starlight was faint and interrupted by high clouds.

“I have to take you back,” Horst said eventually.

“You can’t,” Ash said. “There are two of us, and we’re both armed. We have horses, you don’t. You’re wounded. There’s no chance
you could take us both and drag us down the side of this shagging mountain without one of us clouting you on the head with
a rock. And your lord should know the news we gave to the wraiths. There is an enchanter raising ghosts and giving them body.
Your lord should be told.”

The next pause seemed very long as Horst considered. Flax moved quietly around the side of the horses, trying, Ash could see,
to get behind Horst in case it came to a fight. But then the wind wuthered through a gap in the rocks, sounding just like
a wind wraith, and they all flinched. Horst let out a long sigh.

“You’ll still be a wanted man,” he said. “I can’t let you off Sully’s murder.”

Ash nodded. “Fair enough,” he said.

Horst turned back the way he had come, then paused. Speaking with difficulty, he said, “Thanks.” Then he started walking,
head down.

Flax came up beside Ash and clapped him on the shoulder. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

It was easier said than done. The moon was on its downward slide and its light was interrupted by clouds building from the
south. Ash and Flax took it in turns to go in front of the one leading the horses, poking at the ground with a stick to make
sure it was solid, to make sure they wouldn’t tumble headlong into a crevasse or have one of the horses break a leg in a pothole.
All the time the wind was building, sounding more and more like the wind wraiths returning, until they were soaked with sweat
from the tension and the concentration. When the moon was about to set, Ash decided they had to find somewhere to spend the
rest of the night.

They found a nest of large boulders which had a sheltered spot in the center and a small overhang where they could sit, glad
to have their backs against something solid, glad to be out of the wind, but not willing to sleep. Just in case. The horses,
however, settled down as soon as they came within the circle of rocks, and Ash decided to take that as a sign they were safe.
As they unsaddled and groomed the horses, the dusty scent of their hides and the routine way Mud shifted to let Ash move from
one side to the other created a sense of normalcy that settled him, too.

They drank in silence while the horses found rainwater in hollows and lipped at the coarse grass. Ash wondered where the wind
wraiths were, what they were doing. But there was nothing he could do about it. He remembered Doronit saying, “Concentrate
on things you can do something about.” She had been right. He had to concentrate on getting Flax and himself safely to the
Deep. At least this trail should cut their travel time down considerably. Once they were off the plateau, they should be only
a couple of days’ ride to Gabriston. And then, the Deep.

“What made you think of the lie, back there?” he asked, after a long silence.

“What lie?”

“You being a rich kid of the new blood.”

Flax laughed. “It
was
a good notion, wasn’t it? I can go as one of them, just like my da. Comes in handy, sometimes.”

Ash could imagine his mother’s reaction to that. She despised Travelers who impersonated Acton’s people. She could always
pick them, and Ash had heard her snap her knowledge out of the side of her mouth as they passed someone pretending. She wouldn’t
approve of this charade. His mouth firmed. Well, it wasn’t her life at risk, was it? She had given up all right to tell him
what to do when she had handed him over to Doronit. Time for him to make his own decisions.

“I think we should keep up the act,” he said.

“Sure and certain,” Flax said comfortably. “I might even get you to shine my boots!”

Ash laughed unwillingly. He had never been closer to liking Flax. “Safeguarders are skilled professionals, I’ll have you know,”
he said with mock sternness. “We don’t shine boots.”

“Shame.” Grinning, Flax settled down with his head on Cam’s saddle. “You can take first watch.”

Liking him didn’t last long, Ash thought. Spoiled brat. But there was something comforting about Flax’s insouciance, about
his resilience after the terrors of the night. Ash loosened his knife, just in case, and watched as the moon set and the dark
crowded in.

In daylight the plateau was still remarkable, windshaped rocks taking on the appearance of hunched figures, of curving waves,
of flames reaching to the sky. There was rainwater in rock hollows to drink, but nothing to eat, and Ash’s stomach growled
constantly once the sun was high.

Then they reached the edge of the bluff, and could see Far North Domain spread out below them. Wheat fields shining golden
in the sun. As they took their first steps off the plateau, Ash felt sharp relief flood him. They were out of the wilderness
now, and safe from the wraiths. Flax grinned at him, mirroring his relief.