Scar Felice (The Fourth Age of Shanakan Book 3) (9 page)

“At least.”

She turned to Sam Hekman, who had stood silently through this exchange.

“Thank you, law master,” she said. “Thank you for all your efforts.”

“I regret that the result was not better, Ima.”

“The truth is the truth. If he is gone to White Rock then he is gone, and nothing that you or I could have done would make a difference. I will follow him, even to the house of the Mage Lord himself.”

Hekman left, and Ella drew Felice out onto the balcony, sat her down among the flowers.

“I will arrange everything,” she said. “I know all the traders, and I am sure that we can find a train of wagons heading for White Rock within a few days. Just relax, eat, prepare yourself. I will tell you when I have made the arrangements.”

“I do not know why you are so kind to me, Karana, but I am grateful.”

“It is our way. Who knows? One day you may be able to do us a great favour, and when I ask it of you, you will remember that we were kind, and look favourably on our request.”

“If there was anything less likely it would be impossible,” Felice smiled.

They walked to the wagons together. This departure reminded her of another, many weeks ago. It had been cold then, but now it was hot. The sun was up, well up in the sky and beating down with unrestrained enthusiasm. In Samara, it seemed, journeys started when everyone was around to see them.

“You will be careful?” Ella insisted.

“I will, as far as it is possible.” Felice eyed the wagons with a critical eye. They were built differently from her father’s, but they looked sound enough, and she knew traders well enough to judge the men who loaded and drove them. Everything seemed well.

They embraced, and that, too, was a surprise to Felice. She felt honoured by Ella’s friendship, and by the time that her new friend had lavished on her. It was an odd experience to be sought out and though of as good company, but she had to admit that Ella managed to bring out the best of her moods, and in her company Felice felt, if not exactly witty, then at least able to speak passably well about things.

“I hope we will see you in Samara again,” Ella said. Again it was the right thing to say, softening the blow of departure. She would miss this place, these people.

“And if you are ever in East Scar, you will be welcome at our house,” she replied.

The wagons were mustering in a yard outside a warehouse on the northern edge of the city. Beyond the gates Felice could see nothing but a grassy plain sweeping away to the north, punctuated by small clusters of trees that provided shelter for white buildings, farms she supposed, that peeked out from their green veils, offering at least the illusion of mystery. To the east there was a rise in the land that became cliffs behind the district of Morningside.

“This is where it happened,” Ella said, her voice hushed with memory.

“The battle? Samara Plain?”

“Yes. See that rise over there, the one with a cairn of rocks built on it. That’s where Serhan stood, and the army was to the north, having come down off the high ground to the north east.” She pointed again. “The camp was there, on the rise to the west, just above the river. It was well fortified enough, we were quite safe, but the Saratans were too numerous for the White Rock guard to come out and meet them, and the city would have fallen.”

“Lucky you were not in the city.”

“No. He knew everything beforehand. He knew the Saratans would come, and when. We didn’t think so. He arranged for us to be there with the troops and safe. I think he was angry with us, with the King and the guild. They showed him no respect. They didn’t believe he’d done what he’d done, thought that he was taking advantage of the unexplained departure of the Faer Karan.”

“So what happened?”

“He played games. The soldiers were willing to fight, even outnumbered, but he said no. The King was prepared to go out with just the handful of men he’d brought, but Serhan pointed out that it was suicide, and the city would fall anyway. He made them all see that the city was lost. It was me that asked him to defend the city. I don’t know why I believed in him, but I did, and I don’t really know if he would have gone out if he had not been asked, but I asked, and he went out.” She shivered. “I had no idea he was that powerful. I thought he would use some trick, but he just told them to go home, and they charged him – two thousand men charging one man. He obliterated them.”

“He killed them?”

“It’s not the right word. There was nothing left, afterwards. Nobody has ever found a trace of the army, not a bone, a shoe, a sword, a belt buckle.”

They looked at the plain together, and for Felice it now took on a sinister aspect, like a trap, lying in wait for the unwary traveller, its very dullness a source of unease. Somewhere out there two thousand men, everything they were, everything they could ever be, had simply vanished, and at the will of a single man. Yet it had ended the war. It had even banished the idea of war.

Shouting behind them brought them back to the wagons and the warehouse. Everything was loaded, and the wagon master was doing the last checks, calling for all those travelling to take their seats for a final count. Felice climbed to her designated seat in the back of one of the wagons among bales of cloth. It was a comfortable spot.

“Safe journey,” Ella called up, and the wagons began to move. Felice soon lost sight of her friend, standing and waving in the emptying courtyard, blinking in the dust as the wagons filed out onto the road.

She lay back against the bales of cloth and looked at her fellow passengers. Unlike her father’s wagons, these seemed to carry people as a matter of course, and the wagon not only held a good stock of trade goods, but herself and two children. They were about fourteen and ten years old, she guessed, the boy being the older. They were quite well dressed, so not poor, though poor children would not have been able to afford to ride. At least they seemed quiet and well behaved, and they had been polite to the drover.

It was eight days at least, this journey. She would have to pass the time as best she could, and now she closed her eyes, drew a cloth over her head to protect her from the sun and dozed, thinking of other journeys, and the motion of the wagon rocked her roughly to sleep.

*              *              *              *

The boy was called Tann. He was sensible and conversed well for a child, and so they became friends of a sort. The girl, Pasha, was too shy, and rarely joined in, though she always answered when spoken to directly and seemed bright enough. They were travelling north to join their father, who was a guardsman, an officer, serving at White Rock. He had been part of the Ocean’s Gate guard, but after a great battle between Serhan and Ocean’s Gate he had taken up the offer of a position with the White Rock guard, as had many others.

Their drover, Barker, was less pleasant company. He was a short, thick set man of about forty years, grey, unshaven to the point of a straggling beard, and generally reluctant to wash. He left them every night to eat and drink with the other drovers, and often came back drunk to snore and grunt for the rest of the night on the wide seat of the wagon where he slept. He made it clear from the start of the journey that he had no desire to talk with his passengers. They were just cargo to him.

At least Felice did not have to cook. There was a general pot from which they all fed, and the man responsible did a fair job. The food was always edible, and sometimes quite tasty, though it was always some sort of stew. When they passed through villages and small towns Felice would try to buy fruit from the farmers, and this she shared with the children, who thanked her politely.

The road itself cut east just outside Samara, taking them through a pass between great and darkly forested hills, and then swinging north towards a bridge that crossed the Great North River. It took them three days to reach the bridge, one of the few man-built structures that the Faer Karan had seen fit to maintain outside the fortresses they had taken as their own. It was an impressive structure, at least seventy-five yards long, resting on five mighty stone pillars that rose out of the water. They supported huge iron bound wooden beams which in turn underpinned the planking of the bridge. The wagons rumbled across its span as the sun was setting, and made camp on the other side in a thin grove of trees. There was a smell about the place, faintly rotten, that Felice detected, blowing to them on a gentle easterly breeze.

“It’s the swamp,” Barker said, seeing her sniff the air. He nodded to the east. “Twenty miles of it between here and Stone Island, and no way through it.” This was the longest speech he had ever made in her hearing, and she nodded politely.

“No way at all?” she asked.

“To the south – the guard know it – but here people go in and never come out.”

Ella had told her about the marsh, shown it to her on a map, but she had known about it since childhood. It was the place where the Ghost Road disappeared, and children in the Scar were brought up on tales if its mist shrouded menace. She knew that beyond the marsh, and beyond Stone Island there lay the White Mountain River, and if she could follow that up stream it would take her home in just a few days, but the marsh spread north until it sucked at the foot of the mountains that held Far Delve – yet another fortress. There was no safe passage.

This was the most isolated part of their journey. In another day they would cross yet another bridge and the good land would widen out into forest and farmland again, leaving the marsh to the east, but just here, for the best part of a day they would travel between the river on one side and the marsh on the other. There were places where the safe land was up to a mile wide, but it was all wild country, damp and unpleasant, and good men did not linger here.

That evening she built a fire close to their wagon and the children joined her, sitting around it while she swapped tales with Tann. The day had been hot, but the damp air made them feel cold and the fire banished the chill. When they tired they lay down on three sides of the embers and slept.

It the morning there was a thick mist all about the camp, drifting in from the invisible marsh, and it brought with it an unpleasant, rich smell of corruption. The air seemed dead. Sound faded quickly and the wagons were prepared almost in silence. Nobody felt like talking.

Felice did the small tasks that she had to do and then curled up in her usual place among the bales of cloth. The children sat nearby, looking out to where the marsh hid in the mist, exhaling its evil breath over them.

“Do strange things live in the marsh?” Tann asked.

“Frogs, eels, fish I suppose,” Felice answered.

Tann looked doubtful. “There are so many tales of ghosts and such,” he said. “Monsters and evil things.”

Felice chuckled. “All that was evil in this world was banished by the Mage Lord. The only monsters now are men. Even the Shan fear us.”

“Do you think that there are such things as ghosts?”

“I do not know. It is possible, but if so then they do not have power over us, other than what we allow, and if they are such that they must hide in so dismal a place, then why should we, who live in the light of day, fear them?”

Tann nodded. “You are wise,” he said.

“Wisdom is relative, Tann, as you will learn. I am older than you. That may make me seem wise.”

Now the boy shook his head. “No. I have talked to many older people, and what you say has meaning. You do not just tell us things are so because they are so, as so many do.”

She ruffled Tann’s hair. “Do not forget that, Tann, and one day you, too, will seem wise.”

They began the day’s journey, rolling smoothly along a good road, but the mist did not lift. If anything it grew thicker with the advancing hours and after they had stopped for lunch the wagon master had the drovers rig lights on the rear of each wagon to make it easier for the one behind to see.

It was only in the middle of the afternoon that the mist began to lift, and Felice found that she could see the three wagons in front of them; a distance of about a hundred and fifty yards. The lights were put out again, and she began to think that they had beaten the swamp. In a few hours they would cross the second bridge, take the road that bent North West, and all this would be left behind.

So they were quite relaxed when she heard the noise, a faint thrumming, a vibration in the air that passed swiftly over their heads. She looked up, and was about to ask Barker what it could be when the noise came again, and this time finished with the sound that an axe makes when it strikes wood. An arrow sprouted from the wagon just by the drover’s seat. Felice stared at it, but Barker reacted at once. He shouted and cracked the reins over the horses’ backs, reaching for his whip. The wagon jolted as the animals strained, began to roll and judder as it picked up speed.

More arrows flew. One struck the side of the wagon, and Felice pulled the children to her, forcing them to the floor behind the cloth bales. There was protection there.

The wagon suddenly slewed round to the right, tipping up and then falling back, jarring them all together, and there was a terrible noise. She looked up to see that one of the horses had been felled. Several arrows had struck it, and it had gone down screaming. Barker had been thrown from his seat, and as she watched she saw him run off, without a backward glance, in the direction the other wagons had disappeared.

“We must move,” she said to the children.

“I’m hurt,” Pasha said. A quick glance showed nothing more than a bruised knee, but Felice did not think they had time for niceties, so she snatched up the girl and jumped down into the road. Tann followed.

There were voices to the west, and she could see torches coming through the trees from the direction of the river. There was no way that they could follow Barker and not get trapped by the men, bandits they must be, who were approaching.

“We have to hide,” she said to Tann and Pasha. Can you keep very quiet?” They both nodded. She picked a dark cloth from the wagon, a thing used to cover the cargo in case of rain, and led them off the road towards the marsh. There was little cover here, even in the mist, but after a minute she found a low bush and told the children to lie down. She covered them with the cloth and crouched down nearby, hiding as best she could, drawing her blade. She doubted that the knife would be effective, but it was all she had.

The torches drew closer. She could hear men’s voices, but the air took the strength out of them, and she could not hear the words. The men spread out around her, and she could see the torches moving away – all but one.