The Water Road (19 page)

Rurek stood up and shook his head.
“I don’t know what’s going to be left of my life when all this is finished,
Strefer,” he said, walking out from behind the desk and taking his pikti from
its resting place on the far wall. “You’re right, let’s get out of here.”

~~~~~

Strefer knew that the quickest way
to Oberton from Tolenor was probably not the easiest. But she agreed with Rurek
that it was worth the effort. They made their way quickly to the docks on the
west side of the city, where the great flat-bottomed riverboats were berthed.
Although she had encouraged them to move swiftly, Strefer found herself caught
off guard by Rurek’s determination once he decided to help her. There were no
loose ends to tie up in his life, no one to tell he was leaving. He didn’t even
bother to change out of his dull olive-colored Sentinel’s uniform, although
Strefer supposed that might have been a tactical decision.

“What are we looking for, exactly?”
she asked as they began to walk down the long rows of the bobbing boats tied to
the piers that jutted out into the bay.

“A riverboat, naturally,” Rurek
said, flashing a smile that said he knew it was a bad attempt at humor. The
attempt sank like a stone thrown in the water. “We can’t take a military
transport, for obvious reasons. Too many questions would get asked.”

“Because people won’t ask questions
about a single woman and a Sentinel trying to book passage on a regular
vessel?”

“One of the great benefits of being
a Sentinel is that very few people know exactly what it is that we…or rather
they, do,” Rurek said as they walked down one of the piers. “You have to
remember that here in the city they’re a common sight because they keep the
peace. But outside the city, there aren’t so many of them. It’s really rare to
run into a Sentinel unless you have business with one. If you asked ten people
whether a Sentinel might transport someone from Tolenor to the Arbor, nine of
them, at least, would have no way of knowing. The other one is probably wrong.”

He had a point. “Then let’s just
find a commercial transport.”

Rurek waved away the idea. “For one
thing, those transports fill up quickly. These boats take people to the Endless
Hills, to the River Innis and River Adon, all the way to the Guildlands. It’s
not like jumping on a ship to head to Sermont, Strefer.”

Had she told him about the
specifics of that trip? She couldn’t remember. Not that it mattered, at this
point. There were no secrets between them now. She shrugged off any concern.

“For another thing,” he continued,
“we have to assume that those men who were after you, whoever they were, aren’t
stupid. They will come here and check out the transports, or any obvious way of
leaving the city. They may even have the ability to stop a transport on the
river. Who knows? We don’t want to find out.”

The thought gave Strefer a shiver.
“All right, then, back to my original question. What, exactly, are we looking
for?”

“What we need is a goods
transport,” he said. They reached the end of the pier, turned around, and
walked back. Apparently, there was nothing suitable on this one. “One that’s
large enough to make good time upriver, but small enough that it takes on a few
passengers to help bring in some extra coins.” They stopped at the shoreline
and he turned to her. “You can pay for passage, right?”

Honestly, the question had not
occurred to her. “You remember the part of my story where there were two guys
tearing through my apartment, right?”

He nodded.

“So no, I did not have an
opportunity to dig into my savings.” She opened the pouch slung over her
shoulder and pulled out a beaten leather purse. She loosened the strings that
held it closed and held it out for Rurek’s inspection, shaking it lightly to
make the coins inside jingle. “You think this is enough?”

He scowled. “It will have to do, I
guess,” he said.

“Do you have anything?” she asked.

Rurek crossed his arms. “You
remember the part of my story where I used to be a Sentinel?”

Strefer nodded meekly.

“Sentinels who work as peace
officers on the streets of Tolenor aren’t allowed to carry money. That way, if
anyone bribes us during our shift, the bosses will find it at the end of the
day.”

“Wow,” Strefer said. “Really? You’d
think they would trust you a little more than that.”

“It’s the merchants they don’t
trust, I think,” Rurek said, walking over to the next pier, where the search
for a suitable vessel began again. “But yes, it was somewhat demeaning. The
bottom line, however, is that since we left straight from headquarters, I don’t
have anything to help fill the coffers.”

“So what do we do?” Strefer asked.
She closed the purse, put it back in her pouch, and jogged to catch up with him
on the next pier.

“Like I said, people don’t really
know what Sentinels do,” he said. “Let’s hope we find someone who thinks they are
entitled to cut-rate passage. Once we get to the Arbor, at least, we can live
off the land.”

The thought of dining on wildlife
turned Strefer’s stomach a bit, but she quickly put it out of her mind. If that
was the worst thing she had to deal with on the journey ahead, she would
eagerly endure it. As they walked down the pier, Rurek paused and began to pay
increased attention to one of the boats tied up alongside. “What is it?”

Rurek ignored her, walking over to
inspect a small flatboat, sitting low as it bumped rhythmically against the
pier, that was taking on cargo. It was nestled between a pair of much larger
boats, so that Strefer had not seen it before Rurek went to look it over. He
turned to her and said, “This might do nicely.” He gestured towards the bow, on
which the name
Kanawha
was written.

A small old man was overseeing
several others who were loading cargo. His skin was dark green, which indicated
he was from the deep part of the Arbor. Rurek attracted his attention out of
the corner of his eye. He turned, looked over the Sentinel before him, and
stepped off the boat onto the pier. “Can I help you?” he said, pausing for just
a moment before adding, “sir?”

“I hope so,” Rurek said. “Is this
your vessel?”

“Aye, she is,” the old man said.
“She is called
Kanawha
. I am called Traf, although you may call me
captain, if you like.”

“
Kanawha
,” Rurek said, as if
he was turning the word over in his mind. “I don’t recognize that word.”

“No reason you should, Sentinel,”
Traf said. “It’s Neldathi. Name of a shallow area on the Water Road near Great
Basin Lake. Very calm and peaceful, if you manage to avoid the shoals.”

“Seems an odd name for a
riverboat,” Rurek said, more to Strefer than to Traf. The old man just
shrugged. “How does a man from the deep Arbor find his way to Tolenor?” Rurek
asked him.

“Came down the Adon years ago as a
young man. I’ve lived on the river ever since.” He paused and looked at Rurek
for a moment. “You are from the Arbor yourself, Sentinel. From…Vertidala?”

“Close,” Rurek said with a chuckle.
“Kerkondala. And you?”

“Nevskondala was where I was born.
But, as I said, the river is my home now. I spent many nights in Kerkondala,
though. Nights I’d rather forget,” the old man said, laughing.

Strefer felt like an outsider when it
came to this Arborian bonding, but she recognized that it was leading
somewhere. She hoped so, anyway. While Rurek and Traf talked, she looked over
her shoulder, scanning the coast for any sign of the men who had broken into
her apartment.

“Captain, where are you bound on
this particular voyage?” Rurek finally asked.

“Bound for Innisport this time,
Sentinel,” Traf said. “We leave as soon as we’re loaded.”

Rurek pretended to be surprised by
this pleasant coincidence. “As it happens, my companion and I have need of
passage to Innisport. Would you, by chance, have room for two passengers in
your fine vessel?”

Traf looked at him skeptically for
a moment. “
Kanawha
ain’t a passenger cruise boat, Sentinel. Surely there
must be more comfortable quarters to be had somewhere else on this pier.”

Rurek began to walk slowly towards
the old man. “While I appreciate the advice, captain, you didn’t answer the
question I asked. Do you have room for two passengers?” Without waiting for an
answer, he stepped to Traf and put his arm around his shoulder. “Captain, what
I am asking you—completely off the record, you understand—is to help the
Triumvirate on a matter of utmost importance and delicacy. Do you see that
woman there?” He pointed at Strefer. She waved back. “She has vital
intelligence about the Neldathi hordes in the Vander Range. Her expertise is
needed down the Water Road, not here in Tolenor. The whole matter is, what is
the word I’m looking for…”

“Sensitive?” Traf said eagerly.

“Yes,” Rurek said. “Precisely. It
is a sensitive matter.” He patted the old man on the chest. “So you understand
that I can’t simply walk up to any commercial transport and book passage for
us. It could be dangerous, with all those people about. I am sworn to protect
this woman. I would be delinquent in my duty if we simply booked passage on a
transport. You see?”

The old man nodded. “Where is it
that you need to go, Sentinel?”

“Innisport, to tell the truth, will
suit just fine. It’s not our final destination, but, well, you understand I
cannot tell you that, can I?”

“Of course not, Sentinel,” Traf
said.

“So, back to my original question,
Captain. Do you have room for two passengers on this journey? We can pay,
although perhaps not as much as you would prefer.” He waved over Strefer and
said to her, simply, “The purse.” She gave it to him and he dropped it gently
in Traf’s waiting hand.

“That is no problem, Sentinel,” the
old man said, feeling the weight of the purse. “Do you have any belongings?”

“None other than what we carry,”
Rurek said, releasing the old man from his grip.

“Very well, then,” Traf said. He
stepped towards Strefer and extended his hand. “Welcome, my lady. Your vessel
awaits.” He flashed her a dirty, gap-toothed smile.

Without a word, she took his hand
and was led onto the deck of the
Kanawha
. Within the hour, they were
underway.

The days, perhaps weeks, passed on
without a change in Antrey’s routine. Wake in the snow, hopefully near a stream
or pond, after a decent night’s sleep. Make a quick survey for something to
eat. Take the bottle and pack it with snow or fresh water to last her on that
day’s journey. Afterwards, gather her possessions and continue the trek south.
It was the only course Antrey could be certain about. The terrain was so
similar nearly everywhere that had she not maintained a fixed trajectory, she
might have been walking in circles. Now on the southern side of the mountains,
she followed a stream that ran downhill, towards the south, and hopefully the
nearest valley.

The terrain had also been vastly
empty. Aside from the occasional bear or elk, Antrey was utterly alone in her
travels. At one point she reached a peak from which she could see down into a
narrow valley far in the distance. She thought she saw a large crowd of
Neldathi moving through the valley. It was what Neldathi did, after all, when
spring was upon them. The clans would shift from the more sheltered valleys
back into the mountains in the warmer months. But she quickly realized she was
letting wishful thinking cloud her observations. From that distance, what she
saw could have been anything or nothing at all, a trick of the light.

Although the loneliness at times
wore on Antrey like a rough stone, she was beginning to feel that she needed it,
or at least deserved it. Her encounter with Emkar had shaken her more than she
admitted at first. It was not so much the warning about revenge. She realized
she should let her head become a roiling emotional cauldron. It had more to do
with the simple fact that, in spite of all the time she had spent alone since
she fled from Tolenor, Antrey had not given much thought to what might happen
when she actually encountered the Neldathi.

If she were actually one of them, a
member of some clan—even if it wasn’t the clan she made contact with—at least
she could rely on that label. It would provide some indication that she was one
of them. But that was impossible in her case. The curse of the ranbren is that
they looked neither Neldathi nor Altrerian and cannot pass as either. It was
possible, as Antrey had learned during her flight through Tolenor, to remain
hidden. But hiding was not an option now, not if she wanted to actually do
something with the Neldathi. She would have to confront them with who she was,
and what she was, from the first.

There was also the problem of
language. Antrey grew up hearing others speak the dialect of the Kohar, but her
outsider status meant she had little opportunity to actually use it herself.
Unlike the language Alban taught her that was used in Tolenor, it was difficult
to write or read because the meanings of words changed with the pitch and tone
used to speak them. She never heard any Neldathi tongues spoken in Tolenor, of
course. Over the years, what little grasp she had on the language had been
lost. She supposed she could pick it up again. She hoped so, anyway.

In fact, for all she had read in
Alban’s library, very little of it had been about Neldathi society and customs.
She remembered even less, and then only the broad strokes of things. She
remembered, for instance, that the clans used the colors painted into their
black hair as a symbol of clan membership, but could not remember which
patterns were unique to each clan. She was having problems even remembering the
names of all the clans at this point.

The more she thought about it, this
hole in Alban’s knowledge made little sense. Given the time that had passed
since the Rising, there should have been dozens of books written about them as
a people. Traders from the Triumvirate had occasionally ventured into the
mountains, not to mention the Islanders, who traded freely in their port cities
along the Neldathi coast. There had been military expeditions too. She also
imagined there must be a detailed set of records from the Sentinels who had
been carrying out their grizzly strategy for all these years. Antrey, and most
Altrerians, she suspected, knew more about the Azkiri and the Islanders, though
neither of them made much impact on daily life.

All she had to fill in the gaps of
her knowledge about the Neldathi were the stereotypes absorbed from the
Altrerian culture and the memories of her childhood. Neither filled her with
much confidence. In the Altrerian mind, the Neldathi were little more than
animals. They lived only to fight each other, scavenge the remains, and take
the women and children as slaves. She once read a newspaper story in which a
naturalist speculated that the Neldathi were nothing more than well-shorn
brothers to the great mountain apes that lived in the frozen caves. She knew
that was a myth, a piece that owed more to propaganda than to the reality of
anatomy. It was an attempt to put distance between the civilized Altrerians and
their barbarian southern cousins, to erase the heritage they shared. And to
erase those like her, who were undeniable evidence of that heritage.

Antrey’s own limited experience
taught her that those stereotypes were exaggerations rooted, in some small way,
in fact. It was true, of course, that the clans warred against each other almost
constantly, linked as they were in uneasy and shifting temporary alliances. She
knew now that the flames of those conflicts were fanned, if not lit in the
first place, by the Sentinels. But she could not deny that they had some
material from which to work when they set their plan into action. At best, the
Sentinels could provide a spark, but could not maintain the blaze from year to
year and decade to decade. Aside from that knowledge, Antrey put her own bad
treatment at the hands of her clansmen to her peculiar status, not to any
uncontrollable rage.

She tried to push those concerns
out of her mind as she walked, but it was no use. The best she could manage was
to stare up at the cloud-streaked gray sky overhead to try and clear her head.

Around midday, Antrey came to a
small pool formed by the stream she followed as the current slowed and its
banks widened. It was not really a pond, and certainly not a lake, but it did
provide slow waters from which she might fetch something to eat. In addition,
there was a clutch of large boulders on the opposite shore that were clear of
snow and would provide a good place to rest for a few moments. The evergreens
that crowded the mountainside had thinned considerably in the last day or two.
They maintained a respectful distance from the little pool, as if they dared
not get to close.

She jumped across the stream and
made her way to the rocks, which clustered near the upstream corner. She sat
down, slipped the bottle from her satchel, and took a long drink. What was once
snow was now ice-cold water. She gulped it eagerly, knowing that the pool would
provide a means to refill it.

Just as she took the last drink of
water, Antrey heard a noise behind her, downstream, that sounded like a violent
displacement of limbs and leaves. She turned and saw an elk dive out of the
trees on the other side of the stream. Its great antlers were a tangled mess of
underbrush ripped from the forest as it ran. Her eyes met those of the elk,
which had stopped at the edge of the stream, gasping hard, its breath frosting
in the chilled air. After a moment’s pause, it dropped its head and began to
lap water from the stream.

Antrey closed her eyes for just a
moment and heard the elk make a terrible screaming sound, like it was crying
out in pain. It made her shudder and sent a bolt of pain shooting down her own
spine. She opened her eyes and saw the elk, reared up on its hind legs,
thrashing its head back and forth. There was an arrow in its neck, just above
the shoulder. Antrey had not heard anything to indicate that anyone was around.

A salvo of three more arrows
thwacked into the elk’s flank. It screamed again and tried to move away,
upstream back to the trees, but it took only a few faltering steps before it
collapsed in the snow. As it gasped for air, the white ground turned red with
blood. The beast was trying desperately to live or calling out to die. Antrey
wasn’t sure which.

Antrey was so transfixed by the
elk’s plight that she forgot for a moment that the arrows meant that, after all
this time, she was no longer alone. She did not hear the further rustling of
the trees, but did see first one, then two, then half a dozen Neldathi emerge
from the forest and approach the elk.

They were tall, with just the
faintest tint of blue in their white skin. Were they naked, they would nearly
blend in with the snowy ground. Each wore multiple layers of animal skins that
obscured, but could not hide, that they were strong, powerful men. All had long
black hair, which grew from a fringe of scalp at the back of their heads. It
twisted in braids that ran halfway down their backs. About halfway down, the
black color gave way to a pattern of red, black, and white strips. Three of
them carried ornately carved bows, while two others had similar devices slung
over their backs. They either had not noticed her or ignored her and approached
the elk.

The other Neldathi, Antrey had
thought initially, was unarmed. The tallest of the group, he strode towards the
elk, reached inside the layers of his clothing, and pulled out a knife, bigger
than anything Antrey had ever seen that was not called a sword. In a maneuver
that showed years of practice and an abundance of skill, he knelt beside the
elk, placed the great blade to its throat, and drew the knife across, ending
the beast’s misery. All the while, he said something quickly under his breath.

Antrey had never seen anything like
it in her life. When she was young she had never experienced a hunt or a kill,
only the end result. The sight of such a brutally efficient killing shook her
to the core. The bottle slipped from her hands and splashed into the pool
underneath her. At the noise, the hunters turned and saw her.

The one that had killed the elk
crouched motionless next to it, knife still in hand. The others moved away from
the kill and sprang across the stream swiftly, switching their focus. They
began to converge on her slowly, two from upstream in the direction of the elk,
two others having circled around to come at her from the other direction. She
lost sight of the fifth, but within moments she knew she was surrounded. Before
it ever occurred to her to try and get away, five well-armed and curious
Neldathi had blocked any means of escape.

She ignored the ones on her side of
the stream and tried to make eye contact with the one by the elk. He appeared
to be the leader of this hunting party or its senior member. Regardless, he was
someone who commanded respect. Maybe by making contact directly with him she
might open some line of communication, although she had no idea how to do that.
At the very least, maybe he would put the knife away. The way he crouched
there, casually displaying the bloody blade, made her think he meant to tell
her that it might be her neck that was sliced open next.

As the others inched slowly closer to
her, Antrey could feel their eyes on her, covering every inch of her with their
eyes. One of them was close enough that Antrey thought he might have sniffed
her, but she quickly dismissed that as a work of her imagination. That was
something the barbarian Neldathi of the Altrerian culture would do, but made
little sense upon rational examination. They would use every sense available to
them, just as she would.

With each footstep that brought
them closer, the snow crunched underfoot. Antrey’s heart raced the closer they
came. It was calmed only somewhat when the one across the stream stood up,
wiped the bloody blade of his knife on the elk’s carcass, and returned it to
its sheath. When she heard a voice behind her, she nearly exploded.

She turned her head to see the
young man standing no more than a few feet from her, leaning closer to inspect
this strange creature. The words he spoke were short and clipped and sounded
not at all familiar to Antrey. From the low pitch and rising inflection at the
end of a phrase, she assumed he was asking questions. Not of her, but of his
companions.

The one across the stream answered.
Antrey turned to face him. His words were forceful, precise, and showed no hint
of uncertainty. The pitch skipped through several notes on the scale, different
for each word. At one point, he gestured towards Antrey, reinforcing her
conclusion that she was the topic of discussion. He ended the phrase with what
sounded like another question.

Over her shoulder, Antrey saw the
young one shake his head from side to side. Then the one across the stream said
something, probably derisive, and laughed. The others laughed too, although the
one behind Antrey did not. It must have been a joke made at his expense.

The leader of the group then said
something else, this time looking Antrey directly in the eyes. It was a
dizzying series of words, pitch swooping up and down, that sounded like a kind
of brutal music. But they meant nothing to Antrey. Clearly, he was trying to
tell her something. She decided to try and find some common ground.

“I don’t understand,” Antrey said.

The Neldathi all wore looks of
surprise on their faces. It was clear they understood her about as well as she
understood them. They recognized she was speaking a language quite different
from their own. If they had any contact with Sentinels or other Altrerians,
they would at least know where she had come from.