“As you despise thieves,” Nesaea said, “I despise liars.”
Odran backed away, jammed his skinny backside into a corner. “I’ve no desire to lie. He’s not here, I say. Has not been, near on a month.”
“Then where?”
Odran clamped his lips tight. Nesaea closed on him, the point of her sword directed at his heart. “Skalos!” he blurted.
Instead of hope, his answer filled Nesaea with dread. “You must be mistaken.”
Odran shook his head. “Lord Arthard sent him off. For what, I cannot imagine.”
“And, once freed, what could possibly hold my father to such a perilous journey?”
Odran swallowed, face firming toward resistance. Nesaea jabbed the tip of her sword against the man’s throat.
“Very well,” Odran squawked. Nesaea did not relent. She pushed the tip deeper, until the torturer babbled, “Lord Arthard holds the magician’s daughter for ransom until he returns!”
“I’m his daughter, imbecile. Do I look held, be it for ransom or otherwise?”
Odran’s eyes bulged. “No! Of course not, no. But I have seen the girl in your father’s presence, and he did not deny her. Why she is unknown to you is a question you must inquire of him.”
“Where is this girl?” Nesaea asked, masking her surprise at having a half-sister.
“I cannot answer,” Odran said, more composed. He smiled weakly. “I am my lord’s man, but he does not confide in me on such grave matters. Rumor has it that she was sent away, lest the magician get up to any mischief. He has powers, that one, if erratic.”
That sounds like Father
, Nesaea thought, her flimsy doubts fading. She made to turn away, then whirled back and thumped Odran a blow to the temple. He collapsed like a sack of grain.
In her search of the cells, she found a few hollow-eyed men who had the look of bandits, but none matched her father. Unless he had discovered some magic to transform his appearance, he was good and truly gone.
But did he go to Skalos, where Odran claimed?
Following him was the only sure way to find out, and if not for those conniving monks who made Skalos their home, she would not have believed the torturer. As Sytheus Vonterel, and many like him down through the years, had bought his skills from those black-hearted mystics, it seemed likely Odran had spoken the truth. As for Arthard’s interest in the monks, he must have learned from Sytheus of their very special wares, and desired some for himself.
After coming back to the torture chamber and cranking a winch to lower the groggy bread-thief to the floor, she used a key taken from Odran’s belt to unfasten his shackles.
“Bless you,” Palto gasped.
“Keep your gratitude until after you escape Dionis Keep,” Nesaea said.
He struggled up on an elbow, wincing at the pains Odran had given him. “Won’t you help?”
“I’ve already helped you enough to land me in your chains.” Nesaea tossed the gaoler’s keys on the floor beside Palto. “Free those you trust from the cells, and make your way as you will.”
Palto looked at the keys, bowed his head in gratitude.
Nesaea turned to leave, then called over her shoulder, “The next time you steal bread, do not get caught. Better yet, don’t steal again. Better still, get yourself far from Sazukford.”
Palto accepted the advice with a weary smile, and Nesaea left him there, knowing the fool would probably not heed her.
Before making her escape, she paused beside the unconscious gaoler, rooted through the small leather purse at her belt, pulled out Lynira’s warning note to Arthard. She dropped it on the gaoler’s chair, and fled.
Skalos
. She shivered at the name, almost wished she had never stopped in the Blue Piper to hear mention of her father fall from the lips of stranger.
Chapter 12
The first night after escaping Deepreach, the trail had led Rathe and Loro farther up the river gorge, deeper into the frigid Gyntors. The higher they climbed, the smaller the river became. Over the following days the forest thinned, giving way to talus slopes patched with broad fields of snow and ice. The mists remained, thick enough at times you could scarcely see a hand in front of your face.
Horge never returned. It seemed certain the ratlike fellow had become a feast for Tulfa and his vile kindred, something Rathe would not wish upon his worst enemy. Wish it or not, he had been unable to spare the man a gruesome end, and that pained a part of him he had forgotten existed.
One morning, with the sun fighting to burn off the mist, Rathe and Loro found themselves camped at the end of a vale filled with a partially frozen lake. Blade-shaped, the lake ran to the rock-strewn base of a distant mountain.
“Have we ventured into some frozen realm of the Abyss no man has ever imagined?” Loro grumbled, gnawing the last of their smoked meat. “Gods and demons, I swear I pissed ice this morning.”
Rathe rubbed his hands together over the fire, working numbness from his fingers. “Better than being in Tulfa’s belly.”
“At least we’d be warm there.”
“And dead. Of course, by now, Tulfa and his shadowkin would’ve long since shit us out.”
Loro glanced at the horses, whose ribs were becoming more prominent by the day. They made busy munching frosty blades of grass. Like their masters, they had little hope of finding enough to sustain them. “Give it a few more days, and we’ll be as dead here as there.”
Rathe eyed Loro, noted his girth had diminished even more, and could not argue the point. He stood up, feeling old and boney himself. “I’ll check the snares.”
Loro grunted in answer. Their snares had provided scant few hares in the lowlands. Up here, where winter never seemed to die, they had captured only cold air.
As Rathe moved away from their miserable camp, he eased an inch of his sword from the scabbard, making sure ice had not welded it in place the night before. He had heard of such, but never expected to be somewhere that he would need to take the precaution.
He lost sight of Loro and the lake behind a screen of gray boulders and a stand of hoary spruce. The trees had the height of saplings, no taller than a man, but he detected untold years in their rough bark and tough, springy limbs, hung all over with coarse black moss.
Mist enveloped him before he reached the first snare, set where two boulders had fallen together. It was empty. Rathe looped the leather cord around his wrist, moved to the next snare, set in a clump of wiry brush. Nothing. He kept on, gradually making his way downslope, until reaching the last of six snares. Like all the others, it was as bereft of game as the moment he had set it.
He stiffened when an indistinct shape slid through the fog farther down the slope.
So the hunter still hunts
, he mused, too cold and too weary to feel alarm. Neither condition could stave off smoldering outrage.
“Show yourself, and make an end of this!” he shouted.
The fog devoured his voice. In the still that followed, Rathe heard laughter, recognized the shadow-man’s contemptuous mockery. He waited, expectant, but his invitation went unanswered.
“Fear hones a man to his sharpest,” the shadow-man had said. Rathe guessed there might be a bit of truth to that. He also guessed his adversary’s true purpose was not to sharpen him, but to wear him down, get him jumping at every flicker and sound, so much that he started second-guessing himself and let down his guard.
“I grow weary, coward!” Rathe shouted.
Silence again.
With an oath, Rathe spun on his heel and started back. He did not go far before the laughter came again, unmistakable, darkly amused. Rathe pressed his lips together. When the man came, whether as spirit or flesh, Rathe would be ready. And by Ahnok, he hoped to fare better than he had the first time.
When Rathe returned to camp, Loro shot him a curious look. He had already saddled the gray, and was tacking his red. “An ill thing, challenging the wind.”
The fire had gone to smoldering ash. Without speaking, Rathe squatted and warmed his hands over their dying heat.
Keeping an eye on his companion, Loro cinched the girth strap. “By your sourness, I expect you must have seen something to put your back up.”
“Someone hunts us,” Rathe said quietly, “but, too, he is toying with us. Or, maybe, just me.”
“Truly?”
“I’ve seen him twice,” Rathe confessed. He showed Loro the cuts in his cloak. “The first time, we fought. Suffice to say, he bested me.
Easily
. That was before we came to Deepreach.”
“And you said nothing?”
Rathe shrugged. “He is no man, but a shadow. I think.”
“Gods and demons,” Loro snarled. “We have to get free of these accursed mountains.”
“Just so. But as I saw him again, just now, I expect he’ll try to stop us.”
Eyes wide, Loro looked down the trail. “Did he say something to give you that idea?”
“Not words,” Rathe said. “He laughed, the way a headsman might, just before dropping the axe.”
Loro took that as an invitation to mount up, and Rathe joined him.
It took them most of the day to skirt the lake. Never did the mists fully lift, nor the day warm. Rathe’s hope of soon getting free of the mountains perished at the sight of the trail climbing into yet another gorge, this one cut through by another small, ice-choked stream. Rathe heeled his mount forward before his disappointment could get a strong foothold in his heart, or Loro could begin complaining.
The path was steeper and rockier than any they had yet climbed, the going made slower by deep snow laid over uneven rock. They kept on until dusk turned the constant fog pink.
“That’s the first likely place to make camp I’ve seen all day,” Rathe said, drawing rein at the mouth of a brushy ravine. He was tired and cold. Of hunger, he avoided considering. If they were to fill their bellies, it would be with snow.
“Aye, if we can find dry tinder—”
Loro cut off when a figure burst free of clinging brambles, one step ahead of a shaggy black beast with curved horns, its back loaded down with bundles of fur, banging pots, and wicker panniers.
Rathe recognized the man. Loro saw something else. Before Rathe could stop him, Loro heeled his mount into a scrambling gallop, his sword out and swinging.
The running man gave a terrified squeal, the beast at his back grunted like an enraged boar, and then Loro was upon them both, roaring a battle cry.
Chapter 13
Rathe searched the darkness away from camp. Nothing crept, and he heard no mocking laughter. A breath of wind had picked up, just enough to tear the mist to tatters. For the first time since coming into the Gyntors, stars glinted overhead, cold as chips of ice strewn over black silk. Below them, daunting mountain peaks rose up, moon-lit flanks stark white and laced with black ridges. He prayed the dawn would bring clear skies and some hint of warmth.
As well hope for a banquet at a lord’s high table
, he thought sourly.
Satisfied as he could be nothing intended to attack the camp, he picked his way back up into the ravine. Horge sat across the fire with a handful of crusty snow pressed against a bloody lump on the side of his head that Loro had given him. If not for the wretched man’s pack animal, which had protectively shouldered into Loro’s charging horse, Horge would have lost his skull to a vicious sword stroke.
“What sort of beast is that?” Rathe asked, his tone light. He took a seat on a rock and reached his hands to the flames of their fire.
Horge looked to the creature grazing the sparse grass near the disinterested horses. “Samba is a yak.”
Rathe remembered the name from Deepreach, when Horge had mentioned his beast of burden. Having lost too many warhorses to spears and swords and arrows during his time among the Ghosts of Ahnok, he had never taken the habit of naming animals.
“Truly, friend,” Loro said in an aggrieved voice, “I am sorry to have cracked your head. I thought you were, ah, something else, is all.”
Horge scowled through strings of greasy black hair. “You mean to say, something other than a man?” His fur coat and leather leggings might have been pilfered from a forgotten crypt. Aside from shadowkin, he was the most ragged looking man Rathe had ever laid eyes on.
“I suppose so,” Loro said, gaze flicking to Rathe and away. “We’ve heard it told there are fell creatures in these mountains. After those monsters in Deepreach, and with the way you looked coming out of the bushes, well.…” Loro shrugged.
Horge tossed the bloody clump of snow away with a sigh. “’Tis me who should be sorry. I must have put a terrible fright into you, yelling like that.”
Loro showed a rare grace in not denying his fear. He spoiled it by asking, “I don’t suppose you have a haunch of mutton, or the like, stowed away in your baggage?”
Horge’s face lit up. “No mutton, but this morning I caught three of the fattest trout you’ve ever seen. The least I can do is share, as you spared me from Tulfa’s gullet and—” He cut off, looking as if he had been about to reveal a grave secret.
“And what?” Rathe asked. It was not as though he mistrusted the man, but Horge had a look about him, a jittery agitation that put him ill at ease.