Redoubt (24 page)

One of the men got up, moving with smooth grace, then came over and stared down at
him, and he tried to keep his breathing even and quiet. After a moment, the man went
away, then came back again, and threw the horse-smelling blanket over him, then went
back to the fire.

Disorienting waves of vertigo engulfed him as the pain and cramps eased and his limbs
relaxed under the warmth of the blanket. Obviously the drug wasn’t done with him yet.

Mags closed his eyes, fought off the dizziness the only way he knew how, by concentrating
on everything else around him.

Sound first, that was easiest. Near at hand, the fire crackling, the two men muttering
occasionally. The sound of muffled metal on metal in a regular, slow pattern. Someone
was stirring food in a pot. Someone who actually knew how to cook. Mags remembered
dimly, from when he worked in the Pieters’ kitchen, how the cooks would end up with
pots full of half-burned and ruined food because they didn’t bother to set someone
to stir it. Fat sizzling in the fire and the flare-ups that followed.

Farther away, the sounds of tearing and chewing. He knew those sounds, it was a horse
eating grass. A horse? More than one? The stamp of a hoof. Another. Then two snorts,
just slightly apart in time. Two horses, then. No harness jingling. So, they were
definitely here for the night.

Under the cover of the blanket and between waves of dizziness he tried wiggling fingers
or curling toes, but nothing happened. Back to listening, then.

Leaves moving in a slight breeze, and a moment later, that same breeze cooled his
forehead. The sound of something small moving through the underbrush. A couple of
birds he couldn’t identify in the middle distance, and far, far off, the faint honks
of a flock of geese.

No sounds whatsoever that were man-made except those of his captors.

That disposed of sound. Smell?

Nearest, the stink of his own sweat. No surprise, given how he’d sweated his clothing
until it was soaked. Under that, the faint smell of crushed pine needles. The fire
gave off a slightly different aroma than he was used to. Meat cooking, both the sharp
scent of meat cooking directly over the fire and the more mellow aroma of meat cooking
in water. So they were making their own dinner as well as his soup. And there was
a baking-bread smell, although, again, it wasn’t the sweet scent he was used to. From
the direction of the horses came the smell of torn grass. All around, the faint and
bitter smell of leaves turning.

Finally, the last of his aches melted under the warmth of the blanket. He couldn’t
help it; his body felt comfortable for the first time since he’d been put in the wagon,
and even though he tried to fight it, between the remains of the drug and his relaxing
body, he dozed. But it wasn’t restful, because there was a great and terrible gulf
of loss between him and any real rest.

He couldn’t hear Dallen. He couldn’t hear Dallen. He was all alone in his head for
the first time since he’d been Chosen, and only once in all his life had he felt so
completely alone, abandoned, and in despair. That was when he had decided that he
didn’t deserve Dallen and had tried to give up being Chosen.

It hadn’t worked, of course. But now—

It felt like a bitter betrayal. Not by Dallen! By his own body, perhaps. But he’d
been
promised,
faithfully, that he would never be alone again. And now he was. And it was horrible.

He wept, silently, until he was so exhausted all there was left was sleep.

When he woke again, it was to snores; his eyes were sore, and his face itched from
the tears dried on it. He itched all over, from the dried sweat. They hadn’t drugged
him—he cautiously cracked an eye and turned his head a little to look toward the fire.

One man was curled up on his side, a lump under a blanket. The other sat with his
back to Mags, poking at the fire with a stick.

It was startlingly quiet. Overhead, the stars were spread across the sky like a dusting
of heavy pollen, or seeds spilled from a giant basket onto the black earth, too many
and too thick to count.

With infinite care, Mags tried to move his right index finger.

It moved!

He almost cried all over again.

He tried all the fingers, one at a time, then tried the left hand, and moved on to
his foot. He could move! But he wasn’t going to press his luck by trying to move his
arms or legs. That might alert his captor, and that was the very last thing he wanted
to do right now. Now he knew approximately how long it would take for the drug to
wear off, and—

Before he could finish that thought, the man at the fire straightened and tossed the
stick he had been using to poke at the fire into the coals. Then he reached over and
shook his fellow awake.

Time for the second watch, then.

But it seemed that it was time for more than that, as the first one reached down and
picked up something next to him, and as Mags hastily closed his eyes again, he recognized
with dismay the shape of the waterskin.

—no—
he thought.

But his captors had their own plans. And there was no help for it.

All he could do was, as before, try to drink as little as possible. And then wait
for the dreams to carry him away again, and cling to his knowledge of who and what
he was as he was tossed around like a leaf on a storm wind, and with about as much
control over his fate.

9

T
hey had stopped giving him the drug in his food, and now it was only in his water.
He must have convinced them that he was weakening, and that they didn’t have to drug
him so heavily anymore.

Or, maybe, they were running low, and they were trying to stretch out what they had.

The point was that his moments of clarity were longer, and he was able to move now
at the end of them. In fact, he was in his curled position, secretly flexing his muscles
to exercise them, when the wagon stopped.

He froze, not daring to move at all, lest he be heard.

“Where are you going, and what are you carrying?”
asked a harsh voice that sent chills of fear all down his spine. Fear, because even
though he understood the language, it was
not
one that he wanted to hear.

This was Karsite.

“That is none of your concern,”
replied one of the now-familiar male voices, heavily accented and thick with arrogance.
It was an arrogance that Mags remembered only too well from the so-called “merchant-princes.”
“Behold this seal, dog, and know the will of your masters. We are to go where we will
and answer only to them.”

There was a long pause. Then,
“It appears real,”
the first man said, grudgingly.

“That is because it
is
real, hound,”
the second replied, voice laden with contempt.
“Go back to your meddling in the lives of the small and weak. We have important work
to do and no time to waste satisfying your pitiful curiosity.”

Well . . . this was worse than he thought. As he listened to the sounds of a fairly
large troop of men marching away, he felt his heart plummeting. If he’d had any doubt
before, it was erased now; these were the same sorts of assassins who had been systematically
trying to destroy Valdemar at the behest of Karse. They must still be holding to their
contract with Karse to have a token that enabled them to be rude to the captain of
a troop of Karsite regulars with impunity. So not only was he somewhere on the Karsite
side of the Border, he was in the hands of people who could order Karsite soldiers
around.

So very bad. Really, the only thing worse would be to be in the middle of being tortured
for information.

Which . . . could happen at any point.

Because right now, for whatever reason, they were taking care of him. But if they
lost the protection of that token—or if they insulted someone badly enough that he
decided to ignore it—the Karsites would find
him.

At least I’m not wearing Grays. And at least there’s nothing on me that says I’m from
Valdemar . . .

Not that such thin protection would last long if they were all tossed into a Karsite
prison, because eventually the drug would wear off, and they’d start to question him,
and if his story didn’t match that of his captors . . . or they noticed his accent . . .

He started to sweat.

Maybe if that happens, I’d better pretend to be insane.

* * *

Mags could not look up at the canvas throw over his head without craning his head
to the side in a way that got painful before very long, but then, there wasn’t much
to see, just the cloth lit from behind by whatever light was coming in through the
canvas cover of the wagon. The two men babbled at each other in urgent voices as the
wagon swayed and rolled over uneven ground, and the bed slanted first one way and
then another. He’d thought the road they were on was rough, but now he knew he had
been quite mistaken. Mags was pretty sure what they were doing, and it was exactly
what he would do under the same circumstances. They might have sounded arrogant when
they addressed the captain of that Karsite troop, but he reckoned now that they were
not as sure of their status in Karse as they had pretended to be. So they had left
the main road and taken to something less traveled.

That wasn’t their only problem. He could hear thunder in the distance. They were about
to get hit by a storm, and they were on what was a very bad road. That could spell
a lot of trouble.

Evidently that occurred to them, too. They stopped the wagon as a peal of thunder
growled for a very long time, and the light inside the wagon faded so much that he
could barely make out the shapes of the things penning him in. This was going to be
bad, and they knew it. But they hadn’t pulled off the road, so they weren’t stopping—which
might, or might not, be a good plan. He didn’t know a lot about driving wagons, but
he did know that trying to drive horses in a storm was going to give them an enormous
amount of trouble. He figured they weren’t going to take any chances on him waking
up during the storm, so they were going to drug him now.

Dammit!
Under cover of a storm, of course, would give him the best possible chance at escape.
Even if they pulled off the road, he would have a chance of overpowering them and
getting away.

But there wasn’t anything he could do about it—except that, as they poured the drugged
water into him, to let as much as he could dribble out one side of his mouth, counting
on it being so dark they wouldn’t notice.

Only one of them came around to the back and got in. By the little lurches the wagon
was making, the horses were nervous and the driver didn’t dare leave them unattended.
Mags let about half the water leak out of the side of his mouth, and evidently the
man feeding it to him didn’t see it. He even held the last mouthful and spit it out
once he’d been laid down again.

But being stopped had meant that they hadn’t fed him the soup, either, so since his
stomach was completely empty, the drug hit him fast. All he could take note of when
he passed into a dream of being huddled with the other mine-kiddies in their pit under
the barn floor during a thunderstorm was that he still hadn’t been curled back up
in his cavity, and the fellow was doing a lot of moving things on the other side of
the wagon.

* * *

This time, he came awake all at once, as an enormous
boom
nearby made the horses scream. The wagon lurched and swayed wildly. And
he
was in complete darkness.

He didn’t panic, because for once, on waking, he knew exactly where he was. Except—he
wasn’t curled up. He was stretched out, and he felt wood pinning him in on all sides.
Not coffin-tight, but he hadn’t a lot of room to move, either, except at his head
and his feet. The blanket had been laid over him. A moment later, as another bolt
of lightning hit nearby with a simultaneous crash of thunder, the wagon rocked and
bucked, and he felt boxes and bales hit the side of whatever it was he was in. If
he’d been in his usual position, by now he probably would have had every bone in his
body broken by stuff falling on him. He didn’t think he was in a coffin, because why
would they have a coffin with them? That would be just daft—no one transported bodies
in coffins for very far except the very rich, who could afford to have the bodies
of their loved ones preserved. A coffin in a common wagon would just attract attention.
But they had probably unpacked some sort of equipment from this box and stuffed him
in it to protect him, knowing what was going to happen as they continued down these
terrible roads in a storm.

I guess I’m worth quite a bit if they’re taking that kind of care of me.

They might have thought the storm would blow itself out or that they could get to
the other side of it, and by the time they realized how wrong they were, it was too
late and too dark to stop.

He couldn’t move—yet—but he sensed he had a fair amount of room in this thing, whatever
it was. And if ever he was going to get a chance to escape . . . yes, he might be
able to manage it, even now.

As the wagon lurched and rolled, and rain sluiced over the top and sides, as lightning
struck and thunder boomed, he worked his fingers and toes until life came back into
his limbs. Once he could feel fingers and toes moving normally, he flexed his muscles
until they all came back to life. Then he tried simply lifting the top of the box.

No good. Something had it fastened down tight. He didn’t dare pound at it, not now,
not when he was within an arm’s length of his captors. He tried to remember what he
had seen of the wagon itself. It wasn’t much like a solid wooden gypsy or minstrel
caravan or a prosperous trader’s wagon; it was more like a farmer’s wagon, except
with a round, tentlike canvas top held up by hoops of wood over it all. Had there
been a drop-down flap at the back? Or—could his luck be good enough that there was
no back to it at all?

He decided that it didn’t matter. His plan involved getting out the back, and that
was what he was going to have to do, even if it meant smashing through whatever was
blocking him.

So, when the wagon was lurching and wallowing down a hill, he used his weight to slide
the box he was in to the front of the wagon, and when it was going up, he did the
same, only moving to the back. He hoped that he was shoving the rest of the cargo
out of the way, but it was impossible to tell from inside. He
was
sliding farther each time. And his captors were too busy fighting their panicked
horses to pay much attention to what was going on behind them.

And then it happened.

Another bolt of lightning smashed into the ground so near to them that he
felt
it, felt the shock, felt the hair stand up all over his body, smelled the sharp scent
of the lightning itself and the scorched smell of the earth. Thunder hammered them.
The horses screamed, and the wagon lurched forward into a downhill run that sent everything
in the wagon bouncing and flying, including him and his box. He braced himself inside
it, getting bone-bruising jounces as the box danced all over the floor of the wagon,
but knowing from the impacts on the top that however bad it was in the box, it was
much worse outside it.

Fueled by hysterical strength, the horses lurched up the next hill. A huge bounce
gave him the moment he needed, and he shifted as much of his weight to the foot of
the box as he could. The box went skidding toward the back of the wagon. And this
time . . . he felt it teeter on the edge, balancing there for one precarious moment.

And then the wagon lurched again, and the box went flying into the storm and the night.
It hit the ground, knocking all the breath out of him, then began rolling and bouncing
down a steep slope.

Desperately, he splayed out his limbs and braced himself inside.

The slope was certainly steep enough, and he had enough momentum, that it just kept
tumbling. The blanket they had wrapped him in tangled up around him and cushioned
the blows a little, but not much. It felt as if he were being beaten; it was almost
impossible to keep entirely braced.

And then, sickeningly, he felt—falling. And the thought flashed through his mind that
the end of the fall would be at the bottom of some horrible chasm.

But the fall ended, quickly, in a splash.

And water immediately started pouring in the seams of the box.

Now
he began frantically kicking and pounding at the sides of the box; he had no idea
which was the top, and all he could think of was drowning, trapped in this thing,
as icy water soaked him, and his kicks and flailing blows splashed water about wildly.

But then he felt the box settle, only half full of water.

His relief was short-lived, however. A moment later, he felt it shift with the pressure
of the water rushing around it, and he knew in a moment it could be swept into deeper
water, where he would almost
certainly
drown. But with that brief respite of relief, he knew he had to concentrate his efforts
on the one place where he could get the most impact from his blows.

Not the sides of the box, but the foot.

He wriggled until he got his arms stretched up and braced against the head of the
box, and began to kick downward with all his strength.

After his legs started to hurt, fear gave him new strength. And as the box shifted
in the current again, he finally felt the wood give.

More hysterical blows later, as the box shifted into slightly deeper water, and he
was having trouble keeping his head above it, he felt the bottom pop out. He eeled
out faster than he would have believed, somehow having the presence of mind to bring
his blanket with him, and not a moment too soon. As he scrambled for the bank, he
could see clearly in the nearly continuous flashes of lightning, the box ripped away
from the rocks it had landed among and spun away into the darkness. He clutched the
corner of the blanket between his teeth and scrabbled desperately with hands and feet
through water that pulled at him, until he finally managed to fling himself onto the
bank, panting and half-dead.

All he wanted to do was lie there and not move. But he knew he didn’t dare. First,
the water was rising; he could feel it climbing higher on his legs. Second, he thought
he could hear shouting somewhere above. And third, he knew that if he did remain lying
there, the wet and the cold would get him, and he would very probably die of the cold
if the water didn’t carry him off first. Somehow he managed to get to his feet, wrap
the blanket around himself, and stagger off along the shore of the raging stream.

He had no real idea of what direction to go in. He had no idea where in Karse he was.
He didn’t know where the wagon was, either, except that he was pretty sure he was
still on the same side of the water as it was. All he could do was try to put as much
distance between himself and his captors as he could.

So he went upstream, away from where the box was spinning away on the current, because
with luck, they would go in the opposite direction, assuming he was being carried
away by the water.

He staggered on long past the point of exhaustion, long past the time when his limbs
burned with fatigue and his mind blurred. There was only the fight to keep putting
one foot in front of the other and keep that wool blanket clutched around himself.
The only light he had to see by was the lightning, which showed no sign of abating.