The Outworlder (29 page)

“Well, you must not listen much to mine,
then,” said Jared with a laugh. “Because none of the stories I tell
are as carefully crafted as that!”

“Sometimes the singer doesn’t know what he
sings.” Rafe shrugged. “Anyway, we’re wasting time. We’ve got to
make some history here—we need to prove that our reading is the
right one!”

They set off at a quicker pace. Jared led
them back along the serpentine route through the city toward the
river and the water gate. He never stopped to consider his
direction, nor did he mistake his route this time.

“I wish my sense of direction were this
flawless!” Brytnoth muttered to Rafe as they pounded down the
streets behind Jared.

“Spend a few years navigating the desert and
you’ll get there!” Rafe answered.

At last, they pulled up next to the long
flight of stairs that led over the high city walls. Brytnoth
sprawled on the lowest step, breathing hard.

“What a run!” Brytnoth exclaimed.

“Take a moment only, friends,” Jared said
softly. “Something feels wrong here…but I don’t know what. I’ve got
this strange crawling sensation in my spine.”

At that, Brytnoth was scrambling back to his
feet. “What do you mean, a crawling sensation?”

“Perhaps our friend is giving a ride to some
of the less desirable inhabitants of dark, dusty, underground
places,” Rafe suggested.

“No, I’m not.” Jared reached over and flicked
a large spider off Rafe’s shoulder and into the darkness behind
them. “But you are.”

He turned and began making his way cautiously
up the stairs. Brytnoth hesitated a moment, then plucked Rafe’s
sleeve.

“I don’t have one of those things on me, do
I?”

Rafe checked him over, and then slapped him
on the shoulder. “Nope. You’re good.”

As they started up the steps behind Jared,
Brytnoth said, “Thanks. Too many legs, you know.”

In spite of Jared’s apprehension, they met no
danger on the steps, and soon they were standing once more on the
level outside the city walls.

“Well, maybe everything’s fine after all,”
Jared muttered.

“No!” Rafe shouted. He leaped toward the
river, a curse punctuating every step.

“Where the hell is the boat?” he shouted over
his shoulder.

At that, Brytnoth and Jared dashed after him,
half-running, half-sliding down the bank to the water’s edge. The
boat was nowhere to be seen.

Brytnoth dropped to the ground and put his
head in his hands. “No, no, no, no!” he mumbled, clutching his hair
as if to pull it out by the roots.

Jared walked five or six paces down river,
viciously kicking the rushes that whispered against his boots. When
his short search yielded no sign of their boat, he hung his head
and clenched his fists until the knuckles turned white. The force
of his frustration enveloped him like a sandstorm, and because he
didn’t know whether to weep like a child or yell curses like a
drunk man, he did nothing at all.

I’ve failed her
, he thought.
We’ll
never get back in time. Not now. Not without a way to get back
upriver.

“What now?” Rafe asked from behind him, fury
seething in his voice. “How are we supposed to get back to Albadir
without a boat?”

Jared took a deep breath and turned his face
toward the east. The sky was just beginning to brighten, and a
furtive dawn breeze fluttered against his cheeks.

“Well,” he said, rejoining the others, “we
can start running.”

“Run?” Brytnoth asked despairingly. “Jared,
you can’t possibly be serious!”

Jared arched an eyebrow. “Do we have another
choice? And maybe we’ll find the boat further upstream.”

“That’s a fool’s hope,” Rafe said with a
shake of his head. “The boat was stolen, or sunk, or both. The
current would have driven it up against the water gate, not back
upstream.”

Jared shrugged. “So be it. But if we don’t
try to get back to Albadir, Sahara will die.”

Without another word, he turned and set off
at a fierce pace along the riverbank. Brytnoth groaned and Rafe
held out a hand to haul him to his feet.

“Got to run,” Rafe said with a grin. “Care to
join me? You’ll love it.”

Brytnoth laughed then and adjusted his pack.
“Waiting for you, princess,” he said. “Just waiting for you.”

*****

Sahara sat on a low stone bench, shackled
hand and foot to an iron post driven into the marble floor about
two feet away. There was a fiercely cold wind gusting through the
high window in the outer wall of her prison chamber, but no blanket
had been given to her. Her clothes were tattered and crusted with
blood in places, but her face, though bruised, was confident. Even
proud.

She leaned her head back against the harsh
stones and smiled softly
. He is coming…he is on his way
, she
thought, feeding her hungry soul on the wellspring of hope and joy
that bubbled up within her. She had retreated to this thought so
many times, taking comfort in the certainty that she would not just
be abandoned to her fate.

It was strange, she reflected, that she had
never known freedom until it was so far from her. Her entire life
was now circumscribed by a circle four feet in diameter, and yet it
had liberated her soul. She felt a strange sense of calm and peace
knowing that her fate rested in someone else’s hands—she had done
all she could do, and now she just had to wait for her knight in
shining armor to show up and take care of the rest.

The thought of Jared as a knight at all still
made her smile. He was prudent almost to a fault and preferred
stealth to open confrontation, but she had seen flashes of the fell
warrior beneath the minstrel’s gentle exterior. It was in there,
she knew—perhaps she would finally see it if he really did come to
her rescue.

When
he comes
, she
told herself fiercely.
When
, not if.
When.

With a horrific sound that made her jump in
spite of herself, the heavy door suddenly rasped against its
hinges. Through the gaping black maw, two dark, hooded figures
entered. One carried a bowl of some thin gruel, which he set on the
floor on the far side of the iron post.

“Time to feed, human filth,” he said.

Sahara laughed and shook her head. “You know,
you’re going to regret that you ever demanded my life.”

“Oh, yes. We forgot that you’re expecting to
be rescued before you die,” the other figure sneered. “It’s too bad
that they’ll have to run all the way here, since their boat is now
at the bottom of the Alba River.”

Sahara didn’t move, but her eyes
narrowed.

A jagged chuckle came from somewhere inside
the darkness of their hooded heads. “What, you think we didn’t
know? You think we were blind? You think we had no scouts trailing
them? We were warned, you see. Childir’s message only reached us in
part, but we heard enough to set plans in motion.”

Sahara said nothing for a moment, but when
their hideous laughter began again, she remarked, “Enjoy this
moment, because your day of mirth is at an end. This wind that
blows through the window brings your death-day ever nearer.”

The laughter stopped abruptly. The payment
for her brave words was a stunning blow across the face.

“Eat that with your gruel, you filthy maggot.
That’ll teach you to ape prophecy!”

Sahara’s chains rattled against the stone as
she lifted a hand to her cheek. With another wave of terrible
laughter, the figures were swallowed up in the darkness beyond the
door, and it closed with a bone-jarring bang behind them.

Alone once again, Sahara could not stop the
tears from flowing.
It can’t be true
, she thought.
I
warned him in time…I know I warned him in time!

Despair, fear, and anger swelled within her
until she felt she would fly into a million pieces. She let it all
vent out into her silent cry.

Jared! Tell me it isn’t true!

Rafe and Brytnoth, trailing fifty or so paces
behind Jared, suddenly saw him reel and fall to the earth as though
someone had struck him violently.

“Jared!” Rafe called. “Are you all
right?”

When Jared neither moved nor spoke, the two
broke into a sprint and reached him a few seconds later.

“He’s breathing,” observed Brytnoth with
relief.

“It’s true, it’s true, it’s true,” Jared
moaned. “God, I’m so sorry!”

“What are you talking about?” Rafe asked,
helping him to sit up. “Your nose is bleeding! Did you run into….”
He stopped and looked around, realizing in a flash that there was
nothing in their immediate vicinity that could have done such
damage.

Jared swiped at his nose and saw the back of
his hand come away red with blood. His face, even without the
nosebleed, was as utterly forlorn as Brytnoth had ever seen it.

“It was her,” Brytnoth said matter-of-factly.
“Wasn’t it, Jared?”

Jared nodded, taking the cloth Rafe offered
and holding it against his nose for a moment. “I heard her
voice—she was so angry, so desperately afraid…and I could say
nothing! I couldn’t hold her at all…I could offer no words to
encourage her, no consolation.” He gritted his teeth. “What if I’ve
lost the ability to communicate with her? What if….” His voice
trailed off, but with an effort he finished the sentence, “What if
I’ve lost her and I’ll never be able to find her again?”

Rafe shook his head. “I don’t think you can
lose her, Jared. We don’t know anything about this mind-speech
thing anyway, you know. I always thought it was just a myth! What
if she broke the communication on her side? I mean, you said she
was desperate and angry and afraid—maybe if there’s too much
emotion, the communication breaks down or something.”

“That sounds reasonable, Jared,” said
Brytnoth. “You should try to reach her. Later. When you’re calmer
and she is too, presumably. I’m sure it’s not as bleak as you
think.”

Jared took the cloth from his face and smiled
at his friends. “I hope you’re right,” he said.

“Well, hope is what we’re in the business to
provide right now,” said Rafe with a grin. “Not just for her,
either. But sitting around here doesn’t get us anywhere.” He stood
and pulled Jared up with him. “Come on. Let’s go kill us a
dragon!”

By midday they had to stop. They were back in
the dense underbrush that clung to the water’s edge, and it
provided adequate cover for a bivouac.

Brytnoth dropped his pack at the foot of a
tree and went to the river to splash his face with water. When he
returned, his hair dripping, a fierce frown had settled on his lips
and between his brows.

“What’s wrong with you?” Rafe asked. “Did you
swallow a toad or something?”

“No.”

Brytnoth’s uncharacteristic curtness made
Jared glance up from his meal preparations. “What’s going on,
then?” he asked.

“I think I’ve found something.”

Jared and Rafe both rose to their feet.

“What? What did you find?” Rafe prompted.

“Come and see.”

He led the way back to the river’s edge. When
they were assembled on the bank, Brytnoth pointed to the middle of
the swiftly-flowing water. Something was protruding from the water,
barely large enough to create a small swirl in the current.

“What is that?” Rafe asked, squinting hard.
“It looks like a stick.”

“Wait for it.”

A moment later, the sun flared out from
behind a cloud, and the thing in the water shone like a beacon.

“That’s metal,” remarked Jared. “What would
something metal be doing….” His voice trailed off, and his face
went white with fury. “That’s our boat,” he gritted between
clenched teeth. “That’s our damn boat out there in the middle of
the river.”

Rafe’s mouth opened and shut wordlessly. “How
did it get all the way up here?” he finally managed to ask.

“Don’t you see?” said Brytnoth, his voice
like ice. “They found it. They brought it here. They sunk it. They
knew. They knew all along.”

After a moment’s pause, Jared asked, “Can we
get it out?”

“No way,” Brytnoth said, shaking his head.
“We’d need cables and some way of pulling it up to the surface.
We’d never be able to lift it.”

Jared ran a hand through his hair in utter
frustration and swore softly under his breath. When he raised his
eyes he was shocked to see Rafe’s face plastered with a huge
grin.

“What’s so funny about this?” he snapped.

“We don’t have to lift it,” Rafe answered,
eyes shining as though he’d found Heaven. Jared and Brytnoth both
stared at him,

“What the hell are you talking about?”
Brytnoth barked. “Of course we have to….”

“No, we don’t. Not this boat.”

“You’d best explain what you mean right now,”
Jared said slowly, impatience lacing his voice as well.

Rafe seemed oblivious to his friends’
annoyance. He was almost dancing in his excitement. “Didn’t I tell
you that Arnauld’s boat used the latest and greatest technology?
Didn’t I? Well, that technology, from the rumors I’ve heard
swirling about, included an underwater propulsion system.”

“What!” Jared burst out. The swell of hope
was so extraordinary that it made him angry.

“I’m telling you—all we have to do is swim
down there and activate it! The boat can bring itself up. And then
we can use it again!”

Jared stared at Rafe for a moment, at the
radiant joy in his eyes and the smile on his lips, and then he
started to laugh.

Once he started, he couldn’t stop. Then the
tears came, running down his cheeks as he laughed and laughed. Rafe
and Brytnoth were soon laughing with him, and the sound echoed
through the forest on their left and over the water on their
right.

“Well, so who’s going to swim down there and
turn on the boat?” Brytnoth asked when at last they lay on the bank
with aching sides and light hearts.