“The station is watched,” he warned Mari, describing the Mechanics.
She glared at him. “How the blazes am I supposed to relieve myself?”
“I…do not know.”
Mari had to wait until the wagon was well down the road, jumping off to dart into a patch of bushes, then running to catch up to the wagon again as Alain watched anxiously. For some reason she appeared to blame him for her inconvenience, but the wine and food Alain had purchased put her in a better mood. “We’ll have to stock up on supplies before we leave the road for…our destination,” Mari remarked. “I don’t think we can count on finding anything there.”
He thought about that as the wagon rumbled through the last light of day. What would a city destroyed and then abandoned for more than a century be like? The thoughts brought no comfort, and Alain was glad for the distraction when the wagon turned into a drover’s station for the night. He and Mari got a tiny room in the drover hostel and slept in each other’s arms. So much human contact had taken some getting used to, but now he found himself wishing he could hold her more. It sometimes took great effort not to move his hands to places where Mari had told him not to touch her. But as Alain lay, feeling her breathe in her sleep next to him, he remembered her distress in Severun, and how badly he had wanted to help, and how little he could do. Being told that she was the daughter of the prophecy had been a hard thing to take, an awesome responsibility to be told of.
In some ways, Alain realized to his sorrow, Mari would always be alone, no matter how closely he held her or how hard he tried to help.
Even with frequent purchases of rides on wagons going in the same direction, the need to rest at night and keep an eye out for Mages or Mechanics or Dark Mechanics meant it was still close to two weeks before they reached the place where Mari could see the Imperial road taking a wide turn toward the new capital of Palandur. At that turn, the old route to Marandur was easy to spot, though the paving had been buckled by more than one hundred and fifty years of deliberate neglect. Grass, shrubs, and trees were intruding on the old road, some of the trees quite tall now, but its path remained obvious.
So did the Imperial watchtower at the place where the old road and the new diverged. Unlike the watchtower on the northern plains which Alain had described seeing, this tower was of stone, looking stout enough to stand for a thousand years. The sentries on the tower looked bored, but they kept their eyes on the road traffic.
Standing next to the tower was a huge stone, the side facing the road cut flat and polished. Deeply engraved on the stone were words formed of letters so large as to be easy to read from the road. “To All Who Pass,” Mari read out loud to Alain, “Know The Price Rebellion Will Pay. Only Death Lives In Marandur Now, And Death Will Claim All Who Go There Or Dare To Raise Their Hand Against Their Emperor. Palan, Emperor.”
“Death lives in Marandur?” Mari remarked despite the knot in her stomach the words brought. “The emperor could’ve used an editor.”
“Were I the emperor’s editor,” Alain replied, “I doubt I would find much to criticize in the emperor’s writing.”
Mari and Alain walked on past the turn-off with idle glances at the old road, then went back to watching their fellow travelers for signs of danger. Over the last week sightings of Mechanics on watch along the road had lessened as they went farther south, and then ended except for infrequent sightings of Mechanics who were clearly traveling to destinations in comfortable carriages and paying no attention to others on the road. As hoped, Mari’s Guild apparently had not expected her to come this way, but Mari covertly watched the Mechanics as they passed, her feelings by turns wistful and worried. She should have been one of them. Now they were hunting her.
The occasional Mage had passed them as well, but Alain must have become very good at hiding himself from other Mages because none of them paid any attention to him. Had Asha succeeded in making the Mage Guild believe that Alain had gone west from Severun? Mari felt another guilty twinge at the thought. Despite his advice to Mari that she should not feel guilty for the dangers faced by others, Alain himself clearly felt responsible for anything that might happen to Asha. One time he had tried to talk about that to Mari, but she had been moody and the conversation had ended quickly, Alain appearing let down and Mari mentally kicking herself. The next day she brought it up, let Alain talk out his worries, and they both felt better afterwards.
It seemed that they had thrown their Guilds off of their track, at least temporarily. But that still left the Imperial troops enforcing the ban on traveling to Marandur.
Later in the day they passed a roadside stand selling food and watered wine, so they filled their packs before moving on. They walked until darkness fell and made sure no one was observing them, then turned left off the new road and headed straight for the old, making their way carefully through the night.
They were moving across an open area between patches of woods when Alain grabbed her arm and forced Mari down flat in the grass. Though uncut, the grass here grew not much higher than their ankles, leaving them far too exposed even when hugging the ground. Mari lay unmoving as the muffled clatter of armor and weaponry merged with the soft rustling sounds of legs striding through the grass. The half-full moon provided plenty enough light to see the shapes of the Imperial legionaries trudging by maybe fifty lance-lengths to one side of her and Alain.
Mari held her breath, one hand on her pistol under her jacket. If I have to use this, we’re dead. The sounds of the shots will draw every legionary within thousands of lances. The legionaries didn’t seem to be searching, though, instead slogging wearily along with the attitude of soldiers who have done the same thing too many times with nothing ever happening. None of them glanced in the direction of Mari and Alain, and after some heart-stopping moments the patrol was past its closest point to them and moving away.
Finally drawing a breath, Mari lowered her face to the soil. “This is going to be a long night,” she barely whispered to Alain.
“They cannot patrol the entire area between here and Marandur in strength,” he said. “Even the Empire does not have sufficient troops or wealth to keep such a large garrison in place. Once we get past this band of defenses we should find areas that are less well guarded.”
“I hope you’re right, my Mage.”
They dodged another patrol before dawn, then holed up in a shallow ravine cut by a stream, huddled against the raw earth of the banks as they tried to get some rest, one of them always awake and on watch as the other dozed.
No Imperial patrols disturbed their day, though, and as the sun sank to the horizon Mari and Alain started out through the dying light, quickly stumbling across the old road. Mari came to a halt on its verge, seeing that the road showed no sign of use for several decades at least. “They have troops around Marandur itself enforcing the quarantine, but they’re not using the old road to supply them or move them.”
Alain gazed at the old road, his expression uncharacteristically somber. “The emperors believe they have the power to force their illusions on all others. This is part of that. The road itself is declared dead, never to be used, and no one dares dispute the Imperial will.”
“Not much better than the Great Guilds, is it?”
“No, I do not think so. When you seek allies among the commons, Mari, I believe you should look to those who do not blindly accept the authority of their leaders.”