The Tracker (10 page)

“Not Loria,” Master Maraudi mumbled again and again. “That made the most sense out of the choices she had.”

“You smell,” the tracker called.

“Excuse me?”

“You smell, you and that funeral director at your side, and your zoo man with shuffle caked in his crack!” the tracker yelled. “All of you are interfering with her scent. Go stand by the horses and get out of my air. Have a snack or drown yourselves in the pond. Just go away. She has a troublesome scent to ferret out and I need a little time.”

“Not Loria. You are sure about this?” Keth called as she and Master Maraudi rounded the pond.

“Not Loria,” the tracker said. “There is nothing of her in the east. Well, shuffle man? Do you have shuffle in your ears as well? Shoo.”

Arden retreated, but only halfway around the pond. He thought a very firm command into the tracker’s mind.
Stay close to me
. The tracker instantly headed north, but stopped at ten paces to breathe. Everyone waited as he went west and north, west and north again. Keth and Dieter got comfortable on rocks to have a meal; Master Maraudi trailed away to inspect the ruins of the palace.

“How goes it?” Arden called after some time.

“She left Lighmoon, and not in an easterly or southerly direction,” the tracker said. He was speaking to the sky. “Why is that, eh? With stolen jewels? Even in the Cascades, we would have thought to run east. Plenty of people in the border towns, in Loria, plenty of people who won’t ask for ownership papers. I’d go east. Richer country.” He glanced over his shoulder to Arden. “Aren’t you hungry? Are you that anxious to clap me back in my cage and hunt down a woman who makes no difference to you?”

“Did she go to the fishers?” Dieter called. “Odri fishers? That would be straight west from here.”

“I smell this scent from the west, yes, but it’s fleeting. The smell of a passage, not a settlement like Lighmoon is a settlement to her. But north too . . . Give me time to see if I can narrow it and then we’ll go on.”

Arden watched the small fish swim in the water as he waited. This was a nice change of pace from working in the perindens. Tolaman had to be quite sour over Arden’s abandoned tasks, and there would be twice as much to do when Arden returned as the first lead’s revenge. Yet that was not a care for today. The sky was clear and the wind sweet, and he was standing upon a monument that would impress people should ever he have someone to tell.

Grass swished and he looked over mildly to see which direction the tracker was going in now to sniff. Then he leaped away from the pond and shouted, “Hey!”

The tracker was running away. The chain at his ankles shortened his strides, but he was going as fast as it allowed. Keth and Dieter looked up as Arden bolted after the beast, commands to
stop
flying through his mind. The tracker obeyed none of them. He did, however, slow just a smidgen and look over his shoulder.

Arden was not in control of this animal. He wasn’t in control because the tracker was barely an animal at all. Sprinting through the tassel grass and leaping a rock, he narrowed the distance with his unfettered strides. The tracker’s breath was loud and ragged as he cut through the last of the field and made it into the trees.

They grew thickly and with heavy canopies hanging down; vines snaked around their trunks and dripped from their branches, smothered boulders and twined around fallen logs. Choked out by leaves, what slim sunlight penetrated was dyed a deep green and did little to alleviate the shadows. Arden slipped between trees in pursuit of the tracker and for a moment panicked when he disappeared. Then he reappeared not thirty feet ahead, hands grasping a boulder as he heaved his bound legs over them.

Stop
, Arden thought.
STOP
.

The tracker let out a shout as he vanished again. Arden ran on, swerving around the trees and rocks, batting his hands to part the hanging vines and cobwebs. Weeds had brought down a metal fence that had enclosed a carved stone slab. Someone had been buried here, presumably when the palace still stood. The engraved words had faded away and the slab was cracked. Should there be more graves in these woods, nature was concealing them whole.

Arden reached the boulder and heaved himself over it. The tracker had carved a shallow trench in the leaves and rocks of the ravine on the other side from sliding down it. At the bottom, he was on his side and kicking frantically. The chain connecting his ankles had gotten caught in the broken trunk of a tree. Standing unbalanced at the top of the ravine, Arden took one step and the ground gave. The world spun before his eyes and he fell.

He tumbled to the bottom in a hailstorm of loosed rocks and plant debris. Vines were tangled around his legs. The tracker was wrestling fiercely with the chain. The wood cracked a little and he shouted in harsh glee. Pulling even more strongly, he grunted and jerked his head to get his hair out of his eyes. Arden yanked off the vines and scrambled to his feet just as the wood cracked all the way down to the base where it met the soil. The tracker prized out the chain and started to clamber upright. Diving for him, Arden wrapped his arm around the tracker’s thighs and took them both down to the earth. The tracker thrust himself over onto his back and kicked, but Arden only refastened his grip.

STOP. STOP. STOP!

He could see the expression in the tracker’s eyes change. His commands were making headway, but the degree was exceedingly small. His fingers curling into a fist, the tracker shouted, “I will not stop! I will go home, damn your Dagad and damn your jewel thief and damn you!” He threw his fist and nailed Arden in the throat, but the blow did not carry the full force with which it had started.

STOP! STOP! STOP!

They wrestled as Keth and Dieter shouted for them in the woods. Arden caught the tracker’s hands and pinned him down. The tracker thrashed like a fish and said, “Please.
Please
, Arden, I am begging you.” There were tears in his beautiful green eyes. “Just let me go.”

“I cannot,” Arden said.

“Please, you are a prisoner, too! How can you not see this? How can you not wish for freedom? You have accepted your chains when you must not ever!” The tracker increased his struggles and heaved Arden off. Arden threw out his hand and caught the chain, so when the tracker began to run, he immediately fell.

Keth was sliding down the ravine in a cloud of dirt. The tracker kicked Arden, who commanded
STOP
with all of his might and held onto the chain. As the soldier neared, the tracker said, “Don’t tell me to stop!”

They scuffled for control of the chain.
STOP IT NOW
.

“No! You are not a bad man, Arden. I can see that within you. Do not do a bad thing,” the tracker pleaded. “Release me and you will have my friendship from now to the grave for righting a great wrong done against all the people of the Cascades!”

“There is nothing I can do to help you,” Arden said, but in his heart, he was apologizing.

Keth had almost reached them, and Dieter’s head appeared above the boulder. A rain of dirt sprayed over Arden and the tracker, going into Arden’s right eye and making him blink at the sting. The tracker took advantage of his distraction and wrenched away the chain.

A big rock flew through the air and pegged the tracker on the head. He crumpled to the ground. Breathing hard, Keth lowered her arm. Then she yanked up torn vines and tossed one at Arden. “Quick! Bind him while he’s unconscious!”

It took time to get back to the pond. Getting up the ravine was the worst of it. They only accomplished it by braiding three strong vines together, knotting one end of it to the tracker’s legs, and hurling the other end up to Dieter. He strained and pulled, the tracker moving little by little up the slope, and then Master Maraudi appeared and it went much faster.

“Why’s your penchant not working then, eh?” Dieter asked once the ravine was behind them. “Did you wear it out with the battle gold or something? Need to save it up some more?”

“My penchant is for animals,” Arden said. At last he grasped what was going on. “This is not an animal. This is a human with an animal-like ability, so my control over him is very limited.”

“Then he will have to remain in his cage and he can piss out the bars,” Master Maraudi grunted, the tracker over his shoulder. Waking up, the man groaned and swore. The bindings around him were so tight that he could only thrash. Arden was ashamed at how Keth and Dieter were looking at him, though this was not his fault. His penchant was not for human beings.

Twin to the shame was guilt. As the tracker was actually a man, the way he was being treated was an outrage. Slavery was a custom of Isle Zayre, for Dagad’s sake, and outlawed in Odri and Havanath. Havanath engaged in quite restricted trade with Isle Zayre as a result: its citizenry was very disapproving of a practice that it had made illegal two centuries in the past. Loria’s citizens could only purchase bonded men for five years, and then the debts that had remanded them into custody were considered paid off. And in those five years, they were limited to twelve hours a day of work, and could not be punished by a beating that exceeded six lashes or blows. That was true of everyone save the most corrupt criminals, and they were not used as household servants or shop help but sent to the mines to live out their lifetime sentences beneath the earth.

And yes, Arden as a penchant of Odri belonged to the king, but Arden was paid for his work and held most legal privileges! That was not the same as a brutalized man of Isle Zayre, who could have his parents and siblings, wife and children ripped from his arms and sold off over the years of his life, who had no education or rights of any sort, no hopes of ever earning his freedom, who could be killed by his master, and that master would not be held accountable.

The kidnapping of this man, the cage and forced work, beatings and starvation, it was a shameful scene all around. Arden was out of his depths with it. And never,
never
could the tracker be in the perindens as an exhibit. Some visitor would be rightly filled with pity and outrage and try to set him free, or carry the story to the press about a man in the king’s captivity who had never been convicted of a crime. The storm that that would kick up . . . Tolaman’s anger . . . the rage of the Master-at-Arms and the king’s man . . .

Having none of the internal struggle that Arden was engaged in, Master Maraudi chucked the tracker into the cage and slammed the door shut. The tracker squirmed about in an effort to throw himself at the door, but it was locked by the time he banged against it.

“You will tell us what we want to know, and you will keep all of your body parts as payment,” Master Maraudi said matter-of-factly. “You only need one finger to point us in the right direction, and you don’t need toes or a tongue at all. Just a little food and water will keep you alive, so you have a decision to make about your level of comfort on this track.”

“Let me
go
!” the tracker shouted. He wriggled around and prized a hand free. With that, he tugged and tore at the vines. “What right have you to detain me? What right have any of you? I have a home and a family-”

“And I have a job!” Master Maraudi said. “My job is to find this woman. Her condition is very important to me. Yours is not. Which direction should we be headed?” When the tracker didn’t answer, the soldier reached through the bars and grasped his foot just as the vines fell away. He pulled the foot outside the cage and ordered, “Arden, you shove yourself into what little of an animal mind he has and force him to take this seriously.”

Arden touched the tracker’s mind but did not implant a message there. It was the first order he ever received that he did not obey since coming into the king’s service. This was wrong, so undeniably
wrong
, and disturbing. This was not a chicken, not a dog, not a dragon or a horse, and Arden had no business in his mind. The tracker stared at him, his green eyes burning with defiance, and then a degree of uncertainty entered them when Arden left him alone.

Still holding onto the tracker’s foot and unaware that the command had not been given, Master Maraudi said, “Keth, you’re in charge of handling his human mind. He doesn’t seem to believe me, so get out your knife and pick the toe he’ll miss the least.”

At the instant whisper of a knife being withdrawn, the tracker snatched his foot away. “No! No!”

“Very good,” Master Maraudi said, Dieter smiling meanly to see the tracker bullied into helping. Arden felt sick to watch. “Which way?”

Then they were riding back down Shattered Hill, past the pond and palace, the destroyed apartments and newer construction having met its end. The tracker said nothing. He only gestured when they came to the base of the hill, and they turned right onto the road. Sitting sullenly on the floor of the cage, he undid the last of the vines and pushed them out to fall on the ground. The blow of the rock had left a bloody spot on his scalp. It wasn’t bleeding much, but he touched it and winced. Turning baleful eyes to the back of Keth’s head, he held onto a bar to keep steady as the cage jounced.

They traveled all afternoon, out of Brazia and through a scratch of a town called Ghirg. At the end of the main road, a crowd of excited schoolchildren ran up to peer into the cage. “Who do you got in there?” “Is he a bad one?” “What did he do, eh?” “A thief! I bet he’s a thief! What did he steal?”