Movement behind him.
He whipped around, saw Ringil standing there swaying in the feeble light. Blew out a sigh of relief and eased his grip on the ax.
“Get up,” the Trelayne knight said hoarsely. “We’ve got to get out of here. Before the others get outside.”
Egar glanced toward the inn. The sounds of violence raged from the broken window and the doorway, where a mob of men was gathering, torn between the fascination of spectators and the terror of what they’d seen. There was smoke and the jumping light of flames. No one seemed to have noticed the three of them yet, down here in the gloom. All attention was on the building.
“There’s got to be better than sixty men in there,” he told Ringil. He was breathing hard from the fight. “Even if only two-thirds of them want to mix it up, they’ll finish these fuckers, easy.”
“No, they won’t.” An awful urgency split Ringil’s voice open. “Believe me, we’ve got minutes at most.”
You don’t follow a man to almost certain death in the baking heat of a mountain pass without learning his measure first. Without learning to trust what he says in a coin-spin instant, even if he is a fucking faggot. Egar got up and stared around.
“Right. We take the ferry.”
“What?” Ringil frowned. “Don’t these bumpkins lock up their oars?”
“Yeah, who gives a shit about oars, time like this. The Idrikarn flows hard this far out of the swamp, it’ll carry us south faster than you can fucking run, mate.”
The thing at Egar’s feet stirred and moaned. The Majak looked down in surprise.
“Tough motherfucker, huh?” he said, almost admiring.
Then he reversed the ax in his hands, shifted stance, and chopped down with the bladed end. The swamp wraith’s head rolled free in a messy burst of blood. He wiped some of it off his face, sniffed it curiously and shrugged. He cast about and found his dirk, gathered it up, and clapped Ringil on the shoulder.
“Come on, then,” he said. “Arse in the saddle.”
“Wait, give me his sword.”
“What do you want his fucking sword for? What’s wrong with the one on your back?”
Ringil stared at him as if he’d suddenly started gibbering like a Demlarashan mystic. Egar stopped in midturn, spread his bloodied hands.
“What?”
Ringil lifted his right hand as if it pained him, put it slowly and wonderingly up to his shoulder, and touched the pommel of his sword like, well, like he was caressing someone’s prick, to be honest. Egar shifted uncomfortably, fiddled with his ax.
“You’re a fucking weirdo, Gil. Same as it ever was. Come on.”
Down to the darkened landing stage at a sprint, Sherin stumbling between them, and Ringil saw it was true, even at the bent edge of the river there was current running. Tiny leaves and other specks of river detritus drifted by at ambling pace. In the center of the stream, a taut swirl showed on the fitfully bandlit water. The ferry, a fat little demasted fishing skiff barely four yards long, wagged at the end of its moorings as if in a hurry to be off.
“Hoy! You!” They’d been spotted. “Wait, there—thieves—look. Hoy, stop them, that’s my fucking boat—”
They leapt aboard. Egar hacked the ropes apart and gave the pilings a punt with one boot. Behind them, a spill of dark figures came pelting down toward the landing stage, yelling, gesticulating, brandishing weapons and fists. The skiff drifted away from the shore, agonizingly slow at first and then, as the current caught, swinging briskly out into flow. Balanced amidships, crouched over the collapsed and sobbing form of Sherin, Egar grinned at Ringil.
“Haven’t done this in a while.”
“You’d better get down,” Ringil advised him. “They’re going to start shooting in a minute.”
“Nah. Too much else going on, they won’t have a strung bow between them. They’re not soldiers, Gil.” But he bent and hand-braced himself to a seat on one of the skiff ’s cross-strut benches anyway. He craned sideways and peered. “That’s just Radresh, pissed off ’cause we’ve nicked his ferry.”
“You can see his point.”
“Yeah, well. Never did like his fucking prices.”
The two of them looked back in silence as the crowd on the landing stage boiled about in its own impotence. Something heavy splashed in their wake, but too far aft to be a cause for concern. No one was getting in the water, that was for sure. A couple of pursuers with some presence of mind ran along the bank, trying to keep pace. Ringil watched narrowly for a few seconds, saw them run into thickening undergrowth at the edge of the camp and clog to a halt. The pursuit died in curses and bawled abuse, growing ever fainter. He felt his heart starting to ease.
Until—
Up on the rise, flames burned merrily in the windows and opened door of the inn. It was hard to tell at the growing distance, but he thought a single tall, dark figure loomed in the doorway, unmoved by the fire at its back, staring after them with lightless eyes.
Run if you like, whispered a voice in his head. I’ll count to a hundred.
He shivered.
The boat tugged onward, downriver on the water’s dark swirl.
CHAPTER 30
I had thought of Ennishmin, my lord.
Archeth mimicked herself savagely as she stared out of the window. The Beksanara garrison tower was a stubby affair, barely two stories higher than the rest of the blockhouse, and the view from the top room was the same as everywhere else in this bloody country. Swamp and bleak trees, under a sky the color of spilled brains. You couldn’t even see the river from this angle. You certainly couldn’t see any trace of the morning sun.
She’d had the whole fucking Empire to choose from.
She could have been on a beach somewhere in the Hanliahg Scatter right now, bare feet in the sand and a pitcher of coconut beer for company, watching morning flood the sky across the bay with light. She could have been on the balcony of an Uplands Watch garrison lodge beyond the Dhashara pass, hot coffee and lung-spiking mountain air to wake her up, and the swoop-and-squabble courtship of snow eagles like a duel overhead.
But no, no, you had to follow your fucking hunch to this shit-hole end of the realm. You had to drag Elith back into her past and all the memories too painful to face that she’d left behind. Just couldn’t resist it, could you? Archeth Indamaninarmal returns in triumph with the answer to the Empire’s mysterious woes.
She’d found nothing. Two weeks of crisscrossing the settlements on the fringes of the Ennishmin marshes, of quizzing bored and resentful imperial officials already out of sorts with their miserable luck at being posted here. Two weeks of barely concealed sneers and sullen reticence under questioning from the artifact scavenger trash whose patriotic help she’d tried—and failed—to enlist. Two fucking weeks of old wives’ tales and rumor, and trekking through swamp to look at a succession of curiously shaped boulders or rock outcrops with no significance whatsoever. The big triumph so far was unearthing another glirsht marker to match the one Elith had hauled to Khangset. They dug it out of soggy mud, six miles into the swamp from Yeshtak where it had fallen on its face and lain, apparently for centuries, undisturbed. It was moss-grown and pitted with age, and one of its beckoning arms was broken off. Sweat-stained and mud-streaked, they let it lie where it was and plodded back to Yeshtak.
She saw the way Faileh Rakan and his men looked at her when they thought she wouldn’t notice, and it was hard to blame them.
She was chasing phantoms, and it was turning out exactly as you’d expect.
And now this—sabotage or random viciousness, Idrashan fed something in the stables that brought him mysteriously to his knees and forced them to stay overnight while they waited to see if he would live or die. There was no veterinarian worthy of the name in Beksanara, and not much in the way of law enforcement, either. Rakan bullied the village administrator into rounding up a few likely suspects, and the Throne Eternal men took turns knocking them around in the blockhouse cells. Outside of the exercise, they got nothing remotely useful from it. Blame cycled back and forth as it tended to in these situations, backstabbing and local family feuds, petty criminal mis demeanors brought to light and frankly implausible confessions, all seeded with the usual marsh mist crap: a mysterious plague on the air that afflicted horses when the wind blew from the northeast; bandits, the feral remnants of families driven out in the occupation, hiding in the swamp and slowly turning into something less than human; a tall figure in brimmed leather hat and cloak, sighted recently prowling the streets at night as if surveying the village for some evil purpose; shadowy child-sized figures seen skittering about in the gloom and making eerie, whinnying sounds. After six hours of it, Archeth made Rakan let everybody go.