They paddled all night and through the next day. After that they took turns. By day the sun pounded down mercilessly. Dancer’s lips cracked so severely he could taste his blood with every swallow. Hairlock sweated so badly he was the first to faint from dehydration. Kellanved simply sat back with his shirt held up over his head, dozing. Dancer tried to follow his example but kept starting awake as the narrow boat rocked in the waves.
He lost count of the days after seven – or perhaps eight, he wasn’t certain. In any case one day he found himself blinking up at a new face: a concerned fellow, deeply tanned, with a scraggy beard, peering down at him. Moisture wet his lips and he swallowed, grateful if pained by its passage down his throat.
When he next awoke he saw that he was aboard a fishing vessel, along with Kellanved and Hairlock. One of the crew passed by and handed him a waterskin. He took it with a nod of gratitude.
‘Who are you?’ the fellow asked in an odd accent.
‘Our ship went down,’ Dancer said, his voice hardly recognizable even to himself, so hoarse was it.
‘Is that so?’ the fellow said, nodding sagely. ‘And you three such obvious sailors.’
‘Where do you sail from?’ Dancer asked – eager to change the subject.
‘Delanss. In the Falari archipelago.’
‘We will pay for passage.’
The fellow gave a small motion as if to say: It’s of no matter. ‘We are all men of the sea here. We understand.’ He patted Dancer’s shoulder. ‘Say no more about it.’
Dancer managed to take his hand and squeeze it. ‘You have our gratitude.’ In answer the fisherman pressed the waterskin into his fingers.
*
In the days that followed the seven Falari fishermen were repaid in laughter at the antics of their guests. Over and over the three heaved up buckets of seawater and emptied them over one another – all to the great amusement of the crew. They scoured their skin, their hair, their ears. They scrounged the oldest and most torn clothes the crew could spare and threw their own clothes overboard. Many of the fishermen tapped fingers to their temples and shook their heads, thinking it a shame that the sun had seared their guests’ minds.
After four days of painful scouring, his skin raw and red, his hair hacked short and scraped clean, Dancer took a borrowed knife and sat back against the side, scraping any remaining dirt and grime from beneath his nails. Kellanved was leaning over the side, one nostril blocked, snorting his nose clear. Coughing, he hawked up a mouthful of phlegm and spat into the waves. ‘Tonight, I think,’ he informed Dancer.
‘Good. We’ve been away too long.’
Hairlock was sitting on a heap of old rope, his rags no more than a tattered shirt and shorts; the squat, burly mage looked like an ogre that had eaten a child and now wore its clothes. He had one foot up across the opposite knee and was scouring the sole with a stone.
‘Tonight,’ Dancer called to him.
The man grunted, scraping his foot, fiercely intent.
‘Come with us, yes?’
The man set his foot down, wincing. ‘No,’ he growled. ‘I have unfinished business in Seven Cities.’
‘People to track down, you mean,’ Dancer clarified.
The mage nodded, quite unconcerned. ‘That’s right.’
‘Well … if we succeed at getting out of here, look us up in Malaz.’
The man’s wide mouth turned down in puzzlement. ‘Where?’
‘Malaz. It’s an island south of Quon Tali.’
Hairlock grunted, unimpressed, and turned to scouring his other foot.
*
Later, when the majority of the crew had bedded down among the ropes and duffels and heaped canvas that crowded the open boat, Dancer and Kellanved met Hairlock at the bows. They shook hands with the Seven Cities mage and then Dancer looked at his partner. ‘Well?’
Kellanved let out an anxious breath. ‘Yes. Well, here goes.’
Dancer felt that prickling of his hairs and skin that marked an active Warren. He waved a farewell to the one lone fisherman who was regarding them with his brows clenched in puzzlement where he leaned on the side-mounted tiller … and lost his footing as things changed.
He stumbled among dry dusty ash and dust that rose in clouds into the air about him. Coughing, he waved it away. ‘Kellanved?’
‘Yes.’ The lad sounded very weak.
He found him lying amid the dust, curled into a ball, arms wrapped around his head. ‘That really hurt,’ he said through clenched teeth.
‘Too soon?’
A nod. ‘Yes. Too soon.’
‘Sorry.’ Dancer gently lifted him on to his back, his arms hanging down over his shoulders. ‘I’ll carry you, then. Which way?’
Kellanved raised an arm to point and Dancer set off in that direction. ‘Quite comfortable now, are we?’ he asked.
‘Oh yes, quite.’
Dancer rolled his eyes to the ash-laden sky. ‘Wonderful.’
*
Dassem walked at the very rear of the caravan. He knew many would resent the position, thinking it the worst, the least safe, and the place where one must choke on the kicked-up dust of all ahead. Probably most would feel that way, yet he did not. He was not afraid; he did not yearn for a central position, snug in the middle of the herd and safe from attack. As to the dust – the winds were contrary, blowing mostly across the line of march, and so the nuisance was not constant. And he’d tied a rag across his nose and mouth in any case.
He usually walked next to the horses. If he wanted a break he would sit up on the front of the small cart. Sometimes, when Nara was lucid, they would talk. Small talk, mostly, of the adherents she’d got to know in Heng. Of small kindnesses or stinging injustices; the typical inadvertent or unthinking acts that carry such great weight and importance among youths.
At times the caravan guard, Shear, would pause in her circuits of the straggling line of wagons and carts to walk with him for a time. She would nod and he would nod in return. But not one word had she ever yet spoken to him, and so he’d responded in kind.
It was not until they’d passed the halfway point of the long road south – the first full moon of the march, in fact – that the first incident occurred. On this day the long line of wagons ground to a halt very early. At first he thought of trouble on the road ahead, a broken axle or a lost child perhaps, but then his gaze went to the tall hills to either side, the dense tree cover that ran right down to the rutted dusty traders’ track, and he raised his gaze to the sky, sighing. He walked behind his cart and crossed his arms, waiting.
Shortly thereafter four very ragged individuals, two male and two female, emerged from the brush. One fellow carried a curved blade that was spotted with rust, one woman a long thin rapier; the other two held readied crossbows.
‘Just stand still and no one will get hurt,’ the woman with the rapier told him.
Dassem waited, his arms crossed.
The four kept glancing up the line then back to him, then away towards the lead wagons again. Two were frowning now.
‘You’re wondering where your friends are,’ Dassem said.
‘Shut up!’ the fellow with the crossbow snarled. The heavy weapon was drooping in his thin arms; he looked as if he’d not had a good solid meal in a long time. Of the four only the swordsman wore any armour, and this a hauberk of large overlapping iron scales riveted to thick leather old enough to be an artefact from his grandfather’s hegemony wars, which it probably was.
‘See them?’ the woman with the crossbow asked him.