The Outworlder (32 page)

“You have a better idea?”

Rafe shook his head silently. “Not a one
comes to mind.”

“Then quit griping. Complaints with no
suggestions are useless.” Jared turned away from Rafe and shook out
his sleeping bag.

Brytnoth watched Rafe for a moment longer and
then crept over to Jared, who was testing out the place he had
chosen to bed down for the night.

“Too many rocks,” he was muttering. He rolled
off the bag onto his knees and pulled it towards himself a little
bit.

“Jared?” Brytnoth’s voice was almost a
whisper.

“What?”

“Is it true, what Rafe said? I mean, could we
be ambushed here?”

“We could be ambushed anywhere.” Jared tested
his sleeping bag for the second time and grimaced.

“That’s hardly reassuring.”

“I’m not your mother, and I’m not here to
reassure you!” Jared snapped. “We’ll set a watch, and that’s all we
can do.”

Brytnoth watched him adjust his sleeping bag
for the third time and then went to set up his own spot to
sleep.

Fifteen minutes later, they were sitting
around a very small campfire, which Rafe had built out of the
twisted roots and branches of a rugged mountain plant. Each sat
with his trencher of bread and an assortment of dried fruits and
meats, and each sat, scowling at the fire, without eating a
thing.

At last, Rafe spoke. “Look, I’m sorry about
before.”

Jared nodded brusquely. “We just have to be
careful, you know. We’re in unknown hostile territory on an
extremely tight timetable, and we have very little notion of where
exactly we’re headed. We’ve got just a miniature wax map and some
notion I have in my head to guide us. I don’t want us to do the
Dragon-Lords any favors by cutting each other’s throats before
we’ve finished our mission.”

“I wasn’t that belligerent about the
campsite!” Rafe exclaimed.

“I know. I’m just saying we have to be
careful, that’s all.”

Rafe raised his eyebrows and thoughtfully
chewed a piece of dried meat.

After a minute slipped away in silence,
Brytnoth asked, “How will we divide the watch?”

“You take the first shift,” Jared said. “I’ll
take the second, and Rafe can have the third.”

“That’s generous of you,” said Rafe. “You
sure you want the middle watch? It’s the worst one.”

“I’m sure.”

After another sizable pause, Rafe ventured a
new line of conversation. “Have you…heard from Sahara? Since that
incident on our trip back from the Great City, I mean?”

Jared nodded, his mouth a grim line. “Yes. I
tried to ask her for directions.”

“You asked a
woman
for
directions
?” Rafe asked, an expression of mock horror on his
face. “And you expected an intelligible answer?”

Jared stared at him for a moment and then
broke out laughing. Soon they were all laughing, relieved to forget
for a moment the terrible task that lay before them.

“Rafe, you may be an idiot sometimes,” Jared
remarked when he had breath to speak, “but you sure know how to
lighten the heart!” Rafe inclined his head as if receiving a high
honor, and Jared continued, “Yes, I did ask her for directions, and
yes, I did expect an intelligible answer. She’s been a great help
before.”

“Did you get one?” Brytnoth asked. “An
intelligible answer, I mean?”

“No.”

The high spirits which had welled up with
their laughter fell as sharply as if Jared had struck them all with
a war-hammer.

“No?” Rafe asked, blank disbelief in his
voice. “Did she tell you anything useful at all?”

Jared stared into the fire for a long time.
“‘Useful’ is kind of an ugly word,” he mused, “don’t you think? I
mean, we use it so often as a criterion for eliminating things we
don’t want. That armor isn’t useful—discard it. Or even, that
servant isn’t useful…”

“Not to interrupt your impressive
philosophical contemplation of life, the universe, and everything,”
Rafe cut in, “but useful is kind of high on the priority list right
now.”

Jared roused himself and said in a frozen
sort of voice, “No. She said nothing useful.”

Brytnoth waited for him to continue, but when
Jared simply began eating his dinner, he cried, “But you can’t just
stop there!”

Jared glanced at him in surprise. “Why
not?”

“Because…because you haven’t told us
anything! What did she say? Even if it’s not useful! I mean…”

Jared measured him for a moment over the rim
of his mug. “What if I don’t particularly want to tell you what
else she said?”

This seemed to stagger Brytnoth for a moment.
While he was still fumbling for a response, Rafe reminded him, “You
know, she is
his
girl, not ours.”

Jared grinned a bit at this, considering that
if Sahara were in their midst, she would probably furiously
protest, “I’m nobody’s girl!,” just as she had done so many times
before. But then it occurred to him, with all the suddenness of a
revelation, that she might not say that any longer.

“I know that!” Brytnoth snapped. The
harshness of his voice dragged Jared out of his reverie.

“Look, we’re all friends here,” Rafe said,
hand outstretched as though he were making friends with a bristling
dog. “No offense!”

Brytnoth dropped his eyes and grumbled at his
trencher. Jared and Rafe exchanged glances, and Rafe shook his head
ever so slightly.

Even though he knew he should rest during
Brytnoth’s watch, Jared lay awake, staring up into the star-studded
sky and feeling no tingle of sleep behind his eyes. He glanced at
where Brytnoth sat, hunched next to the tiny, flickering campfire
with an expressionless face that hid, Jared suspected, a roiling
heart. Jared sighed and turned back to the quiet stars. All three
of them had been so involved in Sahara’s life, and especially now
in her rescue, that it seemed inevitable to Jared that each of them
should love her in his own way. But Brytnoth’s outburst made Jared
uneasy. Rafe respected his relationship with Sahara and loved her,
Jared did not doubt, as a brother might love his little sister. But
Brytnoth?

Jared thought back to the first time he had
seen the young outworlder, just after he had been released from
K’ilenfir. Something about Brytnoth’s avid curiosity, his hunger to
know anything and everything about Sahara, had made Jared wary of
him. He felt that wariness returning, the tide stemmed only by his
mental insistence that he knew Brytnoth now, that he knew what his
feelings for Sahara really were, that he knew he was no
betrayer.

And yet, there it was—the clammy hand of
doubt.

Frowning, Jared rolled away from the fire,
staring at the blank face of rock ahead of him. He shut his eyes,
willed sleep to come, and only partially succeeded. When Brytnoth
shook him by the shoulder some hours later, he was barely in a
half-doze.

The rest of the night crawled past without
incident. When dawn finally broke over the eastern horizon, the
light shone pale as gruel before quickly succumbing to a bank of
dark billowing clouds.

“Nice weather we’re having,” remarked Rafe
with his customary lopsided grin. Even before he quite finished
speaking, a smattering of rain pelted them in the face. “Just
lovely.”

“Today is the day,” observed Jared.

No one made any reply.

All that morning, they wound their way
through the trackless waste of rock, and when they stopped for
their midday meal they still had not found the fortress.

“Don’t you think it’s strange that there are
no scouts?” Rafe asked, gnawing on a strip of dried meat. “If we
were close, we should be dodging them, it seems to me.”

Jared sighed and stared up at the sky.
Despair was beginning to eat at his own spirits, and he could think
of nothing reassuring to say to them.

And what good had it done, after all? What
good was it that he had found her that day in the desert if he was
to lose her now in the mountains?

Jared dropped his head into his hands and
pressed his palms into his eyes. An overwhelming weariness surged
up within him and his eyes burned with it.

He didn’t know how long he sat that way, but
he felt the chill around them deepening, a damp, malignant sort of
chill. He raised his head a little and saw the fog, seeping down
the cliffs around them and poking its nose in and out of every
crevice in the rock. Rafe and Brytnoth blurred into an indistinct
mass where they sat together, leaning against a boulder and talking
in low voices.

Time was running out. This day would end in
seven hours, and Sahara would meet her death at moonrise. But
although he knew that time was precious, though he knew they should
set off again immediately, he felt a blank and stultifying
hopelessness. What was the good of it, after all? They hadn’t found
their way in the clear; how were they supposed to navigate in this
accursed fog?

Jared buried his face once more in his hands,
trying to ward off the chill that leeched into him from within and
from without.

Almost before his eyes closed, it came. A
beautiful song, full of mystery and promises and a quiet sort of
strength. And the voice—he would know it anywhere. He glanced at
Rafe and Brytnoth’s muddled forms and saw that they, too, had heard
the sound. A moment later, they were all three clustered together,
listening.

“It’s too faint…too faint!” rasped Jared. He
sprang forward, and the others followed him.

The mist was so thick now that he could
barely see his hand before his face. He vaguely felt someone grab
onto the back of his jacket.

“Keep going,” Rafe’s disembodied voice came
from somewhere close behind him. “We’re with you.”

He stumbled forward, moving as fast as he
could over the uneven ground. The song grew louder, and then
suddenly it stopped.

Jared didn’t realize until that moment that
he had been walking with his eyes screwed tight shut. Now he opened
them and gazed about like a man waking from a dream. The fog had
lifted, and he saw Rafe and Brytnoth standing on either side of
him, gaping.

Within an arm’s reach in front of him, a
sheer cliff of stone reared up to a dizzying height. Jared’s cry of
despair caught in his throat when Rafe pointed at something cut
into the face of the stone.

A ladder.

At last.

“Unbelievable,” Brytnoth breathed. Then, with
a sudden smile that illuminated his whole face, he added, “I guess
she gave us pretty good directions after all.”

Jared turned and crouched against the cliff.
The others squatted down to hear what he had to say.

“I don’t have a doubt in my mind,” Jared said
in a low voice, “that at the top of this cliff we’ll find the
temple. So we need to figure out now what we plan to do when we get
there.”

“We each have our weapons,” Rafe said,
patting the javelin he’d laid on the ground beside him. “We just
need to take our positions and pray our aim is good.”

“Positions where?” asked Brytnoth. “Within
the temple itself? Won’t we be caught?”

Jared stared up the face of the cliff,
straining his eyes to catch some glimpse of the top of the
precipice. After a few moments without success, he dropped his gaze
and shook his head.

“We should split up along the ridge,” he
said. “If that isn’t possible, then we’ll have to conceal ourselves
within the temple itself.” He hesitated for a split second, and
then added with a lopsided smile, “I’ll have to be within the
temple anyway—mine’s not a distance weapon.”

“That’s true,” Rafe nodded.

“Why are we standing around here, then?”
asked Brytnoth. “Let’s go and do this.”

“Leave everything we don’t need behind,”
Jared said, slinging the shield onto his back and checking that his
sword was secure in the scabbard. “This is going to be a tough
climb.”

“Seeing as how we already left pretty much
everything behind when we followed Sahara’s voice,” Rafe remarked
drily, “we should be ready to go.” He hefted his javelin and pulled
a small coil of rope out of one of his side pockets. “Help me
secure this on my back,” he said. “I’m going to need both
hands.”

It was a grueling climb. After an hour,
Jared’s muscles burned so fiercely that he wasn’t sure if he could
make it the rest of the way. He hazarded a glance down and saw just
how high they had already come. Looking up again, he saw the end of
the ladder about fifty feet above his head.

“Keep coming!” he gritted to the others,
toiling a few feet below him. “We’re almost there…I can see the
top.”

It was all just silent, driving willpower
now. Jared didn’t dare stop moving for fear that his muscles would
seize up and he would be stuck. Each move tore a groan from his
parched lips, and he clenched his teeth against the sound.

At last, his fingers found the lip of the
ridge and he was pulling himself over the edge, panting and shaking
from head to foot with exhaustion. After a moment of blissful
stillness, he reached a hand down to help his friends, and soon
they were all there, gasping on the top of the world like three
beached fish.

“We can’t stay here long,” Jared croaked. “We
could be seen.” He rolled onto his knees and scanned their
surroundings.

A long, narrow ridge stretched away on either
side of them, and just a little to their left, not fifty paces
away, Jared saw the obsidian columns of the sacrificial temple.

“Look,” he said, pointing. “That’s where she
is.”

Brytnoth cast an eye along their end of the
cliff. “There’s good cover here,” he remarked, gesturing at a clump
of boulders a short distance away. “I could take up a position
there and have a good shot at the dragon when he appears.”

“What about me?” asked Rafe. “You see
anything I might be able to use?”