Dread Empire - All Darkness Met Part 25

"But which? Never mind. Let's see if we can catch up."

They made no friends that day, pus.h.i.+ng through the streets the way they did, as if they were the Nordmen of old. They caught Nepanthe's party as it turned into the Palace Road, which ran straight to the east gate.

"Got them now," Trebilc.o.c.k enthused. "We can swing around and get ahead."

"Why not just pa.s.s them?"

"The woman knows me."

"Whatever. You're the boss. What'd the old man say when you told him?"

"What?"

"That I'm going off with you. He's still trying to dump those account books on me."

"Oh, h.e.l.l. I clean forgot, Aral."

"You didn't tell him?"

"I was too busy trying to get some money."

"Well, he'll live. He's used to me taking off for a couple days whenever I find me a new s.l.u.t."

But this adventure would last longer than either expected.

Their path wound eastward, through Forbeck and Savernake provinces, often by circuitous routes. The group they tracked avoided all human contact. The two expended a lot of ingenuity maintaining contact while escaping notice.

"They're sure in a hurry," Aral grumped the third morning.

He hadn't complained yet, but his behind was killing him. He wasn't accustomed to long days in the saddle.

"Don't worry. They'll slow down. You'll outlast the woman and boy."

Michael picked the right note. There was no way Aral Dantice was going to be outdone by a kid and a broad in her forties.

Michael finally realized they were getting in deep after they pa.s.sed Baxendala at night and were approaching Maisak, the last stronghold of Kavelin, high in the Savernake Gap.

There, between Maisak and Baxendala, stood several memorials of the civil war. It was said that broken swords and bones could still be found all through the area.

Two weeks after sneaking past Maisak, Michael and Aral reached a point from which they could see the eastern plains.

"My G.o.d! Look, Mike. There's nothing out there. Just gra.s.s."

Trebilc.o.c.k grew nervous.. How did people keep from getting lost out there? It was a green gra.s.s ocean. Yet the caravans came and went....They met caravans every day. Traders were racing to get through with early loads, to obtain the best prices. Sometimes the two overhauled an eastbound train and encountered someone they knew. Thus they kept track of their quarry. Later, when they reached the ruins of Gog-Ahlan, they would have to close up. The other party might strike out toward Necremnos, or Throyes, or any of the cities tributary to them. And who knew where they would go from there?

They traded for better horses, foodstuffs, equipment, and weapons along the way, and always got a poor deal. Trebilc.o.c.k had no mercantile sense whatsoever. He finally surrendered the quartermaster ch.o.r.es to Aral, who was more intimidating in his d.i.c.kering.

It was in potentially violent confrontations that Michael Trebilc.o.c.k was intimidating. Men tended to back down when they saw his eyes.

Michael didn't understand, but used it. He felt it was his best weapon. He had trained in arms, as had everyone at the Rebsamen, but didn't consider himself much good.

He didn't consider himself good at anything unless he was the best around.

They reached Gog-Ahlan. Aral found a man who was a friend of his father. With Michael's help he wrote the elder Dantice, and wrote a credit on House Dantice, which Michael promised to repay. And they learned that Nepanthe's party was bound for Throyes.

There was no holding Aral to an unswerving purpose that night. Old Gog-Ahlan lay in ruins, a victim of the might of llkazar four centuries earlier. On the outskirts, though, a trading city had grown up. Vices were readily available. Aral had energies to dissipate.

It took him two nights. Bowing to the inevitable, Michael tried to keep up. Then, heads spinning, they rode on.

Their quarry moved more leisurely now, safely beyond the reach of Kavelin's Marshall.

The two overhauled them within the week, a hundred miles from Throyes. "Now we go ahead," Michael said. "We'll swing around, too far away to be recognized." That was what two riders overtaking a larger party would do anyway. Out on those wild plains no one trusted anyone else.

Throyes was a sprawl of a city that made Vorgreberg look like a farming village.

Most of it wasn't walled, and no one cared who came or went.

Here, for the first time in their lives, they felt like foreigners. They were surrounded by people who were different, who owed them no sympathy. Aral behaved himself.

Four days pa.s.sed. Their quarry didn't show. Dantice began fretting.

Michael had begun to consider hitting their back trail when Aral said, "Here they come. Finally."

Only one man remained. He was wounded. The woman and boy, though, were hale if still a little frightened.

"Bandits," Trebilc.o.c.k guessed. "Let's stay behind after this. In case we need to rescue the lady."

"Hey, Mike, I'm ready. Let's do it. My old man must be out of his head by now.

You know how long we've been gone?"

"I know. And I think we should stay gone until we find out what's happening."

"We won't get a better chance. That guy's bad hurt.""No. Let's see where he goes."

The wounded man went to a house in the wealthiest part of town. There he turned the woman and boy over. The man who received them wasn't happy. Neither eavesdropper understood the language, but his tone was clear, if not his reasons.

"What now?" Aral asked.

"We see what happens."

They watched. Aral daringly climbed the garden wall and listened at windows. But he heard nothing of importance.

Two days later the woman and boy returned to the road with a new escort.

"Oh, no," Aral groaned. "Here we go again. We going to follow them to the edge of the world?"

"If we have to."

"Hey, Mike, I didn't sign on for that. A couple days, you said."

"I'm not dragging you. You can go back. Just give me h'alf the money."

"What? You'd be in debtor's prison by tomorrow night. And I ain't riding around out here without n.o.body to talk to."

"Then you'd better stick with me."

"They can't go far anyway. Argon is the end of the road."

"How do you know?"

"They're heading for the Argon Gate. If they were headed east, they'd go to Necremnos. So they'd head for the Necremnos Gate."

"How do you know where they're heading?"

"You know my old man."

"So?"

"His stories?"

"Oh. Yeah."

Dantice's father bragged endlessly about his youthful adventures, before the El Murid Wars, when he had made a fortune in the eastern trade. Aral, having heard the tales all his life, had a fair notion of where they were.

They reached Argon two weeks later.

Argon, in summer, was an outpost of h.e.l.l. The city lay in the delta of the River Roe. That vast river ran in scores of channels there, through hundreds of square miles of marshland.

The city itself, twice the size of Throyes, had been built on delta islands. Each was connected by pontoon bridges to others, and some had ca.n.a.ls instead of streets.

The youths' quest took them to the main island, a large, triangular thing with its apex pointing upriver. It was surrounded by walls rising from the river itself."Lord, what a fortress," Trebilc.o.c.k muttered.

Aral was even more impressed. "I thought Dad was a liar.

That wall must be a hundred feet high." He pointed toward the northern end of the island, where the walls were the tallest. "How did Ilkazar conquer it?"

"Sorcery," Michael replied. "And there weren't any walls then. They thought the river was enough."

Aral looked back. "Rice paddies. Everywhere."

"They export it to Matayanga mostly. We studied it at school, in Economics. They have a fleet to haul it down the coast."

"Better close it up. We might lose them in the crowd."

The pontoon was crowded. They couldn't find anyone who spoke their language, so couldn't ask why.

The trail led to a huge fortress within the fortress-island.

"The Fadem," Aral guessed. The Fadem was the seat of government for the Argonese imperium, and was occupied by a nameless Queen usually called the Fadema or Matriarch.

Argon had been ruled by women for four generations, since Fadema Tenaya had slain the sorcerer-tryant Aron Lockwurm and had seized his crown.

The men escorting Nepanthe were expected.

"Don't think we'd better try following," Michael said. n.o.body had challenged them yet. The streets were full of foreigners, but none were entering the inner fortress.

Trebilc.o.c.k led the way round the Fadem once. He could study only three walls. The fourth was part of the island wall and dropped into the river. "We've got to get in there," he said.

"You're crazy."

"You keep saying that. And you keep tagging along."

"So I'm crazy too. How do you figure to do it?"

"It's almost dark. We'll go down there on the south end where the wall is low and climb in."

"Now I know you're crazy."

"They won't expect us. I'll bet n.o.body ever tried it."

He was right. The Argonese were too much in dread of those who dwelt within the Fadem. They would have labeled the plan a good one for getting dead quick. Suicides traditionally jumped from the high point of the triangular outer wall, where the memorial to the victory over Lockwurm stood.

Trebilc.o.c.k and Dantice chose the Fadem, though. About midnight, without light, during a driving rain.

"No guards that I can see," Michael murmured as he helped Aral to the battlements.

"Must be the weather."

It had been raining since nightfall. They would learn that, in Argon, it rained every night during summer. And that by day the humidity was brutal.It took them two hours of grossly incautious flitting from one gla.s.sless window to another, attending only those with lights behind their shutters, to find the right room.

"It's her," Aral whispered to Michael, who had to remain behind him on a narrow ledge. They had clawed eighty feet up the outside of a tower to reach that window.

"I'll go in and...."

"No! She'd turn us in. Remember, she came because she wanted to. Let's just find out what's up."

Nothing happened for a long time. After resting, Michael slipped a few feet back down and worked his way across beneath the window so he could reach the ledge at the window's far side.

Three hours dragged through the stuttering mills of time. Neither man had ever been more miserable. The rain beat at them. Hard stone below dared them to fall asleep.

There was no room to move, to stretch....

Someone entered the room.

Trebilc.o.c.k came alert when he heard a woman say, "Good evening, Madame," in heavily accented Wesson. "I'm sorry you had to wait so long."

Trebilc.o.c.k and Dantice peeked through the slats of the shutters. Why the h.e.l.l don't they put gla.s.s in these things? Michael wondered. But Castle Krief, too, had unglaz.ed windows, and weather in Ravelin was more extreme.