fate's pawn 9 cliffie bonus

 

Chapter 9

 

Five young people slipped through the spinney and walked beside the road as far as the inn, about a mile further down the road. The slave pen was on the other side of the road.

“Stay here,” said Kaz. “When the guards outside the slave pen move, cross the road.”

She disappeared into the darkness, sure-footed for not having to worry about only her sight, which was better at night than her fellows anyway.

It was a nerve-wracking quarter hour for her comrades, but then there was the sound of metal on metal the other side of the inn.

“She’s in a fight! We should go help her!” hissed Lelyn.

“We’ll obey orders,” said Protasion. “Look the guards are running towards the sound of the fighting!”

They crossed the road, and ran round behind the slave hut.

Kaz was already there.

“Sing a folk song from your own tongue,” said Kaz to Svargia.

Svargia obliged. Someone inside the hut joined in the chorus.

“Tell them we’re here to rescue them, and to take time to drink and grab anything they might need,” said Kaz. “Sing it so the guards just think they are singing.

Svargia relayed this, tunefully, and held a brief conversation in song. There was a scuffle and a thump.

“Spy,” said Svargia, laconically.

Kaz nodded to Protasion, the biggest and strongest of them, and he produced the axe. Svargia cast the spell on it, and Kuros raised a silencing spell. With the supernaturally sharp axe, even though the spell only lasted for a very short while, a hole was quickly cut, two blows each on each pole top and bottom being sufficient. The spell failed on the last pole, but Kaz renewed the silencing, and Protasion must rely on main strength to finish cutting.

 Svargia wriggled inside, followed by Kaz.

“Tell them to get the hell out, and stay to this side of the road and low for as far as possible before crossing to the lake side,” said Kaz. “They can work down to the end of the lake – it’s about five and twenty miles – and cross the river, or get lost in Mesolimnos and look for a caravan to join, or whatever.”

Svargia relayed this, and spoke sharply when the leader would have thanked them. The slaves went through the hole.

“Take your traitor too,” said Kaz. “I don’t care if you slit his throat, take him back for trial, or dump him somewhere frightened into not saying a word, if he was coerced. But take him away.”

The slaves filed out. Kaz regarded the hut. The slaves did not even have the dignity of bunks, sleeping on the floor in piles of rather rank hay. Someone had scrabbled the hay away from where the cuts had been made to the wall. Most of the scarring of the axe was on the outside, the timbers having splintered on the inside.

“That will work,” said Kaz. “Protasion, make sure the section you cut out is tied together, smear mud on any rope, and rope it so we can draw it away as we leave.”

Protasion began that, and Kaz pushed most of the straw to one side, plaiting some of it together. She laid the long braid of straw into a circle, and then took her knife to mark what looked like cabalistic symbols at the cardinal compass points. Then she scuffed it.

“Why do that?” asked Svargia.

“Because if it was perfect, it wouldn’t be used,” said Kaz. “It needs just enough left for them to realise what it was for, but not enough to reliably write out a formula to have a knowledge cult translate.”

“Right!” said Svargia. “This is why you’re leading. I don’t need to have a headache living in your convoluted little brain.”

Kaz chuckled.

They left the hut, and pulled the cut logs back into place, wedged against their upper and lower extents, and smeared mud on the white interiors revealed by the axe marks. The rope was removed, and chips of wood buried down in the vegetation starting to grow round the base.

“We want to go up the road,” said Kaz. “The slaves will go down, we can go up, and I can dismantle my sounds of ghostly combat.”

“I wanted to come and help you; what was it?” asked Lelyn.

“Well done for trusting and obeying,” said Kaz. “It was a heap of shovels, pitchforks, and other metal tools from the inn stables, suspended in a tree with a small shovel rotating between them to keep them banging. I inscribed a movement glyph on it with my blood, and let it loose swinging. It lasted long enough to sound realistic.”

Her friends were impressed.

Kaz had managed to climb high enough up an oak tree to suspend her noisy implements out of sight from below.

“People don’t look up,” said Kaz. “And it had stopped before anyone got here to investigate. Now we will stack them outside the stables, and everyone will assume that someone carelessly left them out.”

She wiped the back of her makeshift pendulum on the grass to remove the bloody glyph, so that it could not be used to trace her, and her team quietly made their way to the back of the inn, leaving the implements leaning against a wall. Then they slipped down the steps to the shore where the innkeeper went fishing, and back to the camp, signalling to Evgon that friends approached.

“Did it work?” asked Evgon.

“Like a dream,” said Protasion. “Kaz is a born leader, and plots with the convolution of a Knight of the Clear Starlight, but more common sense and practicality.”

Kaz laughed.

“I’ll take first watch,” she said. “It’s the darkest part of the night.”

She duly woke Protasion, and went to bed an hour and a half later, and slept until Lelyn roused her.

“We left you sleeping whilst Svargia and I got the fire going,” said Lelyn. “There have been soldiers up and down the road, but they haven’t found us yet.”

“I think we’ll skirt the inn by staying on the shore,” said Kaz. “If anyone asks, it’s a training mission whilst carrying dispatches, but we make them bully it out of us because we know our rights.”

The bracken scattered back in the spinney with excess firewood, and the firepit filled and brushed over with a makeshift brush of branches, they set off along the shore. They could not move as fast as on the paved road, but they passed anonymously, finding a scrambleway up the cliffs which the mules could manage before the lake profile lapped the sandy cliffs for a while.

“How wide is the lake?” asked Kaz.

“Here? Sixty or seventy miles,” said Protasion. “The lakes are really inland seas, except that they are freshwater. Without them, the greater part of Limnesthos would be desert.”

“Right,” said Kaz. “You’re lucky to have an education.”

“I suppose I am,” said Protasion. “Well, it’s at your disposal.”

“Good, I may need a military engineer,” said Kaz.

“Well, then! I can specialise in that,” said Protasion.

 

oOoOo

 

Nobody remarked upon a small band of warriors; adventurers and warriors tested themselves continuously against the wilds, and the more successful amongst them sometimes brought back the bones of the less successful. They entered Kallos, a bustling city full of traders and stalls, and the smell of hot metal as goldsmiths and whitesmiths plied their trade. Toróg were not uncommon here, trading ores, gemstones, furs, and slaves. Kaz walked about with whitened knuckles, seeing other Tróglings for sale.

“On a cheerful note, at least they aren’t going to be eaten by human masters, if they displease them,” said Lelyn.

“It’s a good point, I suppose,” said Kaz. There were well-dressed Tróglings walking the street, often as pages to wealthy women. Kaz hated seeing them treated like pets, but it was a better life.

They made their way to the temple of Alethos, making the signs of truth and death as they went in.

“Dispatches for the commandant,” said Protasion, who was assuming the apparent leadership of the group whilst here with a commandant known to be hidebound and unimaginative.

Naturally, an initiate took the dispatches rather than permit a lowly lay member to sully the air of a mighty Lord-Priest of Alethos, as Evgon muttered.

“He puts on his loin wrap the same way everyone else does, and he pisses and shits like the rest of us too,” said Kaz. “We’re just lucky with Pythas. Let’s pay for our meal and bed here with the money we didn’t spend in the inn, keep in the background and not make waves. And you three boys and we three girls will stick together, and not go anywhere alone.”

“Good decision,” said Lelyn.

Lelyn was known to some of the permanent lay servants, which led to the group finding out, when they rose to break their fast, that Commandant Sklerynos had been asked whether he knew of the group of Alethosi who had disrespected a patrol, who might be witnesses to a feat of extraordinary god-magic in the rescue of a number of slaves.

“Well, he hates the Selenites, of course, miss, and so he damned the fellow who came as a troublemaker, and told him that he knew nothing of any such group, the only visitors from the south being a couple of runners bearing dispatches,” said the laundry woman. “He don’t check the rosters of people visiting, and nobody said it was a party of half a dozen who brought the messages you handed over to the initiate, and the Selenites know he won’t lie.” She went into a veritable paroxysm of laughter, her ample flesh shaking all over. “What they don’t know is that he ain’t telling the truth because he can’t be bothered to find it out.”

Kaz gave her a silver piece.

“For the information and good information to help us in our quest,” she said. “They man the gates, so what we need to do is to split up in order to leave the city.”

“They’d notice if we went as three girls and three boys,” said Lelyn.

“Yes, and that’s why you and Protasion are going to leave as a young couple, with your Trógling slave caring for your mule, Svargia and her mule will be leaving as seeming traders, with the mule well piled with trade goods, which will be our armour and weapons, and Evgon and Kuros will wear robes and go out arguing some esoteric point as if they were students,” said Kaz. “And we will pay good Mother Skyra here to find us appropriate clothing.”

“Oh, I can assemble clothing from what’s been left behind from those as never came back from missions, or who moved on to better clothing,” said Skyra.

“And nevertheless, we shall pay for it,” said Kaz.

Svargia favoured her own people’s sartorial choices in any case, and a plainswoman in buckskin trousers and boots with a sheepskin sleeveless jacket over a buckskin shirt occasioned no interest at all. Protasion was attentive to his ‘wife’ riding the mule, which was led by his barefoot slave. Evgon and Kuros were debating whether murder predated Death as personified by Alethos, in that there were blunt instruments before there was the first sword, even though the accepted glyph for murder was the glyph for sword with a line over the top of it. It had been a dormitory topic to irritate a fellow lay member who was, like Protasion, of the upper classes and well educated, because it contained so many specious and circular arguments it almost became, said Evgon, perpetual motion on its own.

It was enough to sound like the sort of nonsense scholars might debate, to fool gate guards, who neither knew, nor cared, which came first, the action or the glyph. In sober and slightly threadbare robes they looked the part.

 

They met up at a small spinney a few miles out of town, and Kaz squealed in delight to see an armoured figure, and left the mule to follow in order to run to Alathan.

He caught her and swung her round, before setting her down.

“Disguises?” he asked.

“We might have irritated some Selenites a teensy bit,” said Kaz.

“They might be looking for witnesses who saw extremely heavy god-magic, extracting Plainsman slaves through a magical portal,” sniggered Protasion as they caught up.

Alathan’s eyebrow shot up.

“Oh?” he said. “Surely anyone of glyph rank would feel any serious ritual.”

“Not when all it was is a length of plaited straw, and some made-up symbols, well scuffed in the circle made by straw,” said Lelyn. “Kaz came up with it, and one day they will find where we cut out the hole in the back wall, but if they are looking for magic, they won’t look closer.”

“And it wouldn’t have worked if they’d been locals,” said Kaz. “But the Selenites don’t know or understand the gods of the plains.”

“You’ve been busy,” said Alathan. “Freedom and truth are allies. And you didn’t lose any time.”

“We were glad of a good sleep last night, though,” said Protasion.

They told him all about it as they resumed their normal appearances. He did not say they sounded like smug children who have had fun with a new game.

“It’s a valid tactic, if implying a lie,” he said. “In a place where magic is common and every day, magic is going to be assumed more readily as an explanation.”

“People see what they expect to see,” grinned Protasion.