Steven woke from a dizzying dream to the smell of a long-distance bike ride.
It had been Mark’s idea, one night at Owen’s Pub after he’d finished the most recent of several-too-many beers and eaten about half a dozen too many of Owen’s spicy burn-your-arse-and-cry-for-your-mama buffalo wings, and he’d named it the Magellan Tour, a circumnavigation of the Denver metro area. He raised his mug and announced, not quite soberly, ‘Tomorrow, Steven Taylor, we round the Horn.’
‘Why don’t I like the sound of that?’ Steven replied, grinning.
‘Because, my good fellow, you are not a visionary.’
Howard Griffin had been there too; it was a rare occasion that the bank manager wasn’t with them at Owen’s. He noisily finished sucking the sauce from a chicken leg and said, ‘I understand the winds this time of year are favourable.’
‘Oh do you?’ Steven raised an eyebrow.
‘Yes, I do.’ Howard raised his own mug before adding, ‘Of course, I have no idea what we’re talking about.’
‘A circumnavigation,’ Mark cried.
‘Of what?’
‘Or whom?’ Howard raised an eyebrow too, mocking Steven.
‘Dirty old man,’ Mark chided, ‘of our great, sprawling city of Denver, Colorado, where else?’
‘We’re going for a drive?’ Steven smiled. ‘All right; I’m in.’
‘Not a drive, Steven, a bicycle ride,’ Mark declaimed, as if announcing they were about to take part in the Olympics. ‘Tomorrow, we set forth where no man has gone before.’ He lifted his glass and drank deeply. ‘Although I’m certain hundreds of adventuresome and resilient women have already made the trip, but that won’t mitigate our great pioneer achievement one iota.’
‘What is an iota, anyway?’ Howard sounded puzzled.
‘Don’t interrupt!’ Mark ordered, and went on, ‘Think about it. We’ll park down by Chatfield Reservoir – the car’ll be all right there overnight-’
‘Overnight?’ Howard interrupted, ‘optimistic, aren’t we?’
‘Don’t interrupt! We ride east through Highlands Ranch to Jordan Road. Granted, we’ll need to pick our way north on the prairie, but from there, we can take Tower all the way up to the 120. We’ll take 85 into Brighton and cut across Route 7 to Lafayette. There’s a hotel off the service road where we can pass out, and then we’ll be up and into Boulder for breakfast-’
‘Boulder?’ Steven said, ‘Mark, that’s not a circle, that’s a bloody great oval!’
‘Hear me out,’ Mark said, ill-advisedly reaching for another hot wing, ‘so breakfast in Boulder and then we come south along the Hogback on 93. We stop in Golden where I buy you a gigantic slice of blueberry pie at the drugstore-’
‘Best pie in the world,’ Howard pointed out.
‘It is,’ Mark agreed, ‘but don’t interrupt! Then it’s down past Red Rocks into Morrison and back to our car.’ Mark raised his hands as if to say see, nothing to it at all?
‘Why?’ Steven asked. ‘It’s got to be a hundred and fifty miles, and you want to do it on mountain bikes?’
‘Because it’s there.’ Mark waved to Gerry, the bartender, and held aloft the empty beer pitcher. ‘We will be there at the advent of a great and timeless tradition for cyclists in the Denver area: the Magellan Tour.’
Steven grimaced. ‘All right. Never let it be said that Steven Taylor ever turned his back on the great unknown.’
‘Oh, Christ,’ Howard groaned, ‘there are convenience stores, shopping centres, motels and fast food restaurants along the entire route. You’ll both have cell phones with you, and the roads are paved, the whole way.’
Mark frowned. ‘We understand your lack of vision, Howard, but if you buy this next pitcher, we won’t hold it against you.’
‘Thanks for that, Sir Edmund,’ Howard said, ‘but you two should probably start drinking water now, lots and lots of water.’
‘And we will!’ shouted Mark, ‘for what is beer if not mostly water! Another pitcher, for we have a great adventure to prepare for!’
The first Magellan Tour had gone nearly as Mark – however drunk he might have been that night – had envisioned, and after that there were numerous other Magellan Tours, mostly on the heels of a long night at the pub or a particularly difficult week at work. Steven participated in all of them, gamely accompanying his roommate, sometimes with other friends, on the two-day ride.
But what Steven recalled most vividly from that first journey was the smell of onions. It was late autumn and most of the crops had been harvested, but one farmer near Brighton had left a field of onions to rot – maybe he failed to find a buyer, maybe he wanted the rotting vegetables to replenish something crucial in his soil for the following year, but whatever the reason, the aroma of rotting onions had been overpowering pedalling through Brighton, forcing Steven to the side of the road where he’d emptied his stomach, rinsed out his mouth with what was left of his water and limped the last few miles to their hotel, praying for a westerly wind before morning.
Awake now, slowly bringing his surroundings into focus, Steven smelled onions again, and his stomach clenched and he threw up what little he had left in his body. He rolled on his side, his head lolling until it struck the musty wooden floor. He shook off the last remnants of the dream and wondered how long he had been unconscious. The taste of vomit in his mouth made him gag again and he spat at the floor, trying to get rid of the saliva. He breathed deeply and stared up at the ceiling.
There’s a ceiling. That’s good.
‘Where are we?’ he asked anyone listening.
Footsteps thunked across the floor; Steven felt them. ‘It stinks in here,’ he whispered, breathing hard, ‘just like Brighton.’
‘Where?’ Garec crouched beside him, holding a wineskin and a section of folded cloth. ‘Let me wipe your face. You’re sweating.’
‘I puked.’ Steven turned his head again and spat another mouthful of discoloured fluid onto the floor.
‘If that means you emptied your stomach, then yes, you did. But no matter, we’ll clean it up.’
‘Where are we?’ He struggled to lift his head; Garec helped him sit up. ‘It smells like Brighton, like onions, rotten onions.’
‘Well, I don’t know where Brighton is, but what you’re smelling is pepperweed. There’s a whole bin of it there by the doors. It’s rotting, stinks like a grettan’s nightmare, but you’ll get used to it after a while. Pepperweed is strong, like onions but much more popular. A good cook would say it’s more useful in the kitchen, more flexible than onions. You had some in Traver’s Notch, at the Bowman, remember? The roots in that stew?’
‘Please, Garec, don’t remind me of that stew. I’ll be hurling again.’
Garec laughed. ‘Right. Sorry. It is good to see you awake, though. How are you feeling?’
‘Like the foul end of a buffalo herd.’ Steven dragged his hands through his hair. ‘How long have I been out of it?’
Brand and Kellin joined them, kneeling beside the confused foreigner. ‘Four days,’ said Brand.
‘Holy shit! Four days? Where are we? Is this a barn? Did we get to a farm?’
‘We did,’ Kellin said, putting a hand on his shoulder. ‘You had a seizure, a gods-rutting horrible seizure. It went on for so long, Steven, we thought you were going to die.’
‘I might have,’ he said. ‘Where’s Gilmour?’
Kellin winced.
Brand said, ‘We lost him. There was nothing we could do.’
‘He’ll be along,’ Garec assured. He tried to sound convincing, and hoped he was right.
‘You keep saying that, Garec, but I watched those snakes. They killed him.’ Kellin was visibly upset.
Garec took her hand. ‘I know what you saw, Kellin, but he’ll be back. We’ve lost Gilmour before. Trust me; the last time I burned his body on a pyre myself, and the old bastard still came back. It’ll take more than a nest of – well, whatever they were – to kill Gilmour.’ Garec hoped the others couldn’t read the doubt in his face. The snakes had been hideous, otherworldly monsters and he was afraid that perhaps Mark had summoned them because they were powerful enough to kill even a Larion Senator.
‘He’s right.’ Steven tried to stand, felt dizzy and gave up. ‘What was it? Snakes?’
‘It was Mark,’ Garec said. ‘He’s working the table. He hit you with that seizure and then set a pack of unholy snakes on Gilmour.’
‘They came out of that book,’ Kellin said.
Steven nodded. ‘That’s Mark. He knows that book scared the dog-piss out of Gilmour on the way to Traver’s Notch. He used it against him, I’m sure.’ Steven looked around the barn. ‘Where’s the body?’
‘Back through the woods, about two days’ journey from here.’
Steven looked surprised. ‘You left him?’
‘There was nothing we could do,’ Brand said. ‘The serpents were all over him. Garec managed to shoot a few of them, but the others were all coiled around his arms, his neck; they were even inside his tunic!’
Steven drank; his body was aching from dehydration. He still had no memory of the seizure. ‘Has Mark gone north?’
‘Yesterday,’ Brand said. ‘He’ll be at Wellham Ridge by tomorrow. The table is intact; Mark has it loaded on a wagon. His soldiers look bad, though, beaten by the forced march.’
‘They must be,’ Kellin said. ‘Look at the ground they’ve covered in so little time. He must be pushing them day and night.’
‘Did you see him?’ Steven asked.
‘No, nor Gabriel either,’ Brand said. ‘I was well hidden and didn’t want to risk going any closer. With you unconscious, the last thing we needed was to be chased back here.’
‘Good thinking,’ Steven said, and then to Garec, ‘He must be one of the officers.’
‘Right. There’d be no other way for him to take command of such a force in so little time.’
‘So he’ll take the table back to the barracks, probably to the commanding officer’s private quarters.’
‘It’s a good guess. So… we follow them tomorrow?’
‘I’m afraid so,’ Steven said. ‘I need to eat. I might be able to whip up a spell to sort myself out, but I’m certainly not up for a fight right now.’
‘That’s fine,’ Garec said. ‘Staying here will give Gilmour another night to catch up as well.’
Kellin looked sceptical, but said nothing more.
‘Where’s the farmer?’ Steven asked. ‘Who’s our host?’
‘No idea,’ Brand said. ‘There’s no one here, no one we can find, anyway.’
‘Some of these farmers work winter crops in Rona,’ Kellin said. ‘They might be on the other side of the Blackstones for the season.’
Steven wrinkled his nose again. ‘I suppose they must be somewhere else. No one would be able to live with that stench all winter.’
‘Good point,’ Garec said. ‘So we’re in no hurry. You rest. We’ll wait another day for Gilmour, and if he shows up, terrific, and if not, we’ll work our way carefully into Wellham Ridge and wait for an opportunity to steal the spell table.’
Steven was not looking forward to facing his roommate. If his seizure and Gilmour’s disappearance were any indication of what Mark was able to do with the Larion artefact, the battle would be deadly dangerous for all of them. Disheartened, he said, ‘Fine. I suppose that’s our only option right now.’
‘He’s shown a willingness to insert the key and start calling up magic from inside that thing. Those snakes he threw at Gilmour were like nothing I’ve ever seen in Eldarn,’ Garec said quietly.
‘So we don’t have the luxury of time,’ Steven finished Garec’s thought.
‘Or a lot of discretion,’ Brand added. ‘Without Gilmour to contact Gita, the Resistance attack on Capehill will be a tragic failure. It’s been too many days already.’
‘Not yet,’ Kellin assured. ‘Even the fastest riders won’t have made it north yet. There’s still a bit of time, but if Gilmour is coming back on his own, we need him to hurry.’
Brand said, ‘If you can kill Mark, Steven, you have to do it.’
Steven didn’t answer.
Two avens later, while wayward streaks of sunlight dappled the farm in orange, a Malakasian soldier approached from across a field between the barn and the woods near the river.
‘Someone’s coming,’ Garec warned, turning from the blurry, blown-glass window.
‘Is it him?’ Kellin asked.
‘Yes.’ Steven sounded certain.
‘I don’t know,’ Garec said. He nocked an arrow and moved towards the sheet of heavy canvas that hung between the storage bins and a wagon-sized loading dock. He pulled back on a corner and stepped out so the lone soldier could see that he was armed. ‘That’s far enough!’ he shouted.
The others heard the man say, ‘Garec?’
‘Who are you?’ Garec called. ‘If you know me, you know I can drop you from here. So don’t come any closer.’
‘Of course I know you, you great, blazing rutter,’ the soldier said, his hands in the air. ‘I also know you prefer trout to steak, although God knows why. I know you are one hundred and ninety-six Twinmoons old and that you think Steven’s coffee tastes like burned dirt.’
‘Gilmour?’
No one inside the barn heard his reply.
Kellin whispered, ‘What’s happening? What did he say?’
Garec pushed his head back beneath the cloth. ‘He’s showing me his wrist. It’s a mess, all bloody.’
‘He had to kill one of them,’ Steven said. ‘It’s him, Garec.’
‘How do you know? Gilmour’s never had that hole in his wrist before. Demonpiss, it’s awful-looking, even from here.’
‘It’s him,’ Steven said again, peering out the wrinkled glass window. ‘He’s only ever taken his hosts in the moment right after they’ve died; that’s why he’s been an elderly man most of the time. It looks like he found Mark’s battalion and picked off one of the soldiers.’
‘So he abandoned that other body?’ Kellin shuddered at the thought.
‘Exactly,’ Steven said. ‘That’s probably why he’s been delayed.’
Garec frowned, disappeared outside the canvas flap again, and shouted, ‘When days in Rona grow balmy-’
Gilmour’s response was faint but enthusiastic, ‘Drink Falkan wine after Twinmoon – but you, Garec, you prefer beer, because you are an uncultured heathen.’
Kellin smiled. ‘He does seem to know you, Garec.’
He poked his head back inside and muttered, ‘Wine gives me a headache.’ Then, in a shout, he added, ‘Come on inside, Gilmour.’
When the Larion sorcerer slipped past the canvas, Steven laughed. ‘You look good.’
The muscular young soldier shot him a bright grin marred by three seriously crooked teeth. Gilmour’s new body was tall and lean, with broad shoulders and a strong jaw. He had a head of shoulder-length, pin-straight hair, bright eyes and a nose that had been broken and poorly set at least twice. The bloody wound on his wrist was the only sign that he had been killed by the spirit of a disembodied Larion Senator. It was clotted with dried blood, but it was festering.
‘Well, I’d never done this before,’ he admitted, ‘so I figured I’d use someone healthy. I found the battalion near the river and sneaked this fellow into the undergrowth two nights ago. It was dark, and the officers were pushing them north so quickly that no one really looked for me. They’re all so rutting tired, I think I could have slipped away with a squad and no one would have been any the wiser.’ He winced. ‘What is that smell anyway? Onions?’
Steven frowned.
Garec said, ‘Pepperweed. There’s a whole bin of it rotting over there.’
‘Good God, but that stinks. It smells like-’
Brighton, Steven thought.
‘It smells like the compost heap out behind the Bowman Inn. You remember that place, Garec? Rotting pepperweed. God.’
‘Well, we won’t be here long,’ Brand said.
‘Right,’ Gilmour said, ‘at the rate they were moving that table, they’ll be in Wellham Ridge in a few days.’
‘Tomorrow, most likely,’ Kellin said. ‘They passed by here yesterday.’
‘Then we need to strike them soon,’ Gilmour said. ‘The soldiers are falling down with fatigue, and the officers are just leaving them to die or to drag themselves back on their own. Some are dragging their weaker mates along, but none of them are strong enough for a real fight.’
Steven shook his head. ‘Neither am I, Gilmour.’
‘That’s right, my boy. How are you? What was it, a seizure? Some sort of attack? Any permanent damage that you can sense?’
‘No, but I feel like a warm barrel of pigshit.’ He looked depressed. ‘I’m not up for much of a fight.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Another night of rest and some decent food would do me good.’ Steven didn’t try to hide the fact that he was pale, weak and tired.
‘Very good.’ Gilmour smiled. ‘Tomorrow, then. What do we have to eat? Something more than those onions, I hope.’
‘We’ve got a bit,’ Kellin said, ‘but not much, I’m afraid.’
‘Garec, any chance you and Kellin can find some game out along the edge of these fields? Brand and I will raid that farmhouse for any dry stores.’
Kellin said, ‘We did that already; there were some pickled vegetables and a few jars of preserves.’
‘Any flour?’
‘No.’
‘Rutters.’ Gilmour shook his head and his hair swept over his shoulder. ‘We’ll have to make do with what we have, but I promise I’ll buy everyone as much hot food as they can eat the moment we reach Wellham Ridge. By the way, why aren’t we hiding in the farmhouse?’
‘You’ll see when you go inside,’ Kellin said. ‘This is much more comfortable.’
Brand added, ‘We figured soldiers would search there first, maybe giving us a few extra moments to mount a defence here in the barn. And Kellin’s right; whoever farms this land left more than just rotting pepperweed in there.’
‘Meat?’
‘Meat, chamber pots, an assortment of disagreeable, albeit unidentifiable, heaps of something covered with burlap sacks…’
‘Nothing you’d spread on a crust of bread, Gilmour.’
‘I see. Is there a fireplace?’
Kellin said, ‘Yes, that they do have.’
‘It would be good for Steven to spend the night beside a real fire. It’s draughty in here with only that tarp hanging over there.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ Steven said.
‘You rest, leave dinner to us. Before we go, I’ll get a fire going, a big one.’
‘Don’t burn down the building!’
‘Don’t worry,’ Gilmour assured him, ‘we need you back in shape, and quickly, so rest now, and sleep if you can.’
‘He’s right,’ Garec said. ‘You don’t look very healthy, Steven.’
‘What do you expect with that stench in here?’
‘Trust me, Steven, it’s worse in the farmhouse,’ Kellin said.
‘No arguments,’ Gilmour said. ‘Take a nap; we’ll be back with dinner.’ He motioned with one hand and stoked their small fire into a crackling blaze. ‘That’ll burn all night now,’ he said and gestured for the others to join him outside.
Steven furrowed his brow but wrapped himself back into his blankets, thumped his pack into a makeshift pillow and closed his eyes. It was not long before he was sleeping again.
Later, fed and resting comfortably, Steven dreamed again. He and Mark were biking north on Tower Road, the old two-lane stretch that ran out past the airport. It was the first Magellan Tour, and there wasn’t much of a hard shoulder along Tower, so cyclists were regularly pushed off the road by the passing trucks hauling shipments out to the mail and cargo jets that used Denver Airport. Mark had called this ‘getting buzzed’, and they’d perfected their protection manoeuvre pretty quickly. Steven had a small mirror affixed to his helmet, so he rode behind, watchful for trucks hugging the shoulder too closely. When one approached without giving them a wide enough berth, Steven would shout, ‘We’re getting buzzed!’ and he and Mark would bail out, turning onto the hardscrabble where the vast rolling prairie pressed up against the northbound lane.
No matter how many trucks rumbled by en route to the freight terminals, they were always uncomfortably aware that any one could have flattened them both to jelly. Now, in his dream, Steven saw in the small circular mirror a massive, eighteen-wheeled beast lumbering towards them. It was a heavy-bodied semi, something prehistoric and clumsy, dragging an open trailer with slat sides. A northerly wind carried the aroma of foetid onions, rotten vegetables bound via Fed-Ex to ports unknown: somewhere, eye-wateringly rank onions had some value. The truck driver, hugging the right shoulder, gave no sign that he saw the two cyclists.
‘We’re getting buzzed,’ Steven shouted.
‘What’s that smell?’
‘Mark!’ he shouted again, louder this time. The rumble of the truck’s engine was deafening; it was too close. In the tiny mirror, the grille and twin headlights looked like the maniacal grin of a homicidal creature bent on running them down. As if to terrorise them further, the driver pressed down on the monster’s air horn. Steven felt the blast tickle the hairs on the back of his neck. His eyes blurred with the foul stench of decomposing onions and he screamed at Mark as he pulled off the road and into a clump of dry chaparral, ‘Mark! Bail out, Mark!’
Mark gave no sign that he heard, and Steven watched in horror as the great truck bore down on his friend. At the last second, he turned away, closed his eyes and screamed.
The magic woke him. It was at his fingertips, ready for battle, ready to blast the vegetable truck to scrap metal. Instead, Steven rolled onto his back and released the spell into Gilmour’s chest. The Larion Senator’s new body, the young Malakasian with the crooked teeth, bent nose and bloody wrist, was looming over him, a short knife drawn and poised to strike. The others slept on beside the fire.
‘No!’ Steven screamed as the magic crashed into Gilmour, shattering his bones and crushing his organs. It was as if the Malakasian soldier had been hit by a lumbering truck loaded to the brink with rotten vegetables, onions or pepperweed…
Gilmour was thrown back, his body turning a lazy half-somersault in the firelight. One foot smashed through a wooden gate near the vegetable storage bins and the impact flipped his body back over itself and his head thudded hard against a support beam. Something cracked, his skull or his neck, and his body finally tumbled to rest inside one of the larger bins along the far wall.
Garec and the others were on their feet.
‘Steven,’ Garec cried, ‘what did you do?’
Steven was breathing hard, the magic still coursing through his veins, invigorating and charging him for another attack. He stared at Garec, his eyes wide in disbelief.
‘You killed him,’ Garec said, hustling towards the vegetable bin.
‘Don’t!’ Steven finally managed.
‘But-’
‘It’s not Gilmour!’
‘What?’ Garec looked at him as if he had gone mad.
‘It’s not him, Garec.’ Steven repeated. ‘It’s Mark, or sent from Mark, anyway. It’s not Gilmour.’
Garec moved back into the firelight and knelt beside Steven.
‘Get me some water, will you?’ Steven held his head in his hands. ‘That was too close.’
Kellin brought a water-filled wineskin and Steven drank deeply before emptying the rest over his head, trying to calm down enough to explain.
‘How do you…’ Brand ventured.
‘It was the things he said, what he did,’ Steven said at last. ‘He mentioned onions today, twice, even after Garec had told him it was pepperweed. Gilmour wouldn’t have done that; he wouldn’t have thought of onions first, like I did.’
‘That’s it?’ Brand was incredulous. ‘Rutters, Steven, you killed him over a reference to onions? We do have onions in Eldarn, you know that!’
‘There was more. He said “God” twice. Not “gods”, but “God”, singular. Gilmour doesn’t do that. A singular god is our God, not your gods of the Northern Forest.’
‘That’s still pretty thin.’ Garec was looking back and forth between Steven and the storage bin as if expecting Gilmour to heave his broken form from the dirty floor like Harren Bonn had done in the spell chamber at Sandcliff Palace.
‘Then he told me to take a nap.’ Steven shook his head. ‘It was too much; that’s just not a phrase Gilmour uses. Taking naps, as if they’re tangible, you know, as if they come in a carry-case, that’s one of our sayings as well. It had to be Mark.’
Kellin drew her sword. ‘Is he here?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Steven said. ‘And there was something else. Did you see the wound on his wrist? It wasn’t right; it was a fake. I mean, it was ugly and bloody, but it wasn’t full of pus and dripping with all that stinking infected shit like the others.’
‘What others?’ Brand asked.
‘I caught a glimpse of Malagon’s when we were on the Prince Marek, only for a moment, but it was an unholy mess. Then there was a dead security guard in the bank lobby; the cops had covered him with a blanket but I had a chance to get a look at him. And finally, I saw Bellan’s. She’d been wearing gloves, but I saw where Nerak had forcibly entered her body, when she reached up to hit me with the hickory staff, just for a moment. So I’ve seen enough to know that the wound on this guy’s wrist was bullshit.’
‘So he’s not here?’ Kellin still wasn’t convinced. She stood facing the vegetable bin, brandishing her sword.
‘No,’ Steven said, ‘if he had been here, that wound would have been real. That was a decoy, just something to throw us off long enough for him to kill me.’
‘Demonpiss,’ Brand whispered.
‘How did he know all that about me?’ Garec asked.
‘You and Mark have spent a lot of time together,’ Steven explained. ‘He didn’t say anything earth-shattering, did he? He didn’t mention anything from your youth.’
‘So what do we do now?’ Brand asked. ‘He obviously knows where we are.’
‘Maybe not,’ Garec said. ‘Maybe he sent out a whole company of those things, each armed with just enough information to lull us into a false sense of security. He’s not stupid. Of course he would check all the farms in the area.’
‘Farms, caves, lean-tos, everything,’ Steven agreed.
‘So there could be others,’ Kellin said. ‘How will we know if the real Gilmour comes back?’
Steven looked to Garec. ‘You need to think of something only Gilmour would know, something he would never have shared with Mark. When he gets here-’
‘If he gets here,’ Kellin interrupted, still unconvinced.
‘When he gets here, we’ll ask him.’
‘We can’t stay here,’ Brand said. ‘We’ll post a watch for the rest of the night, but at first light, we need to move north.’
‘Agreed,’ Garec said. ‘I’ll take the first watch.’
‘What do we do with… well, whatever it was over there?’ Kellin motioned towards the bin where the soldier’s body had fallen.
‘Leave him,’ Brand said. ‘It can’t smell any worse in here.’
Garec smirked. ‘It might improve things, actually.’
Hoyt ducked into the stable as a soldier passed, her gilded black uniform glinting in the torchlight. The main road running south from Pellia to the Welstar Palace encampment was dotted on both sides by merchants’ homes and ranches. The farm houses, while similar in size and grandeur to the homes of shipping magnates or industrial executives, were easy to spot, for they were invariably flanked by barns or stables and had a patchwork of fenced-in fields. This was an expensive area and those who owned property here were all in business with the Malakasian military. Supplying goods to Welstar Palace was lucrative enough; supplying the Welstar encampment and shipping goods to other regions of Eldarn would put Pellia’s largest companies amongst the wealthiest in the land, rich and powerful enough to rival even the massive export companies of Falkan.
This is where Hoyt chose to hunt.
He could hear animals in the night: sheep bleating, cows lowing, horses nickering and pulling at mangers of hay. This district south of the city was redolent with the scents of manure, winter hay, wood-smoke and the faint tang of burned blood: there was a slaughterhouse somewhere further along the road. Hoyt was wondering why shipping and industry tycoons would choose to live alongside smelly farms and noisy animals when it struck him that these were the smells of silver, great piles of silver. The fancy carriages, the elaborate stained-glass windows, the houses built of brick or stone: they all screamed out I have sold myself to Prince Malagon, and this is what I have reaped.
Tonight, Hoyt planned on some reaping of his own. He had been out the last few evenings, and had acquired mostly copper, mixed with a few silver Mareks, mostly from lazy tavern owners, and once, a ship’s captain who’d returned to his cabin drunk and slept like the dead. But to Hoyt, stealing from the hard-working people of Pellia was wrong. Granted, he thought, hidden behind the stable wall, Churn and I used to fleece most of Southport, regardless of whose silver it was; that never mattered to us. But things had changed. Hoyt had seen too much ever to steal from the common people of Eldarn again. That sort of robbery left him feeling hollow. Tonight would be different.
These people, the whole rotten district, deserved to be stripped of every penny they had made from shipping food, weapons, clothing – anything at all – to that gods-forsaken army.
The farmhouse across the road from the stables was a grand, two-storey edifice, with multiple brick chimneys, a stained-glass atrium, a slate roof, and a side entrance for servants. Smoke billowed from three chimneys, but the only windows illuminated this late at night were the upstairs corner rooms, front and back, on the north side. Hoyt waited until the soldier was out of sight, then, patting a curious plough horse gently on the nose, he slipped into the shadow of a tree by the road.
In through the servants’ entrance, down the main hall and out the back, he thought, now focused intently on the upstairs windows, watching for a candle flicker or a moving shadow. The silver will be in the office; all these places have an office, some private sanctum for the master of the house to gaze out over his domain, rutting stuffed-shirt horsecocks, all of ’em.
He crouched another moment. Then it’s either out the same way, or through the back entrance and into the fields. Two means of escape, and both of them away from the main route downstairs and out the front door. Perfect.
When he was certain there was no movement behind the windows, Hoyt crept into the street. For a moment, he was exposed: a dark figure moving warily into the farmyard. The frozen road and snowy fields were a stark, moonlit backdrop against which Hoyt was suddenly conspicuous. The stables and the lone linden tree provided the only cover between the farmhouse and a stone wall marking the property line, but that was three hundred paces to the northeast.
Hoyt was halfway across the farmyard and nearly beneath the sheltered overhang of the servants’ recessed entryway when he heard wagons on the road. He had an instant to make his decision – hide beside the farmhouse or scurry back to the stables? With the wagons still out of sight in the darkness, Hoyt turned and fled across the road, running low to the ground, trying to look like a farm dog, or maybe a fox out for a late-night hunt. He tumbled to a stop beside the linden tree, then crept back inside the stables.
‘Well, that wasn’t exactly how I had planned it, was it?’ he whispered to the old plough horse. ‘But still, better to be in here with you then over there if the whole household woke up to see what rutting fools are driving south at this aven.’ He brushed snow and mud from his tunic, wiped his face on his cloak and peeked out the stable door. ‘Who do you suppose it is?’ Hoyt asked the horse, keeping his face in the shadows.
The wagons came slowly into focus, massive slatted wooden carts emerging from the darkness. They were covered with canvas, and hauled along by teams of horses or oxen. Wooden axles squeaked, and Hoyt flashed back to the forest of ghosts and the platoons of Seron warriors harvesting the bark. They had been driving similar wagons, hauling shipments of bark through the Great Pragan Range, north to Treven and the Welstar-bound barges.
These carts – twelve of them – looked the same. Each was guarded by a squad of Seron warriors, not like the harvesters, staring vacuously into space, but real Seron killers, snarling, angry beasts that would tear Hoyt to pieces in a heartbeat if they found him huddled in the stables.
‘Holy rutting Pragans,’ Hoyt whispered, ‘it’s more bark; it has to be. But how-? Why are they bringing it from the north? There’s nothing between here and the sea, no forests, nothing but the city.’ He ducked back inside, found a corner in an empty stall and curled up in his cloak. He had seen enough; there was no reason to risk capture, either from the road or from the farmhouse, where, he was certain, the entire family would be awake, their noses pressed against the windows by now.
With his forehead on his knees, Hoyt sat listening to the creak and clatter of the wagons fading along the road. A quarter of an aven later, cold and tired, he considered returning to the Wayfarer. He badly wanted to sneak into his room, and maybe slip into bed beside Hannah. Let her warm you up? You think she’d be willing again? Maybe just once?
In the farmhouse windows candles had appeared and Hoyt could see shadows moving about.
‘I’ll give them this much,’ he whispered to the horse, ‘they’re certainly early risers.’ He pulled his hood up, patted the old horse a final time and slipped outside, trying not to think about Hannah. As he hurried towards the stone wall, he said to himself, ‘Let’s see if the neighbours are still asleep.’