CHAPTER 25:
WHERE THERE IS SMOKE…
Behind him, Feronantus heard Istvan shouting at the tiger and the tiger’s answering scream of anger. He managed to get his hands on the reins of his horse, but Istvan’s mount pulled away from him, the whites of its eyes showing. He lunged for the reins, missed, and swore loudly at Istvan’s horse as it bolted, charging up the slope to get away from the angry tiger and Istvan’s flaming sword.
His horse wanted to flee too, jerking its head in an effort to pull the reins from his hands. He went hand over hand on the leather straps, dragging the horse’s head down toward him.
The tiger shrieked again and this time there was more pain than anger in its cry.
Feronantus glanced over his shoulder as he struggled with his horse. The cloud cover above the depression seemed to have thickened in the last few minutes, filling the sinkhole with more shadows. In stark relief against the shadows and among the fat snowflakes were Istvan’s flaming sword and the angry orange and black shape of the tiger, circling one another.
He had to make a choice. If he let go of his horse so that he could go to Istvan’s aid, his mount would flee too. They might both survive the tiger attack, but they would be without steeds. If he left…well, he couldn’t leave.
Why not? Part of him argued. You left the others.
No, that wasn’t how it had been.
Others before them too, the voice continued. How many have you left behind now?
He clamped his jaw shut to keep the voice from getting out. It was the venial self-doubt that plagued any warrior as he entered battle. Feronantus had endured it before, and he had even learned to suppress its voice. The Vor had shown him how, though it was much easier when the shimmering path of his future was visible.
But there was no such path available to him in the depression. He was both below ground and trapped beneath the cloud cover, invisible to the divine graces that might gaze down on him and deign to provide assistance.
Muttering an oath, he left off trying to control his horse’s head and reached for the Spirit Banner instead. It was attached to the horse’s saddle by several leather loops, and as soon as he started to pull the long wooden pole free, the horse jerked away from him, fighting to get clear of the obstruction and flee. He grabbed at his saddle, trying to reach his sword too, and the horse hopped slightly, its hooves pounding against the ground.
“Stop fighting me,” he growled. What he really wanted was the small crossbow hanging off the back of his saddle.
Another scream ripped through the air, and this time it didn’t come from the tiger’s throat. Both Feronantus and his horse paused in their tug-of-war, and Feronantus turned halfway to look for the source of the cry.
Istvan was down on one knee, his smoldering sword no longer held as dramatically. He wavered as if he were falling asleep and then jerked himself upright as the tiger came charging at him. The beast veered away at the last second, dodging Istvan’s slow-moving sword. It swiped at Istvan again, and Istvan managed to bring his sword around enough that the tiger pulled its paw back from trying to swat him.
They were at an impasse, and the tiger continued to circle Istvan, who made no attempt to get up from his position. The feeble movements of his sword cast few shadows, and with each wild swing, the tiger grew bolder. The second time it darted at Istvan to strike him, Istvan didn’t get the sword around in time.
Feronantus left off struggling with the Spirit Banner and concentrated on drawing his longsword. He managed to get the weapon out of its sheath, and he let go of his horse’s bridle as he crashed across the dark and lumpy surface of the depression.
Istvan was on his back, straining to reach his sword which had fallen out of his hand. It lay on the ground just beyond his straining fingers, and as he got his fingertips on the pommel, the tiger pounced and landed on his legs. Istvan left off trying to get his sword and sat up. The tiger bit at his stomach and was rebuffed by the maille. Snarling, it bit at his face and he shoved his left arm into its open mouth.
Feronantus was halfway there.
Istvan screamed as the tiger bit down on his arm, and Feronantus saw his right arm rise up, his hunting knife clutched in his fist, and then Istvan drove his arm down, plunging the knife into the side of the tiger’s neck. The tiger shook him like a child’s doll, but Istvan held on. When the tiger paused, Istvan pulled his knife free and stabbed again. The second time the tiger shook him, his arm separated—forearm and hand remaining inside the tiger’s mouth.
Just as Feronantus was about to reach the beleaguered Hungarian, the black ground beneath Istvan’s discarded blade burst into flame. Feronantus slid to a halt, staring at the flicking flame as it danced across the stained ground.
The tiger roared, spitting out Istvan’s arm, and its eyes were bright with reflected fire. Istvan tried to stab it a third time, but the tiger brushed his arm aside and closed its mouth, with its many sharp teeth, around the front of his head.
The fire leaped across the ground, suddenly creating a wall between Feronantus and Istvan. It kept snaking across the ground, leaping from dark patch to dark patch. With growing horror, Feronantus tracked where the flame was going, and realized it was heading right for the slow bubbling center of the seep. The black heart of the upwelling.
Feronantus ran. He heard the tiger growl deep in its throat and he heard the sizzling hiss of air burning, and then the ground shook beneath him, and he felt the fiery hand of an unleashed giant lift him up and fling him out of the depression and into the endless emptiness of the snowstorm.
He tumbled, spinning like a leaf caught by a zephyr, and dimly wondered why he hadn’t hit the ground yet. He flew away from the eruption of orange and red light, his eyes closed against the glare. He could still see the strange outlines of fiery phantoms, dancing across his field of vision. They were hollow creatures, nothing more than the outlines of ragged dolls drawn in luminous fire. They twitched and darted away from him as he tried to focus his gaze on them, and when the bright light behind them faded, they faded too, turning to ash.
A light breeze caressed his face, and when he tried to open his eyes, the breeze held his eyelids down and he struggled to open them. If he knew where his hands were, he could raise them and push up his eyelids, but he had to see his hands in order to find them. But his hands were connected to his arms, which were connected to his trunk, and his head was attached to the top of his trunk. He should be able to feel his hands, shouldn’t he?
He felt the breeze on his face, but otherwise, he was numb.
There was no light anymore, and even the ashes had turned black. He could see nothing. He could hear nothing. Other than the wind, he could feel nothing. Was he even breathing? As panic laid claim to his mind, he felt none of the physical sensations that accompanied fear. The more he struggled (in his mind, for he had no idea what his body might be doing), the stronger the wind blew, until it was a stinging storm, slapping him on the cheeks. The tempest increased, and he could feel the skin on his face rippling and sliding. Finally, with a herculean effort, he wrenched apart his lips, and the wind hurled itself into the cavern of his mouth.
Like a blacksmith’s bellows, he inflated, and as he filled out, awareness of his body returned—from his neck to his chest to his arms, waist, legs, hands, and feet. He swelled up, and his ears popped loudly. His eyes snapped open too, and he found himself lying on his back, staring up at a white sky, filled with fluffy clouds and drifting snowflakes.
He lay still, watching his breath float away. His back was cold, and as he explored the ground with his fingers, he found it slippery and wet. Ice, he thought as he slowly levered himself upright.
He was not on the steppe. He was lying on a field of ice—a lake, he surmised. To his left were vague shadows that suggested a treeline. To his right, partially behind him, a small shape in a ragged cloak crouched on the ice. The figure was holding a long pole, and a string attached to the end of the pole disappeared into a hole in the ice.
Feronantus peeled himself off the ice and staggered toward the crouched figure. When he touched it lightly on the shoulder, the figure shifted slightly and then fell over. Skeletal hands peeked out of the cloak, and when Feronantus pulled back the hood, he found a mummified face. Judging by the shape of the hands and face, the body was that of a woman, and without taking the robe off the corpse, he had no idea how she had died. Both cloak and body were frozen stiff, and it would take a proper fire and many hours to thaw the corpse enough to remove the cloak.
The pole was longer and thicker than he thought a fishing rod should be, and when he pulled it free of the skeleton’s hands, he realized it was the Spirit Banner, burned black and bereft of its horsehair streamers. The hole in the ice was two spans of his hands in diameter, and the water beneath the ice was a pale blue.
He pulled on the string, and felt a weight at the end. The water was cold, even colder than the ice, and the string burned his hands as he pulled it out. He pulled and pulled, and was starting to wonder how long the string was when he noticed a shadow in the water. Coiling the slack of the string around his arm, he gave another strong pull on the cord.
A frozen hand and arm emerged from the lake. Feronantus braced one foot on the edge of the hole, holding the arm out of the water. It felt like there was an entire body at the end of the string, and when he tugged the string, the resistance increased.
The body wouldn’t fit through the hole.
The hand and arm were bare, though covered with a fine sheen of ice. The fingers were half-bent as if the hand had been holding something that had been yanked free shortly before being frozen in place. Grunting with the exertion, Feronantus rotated the arm. There was a scar on the forearm, the circular brand of the Shield-Brethren.
The ice distorted the sigil slightly, smearing the finer details, but when Feronantus pushed up his right sleeve, he thought the old scar on his forearm was a fairly close match.
He let go of the string, and the outstretched arm disappeared into the lake. He picked at the knot on the staff first with his fingers and then his teeth, loosening the string from the pole. He pulled the string free of the pole and let it go, watching it snake across the ice as its burden descended farther and farther. His heart seized for a second as the end of the string wiggled across the rim of the hole, but he didn’t dive for it. He held fast and let it go.
His hands were black from the layer of ash on the banner, and he suspected his lips and teeth were black too. Using the staff to test the ice, he started to walk toward the tree line.
This was nothing more than a dream, and the sooner he reached the boundary of its imagination, the sooner he would wake up. One foot in front of the other. Just keep walking.
Feronantus…
Once he reached the trees, he wouldn’t stop. He would walk as far and as long as necessary. Dreams could not survive a methodical assault. The more order he forced upon this environment, the less it could sustain itself. It lived off fear and uncertainly. He knew where he was going. He was—
Feronantus.
—heading for the trees.
The staff poked against the ice, and he listened to the rhythmic shuffle of his feet against the slick surface. Poke. Step. Step. Poke. Step…
“Feronantus!”
As the Shield-Brethren company rode toward the boiling column of smoke, they regarded it with curiosity. What could generate that much smoke on the steppe? How long would someone have to gather fuel for such a fire? Was it a signal? Was it, like Lian thought, a marker indicating where they might find Feronantus?
But when they got closer, Yasper realized what it was: an alchemical fire. Naphtha, he explained to the rest, was a concoction used by the Byzantines and Muslims, and it was made from a combination of oil and water. The source of the smoke was a naturally occurring seep of the oily liquid used in naphtha.
The column of smoke had lessened by the time they found the depression from which it was issuing, and the winter storm that had been squatting over the hole had moved on, leaving the skies clear but for the smudges of dark smoke still lingering.
Raphael, Percival, Gawain, and Yasper dismounted from their horses and walked the last hundred paces to the edge of the depression. The ground around the depression was boggy, as if a heavy rain had recently fallen, and there were dark stains on the ground that Yasper explained had been expelled from the seep. Raphael wasn’t sure what they were going to see when they reached the rim of the depression, but as they approached, he strained to hear any noise coming from the fire. The air felt oily, and when he inhaled there was a metallic aftertaste left in his mouth.
A haze filled the depression, and many of the seep stains were on fire, albeit with thin wispy flames. They were like tiny worshippers, emulating the image of their god who roared and danced in the center of the depression. The burning seep was a pond of black oil, and the flames that danced atop it were taller than any of them.
“Well,” Yasper said, breaking the stunned silence of the quartet, “it’s not as bad as I thought it might be.”
“It is the very presence of Hell upon this world,” Percival said.
“Aye,” Gawain said. “The only thing missing is—no, wait, what is that over there?”
The others peered in the direction he pointed, and Raphael felt his gorge rise in the back of his throat. “It appears to be…”
It wasn’t a man, that much was certain, though it appeared to be struggling to wear a man’s shape. It had too many appendages, and there was no telling what was the front and what was the rear. The entire shape was blackened like a log that had been charred in flames for hours, and it was half-twisted around itself. Raphael found himself thinking that the creature had been simultaneously trying to curl into a ball like a tiny child and to run away. The result was something that looked like a crisped snail, flesh burned into an ashen husk.
“Whatever it is, it is dead,” Yasper said.
“How can you be sure?” Gawain asked.
“Go down there and poke it with your sword,” Yasper said. “If you really want to know.”
“Aren’t you curious?”
“No,” Yasper shook his head.
“I am,” Percival said. He reached over and grabbed Yasper’s tunic. “Come, little alchemist. Let us see what the Devil has left for us.”
“What?” Yasper sputtered, struggling in Percival’s grip as the Frank started down the slope. “What are you doing?”
“I’m bringing an expert opinion with me,” Percival said.
“It’s not safe,” Yasper squawked. “You don’t want to breathe this air. Trust me. I’ve done alchemical experiments. I know what I’m talking about.”
“Breathe shallowly and walk quickly, then,” Percival said, his grip not faltering.
Gawain looked at Raphael, expressing his question with a raised eyebrow. Raphael shook his head. “I trust their examination will be sufficient.”
“Lian spoke of Feronantus when she saw the smoke. He is the one you are searching for, yes?”
“Yes, he is,” Raphael said.
“Do you think that monster down there is him?”
“No,” Raphael said. He had been glancing around the rim of the depression while he and Gawain had been talking, and he had spotted an irregular lump on the far side of the depression. “But I wonder whose horse that is.” He pointed out the hump to Gawain.
“That would appear to be a much less frightening corpse to examine,” Gawain said.
“I concur. Shall we walk around the rim of this stinking pit?”
Gawain snorted. “I’m not going down there.”
While the knights of the order went ahead to investigate the column of smoke coming out of the ground, the rest of the company milled about, uncertain what to do. It was too early in the day to make camp for the night, and while none of them said as much out loud, they all had a desire to be far from the burning hole by nightfall. That meant watering, feeding, and changing the horses—tasks that reminded Haakon that, regardless of the sword he wore, he wasn’t much more than a glorified stable boy.
“I’m going to scout ahead,” he told Evren, making the signs they had come up with to explain rudimentary commands: two fingers, pointed at his eyes; four fingers, mimicking the gait of a horse; one finger, pointing in the direction they were headed.
Evren acknowledged his signs with a quick tap of several fingers against his forehead and a nod. Haakon caught sight of Vera looking at him as he climbed onto his horse, but he didn’t bother saying anything to her as he slapped his reins and let his horse run. Evren can tell her, he thought bitterly as his horse galloped in a wide arc around the smoke-filled depression.
He knew this hole was going to be a beacon, summoning every rider within a hundred miles or more. Their group had happened to get here first, but he knew if they stayed too long, they would have company. Judging by the hoofprints he and the Seljuks had seen over the last few days, the visitors would be Mongolian. Haakon needed to spot them before they stumbled upon the aimless Shield-Brethren company.
His eyes swept the open plain restlessly, moving quickly over the long swathes of short grasses and the clumps of wormwood and scrub trees. He had seen all of it a thousand times over and most of the landscape had become little more than a blur. What he was looking for were aberrations—moving shapes or flashes of color that were out of the ordinary.
There was a herd of steppe deer to the east, and he chased them until he was close enough to pick out individual animals. He counted them twice, letting his horse slow to a trot, and once he was satisfied with the number, he pulled his horse south. Three dozen deer were an interesting statistic, but they were no threat to the company.
He rode south for awhile, squinting against the glare of the afternoon sun. There was a dark line stretching across the southeast, and he watched it warily. While he was a single rider against the immense backdrop of the steppe, he was not entirely invisible. Sharp-eyed Mongol scouts could see him as soon as he spotted them.
He spotted a spur of rock to the west and angled his horse in that direction. The outcropping was a line of gnarled stone that protruded enough out of the ground to create a ripple in the landscape. The ground rose up around the ridge and dropped away slightly behind it; overall, the stones didn’t tower more than the height of a pair of men, one standing on the shoulders of the other. A line of spruce, like the wispy beards sported by many Mongolians, trailed behind the ridge, and Haakon suspected he would find some sort of pool at the base of the ridge. During the spring and summer, it would contain a tepid layer of warm rainwater; during the winter months, it would be filled with icy slush.
The basin was where he expected to find it, and he left his horse to drink its fill and munch on the nearby grasses as he quickly climbed the rock face. The top of the tallest rock wasn’t much more than a pace across and the stone was cracked into three sections. He jammed his toes deeper into the crevices along the side of the rock and leaned across the top, trying to find the least jagged places to rest his elbows. He didn’t want to present himself as an oddity of the landscape by standing up, but his somewhat precarious relationship with the rock allowed him to scan the horizon from an elevated location.
The dark line to the southeast was thicker, and as he watched it, he spotted a few other dots moving to and from the squalid line. He was pretty sure it was a Mongol war party, and he glanced up at the sun to gauge how many hours of daylight were left. They might make it by nightfall, he decided.
He descended from the rock and retrieved his horse, the more pressing realization of what he had seen thrumming in his brain. A half day.
That’s all the lead they had on the Mongols.
His horse was annoyed at being pulled away from the moist grasses and he had to slap it on the hindquarters a few times before it finally started to run.
He slipped back into the simple mindset of scouting as the horse galloped across the steppe toward the drifting column of smoke, watching for anything unusual on the plain. Watching for outriders from the Mongol party. Watching for—
Haakon blinked several times and stood up in his saddle to get a better look at the thin shape he had spotted to the west. Having satisfied his first impression that he had spotted a human figure walking across the plain, he sat down and nudged his horse to his left.
As he got closer, details resolved themselves. The figure was a solitary man, dressed in black. He walked slowly and carried no bags of any kind. The only thing he carried was a tall walking stick, and as Haakon got closer, he saw that the man was tapping the walking stick on the ground ahead of him as if he were testing for sinkholes or slippery sand. The man’s clothing was filthy with soot and dirt, and he seemed familiar to Haakon.
“Feronantus?” Haakon called, recognizing the man’s weathered face beneath the layers of dirt and ash.
Feronantus didn’t seem to hear Haakon. He kept tapping the ground with his walking stick and staggering onward, doggedly moving west as if he intended to walk all the way back to Christendom. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t seeing anything of the world in front of him.
They gathered around the dead horse as if they were eulogizing a fallen comrade. Without touching the body, Yasper explained that the horse had died from inhaling fiery air, much like the pair he and Percival had examined in the depression, though the horse had lived a few minutes longer than the other two.
“It is Feronantus’s horse,” Percival said, nudging one of the hooves with his boot. The saddle was blackened with ash, and the horse’s mouth was coated with soot.
“I don’t think it was Feronantus down there,” Yasper said. “It was a man and a tiger, though they had been—” He made a series of complicated gestures that signified nothing more than his own confusion and then put a hand over his face.
“The tiger tried to eat him,” Gawain said.
“It would have eaten him, if the fire hadn’t erupted,” Yasper said. “Whatever happened, happened so fast that neither could flee in time. They didn’t even have a chance to stop fighting.”
“Is it Feronantus or not?” Raphael asked. Like Percival, he had recognized the saddle on the dead horse, but there was no sign of the Spirit Banner, an omission that troubled him.
“Ah, not,” Yasper decided. “I think.” When Raphael glared at him, he spread his hands. “The tiger was chewing the front half of his head off, and the fire burned away most of his clothing. I’m not very good at identifying people from burned-up corpses.”
“Were there other members of your company who might have been traveling with him?” Gawain asked.
Raphael looked at Percival for suggestions, though he had his own suspicions. According to Yasper, Eléazar had remained behind to guard their escape, and of the remaining pair of the lost company, he found it hard to believe that R?dwulf would have tolerated Feronantus’s flight without the rest of the company. That left Istvan, the mad Hungarian who had bedeviled them during their entire journey. “It’s Istvan,” he said, giving voice to his thoughts.
“Aye,” Percival nodded. “I suspect that it was.” He shrugged slightly. “It is a pity that one of our company has fallen, but he fell in combat, did he not? What more could any of us ask?”
“That he did,” Raphael echoed.
“He was fighting a tiger—on foot, and without a weapon, apparently,” Yasper pointed out.
“That sounds like a fair fight,” Percival said.
“That sounds like Istvan,” Raphael said.
No one else had anything more to say about their fallen companion, and so they stood quietly for a few minutes, each conducting his own private memorial. It was Gawain who broke the somber mood eventually.
“Look,” the Welshman said, directing their attention to a lone horse approaching from the southwest. “There is young Haakon, and he has another with him.”
Haakon appeared to have a bundle of blackened sackcloth with him in his saddle, but as the young Northerner approached, Raphael saw that it was the huddled form of an old man. Of equal importance was the long staff strapped to the back of Haakon’s saddle.
“I found Feronantus,” Haakon said as he brought his horse to a stop. “He was walking west.”
The master of Tyrshammar was slumped in the saddle with Haakon, his thin hands with their stark veins clutching the saddle horn. His face was even gaunter than Raphael remembered, and his beard and hair seemed even whiter under the layers of dirt and ash that covered him.
“He recognizes me,” Haakon said, “but he hasn’t said a word yet.”
Feronantus stared at the dead horse, a single tear tracking through the grime on his face.
“There’s something else,” Haakon said. “There’s a war party of Mongols coming. They’re about a half day behind us. We’re going to have to ride through the night if we hope to get away.”
“The plume of smoke is a beacon,” Gawain said. “It doesn’t matter if they saw him or not.”
“Aye,” Raphael said. “They’re coming here for the same reason we did, and when they do, they’ll find our trail. Riding through the night may mean only that we’re tired when they catch up to us.”
The veil of night covered the column of smoke, but in the resulting darkness, the source became abundantly clear. It was a flickering orange glow on the steppe, a beacon even more clear in the dark than the smoke against the blue sky.
Gansukh and Alchiq left their horses behind a stand of spruce and crept cautiously toward the glowing hole in the steppe. There was a fire burning in the ground, neither of them had any doubt of that fact, and during their slow creep toward the hole, Gansukh had ample time to wonder how such a fire was fed. It had burned for several days at this point and showed no sign of going out. How was it being stoked? What was its source of fuel?
The glow of the fire made it easy for them to spot the Skjaldbr?eur camp on the western side of the hole. They gave the fiery hole a wide berth, and crawled on their bellies the rest of the way as close as they dared get. The figures were covered in flickering shadows, and only a few of them were very still. The rest were occupied in frenzied preparations of some kind.
Alchiq put his mouth close to Gansukh’s ear. “They know we’re coming,” the old hunter whispered.
Gansukh had to agree. Three of the male figures were hauling and digging, but he couldn’t see what they were accomplishing. The dirt was being hauled off and dumped, but they weren’t building any sort of retaining wall or defensive barrier. Beyond the camp, he saw the dim shapes of horses, suggesting the company had enough mounts to carry everyone, and perhaps a few more. The fire pit of the camp was obscured by a few tents, but he spotted two or three people who were moving around the fire. A man and two women, one of whom appeared to have long dark hair.
His heart lurched into his throat, and his fingers dug into the ground. Lian. He had given up thinking about what he would do when he saw her again. She had been on his mind nonstop during the first few months, but it was only as he saw her again that he realized he had been thinking about her less and less over the last few weeks. He hadn’t given up hope of seeing her again—no, that wasn’t it: he had come to the realization that he probably wouldn’t and his heart had been quietly burying his feelings.
Not deeply enough, he thought, staring at the slim figure as it moved back and forth behind a tent.
“The armored ones,” Alchiq muttered. “No archers.”
Gansukh swallowed heavily, forcing his heart back down into his chest where it echoed loudly. “What?” he whispered to Alchiq.
“No sign of archers,” Alchiq repeated. “Not like last time. That’s good. But…”
“But what?”
“Even if they are unhorsed, the armored ones are hard to kill.”
Alchiq jerked his head and crawled off, and Gansukh followed. They made a tiring circuit of the camp until they had a better view of the horses. When Alchiq drew up short, Gansukh nearly crawled into him. The old hunter hissed at him for his clumsiness and gestured for him to crawl around. As Gansukh was doing so, he caught sight of what had arrested Alchiq’s progress.
Standing along the western verge of the camp was an old man carrying a long pole. The pole was braced against the ground and the man was standing very still, his face pointed almost directly at them. Gansukh froze, hardly daring to breathe, his heart pounding harder in his chest. Had they been spotted? Alchiq was likewise immobile next to them, and they remained that way for such a time that their slow breathing became the breath of one being.
Alchiq grunted and shifted slightly, moving his body a hand’s span forward. There was no change in the watcher, and Gansukh realized that whatever the man was looking at, it wasn’t them.
“It’s him,” Alchiq hissed, his voice even quieter than before.
He wasn’t a man Gansukh recognized, but since Alchiq clearly did, that meant this elderly figure was the man they had been chasing all these months. Did that mean the staff in his hand was the Spirit Banner?
Alchiq thought as much, judging by the vibrations coming off his body. The old hunter moved again, shifting himself forward, but Gansukh stopped him by grabbing his calf.
“Even if you get the banner, you’ll be on foot,” he whispered to Alchiq. “They have horses. You won’t get far.”
Alchiq hesitated, a growl rumbling through his body. He wanted to try anyway; Gansukh could feel the frustration coursing through Alchiq’s body. To be so close to their goal but unable to reach it!
A pair of figures approached the group of horses, and Gansukh tugged on Alchiq’s leg to redirect his attention. As they watched the pair moved among the horses and, with much discussion, appeared to be separating them into two distinct groups.
“They’re splitting up,” Gansukh whispered to Alchiq, who grudgingly crawled back until he was side by side with Gansukh. “They’re picking out which horses to leave behind and which to take with them.”
Alchiq nodded in agreement, the growl still rumbling in his throat.
“The armored ones are staying behind,” Gansukh guessed.
“Aye,” Alchiq agreed. He watched the division of the horses a little while longer; then, with a lingering glance at the stoic old man and the staff, he signaled that it was time for them to depart.
Scuttling like lizards, they reversed their facing and crawled away from the camp in a straight line. Once they were far enough that the glow from the fiery hole was nothing more than a glimmer beyond the grasses, Alchiq stood up and brushed the mud and gunk off his deel.
“They hope to confuse us,” he said. “When Totukei attacks, he’ll find resistance, but he won’t know that some of them have gone.”
Gansukh’s heart was hammering in his chest again. Would Lian be one of those in the group that fled? “When Totukei overwhelms them, he’ll think he’s found them all,” he said. “He has no reason to think otherwise, does he?”
“Unless we tell him,” Alchiq said.
Gansukh wrestled with how to answer, trying to decide what his heart was telling him. “Why would we?” he asked finally. “Totukei doesn’t like you. You showed up in his camp, made a fool of his cousin, and told him that he wasn’t fit for command. He’ll want to kill them all just to prove you’re wrong about them.”
Alchiq grinned. “He will. Let him attack the Skjaldbr?eur. We’ll just chase after the group that has fled.”
“By ourselves?” Gansukh asked. He cleared his throat and chose his next words with care. “You are not as adept with a bow as you once were,” he said.
Alchiq spat on the ground, unconsciously closing his injured hand to hide his missing finger. “We’ll have Totukei give us an arban. That will be enough for the women and the old man.” He glanced down at his fist and realized what he had done and angrily slashed his hand at Gansukh. “Let’s find our horses,” he said, striding off with utter confidence that he remembered where their horses were waiting.
Gansukh let him go, his attention going back to the distant Skjaldbr?eur camp. The steppe was quiet. There were no night birds seeking food, and no wind moving through the grasses. His heart was still beating noisily in his chest, but it was calming down. He held his breath for a moment, listening and staring intently. Was something out there, watching them? He didn’t see or hear anything, but the skin on his arms prickled with the sense that he was being watched.
“Lian,” the word slipped out of him, and the spell holding him in place was broken. He shook his head and turned to follow Alchiq. There was nothing out there.
Raphael was sure the second Mongol had spotted them, even though he and Haakon had pressed themselves as flat as possible against the ground. Haakon had drawn his knife—that may have been the sound that had alerted the Mongol—and the Northerner was lying on the blade, ensuring no glint of moonlight gave them away.
They had been expecting scouts, and when Evren had spotted movement on the steppe, he and Haakon had immediately darted off into the darkness. They had blackened their faces, hands, and clothing with ash, rendering them practically inseparable from the night, and as the two Mongols had crept along the western edge of their camp, they had followed them.
Raphael had recognized Graymane by his white hair, and confirmation of the suspicion they had all held for so long had been both a relief and cause for alarm. After all this time, Alchiq was still chasing them. The man would never give up. Could they kill him before he was responsible for the deaths of more of their company?
Neither he nor Haakon moved for some time, and finally they heard the faint sound of hooves against the hard ground. Beside him, Haakon led out a loud whoosh of air and rolled onto his side. “They’re gone,” he whispered to Raphael.
Raphael nodded as he sat up. “I recognized Graymane,” he said. “The one named Alchiq.”
“The other one was Gansukh,” Haakon said. “I know him. He and Alchiq visited me while I was in the cage at the Khagan’s camp. He is an intelligent man.”
“Did you understand what they were saying?”
“Aye,” Haakon said as he sheathed his knife. “They know you’re planning on splitting the party. Someone named Totukei will be leading the attack tomorrow. They’re going to hunt Feronantus and the women with an arban.”
“Ten men,” Raphael said. “Did they say anything about how many men will be coming?” He gestured for Haakon to follow him, and started back toward their camp.
“He didn’t, but if he thinks he can get ten men without telling this Totukei what he is planning, then there are probably…” Haakon shrugged, not wanting to quantify the size of the force.
“More than ten,” Raphael said with a tight smile. “And probably fewer than a hundred. We’ve fought a hundred before. A jaghun. It won’t be easy. Harder, in fact, because I want you and Vera to ride with Feronantus.”
“What?”
“Cnán and Lian don’t have any armor. Ten skilled horse archers will bring them down without much trouble. Especially out here where there is no way to minimize their approach.”
“I want to stay,” Haakon complained.
Raphael shook his head. “Your wound slows you down. You won’t be able to help us. I should send the Seljuks too, but I need them.” He sighed and looked up at the star-strewn sky. “I hope the Virgin will watch over you, Haakon. Ride hard. I don’t know if we can stop them.”