The scout shifted a twig from one side of his mouth to the other while eyeing them. ‘Cap’n wants your report.’
‘What report?’ Sour asked.
‘On what you’ve sniffed out.’
‘We ain’t seen nothing,’ Sour answered, crossing his arms.
The man removed the twig from his mouth, studied it, then tucked it back in. ‘Yeah. I see that.’
Murk wanted to slap the damned thing from the fellow’s mouth. ‘Listen, merc. What’s your name?’
‘Sweetly,’ the man answered, his face flat of any emotion.
‘Sweetly,’ Murk echoed. ‘What’s your name — Sweetly?’
The scout glanced about the darkening shadows of the dunes and pockets of low dry brush. His gaze returned to them. The twig sank as his mouth drew down. ‘ ’Sright. Now c’mon. You two got a report to make.’ He jerked his head towards the coast and started off.
Murk and Sour followed along. ‘Oh look at me,’ Sour grumbled sotto voce as they walked. ‘I’m a tough guy. I chew twigs. Look out for me.’
‘You just don’t like meetin’ someone named Sweetly,’ Murk told him, smiling.
Sour’s grumbling descended into dark mouthings.
They found a camp pitched just inland, sheltered from the winds by a high dune. Pickets led them to a central tent, currently more of a simple awning as its canvas sides were still raised. Yusen ducked from beneath. Sweetly gave a tilt of his head then ambled off.
The mercenary captain regarded them from within the deep nests of wrinkles surrounding his eyes then drew a heavy breath and crossed his arms.
‘What?’ Sour said, bristling.
‘Let’s have it,’ the man sighed.
‘She’s interested in the dolmens,’ Murk answered.
‘Dolmens?’
‘The standing stones. That’s why we’re here.’
Yusen got a pained look on his face. He lowered his eyes to study the ground for a time. ‘Damn. I was hoping that wasn’t the case.’
Sour glanced to Murk. ‘Now what?’
‘Now you two stay on her good side, that’s what,’ Yusen answered.
Again, Murk almost saluted. ‘Yes, Cap’n,’ he said. The man shot him a searching sideways glance then grimaced his impatience and waved them away. They ambled off.
After searching for a while Murk stopped a mercenary and asked, ‘Which one’s our tent?’
‘That one,’ the woman answered, pointing to a pile of poles and bundled canvas. Then she walked away.
‘Yeah, very funny,’ Murk called after her. He waved to Sour. ‘Looks like you’ll have to put it up.’
‘Me? Whaddya mean, me? You put it up.’
‘No, you.’
‘You.’
‘I ain’t.’
‘Well, I sure ain’t.’
‘Both of you put it up!’ a mercenary bellowed from the next tent. ‘Or I’ll put them tent-poles up where they don’t belong!’
Both offered choice gestures towards the side of the tent then knelt to the damp canvas. ‘Just like the old days, hey?’ Sour murmured.
‘Yeah. Unfortunately.’
* * *
K’azz, it turned out, fully intended to go alone. He only acquiesced to a token guard when Shimmer told him flat out they would come regardless. In the end she chose two of the remaining Avowed mages, Lor-sinn and Gwynn, and three of their best swords: Cole, Turgal, and Amatt.
Tarkhan, captain of the Third Company, would be left behind to command Stratem. Shimmer was not happy with this arrangement as the Wickan tribesman, a formidable knife-fighter, had been among the top lieutenants of Cowl’s ‘Veils’. Though, she could admit, the intervening years of commanding the Third through various contracts across the world did appear to have tempered the man. And K’azz had every confidence in him. But then, that was one thing K’azz always did well — give and instil confidence.
Seeing the surviving Avowed gathered together in Haven was a pleasure for Shimmer — and at the same time a melancholy reunion. A pleasure to see old friends; heartbreaking for all the absent faces and the painful thinness of the ranks. Her count put the total number at less than seventy. Yet that number varied as the occasional lost Avowed would suddenly appear in Stratem, having made their way from imprisonment, service to some patron, or from simply being stranded in this or that land. And there was always Cal-Brinn’s Fourth Company as welclass="underline" gone missing in Assail lands but possibly still surviving if Bars’ reappearance was any indication. Of the near forty Avowed who chose to follow Skinner into exile, well, they would meet them soon enough.
A week later, the foreigners’ vessel, the Serpent, was readied and fully victualled. When all had been stowed away and the vessel started south under quarter-sail, Rutana turned to K’azz and growled resentfully, ‘I was expecting some sort of an army yet here you come nearly alone. This is an insult to my mistress. Better not to have answered at all.’
Again, to Shimmer’s eyes, K’azz displayed remarkable forbearance in merely quirking his lips. ‘I understand your mistress is something of a seer — surely then she knew this when she sent you …’ and, bowing in the face of the sour woman’s mutterings, he added, ‘I will be in my cabin.’
Alone with Rutana at the vessel’s side, Shimmer offered no comment. The woman wrenched angrily at the bindings on her arm, shot her a hot glare, and grumbled, ‘And I hate all this damned water.’ She marched off. Shimmer leaned over the side to watch the foaming wake. She rather enjoyed being at sea.
Exiting the Sea of Chimes, they headed west round the desolate coast of the Grey Lands. This desert wasteland supported only the thinnest scatterings of scrub and stunted twisted oak and pine. Shimmer had heard the mages discussing whether its barrenness was due to natural unproductive soils and lack of rainfall, or whether the ruins of ancient K’Chain Che’Malle citadels hinted at another possible cause. In either case it was a forbidding peninsula of windswept semi-arid desert, scrubland and broken rock.
Once past its horn, which the Guard had named half jokingly ‘Cape Dire’, the Jacuruku pilot sent them more or less on a due west heading out into the rough waters of what some called the ‘Explorers’ Sea’ and others the ‘White Spires Sea’, named for the hazards of its many floating ship-sized mountains of ice. Indeed, it was even speculated that an immense floating field of ice blocked passage between these lands and those to the immediate west — Jacuruku itself. Yet this vessel had slipped through as, Shimmer knew, another ship bearing Crimson Guard deserters had as welclass="underline" Kyle and other Bael land recruits who then went on to rescue K’azz from the Dolmens.
And now he leads us back to this land. Why? What is so pressing at these Dolmens of Tien? K’azz spoke little of his time there though it had changed him profoundly: before, like Shimmer, he’d not shown his age but when he returned he looked every one of his hundred plus years. From Rutana’s words, and her commander’s reaction, she gathered that something inhabited the Dolmens. Something that he agreed mustn’t be disturbed.
The crossing was for the most part boring. Rutana and Nagal kept to their cabin, as did K’azz. The dull repetitive drone of shipboard routine would only be broken by jolting periods of sheer terror when the call ‘Ice spire!’ rang from the lookouts. Then all aboard ran for the sides while the crew scrambled to the sails and the pilot rammed the tiller aside. Shimmer and the other Avowed watched fascinated as the emerald and white glowing floating sculptures edged past. They looked to her to have been made by the gods, so otherworldly and beautiful were their curving blade-like lines.
Now that they had entered the corridor of ice crags, the captain ordered the sweeps unshipped and their progress slowed to a tentative crawl. Crew and Avowed passengers alike watched from the sides, long poles at hand. Two observers occupied the crow’s nest at all times. Yet despite all these precautions one night Shimmer was thrown from her hammock as the ship rocked and shuddered beneath her like a hammered child’s toy. She lay stunned on the timbers while around her everyone groaned, rousing themselves. The sound of something scraping the ship’s planking tore at her ears and ran its jagged clawed nails down her spine.