North Star Guide Me Home (13 page)

‘I agree. We have sent agents into Akhara to learn what they can of this, but I plan to send another, a messenger, my lady, bearing a letter from you.’

They would think it a trick, just as she had when Bayard first offered them shelter. ‘No,’ Mira said, ‘I have a better idea. I’ll send a messenger of my own.’

The dog crouched at the end of its rope and whined. Rasten offered it his hand to sniff and it licked his knuckles and rolled over on the sandy soil.

Its tail thumped in the dust as he rubbed its chest. Animals often seemed to like him. He didn’t know why. He’d made a pet of a rat once, but he’d come to his senses before Kell found out about it. He threw things at it whenever it appeared and it soon went back to its wild ways.

Rasten scratched the dog’s dusty fur and looked up at the house, a low dark shadow looming out of the night-time gloom.

He’d lost track of time. Was it fifty days since he’d left? It could be sixty … but as many as eighty? Who could say? The pattern of the stars had shifted overhead, but he didn’t know enough of such things to judge how far the seasons had turned. The weather had grown cold and wet, but hardly wintry by Ricalani measures.

In that time, he’d given up counting the slaves he’d freed, the guards he’d killed, and the slave-trains he’d tracked across the patchwork of fields in eastern Akhara. After tracking down any who bore the dormant seed of mage-craft, he ordered the newly freed folk to head west. It was the last thing they wanted. It seemed a trap, a strange new nightmare, that a man of their own people would appear out of nowhere, slaughter their captors and then torture a few seemingly randomly chosen folk from their ranks and then order them to march deeper into Akhara, but they were never game to refuse him. After a while a few of the freed folk started following him at a distance, and when he ordered a new troupe to march west, they would swoop in to assure the frightened folk that there was more method in his madness than first appeared.

At first, they tried to ride with him, but after only a few hours, Rasten had driven them away. He couldn’t bear their presence, their inane chatter, the pressure of their gaze. It was better to be alone.

He hadn’t always felt that way. The first few weeks were an aching blur of loneliness, confusion and disorientation. He missed Sierra horribly — her presence had become his rock, his anchor once the framework of his life crumbled. But as time passed, he stumbled into the common rhythm of a man. He learnt to eat at regular hours rather than waiting until he remembered that the pains of hunger were not simply something to be endured. Boiling water for a hot drink was a comforting ritual. When there was enough water, he bathed and washed his clothes. He liked being clean. It had taken time, but he’d learnt how to live a simple life, to rise at the same hour each day and live like a normal man, even while he hunted the Slavers and their stock across the moist green plains.

Lately, things had begun to change. The Slavers had adapted to the predators stalking them through the fields — for Rasten was no longer the only one hunting them — and now made the southwards run in small groups, hoping to slip past the hunters. It didn’t do them much good, because there were now many patrols of new mages and freed slaves roaming the land between the desert and the sea, but it meant that the hunters had to be always looking for their next target. Every slave-train that slipped through meant more souls lost, with scant hope of ever returning home.

Rasten’s latest hunt had brought him to a dry and rocky patch in the northern region of the grain belt. It was an unpromising place, where the sprouts of winter wheat were sparse and stunted and the fruit trees along the lanes were gnarled and scrawny. There were no slaves here, and no stores to feed the horde. It was time to move on, but first he needed food for the journey. Rasten gave the dog one last scratch, and started towards the house.

The door was barred from within but he slid the bolt back with a thread of power. Inside, he stood silently for some time, letting his eyes adjust.

The old house had seen better days. The floor was nothing but dirt, pitted and uneven. Listing shelves held cracked crockery, but the hanging bunches of onions and herbs were braided and placed with care. A breadbin and a knife box stood on a narrow dresser, and nearby a drowning trap had been set for mice.

He moved deeper into the house. The scant furniture was rough-hewn, padded with lumpy cushions covered with worn cloth. There was an upright loom in one corner, and spindles filled an earthenware jar on a shelf. Rasten ran his fingers across the warp threads, and vaguely recalled helping to measure and cut yarn just like it, years ago and a world away.

In the third room, behind a striped curtain, a couple slept in a sagging rope-slung bed. An orange cat was curled up at their feet, and it lifted its head to blink at him. The couple were both women, and old, with grizzled hair and wrinkled skin. On the shelf beside the bed was a narrow brass bracelet and a few hairpins carved of bone, set there carefully like precious objects.

He left them sleeping and went back to the kitchen, where he took a loaf from the breadbin and cut a few onions from a bunch. In the chimney he found sausages curing in the smoke and took some, together with a wedge of cheese. A barrel revealed a store of apples, very small but smelling like nectar, and he took a few of those as well. He peered into the knife box, but sniffed at the worn and much-sharpened blades. He already had more than he could use, and Rasten removed a salvaged blade from his belt, and set it in the box. Bundling his goods in a piece of cloth, he went to leave, but then he set the package down again to fumble for the bag of coins he’d acquired from some guard or other. Rasten had never handled money before, not that he could remember, and he had no idea what the coins were worth — nothing to him, in any case. He tipped them into a careless pile, but kept the sturdy leather bag, before slipping outside and bolting the door again.

Beside the house was a pen woven from thorny branches, with a handful of scrawny goats inside. The dog came to lean against Rasten’s leg as he peered at them. Behind the pen was an outbuilding built of mud bricks, which held the farm’s meagre supply of grain. Rasten made a pouch of his shirt and scooped a few handfuls to scatter on the ground for his horse. When it nickered softly and bent its head to lip up the corn, Rasten stowed his supplies and went to the well to refill his water-skins and bathe with his shrinking cake of soap. As he wrapped it up again he glanced back towards the house. He hadn’t thought to search for more. Should he go back? No, he’d taken enough. There would be other houses, wealthier than this one.

It had become his habit to ride at night and sleep during the day. The night suited him, it was so quiet and still. There were no people to confuse him, no traps or pitfalls to skirt around. Houses could be avoided or explored as he wished, and when he found a troupe of slaves, it was a simple matter to take them. Sometimes days passed without his speaking a word, but at other times he felt compelled to speak a meaningless prattle, talking of anything and everything. The horse seemed to listen, at least, flicking its ears back as he rambled, giving voice to broken and disordered thoughts. He often thought of Sierra, but even in his garrulous times, he avoided saying her name, and he never let down the shields he’d set to ward her out, no matter how often he thought of making contact to see how she fared, and if Isidro still lived. He’d left for her sake, because he could see her loyalty to him threatened the friendships she valued so much. He was like poison for those bonds, so he stayed away, even when he spent sleepless hours wondering and hoping that she was well. If she truly needed him, she could tear down that wall, but until she did, he’d leave her alone. He owed her that.

He rode most of the moonlit night at a ground-eating canter, heading east and south, and when the sky grew light and he rolled himself up in his blankets beside a gurgling stream, he was back in the deep, damp loam of the grain lands.

Rasten slept soundly, dreamlessly, with a fold of blanket pulled across his eyes to keep out the daylight — until all at once he came awake with a sudden heart-wrenching bolt of anxiety. Someone had found him. Someone was here.

He sat up with a roar of animal fury, flinging the blankets off with a wildly swinging blow of his fist.

There was a woman kneeling over him, reaching out with one hesitant hand to shake him awake. Dimly, Rasten registered that they weren’t alone, that there were many others — a dozen perhaps — circled around him at a respectful distance, but he was too deep in the grip of an instinctive defence to take notice. He swung at the woman’s face, and it hit something viscous and hot hanging in the air between them — a shield.

His power surged, but it was a weak thing compared to what he’d grown used to at Sierra’s side. These days it only ran high when he worked the rituals. But there were other methods of raising power — Rasten had never learnt more than the basics under Kell’s tutelage, but he’d spent long hours drilling himself and practising. With a hardened spike of power he popped her shield like a soap bubble. Then, while she was stricken and gasping with the stinging slap of the shattered working, Rasten swung at her again as he lurched to his feet.

Power surged around him as the gathered women cast a shield to protect her, and he snarled in fury. He could kill them, all of them. All he had to do was separate one from the pack and wring more power from her — they were nothing more than fledglings, weak and untried mages, no match for someone like him.

Then, as he stood over the shocked and crouching woman, he recognised her face. She was cleaner now, her hair combed and bound into two braids, but her expression was the same as the first time he’d seen her, sprawled on the sand and trying to crawl away from him.

Rasten jerked his hand away, but the girl fell back anyway, her face turned aside with her eyes scrunched closed.

‘Tigers take you, Greska!’ Rasten thundered. ‘I told you never to sneak up on me!’

Breathing hard, she scrambled away. Rasten turned away from her, grinding his teeth as he surveyed the folk surrounding him. He knew them all. He’d tried to learn their names, but it seemed the part of his mind that remembered such things had withered away in the dungeons. No one there lasted long enough to need them. ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded.

‘We’ve got some fresh meat for you,’ one of the women said, a wicked smile on her lips. She was slightly built, with swept-back cheekbones and an aquiline nose that had been broken sometime during her stint as a slave.

Rasten focused on her. He crossed the clearing in two quick strides and seized her with one hand on her arm and the other buried in her hair. He studied her closely, reaching inside her to examine the currents and channels power had carved out within her, before at last shoving her away and turning his back.

‘I told you I’d meet up in a week — in the meantime, you can cursed well leave me alone!’ He no longer had any idea how many patrols roamed this corner of the empire, but he was still the only one who could wake the dormant seed of power into a weapon.

‘If we waited another week we’d have twice as many,’ Greska said. ‘The patrols have been busy. And it takes it out of you, doing those kinds of numbers.’

‘The way things are going, it’d be better not to wait,’ another woman said. She was a priestess, nearly twice his age, with tattooed vines curling across her cheekbone. Rasten remembered how she’d wept as she asked for the ritual that would turn her into something she’d been taught to despise. ‘There are legions in the south.’

‘Legions?’ Rasten rubbed the back of his neck. He could still taste the woman’s power, familiar and unpleasant. ‘How many?’

‘Hard to say — they look to be aiming for the main camp with the women and children. The king is riding with them, and Lady Sierra, too. Don’t know what’s brewing, but we may not have the time to get these newcomers trained up.’

Somewhere nearby, a horse nickered, and Rasten’s head jerked up like a startled deer. That wasn’t his gelding. The wind had shifted, and he could smell fresh smoke and roasting meat. ‘How many?’ he said.

‘Twenty,’ the priestess said, and cut a dark glance at the woman who’d mentioned fresh meat. ‘Would have been more, but some got scared off.’

The number made his eyebrows rise. That was a lot for a short stretch of days. ‘Where?’

The priestess nodded to the east. ‘There’s a big house off that way. We took it today, no trouble. The commander’s having the barn cleared for you. They’ve been fasting in case you want to get started right away, but if not the commander had an ox put on a spit to roast.’

His belly was empty and growling with hunger, but Rasten ignored it. Better to get it over with, and worry about food later. ‘Where’s my horse?’

The meeting party hung back once he’d gathered up his gear and mounted his gelding, letting him ride on alone.

He
had
missed the house while riding through the night. Had he known it was there, he wouldn’t have camped so close. The farmhouse was a vast building, easily as large as a Ricalani dwelling that combined living quarters and shelter for the stock through the long winter. Outbuildings were scattered around it: barns, granaries, pens for animals and the long, low lines of slave quarters.

The grounds were thronged with people, with dozens of tether-lines for horses, and many rows of rough tents. Scattered among the dark-haired Ricalanis were a number of foreigners with the coloured hair or dark skin of the Akharian folk. Some of them seemed utterly bewildered, wandering as though lost. It was inevitable that the Ricalani forces would come across other slaves — many farms were run entirely by slaves while their masters lived in the capital. The Ricalanis gave them a choice — they could join the northerners and go with them to Ricalan; remain in the empire and take their chances as runaways; or remain with their former masters and flee with them. By the king’s order, no Akharian folk were to be mistreated or offered any violence so long as they surrendered without resistance.

While the newly freed slaves grappled with a world suddenly turned inside out, the Ricalani folk set about stripping the house. As Rasten approached, folk were carrying armloads of goods outside to lay on the ground — pots and pans, knives and implements, clothes and shoes and bolts of cloth, candles and oil-lamps. Even needles and spools of thread would be carefully gathered up. In the central courtyard, a fire had been lit, and along with the promised ox, a pig had been set over the coals to roast, while folk gathered around barrels, drinking rich dark ale.