Snare (67 page)

‘Rival faction?’ Loy sounded briefly feeble. ‘Don’t tell me they have politics?’

‘Let’s pack up the camp. I’ll tell you what I know while we work.’

By the time they rode out, the sun had climbed high in the sky. With the pack horse they could ride at no faster than a jog, and that only at intervals, but Ammadin kept her little caravan moving. They did pause once, long after the sun had passed zenith, to scan. Ammadin found no trace of Soutan, and Water Woman never answered Long Voice’s call.

All night Warkannan, Jezro, and their horses had struggled to find some degree of comfort in the bamboid cart, plunging onward through the darkness. Sleep avoided them, though they did at odd moments manage to drowse. It was 08.30 by Warkannan’s watch when the ChaMeech finally halted beside another underground platform. Once again the lavender female, backed by the armed males, herded them onto a ramp, but one at least twice as long and steeper than the others they’d seen, or so it seemed as they dragged themselves along.

At last they reached solid ground and sunlight. Behind them stretched the grassy valley, sloping down at a considerable angle to the western horizon. To the east – for some minutes Warkannan stood speechless, staring at the view. They had reached the hills, and they were so bizarrely different from any hills he’d ever seen that he could form no clear idea of their height. At first, in fact, he thought he was looking at fortifications.

A forest of stone columns and pillars stood at their base, eroded
into fantastic shapes and tufted here and there with red and gold vegetation. Some looked like misshapen H’mai, some like spindles of wool, others like sagging cones topped with odd black hats. Behind them great chunks of hill rose in flat cliffs of a reddish-tan stone striped here and there with black. Sporadic vegetation stippled cracks and ledges with maroon and gold. More pillars, eroded into lacy shapes, and great arches of stone clung to the cliff faces. Behind some of the arches, dark shadows marked cave mouths.

In between each massive chunk of hill ran deep canyons, guarded by what appeared to be striped watchtowers, looming in the shadows. The hill crests made a staggered, tilting line in relation to the horizon, as if God had carved the hills out of a high plain, then pushed on them to make an artistic arrangement. At their rims stood more columns and clumps of stone, marching back beyond the line of sight, turning crimson as the sun rose high enough to top the cliffs.

‘Shaitan!’ Warkannan whispered.

Jezro nodded his agreement, open-mouthed.

Their immediate surroundings were far less impressive than the hills. Just north of the white sphere a stand of Midas trees stood dripping with red leaves. Off to the south, in the midst of purple grass, stood a white flexstone building, a mere cube about fifteen feet on a side. The wall facing them sported a pair of unglazed windows and a stout true-oak door. Below each window a narrow ledge jutted out.

‘I wonder what that is?’ Warkannan said.

Their holding cell, as it turned out. With spears and grunts the males marched them over to the building. Warkannan pointed out some Vransic words moulded into the flexstone over the doors and windows.

‘It says luh metroh and billay,’ Jezro said. ‘I don’t have the slightest idea what that means.’

Before the little female opened the door, she pointed to their saddlebags, back to them, to the horses, and back to them. When she pantomimed lifting something, they realized that she wanted them to unsaddle the horses and carry their gear inside.

‘Now listen you,’ Warkannan said. ‘Don’t you dare eat our horses.’

She stamped her foot several times. ‘Eat-not,’ she said. ‘Promise. In.’

She raised her head and inflated her throat sac. Although Warkannan heard nothing, this close he could feel air vibrating when she spoke. The door, however, heard her and slid back into a channel in the wall. Loaded with gear, they staggered inside. Their footsteps echoed under the high ceiling of a stark, white room, empty except for one long bench, moulded seamlessly into the flexstone floor, running down the middle. The female pointed at a door on the wall.

‘Water,’ she said. ‘Yours. Food soon.’

With that she turned and left. They could hear the door slide shut and lock behind her. Jezro dumped his gear at one end of the bench. Warkannan followed his lead, then walked from window to window; he found a pair of ChaMeech males haunched beyond each. Still, by craning his neck he could look around their broad backs and see the little female tethering the horses out in the high grass.

‘Well, here we are,’ Jezro said. ‘Home. For now, anyway.’

‘Yes, apparently so. All we can do is pray that Zayn can get back to Burgunee.’

‘Well, if nothing else, Robear and Zhil will start worrying when we don’t come home in a couple of days. What they’ll do about it, I don’t know. You can say I told you so if you want.’

‘Don’t tempt me.’

Jezro limped across the room and pushed on the side door, which opened to a narrow room, as white and loud as the first. In one corner water gushed up into a flexstone basin, overflowed, and ran across the floor to the far corner, where it drained through a hole about a foot across.

‘Sanitation of a sort.’ Jezro shut the door again. ‘Hostages have been treated worse.’ He paused to wipe his nose on his sleeve. ‘Well, hell, I am now a captive audience in every sense of that term. I suppose appealing to your better nature isn’t going to work.’

‘Work for what? Oh, wait: you mean, make me stop haranguing you about going back to Kazrajistan. When it comes to that, I don’t have a better nature.’

‘Exactly. We have a few other things to mull over, too. For instance, who in hell is going to be interested in ransoming us, way out here? I wonder what this bunch really wants us for? The main course at a banquet? Or appetizers?’

‘That thought had occurred to me.’ Warkannan yawned with a
shake of his head. ‘But what I really wonder is if I’m tired enough to fall asleep on the floor. Damn good thing we brought bedrolls. I think I’ll try it and see.’

When Zayn had woken that same morning, the first thing he’d remembered was the imp. He pulled it out of his shirt to let it soak up the sun; he could only pray that it would recover from its long time in darkness. When he inspected the road for tracks, he found none, but now that he knew about the tunnels, the lack of tracks told him nothing. Soutan might be near, far, still ahead of him to the west or long past him to the east. He had no desire to round a turn in the road and see the sorcerer waiting for him. He could take some comfort from the desolation of the countryside; in this flat, empty landscape, where the only cover stood far from the actual road, laying an ambush would be difficult.

After a long graze, the sorrel gelding had recovered from its nightmare journey. For the sake of speed, Zayn mounted and rode at a brisk walk, but always he stayed aware of the horse. He had no intention of being caught in ruined N’Dosha with a lame mount. At intervals he stopped, dismounted, and checked the road for tracks. He never found any hoofprints, but late in the afternoon he ran across a profusion of very different tracks, scrambled and messy, as if a pack of animals had rushed across the road. Off to one side he discovered a few clear prints. A mid-size animal, with thick round feet, tipped with claws – he didn’t like the look of them. Leading his horse, he followed the trail to the side of the dirt road and saw trampled, broken grass where the pack had charged through. He also found excrement, tubular, dark in colour, and still stinking though nearly dry.

‘A meat-eater,’ he said aloud. ‘A meat-eater that hunts in packs.’

And there he was, one man with no sabre or bow, nothing but a long knife that would do him no good at any sort of distance. He’d been lucky the night before, blind lucky, and he muttered a prayer of thanks to God. But if they smelled him out and attacked during the coming night, he suspected that his luck would run out and God would be busy elsewhere. He could, he supposed, climb a tree, but that would mean abandoning the sorrel.

‘I think we’ll stop here,’ he said. ‘There’s some wild wheatian growing in this field. You eat that, and then when it’s dark, we’ll keep moving.’

As he tethered the horse out in the patch of wild grain, Zayn was thinking of his comnee bow and quiver of arrows, lying on the bed in the guest room back at Marya’s manor house – not, he supposed, that he could have hit anything with them anyway. He’d never hit anything except for that one lucky shot in the Mistlands. But had it really been luck, or did the difference lie in the drug that Ammadin had given him? The drug had wiped away his old mind set to make him see things anew, and perhaps it had done the same for his physical reflexes. In that moment he finally identified the problem. Undrugged, his fingers, his arms, the muscles and tendons – they all remembered his old bowcraft with that vertically held Kazraki weapon he’d learned at such a young age, and he’d not made the properly conscious effort to teach them the new.

Every inch of him was a Recaller.

Had it been night and the galaxy risen, Zayn might have turned towards the stars and screamed curses at the ancestors who had made him what he was. Instead, he lay down to sleep with his saddle for a pillow and dreamt that he was lying in a comnee tent with Dallador’s arms around him.

Through a sweltering day, Ammadin and Loy followed the dead-straight road. Far off in the east they could see the dark line of hills, dancing in the heat haze.

‘I don’t understand,’ Ammadin said to Loy. ‘How are we supposed to find a white cliff before we reach the hills?’

‘Good question. It’s probably artificial, made of the same stuff as the border pillar.’

Loy’s guess was proved right in mid-afternoon, when they saw, ahead and beside the road, some wide, tall thing gleaming in the angled sunlight. As they rode closer, it resolved itself into a wall of white flexstone, curved in a gentle arc, ten feet high and about fifty yards long. Carvings revealed by pale grey shadow covered the surface.

‘Merde!’ Loy said. ‘I wonder just what those bas-reliefs show.’ She was leaning forward in the saddle, unsmiling, staring ahead at the wall.

‘Something you don’t want me to see?’ Ammadin said.

Loy winced. ‘Not me, Ammi. The Landfall Treaty. Ever heard of that?’

‘Yes, of course. It keeps the Kazraks from moving out onto the plains.’

‘It was also supposed to keep everyone from killing off the Chof, and the Chof from killing off us. Neither of those parts of it have worked so well.’

Behind the wall a blue and purple meadow stretched out to a stream, the same river that they had camped beside the night before. Midas trees grew along it, tangled here with pink bamboid and tall maroon ferns. Neither Ammadin nor Loy wanted to wait to look at the wall until after they made camp. They did tend the horses first, and out of prudence wrapped the dead yap-packer with fresh leaves, then sank it in the cold river with stones. They left the rest of their gear in a heap and headed for the flexstone.

Ammadin felt her heart pounding. Here there could be answers, here there could be truth. The first panel, at the end of the wall on the side facing the road, displayed just that, not that she could grasp it at that moment. The carving showed the Herd as she had always seen it, but near the spiral floated a lone dot with an arrow connecting it to a square. Inside the square was a big dot with circles around it. Another arrow pointed to the small dot on the fourth circle.

Ammadin shrugged and moved on to the next panel, which told her even less. A round ball, marked with a row of little squares and some wavy lines, supported a long cluster of what might have been tubes wound round with ropes and decorated with dots and arrowheads. At the far end of the tubes dangled another ball, much smaller, decorated with three arrowheads, point to point to form a circular symbol. At the third picture, however, she felt her breath catch in her throat. Flying things were sailing over the plains, flying things were landing among hills, long sleek tubular machines with pointed noses and swept-back wings.

‘Merde!’ Loy muttered. ‘Well, so much for that.’

‘What do you mean?’ Ammadin said.

‘So much for the Landfall Treaty and you. The Tribes aren’t supposed to know all this.’

‘Why?’

‘Because your ancestors didn’t want you to know.’

‘That doesn’t make any sense. Why the lies?’ Ammadin turned to look at her. ‘I’m sick to death of hearing one lie after another.’

Loy took a frightened step back. Ammadin followed.

‘Why tell the Kazraks they came from over the seas, why tell us we’ve always been here? Water Woman told me that the Tribes came with the rest of you, in those ships.’ Ammadin pointed to the carvings. ‘She was right, wasn’t she? Why have you people been lying to us?’

‘Because that’s what we promised to do. It’s all in the Landfall Treaty.’

‘Oh is it? How come I’ve never heard all of it, then?’

‘Hey!’ Loy snarled right back. ‘Do you think I like to lie? My business is finding out the truth of things.’

Ammadin took a deep breath and spoke more calmly. ‘No, I don’t suppose you do like it. Sorry. I’m just so sick of being frustrated by half-told stories.’

‘So am I. Look, I’ve studied the Landfall Treaty for years. I’ve picked it clean of every scrap of historical information I could, and I’ve spent more years hunting down surviving letters and other records from that period. Even so, I can’t tell you everything because I don’t know everything. But I’ll tell you what I know. Fair?’

‘Fair. After all, it’s the only bargain we can strike.’

‘That’s true, isn’t it? Unfortunately.’ Loy paused for a smile. ‘But anyway, your ancestors left their home planet to live an entirely new way. Now, I don’t know what they left behind. That’s an answer that’s eluded me for my entire career. We know the Kazraks wanted a place where they could be pure and live simple religious lives without a lot of machines around. No secrets there. But your people – they’re the mystery, because after that first generation, no one knew the truth.’

‘Wait! You mean my ancestors lied to their own children.’