The Sentinel Mage (54 page)

“After a fashion,” Bennick said. “We’re Brothers.”

Jaumé looked at the men. They were short and tall, dark and fair, lean, stocky. He saw skin of all shades and hair of all colors, from Bennick’s red-blond to a dark-skinned man with hair so black it seemed to suck up the daylight. The only things they seemed to have in common were their efficiency of movement and their quiet, unhurried discipline. “Brothers?”

“Brothers of the sword.” Bennick pushed to his feet and looked down at him. His eyes smiled, the way Da’s eyes used to smile. “We were all like you once, lad. Orphans. You can be our Brother, too. If you have what we need.”

Jaumé looked up at him. “What’s that?”

“Courage. Quickness. Toughness. You have all those, lad. It just remains to be seen whether you have enough.” Bennick crouched. His face lost its good-humor, became serious. “The training’s hard, lad. Very hard. But I think you’re strong enough. And so does Nolt. You’re a survivor, else you wouldn’t have made it this far.”

Jaumé stared back at Bennick. His heart was beating loudly. He knew he was on the brink of something momentous. “Training?”

“In Fith. Our home. We’ll be going there after Ankeny.” Bennick’s eyes held his, steady and serious, blue. “Journey home with us, lad. Undergo the training. Become our Brother.”

Home. Brother.
The words resonated inside him, in time with the beating of his heart.

Bennick straightened. “You coming, lad?”

Jaumé took a deep breath. “Yes,” he said.

CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

“C
HANGE WITH
E
BRIL
,” Cora told her the next morning. “And show Petrus and Gerit where the assassins are.”

Innis nodded. She glanced around. Three soldiers had gone to retrieve the horses. Everyone else was gathered at the fire, checking weapons.

She walked across to the stack of supplies, pretending to rummage among the sacks as she eased her feet out of Justen’s boots. Ebril came up alongside her, whistling between his teeth. Innis handed him the amulet. “Here.”

Ebril kicked off his boots. His features wavered, solidified again, he grew taller, his hair became light brown instead of red. He bent to pull on Justen’s boots. Innis cast a glance at the fire. No one was watching them. She slipped the baldric over her head and laid it on the sacks, then let herself shift back into her own shape. The forest-green uniform grew baggy. She had to hold on to the trews to stop them sliding off her hips. “He’s asked Justen to call him Harkeld,” she told Ebril as he picked up the baldric.

Ebril stopped whistling. His eyebrows rose.

“When you’re in private.”

Ebril nodded, and headed back to the fire and Prince Harkeld. Petrus was already shedding his clothes. “Once the look-out’s dead, one of us will fly back,” Innis heard him tell Prince Tomas as he peeled off his shirt. “Don’t move until then.”

Tomas looked up from the arrows he was checking. “How are you going to kill him?”

“Tip him out of the cave,” Petrus said. “One of us will wait at the bottom, in case he survives the fall.”

Tomas nodded, and went back to his task.

Innis shifted. She stood for a moment in the nest of her shirt and trews, letting the sense of
bird
sink into her bones, then stretched her wings and leapt into the air.

The canyon floor dropped away beneath her. When she was level with the top of the cliffs, she glanced down. Cora was collecting their piles of clothing. In the distance she saw the soldiers returning with the horses. Petrus soared on her right, his feathers gleaming with the sheen of magic. Gerit was on her left.

They skimmed across the rocky plateau, gliding down into the mouth of the canyon from the northeast, out of the assassins’ line of sight. Innis landed on an upthrusting spire of orange-red sandstone and shifted into the shape of a skylark. Alongside her, Gerit and Petrus did the same.

They flew through the forest of rock, flitting from outcrop to outcrop. Innis landed again. She shifted into a lizard and scuttled up and over a lip of rock. Ahead, in their cave, were the six assassins. They were eating. She caught the scent of dried meat, of cheese.

She gave Gerit and Petrus a few minutes to examine the surroundings, then sidled back over the lip of rock and became a sky lark again. They followed as she flew, as she landed, as she shifted into a lizard. Her tiny claws scraped on the sandstone as she scuttled up to a shaded vantage point. There, tucked in his cave, staring south down the canyon, was the seventh assassin.

They watched in silence for several minutes. Innis felt a twinge of sorrow as she observed the man. Shortly, he’d be dead. His eyes would never blink again, he’d never rub his bearded face again, never breathe again.

She pushed the emotion aside, annoyed with herself. Sorrow, for a Fithian assassin? The man would kill her without a second’s hesitation—and certainly no regret.

She looked at Petrus.
Be careful.
But the words went unuttered; her lizard’s tongue wasn’t shaped for speech. She touched her shoulder to his.

Petrus nudged her back. He closed one reptilian eye in a wink and flicked his tail at her, a silent
Be gone.

Innis backed away, leaving them to their task.

H
ARKELD DIDN’T OFFER
to help saddle the horses; neither Tomas nor his men were easy in his presence any more.
And yet today they’ll risk their lives for me.

No, it wasn’t him they risked their lives for; it was Lundegaard.

He looked down at the sand, scuffed it with the toe of his boot. Today Tomas would try to keep him alive. But once Ivek’s curse was broken, what would happen? If they met, would Tomas try to kill him?

He glanced at Tomas, saddling the last of the horses.
You were a good friend.

Harkeld turned away. Cora was assembling a bundle. He saw clothes, boots, a baldric and sword.

“Ach!” Justen said. “Cursed things!”

“Put out the fire,” Harkeld said, turning to see the armsman stamping at something on the sand.

Justen bent, scooping up a handful of sand. “No scorpions on the Groot Islands, the All-Mother be praised.” He cast the sand on the fire and bent again. “Although we have this fly that bites—” He uttered a yelp and jerked back, shaking his hand.

“Scorpion?” Harkeld half-ran to his armsman’s side and grabbed his hand.

Justen’s face was screwed up in pain. “Son of a whore.”

Cora looked up. “What’s wrong?”

“Scorpion.” Harkeld examined Justen’s hand. The puncture wound was small, but the skin around it was rapidly reddening, swelling. “Does it hurt?”

“Like you wouldn’t believe,” Justen said through clenched teeth.

One of the archers, checking his bow beside the still smoldering fire, uttered a choked cry. He jerked back, beating frantically at his leg.

“Everyone away from the fire,” Harkeld snapped. “And someone put the cursed thing out!”

H
ARKELD CROUCHED BESIDE
his armsman. Justen was shivering. “Blankets,” he said curtly to one of Tomas’s soldiers. The man ran to obey.

The archer who’d been stung groaned. He stretched his leg out in front of him, grimacing, massaging his calf.

Tomas strode up. “What’s wrong?”

Harkeld glanced at him. “Two scorpion stings.”

Tomas swore under his breath. He looked at Cora. “Is it too late to call the shapeshifters back?”

She nodded.

“One of them’s coming now,” a soldier said, pointing north.

Harkeld followed the direction of the man’s finger. The hawk had dark plumage. “It’s the girl. Innis.”

I
NNIS LANDED BESIDE
the neatly stacked supplies. Ten saddled horses stood waiting; the rest were picketed by the river. Everyone was clustered around something on the ground. Cora broke away from the group and hurried towards her.

Innis shifted, reaching for a blanket. “What’s wrong?”

“Ebril’s been stung by a scorpion.” Cora had lost her calm. Her voice was terse, urgent. “And one of the archers. Fly back and see if you can stop them.”

Innis didn’t bother to reply. She dropped the blanket. Magic surged through her. She pushed up into the sky almost before the shift was complete.

The campsite shrank rapidly behind her. At the mouth of the canyon she changed in mid-air to a skylark, plummeting for a moment, clawing with her wings to stay aloft. She sped towards the cave where the look-out hid, swooping over a fin of rock—

The cave was empty. Beneath it, on the rust-orange sand, the assassin lay sprawled. His legs were twisted at an impossible angle: broken. His face was raked by claws and his throat ripped out. Blood soaked into the sand, dark.

Petrus and Gerit stood beside the body.

Innis glided down and shifted.

“What’s wrong?” Petrus asked. He wiped a smear of blood from his face with one hand.

“Ebril’s been stung by a scorpion. And one of the archers.”

Her words hung in the air for a moment, and then Gerit swore: “Son of a whore.”

Petrus looked down at the dead man. “It’s too late to stop now. We have to go on.”

H
ARKELD SWUNG UP
into the saddle and settled his baldric more comfortably across his back.

“Ready?” Tomas asked.

He nodded and looked back at his armsman. Justen lay wrapped in blankets. His face was pallid, shiny with sweat, contorted in pain.

“Then let’s go.”

They left at a slow trot—Tomas, five soldiers, Cora, himself—riding in silence towards Ner. The canyon curved, turning north. Harkeld glanced back once, and then kept his gaze grimly ahead. Justen had ridden at his side for the last month. Now Cora rode there. He felt unarmed, naked, exposed.

A low moan accompanied them, teased from the cliffs by the wind. Above, riding the currents effortlessly, was the dark hawk. Seeing her up there was oddly comforting. It made him feel safer.

Outcrops of rock pushed up from the sand ahead, pillars and walls of red-orange sandstone. They followed the hawk, making their way silently between the towering monoliths. A second hawk joined her. Petrus, his underwings and breast pale. All around them, the rock sang its eerie song.

Harkeld’s skin prickled. Somewhere in this maze were six Fithians. The sounds the horses made—the muffled
clop
of their hooves in the sand, the faint jingle of the harnesses—seemed to shout their presence to the assassins.

They skirted a long ridge of rock, passed from shade into sunlight again, and suddenly the desert opened out before them, an undulating orange sea stretching east, north, west.

Directly ahead, perhaps half a mile distant, a broken tower jutted from the sand. The river curved away to the east, hugging the cliffs. North and east, several miles into the desert, a vast hump of orange rock squatted in the sand.

“The catacombs are inside that?” he asked Cora.

She nodded. “Yes. But don’t worry; it’s daylight. The corpses will be dormant.”

The pale hawk peeled off, heading back into the maze of sandstone. Harkeld followed it with his eyes for a moment.
Be careful.

G
ERIT WAS WHERE
Petrus had left him: in lizard form, watching the six assassins in their cave.

Petrus glided past him—above the men’s line of sight—and swooped down to land behind a fin of sandstone. A moment later, a skylark flitted down alongside him. The bird folded its wings and shifted, became Gerit. “They’ve passed?”

“Halfway to the catacombs by now,” Petrus said. “How shall we work this? Sneak into the cave and shift into lions—”

Gerit snorted. “You want to kill as many as possible, that’s not the way to do it.”

“But we’d have the element of surprise—”