Diplomats and Fugitives (The Emperor's Edge Book 9) (47 page)

Maybe it got away from him,
Basilard suggested.
Or he controlled it for a while and then grew too tired. It might have been more resistant to the mental sciences than usual
.

Sicarius gazed around at the carnage. “It seems like he would have found the mental reserves to fight it off when it started doing this.”

Basilard spread his hands. He didn’t have an answer. He looked to Hykur, wondering if he might have some ideas, but the young priest was clenching a twine and wood talisman that hung around his neck and shaking his head slowly as he stared around the clearing. If he had any ideas, he wasn’t sharing them.

“Female organs,” Jomrik said slowly, his lips curling with horror. He seemed to still be recovering from the revelation. Then a new horror dawned in his eyes. “That means it might go out of its way to chase Mahliki?”

Sicarius did not say anything, but his face appeared grimmer than usual. “I will search for her tracks.”

I’ll look too.
Basilard ran around the perimeter of the meadow, moving as quickly as he could without risking missing signs. He hated the thought of returning to Starcrest and having to explain that his daughter had died horribly at the claws of a monster from his homeland. More than that, he would mourn Mahliki’s loss as a person, one who had learned his language almost overnight and who had never been anything but friendly to him.

He halted, spotting an old trail bearing fresh tracks. He crouched, tracing the outline of a boot with his finger. As tall as Mahliki was, she did not have smaller feet than her captors, but he recognized the make of Turgonian footwear, the sole harder than that of the moccasins the Kendorians wore. Normally, finding a sign that she had been alive only a few hours earlier would have heartened him, but he could tell from the distance between the prints that she had been running when she had made them. Deep claw marks promised the makarovi had also come down this trail, heading in the same direction as Mahliki. In spots, its big tracks trod right over hers.

Basilard waved for the others, signing that they had to hurry.

Chapter 20

“Are you sure you don’t want us to carry you?” Maldynado asked. “Or make a litter and drag you along? You look like a walking corpse.”

Ashara
felt
like a walking corpse. One with a limp and a back that throbbed in pain with every step. Basilard had splinted her broken fingers before climbing up after Sicarius, but there wasn’t much to do about the broken ribs out here. She had regained some strength from her salve and from the tree—she had focused most of the borrowed energy into fusing cracked vertebrae—but it would take days, if not weeks, before she healed fully. If she ever did. Given the way she had landed, she was lucky she could walk at all. The concerned glances Amaranthe and Maldynado kept sending her way made her wonder if she should take them up on the offer to be carried. But the ground was uneven and tangled with undergrowth, and they weren’t following a trail. Being toted across it wouldn’t be much more comfortable than walking. She would probably get dropped every time someone tripped over a root.

“Your eye is so puffy, I can barely see it.” Maldynado squinted at her face from the side. “The cut is bleeding again, and you’re limping.”

“Thanks for the list of deficiencies. I
did
fall off a cliff, you know.”

“You shouldn’t do that in the future. It’s not a recommended method of avoiding a shaman’s wrath.”

“I didn’t know there
were
recommended methods.”

“Bribery, pleading, and hurling explosives can work,” Amaranthe said. “Not all at the same time, mind you, but they’re human beings. Sometimes, it makes more sense to talk to them than run around dodging their firepower.”

“Since you’re an expert, maybe you should be helping the others deal with him instead of escorting me.”

A grimace crossed Amaranthe’s face, though she hid it quickly, and Ashara realized that was exactly what she would have preferred to be doing. But she said, “Sicarius, Basilard, and the others can handle him. Besides, you don’t know where you’re going.”

“We’re heading toward the highway.” After the wild run, it had taken Ashara a while to find her bearings, especially with clouds hiding the sun, but she recognized the peaks surrounding them and could tell which direction they were walking.

“Yes, but you don’t know where our lorry is parked, and our driver doesn’t know who you are. He might decide you’re with the rest of the Kendorians and that he should shoot you.”

Ashara almost said that she could handle one Turgonian soldier—or at least avoid being shot by one Turgonian soldier—but in her condition, she doubted she could dodge a drunk grandmother swinging a broom. “I’ve heard stories of medical care in Turgonia. Maybe I’ll just crawl into a cave and let nature heal me.”

“Sounds lonely,” Maldynado said. “And Basilard would be upset with us if we left you in a cave.” He didn’t bother hiding the longing gaze he cast back toward the woods they had left. It seemed he would rather be fighting a shaman too. Crazy Turgonians.

“Do we need to worry about pursuit?” Ashara asked. “Basilard had weeds hanging from the back of his shirt and looked like he was caught in a flood.”

“He was,” Amaranthe said. “As was the entire Kendorian encampment. A lot of people and equipment were swept downriver, and many of their supplies should be ruined. Sicarius and his new Mangdorian friends only kept from being swept away by climbing the cliff walls. A few Kendorians managed to do that, too, but most went downriver with their gear. We left before we could see if they would try to regroup and return, or if they would head back across the border, but we’re hoping for the latter, of course. Their commander was killed. Their shaman is… obviously still a problem.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Their fledging outpost was also utterly destroyed,” Maldynado said, sounding smug. “Did you know that a single squirrel-chewed blasting stick can make a sufficient fuse in the presence of kegs of black powder?”

“I could see that.”

Ashara put a hand on a fir tree for support as she stepped over a large log but paused, a sense of wrongness coming over her. She couldn’t tell if it was coming from the fir or from the forest itself. Or maybe her own intuition had been set off by some magic or menace in the area. The birds were chirping, but she couldn’t dismiss her feeling.

“Something wrong?” Amaranthe asked quietly, glancing into the trees around them.

“I’m not sure. Can you give me a second?” With her hand still on the bark, Ashara dropped her chin and closed her eyes. She did not feel comfortable using her power in front of these Turgonian witnesses, but that intuition told her that she had better do it, regardless.

Barely aware of Amaranthe and Maldynado murmuring to each other, Ashara stretched her senses out, using the network of roots once again, seeing more than she ever could have with her own limited power. That disquiet came to her through the link, from the animals crouching or running across those roots, from the birds sitting in the branches above them. In this area of the woods, there did not seem to be danger, but a couple of miles away and farther up the mountain, something was happening. A scene flashed into her mind, one of bloodied and fallen men, one of a huge, shaggy beast on a rampage.

The intensity of the images made Ashara gasp and stumble back from the tree. Scarcely seeing anything around her, she would have fallen over the log, but Maldynado gripped her shoulders to steady her.

“What is it?” Amaranthe asked.

“I… I’ve never seen one before, but I think that was a makarovi.”

Amaranthe sucked in a quick breath and met Maldynado’s eyes. They seemed to exchange some silent communication, but Ashara was too busy trying to push the image of the mauled soldiers and of the creature out of her mind to worry about it.

“The others need our help,” she managed to say. Based on the grisly stories she had heard of makarovi, she did not know if this one had been acting of its own accord or if it was being controlled, but she suspected Tladik was responsible.

Ashara thought Amaranthe and Maldynado might question her vision, but maybe Basilard wasn’t the only one who had figured out that she had a few talents other than archery.

“Where?” Amaranthe asked.

“This way.” Ashara turned up the slope, hastening her pace even though it hurt. Her vision of the makarovi had been brief, but she’d had the sense that it was after something, that it was on the hunt.

“Should we have a plan?” Maldynado asked Amaranthe. They were letting Ashara lead, but they were staying close, too, with their firearms in hand.

“Probably,” Amaranthe said. “It’s a shame we’re out of blasting sticks.”

“I’m not sure those work as well on makarovi as they do on dams.”

“I’m assuming the shaman is controlling it. We’ve seen him using everything from grimbals to owls.”

“Cougars,” Ashara said, though she wasn’t paying much attention to the conversation. She was focusing on walking through the pain and finding the makarovi before it found Mahliki—if it hadn’t already. She hoped Basilard and the others were on the trail too.

“A cougar? Is that how you ended up falling?” Amaranthe asked.

“It pushed me over the edge.”

“Hm, he definitely spends time in the minds of a lot of animals. I wonder if there’s a way to use that against him.”

“I didn’t think to bring any catnip,” Maldynado said.

“Shortsighted,” Amaranthe murmured.

“It veered down from the higher ground,” Ashara said after touching another tree, trying to update herself on the creature’s location. She couldn’t sense Mahliki or the others, but the makarovi created such terrified emotions within the wild animals that it left an imprint on the forest. “We’re not that far.”

“Wish we weren’t that far from the lorry,” Maldynado said. “I’d rather face it from inside some steel walls. Preferably, moving steel walls that are outrunning it while we fire cannons back at it.”

Ashara did not point out that a steam vehicle would be useless out here in this roadless terrain. She wouldn’t have minded steel walls and cannons, either. She had no idea how they would kill a makarovi, especially when she didn’t know if she could draw her bow right now; she just knew that they couldn’t let it have Mahliki or kill any more people without trying to stop it.

A bone-shaking, unearthly roar emanated from the forest ahead of them. It made Ashara shudder—and grab an arrow to nock. Broken fingers or not, she would have to try and shoot.

“Can we circle around and find some high ground?” Amaranthe asked. “Maybe a spot where we can shoot at it and it can’t reach us?”

Ashara thought of the tree she and Mahliki had shared a few days earlier. She did not know if that would be enough of a deterrent to stop a makarovi—it might tear a trunk up from the roots with its massive strength. But perhaps they could find an outcropping of rocks or a big boulder to climb up. She wished she had personal experience fighting the creatures and knew what they were capable of.

“We can try.” Normally, Ashara would run ahead to check, but she only pointed in a direction that would let the others circle around the location where the roar had originated. She couldn’t move faster than they could and admitted to fear seeping into her blood. She didn’t want to chance facing a makarovi alone, not right now. “That way.”

Another roar came from the trees up ahead. She couldn’t see the source yet, but her ears told her that the creature hadn’t moved far from where it had made the first cry. She also didn’t think it was facing in their direction. So what was it roaring at?

“Watch my back,” she whispered and touched a tree again, hoping nature would share another vision with her. And also hoping that this one wouldn’t include mangled corpses.

For a moment, Ashara saw only the creases in the bark of the pine tree under her hand. Then her mind settled enough, and she had her vision. She glimpsed a thick stand of fir and hemlock and a looming pile of granite boulders. Her first thought was that she had located the high ground that Amaranthe wanted, but the makarovi loomed right in front of the boulders, standing on its hind legs, towering twenty feet. With massive paws, it was cutting at the rocks, tearing away shards as if its claws were unbreakable axes.

Ashara’s stomach sank. There could only be one reason for its obsession. It had someone trapped. Mahliki. Ashara wanted it to be someone else, one of the shaman’s companions, but she knew with otherworldly certainty that it wasn’t. Her head sagged. Mahliki might have somehow evaded Tladik, but she hadn’t escaped his latest minion.

Someone shook her shoulder, pulling her from her trance.

Ashara lowered her hand and took a breath. Mahliki wasn’t dead yet. There was still hope.

“She’s trapped inside a small cave in some rocks,” Ashara whispered. “I’m not sure how long she has until the makarovi forces its way in, but I did see a cliff rising up in the background. Maybe we can climb up and shoot at it from the top.” As she spoke, she was already moving. Though it rattled her aching body, she forced herself into a run. There was not much time.

Grim-faced, Amaranthe and Maldynado did not argue. They followed her, keeping up easily, glancing toward the sounds of the roars as they circled widely around the spot. The scrapes and squeals of claws gouging rock were also audible now.

When Ashara saw the cliff with her own eyes, it did not impress her. It would take them to about twenty feet above the makarovi, the ledge about even with the top of the jumble of boulders it was attacking, but it would not take any fancy climbing to reach the top. They ran up a slope on one end, a move the makarovi could replicate once it noticed them attacking. Ashara hoped the creature was too obsessed with reaching Mahliki to leave the rock pile—and that she or one of the others could luck into a killing shot. Her experience shooting the grimbals on the highway did not lead her to believe that would be easy. The grimbals seemed small next to this dark, shaggy predator. But maybe if she could catch it in the eye…

“Dear ancestors, that is one ugly monster,” Maldynado whispered, dropping to one knee at the edge of the overlook. His rifle was already loaded with the six bullets it could hold, and he laid a small pile next to his knee for quick reloading.