Tyrant

III

They settled by the skeleton of a horse as dusk fell. Or perhaps it had been a mule. It was impossible to tell from the cage of bleached bones its ribs had become, or from the skull lying there in the dust, so perfectly stripped of flesh and hide it looked almost polished.

Manadar stood some twenty paces from the skull and threw knives into it. He held his five blades loosely in his left hand, plucked one after another with his right and sent them spinning straight and true to lodge in the old bone of the skull’s forehead. He never missed. There was a rhythm and precision to his movements which Brennan envied. Each blade, glinting as it tumbled through the air, followed almost exactly the same path. They clustered tightly together in their bone bed, like a clump of metal grass.

When all five were thrown, Manadar would walk slowly forward, tug them out and return to his mark. Then begin again.

He did this most evenings, in the last light of the day. This or playing his little reed flute. Lorin had forbidden any music out here on the hunt, since he worried that the sound would carry too far, so Manadar threw his knives instead.

Lorin was giving the horses handfuls of grain, patting their necks and checking for signs of hurt or weariness as they ate noisily from his palm. Brennan sat with the woman, watching as she drank thirstily from his water bag.

‘Not too much,’ he said.

There was a moment’s reluctance in the way she looked at him, but she lowered the bag from her lips and handed it back to him.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked her.

‘Marweh.’

‘I’m Brennan.’

She was too tired to really be much interested in his name, he supposed. It was hard to tell her age, with the grime and exhaustion masking her features. He would guess at near thirty years. Close to a decade older than him. She could pass for much older, hunched down, almost folded in on herself, as she was. They had given her a blanket and she had it draped about her shoulders. It got cold quickly once the night came on here.

She had hardly spoken all through the long afternoon. Only once, really. When they came across a sad, solitary corpse in their path. The birds-the inevitable attendants upon the dead, out here-told them what to expect from some distance away. Crows and vultures and buzzards that abandoned their feast only reluctantly, at the last moment when the riders were almost on top of them.

It was a woman, but the attentions of beak and claw had made it hard to tell much of her age and appearance. Marweh knew though.

‘It’s Astera,’ she murmured, before averting her eyes.

Astera’s throat had been cut. Neatly and precisely, from hinge of jaw to hinge of jaw.

‘She wasn’t strong,’ Marweh said, staring off into the distance. ‘That’s what they do with those who can’t keep the pace.’

And after that, she had said no more.

‘You escaped from them,’ Brennan said now, thinking it a foolish and pointless thing to say even as the words emerged.

She nodded, too kind or too tired to mock him for it.

‘Can you take me back?’ she asked him. ‘Home.’

Her voice was less brittle than it had been when she first came to them, but still weak.

‘Please?’ she said.

It was a good question. One that Brennan knew had occurred to Lorin and Manadar, though they had not discussed it. Yulan, their Captain, had given them a task: to keep close on the trail of the slavers and their captives so that some storm or wind did not erase it before they could be brought to battle. It would be hard to do that with an unplanned companion adding weight to a horse’s back, drinking an extra share of water.

They had pushed on through what remained of the afternoon after Marweh found them, cautious and slow. Lorin did not want to lose any time, especially now that the slavers knew precisely where they were, and how many. But that would have to change in the morning, Brennan imagined.

Lorin confirmed it as he scratched, hard, at his horse’s mane.

‘Brennan there’ll take you once the light returns,’ he said. ‘There’s more of us just a few hours behind. They can care for you.’

Brennan’s heart sank. He knew it was childish and futile. Even so, there was a part of him that was desperately disappointed at the notion of being separated from these other two. It was not just that it felt important and exciting to be out here in the van of the Free, on the sharp edge; Lorin and Manadar were, of all the Free, the men he felt closest to. There was no man or woman of the company he would not gladly fight alongside, or die for if he had to-that was the bargain and the commitment required of anyone who rode in their ranks. He could not honestly call every single one of them a good and true friend though. Not the way he could Lorin and Manadar.

‘And you’ll go on?’ Marweh was asking Lorin. ‘You two?’

She sounded strangely unmoved by the promise of tomorrow’s escape from this hard and dangerous place.

‘We will,’ Lorin confirmed.

Manadar’s knives were thudding in the background like a slow heartbeat.

‘Another day, another night… I think on the second day from here this’ll all be decided, as long as we don’t lose their trail,’ Lorin told Marweh. ‘Maybe sooner. Any longer than that and they’ll be too deep into the Empire for even us to safely reach. All the rest who’ve been taken will be lost to us. Gone into the worst kind of life.’

She hung her head. Too tired even for relief, Brennan supposed.

‘You’ll have to tell us everything you saw, before you and Brennan go. How many swords the slavers have, how many captives. How many bows and horses.’

Marweh did not stir.

‘Not now though,’ Lorin continued gently. ‘It’s too dangerous to ride in the dark, so tonight you sleep as well as you can manage. We’ll talk in the dawn. You can tell us the tale of your escape.’

‘Yes,’ Marweh said distantly. ‘There’s a hundred of them, you know. More. Hard and cruel as crows. You can’t fight that many, can you?’

‘We’re of the Free,’ Brennan said. It was an instinctive response to the very idea that there was something they could not do. For any who could claim it truthfully, it was the answer to a great many questions. A great many doubts.

‘I know,’ said Marweh. She did not appear convinced.

‘I was there, a year or two back, on a bloody field north of the Hervent, when the Free turned back the Huluk Kur,’ Lorin told her. ‘We stood with the King’s men against thousands, and you know how many fell that day? How many of the Free, how many of the Huluk Kur?’

Marweh was silent. She did not even acknowledge the question.

‘None,’ Lorin told her. ‘None of the Free; hundreds of the Huluk Kur. That’s what has come to claim your crow-cruel slavers, my lady.’

She only rubbed her eyes.

‘Let it be for now,’ Lorin said. ‘Rest well. We’ll need to be on our feet before the sun’s up.’

A dull thud and an instant, sharper crack made them all look round. Manadar was advancing upon the pale skull. He leaned down and frowned at the last knife he had thrown into it.

‘Huh,’ he grunted. ‘Split the bone.’

When the sun went down, all heat went with it. They did not light a fire of course. Marweh lay, half-asleep beneath that single blanket they could spare for her, shivering sometimes. Murmuring sometimes, as if plagued by bad dreams. Which Brennan would not have blamed her for.

He watched her-the outline of her anyway, which was all he could really make out even on this clear night-and wished they had more to offer her. More bedding and clothes; more food and water. She was lucky; she had escaped the terrible, probably short, life of a slave among the mad Orphans. But that escape did not mean her suffering had quite ended. Not yet.

Manadar nudged Brennan in the ribs with a sharp elbow. Brennan winced but stifled any protest when Manadar put a finger to his lips.

‘Don’t wake the pretty sleeper,’ Manadar whispered. ‘That’s what Lorin says anyway.’

Brennan nodded.

‘Me and him’re going for a little wander,’ Manadar continued. ‘Be sure those six aren’t creeping up on us with a few of their friends. When we come back, you’re taking the watch, so shut your eyes for a while.’

Lorin and Manadar walked out into the night. They left their horses tethered alongside Brennan’s, because the animals needed their rest. It was something close to a rule among the Free that except in the direst of circumstance the needs of your horse came before your own. Not keeping to that rule would likely mean that when that direst circumstance came around-and it always did, sooner or later-the animal would likely fail you. And if that happened, your own needs probably would not amount to much more than some dry wood for your funeral pyre.

Brennan watched his fellows disappear into the darkness. Any slavers who were out there, trying to spring a surprise on the Free, would have an unpleasant-and probably brief-night.

It was not his intent to actually sleep. With his hunger and thirst and the still constant itching of various insect bites, he doubted he could manage it. And he preferred to keep his eyes open anyway, against the one time in a hundred someone might manage to get past the other two. Nevertheless, it did not take long for his eyelids to start slumping.

There were enough insects out here to put up a faint, constant chorus of whines and trills. Brennan wondered how they fed themselves when he was not here to offer his blood. It was a soporific kind of hum. And he was, after all, extremely tired. It was that deep kind of tiredness that was only really kept at bay by movement. Now that he was still, sitting there cross-legged, it rose up from his belly and through his limbs and slowly, gently, drifted him off towards slumber.

What woke him was not the return of Lorin or Manadar but the whickering of one of the horses. Exhausted he might be, but he was not so far gone that he forgot who, or where, he was. That single sound, which even his sleeping mind noted as somehow significant, started him awake and had him half rising, reaching for his sword, in a moment.

His legs were much slower to shake off sleep than was his head, and his first steps were staggering and stiff. He swung around, looking for the horses and what had roused them. They were easy enough to pick out in the star- and moonlight, still standing where they should be. Big, black shapes in the half-dark. Nothing obviously amiss. His hand fell away from the hilt of his sword, and the blade stayed nested in its sheath. It took his blinking eyes another instant or two to recognise what was out of place.

Marweh was standing beside one of the horses. He wasted another instant, staring, as his sluggish thoughts tried to make sense of what he was seeing. She was holding something. Tipping something. There was a strange, wildly out of place sound: pattering and splashing. Everything snapped into focus, and he understood, and he cried out in anger.

She had taken one of the waterskins and was pouring it out onto the ground.

‘What are you doing?’ he shouted, and rushed at her.

She shook the last few drops from the skin, let it fall and ran. As he followed her, his foot went deep into the soft, wet ground she had fed with their water supplies. It unbalanced him, just for a stride or two. Enough that he had to put on a burst of speed to throw himself at her.

He tackled Marweh around the waist, crashing her to ground with ease. She did fight him, or at least tried. She scratched at him and writhed in his grip, even when he rolled her onto her face and straddled her back. He pinned her arms to the ground.

‘Are you mad?’ he snarled.

That seemed possible. She must have suffered terribly. She was half-starved, thirsted, perhaps even a little heat-touched in the head.

He heard heavy, hurried footsteps and looked up, ready to reach again for his blade. It was only Lorin though, loping back into the camp.

‘What’s happening?’ the older man demanded.

‘This one was pouring out our water. One of the skins anyway. I haven’t checked the others.’

‘Keep her there,’ Lorin said, and went in search of the waterskins.

‘You want to kill us all?’ Brennan muttered, more confused than angry now that the immediate shock was subsiding.

Marweh ignored him. She had stopped struggling by now, and lay still with her eyes closed.

‘They’re all empty,’ Lorin called from over by the horses. ‘Every drop’s gone into the ground.’

Manadar appeared all but silently over Brennan’s shoulder.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked. ‘Why are you sitting on her?’

‘Because she needs sitting on,’ Brennan growled.

Lorin cursed-a rare eruption of anger-and flung an empty waterskin so violently to the ground that the horses started and tugged against their tethers.

‘She’s undone us, that’s what’s going on. Bind her hands. Ready the horses. We’re riding all night to Yulan and the rest now.’