The Hekamon (24 page)

Gregario raised the poker high. Gleeful at the chance to
halt the escape. To avoid the scurrying chase through the dirt.

He
began to bring his weapon down through a high arc as the kneeling man
begged, with raised palms and plaintive eyes. Immediately Gregario
responded, checking himself, reeling in his rage, the glinting brass
rod slowed as he eased back. He must not, he told himself in briefest
of moments he had to act, hit him, measuring his strength, too hard,
as the poker found its target.

He needed him alive.

The glancing blow sent the man down face first.
Ending the chase as quickly as it had begun, with the merchant lying
unconscious in the entrance to the tunnel. Gregario leant against a
wall and caught his breath, puffing out his cheeks at the close run
thing. By stopping Tansley reaching the tunnel, it meant he had
avoided it too, he didn't know what relieved him more.

He reached down to the tradesman's belt, took the
keyring and went to the door that lead outside. Finding the right key,
he tried the lock. It was stiff but turned and the door creaked on
its hinges as it opened. Satisfied he would be leaving on his feet,
and not having to crawl out as he had crawled in, Gregario closed the
door and placed the keys in the pocket of his tunic.

Taking the merchant by a limp leg, he turned and dragged
the man through doorway and into the store room. As he did, he could see
that Aegis had made it to his knees and was holding his face.

"Aegis, what happened?" he asked angrily.

"He was not resisting, then suddenly he hit me,"
Aegis said, wiping away some blood pouring from his nose.

"Luckily there's no harm done. Well not much."
he added, seeing Aegis's irritation at the suggestion that he was
unharmed.

Gregario dragged the unconscious tradesman into the
kitchen, before returning to the store room to retrieve some of the
rope.

"At least he'll be easier to tie up like this,"
he said, but Aegis could only mumble his agreement.

Once back in the kitchen, Gregario spent a few minutes
binding the merchants arms and legs, and just as he was tying off the
last knot, his companion entered. There was blood down the boy's
tunic and around his mouth and nose, but it didn't seem like he was
going to make a fuss about it. Maybe the son of the saceress was
tougher than he gave him credit for.

Gregario dragged the kitchen
table to one side to give himself more room, before maneuvering the
merchant's limp and bound body nearer to the stove, while Aegis looked on.

"What are you going to do?"

"You're slower on the uptake than this fellow,"
he said, holding up the poker and opening the door of the stove.

"What, torture him?" Aegis asked, with more
than a hint of disbelief.

"We won't do any permanent harm, it will frighten
him more than anything." He doubted the man would get so much as
singed, Tansley was the kind who talked, he just needed a little
prompting.

"But we don't even know if he has the Eagle
Standard, or knows anything about it."

"A hot poker will find out one way or another. Go
and get more wood for this fire and we'll put it to good use. He
could be out for a while. First we'll have some food then the
information we require."

He watched as Aegis dabbed his bloody nose unhappily,
before walking through the hallway and towards the woodshed. Gregario
called after him as he went.

"We'll wait here for Decarius, he shouldn't be
long," he said, and a thought occurred to him.

Decarius had gone after Tansley, yet the merchant had
returned and there was no sign of his fellow militiaman. Could
Tansley have given him the slip? Maybe Decarius never caught up with him, and is searching the forest for him right now. Or might he have
switched targets?

This seemed more plausible.

Tansley spoke about an armory he had visited and he
seemed to have returned without the sack he'd left with. Decarius
stayed on the trail of the sack and let Tansley return knowing he and
Aegis were waiting here. This must have been what had happened.

Feeling more optimistic that things were being brought
back under control, Gregario took his pugio dagger and started
slicing the joint of ham. As he was doing so, there came the sound of
falling logs from the woodshed at the back of the hut.

"We only need a few logs, not the whole pile,"
he called through the doorway.

He continued to slice the ham while thinking some more.
The merchant had told him he had gone to an armory. It sounded like
it was the place the man had intended to go after leaving his tunnel.
Which meant he hadn't realized he was being followed. If so, Decarius
would take is time and be the paragon of discretion. Gregario paused,
this was Decarius he was thinking about. Well he might not be
discrete but he would be relentless. The Standard would be recovered.

Gregario peered quizzically from the kitchen, through
the hall and into the store room, "You're taking along time with
that wood."

He took a few more slices of meat for the stove, it
seemed tender and he felt his appetite growing. The small amount of
bread he'd eaten earlier had hardly replenished the effort involved
in traversing the mountain tunnels, let alone descending the cold,
exposed rock face—

Where
had Aegis got to?
He
stopped slicing ham and moved to the kitchen doorway.

"Is something wrong?" He called to the
woodshed, but to no reply.

Keeping hold of his dagger, he moved through the hall
and into the store room. It was dark here, with the only light coming
from the floor above. He could see the door to the woodshed was open
slightly, and through the gap, he could see what appeared to be
Aegis' feet. If so, then the boy was lying down.

Gregario started walking quietly now, listening intently. He could hear something, but what? Someone moving? Logs settling?

Reaching the door of the woodshed, he tried to push it
open further. It moved but only a small way. It was prevented from
opening fully by the prone body of his young companion.

Squeezing through the half open door and into the woodshed,
Gregario could see Aegis lying face down, surrounded by some logs of
wood. He surveyed the scene, or as best he could in the darkness, and
tried to figure out what had happened.

He realized that the boy must
have lazily taken some logs out from the middle of the pile, and in
doing so brought the higher ones down on top of him. He stood,
blinking in disbelief at his motionless colleague. Unable to think of
another explanation, when, from the other side of the woodshed, there
came a faint click.

Gregario
turned sharply and looked into the shadowy corner, the one into which
the escape hatch was built. He looked at Aegis, then back to the
hatch, holding his blade ahead of him. He could scarcely breathe.
There
had been someone else here.

He stepped toward the far corner, edging nearer the
hatch, crouching down, his breathing suddenly coming back to him in
deep gasps. He worked the catch, opened the small door and looked
inside.

The tunnel was even darker than the woodshed. He crouched
lower, but it was impossible to see anything. The trapdoor at the
other end was not open, that's all he could be sure of. He listened,
but only heard the sound of his own labored breathing. Did he need to
follow whoever it was through the tunnel?

Suddenly, he realized he could use the back door. He'd
taken Tansley's key and unlocked it. He could be outside, across to
the embankment and at the tunnel's exit before whoever it was had
made it out. Gregario began to raise himself from his kneeling
position and turned towards the door.

As he did so, several thoughts
coalesced into one ominous realization, and the darkness around him
seemed to come alive.

There was movement in the heavy, dust laden
air. Shadows amidst the gloom. Something stirred from the dark recess
of its lair above him, a blur of limbs and piercing eyes. Tansley
hadn't been slow through the hatch, someone had blocked his way. They
had emerged from the tunnel, they had attacked Aegis.
They
had not left again
.
The wood pile rattled, the dusty air swirled, the shadow landed on
him with a crushing, splintering blow.

Kormak, Palfrey and Loccsleah, left the sanctuary of Ochre Hill, and started walking
along the trail that lead south across the marshland
toward Egret Stockade.

Kormak was well aware that outsiders were more
inclined to call it swampland, with the inference that it was dirty,
dangerous and undesirable. In some locations, and during hot, wet
summers, they would not be far wrong.

To Kormak though, for all their deficiencies, the
marshes were an oasis. A place of relative peace amidst the
aggressive foes that surrounded them. And if there was one thing more
than anything else that made the marshes livable, it was the hill
that he and his two companions where now departing. The mound of
earth that rose out of the marsh, the color of a beautiful sunrise,
provided a dry and readily defendable site for their settlement.

Walking away from hill, the three of them had remained quiet, Kormak
was thinking about Alyssa, his friend must have been thinking of her,
too.

"Have you thought about what you are going to say
to Tolle?" Palfrey asked.

"I'll just tell him the situation, he'll
understand."

Palfrey gave a derisory snort, "Will he? Didn't he
tell you to take care of Alyssa, I don't think coming home without
her was what he had in mind."

Kormak didn't answer, instead he trudged on, the path
was difficult in places and he had to watch his step. The routes they
traveled could be treacherous, but he'd noticed that they'd become
even more so in recent years and it had started to worry him.

Saskia had told him that Fennelbek had not always been a
wetland, or at least, not this wet. Water channeled from the
mountains via the Rhavenbrook was making it that way. Good for
certain herbs they grew and traded, but not for most of the other
plants and trees.

The trees in particular seemed to be suffering.
Many of the them, even those still standing, were now dead and only
remained upright because of the compacted mud at their base. The
roots, preserved and still functioning in role of holding the tree
up, but no longer taking up water, or helping to keep areas dry.

Kormak knew, that without living and healthy roots, the
inevitable would happen, and it did, quite often. It was becoming
increasingly common for him to be woken in the night, his dreams
disturbed by the crashing sound of another falling tree.

Occasionally, the fallen trees landed in such a way as
to create a helpfully traversable walkway, for a few weeks anyway,
before they slowly sank into the mud. He made use of one such tree now,
holding his arms outstretched for balance and taking small stuttering
steps until across.

Whenever he encountered a dead tree such as this,
the thought occurred to him that the marshes themselves might be
dying, or turning into a real swamp. It seemed to be an ever more
likely possibility with each passing season. Trees were dying but
none were growing in their place.

They journeyed on, with the afternoon sun providing
some welcome warmth. As the crow flies, the distance from Ochre to
Egret was only about a mile, but the circuitous route they needed to
take and slow going, meant it had taken them a better part of an hour.
Kormak had spent some of the time telling Palfrey and Loccsleah of
the previous evening excursion, before he spotted the wooden tower
ahead.

"We're nearly there," he said, seeing the
stockade.

Looking more closely, he could see two figures in the
tower, just visible through the bare branches of the trees in
between. Holding an arm aloft in a part-wave, part-salute gesture, he
saw his signal returned by the two ferguths on lookout duty.

They had no formal passwords or agreed signals, there
was no need. There were only six ferguths in the Egret Patrol, and no
visitors, friend or foe, ever came here, except Saskia and, on rare
occasions, Vondern.

"Who goes there?" A voice shouted from the
tower. The voice belonged to Tolle, his patrol leader.

The lack of need for any formal greetings didn't sit
well with Tolle. He felt it showed an absence of seriousness and
professionalism, but their lack of importance was hard to disguise.
Kormak thought that by demanding a roll call from the few people he
saw everyday, Tolle only made their irrelevance even more apparent.

"It's us," he shouted back. "Friend,"
and "Hello," called out Palfrey and Loccsleah. It was just
easier to play along and give some reply, and doing so was the signal
for Tolle and Moxley to make their way down from the lookout as the
trio approached.

Walking up the gently sloping earthen mound, the mud
underfoot gave way to firmer ground, while the trees parted to reveal
the substantial wooden structure ahead. Kormak lead them in through
the open gate of the rotting palisade wall and toward the main
building inside.

Their destination, and the patrols base, was Egret
Stockade, which sat atop a small hill. It wouldn't be called a hill
anywhere else, but in Fennelbek anything more than few feet above
water level was dry land, and dry land was always put to use.

The
larger areas were used almost exclusively used as redoubts. It was
said they had served another purpose before being turned into
fortified camps, Kormak didn't know what, he just knew they were part
of the Fennelbek defenses now, and Egret was his post.

He reached the main door just as Tolle opened it, and
the five ferguths exchanged greetings before going inside. Tolle and
Moxley moved toward the main seating area, made up of a few wooden
benches, probably expecting him to do likewise but instead, Kormak
headed for the strongroom.