The Past The Fire #2
“The stronger ones aren’t going to leave a city, even if there’s not a Hierarch there.” Kai squinted at the lightening sky, where gray was just beginning to give way to blue. They needed to get moving. “Let’s get his body away from the stream.”
Flies already buzzed around them as they dragged it down the defile into a gully toward the side of the road.
They stripped it, and Salatel bashed the face in with a rock.
If it was found by legionaries, they would have no idea who the man had been.
It was an important part of keeping the Hierarchs’ forces in the Arik guessing.
If they could throw doubt into the legionary command, make them think their expositors were taking opportunities to leave, all the better.
Salatel tossed the bundle of the expositor’s clothes to Arsha, who stuffed them in a bag.
They buried the corpse under a shallow layer of loose gravel and brush, which would keep it from being seen from the road, but not stop the lizards and other carrion scavengers from finding it.
With that finished, Kai climbed back on his growling horse.
He didn’t need to give many orders, the soldiers knew better what to do as a cadre than he did; all he had to do was indicate to Salatel what he wanted to do next.
He said, “Let’s get back to the others.”
Salatel lifted her hand in a signal and led the way down the defile toward the plain. Kai waited for his horse to hack up an undigested pellet of rodent and lizard bones, then nudged it to follow her.
It was late morning when they caught up with Bashasa’s troop.
The sky to the west was filling with gray clouds, a cool breeze making the grasses ripple over the hills.
Kai saw a flicker of movement in the brush as they rode down out of the rocks.
It was one of their scouts, who the Arike called vanguarders, trailing the main troop to keep watch for pursuit.
Salatel acknowledged the movement with a subtle hand gesture.
Kai shook his head to let the hood of his coat fall back, mostly for the benefit of any wind-devils Ziede had sent to keep watch, so she would know it was him.
Kai had made sure he was recognizable. The soldiers wore long tunics and coats and loose leggings of cotton and grass silk, in sun-faded rust or brown-green, pale yellows and tans, colors that faded into the landscape.
Kai wore the male version of the same, with a split-skirt made to be easily tucked or tied out of the way.
But he had taken a black embroidered coat from one of the expositors he had killed in Benais-arik, now mottled where the bloodstains had been mostly washed out, and he wore Talamines’ emerald pins in his long mane of hair.
Everyone, from Bashasa through to the people who were too old or incapacitated to fight, but who made the camps and tended wounds and managed the supplies, had told him that it made him a target.
Which was Kai’s intention. He wanted their allies and enemies to see him, Bashasa’s demon prince.
To know they would have to go through Kai to get to Bashasa.
They headed down to a wide strip that cut through the edge of the rocky terrain, running along a gully carved by a fast, shallow stream, and sheltered by the scrub and tree-covered hills rising all around.
According to the maps it was an old trade route that had been long abandoned, its stones buried under decades of dirt and growing things.
The legionaries brought to the Arik from across the straits far to the south were unlikely to know it was here, and it allowed the troops to move faster.
Once they were down on the road, Kai urged his horse to a quicker pace and Salatel and the others followed suit. After a little distance, Kai spotted a wallwalker, its dark-furred bulk disappearing where the road curved around a rocky bluff.
Kai and the cadre reached the rearguard, the soldiers waving greetings, then passed it and drew even with the wallwalker. He still hated the things, the stink of their fur and their lizard-like hide, their giant teeth, the crushing step of their clawed feet. Even the angry Arike horses were better.
A supply officer hung off the wallwalker’s cargo netting, handing out fresh waterskins and bags of food to returning patrols.
Kai nodded to Salatel and she split off with the rest of the cadre to get their share.
Kai continued up toward the front, past the other wallwalkers and the riders alongside them, a mix of now-familiar Arike soldiers and civilians who had joined them from the cities and towns along the way.
They had withdrawn from Benais-arik two months ago as planned, leaving the evacuated city behind them. As Bashasa had led them north, killing the legionary patrols they encountered, he had sent vanguarders to warn villages and towns and isolated farmsteads.
The disheartening thing was that many of those villages and towns were empty, and others were barely populated at all, often only with people who had fled the cities looking for shelter with family or friends, and had found their homes empty.
Other times, the vanguarders didn’t even know they were approaching the burned ruin of a settlement until they realized the horses were walking through overgrown plowed plots, or unharvested crops left to rot on the ground.
While some of the Arike soldiers tried to tell themselves many of the missing might have left on their own, Kai and most of the others thought the more obvious explanation was the right one.
Despite the agreements, supposed treaties, and sending of hostages, the Hierarchs had started to kill off the inhabitants of the Arik region that they didn’t see a use for, and they had begun this at least a year before the destruction of the Summer Halls.
The Arike city-states were running out of time.
With this knowledge, Bashasa enlisted everyone they encountered who would listen as fighters, vanguarders, messengers, or spies.
Those who couldn’t fight were sent off to find hiding places to retreat to, to create hidden caches of supplies, to warn others and to recruit them in turn or lead them to whatever safety they could find.
He had also split his original force into smaller bands, to move more quickly and come together at prearranged meeting points only known to the sub-Captains.
The Arike had always used cavalry to fight each other, but their ancestral battles over land had been much more formalized confrontations, with rules agreed to by all parties concerned.
Kai had explained the way the Saredi had organized their attacks on the Hierarchs in Erathi and their alliance with the borderlanders, and Bashasa had listened intently, the way he listened to everyone, and used it to build his strategy.
“The Hierarchs have studied us, and their legionaries know how we fight, the way our ancestors fought,” Bashasa had explained to the Arike soldiers and the other Prince-heirs. “They won’t expect this from us.”
As Kai passed the supply train, he was aware how many people watched him, some startled or wary and some matter-of-fact, depending on when they had joined the troop.
He caught motion out of the corner of his eye, and glanced up to see Dahin waving wildly from the palanquin atop the lead wallwalker’s back. Kai smiled and waved back.
He found Bashasa and Ziede past the wallwalkers at the front.
Grouped behind them were Tahren, Bashasa’s cadre, and the band of soldiers the Arike called the outguard, who led the attacks.
Mixed in among them were some Ilveri and Grale and a dozen others whose appearance and dress Kai couldn’t recognize yet.
And a group of three Enalin, their robes dusty with travel, riding to one side of Bashasa’s cadre.
Bashasa had been sending messengers back and forth to the Tescai-lin for the last few months, but Kai thought this trio looked recently arrived.
The outguard parted for Kai’s horse, and he rode up alongside Ziede. She was saying to Bashasa, “We can’t continue to use Kai only as a vanguarder. We can’t continue to use me only as a vanguarder—”
“I know this,” Bashasa agreed, more in commiseration than argument.
He had left his white finery behind and wore sturdier clothes in brown and faded red, a long shirt and skirt under a coat embroidered in shades of browns and yellows.
The blue-and-gold brocaded coat he had worn in the Summer Halls was apparently Kai’s now, and packed into the small bag that constituted his belongings.
Bashasa gestured eloquently. “And you know I know this, Sister Ziede. It’s only that the solution eludes us.
” He glanced over and smiled. “Ah, Fourth Prince is back. Were you successful?”
Kai said, “Mostly. We found the expositor, but he didn’t have anything useful on him.”
Tahren nudged her horse up closer to listen.
“Good! And did he tell you anything of worth, since I assume you questioned him, as I reminded you to do?” Bashasa prompted.
“He thought I was a Hierarch’s demon who had been sent to find him or kill him or something by another expositor called Vartasias. I tried to go along with it to see if he’d say more, but he figured it out pretty quickly,” Kai explained.
Bashasa took this in with a thoughtful expression. “Interesting.”
“Did he say where Vartasias was?” Tahren asked.
“He asked if Vartasias was at Dashar now. Then he realized I was lying and called me a dross’s demon and then I killed him,” Kai admitted.
If Bashasa was disappointed he didn’t show it, but Ziede began in exasperation, “Kai…”
“He wasn’t going to say anything else,” Kai said pointedly. “I got a new intention off him.”
Ziede was skeptical but Bashasa said, “No, you’ve done well, Fourth Prince.” He stared into the distance, brow furrowed. “This could be useful. I have plans for Dashar. We must speak of it more later.”