Diplomats and Fugitives (The Emperor's Edge Book 9) (8 page)

Perhaps Ashara could have asked for more personal information, but then she might have been expected to share some in exchange. She had no desire to do that. Shukura might believe her previous profession would be useful in this, but the night stalkers weren’t spies; they were trackers and fighters, assassins when necessary. She knew how to use the wilderness to find people and then kill them if they were a threat to Kendor. She didn’t know how to make people trust her—or how to keep them from figuring out what she was. All she could hope was that none of these people were that percipient.

In addition to Mahliki, her other traveling companions were named Maldynado, Corporal Jomrik, and Basilard, the latter being every bit as odd and unlikely as the scientist. He appeared old enough for the position of ambassador, somewhere in his mid-thirties, but he had battle scars all over his face, shaven head, and hands. Considering Mangdorians were pacifists, that in itself was perplexing. He also could not speak and had devised some kind of gesture-based language to communicate with the others. After catching a few exchanges, Ashara recognized some of the signs as belonging to the Mangdorian hunting code, but it had evolved far beyond those origins, and she could only understand part of what he said. Not that she was trying hard to learn.

Currently, Ashara sat wedged between two crates in the back of the lorry, doing her best to avoid her traveling mates. She had no wish to get attached to them. This mission would be hard enough without feelings of camaraderie confusing her duty further. The one named Maldynado was hard to avoid as every time they stopped, he ambled over wearing his ridiculous hat and tried to engage her in conversation. She shouldn’t have spoken to them on the morning of their departure; perhaps she could have pretended she didn’t speak the language. In retrospect, that would have been a wonderful way to play the role of spy. Alas, it hadn’t occurred to her until they were underway.

Midway through the second day, the lorry halted, and Ashara lifted the flap in the bed to peek out. Mahliki hopped out of the cab with a huge satchel clanking against her hip. After a brief disappearance behind some bushes, she strode toward a stand of oaks. The trees looked to be no more than twenty years old, new growth interspersed with decomposing stumps. From the lorry, Ashara did not see any sign of tree disease, but she climbed out, knowing she needed to keep an eye on the young scientist—or whatever she was.

Unfortunately, the men climbed out of the cab too. They stayed nearby, walking around and talking. Ashara tried to follow Mahliki without being noticed, but it was hard to stealthily cross a highway with the afternoon sun stealing all of the shadows.

“Hello, Ashara,” Maldynado called after her.

She ignored him. She caught up with Mahliki at the base of one of the oaks. She had dropped her pack and was eyeing the bark with a small knife in hand.

Ashara stopped several paces back, hoping not to attract attention. That was probably a vain hope after Maldynado’s loud greeting, but Mahliki did seem to be absorbed with what she was doing. Ashara rested her palm on a nearby oak, a casual enough gesture that anyone observing her should not think anything of it. She let her eyelids droop and reached out with her senses, using skills her mother had taught her as a girl and that had been further enhanced during her training as a tracker. She wanted to ensure that what she saw with her eyes matched what was truly going on in the young forest. She examined the oak beneath her fingers, then stretched her senses outward, through the roots and into the surrounding trees. Here and there, a few traces of fungal growths afflicted some of the oaks, but it was nothing uniform that could be called a blight, nor was it anything outside of the norm. The tree Mahliki was examining was perfectly healthy. With some puzzlement, Ashara watched her shave off a couple of bark samples and use a coring device to extract a sliver of wood from the trunk.

Ashara dropped her hand, letting her connection with the woods fade. She immediately grew aware of another presence and turned to face Basilard. It disturbed her that he had approached without her hearing him, even if practicing the mental sciences required concentration and it was understandable if one’s attention was less reliable than usual.

He gazed curiously at her with sky-blue eyes. He
was
a Mangdorian, she reminded herself, the battle scars notwithstanding. He would have learned to move silently through the forest as a youth, since all of the men in the culture were taught to hunt.

Basilard lifted his hands, as if he wanted to ask her something, but his lips twisted and he waved to catch Mahliki’s attention instead. When he signed a few words to her, Ashara watched. It wouldn’t hurt to learn to understand him, if only so she might gain some intelligence later on, when he signed to his comrades without realizing she knew his code.

“No, not long,” Mahliki said. “I know we’re not in Mangdoria yet. Just wanted to pick up a couple of samples on the way. And to use the sylvan lavatory. As much as I’m impressed by the way you men can water the bushes out the door while we’re in motion, I’m not that talented.”

Basilard glanced at Ashara, a hint of pink flushing his cheeks. He quickly signed something else.

“Basilard says, ‘Thank you for coming along, Ashara. Is there anything we can do to make you more comfortable?’ He also asks that I not mention the peripatetic peeing to my father, especially the part where Maldynado and Jomrik don’t always remember to tell me to turn my back. Though maybe that message was for me and not for you. I’m not a practiced translator.”

Basilard dropped his face into his hand.

Ashara told herself to ignore the conversation—she didn’t want to be drawn into casually chatting with these people—but her humor was piqued and she couldn’t resist asking, “You have a sign for peripatetic?” Ashara had come across the word in a textbook talking about traveling business owners, or she wouldn’t have known it at all. She wasn’t quite sure about using it in relation to urination, but what did she know? Maybe it was part of a Turgonian saying.

Basilard shook his head and signed something else.

“He’s lost his original translator,” Mahliki explained, “and laments that Maldynado and I like to augment his words.” She winked and took a core sample from another tree.

Ashara caught herself tempted to ask what had happened to the translator and scowled at herself. She was not going to learn about these people’s personal lives. Not trusting herself, she walked away. She caught a faintly wounded expression on Basilard’s face and a twinge of guilt prodded her. She had ignored his question. She pushed the feeling aside. She wasn’t out here to make friends.

She spotted a
milshiar
plant carpeting the base of a boulder and took the opportunity to slice off a few leaves. If she crushed the dried leaves using her mortar and pestle, they could be a useful component in her healing salves. She had brought a jar of salve with her, along with some of her potions, but if these people figured out she was here to spy, she might need more than she had.

Near the
milshiar
, she spotted a salmonberry bush and plucked a few berries. Might as well gather food and herbs while she waited. She kept her eyes open and glanced back a few times to make sure Mahliki was still working. More than once, she caught Basilard gazing in her direction. Despite the scars, he had a pleasant face and didn’t seem the judgmental sort, but she wasn’t sure she wanted him paying that much attention to her. Those who talked little tended to observe much. She didn’t want to be observed.

“Ready,” Mahliki called.

Ashara took her gathered leaves and berries and headed back to the highway. Before she reached it, an uneasy feeling came over her, one of being watched. This time, it wasn’t Basilard. He, Mahliki, and the others were all ahead of her. The feeling of someone watching came from behind. She gazed back into the trees, searching for movement or something out of the ordinary, but did not see anything. She almost reached out to touch a tree again, wanting to use the eyes of the forest instead of relying on her own, but the group was waiting on her. Basilard and Maldynado were both looking in her direction. She doubted the Turgonians would recognize magic, as they would call it, being used, but she couldn’t make assumptions about Basilard. Mangdorians had priests and shamans, not unlike the Kendorians had.

“Not enough leaves in your hair?” Maldynado asked.

“What?” Ashara started to lift a hand to her head, but she was using both of them to cup her berries and herbs—that would teach her to leave the lorry without her gathering pouch. Besides, she didn’t care about her hair. It wasn’t as if she wanted to impress these men with her looks.

“There are only two twigs sticking out of it,” Maldynado said. “I thought you might be thinking of going back for more.” He nodded toward the forest in the direction she had been looking.

Basilard elbowed him, then gestured to Ashara. She had no idea what he said.
Ignore him
, she hoped.

“What am I doing out here?” she muttered to herself in Kendorian.

Careful not to mash her berries, she climbed back into the bed, finding her spot where none of them could see her. The lorry soon rolled into motion again, the steam engine chugging as it powered the vehicle up a slope. After Ashara put away her gathered goods, she pulled a leather thong out from under her shirt. A silver locket hung from the end, and she opened it to admire the tiny portrait of her children.
This
was what she was doing out here. She couldn’t forget it.

• • • • •

At the end of two days, Basilard knew far more than he had ever wanted to know about the infamous macadamia blight of the Kyattese Islands. But he knew nothing about their Kendorian comrade, or why Maldynado was still wearing the turkey hat. He clunked his head on the roof of the cab every other time he stood up, causing the small brim to push down to the bottoms of his ears. Each time it happened, their driver, Corporal Jomrik, who had informed them he was personally responsible for the army lorry, glowered back at Maldynado, as if his hard head might be damaging the vehicle. Maldynado ignored him. The driver muttered to himself and occasionally reached up to bump his knuckles against a pair of dried duck feet dangling above his seat. Basilard could only assume it was some Turgonian superstition he hadn’t heard of before.

Someone must have told Jomrik that the mission would not be without peril, for he kept his rifle balanced across his lap as he drove. It hadn’t been out of his reach for eating, sleeping, or peeing, even though, since leaving the lowlands, they hadn’t seen many others on the highway. Now and then, lorries laden with logs had trundled past, heading toward the city, and they had crossed a Kendorian trader sitting on a wagon pulled by two stocky lizards. Basilard had been watching the road every moment of the trip, hoping to spot Elwa. He feared she and the courier must have chosen the back trails instead of traveling along the highway. During the summer, the snow pack was high enough that sticking to the pass wasn’t as imperative.

“Your people have a border post up here somewhere, don’t they, Ambassador?” Corporal Jomrik asked in a thick drawl that marked him as from a rural part of the republic. “I haven’t been over the pass before. Not much out this way, I’ve heard.”

No, most of Turgonia’s massive republic lay to the west of the capital, because that’s where the fertile land was. They had appropriated a lot of the mountains for timber and ore, but few people lived out in this range. It was more of a buffer zone between Turgonia and its neighbors.

A few more miles
, Basilard signed, making sure Maldynado was watching.

“Around the next bend,” Maldynado informed the driver, his mouth full as he munched on an apple.

Would it distress you terribly to translate my signs verbatim? Once in a while?
Basilard did not want to sound ungrateful, since it wasn’t as if Maldynado was a trained translator, but Starcrest
had
sent him along for this purpose.

“I like to add flair,” Maldynado said.

Jomrik frowned back at him. “You’re not getting crumbs on the floor of my cab, are you?”

“Of course not. Apples don’t have crumbs.”

Jomrik glared at him, pulled a rag out from under his seat, and tossed it at Maldynado before turning his attention back to the road. The corporal couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, but he was not intimidated by Maldynado’s warrior-caste airs or the fact that Maldynado was, as he mentioned daily, friends with the president. He
did
keep the lorry in meticulous condition. There wasn’t so much as a smudge of coal dust in the grooves of the textured floor.

Maldynado took another bite of his apple and peeked through the opening behind the furnace, a small window that allowed a person to see into the cargo bed. “Don’t see her.”

Why do you keep checking?

The Kendorian woman had been even less garrulous than their assassin comrade, Sicarius. The night before, she had slept in the back of the lorry instead of around the campfire with everyone else, and she was taking her meals by herself, too, eating ration bars that looked as appealing as the soles of boots.

“To make sure she didn’t fall out?” Maldynado shrugged. “I’m curious. She doesn’t look like someone who knows anything about trees or blights.”

What does someone who knows about trees and blights usually look like?

“Well.” Maldynado jerked a thumb toward the corner by the boiler. “That.”

Mahliki sat cross-legged on the floor, a cloth spread out before her with flowers, leaves, and bark samples, along with several tools on it. She plucked up something with tweezers, dropped it into a vial of colored water, shook it, then peered inside with a loupe held to her eye.

I saw Ashara pick a few edible berries last night to go with her ration bar. She knew to avoid the poisonous ones and probably has a background in woodland lore. Maybe we can have some interesting discussions on foraging.
Of course, he would have to teach her his hand signs for that. Would she have any interest in learning?