The Path of the Sword (54 page)

He was about to strike at the next man who came from the trees but for some reason the man stopped mid-stride, stood rigid, clawing at his throat and fell.

“Got him,” Kurin muttered triumphantly.

It was over as quickly as it began. Jurel frantically moved past Kurin and saw Mikal standing amid three man-sized lumps. Relieved that the scream he had heard a moment ago was not Mikal, he felt the adrenaline rush out of him, leaving him breathless and with a renewed burning in his side. He was pretty sure he had torn some stitches.

More of Kurin's pain poultice for me.
He laughed. It was a terrible sound.

* * *

Thalor rubbed his hands gleefully as he gazed down into his scrying bowl. The platoon from Threimes had failed. They were dead to a man and Thalor could not have been more pleased—surprised but pleased. How one swordmaster, one heretic, and one farm boy could best fifty trained Soldiers, he could not fathom, but they had. There was still the platoon from Grayson to worry about but from what he had seen so far, they should pose little threat.

This calls for a drink,
he thought smugly. Following his own advice, he rose and poured himself a nip of the finest brandy he had, savoring the mellow scent of the amber liquid as he did so. Calen had nearly ruined his plans, had nearly ruined
him
, with his little ploy but Thalor would come out on top.
He knew that. He was the better man. It was only his right.

Maten, as Calen had foreseen, had had some unpleasant words for him, rebuking him scathingly for his failure to communicate the discovery of the renegade's whereabouts. It had only been by the skin of his teeth that he had avoided a ritual lashing. But Calen's own plans were falling apart. One platoon down, one to go. Even if the second platoon was successful, Calen would have much to answer for. Fifty men dead.

There was planning to do. Thalor poured himself a second drink and mulled over his options. If Kurin could escape the second platoon, then he would be in a position to undermine Calen permanently. He would have to speak with his allies. He would need back up if he wanted to destroy the fat thorn in his side. There would be deals to draw up and concessions to be made but in the end it would all be worth it.

He downed his second drink, savoring the burn as it coursed down his throat, then sat and picked up a quill and a blank page.

Fifty men dead. He could not be more pleased.

Chapter 42

They set up camp after the moon set. They had no choice. The forest was no longer a maze of shadows, it was one solid black mass. Each one knew he was not alone only by the sounds of the others's footsteps and the odd grunts of surprise when one stumbled into a depression or over a branch. So, Mikal had reluctantly called a halt.

There was no other sound in the forest; even those animals who thrived in the darkness seemed to be waiting breathlessly for something more to happen. It had been quite an exciting night. Men had battled and men had died and perhaps those nocturnal creatures thought to stay up a little longer so as not to miss any of the action. So they waited silently, and watched as these three set up their little camp and lit a little fire and sat, staring fixedly at their little pin prick of light as if that light would provide answers to their unasked questions.

Jurel sat with his back leaned up against a knotty old tree trunk and his legs splayed out in imitation of a puppet cast aside by its master to wait until the next tug of its strings, uncaring of the whorls that poked into his back. He tried not to jump at every shadow hurled at the trees by the tiny camp fire that Mikal had expertly started. How in the name of the demon's pits had the man seen the flint he was striking in the blackness?

Who cared? It was warm. It was light.

Kurin sat cross legged across the fire from him, hands resting on his knees palms up, and head bowed low. He could be asleep except that every now and then, quiet words, too quiet to make out, escaped the confines of his hood and crept furtively across to Jurel. The words were indecipherable but the tone was unmistakable. Not sleeping then. Praying. Appropriate.

Mikal, as usual, sat ramrod straight, watching the night for shadows that did not belong, wordlessly surveying their fortress, calmly honing his sword blade to a mirror finish and a razor's edge. Strangely that sound, the faint scratch of strop on steel, was as a sedative to Jurel.

He sat, listlessly staring at the fire, trying to ignore the symphony of aches and pains that played its discordant harmony on every string in his body, and buried himself in his thoughts. How much longer? No. Wrong question. Where were they going? That was it. Kurin had some place in mind. Of that, Jurel had no doubt. But, bollocks and whores, though the old man liked to hear the sound of his own voice, he could be entirely too reticent when he set his mind to it.

“Kurin?”

He did not stop his praying.

“Kurin, where are we going?”

Still nothing.

“Kurin, damn it. Where are you taking me?”

Finally, a reaction. The words quavered and stumbled to a halt. Then started again.

“Leave him be,” Mikal advised quietly. “He'll be done soon and then you can ask him.”

Frustration exploded in bright shades of red across Jurel's eyes. He trembled with pent up anger and turned his glare to Mikal.

“
No. I want to know. I have a
right
to know. I've been dragged halfway across the world, survived the bloody cold, I've been attacked, hurt so badly that I can't sleep for the pain, forced to stumble through the bloody night like a criminal, and I don't know why. I can leave the why for later. I just want to know where and how much longer until we get there. I've lost everything I care about. My father, my life, everything,” Pain slipped into his voice on stealthy feet, sidling its way between the fractures of his anger like a thief in the night. “All I have left are you two and
this road. This journey to someplace unknown only to me.”

He did not realize that he had started to shout as his rage began to break through the wall he had so carefully built, like flood waters break through a dam that was never meant to handle that much stress until, when he fell silent, his anger at least partially spent, he noticed Kurin eying him over the
fire. The eye contact between the two was an uncomfortable one. It was a showdown of sorts, like a fractious teenager and his father: one angry and full of self-righteousness and the other, calm and full of love, but implacable.

“Self-pity does not become you, Jurel. What have you gained?” Kurin, the mentor and the philosopher, asked.

“What? What have I gained? The ability to kill. An ability that I was very happy to live without.” He had endured years of bullying at Valik's hands. The torments he had suffered all for the sake of a selfish fool had seemed to be the height of anguish. He would gladly go back to that harmless jostling.

“Is that all?”

The old man's eyes bored into his own, spreading open the layers of his soul until he peered into the ashen remains of Jurel's self, a cored out apple left to rot unnoticed under the tree that had carelessly dropped it.

“What else is there?” Jurel muttered, turning away from eyes that knew too much.

“There is you. You think to the future. The future is unknown and unknowable. You care so much about what might be that you ignore what is.” Gently spoken, the words still picked at Jurel, dug steel tipped claws into his mind and scraped as mercilessly as a predator at his soft underbelly. “There is now. There is you.”

He threw his hands in the air “What about me? A simple farmer forced to face death—from the boredom of a million identical trees as much as swords—for reasons that no one seems to think he needs to know, going somewhere he doesn't want to go.” He faltered, trembling and breathing heavily, trying to hold on to the fury that covered new wounds like a field dressing.

“Then you have much to learn.” Kurin bowed his head again as if to return to his prayers.

“And when I ask the questions that will allow me to learn, you ignore me!”

“You ask the wrong questions. You ask the wrong person.”

“Really? Then tell me, O wise one, what questions should I be asking?”

“I don't know. You will when you admit it to yourself.”

Slamming his fist to the frozen ground, Jurel rose and strode beyond the light of the fire and into the woods. He did not hear Kurin's words to Mikal, “Leave him be,” for his thoughts were too untamed to allow for something as organized as listening. He stumbled further away from the camp, from the light, and dimly he felt his foot connect on a root. He fell, sprawling gracelessly on the ground. He lay there, not feeling the tearing of some of the careful stitching in his side, shivering as icy chill began to work its way through his cloak. He lay there, trying to rein in the stampede of his tattered life as it rumbled across the landscape of his mind.

He could not. He tried but just like that bovine herd that had almost trampled him so many years ago during an innocent child's prank, all he could do was try to run ahead of it and keep it from crushing him to cold dirt. Carefully, he raised himself and propped himself against the bole of a tree, unconsciously adopting the same marionette position that he had assumed across from Kurin so short a time ago and gazed unseeing into the blackness that seemed to reflect back into him like a mirror that bared his own deepest hurts and showed them to him with a stark reality.

In the depths of his mind, a pair of eyes, familiar and alien all at once, stared at him accusingly, asking the question that he wanted answered. Forget the questions, “What's going on?” and “Where are we going?” Important enough questions, but that's not what those eyes asked.

The question that those eyes asked was,
“Who are you?”

That was a good question. Who was he? An orphan, a farmer's son, a vagrant, a killer. He was all of these things but there was something else. Something more. A farmer's son picks apples out of trees, not arrows out of mid air. A vagrant does not learn how to use a sword in two weeks. Well, not well enough to matter in a fight against battle-hardened soldiers sporting the latest fashion in armor anyway. These were things a killer learned.

So, a killer then, first and foremost. But would not a killer enjoy turning his blade red with the guts of his victims? Did he not? Perhaps, but surely the pleasure would linger; surely he would not be consumed by guilt after the blood-letting was over. All right then. Not a killer. Not completely.

But then, what? Who?

Hints, clues within clues, mysteries wrapped within enigmas and served on a platter of shadows, and nothing told him anything useful. Frustration flared again battling with confusion, tussling with melancholy. It gnawed at him like a hundred cockroaches, leaving him an empty shell. No, not empty. Black. Black as the forest at night. Never more than an arm span away yet never visible. Never obvious.

It was as he was nodding off into a frigid slumber that he realized those eyes were an amalgam of two sets of eyes, two disparate people in his life that had meant so much to him in entirely different ways: Kurin, the teacher and fatherly figure who tried to teach him something; and Shenk, the thug, would-be assassin, and his first victim.

Chapter 43

Dawn broke as dawns usually do. The sun was born of its earthen womb far to the east and began again its majestic trek across the firmament, gazing benevolently, innocently, across the land as if each day, it experienced all the wonders of life anew. The pristine snow answered, competing with the sun, arguing over who was the brighter. The end result, of course, was that no matter which way one looked, up or down, squinted eyes were necessary to keep away the blindness.

If it were not so bright, they would see the river was flowing rapidly again, courtesy of a late winter thaw, carrying sheets of broken ice as smoothly and gently as if they were the finest of crystal, some small enough to pick up and throw, while others could have supported the weight of ten men and their horses. The forest carried on as always, as eternally predictable as the sun, standing alongside them and watching their progress.

They were back on the road, the two horses plodding along side by side, Jurel on the roan's bare back and Kurin once again sharing a saddle with Mikal—for all the horses the Soldiers had ridden, there was not a one to be found after their flight—their thudding hooves drumming a dull counterpoint to the rolling cadence of their gait. It was hypnotizing, and since Jurel's eyes were half closed anyway to stave off the glare, it was easy for him to nod off every once in a while—which proved dangerous; he still had some difficulty maintaining his seat when he was alert, let alone when he was asleep. Kurin had already repaired torn stitches twice since setting out that day.

Conversation was in short supply. Jurel still felt uneasy from the words spoken around the last night's fire. Kurin did not seem to mind; he held on to Mikal with one hand and read from a book in the other. As always, Mikal's eagle eyes ran over the land ahead, watching for movement.

Up ahead the road curved out of view behind the trees. It was difficult to tell how far ahead since there were no real landmarks to compare against—except for the infrequent villages scattered a day or so apart, but Jurel surmised that it was maybe a half mile. He began to imagine that around that bend, they would come across some fantastic sight: an ancient fortress raised by the legendary Aelephim thousands of years before man walked these lands, tall spindly spires reaching for the skies like alabaster fingers, for example; or perhaps the squat, beautifully carved entrance to an underground heaven carved by the Daelephim; or he would make do with a grand city to dwarf even Merris, with glass sided palaces glittering in the sun and temples spanning one end of the visible world to the other like the stories Daved had told him in front of a wood stove not so long ago. Which, after seeing Merris, Jurel found hard to imagine at all; Merris was pretty big, as he recalled. Anything would do. Anything to alleviate the gloom and boredom and the myriad little discomforts.