New Lands (THE CHRONICLES OF EGG) (17 page)

“Wot if they’re evil?” Guts asked.

“Then so will be the world,” Kira said.

I heard a noise like a pained sigh. I looked to my left, where it came from. Millicent was staring at the ground with her eyebrows crumpled together like she might cry.

Looking at her, I felt awful all over again.

“Are you all right?” I asked her.

“Fine.” She shook her head, and just like that, the sorrowful look was gone.

“Let’s get moving,” she said.

“We should eat first,” said Kira. “We’ll go faster with food in our stomachs.”

“We’ve hardly got any left,” said Millicent. “Be wiser to save it.”

Kira shook her head. “There’s food in the valley.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“The Flut live there. They’re farmers. They’ll have food. One way or another, we’ll eat.”

“What do you mean, ‘one way or another’?” I asked.

“We have money and weapons. One of them will get us food.”

I watched Kira hand out the last bit of our rations, thinking that she scared me a little, but I was glad she was on our side.

Guts finished his portion in seconds. As the rest of us nibbled slowly, trying to convince our stomachs it was an actual meal, he started fidgeting with his hook, unstrapping it from his stump and shaking out the cowl before he strapped it back on.

“Everything okay with Lucy?” I asked.

Kira gave me a curious look. “Who’s Lucy?”

“His hook,” I said.

“Nobody!” Guts barked, talking over me.

The girls both looked amused.

“You
named
your hook?” Millicent snorted.

“Didn’t!” Guts protested, turning red in the face. “He’s a liar!”

I might have covered for him if he hadn’t called me a liar. But after I’d just been branded a pig and a coward by Millicent, I wasn’t in the mood to take any more abuse. Especially when I didn’t deserve it.

“Come off it!” I said. “You named her—”

“Shut up!”

“—the day you got her!”

“Pack o’ lies!”

“‘Thunk aw’ll cawl ’er Luuucy,’” I said, imitating Guts’s voice in a way that made him sound even more deranged than he actually was.

Big mistake.

Guts leaped on me, which caught me so off guard I didn’t have time to get my hands up, and we toppled backward off the fallen tree I’d been sitting on.

He pinned my shoulders with his knees and started swinging. I managed to get both my hands on the wrist of his hook arm so he couldn’t stab me, but that left his good fist free, and he kept slugging me in the side of the head with it. I tried to twist away, but my legs were still up over the side of the fallen tree, and I couldn’t get any leverage to buck him off.

“Get off!”

“—you, ye—
porsamora
!”

Kira and Millicent were both on him, trying to pull him off me by his upper arms, when we heard a shout that froze us all in place.

“FOUND ’EM!”

I turned my head to the sound of the voice. On the crest of a nearby rock, about a hundred feet along the hilltop from us, was a beefy Rovian man with a shock of red hair and a rifle in his hand.

For an endless second, we stared at each other.

“OVER HERE!” he yelled. Then he started off the rock after us.

By the time we were up and running, answering shouts were echoing off the rocks.

I
tore down the hillside. It was so steep that moving fast was easy.

The hard part was staying on my feet.

Trees and branches and roots and holes zoomed by in a blur.

FASTER.

One wrong step, and I’d break an ankle.

That wouldn’t be the worst of it. If I fell, they’d catch me.

I could hear branches snapping behind me.

The others were up ahead. I couldn’t raise my eyes from the ground long enough to get a fix on them, but I knew Guts and Millicent had gotten a head start on me.

I caught a glimpse of Kira’s pack, bouncing on her shoulders.

That meant the noise behind me was a slaver.

FASTER—

I hit the side of a hole with my foot and nearly went down.

It hurt.

I tried to take shorter steps so I wasn’t landing so hard.

My shoulder caught the side of a tree.

That hurt more.

I could still hear the slaver. He was gaining on me.

The ground began to flatten out. We were almost to the bottom of the hill.

The trees grew thicker—and then, almost in an instant, they were gone.

We were on the valley floor. Open land in every direction.

RUN FASTER.

The soil was loose and spongy now, mixed with the dry stubble of dead plants—at every step, my foot either sank into the ground or got spiked on a sharp stalk.

FASTER.

Gravity wasn’t pulling me along anymore. I had to pump my legs hard to keep them churning over the soft ground.

My lungs started to burn.

My thigh muscles were getting shaky.

I couldn’t hear the slaver behind me anymore. But I knew he was still there.

RUN FASTER.

A quarter mile ahead was a line of tall plants rising to the height of a man’s head. They grew in what looked like a perfectly straight row.

Tall and straight and evenly spaced.

Nature hadn’t grown them that way.

And nature hadn’t made the soil under my feet this loose.

We were running over cropland.

Crops meant people.

I saw the first of them without realizing what I was looking at. Up ahead to the right, at the edge of the plantings, was a single crooked spire that rose thirty feet straight into the air.

At first, I thought it was the skinny trunk of a dead tree.

But there was a clump of something on top of it.

The clump was moving, shinnying down the spire.

It wasn’t a tree. It was a lookout post. The moving clump was the lookout, climbing down from a Y-shaped joint at the top.

He vanished into the tall plantings.

They’d know we were coming.

I hoped they were friendly.

But they couldn’t be any worse than the slavers chasing us.

FASTER.

Guts and Millicent were tiring. I was gaining on them. Just a few feet behind.

Was the slaver gaining on me?

I didn’t know. And I didn’t dare to look back.

Kira was twenty yards ahead, outrunning us even with the pack on her shoulders.

She looked back as she ran—first over her left shoulder, then her right.

When she looked the second time, her face showed alarm.

I turned my head in the direction she’d looked. A man was running toward us on a diagonal, about two hundred yards away. He was in Continental clothes, but he must have been a Moku, because he was much darker-skinned than the big redhead.

He was carrying a rifle.

The redhead must be behind us.

There was a third man somewhere. Maybe a fourth. They’d all have rifles.

RUN FASTER.

My lungs were on fire, and my legs felt limp. But there was nothing to do except keep going.

They weren’t firing at us. Why? We were easy targets.

Because they needed us alive.

They needed
me
alive. For the map. The others…

FASTER.

I didn’t have much left in me.

Neither did Millicent. I was dead even with her.

I made sure I didn’t pull ahead. After everything that had happened, I was going to stick by her no matter what.

The tall plants were close now—close enough that I could see there wasn’t just a line of them but a whole field, row upon row stretching back into the distance.

The rows were just wide enough to run between. Kira reached them first and disappeared.

Then Guts.

Then me and Millicent. We ran down adjoining rows, our arms slapping the long, yellow-tinged leaves as we went.

The ground was even softer now, and the damp soil sucked at my feet.

I heard noise behind me. The slaver was crashing through the plants behind us.

Up ahead, Kira made a sharp left turn and vanished.

A moment later, Millicent and I reached the spot where she’d turned. A three-foot-wide path lay crosswise to the direction we’d been running. We followed Kira down the path.

Kira stopped short.

As we reached her, we saw why she’d stopped—and we did, too.

Half a dozen Flut warriors—I’d spent enough time around the Natives in Pella to recognize the tribe by their long, thin faces—were blocking the path in front of us.

They were shirtless, dressed only in Native breeches. The first two were crouched on one knee, aiming rifles at us.

Behind the riflemen, the other four all had long wooden spears raised over their shoulders.

The spearheads were pointed at our chests.

The lead spear carrier yelled something at us. He was speaking Cartager—I recognized the slippery sound of the words, even though I didn’t know what they meant.

Kira answered, her voice rising in a question. She was asking for help.

The leader answered. His tone was hostile.

The answer was no.

I could hear the redheaded slaver crashing through the plants behind us.

Millicent spoke up, in urgent, plaintive Cartager.

Kira turned to stare at her with a look of surprise.

Millicent had just finished speaking when the crashing noise behind us suddenly stopped.

We all turned to see the redheaded slaver standing in the pathway, panting and sweaty, his rifle in his hands.

He was gaping at the Flut, dumbfounded.

I heard a Flut yell something that sounded like,
“Hio!”

“DUCK!” screamed Millicent and Kira together.

We all hit the ground as the Flut rifles roared over our heads. When I looked up, the plants were still rustling from where the slaver had dived back into cover.

The Flut leader issued a quick series of orders. The two riflemen and the other spear carriers vanished into the plants. A moment later, I heard a faint rustling off to my left as they headed for the spot where the slaver had taken cover.

The path was empty now except for us and the leader. He gestured toward us:
come with me.

Then he turned and started down the path at a run.

We followed him.

THE FLUT LEADER
kept up a fast pace, his back muscles rippling under his long black hair as he ran down a series of pathways through the tall crops. None of us spoke—it took all our energy just to keep him in sight.

Twice, gunfire rang out in the field behind us. Whatever Millicent had said, it must have worked, because the Flut were fighting our battle for us.

We emerged onto open land. Still running, the leader took us down a worn path over a wide plain of low grass, dotted with the occasional shade tree. After half a mile or so, we reached a shallow, six-foot-wide stream.

The Flut leader splashed across the calf deep water, then crouched at the far bank to drink with his hands from the stream. The four of us did the same, grateful for the chance to catch our breath and drink. Kira pulled the two empty water skins from her rucksack. She handed one to me, and we both filled them.

A minute later, the Flut set off again, this time at a brisk walk.
As we followed him along another path through an open meadow, I fell into step behind Millicent.

“What did you say to him back there?” I asked.

“Nothing special. He didn’t seem to care for Crazy Knife Girl much. I don’t think their tribes get along.”

“Where’s he leading us?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea. For all I know, he’s going to kill us all.”

“Seriously?”

“I said I don’t know. Quit asking stupid questions.”

She was still angry. That much was obvious.

“Millicent, I really am sorry—”

“And stop apologizing! It’s pathetic.”

After that, I fell to the back of the group and tried not to collapse in a heap. I was exhausted and starving, and all of a sudden, the whole thing seemed pointless.

Men with guns are chasing me. For what? The map to a treasure that’s probably nonsense anyway. All that stuff Kira said about the Fist—power to heal and kill, burn and build, blah blah blah—seems awfully hard to swallow.