Chapter 15

It had already been a difficult day, so naturally it began raining.

Only a patter at first, nothing like the sheets of icy water Peredur’s coasts enjoyed springing on its dwellers, but it grew. Within an hour they could hardly see in front of the even with the lantern, stumbling along carefully. Master Cozme pointed out a silver lining, that few lemures could fly in such weather and none could follow a scent through it, but wet feet spoke louder than his optimism. It did not stop there: Angharad had near forgot that the High Road was an aqueduct, after using it for a highway so long, but now she was up to her ankles in the reminder. The rain had filled the aqueduct’s body up to their ankles and were it not so rich with broken edges the water would have run even higher.

Between wading against the current on now treacherous footing, all of them being soaked to the bone through their clothes and the wind beginning to hurl itself at them from the east – cold, it felt as if none of them were wearing coats – the mood took a grim turn.

It did not help that not all were recovered from the encounter with the harrowhawk. Angharad was yet dazed, prone to staring out into the storm, and though Cozme had cleaned out the wound he’d taken on his face the flesh was still dark. They were both better off than Augusto Cerdan, whose left arm was broken, and better still than poor Briceida. The handmaid had been sick since eating her chalk tablets, enough that the wind and rain slowed her advance to a crawl. Brun was helping her keep pace, but the two were at the back of the company and certain to stay there. Angharad made sure to pull back and stay with them a span whenever they trailed behind too much.

She caught an irritated expression on Brun’s face once or twice, but she would tell him later no insult was meant to his efforts. It was only that if they lost the pair in the storm, there was no telling when the two would be able to catch up. Better to slow their entire company than to risk it.

They all felt the change in the current around two hours before dinner, the way it was now pulling forward instead of back. It was good news, Angharad was informed as a few of them pulled close together and shouted over the rainstorm’s din to understand each other. It meant they were close to a break in the aqueduct, one they had planned to reach hours ago. They had passed the great river without even realizing and by now they must be surrounded by woods. If they pushed on after dinner time, they ought to reach the end of the High Road today. Since no one was eager to sleep in a river, Angharad the notion was agreed on.

The first break in the High Road was subtle enough Beatris almost walked off the edge.

She was pulled back shrieking by Remund Cerdan, who promptly shouted for a halt. It was only a break of about five feet, though unnaturally neat: as if some giant’s sharp sword had sliced through the aqueduct. If not for the weather they might have been expected to make the jump, but as things stood Remund was prevailed upon to use his contract. First a ring for them to step on, halfway, then another above and to the side of it for them to hold on to.

“Some of you have gloves,” Song shouted into the rain. “They should be shared with whoever crosses.”

Not even the Cerdan brothers tried to argue that holding a cloth to the rings of light would be enough in such weather. Good. Angharad had not been looking forward to again pulling her sleeves forward and grasping the light through them: if she slipped even a little, she would be holding the burning radiance. She was the third to cross, using Isabel’s gloves and passing them back to a leaning Brun, and once across with her pack she followed Cozme to the edge to share in his grimace. The small break had only been the first, leading onto an elevated island ten feet long. The real precipice lay ahead: almost forty feet of mostly missing aqueduct, with some arches still standing but no funnel over them.

“It may be too dangerous to cross,” Master Cozme yelled.

The man passed a hand through his drenched hair, clearly regretting the loss of his hat. Angharad sympathized: with how much rain her braids had taken, it felt like someone had hung a waterskin against the back of her head.

“We cannot camp here,” Angharad shouted back. “There’s no other way.”

“He’ll need to be carried after,” Cozme told her. “The contract is hard on his body.”

“Then we will carry him,” the Pereduri insisted.

There was no arguing with the needs of the moment, so before long Remund Cerdan set to tracing his rings of light across the gap. It was a thing surreal, almost out of a play, to see the man hanging in the air in the middle of a storm with only slices of light to stand on, making a foothold and handhold every time. Had Angharad not been able to glimpse the clear terror on the younger Cerdan’s face, she might have thought him a spirit. Lord Remund slowed near the end, his limbs grown stiff, and only narrowly made it to the other side. He collapsed the moment he reached there, though to everyone’s relief the rings stayed. Not knowing how long that would be the case, they set to crossing in a hurry.

It was one of the most thoroughly unpleasant experiences in Angharad’s life.

The rain somehow made the solid light slippery, and with the wind whipping it in her face she could barely see the rings ahead of her. Twice she had to hold on for dear life to one of the ‘handhold’ rings as her boots slipped, fear icily seizing her limbs, and when she threw herself at the end of the road her angle was off: she fell and bruised her knees against the aqueduct’s bottom, cold water running down from her collarbones to her belly. It was a good thing she carried no blackpowder, for it would surely have been ruined. As the fourth to cross Angharad found that others had already helped Remund to sit up but also that he was no better for it.

Though he stayed out of the lantern’s light, all the skin she glimpsed had turned pale as ivory and she hardly saw him move save for breathing. The infanzon was half a statue already and there were still others yet to cross. Stomach in knots at the though of what might happen to him and the others both, Angharad stalked around the end of the ring road with nervous impatience. They had a stroke of luck when the storm began to calm, the rain growing sparser, but it would only get them so far. By the time the last of them began the crossing, Remund could only moved with a shallow breath. Not even to blink. Augusto was the last to cross, and in a way he was lucky.

The storm was near dead by now, the rain barely more than a patter and the wind more of a breeze. The Cerdan made better time than any of them all the way across – lights winking out behind him – as he made haste. On the last foothold he threw them all a cocky grin, his only good hand releasing the handhold ring before he leapt.

The wind picked up halfway through.

Angharad was standing close, still stalking about, so she saw the horror writ plain on his face. His jump fell short, brushed aside, and he hit the edge of the aqueduct with his belly. Hands scrabbled against wet, smooth stone while water flowed into his face – screams of surprise of dismay sounded behind her, but Angharad was already moving. She caught his arm as it slid back, clothes ripping but her fingers tightened around his wrist and she held tight with gritted teeth. She was kneeling in the water and, Sleeping God, she could feel her boots slip.

“Help her,” Isabel shouted.

Cozme was there a moment later, pulling at Augusto’s shoulder, and between the two of them they hoisted him over the edge. Augusto crawled through the wet, eyes wild and limbs shaking as he fled the edge of the aqueduct.

“Gods,” the infanzon croaked. “Gods.”

Catching her breath, Angharad knelt by his side and closed her eyes. Her heart was beating as wildly as his must. She might have stayed there a while, rain flowing down her face, had the infanzon not tugged at her sleeve.

“Thank you,” Augusto Cerdan said. “Lady Tredegar. I did not think you would…”

“We are under truce,” Angharad said. “Your safety is yet my concern.”

It was not the reason she had moved. In the moment, she had only seen a man about to die. Honor’s laws had only caught up to her hands after the deed. The dark-haired noble swallowed, nodding, and looked torn.

“The rings only support the weight of one man,” he said, tone somewhere between a plea and a concession. “There was no other way for us to live. The knife, it was a mercy. Better that than to be eaten alive.”

Her face hardened.

“Then we should have died,” Angharad flatly replied. “There are some lines good men do not cross.”

His cheeks were already red from the cold, but anger reddened them yet more.

“I should have known better,” Augusto Cerdan spat out. “Go on, then, Tredegar. Honour has been satisfied, you need not keep my company any longer.”

It sounded fine by her, so she stiffly took her leave. Even after that close call their company agreed to press on, for now that the storm was weak they were certain to be able to descend from the High Road that night. The original plan, Angharad learned, had been for their company to camp up on the aqueduct for safety and then descend the following morning – that method would also allow Remund, who was still unmoving as marble, to rest before using his contract again. Instead they would be using the rope taken from the hollows that Angharad was carrying so they might find shelter down in the woods away from the water. It would take hours, after all, for the aqueduct to empty even after rain ceased. None of them wanted to sleep in a filthy riverbed.

It was almost a surprise that the last leg of the journey was so uneventful, the only imposition that Remund Cerdan had to be carried by two of them at all times. He was, she noticed much heavier than a man his size should be. Angharad was careful never to touch any of that too-pale skin when it was her turn to bear the weight, afraid of what it might spread. By the time they reached the end of the High Road, or at least the part they intended to use – its silhouette resumed half a mile ahead, leading into the mountains – Remund was capable of hobbling forward. It only took one of them to help him keep up, much like Briceida.

Getting down from the aqueduct was more tedious than dangerous. Remund and Briceida were lowered tied with the rope instead of climbing down, which took most of the rest of their company to do safely, and after that down went their last supplies. They were all soaked, exhausted and irritable but by the end of it they were finally back on solid ground.

Around them were deep woods, tall trees whose branches obscured much of the sky, but the way forward was plain: they were near the bottom of a hill and going north up the slope would lead them to the mountains where the second trial awaited. There would be a need to march eastwards for a few hours, as the High Road was on the western half of the Dominion, but they should be well past the hollows and the most dangerous lemures. They still set a watch after finding a tall tree to hide under, settling in for the night and hoping their clothes would dry some before they had to march again.

Exhaustion saw to it that Angharad fell into a mercifully dreamless sleep.

—

The clothes were only half-dry, so they all stank like dogs when they set out the following morning.

The slope was muddy and slippery, covered by a thick carpet of dead leaves, but there could be no mistaking the way they needed to go. Up the hills they went, through trees and great ferns and fields of pale blue wildflowers. When the mud turned to rock Angharad knew they were close, and barely an hour after that they were looking up at the towering heights of the mountains at the heart of the Dominion of Lost Things.

“We are a little further north than I would prefer,” Song told them, consulting her map, “but following the mountains east will get us most of the way there. We will have to go around crags to find the road to the sanctuary, but I expect we will reach the end of our journey a little past midday.”

The Tianxi’s prediction ended up somewhat off, as they discovered two hours in that a landslide had cut their path east. They decided against risking to cross it when they found some great boulders balancing precariously further up, instead dipping back south into the woods and then resuming going east. Their pace was slower in the forest, noticeably so, and by the time they stopped for lunch they were barely halfway through the journey. Before long, at least, they finally found the crags that Song had mentioned: three massive rocks with flat tops, forming a broad half-circle appended to the mountainside.

“The road we must take passes behind them,” Song said, “and then rides the edge of the one closest to the mountains to lead up to the sanctuary’s entrance.”

“Would it not be possible to go through them instead?” Master Cozme asked. “Surely there are paths we could use.”

“There are, but I was advised against doing this,” the Tianxi replied. “Landslides are apparently common, especially after rain.”

“It is an unnecessary risk,” Isabel opined. “Let us take the longer way.”

Most agreed with her, including Angharad. They had barely begun circling the crags when Brun breathed in sharply. He turned to catch her eye and she drifted close, but Remund Cerdan – now recovered, unlike poor Briceida who was still lagging behind despite being able to walk on her own – raised a hand at them.

“None of that,” the infanzon said. “If your contract had told you something, share it with all our company and not only our dear Lady Tredegar.”

Angharad grimaced but nodded when Brun’s turned a questioning gaze her way. The cat was out of the bag: Master Cozme had noticed the hint of a contract before their fight with the hollows, and evidently passed on his suspicions to his lords.

“There are people to our west,” Brun said. “Hollows, I think. At least ten of them.”

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They had just come from the west, moving eastwards, so their company was either being followed or about to be: most of them were poor woodsmen, any half-decent tracker would be able to find traces of their passage.

“Are they following us?” Augusto Cerdan bluntly asked.

“Too early to tell,” Brun shrugged, “but they are coming our way.”

“Then we must hurry,” Angharad said. “The last thing we need is a fight.”

She did not fear testing her blade against darklings, but their company was wounded and exhausted. Mistakes were certain to be made. They picked up the pace, no longer even half-heartedly attempting not to leave a trail, and after half an hour Brun told them the hollows had been left behind. The news cheered them all, until another quarter hour passed and he told them that another group of hollows was coming from the west.

They were, it seemed, being hunted.

“If we head south we might be able to circle around the western warband,” Isabel suggested.

“That is exactly what they want, my lady,” Cozme Aflor shook his head. “They are not going for the kill at the moment, only pushing us firther away from the sanctuary so they might hunt us at their leisure.”

“We don’t know how well they can track us,” Remund noted. “Isabel’s idea might well be feasible.”

Angharad shook her head.

“This is too much for coincidence,” she said. “How would they have known to watch near the High Road? It smacks of Gloam sorcery or a tracking contract.”

The latter were not so rare: she had been hunted through the streets of Sacromonte by what she suspected to be exactly such a thing. The darklings of the Dominion were a cult worshipping some ancient spirit, it was only to be expected that some among them would have won contracts off this ‘Red Eye’.

“She is right,” Master Cozme grunted. “It’s too close a hunt for how clever we have been. There is only one way: we need to try the crags.”

No one was eager, given the dangers Song had spoken of, but at least the landslides would not be purposefully hunting them.

“I saw what looked like a trail going up,” Brun told them. “About half a mile back.”

“I saw it as well,” Song agreed. “It seems our best chance if we are to move quickly enough to slip the noose.”

It felt like wasted time to go back the way they’d just come, but Angharad kept silent. It was the wisest course. The trail the pair had spoken of was more of ravine just large enough for someone to squeeze through, leading towards what the lantern revealed to be an outcropping low enough to be climbable. For lack of better choices they went through, stone scraping at their sides. It was half an hour of occasionally painful squeezing and climbing – Briceida was finally feeling better, no longer slowing them down so much – until they reached a broader path.

It was another ravine inside the crag, this one about two people wide. Angharad suspected it must have been worn into existence by rain over decades, for it was narrow at the top and wider at the bottom. The ground had dried since last night, fortunately, and the footing was smooth. The occasional falling rock was a small price to pay for the good time they made but goods news, as ever, were followed with bad.

“We are being followed,” Brun told them, voice echoing against the stone. “They are taking the same path we did.”