Riding the Serpent's Back (54 page)

Leeth clambered to his feet and then stooped to help the mourner rise. Other people had joined them now, all dressed in the red of the grieving.

He brushed himself down and was about to speak when he saw that they were all staring at him.

“I...” he said. “The monkeys,” he said. “I—”

The man who had collided with him spoke in a sudden stream that was entirely unintelligible to Leeth, then he stepped towards him and spat in his face.

Leeth backed away, outnumbered by the angry mob. The only word he had been able to make out from the man’s tirade was
Tullan
. His clothes, his manner, his accent – and perhaps something more subtle, he knew – must all have betrayed him as an outsider, a foreigner.

He turned and walked away, listening fearfully for sounds of pursuit. He wondered what had happened to cause so large a funeral. There must easily have been thirty or forty rafts out there.

He remembered the village where he had stopped to break his journey north. The young Tullan soldier, his long knife smeared red. The mutilated corpses, Charmed back into a semblance of life.

When he had returned to the inn, Leeth went straight up to the boarding hall and barricaded himself inside. He would be glad to leave this town in the morning.

~

He went to the town hall, as the official had told him he must do before departing. He saw the same young woman he had seen the day before – he recognised the distrustful way she peered at him through small spectacles perched on the end of her nose.

She recognised him and produced the registration card for him to complete. “Leeth Hamera,” she said, ponderously, extending the vowels with the drawl Leeth now knew as the local accent.

He nodded, but said nothing.

“Someone was asking for you yesterday,” she said.

Now, he looked up sharply. His first thought was of the mob: had they regretted letting him off so lightly for his foreignness? Had one of them come asking about a young Tullan, new to Hazlet?

The clerk soon quashed that theory. “He was asking for you by name,” she said. The mob could not possibly know his name. “He made it quite obvious that he was no friend of yours either.” She seemed to be treating it lightly, as if she was enjoying the power she had over him: her knowledge, against his need to know.

“Who was it?”

She said something that sounded to Leeth like
halahneesh
. He had heard the word last night, when he had been confronted by the mourning mob. In response to his blank look, the clerk explained, “A foreigner, an outsider. From Tule, I think, although we Ranani always suspect strangers of being Tullan.” She leaned forward now, enjoying herself. “Especially if they look dangerous.”

“What did you tell him?” Leeth couldn’t resist the impulse to look nervously over his shoulder. Other than the two of them, the office was deserted.

She tapped the card with a long fingernail. “Registered details are confidential,” she said primly.

Leeth realised he might be dead or captured by now if it was not for this young woman. He tried to sense the shape of her mind, wondering if this was how Chi healed, or how Joel seduced – a Charm similar to bonding.

It was hard, nowhere near as straightforward as connecting with Sky, or even with those confounded monkeys the night before.

He leaned towards her, so that their faces were no more than the breadth of a finger apart. He could feel her breath on his face, and knew she could feel his. “Did you register this stranger?” he asked softly.

She shook her head, almost imperceptibly. “Confidential,” she whispered. “But his type...they are exempt from registration. A soldier. A military adviser.”

“What does he look like?”

She opened her mouth, but said nothing. She kept her lips parted, her head poised, as if expecting him to kiss her.

Then he noticed that her gaze had shifted beyond him.

He felt a draught, coming from the open door.

“Like this,” said a man’s voice.

Slowly, Leeth straightened, turned.

A man of about his own height stood silhouetted in the doorway, hands resting lightly on his hips. He was wearing a long coat, and underneath it Leeth was sure he saw the bulge of either a long knife or a small club hanging at belt level.

The man let his coat hang free, confirming Leeth’s fears: a long dagger, and across his chest a diagonal belt of throwing knives.

A door opened at the back of the office and a middle-aged man came in carrying a stack of files balanced up to his chin. “What’s going on?” he said. “And why’s that door open? Someone is accountable for the heat in this office, you know.”

Leeth hurled himself around the desk, skidding on a rug. He crashed to his knees before the complaining office manager and instantly a cloud of papers and files flew into the air.

Leeth barged past him, reached the door and was through, yanking it closed behind him.

 A split second later there was a dull thud against the door and, as he looked back, he saw the blade of a throwing knife protruding through the thin wood.

He tipped a desk over against the door to slow down the pursuit and turned. He was in another office. An elderly woman sat on a stool where the desk had been moments before. She stared at him open-mouthed.

He heard a crash against the door, and turned.

Two other doorways, both open. He chose one and sprinted through.

He was in a corridor. He headed deeper into the building, through another office where this time people protested that he couldn’t come through.

He barged on, regardless.

Soon, he came to a door that opened onto a side-street. Just before emerging, he stopped himself. It was some time since he had heard any sounds of pursuit. Either his assailant had been stopped, or he had retreated outside to watch for Leeth to emerge.

He leaned back against a wall, struggling to calm his flustered mind.

He should change himself, he realised, but he did not know if he could do it just like that. He closed his eyes and tried to think, struggling to focus on a face – any face! – that should become his own.

Minutes later, he ran a hand over his features. They had changed. The jaw was lower, the hair tightly curled, the nose broken crookedly.

He smiled and went out into the street.

As he walked, he struggled to look natural, to watch those all around and mimic their easy pace, their confident strides. And all the time, his mind was frantically trying to keep pace: he had to concentrate so hard to keep this new form!

Sky, Sky!
he cried, picturing in his mind the square by the river – these streets were too narrow and congested for the courser to land.

He came to the square, but there was no sign of Sky. Sometimes when the beast had been free to wander during the night, she could take quite a long time to respond to the summons.

Sky, I need you!

He crossed the square, aware of the monkeys chattering and leaping about their home in a manner that was agitated even for them.

A man came towards him. Leeth was about to walk past when the man stopped and said, “No sign of him, then Grath?”

Leeth’s stride faltered. Why did this man seem to recognise him? He shook his head, not daring to speak.

Then he put a hand to his face, found the broken nose, felt how broad it was, the thick rasp of his stubble.

Now he knew whose face he had fixed on in his desperate attempt to change.

He had made himself look exactly like the man who had tried to kill him.

He looked at this other man. Another Tullan soldier, no doubt. Another assassin.

“You okay, Grath?” asked the man.

Leeth nodded, still rubbing nervously at his face. He stepped past the man and willed him not to follow.

Sky! I need you.

He reached the monkey house and the beasts were lined up against the front of the skeletal building, all staring at him as if to say,
He’s the one! Don’t let him go
.

“Hey!”

He recognised the voice. He turned to look back and the real Grath was running across to his colleague. He must have recognised Leeth’s clothing, he realised. When he saw Leeth, he stopped in shock as he saw his own face looking back.

His colleague stood dumbly, staring first at one and then the other.

“Get him!” cried Grath, and suddenly they were chasing him again.

Leeth leapt through a space in the shrine’s wall, and suddenly the monkeys were screeching and wailing, leaping all about.

He sprinted through, slithering over rotting food remains and years-old layers of monkey dung.
Sky!

At the back of the building he paused before throwing himself through an empty window-frame. At any instant he expected to feel a knife sinking into his back but it never came.

He saw Sky. Skimming in low across the river.

He turned and gasped: his two assailants were twisting and writhing beneath a carpet of attacking monkeys. Leeth sensed the excited seething of the animals’ minds as they bit and tore at the two soldiers. They had responded to his panicking mind just as a bonded courser would have done.

He jogged across to Sky. The courser settled back on her haunches, chewing lazily, oblivious to the commotion. Leeth scrambled up onto the beast’s back, clipped himself into the harness and thought,
Fly, fly, fly
.

And then, as Sky unhurriedly stretched her wings up into a V, Leeth looked back at the shrine.

One of the soldiers had struggled to his feet and was staggering across the empty building, still weighed down by a number of monkeys.

As Leeth watched, the man seized a monkey by the throat and hurled it away. He reached into his coat and took out a small knife.

Fly.

Finally, Sky lifted, and they were out over the river. In the courser’s mind there was a sudden sense of panic, as if she had finally woken up to the danger.

Leeth looked back and the monkeys had suddenly lost interest. The soldier, Grath, stood bloody and torn, watching him flee. With a final despairing effort, he produced another knife and hurled it after them.

Leeth watched it as it flew hard and fast to where they would be in a second or so.

Up, up.

Sky lifted and Leeth lost sight of the knife somewhere below. He sighed. If he had not been alert to the danger, that knife would have been his.

~

They flew hard that morning. Whenever Sky eased up, Leeth urged the beast on to ever greater efforts.

He kept dwelling on his double stupidity: to forget that, although he had changed, his clothes remained identifiable and, even worse, to copy the features of the Tullan soldier, Grath.

He couldn’t really understand how they had known who he was. He was sure that clerk at the town hall had been telling the truth when she had said she hadn’t given them any information. In any case, they had already been looking for him by name. He had told nobody he would be in Hazlet last night.

There were two possibilities. Either someone had, by chance, recognised him or his name at some point shortly after his arrival, or – even more improbably – he had somehow been followed.

In a short time they were above the first fringe of the Zochi jungle. Leeth stared at the lush green carpet spread out before them. Heading north, Sky had flown over the jungle in a day’s hard flying. “Come on,” he urged the courser. “Just one more day, then I promise I’ll let you rest.”

Sky could not understand his spoken words, but she must have sensed the thoughts behind them. With a brave effort, she lowered her head and kept flying.

~

Sky was starting to flag.

Leeth had noticed it a short time ago, and soon it had become obvious that it was not mere tiredness, or over-exertion.

Something was wrong.

Leeth glanced at the sun, still climbing across the sky. It was not yet midday. He was aware of the intensity of the sun’s heat, even up here with the air rushing all about him.

But Sky had coped with the heat on their previous journey.

He tried to see if there was anything visibly wrong, but there was nothing. Before long, Sky’s thoughts had lost all shape and Leeth knew the flying was no more than a mechanical activity, a dumb response to her master’s commands.

They began to fly lower and lower.

“Come on, girl,” said Leeth. “Please.”
Fly
. The thought that they might be stranded in the jungle was so awful as to be virtually inconceivable.

Soon, they were flying so low that Leeth feared they might plunge through the top layers of leaves and branches at any moment. Now, as Sky flew, she made a feeble grunting sound with every downbeat. Leeth felt the courser’s pain as if it was his own.

“Come on.”

Suddenly, the trees thinned. Leeth caught sight of a flash of bare rock and then it was lost again amongst the trees. He listened to Sky’s feeble grunting for a few more wingbeats, then made his decision. He pictured the clearing in his mind, thought the command to Sky.

With a great effort, Sky turned back and a short time later landed in a heap on the bare rock floor of the clearing. Immediately they were surrounded by a wall of sound: the relentless buzz of insects, a series of piercing shrieks, a laughing call that repeated at regular intervals.

Leeth climbed down, patting the courser reassuringly as he did so.

He was shocked by the look of pain in the beast’s tiny eyes.

He didn’t understand. There was nothing visibly wrong with her.

And then Sky shifted uncomfortably and Leeth saw a metallic glint from her flank. He squatted and reached out. Sky flinched, but her trust in Leeth was great enough that she overcame her fear and pain and let him touch the small knife.

It was buried to its hilt in the great slab of muscle that joined the underside of Sky’s left wing to the reinforced bone-cage across her chest.

Leeth tried to reassure her with a flow of calming thought-shapes and then he jerked the knife free. Immediately, fresh blood began to flow over that which had been crusted around the wound.

He tried to staunch the flow with his hands, holding the wound closed until the blood eventually dried again.