It was in potentially violent confrontations that Michael Trebilcock was intimidating. Men tended to back down when they saw his eyes.
Michael didn't understand, but used it. He felt it was his best weapon. He had trained in arms, as had everyone at the Rebsamen, but didn't consider himself much good. He didn't consider himself good at anything unless he was the best around.
They reached Gog-Ahlan. Aral found a man who was afriend of his father. With Michael's help he wrote the elder Dantice, and wrote a credit on House Dantice, which Michael promised to repay. And they learned that Nepanthe's party was bound for Throyes.
There was no holding Aral to an unswerving purpose that night. Old Gog-Ahlan lay in ruins, a victim of the might of llkazar four centuries earlier. On the outskirts, though, a trading city had grown up. Vices were readily available. Aral had energies to dissipate.
It took him two nights. Bowing to the inevitable, Michael tried to keep up. Then, heads spinning, they rode on.
Their quarry moved more leisurely now, safely beyond the reach of Kavelin's Marshall.
The two overhauled them within the week, a hundred miles from Throyes. "Now we go ahead," Michael said. "We'll swing around, too far away to be recognized." That was what two riders overtaking a larger party would do anyway. Out on those wild plains no one trusted anyone else.
Throyes was a sprawl of a city that made Vorgreberg look like a farming village. Most of it wasn't walled, and no one cared who came or went.
Here, for the first time in their lives, they felt like foreigners. They were surrounded by people who were different, who owed them no sympathy. Aral behaved himself.
Four days passed. Their quarry didn't show. Dantice began fretting.
Michael had begun to consider hitting their back trail when Aral said, "Here they come. Finally."
Only one man remained. He was wounded. The woman and boy, though, were hale if still a little frightened.
"Bandits," Trebilcock guessed. "Let's stay behind after this. In case we need to rescue the lady."
"Hey, Mike, I'm ready. Let's do it. My old man must be out of his head by now. You know how long we've been gone?"
"I know. And I think we should stay gone until we find out what's happening."
"We won't get a better chance. That guy's bad hurt."
"No. Let's see where he goes."
The wounded man went to a house in the wealthiest part of town. There he turned the woman and boy over. The man who received them wasn't happy. Neither eavesdropper understood the language, but his tone was clear, if not his reasons.
"What now?" Aral asked.
"We see what happens."
They watched. Aral daringly climbed the garden wall and listened at windows. But he heard nothing of importance.
Two days later the woman and boy returned to the road with a new escort.
"Oh, no," Aral groaned. "Here we go again. We going to follow them to the edge of the world?"
"If we have to."
"Hey, Mike, I didn't sign on for that. A couple days, you said."
"I'm not dragging you. You can go back. Just give me h'alf the money."
"What? You'd be in debtor's prison by tomorrow night. And I ain't riding around out here without nobody to talk to."
"Then you'd better stick with me."
"They can't go far anyway. Argon is the end of the road."
"How do you know?"
"They're heading for the Argon Gate. If they were headed east, they'd go to Necremnos. So they'd head for the Necremnos Gate."
"How do you know where they're heading?"
"You know my old man."
"So?"
"His stories?"
"Oh. Yeah."
Dantice's father bragged endlessly about his youthful adventures, before the El Murid Wars, when he had made a fortune in the eastern trade. Aral, having heard the tales all his life, had a fair notion of where they were.
They reached Argon two weeks later.
Argon, in summer, was an outpost of Hell. The city lay in the delta of the River Roe. That vast river ran in scores of channels there, through hundreds of square miles of marshland.
The city itself, twice the size of Throyes, had been built on delta islands. Each was connected by pontoon bridges to others, and some had canals instead of streets.
The youths' quest took them to the main island, a large, triangular thing with its apex pointing upriver. It was surrounded by walls rising from the river itself.
"Lord, what a fortress," Trebilcock muttered.
Aral was even more impressed. "I thought Dad was a liar.
That wall must be a hundred feet high." He pointed toward the northern end of the island, where the walls were the tallest. "How did Ilkazar conquer it?"
"Sorcery," Michael replied. "And there weren't any walls then. They thought the river was enough."
Aral looked back. "Rice paddies. Everywhere."
"They export it to Matayanga mostly. We studied it at school, in Economics. They have a fleet to haul it down the coast."
"Better close it up. We might lose them in the crowd."
The pontoon was crowded. They couldn't find anyone who spoke their language, so couldn't ask why.
The trail led to a huge fortress within the fortress-island.
"The Fadem," Aral guessed. The Fadem was the seat of government for the Argonese imperium, and was occupied by a nameless Queen usually called the Fadema or Matriarch. Argon had been ruled by women for four generations, since Fadema Tenaya had slain the sorcerer-tryant Aron Lockwurm and had seized his crown.
The men escorting Nepanthe were expected.
"Don't think we'd better try following," Michael said. Nobody had challenged them yet. The streets were full of foreigners, but none were entering the inner fortress.
Trebilcock led the way round the Fadem once. He could study only three walls. The fourth was part of the island wall and dropped into the river. "We've got to get in there," he said.
"You're crazy."
"You keep saying that. And you keep tagging along."
"So I'm crazy too. How do you figure to do it?"
"It's almost dark. We'll go down there on the south end where the wall is low and climb in."
"Now I know you're crazy."
"They won't expect us. I'll bet nobody ever tried it."
He was right. The Argonese were too much in dread of those who dwelt within the Fadem. They would have labeled the plan a good one for getting dead quick. Suicides traditionally jumped from the high point of the triangular outer wall, where the memorial to the victory over Lockwurm stood.
Trebilcock and Dantice chose the Fadem, though. About midnight, without light, during a driving rain.
"No guards that I can see," Michael murmured as he helped Aral to the battlements.
"Must be the weather."
It had been raining since nightfall. They would learn that, in Argon, it rained every night during summer. And that by day the humidity was brutal.
It took them two hours of grossly incautious flitting from one glassless window to another, attending only those with lights behind their shutters, to find the right room.
"It's her," Aral whispered to Michael, who had to remain behind him on a narrow ledge. They had clawed eighty feet up the outside of a tower to reach that window. "I'll go in and...."
"No! She'd turn us in. Remember, she came because she wanted to. Let's just find out what's up."
Nothing happened for a long time. After resting, Michael slipped a few feet back down and worked his way across beneath the window so he could reach the ledge at the window's far side.