Chronicles of Gilderam: Book One: Sunset (23 page)

Shazahd forgot to breathe as she watched him close distance between them, pounding feet and thrashing arms like a madman. She was sure he was going to catch them. He was looking right at her, staring into her eyes. He was going to get close enough to grab her dress, and then he was going to yank her off the horse. She pressed herself to Owein, securing her arms around him in a rigid bear hug.

Owein glanced at her over his shoulder.

Then the man with the ponytail finally began to lose speed, and fell steadily behind. His human limitations took hold at last. When it was clear they were going to outrun him, Shazahd relaxed a little, and readjusted her grip around Owein’s torso. He peered back again, this time making sure their pursuer was dropping behind them.

He was.

Owein relaxed too, and released the horse from his pinching heels.

Shazahd let her forehead drop on Owein’s back.

She took a couple deep breaths.

The rhythmic clomping of the horse’s hooves somehow helped to stomp out the sensation of dread that had flooded her brain. She became aware of the adrenaline igniting her nerves. She felt as though her body were on fire with electricity. She looked behind once more for reassurance.

But her heart sank as she saw the man with the ponytail hopping onto a saddled horse, its previous rider writhing on the ground, dazed. It was a grisly, black warhorse – mammoth and muscular. Tolora lashed it with the reins and it barreled down the street, coming right for them.

“Owein!” she cried out, and he whipped his head around to see.

“This guy just doesn’t know when to quit,” he said. “
Yah!
” Owein kicked the horse again with his heels. It threw back its head in protest, but galloped onward nonetheless.

They flew around a corner and came into a side street. It was rather narrow, filled with a horde of pedestrians, and lined with merchant carts.

“Get out of the way!” Owein yelled at the startled shoppers in the street. “Move!
Move!
”

They screamed and cursed and threw themselves to the gutter. Owein, Shazahd and the carriage horse bumbled through at a reckless speed, knocking over a stand in the process and spilling fruit and wares everywhere. The operator of the stand hollered at them as they rode past.

A second later and Tolora steered his horse into the alley after them. The enormous, shiny-black steed roared through the market street, taking out three more food stands and trampling a handful of unfortunate bystanders in the process.

Owein heard a gun go off as he rounded another corner, though who it was aimed at was anyone’s guess. They escaped onto a wider avenue. This one was amply sized, and far less populated. He commanded his horse to charge down it diagonally, heading for a tiny alley on the other side.

He hoped that the gunshot might’ve been for Tolora, but no such luck. The great warhorse exploded from the merchant street, angrier than ever. It stood on its hind legs and let loose an awful cry. It landed running, and gained rapidly on Owein and Shazahd in the open stretch.

Owein drove his little brown horse into the alley. Their only hope was to out-maneuver him using Gresadia’s infamously winding streets. That, Owein imagined, was at least slightly plausible.

This alley was not quite wide enough to accommodate two people abreast, let alone an adult horse. The animal whinnied and refused at first, but Owein wrangled it by the reins and forced it to enter. It bounced against the brick as it trotted, scraping Owein’s boots when it did. Shazahd pulled her legs up to avoid the walls.

When the black horse appeared at the entrance it cursed and spat. The sound was acutely focused down the stone corridor. Owein led his ride on methodically, clomping patiently down the alley, and didn’t turn to look.

The pursuing horse seemed just as thirsty for blood as its rider, and willingly shouldered its way into the tight space. A much bigger horse than Owein’s, it had a difficult time sliding through the alley, and banged itself up badly between the walls. It cried out from the pain, but plowed on, storming determinedly toward its prey.

Owein and Shazahd squeezed out the far end of the alley and wheeled around the corner.

Owein brought the horse to a halt and leapt off.

“What in the gods’ names are you doing?!” Shazahd yelled at him.

“Buying us some time,” he said, and crouched down beside a heavy table outside a fishmonger’s storefront. It was a long table, made of thick, heavy wood, and was bedecked with an array of smelly, scaly fish laid out in neat rows on a bed of ice. He wedged himself beneath one end and heaved it upward, spilling cold fish all over the ground.

“Hey!” the fishmonger called out. “What do you think you’re doing?!”

Owein threw the table up on one end, and directed the skyward side into the slot of the alley.

“I’m talking to you,
drindam!
”

With the table now vertical, and the top end inside the alley, Owein hurled the entire thing from the bottom, pushing it wholly into the passageway.

It fell lengthwise in front of the black horse, and landed with a hearty
thud
that spooked the animal. The obstruction effectively clogged the alley’s exit and rendered it impassible for any horse.

“Hey,
YOU!
”

The fishmonger shoved Owein around by the shoulder, then punched him hard in the face, bowling him over.

“Just who do you think you are, huh? Dumping all my fish in the street! Do you have any idea what that’s
worth?!
”

The black horse neighed from the alleyway, infuriated.

“Yeah, sorry,” said Owein curtly before scurrying around him and bounding back atop the horse from behind. His front careened into Shazahd’s back, knocking her forward along the horse’s back.

“Sorry, princess,” Owein said, fumbling around her for the reins.

“Whoa, there!” the fishmonger yelled, coming up beside them, shaking a fist. “You think you’re going to leave without paying for this?!”

“Princess…?” Shazahd echoed incredulously.

The fishmonger tugged at her dress.

“Just where d’you think you’re going, huh?!”

“
Princess?!
” she roared, and kicked the fishmonger in the shoulder so hard he spun around and collapsed onto another table of fish.

Owein seized the reins and kicked the beast in the sides. It lurched forward and slowly worked into a run.

They were at the end of the block when Shazahd saw the table fly out of the alley. A moment later and the black horse was sprinting for them again. Bloody scratches smirched its sides. Tolora was as intense as ever, crouched over the saddle like a jockey.

Owein steered his horse across the road and turned it onto another side street. The black horse was catching up with them as they came out on the other end beside a gracht.

Two meager sidewalks flanked the canal, one of the Vulc Muri’s many scattered capillaries flowing through the city. This waterway was fairly wide, and a bridge spanning its breadth was not too far away. They went for it, but their puny horse was slobbering and slowing.

“Come on…
come
on
…
!
” Owein muttered, unable to contain his growing anxiety as the bridge crept very gradually nearer. The black horse flew out onto the riverfront behind them, braying vengefully. Its hooves thundered across the cobblestones. It would be on top of them in no time.

But the weak carriage horse made it to the bridge before they were overtaken. Owein craned his neck out before they turned onto it, looking at something beneath the bridge on the other side.

“Come with me,” he said, and dismounted with a swift hop. He pulled Shazahd down and they ran to the center of the bridge. He wasn’t leading her to the opposite shore, but to the parapet on the northern side.

“Owein, what are you doing–?!” she gasped, but it was too late. The black horse was rounding onto the bridge and Owein already had one arm around her back, the other beneath her legs, and one foot on the stone ledge. All she could do was throw her arms around his neck and scream as he leapt with her in his arms – right off the bridge.

She closed her eyes on the descent, a reflex she was unequipped to resist, and was therefore entirely surprised not to land in water, but on something solid. She felt her body banged in a quick succession of places so fast and so hard that it would take her a while to catalogue exactly what had been hurt, where, and how severely. When she opened her eyes she found herself in a long, thin punt boat loaded with bales of wheat. She had somehow managed to miss every bale.

Owein was already at the back of the boat, where he grabbed the punt pole from the boatman and shoved him into the canal. She watched as he jammed the rod into the riverbed and braced his whole body against it. She saw the sinews in his forearms bulge and flex, and his face grimace with effort. The skiff gently churned forward through the water. It must’ve have been heavy, she thought.

They heard the black horse skid halt on the bridge above. Owein retrieved the pole from the river, dragging it out of the water hand over hand, as Tolora appeared above them. He hurled himself from the parapet as they had done, and drew his sword in the air.

But Owein was there, a surgeon with the punt pole, and leveled the end of the rod with the man’s torso. The blade swished, and a hunk of pole fell free, but the rest of it was still in his way, and it rammed him squarely in the chest. Tolora had to grip it with one hand to keep from being impaled, and let out a pained, “
oof!
” from the impact.

Owein flung him into the water, wrenched the pole back, and continued to push the little boat northward through the gracht.

Tolora had proven himself adept at running and riding, but swimming was apparently not his forte. He sloshed around like a frantic child, groping inefficiently for handfuls of water. He sloppily thrashed his way to the shore.

Shazahd watched him like a hawk as the punt boat slid downstream. Owein was giving the rod all of his might, and he now had the craft gliding at a comfortable clip away from the assassin.

He took a break from the pole to kick some wheat bales into the water.

“Can we get to the shipyard from the river?” he asked.

“We can go as far the locks, then it’s only a short distance by foot.”

“Even shorter by horse, I’d bet.”

“How do you expect to find one of those?”

“I
expect
we’ll have to steal it.” Owein looked back toward the bridge, which was safely receding into the distance. “Of course….”

Tolora had made it up to the sidewalk, and was shaking the water out of his tricorn. He plopped the disheveled hat back on his head and took off running westward across the bridge, vanishing down an alley.

“I don’t think our friend has given up on us,” Owein said. “Looks like he guessed where we’re going.”

“Then maybe you should quit talking and start pushing.”

Owein turned to say something to Shazahd, but he was stayed by the seriousness of her expression. Instead he laughed.

“Right away, My
Lady
….” He sank the pole into the canal and shoved the boat forward.

“I’m still not a lady.”

In the north of New Gresad, the grachten were capped with locks that regulated water levels before they spilled into the open ocean. There was no need to accommodate large sailing vessels, as travel by sea was quite rare.

When Owein and Shazahd came to the first lock, they abandoned the punt boat in the water and climbed back onto the street. They dashed a few blocks before Owein located a trove of unmonitored horses tethered to a hitching post outside a bar. He casually stole one for Shazahd and one for himself, and the two rode off westward into New Gresad’s industrial district.

It was getting late by the time they arrived at the Ranaloc Shipyard and Machinery Works Company. They found Fulo and Gor’m at the gatehouse and brought them to one of the smaller hangars beside the workshop.

Inside it was
Gilderam
. A team of mechanics filed out of her open cargo door, their arms laden with tools, having finished for the day. Galif was on the floor with a wad of papers in his hands, yelling to a worker suspended from the upper deck high above who was patching bullet holes in the balloon.

“Finish that last one, then come on down!” Galif hollered. “That’s enough for today!”

“Aye aye!” came the reply.

Galif jumped when he noticed Shazahd and Owein beside him.

“Oh my! Shazahd! What brings you here? And Master…?”

“Maeriod. Owein.” Galif was still drawing a blank. “The security guy.”

“Oh, right. Right,” said Galif, nodding, though Owein was certain he didn’t remember him.

“Galif,” said Shazahd, stepping close. “I need to ask you a favor.”

“Of course, my girl! Of course! Anything.”

“I need you to help me fly this ship.”

“The… ship?” he echoed dimly.

“Master Maeriod and his men have agreed to help me find my father. We’re going to Zarothus. Tonight.”

Galif stumbled backward as though the words had dealt him a blow. He looked troubled.

“Your father…. He’s in Zarothus?”

“We think so.”

“If he’s there,” Owein said, “we’ll find him. And we’ll bring him back.”

Galif’s mouth puttered wordlessly for a moment. His eyes darted back and forth between Shazahd and Owein.

“Well…” he began to say.

“Well?” said Shazahd.

“Well… what in the gods’ names are we standing around here for?! Get aboard that ship! We set sail immediately!”

Shazahd beamed, and wrapped up the aging engineer in a hug.

“Oh yes, thank you dear,” he said a bit bashfully, chuckling. “Now hurry along – I’ll gather a skeleton crew.” Galif turned to the mob of mechanics on their way out and called to them.

“Hey! Who among ye wants to help the mistress here find old man Ranaloc? We’re taking the ship to go look for him, and we’ll be leaving presently.”

“Ranaloc?” someone spoke up. “You mean…?”

“Aye. You heard me right. They think he might be in Zarothus. No one can force you to come, but anyone who wants to volunteer is sure welcome.”

The mechanics were still for a moment. Then they collectively turned around and went back into the ship. Every single one of them.

“Ranaloc, eh?” one said. “Count me in.” “Let’s go find the old
tetsa
.”

“You five,” Galif said to his men. “And you there. Get on that cart and haul that new turbine in, would ya? We’ll have to install it inflight. Take it right into the hold. We’ll see to it from there.”

“Aye aye,” they said, and scurried to one corner of the hangar where a wooden crate of tremendous proportions sat waiting on a wheeled cart.

Owein recognized one of the workers.

“Cavada?!” he exclaimed. The young man stopped short. “What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be on leave.”

Cavada stammered awkwardly. “Yeah, well… I am. It’s just, you see, Captain Vrei asked if I could help out. You know, with some of the repairs. And – and I –”

“All right, I get it. Go get that thing over there and get yourself on board. You’re coming with.”

“I was planning on it, sir.” Cavada turned away.

“Hey, Cavada.”

“Sir?”

“…Just remember who your boss is.”

“Yessir!” and he sped away.

“Oh!” Galif was still directing crewmen. “Grab that tool chest over there before we go. And bring those spanners. No, all of them. And that pile of scrap in the corner. We’ll need it for replacing the – yeah? What is it?”

Owein had tapped him on the shoulder.

“Hey,” he said. “So… well, will this thing be all right in the air?”

“You mean the ship?”

“Yeah. It’s just… I remember she suffered some pretty serious damage.”

“Don’t you worry your pretty little head over it, Master Maeriod,” Galif chided, a little agitated. “She’ll fly if I ask her nice enough.”

“
Nice
enough?”

“Oh, sure.
Gilderam
is a true lady after all. And she acts like one. Now if you’d like to help out, there’s one person we need to find before we can leave.”

“And who’s that?”

“The captain.” And he left for the cargo hold.

Owein stared after him. “Fulo, Gor’m,” he said. “Go and find our captain.”

“Aye aye,” they said, and sped out of the hangar.

“
Aye aye
…
?
” Owein muttered to himself. “Are all my men becoming sailors…?”

“Perhaps you should get aboard,” Shazahd said from beside him. “We wouldn’t want to leave you behind.”

She walked past him with a teasing smirk.

His eyes followed her.

“Yeah, sure,” he said distantly, and started for the gondola. They were waiting to board behind a couple engineers when Owein heard something clink over by the hangar door.

“Back already…?”

But it wasn’t his men.

Or the captain.

It was Tolora. And he was sopping wet, glaring at him from the doorway. In his hand, a curved sword gleamed bright gold with the reflection of the waning sun. His eyes burned with rage.

Dumbstruck mechanics, witnessing the stare-down, took only a second to recognize the situation before they hurried into the ship.

“Owein –”

“Get inside, Shazahd.”

She gripped his arm.

“I said get inside. I’ll handle this.”

One of the mechanics pulled her away and they disappeared into the gondola. The man in the coat didn’t move.

“So you’re the one they sent for me,” Owein called out. He took a couple steps forward. “Not like the Empire to outsource their assassins.”

The man didn’t reply.

“Or was it the Empire that hired you?”

The man with the ponytail laughed softly from behind his buckled collar, but didn’t answer. Owein drew his cutlass, unlatched his sword belt and tossed it to the floor.

“Not the talkative type, huh? That’s fine. I like my stalkers to be… introspective.”

And Owein charged him.

Tolora didn’t move until they had nearly collided, then he stepped back into a low stance, and brought his blade up over his head. Owein gave him a powerful downward slash, but his momentum was deftly redirected by the curved sword. He felt his own weight carried off balance, and he stutter-stepped to one side.

By the time he spun around, Tolora had already moved and was now on his flank. The glimmering arc of his sword was flying at Owein, and he brought up his own to block it at the last second. His control was sacrificed to speed, and the block was sloppy and desperate, successful only in bashing his opponent’s weapon away.

He took a step back as he did so, and before he could prepare himself the arc was slashing at him again. In the blink of an eye, Owein repelled three more blows – then four more, each lighting fast – and they kept on coming.

Owein could only guess where the blade was coming next, and each time he hurled his cutlass there to deflect it, it was almost too late. His enemy was a blur, leaping and dancing around the hangar like no duelist Owein had ever seen.

He couldn’t think; there wasn’t time. Instead he relied on subconscious reflex, honed through years of training and combat experience. Even still, he didn’t have a good feeling about this fight. He felt like a novice, lacking all control and grace.

Tolora’s body rose up for an aerial attack, parallel to the floor, with blade whirling, and landed in a kneel. He rolled to the side, hopped up again with a slash, crouched, leapt into a forward flip, coming down with the edge of his sword as he did so, and landed again.

His body was a rag doll, somehow free from the usual constraints of gravity and human physiology. The four flaps of his coat, below the waist, flew straight out when he twirled, and his wet ponytail ripped through the air like a flail.

At one point amidst a flurry of attacks, Tolora stopped suddenly, his blade crossed with Owein’s. In the lull their faces came close together. He and Owein exchanged point-blank glares.

Tolora’s eyes were dark brown, and his eyelids bore a folded epicanthus like the people of the far west. There were deep wrinkles in his face, marking him considerably older than Owein would’ve guessed from his incredible agility. Two plump eyebrows pushed together beneath his tricorn, bunching up his forehead with exertion.

Though the man’s body had stopped, his long ponytail hadn’t, and it wound its way around the two of them until the frayed tip slapped Owein across the face.

Owein pushed off with his sword, shaking the shock from his head. But his enemy’s blade was coming down at him again with its usual, merciless relentlessness.

The force of each blow was getting stronger. Owein gripped his hilt with both hands but felt his arms beginning to tire. He surmised that Tolora must be growing weary of their fight, and was working to hasten its end. Owein’s skill, pathetic compared to his, was only barely enough to keep him alive, and his heart sank with the inevitable realization that it wouldn’t save him for long….

Tolora leapt high in the air – a whole man’s height above the ground – and came down with all his weight focused into his sword. Owein blocked over his head, but the force brought him to his knees. Two more strikes and Owein felt his clunky steel weapon fly from his hand. He heard it clang on the hangar floor and slide to a halt.

He was disarmed.

This
, he thought uncontrollably,
is the end.

Owein watched as the curved blade rose high in the air. Though he could scarcely see it zooming a moment before, now time slowed down, and he could see every detail.

He saw sweat beaded on the man’s face. He saw the individual hairs of his ponytail. He could’ve counted the threads in his coat, if he wanted to. He focused on the razor-edge of the blade as it fell toward him.

It was going to cut him cleanly in two, from head to toe.

He was so consumed with his coming demise that he hadn’t noticed one of the lower windows of the hangar shatter to pieces behind him. He hadn’t heard the sound of someone landing on a table, either. He hadn’t even registered the sprinting footfalls, nor had he detected the sound of a whirring knife thrown through the air.

Tolora had noticed all of this, however. And when his sword should have cleft Owein in half, instead it swatted the soaring knife out of the air, preventing it from sinking into his chest.

Owein blinked.

Shouldn’t he have been killed by now?

When Tolora rebounded his sword again, it rose into a defensive position in front of his face. Owein tilted his head in confusion. The explanation for this strange behavior came next, when a body sailed through the air over Owein’s head and collided headlong with Tolora. Steel rang against steel, and Owein watched the two bodies spill onto the floor in front of him.

They sprang to their feet in the next heartbeat, swords at the ready. The new contender was dressed in a mottled variety of rags – ancient looking, worn and soiled. He wore a cloth around his head that concealed his face. Only his eyes were visible, dark and foreign like Tolora’s. His sword was the oddest part: a strange, swishing design that was widest at its ends and thinnest in the middle.

And then they dueled.

Owein had never seen a fighting style like Tolora’s before in his life, and now he saw it twice. The warriors fought a ballet of foot and sword. They danced around each other, vaulting themselves high into the air, landing in crouches or rolls, zipping around like hornets. They moved so quickly that their exact actions could not always be clearly discerned.

Somewhere between the spinning and twirling bodies, swords found each other and sang out in bitter contest. The ringing of blades reverberated around the hangar, clanging audibly more often than Owein could see.