Demontech: Gulf Run (21 page)

Haft nodded. He understood the reasoning. The men who came with them from Eikby had all fought and beaten the Jokapcul at least once, and could presumably be relied on not to desert during the night. But still . . .

“If the Jokapcul are still moving in the numbers I saw earlier, if they turn this way they’ll overwhelm our people.”

It was Spinner’s turn to nod, he was painfully aware of that. “But they can slow them down enough to give some of the others a chance to escape.”

Haft harrumphed. “I think there should have been a couple of ’maybes’ and ’ifs’ in what you just said.” He shook himself, but couldn’t think of anything different Spinner could have done. “Who’s watching the other sides?”

Spinner looked at Haft quizzically; it wasn’t that long ago Haft wouldn’t have thought to ask that question without prompting. “Corporal Armana has a squad of the Earl’s Guards to the south and Upper Sergeant Han has his men on the west side.” He gave a wry grin. “And I was relying on you to the north.”

Haft slowly let out a deep breath. “We need to get moving. What I saw east of here has me pretty nervous.”

Spinner smiled.
That
was more like the Haft he’d served with for so long. “We can’t go at night. Wagons will lose the road and people will wander off and get lost. A night movement with people who don’t know how to make one will be too much of a mess. We have to wait until daybreak.”

Haft made a face. As much as he didn’t like it, Spinner was right—again. “Then let’s get an early start. I don’t like being here.”

“We’ll move out as early as possible. I climbed a lookout tree too—I don’t like sitting here any more than you do.”

What with one thing and another, they didn’t get moving at the break of dawn. When you have more than six thousand people, some with wagons or carts, most without, some healthy and strong and able to cover distance quickly, others not so fit, and from many different cities, regions, and even countries, speaking a multitude of languages and dialects, then add in a distribution of food still so chaotic nobody could know whether anybody has to begin the day’s march hungry—well, it takes time to get them organized and moving. They began preparations an hour before sunrise but the sun had been up for a good two hours or more before the point—a squad of Zobran Lancers guided by the Border Warder called Hunter—cantered off along the north road. Impatient to be off, Haft had already gone ahead with half a squad of mounted Bloody Axes to scout the way beyond where he’d gone the day before. The caravan didn’t stop at midday, and the day wasn’t hot enough to make anyone suffer, so the entire caravan was on the eastbound road along the border between the forest and the desert by the time Spinner called a halt for the night. Even though he thought they were still far too close to where he’d seen the Jokapcul marching along the Gulf coast, Haft didn’t object—other than some mild grumbling that he wasn’t serious about.

They reached the escarpment on the second day of eastern travel. They didn’t camp on the road or next to it that night. The escarpment rose above the scrub half a mile north of the road. Flankers investigated the escarpment and reported back that it was largely unscalable and had many shallow caves at its base. So Spinner, with Haft, Alyline, Fletcher, and Zweepee concurring, had the caravan move to the foot of the escarpment for the night.

There was one split in the cliff wall, though, that the scouts dismissed as shallow without actually entering.

Seife the Merchant, from far off Bostia, had lost his wagons and goods and barely managed to hang onto his wife and three of their four children during their flight across the continent. Now, he wasn’t happy about leaving the road for the foot of the escarpment. Had he thought the cliffs were sound, he would have been content to tramp the extra half mile to their base for whatever protection they would afford from the elements. But the sedimentary rock, with its unevenly eroded layers, reminded him far too much of improperly stocked shelves whose contents would come tumbling down the instant the wrong item was dislodged.

He found the crack in the rock face a few paces from where his family was settling in for the night particularly bothersome. The people camped directly in front of it had gone in thinking it was a narrow entrance to a shallow cave, only to come out and announce it didn’t widen out enough for them to spread their bedding, and didn’t seem to offer much in the way of protection from the elements. Besides, the wind whistled through it too much.

Seife the Merchant brooded over that crack in the wall for a time. He pictured it as a shelving aisle. Sometimes, if the goods improperly stacked in a shelving aisle collapsed toward each other, they eased the dangerous imbalance from adjoining shelves, and he wondered about the condition of the walls inside the split.

After they’d eaten their spartan dinner, when his son and younger daughter had fallen asleep, and his wife and older daughter whispered with their heads together the way women do when they don’t want men to know what they’re talking about, he decided to investigate. Lighting a brand in their small cookfire, he said, “I need to take care of something, I’ll be back soon. Don’t wait up.”

His elder daughter flashed him a quick smile and his wife cocked her head at him; she’d caught the contradiction in “I’ll be back soon, don’t wait up” but decided that in the wilderness it meant nothing, and the two resumed their heads-together whispering.

Seife had no problem entering the crack—he was able to walk straight into it with his shoulders barely brushing its sides. Before he became a refugee, he wouldn’t have been able to squeeze through it at all, but with the unaccustomed exertion and lean meals of their flight, he’d lost a great deal of bulk. His wife now looked at him in ways she hadn’t looked at him in many years, and their lovemaking, when they had the energy for it, was much more vigorous and satisfying than it had been in just as many years. A smile flickered across his face. Beneath the dirt and wear of the long trek, his wife had also lost a great deal of bulk and looked much better than
she
had in years, which greatly contributed to the increased vigor and satisfaction of their lovemaking as well.

The walls of the crack leaned toward each other as they rose. Seife didn’t notice during the day whether they met, and the small torch he carried didn’t cast its light high enough for him to tell. He entered the crack and looked from one wall to the other. The dancing shadows deceived his eyes so he couldn’t tell if the walls were smooth or as tumbled as the outer face of the cliffs. He held the brand high and ahead of him with one hand while brushing the palm of the other hand up and down the walls. He silently chided himself for not having felt the outside walls; he couldn’t tell by touch if these surfaces were as uneven as the outside wall, more uneven, or smoother.

He went in five feet, then ten, then twenty, and the split remained roughly as wide as at its entrance. He thought the smoothness of the shifting sand on the floor of the split meant the walls were sound, that they never tumbled. If he’d been able to read the signs, he would have known that large masses of water sometimes shussed through the split and washed out the gravel and boulders that tumbled from the walls. But he was a town merchant, not any kind of outdoorsman, so he didn’t even realize there
were
signs, much less know how to read them. He kept going until he could no longer guess how far he’d gone. The whistling of the wind through the crack annoyed his ears almost as much as the grit that peck-pecked at his face, made his eyes water, and threatened to fill his ears.

Then, suddenly, his torch no longer made shadows dance on the walls and his brushing hand met air rather than layers of stone. He stopped abruptly and spun about, swinging the torch before him. He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw a stone face with a crack in it. On the ground he saw his own footprints leading directly into the crack. He thrust the torch up, but it blinded his night vision so he couldn’t see whether there was a roof above his head or stars in the night sky. Slowly, he turned in a circle, holding the torch out at arm’s length. The space he was in was so large his light didn’t reach its sides except by the crack he’d emerged from.

He took two steps forward, lowered the torch and closed his eyes to listen. He knew what an empty warehouse sounded like. Perhaps a large cave would sound the same and he could estimate its size. But, no, all he got was quiet, though not the quiet of an empty space. Maybe if he made a noise and saw how long it took the echo to come back . . .

“Hello?”
There,
an echo!

Wait a minute, that wasn’t an echo, not quite. It was more like a footstep.

“Hel-Hello? Is someone there?” He heard something from over
there
this time, it sounded like slow breathing.
No!
The breathing came from over
there
! No, it came from... In half a panic, imagining bandits or ravening beasts closing on him, he opened his eyes and spun about to flee.

And ran smack into something very hard—the chest of a very large, very strong man.

CHAPTER

TWELVE

“Lord Spinner, Lord Haft,” said Wudu, one of the Prince’s Swords guarding the commanders’ tent, as he ducked his head under the closed door flap. “Mr. Fletcher and Sergeant Mearh are here with someone who wants to see you.”

Sergeant Mearh was the leader of the squads of Zobran Light Horse who were pulling perimeter guard duty.

Spinner and Haft looked at Wudu. They had just been discussing sleeping arrangements; Haft wanted privacy for himself and Maid Marigold, but Alyline and Doli had been giving Spinner a very hard time about giving up the tent every night for Haft’s “dalliance.” “It looks bad,” they told him, “for you to sleep under the sky every night while
he
plays with his bedmate.” Spinner didn’t care that much, but he was tired of having Alyline and Doli berate him over the issue. There wasn’t an extra tent for either of them to move into, and Alyline wouldn’t allow Spinner into hers, and even if he was willing to spend his nights in Doli’s—she’d made clear her willingness to welcome him—Maid Primrose, who shared Doli’s tent, would have no part of him.

Needless to say, Spinner and Haft were annoyed by the interruption.

“Can’t it wait until morning?” Haft snarled.

“Sergeant Mearh says it’s very important, sir.”

Spinner snarled in disgust.

“Let them in.”

“Yes, Lord Spinner.” Wudu quickly glanced at Haft to make sure he wasn’t going to countermand the order, then ducked back out and pulled the door flap aside for the three men to enter.

Fletcher came in first and graced the two Frangerian Marines with a look that seemed to ask,
How are you going to deal with this?
He took a place standing between Haft’s desk and cot and folded his arms across his chest. Sergeant Mearh came next, sword in hand, and stood between Spinner’s desk and yet-to-be-slept-on cot.

The third man stepped in and gave a deep, sweeping—but mostly mocking—bow, then stood with arms akimbo, his feet spread as if he were balancing on the deck of a ship at sea. He was very large and wore a familiar double-reversible cloak, tan side out, with three stripes on the shoulder and a merman clasp holding it together at the throat. “
Lord
Spinner?
Lord
Haft?” he questioned with a broad grin. “The last time I saw you two, you were just a couple of frightened pea ons trying to evade and escape.”

There was a moment of stunned silence from the two before they leaped to their feet and rushed around their desks, jostling each other in their haste to be the first to reach and embrace him.

“Rammer! We thought you were dead! How did you get away?”

Sergeant Rammer had been the Marine detail commander on the
Sea Horse
, the Frangerian merchantman they’d been on when the Jokapcul invaded New Bally. The last time they saw him was in New Bally, where he was a prisoner; he’d seen them hiding in the shadows near where he was being held and signaled them to take off on their own.

By the time they finished greeting each other, Alyline, Doli, and Zweepee had crowded into the tent behind them, along with Sergeant Phard of the Bloody Axes and Sergeant Geatwe of the Prince’s Swords. Spinner and Haft were forced back behind their desks and Rammer against the desk fronts. The Marine sergeant turned about and looked at the faces crowding him. His gaze lingered longest on Alyline, openly taking in the vest that didn’t quite close between her breasts, and the pantaloons held low on her hips by a girdle of gold coins.

“Mistress,” Rammer said, and essayed a cramped bow. “Is your Sothar player near?”

Spinner goggled at him. Sergeant
Rammer
knew about the Sothar player? He wasn’t even Apianghian! Spinner, who was, hadn’t known, even though Alyline was from the highlands of his home country!

“No, he is not,” Alyline replied sourly. At Rammer’s disappointed look, she added, “Thanks to the ignorance of two of your fellows.”

“Spinner! How could you not know?”

“Well …” Spinner spread his hands helplessly.

“Would somebody please get a stool for Sergeant Rammer?” Haft interjected. He realized he and Spinner had just lost points with their detachment commander, and he didn’t want to lose any more. “And everybody, please sit.” He gestured at the cots.

Doli squeezed past Sergeant Mearh and perched on the end of Spinner’s cot nearest the desk. Fletcher and Zweepee waited for the camp stool to be produced and opened before they sat on Haft’s cot. Once Rammer was seated, Sergeant Mearh took the place next to Doli—if Spinner didn’t want her, maybe she could become interested in someone else. Sergeants Phard and Geatwe chose to remain standing. Spinner and Haft introduced everyone.

“All sergeants?” Rammer said with a chuckle. “No officers?” He paused, waiting for an explanation.

“One captain refused to join us and went over to the bandits,” Spinner said.

“We had to strip another captain of command when he thought his men could have their way with women without the women’s consent,” Alyline said. “Haft killed him,” she added with a hint of approval in her voice.