The Past The Fire #3
Kai was glad to put off that discussion.
They had heard the Hierarchs used enslaved demons to fight in Belith, but that was a long way from here.
He wondered how many of the demons they had tried to free from the Cageling Court had actually escaped; that failure still hurt.
He said, “What’s the problem with the vanguarders? ”
“Some of our more important messages are not getting through. Amabel is the best at it, but they can’t take on every task,” Tahren told him.
Ziede added, “We need more Witches.”
“That would be the easiest solution,” Tahren said. Ziede turned to side-eye her and Tahren sighed a little. “That wasn’t sarcasm, I was agreeing with you.”
Amabel was one of the party of Witches who had joined Bashasa’s wallwalkers at the river crossing on the way to the Kagala.
Kai and Ziede had sought those Witches out after Karanis’ death, hoping that they could help fight.
But though the family could trace their line back to the borderlands, most of the group could only do small cantrips, to ease pain or find lost objects, and they were mostly too young or too old or their health was too bad to do any other kind of fighting.
Bashasa had explained to Kai that he could make them part of his cadre, until they found somewhere else to go, so he had done that.
They helped with camp chores and with translating or copying maps and other things that needed doing.
The personal cadres and soldiers who formed the core of Bashasa’s troop had gotten used to Kai and Ziede, and had even less trouble getting used to Witches who could find water by sniffing for it and could sometimes make the wind calm a little if they tried very hard.
Amabel was the only one who could swift-travel, something that Ziede said was rare this far east. It used air and earth spirits in a way even the teachers of the Khalin Islands hadn’t understood. It made Amabel the best messenger and vanguarder Bashasa had.
“More Witches?” Lahshar Calis, Bashasa’s cousin, guided her horse up beside Bashasa.
She was Bashasa’s age though she looked older than she had in the Hostage Courts, her curly dark hair pulled into a bun on top of her head.
She wore much the same clothing as the soldiers, of finer material but just as covered with dust. She must have recently returned from patrol with her cadre.
She waved a hand toward Kai and Ziede. “Are these not adequate? I thought one was supposed to be a demon?”
“Should I prove it to you?” Kai said. The problem with Lahshar was that she was probably the quickest thinker among Bashasa’s extended family who hadn’t been murdered or was still trapped in a Hierarch prison camp somewhere.
She understood the tactics and strategies Bashasa and Prince-heir Hiranan came up with well enough to argue about them and make good suggestions.
But she hated expositors even more than the rest of the Arike did and by extension hated Kai, stuck in this expositor’s body.
He knew by now that letting her insult him didn’t help and about the only way to deflect her was a direct attack. “Do you volunteer as a demonstration?”
“Please say yes.” Ziede gave her a long look.
Bashasa interposed, “Lahshar, you must be kinder to our allies. It was isolationism that led us to this pass in the first place. If we had come to the Arkai’s aid, if we had listened to the tales from the archipelagoes and southern Belith, we might have had a chance to resist before we were brought to this point. ”
“And you are the expert on strategy now? Because before this you didn’t pay attention to anything except your clothes and your liquor,” Lahshar snapped.
It was brutal enough that even Tahren blinked and Ziede’s nose wrinkled, but Bashasa didn’t flinch. He smiled and said, “Don’t wave a torch in a grass house, cousin.” He turned back to Ziede. “Now, the vanguarder situation…”
By afternoon they came into sight of the meeting point, an old deserted traveler’s refuge far to the east of Seidel-arik.
It was a round tower of brick and stone, only a few levels high, sat astride the remnants of the road, the lower part forming an arch over it like a gatehouse.
The upper two levels were ringed by terraces and balconies to catch the cool breeze.
Open paddocks for riding animals surrounded it, their stone walls crumbling, with a few scattered stone sheds and small wooden guesthouses that had begun to collapse with age.
The vanguarders who had first reached it several days ago had reported that the place had been deserted for years, but its troughs and basins were still filled by the nearby wellspring.
It was a perfect rendezvous point. To Kai’s eye it was also indefensible so it was a good thing Bashasa didn’t intend to stay long enough to need to defend it.
The troop moved into the overgrown paddocks and began to set up camp, something they were all very familiar with by now.
A vanguarder arrived and reported that Prince-heir Vrim’s troop was not far behind her.
Bashasa left his horse with the outguard’s wranglers and headed in to the caravanserai with his cadre to meet with the advance vanguarders who were already here.
Kai and Ziede split off with Kai’s cadre to help set up an outer perimeter while Tahren went with the outguard to plan sentry posts.
They started the long loop around the caravanserai’s outer paddocks, Ziede using her wind-devils to see for longer distances over the fields and Kai watching for any threats lingering near the ruined buildings or half-tumbled walls.
There was so much death in these lands now, it attracted unwanted attention.
From things that had long been dormant in the silent isolated places of the world, from things cut off from the underearth when the Hierarchs closed the passage to it.
Creatures that might have been harmless but had been transformed by hunger, or from being cut off from the forms left behind there.
Kai was a creature cut off from the form he had left behind there, but he had been in a mortal body too long to feel any kind of urge to eat mortal flesh.
He missed his mortal family, all dead, and his grandmother, who was trapped in the underearth now.
Trapped there forever, since the legionaries had burned her mortal body.
And he missed the sense of being able to shift shape, to travel effortlessly. He shook off the useless thoughts as Cerala called him over to look at something strange, which turned out to be a cache of dead lizards.
Kai rode back to Ziede, who wore a preoccupied expression as she listened to the wind-devils. “Not a lizard-killing horror then,” she said absently.
“Not today.” They were about three-quarters of the way done, and the sky was beginning to cloud over.
Kai was getting hungry enough that the unseasoned millet porridge the supply train would make for dinner seemed appetizing.
They needed to kill an expositor who happened to be carrying some bags of peppercorns.
“They’re doing well, though, looking for signs of things they haven’t seen before. ”
“Ibel has been helpful, teaching the outguard what to watch for.” Ibel was one of Amabel’s relatives.
She spoke Imperial well enough to teach, though her lungs were bad and it kept her from being able to work as a vanguarder.
Ziede added, “I find it somewhat encouraging that there are any Witches left east of the mountains. I thought they were all dead.”
Ziede had taught in the cloisters of the Khalin Islands, which had been completely wiped out.
From what Kai had been told, the Hierarchs had attacked the archipelagoes and barrier islands first. He wondered if there was anybody still alive on any of the islands on the Erathi trade routes.
He said, “Most of the Witches west of the mountains are dead too.”
Those Witches had lived with the borderlanders who came to fight the Hierarchs with the Saredi.
That alliance had moved swiftly, driving the occupying legionaries out of the Erathi coastal towns and then chasing them into the hills.
But they had no warning of the power of the Well of the Hierarchs, and had been destroyed almost in one stroke.
If the Saredi captains had had any concept of the Hierarchs’ great weapon, they would never have allowed the borderlanders and the clans to gather in force.
They would have stayed in their hundreds of small groups and harried the legions until the Witches and their allies in the underearth came up with some way to destroy the Well or defend against it.
But the grasslands had never traded much with the east past the mountains; they hadn’t even known of the invaders until the Hierarchs had come ashore in Erathi.
Bashasa is right, Kai thought. Like the Arike, isolation had killed the Saredi too.
“There have to be other Witches in this region,” Ziede said, turning her horse to continue on their route.
“The smart ones are hiding somewhere far away from here.” Kai knew more about scouting than he did about being an expositor or a Witch, and his attempts to use intentions didn’t always work.
When an Immortal Blessed ascension raft had appeared in the sky as they were leaving the Kagala, he had tried to set it on fire and failed.
Ziede had used wind-devils to force it to crash, and then Tahren had killed the two Immortal Blessed who had survived, but she only reached them after they killed seven Arike and wounded a dozen others.
Ziede meant to teach Kai more about Witchcraft, but they had been fighting or moving continuously since the Kagala, and there hadn’t been much time.
Ziede’s glance was dry. “Are you saying we aren’t smart, Kai?”