A Solitary Journey (33 page)

T
he crash of the waves drew A Ahmud Ki to the edge of the cliff where he looked down on the rocks. Seagulls hung on the northerly wind near the cliffs, their white wings flecked with pink from the setting sun. He flinched when a hand touched his shoulder, but turned placidly to the minstrel who was urging him to come back to the limestone rocks. The woman, Meg, was very apt in teaching A Ahmud Ki her language and he already understood much more than he let on to the others, so much so that he felt confident enough to hold a simple conversation, but his pride stopped him because he had no intention of speaking until he could do so in a sophisticated manner. Anything less would belittle him. He nodded to indicate he understood and followed the minstrel to where the Shessian warrior stood over the form of the red-haired woman.

‘She’s alive,’ Talemaker explained to A Ahmud Ki, hoping that the stranger would get his meaning. ‘Is there anything you know to do?’

A Ahmud Ki kneeled and felt Meg’s forehead as he studied the wound on the side of her temple. It wasn’t deep—more like a graze. She’d been stunned as near as he could tell. As he touched her a surge of energy flowed
through him, a feeling he had every time he made contact with the woman. He moved his hand down onto her chest to check the rise and fall of her breathing and his feeling of energy dramatically heightened. Memories lifted his confidence. Her power was flowing into him, somehow, but as he placed his free hand over her temple, intending to harness his new-found energy and heal her, he was trampled by Kerwyn soldiers who appeared out of thin air. He frantically shoved aside legs and swung his arms to beat the soldiers away in an effort to protect Meg from being crushed, but when a sword flashed past his face he abandoned his position to save himself by rolling deftly to his left, away from the menacing blade.

Astonished as he was to see Kerwyn soldiers materialising, Blade Cutter seized the brief opportunity of surprise afforded by the Kerwyn’s disorientation from their magical arrival and had five down, including the Hordemaster who stared in disbelief when Cutter stabbed him, before the Kerwyn numbers forced him to retreat to a gap between the rocks. Talemaker grabbed a sword dropped in the skirmish and lashed out at the Kerwyn, disabling three of the enemy before they could rally. Then he retreated beside Cutter. A Ahmud Ki joined them and Cutter thrust a dagger into his hand as they watched the Kerwyn assemble around Meg.

‘Now what?’ Talemaker asked.

A Ahmud Ki rolled the dagger in his hand, assessed its weight and threw it precisely, hitting a Kerwyn soldier in the left eye—an unexpected attack that broke the Kerwyn ranks because several charged. Cutter met them with savage blows that felled two and made the others pause.

‘We have to close the portal,’ A Ahmud Ki said calmly in Shessian.

Talemaker looked at him in amazement. ‘You can speak.’

‘Enough,’ A Ahmud Ki said curtly.

‘But how do we close the—what is it?’

‘Portal,’ A Ahmud Ki repeated. ‘Meg has to do it.’

The Kerwyn surrounding Meg looked bewildered, as if they were searching for something important. ‘That’s what they’re looking for,’ Talemaker said, understanding their dilemma. ‘They’ve just realised they can’t go back.’

‘But they can still come through,’ A Ahmud Ki said in his crude Shessian accent, ‘which means more can come.’

‘Look!’ Talemaker cried.

In the midst of the Kerwyn soldiers, Meg sat up and the soldiers stepped back, lowering their swords. She seemed immobile until the Kerwyn circle burst into flame. Shrieking soldiers leapt and jumped and ran, covered in fire. Cutter grabbed his chance and cut down three more Kerwyn as they ran wildly around the space between the rocks and a cliff and a man tumbled over the edge, spiralling like a falling candle into the dark seething ocean. The surviving six men bolted for their lives between the rocks along a path that led inland. Cutter ran to Meg as she staggered and sank to her knees. ‘I’ve got you,’ he said as he wrapped his arms around her shoulders.

‘I’ve closed the portal,’ she murmured, and closed her eyes with a sigh.

He envied her power. What fascinated him as he watched her healing the big soldier’s ears was knowing that he felt the resurgence of power in himself whenever he touched her. She had confessed to him that she was a Conduit, whatever that meant in this strange land, effectively a carrier of power, and from what he’d observed she knew nothing of her true potential beyond simple fire spells, healing and portal construction. If
time had allowed, he would have tested the extent of her abilities as he began to do when he taught her Seralinna’s bird-shaping spell, but circumstance stalled his experimentation and his questions were unanswered. She had all the potential of a Dragonlord because she entered Se’Treya and released him from Mareg’s glyph, but she was naive—raw—an enigma. Somehow he had to test contact with her too, because he was certain that he could restore himself through her.

‘You’re handy with a knife,’ Talemaker said as he sat beside A Ahmud Ki, and when A Ahmud Ki didn’t answer he added, ‘You know I know you understand.’ A Ahmud Ki gazed at him in the cool, clear light coming from the rock that Meg had made into a glow stone so that she could see to heal Cutter, and the steady gaze unnerved Talemaker. ‘What is your problem?’ he muttered, his irritation rising.

‘I learned once that it is wise never to show what you know until you are certain there is no threat to you,’ said A Ahmud Ki slowly.

Talemaker’s eyebrow rose. ‘Threat? From us?’ He snorted and shook his head. ‘We’ve travelled and fought side by side for how long now? And you still don’t trust us?’

‘The nature of humans is to be untrustworthy,’ A Ahmud Ki replied calmly.

‘You talk as if you aren’t human,’ said Talemaker. ‘You look different, but you’re still human.’

‘Am I?’ A Ahmud Ki asked.

‘What sort of question is that?’ Talemaker queried.

‘Just a question,’ said A Ahmud Ki diffidently. He rose and headed into the darkness among the rocks, leaving Talemaker to stare after him, wondering whether or not the stranger who didn’t seem to belong anywhere was a madman.

Away from the others, A Ahmud Ki wandered, immersed in his thoughts, until he found a large rock which he nimbly scaled. He sat on the peak of the rock and gazed at the stars, studying their positions and patterns. The sky had changed. He knew the positions and names of stars from his formative Aelendyell years and later from his time of learning in the land of the Ranu Ka Shehaala, but the sky above him was alien and while he thought that a cluster of stars sitting low in the south-western sky looked familiar they should have been to the north and much higher. Yet he knew for certain that Andrakis was somewhere in this world. The tapestries in the Shessian palace proved it existed—or at least that it
had
existed—and it was close enough to this place for the people to retrieve the tapestries. How far was he from the lands he knew? How much time had he lost locked away in Se’Treya? How would he find Andrakis again even if it did exist?

The northerly wind dropped to a gentle breeze in the night, but he was bitterly cold perched high on the rock so he wrapped his arms around his knees. Apart from the days of hunting and harassing the enemy of his companions in the strange forest, since the woman released him he’d spent most of the time running and hiding. He wasn’t used to that feeling—at least not since his time of growing up among the Aelendyell—and this fugitive lifestyle didn’t suit him. He was used to those around him treating him with respect out of fear for his awesome power and if he could find the way back to Andrakis he might be able to re-establish his status. ‘Why have you abandoned me, Berak N’eth?’ he whispered, and automatically touched the point at his neck where he’d worn the religious Ranu symbol of the goddess, Fareeka. Then he was conscious of his missing finger, where he’d worn the ceremonial amber Aelendyell ring given by the Ithosen to those who were
training to become Lore Bearers.
Why did Mareg take that from me?
he wondered.
How did he know it was there?

He shivered again, but this time from the memory of his final encounter with the Dragonlord on the grey plains of Se’Treya. He underestimated everything in his endplay to rule Andrakis—Mareg’s warrior skills, Dylan’s willingness to sacrifice him to defeat the Dragonlord, the inability of Dylan’s magic sword to work in Se’Treya—so Dylan abandoned him and Mareg nearly killed him in the aftermath. As close to death as Mareg was himself, the Dragonlord dragged A Ahmud Ki’s battered body into his lair and consigned him to suffer eternally, pinned with battleaxes to the dragon statue and locked within a glyph designed to sustain him in the moment between life and death. He could still recall his tormentor’s deep, resonating, raspy voice as Mareg dragged him into the chamber. ‘You wanted immortality as a Dragonlord, Ki? Let me give it to you. You’ll live forever in this place, pinned not just by these axes but with knowing that you will never leave. Here’s immortality, Ki. Welcome to the brotherhood of Dragonlords.’ Mareg was dying. A Ahmud Ki saw it in the Dragonlord’s eyes and if he hadn’t died after sealing A Ahmud Ki in the glyph he was inevitably doomed to perish at King Dylan’s hands. Dylan had Abreotan’s sword and it was prophesied that with it Dylan would slay the last Dragonlord. Mareg’s time was at an end. That knowledge had given A Ahmud Ki one tiny fragment of enduring satisfaction as he lay locked in eternity.

The memories were bitter and strong. Long after A Ahmud Ki returned and the men were asleep under the shelter of the rocks, Meg stood at the edge of the cliff staring at the stars and the sliver of moon, tears streaming
down her cheeks, her fists clenched and white from the tension. Jon died here—her firstborn—the child from Treasure Overbrook, grandson of Queen Sunset, murdered by Seer Truth. The image of the burning bundle tumbling out of sight over the lip of the cliff replayed in her memory, each time searing into her mind like molten metal through flesh, until she was shaking with anger and grief.
I summoned the Demon Horsemen,
she remembered.
I crushed Truth’s skull between my hands and let the Horsemen destroy the others, friend and foe. I killed them all.
She’d shielded herself from those memories for a long time, hiding them beneath the new life she created with Button Tailor in Summerbrook, using her children to bury the past in the happiness of the future. ‘Jon,’ she sobbed to the night. ‘Jon.’

Though it was certain that they’d been sold into slavery at a western port, she knew in her heart that her two youngest children were still alive. She saw them in her dreams and her dreams, as twisted as they sometimes were in meaning, never lied about who was involved. Emma and Treasure were alive. She’d seen them. Whatever else happened after this point, she was determined to find them. The Seers murdered her firstborn, Jon, and the Kerwyn slew her secondborn, named Jon after the firstborn, but she would save her surviving daughter and son. She would have her children again.

Their first day of travel north from Whiterocks Bluff proved harrowing as they walked through the burnt-out ruins of three coastal villages and passed a dozen isolated and guttered farms, proof of the Kerwyn extermination policy. ‘They came here last year,’ Talemaker said, studying the green grass rising through the ashes of a former building in the first village. ‘This was Dunk Oarmaster’s tavern, The
Fisherman’s Rest. I stayed here a couple of times. He was a generous host.’

They also hid twice to avoid Kerwyn war parties, but the Kerwyn seemed uninterested in searching for anyone. ‘They probably think they’ve already killed everyone,’ Talemaker said.

‘The war was over when Port of Joy fell,’ Cutter reminded him. ‘There’s no point continuing the slaughter.’

‘Unless they want to get rid of every Shessian,’ Meg remarked, at which the group fell silent and continued on.

‘Where do we go?’ Talemaker asked when they woke at sunrise the morning after leaving Whiterocks Bluff. ‘The Kerwyn are everywhere.’

‘We find a port,’ Meg said calmly.

‘Why?’ Talemaker asked.

Cutter answered, looking at Meg in understanding. ‘We can buy or sneak passage to somewhere safer. There’ll be shipmasters willing to make money taking refugees south or west.’

‘But the Kerwyn will stop us,’ Talemaker argued.

‘If
they find us,’ Meg told him. ‘How far is it to the next port?’

‘Four more days north,’ Cutter replied. ‘Westport. It’s a trading centre. It used to be the best harbour in Western Shess—if the Kerwyn haven’t ruined it.’

‘Then we go to Westport,’ Meg decided.

‘Can you make a portal to it like you’ve done before?’ Talemaker asked.

Meg shook her head and glanced at A Ahmud Ki, who was sitting near the cliff stroking Whisper on his lap and staring out to sea. ‘I can only make a portal to a place I can clearly remember. I’ve never been to Westport.’

Talemaker cursed but grinned, lamenting, ‘It was worth a try.’

As they traversed the undulating coastal landscape, climbing sandhills and shadowing the tops of limestone cliffs, Cutter related what had transpired in the wider kingdom during the year of the Kerwyn invasion. Talemaker sang ballads when he found the energy and it was certain they weren’t likely to be overheard by passing Kerwyn. Cutter was also curious about what Meg did after she disappeared as Lady Amber, so she quietly shared the story of the ten years in Summerbrook with Button Tailor and her children, fighting the sorrow that formed a lump in her throat as she spoke. Through all of the journey, A Ahmud Ki stayed aloof, even when Talemaker reminded him that they knew he was capable of speaking and understanding them, choosing only to converse with Meg in the evening.

‘Your friend is not all that he seems,’ Cutter observed on the third evening.

‘What do you mean?’ Meg asked.

‘He’s hiding something from us as if he has a plan of his own.’

She dismissed Cutter’s disquiet as the comment of someone who doesn’t trust a person different to themselves, but she was increasingly aware of A Ahmud Ki’s self-imposed distance. ‘Cutter and Talemaker are good men,’ she told A Ahmud Ki when she sat to talk about magic and continue his lessons in the Shessian language.