Snare

By the glow from the female’s lightwands, Warkannan could see Jezro, smiling at him.

  ‘Not bad,’ Jezro muttered in Kazraki. ‘You always could think on your feet.’

  ‘I’m surprised it worked, frankly.’ Warkannan returned to speaking Hirl-Onglay. ‘Now, we’d best follow our lady friend. I don’t like the look of those spears her escort is shoving at us.’

  Zayn’s sorrel gelding had rested, in a way, during their ride through the tunnel, but only in a way. Standing on an unstable moving surface, surrounded by meat-eaters, enclosed in a dark space with no long view nor room to run – the sorrel had experienced an equine version of Hell. As soon as he was well out of sight of the ChaMeech, Zayn dismounted. He unlaced his saddlebags and slung them around his own neck to spare the horse the weight, then walked on west, leading the gelding. He felt as exhausted as the horse, and for similar reasons, but he could push himself to keep walking, he figured, for a couple of hours at least.

  Leave it to Idres, Zayn thought. He’s like Mullah Nasrudin in those old stories, always something up his sleeve. Still, he wondered how he was going to make Idres’ trick pay off. Get help, the khan had said. Where, and from whom? Certainly not from the mayor back in Shairb. And how far away was the Burgunee border? They might have travelled fifty miles or a hundred while underground, for all he knew. Fortunately, he could call up his memory of the map. Sarla lay closer than Kors, and there he could count on help from people who didn’t turn a profit trading with ChaMeech.

  Zayn kept walking until the galaxy began to set and take its pale light away. Down by the river that ran parallel to the road, he saw a faint glow of phosphorescence from among the Midas trees. When he led his horse over to investigate, he found glowing mosses and algae floating in a backwater near shore. Fumbling in that scant light he got his horse tethered and his bedroll down from behind his saddle. He spread out the blankets, knelt down, and felt the imp hit against his chest. The imp. All afternoon they’d travelled in darkness. He’d not exposed it to the sunlight for a long time, not since their walk around Shairb.

  ‘Shit,’ he muttered. ‘What’ll you bet it’s stopped working?’

  He lay down, wrapped himself in a blanket, and fell asleep before he could worry more.

  At dawn Ammadin inspected the remains of their night visitors. A roiling mass of tiny worms, striped red and purple, covered the second dead yap-packer and the skin and offal from the first. As the light brightened, long-beaked birds flew shrieking to the carrion. Wings of pale blue skin slapped the air as they dropped to the feast, then wrapped around their owners with a last flutter. The largest birds tore at the flesh with ivory bills and gobbled it down, worms and all, while the smaller, wings still akimbo, dragged themselves on four tiny legs around the circle, pecking and shrieking as they tried to fight their way in.

  Loy got out a notebook to write down a description of the scavengers – for old Onree, she said. Ammadin left her to it and brought out her crystals. Water Woman answered her signal immediately.

  Much news, Water Woman said. Sibyl tell-then-just-now me much. All bad.

  ‘Could she find Zayn?’

  Yes, she see-many-times Zayn. I writhe-now in shame, I hide-then too much, I be bad bad person, soul of Chur not Chiri Michi be in my heart, I writhe and grovel with my neck bent. I piss on my own feet.

  ‘Water Woman, please, what’s happened?’

  I start-now at the beginning. Three Karshaks Sibyl see-many-day-past riding on Burgunee road. They head-then east, turn-now south. One Karshak ride-then-before with Soutan. Two Karshak, Zayn. Three Karshak, not ride-then-before.

  ‘Three Kazraks. Warkannan, Zayn, and Jezro Khan – it could be. Did Sibyl say that one of them looked like a prisoner?’

  No, Sibyl say-then that they laugh-then-day-past all together, talk-then together when they ride. Sibyl say-then that one wear-always imp. She jam-then imp, see-then him. Zayn wear-always imp not wear?

  ‘Yes, that’s Zayn.’

  So, all well-then. Then not now. They ride-then east to Shairb. They leave-then Shairb, go-next to old road. On the old road many Chof come-then, surround-then them and take-next away.

  ‘They did what? What happened?’

  Many us – Chof – six Chur and one Chiri Van – capture-then the three Karshaks. Take-then them as hostages. Carry-then-next them on secret roads east.

  ‘Six Chur? Soutan’s spear servants?’

  No, not Soutan, he be too stupid to think up something like this. I grovel-next-soon, I writhe-always in shame. I tell-not you enough, I warn-not your friend Zayn. She began to moan into her transmit crystal.

  Ammadin’s heart started pounding. ‘Water Woman, it’s that other group, isn’t it? The faction you told me about once, the ones who want Sibyl to give them weapons.’

  Yes, yes, that be the truth. I think-never they grow-never so brave. They take-then on lastday the three Karshaks. I know-not what they do-next-soon, but I think-maybe they try trade Karshaks for the location of Sibyl’s cave.

  ‘Trade them to who, though? You?’

  Maybe me, maybe the Great Mother, I know-not.

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense. Your people aren’t going to care if this faction kills their hostages.’

  I care. No more death, Ammadin Witchwoman. I want-never no more death, not Chof not you not even Karshaks. Especially not this important male Karshak, Jezro Khan. I ask-then Sibyl about khan, what it mean, this word. She tell me, very important, very holy, marked by Karshak god. If a khan die, his people come-next with an army and kill-next-soon us all.

  Ammadin decided that Water Woman didn’t need to know that Jezro was a powerless exile. ‘All right, so this faction wants to trade the Kazraks for the location of Sibyl’s cave.’

  I think-only this be true. I know-not. They send-maybe soon message to me or to Great Mother. We know-next if they send. If I know I tell-next you about Zayn.

  Ammadin squelched a brief impulse towards tears. ‘What about Soutan? Has Sibyl seen him?’

  Sibyl tell-then me – yes, I be foolish and forget-now to tell you. Here be bad more news. Soutan and that young Karshak, they ride-still east on the old N’Dosha road. Six of our men walk-now with them, the renegade men that I tell-then-long-time-ago you about. Sibyl fear-now that Soutan make-next ambush.

  ‘You know, if Soutan has an ounce of sense, he won’t come near Loy. She’s a very powerful sorcerer, she hates him, and I think he knows it.’

  Good. Let him fear. You keep-now travelling and get to the white cliff. We come-soon. I call-next my men, my servant spears. We reach-soon you.

  Abruptly she closed down, leaving only the sound of the illusory sea whispering on the non-existent beach. Ammadin came back to camp to find that Loy had finished with her writing. She’d taken out her own crystals and had some news of her own.

  ‘My spirits did finally manage to reach Master Zhoc,’ Loy told her. ‘It sounds like the zhundars in Burgunee have finally seen reason. They’re honouring that warrant for Soutan’s arrest.’

  ‘Too bad he’s not still in the Cantons, then.’

  ‘Yes. How I hate him, the wormy little sheep cunt!’ Loy hesitated. ‘Happier thoughts: was there news of Zayn?’

  ‘Oh yes. He’s probably still alive. He was yesterday. He rode across the Burgunee border with Warkannan and Jezro Khan. Come to think of it, they were probably trying to find Warkannan’s nephew, but anyway, they’ve been kidnapped by a rival faction of ChaMeech.’

  Loy opened her mouth, but no sound came.

  ‘Yes,’ Ammadin said. ‘Not the kind of news I was hoping for.’

  ‘Rival faction?’ Loy sounded briefly feeble. ‘Don’t tell me they have politics?’

  ‘Let’s pack up the camp. I’ll tell you what I know while we work.’

  By the time they rode out, the sun had climbed high in the sky. With the pack horse they could ride at no faster than a jog, and that only at intervals, but Ammadin kept her little caravan moving. They did pause once, long afte
r the sun had passed zenith, to scan. Ammadin found no trace of Soutan, and Water Woman never answered Long Voice’s call.

  All night Warkannan, Jezro, and their horses had struggled to find some degree of comfort in the bamboid cart, plunging onward through the darkness. Sleep avoided them, though they did at odd moments manage to drowse. It was 08.30 by Warkannan’s watch when the ChaMeech finally halted beside another underground platform. Once again the lavender female, backed by the armed males, herded them onto a ramp, but one at least twice as long and steeper than the others they’d seen, or so it seemed as they dragged themselves along.

  At last they reached solid ground and sunlight. Behind them stretched the grassy valley, sloping down at a considerable angle to the western horizon. To the east – for some minutes Warkannan stood speechless, staring at the view. They had reached the hills, and they were so bizarrely different from any hills he’d ever seen that he could form no clear idea of their height. At first, in fact, he thought he was looking at fortifications.

  A forest of stone columns and pillars stood at their base, eroded into fantastic shapes and tufted here and there with red and gold vegetation. Some looked like misshapen H’mai, some like spindles of wool, others like sagging cones topped with odd black hats. Behind them great chunks of hill rose in flat cliffs of a reddish-tan stone striped here and there with black. Sporadic vegetation stippled cracks and ledges with maroon and gold. More pillars, eroded into lacy shapes, and great arches of stone clung to the cliff faces. Behind some of the arches, dark shadows marked cave mouths.

  In between each massive chunk of hill ran deep canyons, guarded by what appeared to be striped watchtowers, looming in the shadows. The hill crests made a staggered, tilting line in relation to the horizon, as if God had carved the hills out of a high plain, then pushed on them to make an artistic arrangement. At their rims stood more columns and clumps of stone, marching back beyond the line of sight, turning crimson as the sun rose high enough to top the cliffs.

  ‘Shaitan!’ Warkannan whispered.

  Jezro nodded his agreement, open-mouthed.

  Their immediate surroundings were far less impressive than the hills. Just north of the white sphere a stand of Midas trees stood dripping with red leaves. Off to the south, in the midst of purple grass, stood a white flexstone building, a mere cube about fifteen feet on a side. The wall facing them sported a pair of unglazed windows and a stout true-oak door. Below each window a narrow ledge jutted out.

  ‘I wonder what that is?’ Warkannan said.

  Their holding cell, as it turned out. With spears and grunts the males marched them over to the building. Warkannan pointed out some Vransic words moulded into the flexstone over the doors and windows.

  ‘It says luh metroh and billay,’ Jezro said. ‘I don’t have the slightest idea what that means.’

  Before the little female opened the door, she pointed to their saddlebags, back to them, to the horses, and back to them. When she pantomimed lifting something, they realized that she wanted them to unsaddle the horses and carry their gear inside.

  ‘Now listen you,’ Warkannan said. ‘Don’t you dare eat our horses.’

  She stamped her foot several times. ‘Eat-not,’ she said. ‘Promise. In.’

  She raised her head and inflated her throat sac. Although Warkannan heard nothing, this close he could feel air vibrating when she spoke. The door, however, heard her and slid back into a channel in the wall. Loaded with gear, they staggered inside. Their footsteps echoed under the high ceiling of a stark, white room, empty except for one long bench, moulded seamlessly into the flexstone floor, running down the middle. The female pointed at a door on the wall.

  ‘Water,’ she said. ‘Yours. Food soon.’

  With that she turned and left. They could hear the door slide shut and lock behind her. Jezro dumped his gear at one end of the bench. Warkannan followed his lead, then walked from window to window; he found a pair of ChaMeech males haunched beyond each. Still, by craning his neck he could look around their broad backs and see the little female tethering the horses out in the high grass.

  ‘Well, here we are,’ Jezro said. ‘Home. For now, anyway.’

  ‘Yes, apparently so. All we can do is pray that Zayn can get back to Burgunee.’

  ‘Well, if nothing else, Robear and Zhil will start worrying when we don’t come home in a couple of days. What they’ll do about it, I don’t know. You can say I told you so if you want.’

  ‘Don’t tempt me.’

  Jezro limped across the room and pushed on the side door, which opened to a narrow room, as white and loud as the first. In one corner water gushed up into a flexstone basin, overflowed, and ran across the floor to the far corner, where it drained through a hole about a foot across.

  ‘Sanitation of a sort.’ Jezro shut the door again. ‘Hostages have been treated worse.’ He paused to wipe his nose on his sleeve. ‘Well, hell, I am now a captive audience in every sense of that term. I suppose appealing to your better nature isn’t going to work.’

  ‘Work for what? Oh, wait: you mean, make me stop haranguing you about going back to Kazrajistan. When it comes to that, I don’t have a better nature.’

  ‘Exactly. We have a few other things to mull over, too. For instance, who in hell is going to be interested in ransoming us, way out here? I wonder what this bunch really wants us for? The main course at a banquet? Or appetizers?’

  ‘That thought had occurred to me.’ Warkannan yawned with a shake of his head. ‘But what I really wonder is if I’m tired enough to fall asleep on the floor. Damn good thing we brought bedrolls. I think I’ll try it and see.’

  When Zayn had woken that same morning, the first thing he’d remembered was the imp. He pulled it out of his shirt to let it soak up the sun; he could only pray that it would recover from its long time in darkness. When he inspected the road for tracks, he found none, but now that he knew about the tunnels, the lack of tracks told him nothing. Soutan might be near, far, still ahead of him to the west or long past him to the east. He had no desire to round a turn in the road and see the sorcerer waiting for him. He could take some comfort from the desolation of the countryside; in this flat, empty landscape, where the only cover stood far from the actual road, laying an ambush would be difficult.

  After a long graze, the sorrel gelding had recovered from its nightmare journey. For the sake of speed, Zayn mounted and rode at a brisk walk, but always he stayed aware of the horse. He had no intention of being caught in ruined N’Dosha with a lame mount. At intervals he stopped, dismounted, and checked the road for tracks. He never found any hoofprints, but late in the afternoon he ran across a profusion of very different tracks, scrambled and messy, as if a pack of animals had rushed across the road. Off to one side he discovered a few clear prints. A mid-size animal, with thick round feet, tipped with claws – he didn’t like the look of them. Leading his horse, he followed the trail to the side of the dirt road and saw trampled, broken grass where the pack had charged through. He also found excrement, tubular, dark in colour, and still stinking though nearly dry.

  ‘A meat-eater,’ he said aloud. ‘A meat-eater that hunts in packs.’

  And there he was, one man with no sabre or bow, nothing but a long knife that would do him no good at any sort of distance. He’d been lucky the night before, blind lucky, and he muttered a prayer of thanks to God. But if they smelled him out and attacked during the coming night, he suspected that his luck would run out and God would be busy elsewhere. He could, he supposed, climb a tree, but that would mean abandoning the sorrel.

  ‘I think we’ll stop here,’ he said. ‘There’s some wild wheatian growing in this field. You eat that, and then when it’s dark, we’ll keep moving.’

  As he tethered the horse out in the patch of wild grain, Zayn was thinking of his comnee bow and quiver of arrows, lying on the bed in the guest room back at Marya’s manor house – not, he supposed, that he could have hit anything with them anyway. He’d never hit anything exce
pt for that one lucky shot in the Mistlands. But had it really been luck, or did the difference lie in the drug that Ammadin had given him? The drug had wiped away his old mind set to make him see things anew, and perhaps it had done the same for his physical reflexes. In that moment he finally identified the problem. Undrugged, his fingers, his arms, the muscles and tendons – they all remembered his old bowcraft with that vertically held Kazraki weapon he’d learned at such a young age, and he’d not made the properly conscious effort to teach them the new.

  Every inch of him was a Recaller.

  Had it been night and the galaxy risen, Zayn might have turned towards the stars and screamed curses at the ancestors who had made him what he was. Instead, he lay down to sleep with his saddle for a pillow and dreamt that he was lying in a comnee tent with Dallador’s arms around him.

  Through a sweltering day, Ammadin and Loy followed the dead-straight road. Far off in the east they could see the dark line of hills, dancing in the heat haze.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Ammadin said to Loy. ‘How are we supposed to find a white cliff before we reach the hills?’

  ‘Good question. It’s probably artificial, made of the same stuff as the border pillar.’

  Loy’s guess was proved right in mid-afternoon, when they saw, ahead and beside the road, some wide, tall thing gleaming in the angled sunlight. As they rode closer, it resolved itself into a wall of white flexstone, curved in a gentle arc, ten feet high and about fifty yards long. Carvings revealed by pale grey shadow covered the surface.

  ‘Merde!’ Loy said. ‘I wonder just what those bas-reliefs show.’ She was leaning forward in the saddle, unsmiling, staring ahead at the wall.

  ‘Something you don’t want me to see?’ Ammadin said.

  Loy winced. ‘Not me, Ammi. The Landfall Treaty. Ever heard of that?’

  ‘Yes, of course. It keeps the Kazraks from moving out onto the plains.’