They were a
matched set now, Aldous moving east from the city in the wake of Cressus and
Vana, and Weiss moving east from the village in the wake of his own
credulousness. On horseback, Aldous was making better time than Weiss, but they
had to swing far to the north to get around the bog that had almost swallowed
up Weiss, and so for the remainder of the night the distance between them was
not much closed.
By dawn,
though, Weiss was stumbling again, slow and weary and weighted, and Cressus and
Aldous switched horses so that Aldous with her slight form could give Cressus’
mount a respite. They reached the first near the tenth bell and it was there,
tied to a tree, that they found Terrick and heard his story. Weiss, travelling
in the company of a Thron woman. Terrick was given a horse, and Aldous rode with
Cressus. She could feel the anger crackling through his skin. It was whirring
and buzzing against her chest, and she liked that, though it frightened her
too. Weiss, Weiss, what are you doing?
At about
midday, as Aldous was sharing dustbread and a flask of whiskey with Cressus,
his electric anger suddenly hardened into glass before her eyes. She followed
his gaze and saw two women travelling along the road out from the village. One
of the women wore the simple belted tunic and linen headscarf of a farm worker,
but the other was a Thron. You could see it even at that distance. Long black
braid down her back, skin even darker than the tanned skin of the village
woman. She wore a strange, loose-draped dress of deep coppery-gold, and she was
leading a village woman away from her home. Aldous barely had time to register
all this when Cressus and Vana wordlessly kicked the horses into a gallop.
Aldous was clinging to Cressus’ back but she could feel everything in him
flowing forward, reaching furiously for the Thron and her victim, and she
thought in surprise that if she fell off the horse now, Cressus would likely
not even notice.
Despite the
bright midday sun, everything felt strangely cold and crystalline. Vana was low
on the neck of her horse, a black river with her black hair and black tunic and
black knifebelt. Cressus was a mountain, an icy height, craggy and howling with
wind. Aldous shrank back into herself. They were riding to kill.
The pair
saw them dawn the road and ran, although there was nowhere to go. They ran as
animals run, zigzagging wide-eyed through the scrubby grass at the roadside,
and Vana and Cressus without speaking herded them towards the gully of a
mountain stream that crossed under the road ahead. When they had their quarry
at the edge, they both suddenly slowed to a crawl, pulling up the horses and
dismounting with a menacing, leisurely grace.
“Hello,”
drawled Vana, thumbing her knives.
Cressus’
boots crushed through the grass, and the Thron stepped to face him. She held a
wooden staff and braced it towards Cressus, but Aldous thought, “Cressus will
snap that like a twig,” and so he
did, darting forward with unexpected speed, wrenching the staff away, and
casually breaking it in two across his knee. He tossed it into the gully and said
lightly, “I’m going to enjoy this.”
The Thron
woman moved quickly, slipping in front of the village woman, and barring out
her arms as if she could somehow protect the woman from Vana’s knives and
Cressus’ bearlike arms.
“Oh, don’t
worry, we won’t kill you quite yet,” said Vana. Kill them? thought Aldous, a twist of horror contracting across her
belly, and she made a half-hopeless gesture. Vana looked pointedly at Cressus
and jerked her head back towards Aldous.
“Aldous,” murmured Cressus gently, coming
over to her side. His breath danced over her neck as he bent very close to her
ear. “Aldous, please keep quiet,” he begged. Vana’s back darted tongues of
black, disapproving fire. Aldous’ eyes were wide as a child, and she had them
locked onto Cressus’. She was holding onto him, the warm, rough skin puckered
around his eyes, the set of his shoulders. “I will be quiet,” she said. She did
not feel sorry—yet.
#
He was under the
shadow of the mountains now.
“Caethron.” Weiss said it aloud, feeling
the urgency and weight of it as Mare had said it before she parted from him.
The gate. The safehouse. Carved into the very mountain, it was a way between
where no pursuer could follow, and yet it seemed to Weiss that, wretched as he
was, it might also be a bar for him. He kept strictly to the path on the map.
The few travellers he met, he did not even acknowledge. He kept his head down,
and his feet somehow moving, one before the other, and he was under the shadow
of the mountains now.
When he came to the steps up to the
gate, broad, shallow steps roughly cut into the mountainside, he looked
foolishly up at the gate, and down at his map, and up again, and down again.
The plains and Aiken where he had lived all his life were behind him, but with
an effort he managed not to look back at it, and he breathed deeply and started
up the steps.
He did not look back when he heard the
dull thunder of horses’ hooves, the commotion of following that rummaged along
the trail behind him, did not even look back when two strange voices, one of a
woman and one a deep, booming man’s voice, called his name, growing in strength
as the horses neared, telling him to stop.
The gate between the mountains was
before him, and Weiss said, “Caethron,” in quiet wonder, and he raised his hand
in a fist to knock.
A small door slid to, opening a window
in the stone gate, and a face hovered in the opening. It was the face of a man
about forty years old, slender and lucid, and it’s owner asked gravely who was
there, and whence he came, and what did he want at Caethron.
“I am Weiss, of Aiken, looking for
passage to Jesh’s Land and to Elionae’s City beyond that. I was sent by one
called Mare to find refuge here—if you are willing to let me in.”
There were footfalls on the steps behind
him but Weiss didn’t turn; the urgency in the eyes of the man behind the gate
was enough for him, and his hands reaching out to pull Weiss in as he swung the
gate open. Weiss stumbled into the courtyard as the man slammed the gate shut
behind him, and the great iron bar of it fell with a knell of strength. On the
other side of the gate, the great man and the woman in black shouted their fury
into echoes of the mountain.
#
Back at the mouth of the pass, Aldous
paced nervously between the two women bound back-to-back on the ground, and the
horse tied to a tree. Her hands fluttered through the air, through echoes of Cressus
snapping the wooden staff like a twig, his warm skin, of Weiss grave and
determined out on the fields, the courage in the eyes of the Thron woman at her
feet, the grey bank of a thousand thousand days of her life in Aiken, and she
found herself torn down the middle, crying silently.
“Woman of Aiken,” said the Thron woman,
her voice an arrow cutting clear and straight through the mountain air, “why do
you weep?”
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