Brian Ruckley

Tyrant

I

Brennan was as hot as he had ever been. Sweat was pouring out of him, and felt like it was boiling off his face. The skin on the nape of his neck had been burned by the sun and hurt every time his collar touched it. He had been bitten in the night by some evil kind of insect. A whole swarm, in fact, since his ankles and the backs of his knees itched and stung almost unbearably. His tongue and lips felt fat and clumsy from want of water. In short, he was suffering.

And yet he was happy. His body might be chest-deep in misery but his heart and mind revelled in every hard moment of it. He was where he wanted to be.

His two companions were not of quite the same mind.

‘My mouth feels like it’s full of sand,’ Manadar complained.

‘Probably is,’ said Lorin. The older man was usually a reassuring, encouraging presence, full of stubborn resilience. Apparently that resilience was at a low ebb.

Brennan glanced down at the bare earth beneath his horse’s hoofs. He did not think it was really sand. More like dust. Ancient, exhausted soil that had forgotten the taste of water. And, if he was honest, he rather liked its colours. Looking out towards the horizon, he could see all the subtle changes of the vast plains in hue and texture. More browns and ochres and faint reds and yellows than he had known dust could be. Somehow, he doubted the other two would be interested in that.

‘Wet your tongue,’ he said instead, holding out his goat-hide water bag to Manadar.

He could tell from the weight of it in his hand that it was more than half empty.

Manadar looked at the bag, smiled-or grimaced perhaps-and shook his head.

‘I’ve some of my own still. We wait our thirst out till dusk. That’s the rule.’

‘We drink sand until then.’ Lorin nodded approvingly.

‘It’s more like dust than sand though,’ Brennan observed as he hitched the water bag back onto his saddle.

‘Grit,’ Lorin suggested. He brushed his horse’s mane absently. The fine cloud that rose from the hairs still looked like dust to Brennan.

‘Does it matter?’ Manadar grunted. ‘It’s dry; it’s in my eyes and my nose and my mouth. It’s in my ears. I can feel it rattling around in there like salt in a pot.’

‘No, you can’t,’ Brennan said. He had known Manadar long enough-more than a year now-to recognise that the man never met a slight discomfort that fell short of agony, nor a small pleasure that fell short of ecstasy.

‘You don’t know what’s going on in my ears,’ Manadar said. ‘You want to slip your finger in there? It’ll come out dressed in sand, I promise you.’

‘Grit.’ Brennan smiled.

‘One of you boys put your young eyes to work,’ Lorin said quietly, ‘and tell me what that is out there.’

Brennan looked where Lorin was pointing. There was a shimmer and a sheen across the meeting point of earth and sky. Like water or glass. He blinked a bead or two of sweat away from his eyes. It hardly helped. The distance was still a blurred and tricky place.

But he could, just about, see what Lorin was talking about. A dark hint of a shape. ‘Whatever it is, it’s moving,’ Manadar observed.

‘It’s human,’ Brennan said. He was not certain of that beyond all doubt, but wanted to say it before anyone else did. Eyesight was almost certainly the only weapon he could best the other two with. ‘Should we hide ourselves?’

He twisted around in his saddle, surveying their surroundings. Hiding places were not exactly abundant. The three of them were sitting on big horses on a gently falling slope, with the pale earth at their backs and not a bush or rock more than knee-high anywhere to be seen.

‘They’ll have seen us by now, unless they’re blind,’ Lorin grunted. ‘Seems to me they’re coming straight at us.’

‘We wait, then?’ Manadar asked, resting his hands one atop the other on his horse’s neck. He leaned slightly to one side and spat on the ground.

Lorin frowned at him.

‘You should swallow that,’ the oldest of them said. ‘Waste of wet to spit it out.’

Manadar wrinkled his nose.

‘My mouth’s as full of sand as my ears.’

‘Grit,’ Brennan murmured.

He was not really paying attention. His narrowed eyes were locked on that distant figure; he was sure it was a figure now. A solitary human being out there on the hot, flat plateau. And just as Lorin said, that lone madman was indeed coming closer. There were birds up above. They were too far out to be sure of their kind, but it was easy enough to guess. Corpse-crows or vultures. They knew a madman when they saw one too.

‘It’s going to take them a while to get here,’ Manadar observed, reaching inside his jacket.

‘You bring that flute of yours out and I’ll ram it so far up your nose I could scratch my name into the inside of your skull,’ Lorin growled.

Manadar shrugged, unperturbed. He withdrew his hand.

Lorin glanced over his shoulder, back the way they had come.

‘Brennan,’ he said, ‘get up on top of the rise. Make sure there’s no evil creeping up behind us.’

Brennan began to turn his horse, even though it seemed a waste of time. They were the ones doing the tracking, not the other way round. They had only come over the top of that low ridge a few minutes ago, and these vast, bare plains were not the kind of place surprises could creep up all unseen and unexpected. Not during the day, anyway.

‘Never hurts to take every care,’ Lorin said, as if he knew the shape of Brennan’s thoughts. ‘I’ve lived through twenty and more years of the Free by holding fast to that notion.’

Which was better than ten times as many years that Brennan had been riding with the Free, so he was content to do as he was told.

His horse’s hoofs slipped and sank a little in the soft, loose dust. Or sand, or whatever they were calling it. The animal was tired. They all were. Two days and a night out in these searing wastes would tire anyone or anything that was not born to it. And as far as Brennan could tell, the only things born to it were biting flies, carrion birds and the little lizards he had noticed now and again scurrying around among rocks.

Cresting the ridge, he thought for a moment he felt the faintest brush of a breeze across his face. So brief and faint it might have been imaginary. It was pleasant, real or not. He looked down the line of their tracks. Nothing but stones and bare ground and a few clumps of dried grass as far as the eye could see.

He was struck by the reality of what he was doing, what he had become. It was so easy to forget when the day offered so many difficulties and discomforts to occupy the mind. But sitting astride his horse there on the high ground, with emptiness all around him, he smiled to himself.

Here he was, a child of fisherfolk, grown to be a man who rode among the Free. He had heard tales of the Free, the last and greatest of the independent warbands, from his earliest childhood. They had been figures of wonder and terror alike to him and all his friends. Their wars and victories-only victories, never defeats-were the stuff of games and dreams and shared longings. His friends were grown now, as he was. But they lived the lives of their parents, riding the boats and hauling the nets; he lived the life of stories and legends. He fought with the Free. He had friends of a very different kind now. Another kind of family in its way.

And staring at the many-hued desolation which surrounded him he could only smile again at the absurdity of how things turned out. He could so easily have been out there on the waves. Instead he was here, miles into the Empire of Orphans, the dread and constant enemy of his homeland, the Hommetic Kingdom. An Empire riddled with madness and cruelty, built upon the backs of slaves and conquered peoples. Over centuries, it had spread like a bloody stain across the land and now the Emperors in Arnothex ruled over much of the continent.

It was said that most of those emperors barely knew what lay outside the walls of their palace of course. Half of them inherited idiocy from their incestuous ancestors; the other half were too busy competing with their nobles in the invention of savageries and debaucheries to pay much heed to the wider world’s turning. And still the Empire grew, and gathered subjects into its feverish embrace. Armies of not just warriors but tax-harvesters and torturers, bailiffs and sheriffs, did their remorseless work on behalf of even the most delinquent of emperors.

Brennan had a sword at his belt and a bow on his back, and he was an uninvited and unwelcome guest in the most powerful, most dangerous domain the world had known in centuries. He should have been afraid; uneasy, at the very least. He was neither because he was one of the Free, and the Free were powerful and dangerous too.

He had killed two men since he had joined the Free. He would be killing more soon. Very soon. It was a part of what he did now.

Gazing out over Lorin and Manadar’s heads, he saw that indistinct figure drawing slowly closer, becoming a little less indistinct with each passing moment. It was a person, beyond doubt.

‘There’s no one at our back,’ he called down to Lorin.

The older man waved a hand in casual acknowledgement without looking round. He and Manadar were both staring fixedly at the approaching wanderer. Brennan looked too, as he allowed his horse to step gingerly back down the slope towards the others.

Was that a dust cloud out on the glassy horizon, some way behind that lone figure, rising from some other feet?

‘There more than one out there?’ he asked as he drew up alongside Lorin.

Lorin grunted, but said nothing. He scraped a fingernail absently down the length of the scar on his right cheek. He did that sometimes, when turning thoughts over in his head. Brennan had never heard the story of the scar from Lorin’s own mouth, but by all accounts a man had put it there while trying to steal Lorin’s horse. By those same accounts, the trade of injuries had been uneven: Lorin acquired a scar; the would-be thief acquired a broken neck.

‘Something’s stirring things up, further out,’ Manadar mused.

The dust cloud was small, little more than a faint, brownish smudge at the very limit of sight, but it was enough to put all three of them on edge. Brennan was still not afraid. He could admit to the stirring of a little unease though. This was the brutal Empire of Orphans, where death might come in many forms, any one of which might raise a small cloud on its approach for all he knew. Even setting aside all other possibilities, the men they had followed here-the men they were hunting-were cruel and numerous. Though they were far from the worst the Empire had to offer, they were not by any means a safe or easy quarry. If they had been, it would not have required the Free to hunt them down.

‘Takes four or five horses to raise dust like that out here, I’d guess,’ Lorin said thoughtfully.

‘One on foot, followed at a distance-pursued perhaps-by four or five atop horses,’ Manadar said, and Brennan could hear the amusement and anticipation in his voice. ‘That sounds interesting, don’t you think? Doesn’t that sound like it might be interesting?’

‘Might be, might be,’ Lorin acknowledged.

Which was enough to light a little spark of excitement in Brennan’s chest. His hand had gone to the hilt of his sword before he even knew it was moving. He had his own guess now about what it was they were seeing out there on the hot ground: a slave running from slavers. The same Imperial slavers the Free had chased into this land of the Orphans.

‘If it comes to blood-work, you’ll be wanting your bow, not your blade,’ Lorin observed without looking at him.

Quite calm. If he shared Manadar and Brennan’s eagerness, the sentiment was well hidden. Brennan took the advice and unslung his bow. He felt for the arrows quivered at his horse’s side. An unnecessary, almost unconscious gesture: they were hardly likely to have disappeared since he put them there.

‘We’re only supposed to be scouting the trail,’ Lorin said. Which was true, of course. Their task was to forge the path for the seventeen others of the Free who were not far behind them; to read and mark the way that the hundred or more slavers they were hunting had taken.

‘But this does look a little interesting,’ Lorin went on. ‘And we’re going to have to get around to killing slavers and saving slaves some time if this contract’s ever to be done.’

Manadar grinned at Brennan.

‘Might be nothing though,’ Lorin cautioned, frowning in what Brennan suspected was pretend disapproval. ‘Might be nothing to do with our business at all. We kill the wrong man out here, we could all wind up in the bellies of corpse-crows and lizards. Empire’s like a hive of mad bees: you swat one of them and soon enough you’ll be breathing the whole swarm into your chest. So don’t either of you go starting anything until we know which way the river’s running.’

‘Never have, never will.’ Manadar smiled.

II

They rode slowly out in line abreast, well spaced. Brennan strung his bow as they went. He was still somewhat clumsy and unpractised at it. The whole notion of using a bow on horseback was new to him. Like several of the Free, he had been learning from Hamdan, a Massatan whose people knew the skill from birth as best Brennan could tell. It would never come as naturally to him, he imagined, but then it hardly needed to. There were few other horse archers in the Hommetic Kingdom. Having even a handful, late learners or not, gave the Free another small claim on the fear of their enemies. One among many.

‘Anyone looses a shaft without my word, I’ll make you walk all the way back to Yulan to explain yourself,’ Lorin said.

Brennan tugged at his bowstring, testing it. He steered his horse with his legs and his weight just as Hamdan had taught.

The sun was off on their left, high and hard. At least it would not be in their eyes. He had no sooner thought that than he had cause to doubt whether the sun’s place in the sky mattered.

As the distance closed between them and the staggering, stumbling figure and the riders further out, that figure stumbled once too often. Fell to the ground. And the riders beyond, dark shapes all but obscured by their own dust and the heat shimmer, appeared to draw to a halt. Brennan did not know whether to be relieved or disappointed at that.

Lorin kept his horse to the same steady pace. The three of them advanced upon the fallen man. The other horsemen-there were half a dozen of them, Brennan could see now-remained still. They held at a longbowshot’s distance. Brennan slid an arrow from his quiver and set it to the string. There was no harm in being prepared, but he did not draw the bowstring back. Not yet.

The solitary figure rose, not far ahead of them now, and Brennan realised with an involuntary grunt of surprise that it was a woman. She came unsteadily towards them. Her hair was matted and lank; her clothes dirty and ragged. She was dressed as any villager might be, in a long, heavy skirt and a light cloth jacket. To Brennan, she certainly looked as someone might after they had been seized from their fields by raiding slavers.

She almost fell once more as she drew near, but kept her footing. She showed no sign of injury. It was exhaustion, perhaps the weakness of hunger and thirst, which made her so unsteady.

Lorin drew his horse to a halt and Brennan and Manadar did likewise, flanking him.

Brennan made to dismount, ready to help the woman. Lorin forestalled that, not sharply but firmly.

‘Keep your saddle, boy. You don’t go to ground when there’s folk with blades sitting on horses close by. Let her come to us, if that’s what she wants to do.’

‘Help me,’ the woman called out, almost as if answering Lorin’s words.

Her voice was a cracking, crumbling rasp. Brennan doubted any water had passed her lips in a long time.

Manadar beckoned her.

‘Come to me; I’ll lift you up,’ he told her.

They watched in silence as she staggered to his horse. She took hold of the arm he reached down much like a drowning woman grabbing hold of a branch. Manadar hooked his hand under her armpit and swung her up. It was clumsy and far from elegant, but she ended up slumped at his back, sitting on the bedroll tied across the horse’s rump. She clung to his shoulders.

‘Where are you from?’ Lorin asked loudly, keeping his eyes on the six riders.

She did not reply at first and he asked again, louder.

‘Wyven Dam,’ she murmured.

One of the two Hommetic villages the Imperial slavers had despoiled. Thirty or so folk had been taken from there, as best Brennan could remember. The same again from the other hamlet. Torn from their huts and hiding places and carried away into the Empire of Orphans. Those who were not killed, in any case.

The Free had ridden through Wyven Dam at the very start of their hunt. A few days after the slavers had come visiting, and still there were some corpses on the ground. There were too few left there to bury or burn all the dead quickly. Those dead were mostly old men who had tried to defend their people and had no value to slavers alive. And old women.

‘Wyven Dam,’ Lorin repeated. ‘Good enough. Well, we can’t be sitting out here trading stares with slave-takers all day. Too hot for that. Send an arrow down their necks, Brennan. I imagine, one way or the other, that’ll move things along.’

Brennan did as he was told. He aimed high, breathed out a long, slow breath and sent the shaft arcing across the blue sky. It fell short by perhaps ten yards.

‘Lucky Hamdan’s not here to see that,’ chuckled Manadar.

Brennan grimaced. It was not a terrible shot by his own standards, but Manadar was right. Hamdan did not approve of misses, no matter how hard the target. Still, the attempt had the desired effect. Without any show of alarm, the six riders wheeled their mounts around and began to move away.

Like scattered fragments of shadow, the birds circling above did the same. Understanding somehow that the day’s promise of food had come to nothing, they slid away across the hot sky.

Manadar cocked his head and frowned at the backs of the horsemen as they sank away into the haze.

‘Didn’t ride very hard to catch her, and they’re not riding very hard now,’ he grunted.

‘Perhaps they’re not as stupid as we’d like them to be,’ said Lorin. ‘Riding hard out here’s a fast way to kill a horse.’

‘True. They must know who we are though. You’d think they’d ride at least a little harder to get out of our reach. I feel… slighted.’

Brennan smiled to himself. Manadar was not entirely wrong. Half the Free’s battles were won before they began, by the reputation those who had gone before had built. Their band of swords had existed for decades, surviving as all the other free companies dwindled away or were destroyed. Overcoming all enemies, great and small, until they stood alone. Alone yet so potent that their name was enough to breed fear.

He watched the woman at Manadar’s back. He might have thought she had fallen asleep or into unconsciousness, but for the slight trembling and shifting of her hand.

‘Retrieve your arrow,’ Lorin said.

Brennan blinked. The slavers were almost lost to sight now. Swallowed up by this hateful emptiness. Lorin was right. No sense in letting the arrow go to waste. Here in the Empire, there might come a day when he needed every single shaft in his quiver.

Brennan rode out slowly. The sun beat at his bare head.

III

They settled by the skeleton of a horse as dusk fell. Or perhaps it had been a mule. It was impossible to tell from the cage of bleached bones its ribs had become, or from the skull lying there in the dust, so perfectly stripped of flesh and hide it looked almost polished.

Manadar stood some twenty paces from the skull and threw knives into it. He held his five blades loosely in his left hand, plucked one after another with his right and sent them spinning straight and true to lodge in the old bone of the skull’s forehead. He never missed. There was a rhythm and precision to his movements which Brennan envied. Each blade, glinting as it tumbled through the air, followed almost exactly the same path. They clustered tightly together in their bone bed, like a clump of metal grass.

When all five were thrown, Manadar would walk slowly forward, tug them out and return to his mark. Then begin again.

He did this most evenings, in the last light of the day. This or playing his little reed flute. Lorin had forbidden any music out here on the hunt, since he worried that the sound would carry too far, so Manadar threw his knives instead.

Lorin was giving the horses handfuls of grain, patting their necks and checking for signs of hurt or weariness as they ate noisily from his palm. Brennan sat with the woman, watching as she drank thirstily from his water bag.

‘Not too much,’ he said.

There was a moment’s reluctance in the way she looked at him, but she lowered the bag from her lips and handed it back to him.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked her.

‘Marweh.’

‘I’m Brennan.’

She was too tired to really be much interested in his name, he supposed. It was hard to tell her age, with the grime and exhaustion masking her features. He would guess at near thirty years. Close to a decade older than him. She could pass for much older, hunched down, almost folded in on herself, as she was. They had given her a blanket and she had it draped about her shoulders. It got cold quickly once the night came on here.

She had hardly spoken all through the long afternoon. Only once, really. When they came across a sad, solitary corpse in their path. The birds-the inevitable attendants upon the dead, out here-told them what to expect from some distance away. Crows and vultures and buzzards that abandoned their feast only reluctantly, at the last moment when the riders were almost on top of them.

It was a woman, but the attentions of beak and claw had made it hard to tell much of her age and appearance. Marweh knew though.

‘It’s Astera,’ she murmured, before averting her eyes.

Astera’s throat had been cut. Neatly and precisely, from hinge of jaw to hinge of jaw.

‘She wasn’t strong,’ Marweh said, staring off into the distance. ‘That’s what they do with those who can’t keep the pace.’

And after that, she had said no more.

‘You escaped from them,’ Brennan said now, thinking it a foolish and pointless thing to say even as the words emerged.

She nodded, too kind or too tired to mock him for it.

‘Can you take me back?’ she asked him. ‘Home.’

Her voice was less brittle than it had been when she first came to them, but still weak.

‘Please?’ she said.

It was a good question. One that Brennan knew had occurred to Lorin and Manadar, though they had not discussed it. Yulan, their Captain, had given them a task: to keep close on the trail of the slavers and their captives so that some storm or wind did not erase it before they could be brought to battle. It would be hard to do that with an unplanned companion adding weight to a horse’s back, drinking an extra share of water.

They had pushed on through what remained of the afternoon after Marweh found them, cautious and slow. Lorin did not want to lose any time, especially now that the slavers knew precisely where they were, and how many. But that would have to change in the morning, Brennan imagined.

Lorin confirmed it as he scratched, hard, at his horse’s mane.

‘Brennan there’ll take you once the light returns,’ he said. ‘There’s more of us just a few hours behind. They can care for you.’

Brennan’s heart sank. He knew it was childish and futile. Even so, there was a part of him that was desperately disappointed at the notion of being separated from these other two. It was not just that it felt important and exciting to be out here in the van of the Free, on the sharp edge; Lorin and Manadar were, of all the Free, the men he felt closest to. There was no man or woman of the company he would not gladly fight alongside, or die for if he had to-that was the bargain and the commitment required of anyone who rode in their ranks. He could not honestly call every single one of them a good and true friend though. Not the way he could Lorin and Manadar.

‘And you’ll go on?’ Marweh was asking Lorin. ‘You two?’

She sounded strangely unmoved by the promise of tomorrow’s escape from this hard and dangerous place.

‘We will,’ Lorin confirmed.

Manadar’s knives were thudding in the background like a slow heartbeat.

‘Another day, another night… I think on the second day from here this’ll all be decided, as long as we don’t lose their trail,’ Lorin told Marweh. ‘Maybe sooner. Any longer than that and they’ll be too deep into the Empire for even us to safely reach. All the rest who’ve been taken will be lost to us. Gone into the worst kind of life.’

She hung her head. Too tired even for relief, Brennan supposed.

‘You’ll have to tell us everything you saw, before you and Brennan go. How many swords the slavers have, how many captives. How many bows and horses.’

Marweh did not stir.

‘Not now though,’ Lorin continued gently. ‘It’s too dangerous to ride in the dark, so tonight you sleep as well as you can manage. We’ll talk in the dawn. You can tell us the tale of your escape.’

‘Yes,’ Marweh said distantly. ‘There’s a hundred of them, you know. More. Hard and cruel as crows. You can’t fight that many, can you?’

‘We’re of the Free,’ Brennan said. It was an instinctive response to the very idea that there was something they could not do. For any who could claim it truthfully, it was the answer to a great many questions. A great many doubts.

‘I know,’ said Marweh. She did not appear convinced.

‘I was there, a year or two back, on a bloody field north of the Hervent, when the Free turned back the Huluk Kur,’ Lorin told her. ‘We stood with the King’s men against thousands, and you know how many fell that day? How many of the Free, how many of the Huluk Kur?’

Marweh was silent. She did not even acknowledge the question.

‘None,’ Lorin told her. ‘None of the Free; hundreds of the Huluk Kur. That’s what has come to claim your crow-cruel slavers, my lady.’

She only rubbed her eyes.

‘Let it be for now,’ Lorin said. ‘Rest well. We’ll need to be on our feet before the sun’s up.’

A dull thud and an instant, sharper crack made them all look round. Manadar was advancing upon the pale skull. He leaned down and frowned at the last knife he had thrown into it.

‘Huh,’ he grunted. ‘Split the bone.’

When the sun went down, all heat went with it. They did not light a fire of course. Marweh lay, half-asleep beneath that single blanket they could spare for her, shivering sometimes. Murmuring sometimes, as if plagued by bad dreams. Which Brennan would not have blamed her for.

He watched her-the outline of her anyway, which was all he could really make out even on this clear night-and wished they had more to offer her. More bedding and clothes; more food and water. She was lucky; she had escaped the terrible, probably short, life of a slave among the mad Orphans. But that escape did not mean her suffering had quite ended. Not yet.

Manadar nudged Brennan in the ribs with a sharp elbow. Brennan winced but stifled any protest when Manadar put a finger to his lips.

‘Don’t wake the pretty sleeper,’ Manadar whispered. ‘That’s what Lorin says anyway.’

Brennan nodded.

‘Me and him’re going for a little wander,’ Manadar continued. ‘Be sure those six aren’t creeping up on us with a few of their friends. When we come back, you’re taking the watch, so shut your eyes for a while.’

Lorin and Manadar walked out into the night. They left their horses tethered alongside Brennan’s, because the animals needed their rest. It was something close to a rule among the Free that except in the direst of circumstance the needs of your horse came before your own. Not keeping to that rule would likely mean that when that direst circumstance came around-and it always did, sooner or later-the animal would likely fail you. And if that happened, your own needs probably would not amount to much more than some dry wood for your funeral pyre.

Brennan watched his fellows disappear into the darkness. Any slavers who were out there, trying to spring a surprise on the Free, would have an unpleasant-and probably brief-night.

It was not his intent to actually sleep. With his hunger and thirst and the still constant itching of various insect bites, he doubted he could manage it. And he preferred to keep his eyes open anyway, against the one time in a hundred someone might manage to get past the other two. Nevertheless, it did not take long for his eyelids to start slumping.

There were enough insects out here to put up a faint, constant chorus of whines and trills. Brennan wondered how they fed themselves when he was not here to offer his blood. It was a soporific kind of hum. And he was, after all, extremely tired. It was that deep kind of tiredness that was only really kept at bay by movement. Now that he was still, sitting there cross-legged, it rose up from his belly and through his limbs and slowly, gently, drifted him off towards slumber.

What woke him was not the return of Lorin or Manadar but the whickering of one of the horses. Exhausted he might be, but he was not so far gone that he forgot who, or where, he was. That single sound, which even his sleeping mind noted as somehow significant, started him awake and had him half rising, reaching for his sword, in a moment.

His legs were much slower to shake off sleep than was his head, and his first steps were staggering and stiff. He swung around, looking for the horses and what had roused them. They were easy enough to pick out in the star- and moonlight, still standing where they should be. Big, black shapes in the half-dark. Nothing obviously amiss. His hand fell away from the hilt of his sword, and the blade stayed nested in its sheath. It took his blinking eyes another instant or two to recognise what was out of place.

Marweh was standing beside one of the horses. He wasted another instant, staring, as his sluggish thoughts tried to make sense of what he was seeing. She was holding something. Tipping something. There was a strange, wildly out of place sound: pattering and splashing. Everything snapped into focus, and he understood, and he cried out in anger.

She had taken one of the waterskins and was pouring it out onto the ground.

‘What are you doing?’ he shouted, and rushed at her.

She shook the last few drops from the skin, let it fall and ran. As he followed her, his foot went deep into the soft, wet ground she had fed with their water supplies. It unbalanced him, just for a stride or two. Enough that he had to put on a burst of speed to throw himself at her.

He tackled Marweh around the waist, crashing her to ground with ease. She did fight him, or at least tried. She scratched at him and writhed in his grip, even when he rolled her onto her face and straddled her back. He pinned her arms to the ground.

‘Are you mad?’ he snarled.

That seemed possible. She must have suffered terribly. She was half-starved, thirsted, perhaps even a little heat-touched in the head.

He heard heavy, hurried footsteps and looked up, ready to reach again for his blade. It was only Lorin though, loping back into the camp.

‘What’s happening?’ the older man demanded.

‘This one was pouring out our water. One of the skins anyway. I haven’t checked the others.’

‘Keep her there,’ Lorin said, and went in search of the waterskins.

‘You want to kill us all?’ Brennan muttered, more confused than angry now that the immediate shock was subsiding.

Marweh ignored him. She had stopped struggling by now, and lay still with her eyes closed.

‘They’re all empty,’ Lorin called from over by the horses. ‘Every drop’s gone into the ground.’

Manadar appeared all but silently over Brennan’s shoulder.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked. ‘Why are you sitting on her?’

‘Because she needs sitting on,’ Brennan growled.

Lorin cursed-a rare eruption of anger-and flung an empty waterskin so violently to the ground that the horses started and tugged against their tethers.

‘She’s undone us, that’s what’s going on. Bind her hands. Ready the horses. We’re riding all night to Yulan and the rest now.’

IV

‘Why?’ Brennan asked Marweh as they moved through the moon-hued gloom.

She made no reply. She kept her eyes averted from him. Her hands were bound as Lorin had commanded. And she was herself bound to Lorin’s horse. She rode behind him, a knot of sullen silence.

‘Tell us why,’ said Lorin, and his voice had all the calm authority that Brennan’s did not. The anger which had flared in the older man earlier was still there but it was less now. Tightly controlled.

‘You have a family?’ Marweh asked.

Manadar laughed.

‘Does Lorin have family? Twice over, twice over. A wife in Sussadar and a wife in Armadell, and neither knowing the other’s even breathing.’

‘And both good women,’ Lorin grunted. ‘But we’re not talking of me and my loves.’

‘I have a husband and a son,’ Marweh said. ‘The slavers have them. We were all taken together.’

‘Ah,’ Lorin breathed, as if that explained everything. Brennan was not sure it did.

‘And you want them carried off into the deep Empire to be slaves to some sick-headed noble?’ he snapped in exasperation. ‘They treat slaves like playthings there, you know. Kill them for sport.’

‘I want them safe. Alive.’ She sounded as weary now as she ever had. ‘My husband’s sickened. When they came to Wyven Dam, he tried to fight them, and they cut him. They… he’s fevered now. Flagging. And my son’s only six. You saw what happened to Astera. They’ll neither of them live if they’re not freed.’

‘Which is what we meant-what we mean to do,’ Brennan snorted.

‘Maybe. Maybe not. You weren’t there at yesterday’s dawn. You weren’t there when the tyrant lashed my sick husband’s back with thorn-weeds. You weren’t there when he tore my son from my arms and told me I’d not see him again. Not ever.’

She lapsed into silence. She was not shamed by what she had done, Brennan could tell. She did not regret it. The sorrow which seemed to lie so heavily upon her now was not to do with her choices.

‘And…’ Lorin prompted her. Almost gently. More gently than Brennan would have done it anyway.

‘And he made me a bargain, the tyrant: that my husband would be healed and we would all three be set free if I turned you from their trail. And if I refused or failed, my husband would be left to die. My son… my son would be buried an arm’s length down in the dirt. Alive.’

Lorin sighed.

‘Spilling our water’s a neat way to do it.’

‘It was the tyrant’s idea,’ Marweh said distantly.

‘Who is he, this tyrant?’ Brennan asked. But she was not listening. She hung her head and was lost in some inner reverie.

‘Every gang of slave-takers working for the Orphans has one,’ Lorin told him. ‘It’s just the leader. The captain of their squalid little band. They call themselves tyrants for the power of life and death they give themselves over their followers and slaves alike. Bandit chieflings, nothing more, but cruel ones. Hard.’

‘So you’d sooner trust your family’s lives to the word of a man like that than to us. To the Free?’ Brennan exclaimed.

‘You weren’t there,’ Marweh repeated dully. ‘And who was to say you’d ever be there, or be strong enough when you came to kill a hundred slavers? When you have a child, then you can scold me for my choices. Not before. Not before.’

‘Let her be, Brennan,’ Lorin said. ‘What’s done is done. No denying love makes folks do idiot things. Look at me, married twice for the sake of it.’

‘And still not fool enough to hamstring the ones who might save your wives,’ Brennan snorted.

There was a part of him that knew he was so stubbornly unforgiving because the water had been poured away while he slept. He was the only one who might have prevented it. And he had not.

‘We’ll save her folk yet,’ Lorin said, sounding as if he believed it. ‘And she’s right, isn’t she? When she had to make the choice, when she needed an answer, we weren’t there.’

Some kind of wild dog was howling and yapping far away in the night. This land was full of scavengers. They rode on beneath that distant sound.

‘Yulan’s not going to be happy,’ Manadar said glumly after a time.

To no one in particular, Brennan supposed. It was not intended as a finger of blame, pointing at him. It felt like one even so.

‘Probably have us feeding and grooming the horses for a month,’ Manadar went on. He was evidently enjoying the flow of his bleak premonitions in his own perverse way. ‘Cleaning stables when we get back. Picking thistle seeds out tails.’

‘You have your own tyrant, do you?’ Marweh grunted.

‘If you like,’ Lorin snapped at her. Even his patience was dwindling. ‘Difference is, he’s not cruel. His is the tyranny of life, of keeping our hearts beating in our breasts, not of death. He’s the best of us, not the worst.’

Dawn’s first light revealed a vast, flat landscape all around them; indistinguishable from any other piece of this forsaken place, to Brennan’s eye. It still looked like the very last corner of the world he wanted to wander around without water. As night became day, the air would turn in just an hour or so from sharply cold to suffocatingly hot. Brennan’s mouth was already dry, as if in anticipation of the thirst to come.

But he had faith in Lorin. He had never known a man to match him when it came to tracking and reading ground and just generally knowing which way to go. How he did it, Brennan could not say, but as soon as the sun was properly above the horizon and the last of the night’s shadows had fled, Lorin drew his horse to a halt and pointed off to the north towards a long, low rocky ridge that cut across the plain.

‘They should be somewhere about there by now, you think?’

‘I couldn’t say,’ Brennan admitted.

‘Well, I think so. Best chance of water’d be along the line of that ridge, at its foot. And that’s about the course they were on when we left them.’

And he was right, of course. About all of it. As they rode into the dip at the base of the ridge, even Brennan could see the traces of green in the grass here and there, the bushes and the darker tint to the earth that spoke of water somewhere close beneath the surface. Perhaps even above it, somewhere, sometimes.

And it took no time at all to find the trail of the Free. Seventeen riders left a track no one could miss. They turned to follow that track, with the high ground on their right hand, the wide open waste on their left. Lorin could still see more in the marks than Brennan could.

‘They came through early this morning. Maybe before dawn. Can’t be far ahead.’

Lorin glanced at Manadar.

‘You can play that bastard flute of yours now. Might as well make sure they know it’s friends coming up. Be a shame to end all of this with one of Hamdan’s arrows in my neck.’

Manadar grinned. He produced his flute from inside his jerkin at once. It was nothing but a long, thick section of a giant water-reed’s stem, with the pith pushed out of it and a few holes punched down its length. The notes it produced were as crude and ramshackle as the flute itself. Manadar considered anyone who said as much-and there were many of them-an ignorant fool in the matter of music.

He played it one handed as they rode along. There was a very faint echo to the tune, cast back from the rocky flanks of the ridge. It did nothing to improve the effect.

Once, Brennan happened to look towards Lorin and Marweh. He caught the woman staring in some complicated mixture of horror and bewilderment at Manadar. It almost made Brennan laugh. It almost made him forget what she had done. Whatever her other mistakes, she stood alongside all the other ignorant fools in their entirely wise judgement of Manadar’s music.

‘I’ll put an arrow in your eye if you don’t quiet that yowling.’

The sharp voice from up ahead stopped them all and cut the coarse melody as sharply and neatly as a knife on tight string. Manadar lowered the flute, pouting in exaggerated fashion.

‘That’s not the intended effect,’ he shouted. ‘More or less the opposite, in fact.’

Hamdan emerged from a dip in the ground, close to a hundred paces further on. He and Yulan were the only two Massatans in the Free: olive-skinned southerners who, it occurred to Brennan for the first time, probably found this hot, arid land almost homely. Hamdan certainly looked quite content. No sign of sweat, no lethargy to his movements. A smile on his face. He lowered his bow and beckoned them on.

V

All the rest were waiting for them. They had paused to water and rest their horses for an hour or two, and made the simplest of camps. Some had unrolled bedding so that they could close their eyes, however briefly. Someone had made a quick, small fire to roast a bird Hamdan had shot. The Free could make themselves comfortable-comfortable enough, at least-almost anywhere.

All of them, though, were awake and assembled to meet Brennan and the others as Hamdan led them in. Rudran, a red-bearded giant of a man who led the Free’s small company of lancers. He was there, with half a dozen of his men. Another half-dozen, more motley and less neatly attired than the lancers, who were swordsmen or spearmen.

Wren and Kerig, she smiling, he as usual with an almost-scowl on his face. They were lovers, those two, and more importantly Clevers. Capable of shaping and channelling the raw entelechs of which the world was composed. Less imposing, but far more dangerous than all the fell warriors gathered around them.

There was one who was not of the Free too: Surmun, the contract-holder. He bore the parchment that set out the particular task they had agreed to perform. The idea was that he could show it to anyone who questioned their right to do whatever they judged necessary in fulfilment of that task. In reality, few if any contract-holders ever had to show anyone anything. People tended not to challenge the will of the Free.

No one seriously thought a piece of parchment carried any weight within the Empire. But tradition and habit lay heavily on the Free. More often than not, a contract-holder rode with them. This particular contract-holder had barely spoken to anyone for days. He was not overly pleased with the course events had taken since he acquired his position. Exploring the fringes of the Empire of Orphans had not been one of his ambitions for the role.

And there was Yulan. The Captain of all the Free, latest in the long line of great warriors to lead this greatest of all the battle companies. His skin had the same soft, dark tone as Hamdan’s, but he was much taller and more powerfully built than the archer. Most strikingly, his head was almost entirely shaved. A perfectly smooth scalp surrounded the topknot into which he tied a single long lock of oiled black hair.

Lorin neatly and wordlessly cut Marweh’s bonds with a knife from his boot. He made no move to help her dismount, and she slipped and slumped clumsily sideways, almost falling to her knees. Lorin handed his reins to Brennan and went straight to Yulan. The two of them fell at once into muted but animated conversation.

Brennan and Manadar jumped to the ground. They tethered their horses to an ancient, desiccated tree trunk which lay close by. Inevitably, they were surrounded by curious questioners.

‘You lose the slavers or something?’

‘Why are you boys looking so glum?’

‘How’d you find a lady to bring along with you in this empty pit of a place?’

Brennan let Manadar answer the questions. He was not in the mood for recounting their misadventure. He led Marweh to a broad, flat stone embedded in the dry earth and sat her there. She was watching Lorin and Yulan. Brennan did too.

Lorin was pointing the way they had come. Drawing maps and movements in the air with his finger. Yulan was nodding. They had not-at least so Brennan hoped-lost the slavers. Lorin still held in his head the directions and distances. He evidently thought there could yet be a meeting of swords and a breaking of shackles before their quarry was too deep into the Empire to be reached.

Brennan stripped bedrolls and saddles and empty waterskins from the horses. Out of habit and long training he began checking their hoofs, one by one, for stones or wounds. The animals lifted each foot when he tapped their legs. They were patient and tolerant of his rather distracted ministrations.

He was brushing sand and grit from a hoof when he became aware of a presence at his side. He let loose the horse’s leg and looked up at Yulan.

‘Feel like a fool?’ the Captain of the Free asked him with a smile.

Brennan nodded.

‘A bit.’

‘Remember it, that feeling. It’ll make you work to stay clear of it in days to come. But it doesn’t sound as though what happened was much of your fault.’

‘It wasn’t Lorin’s either,’ Brennan said impulsively.

Yulan smiled again at that. A little ruefully this time.

‘Well said. True or not, well and loyally said.’

He ran one hand slowly, from front to back, over his bald scalp.

‘When a day goes sour, the man who gives the orders owns the fault. Only he knows how deserved or not that ownership is. Only he knows how important it is to remember the fault and the feeling it brings.’

Yulan turned away.

‘Rest a little,’ he said as he went. ‘We’re going to war very soon now before that war slips away through our hands like your water did.’

There was not a man among the Free who thought Yulan anything but a great leader as far as Brennan knew. Wise in judgement; fearsome in battle. In the nearly four years he had commanded them, none had fallen beneath an enemy’s blade. Yulan would be a legend one day.

Few knew him well though. Few came close to him. A handful, the most trusted, were no doubt his friends: Hamdan, Rudran, some of the Clevers perhaps. For the rest-those like Brennan who served lower in the ranks-well, they were left to wonder, to imagine.

The story they whispered was that Yulan shaved his head after something went wrong the very first time he led the Free into battle. Something that the Free failed to prevent, and in that failure saw their proud history tarnished. Those who knew the tale did not speak of it. Those who did not know it were left to murmur among themselves that the shaven head of their Captain meant something in the traditions of his Massatan people. It meant shame or regret or contrition. Nobody knew exactly what. Perhaps, Brennan thought, it was Yulan’s own inner judgement on how much of the fault for a sour day resided with the man who gave the orders.

Brennan hoped Lorin would not be judging himself too harshly for what had happened in the night. That might, he suspected, depend upon what happened next. In the possibly bloody hours and days to come.

Despite Yulan’s instruction and his own deep weariness, Brennan could not rest. His mind was more awake than his body would have wished.

He sat with the rest and ate a few morsels of roasted bird flesh. He did not speak much. None of them did for close to an hour. There would be good-natured taunts and jibes about lost water and the farmer’s wife who fooled the Free eventually, but for now everyone had more pressing matters on their minds. Some lay down and closed their eyes. Hamdan kicked sand over the little fire to extinguish it.

Marweh sat in the deepest silence of all. Wren, the Clever, took her some food and water, which she accepted with nothing more than a grateful nod.

‘Poor woman’s as lost and fearful as she could be,’ Wren said as she squatted down beside Brennan and Hamdan.

‘Might be less so if she’d not tricked us,’ muttered Brennan.

‘The harm’s not mortal,’ said Wren calmly. ‘Yulan and Lorin seem to reckon we’ve time yet to do what we came here to do.’

‘Sooner the better,’ Brennan said. ‘I’ve never been so hot or grimy in my life. And every night, some evil swarm’s been biting me. Never hear or see a thing. But the itching, that I feel.’

‘Probably sandflies,’ Hamdan grunted. ‘Could be sting-ants. Maybe ghost scorpions.’

‘Ghost scorpions?’ Brennan repeated, alarm raising his eyebrows. ‘Really?’

‘No, not really,’ Hamdan said with a straight face.

‘Oh. I’d believe anything out here. Never seen so much angry life and so little water. Can’t seem to shake my thirst, no matter how much I drink.’

‘You give it time. You stay with the Free long enough, you’ll see worse places than this. Anyway, there’s a whole pool a couple of hundred paces beyond that hummock,’ Hamdan said, jabbing a thumb in the relevant direction.

‘A pool?’ Brennan echoed him, almost disbelieving.

‘Cool and fresh,’ Wren confirmed.

‘Let me clean myself,’ Marweh said unexpectedly behind them. ‘I haven’t been better than half-clean since the night I was taken.’

‘It’ll not kill you to wait another while,’ Hamdan told her without looking round. He was usually a good-humoured and rather forgiving man, but he had not yet found much amusement in the tale of Marweh and the waterskins.

‘Let the woman wash,’ Wren scolded him. ‘We’ve another hour or more before we ride on. For all that you men moan and bleat, she’s suffered more and worse than any of us. Just because she wounded your pride, you shouldn’t make yourselves cruel.’

Hamdan shrugged.

‘I’ll take her,’ Brennan sighed.

It looked like luxury. Brennan understood that it was just a long, shallow pool fringed by a few reeds and some small trees a bit-but not entirely-like the willows of his homeland. He understood how meagre and modest a place this would have seemed to him not long ago. And understanding all that, it still looked like luxury. After a few days breathing the heat and the dust of these wastes, it was almost intoxicating to see the sun glint on the surface of real water and to hear a gentle breeze stirring through those thin-leaved fronds.

There were dead trees and fallen branches at the water’s edge too. Perhaps there was not always water here; perhaps not all the trees had the stubbornness to wait out long, dry times. He noticed that and gave it no heed. He had eyes only for the life, the green. And the water that was here now, today, above all. It had drawn a flock of desert doves. They thronged the far side of the pool, little gems of soft colour.

Brennan knelt and scooped handfuls of the wonderful wet up to his lips. Marweh, beside him, did the same.

‘This land’s harder than any of you, slaver or Free,’ she murmured once they had slaked their thirst.

‘We don’t belong in the same breath as them.’

‘No? Men with swords all look much alike to my kind.’

He frowned at her, though in truth he was more annoyed at himself than her. He should not be concerned by what she thought of the Free.

‘I’m here to bathe, aren’t I?’ she asked.

He nodded distractedly, still staring at her. After a moment or two, she raised her eyebrows meaningfully.

‘You think what I deserve, after all of this, is to be humbled some more? You think I want any man but my husband to set eyes on me when I bathe?’

A few years ago, Brennan would have blushed at that. A woman even talking of her nakedness would have left him scrambling for excuses or a hiding place. Not so now. He had grown to manhood in more ways than one among the Free. Still, he should have thought of her modesty sooner. Much as he chafed at what she had done, and thought her a fool for it, he had no desire to humiliate her.

‘I’ll stand over there,’ he said, just a tiny trace of truculence in his tone. He did not want to appear too apologetic any more than he wished to appear cruel.

‘With your back turned.’

‘Fine. But you talk to me while you’re washing so I know you’re not swimming off.’

She laughed at that. The first time he had heard anything approaching amusement from her.

‘You think I’ll splash away, naked, into the desert?’

He shrugged, and set his back to the water.

He heard her clothes falling to the ground and water lapping at her ankles as she waded out. Then splashing, the fall of drops. The sound made him unexpectedly uncomfortable. Just a little. He could even imagine that if he listened to it for too long, or thought about it too deeply, he might rediscover the ability to blush.

‘Thought you were going to talk,’ he said gruffly.

‘About what? Can’t you hear well enough that I’m right here?’

‘I suppose so.’

She was quiet for a little while. Not long.

‘Do you have a family then?’ she asked. ‘That old one of you has two wives. How many have you got?’

‘None. I’ve a mother, and a brother and sister. Back where I came from. I’ve not seen them for years. Never knew my father.’

‘Ah,’ Marweh said, as if he had spoken more than he knew.

There was a gentle splashing and a pattering of drops on the surface of the pool. Brennan imagined her to be shaking her hair.

‘Ah, what?’ he demanded.

‘Think you’ve made yourself a new family, do you? A whole warband of fathers?’

‘No.’

‘Why do you do what you do then? You men of blood. Is it just that you like the fighting, the killing? You like the strength of it all, and the lording it over others?’

Brennan shook his head without knowing if she was even watching him. She could not be more wrong, he was sure, but he did not quite have his own words for why. He had heard many others among the Free speak of it now and again though. They had words.

‘It’s not that I like the fighting,’ he said. Which was not entirely true. It did excite him; he was not afraid of it. ‘In all the Kingdom there’s one who doesn’t bend the knee to anyone: Crex the King. There’s him, and there’s the Free, and there’s no one else. We’re the only ones save him who could be called by that name and have it be true. There’s no lord above us; there’s none below us.’

‘That what you do the fighting and the killing for then, is it? Nothing to do with all the gold, I don’t suppose.’

When she asked the question like that, Brennan did know the answer. He did not give it to her because he did not think she would really understand it, or entirely believe it.

The gold had never been that important. Not to him anyway. The Free did indeed make those who survived it rich, and there were those who fought and sometimes died for that very reason. They were not him. He fought and might die for those who did the same thing alongside him. For the shared, bright life they lived, that none who did not share it could ever fully comprehend. For the suffering they had shared, and the pleasures they had tasted and the fears they had conquered together. Yes, for the family they had become, some of them, just as Marweh said. Not that he was going to admit as much to her.

‘I don’t know how you can do it, all the killing,’ Marweh was saying. ‘Even men who deserve nothing better.’

‘We do what we must. You farm. I fight.’

He heard her rising out of the water, and instinctively started to turn his head a little.

‘You keep your eyes to yourself until I’m dried and dressed,’ she warned him, and he half-raised an apologetic hand. Kept his back to her and his gaze fixed on the dry grass before him. It was so close to the pool, that grass, yet still yellow and brittle-looking. Step just a few paces from the water and everything here was thirsty.

‘We all do what our nature calls us to,’ he said.

He had heard that from Lorin a while back. Lorin and Manadar, both of them, had movement in their nature. Unsettled. If Brennan was honest, he was not certain what his nature really called him to. Perhaps it would come to him one day. For now, it was enough to be a part of something much greater than he could ever be alone. To be among friends and family.

‘We all do what our nature calls us to,’ Marweh repeated, closer behind now. ‘I like that. We do what we must.’

Something in her voice, almost sad and resigned, made him start to turn once more.

He never did set eyes on her. There was only the blur of movement and the ferocious impact across his temple. Then points of light tumbling across his vision. A spike of pain punching deep into his head. Darkness. Falling.

As he fell, he heard the flock of doves rising from the far side of the pool. Erupting in a clattering of wings.

Then nothing.

VI

Someone threw water in his face and Brennan blinked. Sharp light hurt his eyes. He winced. All he could see was Manadar grinning down at him.

‘She hit you with a stick,’ Manadar told him merrily. ‘You want to see it? It’s still got some of your blood on it.’

‘Go sit on your sword, you bastard,’ Brennan groaned. He could barely believe what was happening. What had happened.

‘Take a look. I think this might be some of your hair just here.’

‘I’d piss on you if I could stand up.’

‘He’s fine,’ Manadar called over his shoulder.

Brennan sat up stiffly. His head throbbed. He felt, gingerly, with his fingertips and there was dried blood caked there at his temple. Manadar hauled him to his feet and Brennan could not help groaning. It was not just his head that ached. His whole body was unready for this.

‘Where is she?’ he asked, squeezing his eyes shut against the pounding pain.

‘Not here,’ Lorin said from a short distance away.

Brennan let a little bit of the piercing light in again. Lorin was crouched over the bare earth, a dozen or so paces around the edge of the pool.

‘She leaves a plain enough trail,’ he said. ‘Looks to me like she’s in a hurry to get back to her family.’

‘She can’t be far,’ Brennan muttered, realising even as he said it that he had no clear idea how long he had been gone from the world for. Though there was a faint, hot tingle in the skin of his face that suggested he might have lain unmoving beneath the hard sun long enough for a burn to begin.

‘Might be a bit further than you imagine,’ said Manadar. ‘She’s business for later though. There’s bigger trouble brewing. That’s why we came to find the two of you.’

‘Bigger trouble?’ Brennan echoed. He felt dull and befuddled. Dim-witted as a fool.

‘Orphanidons,’ Lorin said, rising to his feet. He strode past Brennan without looking at him.

‘Careless, idiot boy,’ he muttered as he went.

And that wounded Brennan more deeply than Marweh’s makeshift club had done. The more so because it was richly deserved. Not that the blow to the head had been exactly unearned if the currency of the moment was carelessness.

But there were more immediate problems than the disappointment of those whose opinions Brennan valued. Orphanidons. Even in his soft-headed state he knew that was-just as Manadar said-a much bigger kind of trouble.

Manadar had to support him now and again as they walked back to the camp. Brennan’s legs were slow to respond to his mental commands. It was not the first time he had been knocked unconscious, so he was not too concerned about that. Not yet. His body should remember itself in an hour or two. Hopefully the dull throb in his head and the faint nausea in his gut would subside by then too.

The rest of the Free were waiting for them. Or waiting for something at least. As Brennan and the other two came slowly back towards the little camp, they received little attention. Hamdan-he and Yulan and Rudran were sitting on their horses side by side-glanced at them and gave a faint, wry smile when he saw Brennan’s stumbling condition. The archer nudged Rudran. When the big man looked round and saw them coming, he scowled. Rudran was not much given to smiles of any sort.

The rest-Yulan himself, and Wren and Kerig and all the others-were looking elsewhere. Up on the low, rocky ridge above the campsite was a distant mounted figure. One that glinted and gleamed in the sunlight. Another, just the same, was riding very slowly down across the slope towards them. That second horseman was close enough for all to see that it was metal that caught the light and shone with its reflection. Armour.

Brennan and Lorin and Manadar stood beside Wren and Kerig. The two Clevers were close but not quite touching. Brennan was always just a touch wary of talking to any of the Free’s Clevers. By rights, they were no different from him. Just more companions on the hard road the company followed. But of course they were a little different. They did things Brennan could not understand, and never would. They lived in a slightly different world.

Wren was the most approachable of them all to his way of thinking. Much of the time, it was possible to forget who and what she was. Kerig was another matter. Him Brennan found decidedly intimidating. There was always a faint tension in the man. A sense that saying the wrong thing might have unfortunate consequences. As a result, Brennan tended to say as little as possible in the Clever’s presence.

Manadar had no such inhibitions.

‘Just one of them coming down?’ he whispered to Kerig. ‘That’s a man short on fear and sense.’

Kerig glanced at the warrior and was clearly unimpressed.

‘You short on them yourself? Might be we just lost this whole contract, now the Orphanidons have found us. And if that’s all we lose, we’ll be doing well.’

‘Let him be,’ Wren whispered, touching her lover’s arm. ‘We’ll all know which way this is heading soon enough.’

Rudran was muttering quietly to Yulan. His voice was too low for Brennan to hear the words, but the general sense was not hard to gather. The lancer-clad in his own armour, which had never in its existence shone the way the Orphanidons’ did-was hefting a hammer, giving it a little shake now and again to emphasise some point.

It was a nasty weapon, with a heavy blunt head backed by a long, sharp spike. Made, Brennan knew well enough, more or less specifically to kill Orphanidons. To break armoured bones by sheer weight of impact; or, if turned in the hand, to punch through metal into flesh. Brennan had seen Rudran and his horsemen training with them often enough. As far as he was aware, the Free had not had to fight Orphanidons for many, many years. But the possibility was always there, and it was in the nature of both the Free as a whole and Yulan as their Captain to prepare for that possibility. The Orphanidons were the kind of threat that, without a planned answer to the question they posed, was liable to ride right over you and trample you into the dirt.

Yulan was shaking his head. Rudran would not get the chance to test his answer today. The lancer lowered his hammer. He looked disappointed.

Yulan and Hamdan and Rudran advanced a short way to meet this uninvited guest. And the lone Orphanidon ignored them. He did not so much as glance in their direction as he rode, very slowly, past them and on into the very camp of the Free, where their bedrolls were still on the ground and spears and sacks lay all about. Yulan and the other two had to turn their horses about and follow him.

He was like no man Brennan had ever seen, this one. His horse was magnificent, a hand taller at the shoulder than anything the Free rode. He wore a chest-plate and helm of polished, silvery metal. He had greaves at his shins of the same metal, engraved with swirling patterns. His gauntlets were overlaid with plates of gleaming bronze. Ribbons of many colours were tied about his upper arm.

He had a tall spear in one hand, held perfectly erect with its butt resting beside his foot in a stirrup. A round shield was strapped across his back, and a long sword was at his waist. He was bright and fearsome and proud.

Orphanidons. Terrible and impregnable. The master troops of the Emperor. But they had meaning far beyond that simple fact. The Empire was named for the countless thousands of orphans it harvested-quite deliberately and methodically-in its wars of conquest, and then shaped to serve its own ends. The best of them, the strongest and most iron-willed, became the Orphanidons. Each one of them was the result of years of training and sculpting. He was not merely a man of war; he was the crowning achievement of the Empire that had made him. As a baker made bread from humble grain, so the Empire made warriors from orphaned children. Perhaps-if the stories were to be believed-the greatest warriors the world had ever seen. So many thought. Not the Free, of course. Brennan would not allow himself to believe it. He preferred to remember that the Free had carved just as many stories into the world’s memory as the Orphanidons ever had.

This dazzling warrior drew his horse to a halt in the centre of the ring made by the Free’s bedrolls, and turned it about in a tight circle. The animal trampled the ashes of the firepit.

The Orphanidon said something in his own fluting language.

Yulan, sitting quite relaxed astride his horse, smiled apologetically.

‘Forgive me, but we have no one here who knows your tongue. It shames me to ask it of you, but can you speak in ours?’ It was a lie, Brennan knew. There were at least a couple of men here-including Hamdan, right there at Yulan’s side as ever-who could speak the language of the Orphans. For all Brennan knew, Yulan could as well. When it came to his Captain, no accomplishment would surprise him.

The Orphanidon regarded Yulan flatly for a moment or two, almost as if he smelled the untruth. Then he spoke.

‘You do not belong here. You are not of the Empire.’

‘No,’ Yulan acknowledged.

‘You will go back to your bed of lice and whores in your little lands.’

‘Ha.’ Yulan looked as though he wanted to laugh at that. ‘A fine turn of phrase you’ve got there. But no, sadly we cannot do that. Not yet.’

‘You can. Now.’

The Orphanidon matched Yulan’s calm. He was more stern, his face all but dead in its absence of expression. It did nothing to dampen the tension in the air.

‘Your ribbons say that you have seen much of the world,’ Yulan observed, twitching a finger at the many-coloured bands adorning the Orphanidon’s arm. ‘You must have served long and risen high.’

‘I hold the rank of Carnotec.’ The man of the Empire appeared entirely unmoved by flattery, if that had been Yulan’s intent.

‘I see the ribbon for crossing the northern bounds into the cold places,’ Yulan went on. ‘I see the ribbon for guarding the Emperor himself in Arnothex. I see the ribbon for tracking the Unhomed, and riding its flanks.’

‘You see those and more.’

‘Then you know much of the world. And you know well who we are, Carnotec.’

‘You are the Free.’

‘A few of them, yes. Just a few.’

‘Too many.’

‘You know we are bound to fulfil any contract we have taken. You know that is our code, and the earth from which our honour grows.’

‘I know that none who kneel before Crex the Corrupt, Crex the Base, may set foot where you have done. These are the lands of the Emperor, and the lives of his enemies are forfeit.’

‘As it should be,’ Yulan nodded. ‘Yet if you know of us, you know we do not kneel before Crex, or any other. We are the last of the free companies, unbound and unfettered. And it is not Crex’s contract that we are here to fulfil. He would not dare to test the patience of the great Emperor in such a way.’

Yulan twisted in his saddle. Only his body really; he kept his eyes firmly fixed upon the Orphanidon.

‘We have our contract-holder here. You can see the document he bears, if you wish. The name it carries is that of a village headman who asks us to return to him the many of his people who have been stolen away by evil men, and carried off into subjection and servitude.’

Surmun was in fact nowhere to be seen. Brennan glanced around and saw no sign of him. The high responsibility of accompanying the Free to bear witness to the legality of their contract had made Surmun a deeply unhappy man. To be fair, he had only sunk into despondency once it became apparent that the pursuit of the slavers was going to take them into the Empire. Until then he had given every sign of quite enjoying himself in a preening sort of way. Brennan was not surprised to find that he had disappeared from sight now that Orphanidons were on the scene. Poor Surmun’s little adventure was showing every sign of going terribly wrong. Not that he was alone in that.

Fortunately, the Orphanidon was not interested in the details of the contract. It would have said precisely what Yulan claimed it did. They all knew, as no doubt did the Orphanidon, that what it said and what it really meant were not the same thing. The headman of Wyven Dam might have put his mark on the contract, but it was the King’s coin that would pay the Free, and it had been the King’s scribes who wrote it.

The Orphanidon stared into Yulan’s eyes. There was a true courage here, Brennan thought. It might be born of arrogance and privilege and brutality; that did not make it any less brave to ride alone into the camp of twenty fighting men, knowing they were no friends.

‘The Empire takes no slaves from Hommetic lands,’ the Orphanidon stated.

‘Excellent,’ said Yulan. ‘We understand one another. The Orphans do not take slaves from Hommetic lands. And Crex does not trespass upon the rightful territories of the Orphans. Those we pursue are but bandits and rogues, who act without the Emperor’s knowledge. Just as we act without the King’s.’

There was the crux of it. Even Brennan, little of the world as he had seen and little of its workings as he understood, knew that. For years-decades-there had been nothing but loathing between Hommetics and Orphans, yet neither would venture open war against the other. The Empire feared the Kingdom’s School of Clevers and the terrible Permanence, the Bereaved, that they controlled. The Kingdom feared the Empire’s limitless expanse and limitless armies. Their fears balanced one another, and there would be no war. But there would be slave raids and skirmishes and killings, all of which each ruler could feign ignorance of. There would be contracts that sent the Free hunting slavers. And everyone, if they chose, could pretend that it was not war.

The Orphanidon looked around. For the first time, he shifted his attention from Yulan to the rest of them and let his gaze flow around the circle of the Free. It brushed over Brennan, and for that moment he felt all the cold confidence and certitude of this potent warrior.

It did not linger on him though. He was of no interest. Wren and Kerig, they were of interest. Just for a heartbeat or two. Then the Orphanidon looked back to Yulan.

‘You have Clevers,’ he said levelly.

Yulan said nothing.

‘Clevers are forbidden. Practice of their magics is forbidden. The shielding of them from the Empire’s law is forbidden.’

‘I understand,’ Yulan nodded.

‘You will be watched. You will be measured. If your Clevers wake the entelechs, they will be mine.’

Brennan heard Kerig shifting at his side. The Clever had a reputation for a certain hotness of temper, though by all accounts Wren had worked wonders in cooling it over the last year or two. Even so, he was known as a man it was unwise to provoke. Brennan fervently hoped that they were not all about to see why.

‘No one puts a claim on any one of the Free without claiming all,’ Yulan said, for the first time letting a little steel into his voice, ‘and that is the kind of claim there are few in this world able to press. We stand together, always. That too is the earth in which our honour roots.’

The Orphanidon was unmoved. He simply stared back at Yulan.

‘It is of no matter now though,’ Yulan continued with a small smile. ‘Our Clevers will give you no cause for concern. They will let the entelechs sleep for now.’

Just from the slow intake of breath at his side, Brennan could tell that Kerig did not like that. He did not much like it himself. The Free had the best warriors that years of experience and the greatest ferocity of will could shape, but they had some of the most powerful Clevers in the known world too. Without them, a truly potent weapon was being left in its scabbard.

The Orphanidon reached to his belt and unhooked an object Brennan had not noticed there before. A delicate horn of silver and ivory and ebony, as beautiful a thing as he had ever seen in the hands of a fighting man. The Orphanidon tipped his head back a touch, set the horn to his lips and blew.

The note was pure and clean. A high, wavering rise and fall which echoed from the slopes and flew like the fastest of birds across the wide lands. It was taken up and repeated after a few moments by the solitary figure out on the ridge. And then, faintly, from far beyond that. The Free listened as the cry of the horn was carried off into the distance by one silvery voice after another.

Beautiful a sound as it was, it felt very much like ill tidings to Brennan.

The Orphanidon there among them set his instrument back on his waist. He regarded Yulan impassively.

‘I have called my company. After one setting of the sun and one rising, there will be two hundred Orphanidons across your path, man of the Free. There will be no talking then.’

‘I understand,’ Yulan said quietly. ‘What I have not done in one sunset and one rise, I will leave undone.’

The Orphanidon nodded his head just once. He hauled on his horse’s reins and moved away, brushing close by Yulan as he went. The Free silently watched him ride back up towards his fellow on the ridge.

‘This is going to be interesting,’ Hamdan said after a while, loud enough for everyone to hear. ‘Hope we’ve got enough arrows.’

VII

As the Free busied themselves packing up their simple little camp, Brennan noticed a belated reappearance. Surmun came stumbling up, the case which held the contract scroll securely at his belt, his clothes speckled with dust and dirt. He had been lying somewhere. Not just staying out of the way then. Hiding.

He had a slightly sheepish look about him, but mostly he was trying-and failing-to conceal a tremble of relief. Hope, perhaps. The contract-holder approached Yulan almost eagerly.

‘Is it done?’ he asked. By which he meant, of course, that he wanted to go home.

Yulan laid one hand on his shoulder and brushed some of the dry earth from the man’s breast with the other.

‘You know, contract-holder, when the Free make an agreement, they drain the cup of that agreement to its very dregs. We do as we have pledged and been paid to do. So no, it’s not over.’

Surmun’s face fell.

‘I’ll tell you something,’ Yulan said. ‘Making bones of men who steal children from their beds and carry them off to slavery in some foreign lands… that I would do without payment. We’ve fought and slain many who deserved our wrath and our contempt less.

‘So this ends in only two ways, good Surmun: either with freed slaves and birds plucking the eyes from dead slavers, or with a whole army of Orphanidons barring our way and turning us back. I’d suggest you forget your worries and put your heart into wishing for the first of those endings. Because we’re going to be riding fast for one or other of them now.’

Surmun hung his head. Yulan was already turning away, walking towards his own bedroll. He beckoned Brennan as he went. It was something Brennan had been half expecting. Half dreading, more honestly. Lorin and Yulan had been deep in conversation for a time after the Orphanidon had departed. Brennan had not needed to hear what they had said to sense the darkening of moods which were not exactly bright in the first place.

‘I hear you lost your woman,’ Yulan said as Brennan fell into step at his side. ‘That’d be twice now she’s got the better of the Free. You mean to award yourself some of the fault for this new souring of our day?’

‘I do,’ Brennan said quietly.

‘Good. Seems you earned it this time around.’

Yulan was angry. Brennan could tell that, even though it was a quiet, controlled kind of anger. And Yulan’s anger was not a thing he would ever have wished to merit. Today, for the very first time since he had joined the Free, Brennan felt like a failure. That feeling writhed in him and would not lie still.

‘Turn your head,’ Yulan commanded. ‘Let me see that wound.’

Brennan leaned his head slightly to one side, and turned and lifted it so that Yulan could touch his fingers to the still-bloodied skin. Like a child coming marked from play being inspected by his mother.

‘It hurt?’ Yulan asked. ‘Does it spin or tremble in there?’

‘No. I mean, it hurts, but nothing more.’

‘Very well.’

Yulan lowered his hand.

‘You and your two fool-friends are going to redeem yourselves,’ he said. ‘The three of you go after your runaway. We’ve got no time left to play with, now that the Emperor’s lions are closing in, so you go this very moment. I don’t much want to see any of your faces again without hers alongside.’

‘Yes,’ Brennan nodded.

‘And don’t you let any harm come to her,’ snapped Yulan. ‘Whether she’s running to her family or just out into the waste, she’s still one of those we’re here to save. Whatever she’s done, she’s not done it of her own free choice. You remember that. No matter what happens, you keep her alive. But you make sure she doesn’t reach those slavers and their tyrant either. I’ll not have her warning him where we are and how many.’

Lorin and Manadar were more subdued than usual as the three of them rode on Marweh’s trail. Lorin was concentrating intently, leaning down from his saddle often to check footprints or sign. That did not entirely explain the mood though.

The two of them blamed him for this latest setback, Brennan understood. Reasonably enough. The waterskins-that had been less uniquely and obviously his fault alone. Mostly his, he was still inclined to think. The point was at least open to debate. This… this was all his own.

Neither one of them would hold it against him for long. He knew them well enough to be sure of that. It too would become fodder for mockery and good-humoured baiting in time. Tomorrow will mend it, as his mother used to say about so many passing ills. A finger broken clambering over slippery rocks in the stream: tomorrow will mend it. A heart broken by a girl in the next village over: tomorrow will mend it. Brothers warring over some small slight: tomorrow will mend it.

Still, today was going to be a long and probably miserable day. Perhaps more than a day. As Brennan watched the ground slowly passing beneath his horse’s hoofs, he wondered if he had not acquired a tyrant of his own. Perched at the back of his mind like a curled, bleak-hearted snake. Doubt.

He had thought he belonged in the Free. He had thought he was, or could become, worthy of riding beneath that banner. Now he was not so casually certain. In the life of the sword, mistakes killed people. Failings cost blood. Brennan had no wish to be the one people spoke of when they tried to teach that lesson to others.

‘I don’t think she knows where she’s going,’ Lorin said from up ahead.

He had drawn his horse to a halt. He was pointing out, away from the ridge and the long, low furrow of faintly moist ground they had kept to thus far. Into the emptiness.

Brennan pushed the hair back from his brow. His hand came away wet with sweat.

‘Almost like she’s just wandering,’ Lorin said.

‘If that’s what she’s doing, she’s doing it fast,’ Manadar pointed out. ‘Day’s almost half gone and we’ve not caught her yet.’

‘She’s walking quickly,’ Lorin confirmed. ‘Trotting now and again, for a little while.’

‘Sounds like there’s somewhere she wants to be,’ Brennan suggested.

‘Maybe,’ was all Lorin said.

And he led them out into the dry plain once more.

To follow the trail of a lone woman was not as easy as it had been to follow a hundred mounted slavers and fifty or more captives. They moved slowly. Lorin paused now and again to reassure himself that he had not lost the course.

It did not help that a hot wind was starting to stir the air. Out in the far distance, Brennan could even see occasional swirling little pillars of dust dancing across the flats. They fascinated him at first. He had never seen anything quite like them. Soon enough, his thoughts turned to worry instead. If gusts of wind took away too long a stretch of Marweh’s prints, even Lorin might be left impotent. She would be gone, vanished into this endless waste. Brennan would have more failure to stew over.

Perhaps pondering the same possibilities, Lorin picked up the pace a little. The air itself had now turned against them. Time had always been their enemy. They had known it anyway, but Yulan made it clear before they rode out from the camp: one sunset, one sunrise, and whether they had Marweh or not they turned about and rode for Hommetic lands. As fast as they liked. After that dawn, more than likely the Free were going to turn from hunters to hunted. These bleak lands might well be full of Orphanidons by then.

Yulan and the rest raced against the same foretold fate, but Brennan would not be there to see what became of their quest. He would not see the tyrant’s little army run down and destroyed, if that was what happened. He would not see the slaves saved, if that was what happened. He and Lorin and Manadar would not be a part of whatever grand victory the Free might win. So be it. If it was punishment, he would never have argued against it.

‘She knows where she’s going now,’ Lorin said abruptly.

Brennan and Manadar rode up to his side.

‘Look there.’ Lorin gestured at the ground. ‘She stopped, then turned suddenly. Heads off in a pretty straight line. You see it?’

‘No,’ Brennan said honestly. The bare earth was unreadable to him.

Lorin pointed at the horizon.

‘She spotted that,’ he said. ‘She’s making straight for it.’

Brennan frowned. The subtle breeze had lifted up a sand-haze, dulling and flattening everything more than a few hundred paces in any direction. He could just make out what Lorin meant though. Way out there in the distance-it was impossible to say how far-there was a shape. A bulging rise in the land. Some kind of wide, low hill rising and falling from the featureless expanse all around it.

‘She must have been told where to go to be reunited with her husband and child,’ Lorin mused. ‘Told what to look for.’

‘It’s probably a lie,’ said Manadar. ‘There’ll be nothing there waiting for her.’

‘Probably,’ Lorin agreed. ‘Doesn’t matter.’

They turned their horses towards that distant point and moved on.

VIII

The hill was much larger than it had appeared. It was also further away than Brennan would have guessed. It took them a good two hours to get close enough to make out any details of the terrain.

Those details were not unexpected. Bare, yellowish rock. A few frail shrubs rooted in crevices and crannies. There were gullies on the lower flanks of the hill, extending out into the flat ground beyond. They shallowed and shrank the further from the slopes they reached, until they disappeared altogether. There must be downpours here, Brennan supposed. Brief, sudden storms which sent water pouring off the hard heights, scouring out channels for itself down onto the plain. Where it flowed and spread and sank away, sucked up by the parched earth.

‘I don’t much like this,’ Lorin said as they drew closer to the great rocky mound.

‘No? You amaze me,’ said Manadar sarcastically.

‘This is not so far from where I told Yulan he might find his quarry. Unless they changed course, there could be a hundred slavers on the other side of this hill.’

‘What should we do?’ Brennan asked.

‘Well, if there’re eyes up on top, they might have seen us by now,’ Lorin said, ‘but they might be careless, or tired, or not there at all. Either way, it’d do no harm to make ourselves a little harder to see.’

He angled his horse a touch to the side and led them down into the tail end of one of the long, sprawling gullies. They worked their way along the bottom of it, its sides rising higher and higher until they passed their heads. There was some dry vegetation down there in the bed of what, perhaps for only a day or two a year, must be a fierce-flowing river. Browned seed-heads that said there had been flowers here, in times past. There were no flowers now.

Soon enough, the ground beneath their feet was starting to rise. They halted, looking up the deep notch cut into the side of the hill. Lorin swung himself down from his horse. Brennan and Manadar copied him.

‘We need to walk someone up there,’ Lorin said, hooking a thumb towards the top of the hill. ‘Make sure there’s no eyes there before we take the horses up.’

‘That’ll take time,’ Manadar murmured. ‘She’s walking away from us, step by step.’

‘Do you boys listen to anything I say? Told you before: never hurts to take every care. Can you not smell it?’

Brennan looked around, puzzled. He could smell nothing but his own dried sweat, filling clothes he had been wearing for days. Manadar, similarly confounded, shrugged.

‘Trouble,’ said Lorin emphatically. ‘Bloody, bad trouble. This place reeks of it. This whole contract reeks of it. You want to see the far side of the next day or two, you’d better learn to smell the way the wind’s blowing.’

‘I’ll go,’ Brennan said, gazing up towards the rocks above.

‘Not alone. Manadar, you keep the horses here until you get some sign from us.’

Manadar started to protest as Lorin pressed reins into his hands, but the older man was far beyond any patience for debates.

‘Brennan here’s the closest thing we’ve got to an archer. I’m more likely to need him up there than you and your sword. And some time soon I’ll need my horse more than either of you, so don’t lose it.’

Brennan followed closely on Lorin’s heels as they worked their way up the gully, and then out onto the slopes of the hill. He tried to put his feet where Lorin’s went, and to keep his back bent just the same and his head bowed just as low.

There was not much by way of shelter from curious eyes out there on the higher ground. What little there was, they found. The few bushes had more or less no leaves. There were boulders here and there, most smoothed and rounded by centuries of wind-blown sand. Cracks and crevices ran up and across the flatter expanses of exposed stone. Trying to remain unseen took a great effort. A keen concentration of mind and a control of body. Lorin had that, and Brennan sought to mimic it with every step.

There were loose pebbles, most resting in crannies but some just lying there on slabs of rock. Lorin disturbed none of them. His feet made no sound on the stone. The leather of his boots did not even creak. Brennan could not quite match that silence. He could hear his own footsteps, soft as he tried to make them. He could hear the arrows in the quiver at his waist shifting against one another.

He took some comfort from the fact that the higher they rose, the more noticeably the wind flowed over them. It was blowing across the face of the hill and out onto the plain. It might carry faint sounds away with it. Unfortunately, it did not carry off much in the way of heat. Even the moving air felt drying and hot. The harsh sun was beating back off the naked rocks. Brennan imagined himself to be a ball of dough, thrust into a baker’s oven.

He heard a buzzard’s cry above and stared up at the dark bird, circling and rising. Waiting for the bread to be thoroughly cooked, he thought.

Lorin pulled him into the lee of a big, round sandy-coloured rock. There was a pool of shadow that came as the most soothing relief. Brennan would have drunk that shadow down if he could, to hold its coolness within him. That was not why Lorin had chosen the spot though.

‘Someone up above us,’ he whispered. ‘Couple of hundred paces, on the top.’

Brennan was surprised. And shamed in a way. He had seen nothing.

‘He’s looking the wrong way,’ Lorin told him. ‘Or not. He’s watching Yulan’s likely approach, if the rest of them were coming here. Can’t really blame him for that, I suppose.’

‘I suppose not,’ Brennan said.

‘We can kill him for it though.’

Once Lorin had pointed the watcher out, Brennan did not feel quite so bad about having missed him. All that could be seen was a bent knee, jutting out from behind a low cairn someone-many someones, more likely-had built atop the rounded summit long ago. Why anyone in their right mind would spend sweat and strength to gather rocks, carry them up there and pile them in a little tower, Brennan could not guess.

‘You want to go?’ Lorin asked him.

‘Yes,’ Brennan said without hesitation.

‘Good. Draw your knife now. He might hear it leave the sheath if you wait until the last moment.’

Brennan clamped the blade between his teeth so that he would have both hands if he needed them on the ascent, and so that he could not accidentally strike metal against stone. He left his bow and sword and quiver full of arrows there with Lorin. He would not need them.

‘Come at him into the wind,’ Lorin said.

Brennan did that. He cut across the slope before turning round and up. Put the solid body of that cairn between him and the man he meant to kill. He went carefully but not as slowly as before. He trusted the breeze to drift away any slight sound he might make.

For the last hundred or more yards, there was virtually no cover. Much of the hill’s summit was just huge, open slabs of smooth rock. He covered the ground quickly, in a low crouch. His senses were sharp now that violence was coming, and his eyes took in every tiny feature of the surface before each stride. Not a pebble shifted as he passed; not a single crack tripped him.

Only for the final few footsteps up to the cairn did he slow. He measured every movement. Carefully, so carefully, he took the knife from his mouth and readied it. Even then, at the very last, with only a few yards and the stones of the cairn between him and the other, he took the time to stop and wait until his heart had slowed. He cleared his mind and felt his breath pulsing in and out. He delicately lifted his right foot and set it silently down a little further forward. Shifted his weight onto it.

When he moved again, he did it as fast as he possibly could. A huge surging push from his right leg, pumping his arms to carry him forward and round the cairn.

To his credit, the slaver was not asleep. He was rising, levering himself up and away from the cairn as Brennan reached him. He was lifting his spear from where it lay on the ground beside him. This was no fight fit for a spear though. This was knife work.

Brennan reached for the man’s mouth with his free hand, even as he reached for the heart with his knife. He missed the mouth. His hand hit the slaver’s cheek instead, hard enough to slap his head around.

Brennan was moving so fast he easily bore his unbalanced opponent over backwards. They fell together, and Brennan let his full weight land on the man’s chest. He scrabbled again to cover his mouth as he did so. The choking, dying cry that burst out was muffled before it found any strength.

The knife was deep in the man’s chest. Mortally so, Brennan was sure, but he pushed and twisted it as hard as he could in any case. The slaver bucked and flailed beneath him. Warm blood spilled out between the two of them. A lot of it.

Then the man went still. There was no more breath fighting to get past Brennan’s suffocating hand. Open eyes stared up at Brennan and they were empty. Whatever had been there a moment ago had departed. Brennan rolled away. His knife hand and chest were soaked with blood. He wiped the blade clean on his trousers.

His own heart was pounding now, and he was breathing hard. His head ached, echoes of the blow Marweh had delivered pounding through it. Just for a moment, he closed his eyes.

‘Well done,’ he heard Lorin saying.

IX

Lorin chose one of the smallest stones from near the top of the cairn. He stretched his arm back, gathered his strength for a moment or two and then flung the stone as hard and far as he could. It tumbled away and then went tip-tapping down the hill. It bounced and bounded down the slope, its descent knocking out a faint message.

Manadar, far below, heard that message. His head-a tiny black dot-rose above the lip of the gully where they had left him with the horses. Lorin waved. Manadar emerged, leading the three animals.

‘Be hard work, hauling them all the way up here,’ Brennan observed.

‘You want to go and help him?’

In truth, Brennan did. That was his instinct. Hard work was a part of what he needed, he thought, to dislodge doubt.

‘No,’ he said instead, because that seemed to be the answer Lorin expected.

Rather than watch Manadar struggling up, battling reluctant horses as much as the incline, Brennan searched the slaver’s body. The man was not heavily laden. He had some flatbread in a folded cloth and a few copper coins in a pouch. Brennan examined his spear just in case it was worth keeping. Probably not, he judged. The shaft was not perfectly straight, and the binding that held the rough iron point looked about ready to let go. If slaving was a trade to make men rich, this man had not reaped the benefit. Most likely, Brennan supposed, whatever gold was flowing ended up pooling in the tyrant’s pockets.

With a fleeting twinge of guilt, Brennan tore the dead man’s shirt apart. He used some more or less clean scraps of it to wipe away as much as he could of the man’s blood from his own clothes.

While he did it, Lorin was ranging across the top of the hill. He was still keeping low, trying to make himself a little less obvious, but he could not see as far and wide as he wanted to without accepting some small risk of being seen himself. Soon, he gave out a sharp, wordless hiss to attract Brennan’s attention.

‘Can’t see over the far side properly-hill’s got a big, ugly shoulder out there-but look what I found down here,’ Lorin said as Brennan joined him.

Brennan squatted at Lorin’s side and looked. What he saw, there at the very foot of the slope, was so unexpected that he blinked and could think of nothing to say at first.

‘Are those trees?’ he managed to ask stupidly. Obviously-if improbably-they were trees.

‘There must be a spring,’ Lorin snapped, irritated. ‘Never mind the trees though. Eyes, eyes! Tell me what else you see.’

Brennan stared. Concentrated. People. He saw people. The little clump of trees was not dense. The canopy was open. Beneath it, Brennan could see figures moving about. It was impossible to say exactly how many; no more than a dozen or so, he thought. And some horses too, now that he looked closely. Just a few of them, tethered in a line on the far side of the thicket.

‘Where are the rest of them?’ he wondered aloud.

‘Somewhere,’ Lorin said. He shrank back from the brow of the hill. ‘You keep your eyes on those bastards. I’ll hurry Manadar along.’

Brennan stayed there, watching. He lay flat on his belly, resting his chin on his hands. He could feel the stored heat of the rock beneath him.

There was no sign of agitation or excitement down there among the trees. People moved to and fro without haste. And now that he gave them his full attention, he thought he could see more of them. The slightest stirring of the leaves now and again revealed what might be quite a few more folk; not moving, these. Sitting or lying together in a couple of tight groups in the shade of the trees.

Slavers or slaves? He could not be sure. Either way, it meant he was back in the van of the Free. He was back at the sharp edge of things. He swallowed. His mouth was dry.

Something else took his eye. A fragment of movement, not among the trees but further round the flank of the hill. A lone figure was working its way around rocks, flitting in and out of sight. Moving towards the copse without much care for concealment. Brennan frowned and stared. He felt beads of sweat creeping down his face and the back of his neck.

It was Marweh. He was sure of it.

He rolled onto his back and looked across the top of the hill, searching for Lorin. He and Manadar were there, just coming up onto the summit, leading the three unhappy-looking horses.

‘Marweh’s there,’ Brennan called out softly.

Lorin dropped the reins and hurried to his side.

‘Where?’

Brennan pointed. ‘She’s making for the slavers. Doesn’t seem like they’ve seen her yet, but she’ll be there in a minute or two.’

Lorin hissed out between clenched teeth. He stared. He brushed the scar on his face with his fingertips. Then, resolved, he moved.

‘Let’s go,’ he snapped.

Brennan, surprised, did not follow him at once. Manadar too was caught somewhat off guard by the sudden urgency. Lorin snatched his horse’s lead from his hands and vaulted nimbly up into the saddle.

‘Had enough of all this sneaking and creeping about anyway,’ Lorin snarled, drawing his sword. ‘Nothing’s going to get settled until someone tests their fortune.’

Brennan scrambled to his feet and ran for his horse. Manadar was already swinging up onto his.

‘Hurry up!’ Lorin cried, edging forwards. ‘Yulan’s commands were to keep her from reaching the slavers, and to keep her alive. We’re about to fail in one for sure and the other most likely.’

He kicked his horse and it sprang forward and threw itself down the hillside.

Lorin shouted as he went: ‘Now it’s time to ride like you belong in the Free!’

X

When Brennan first came to the Free, Lorin had told him that two things, above all else, marked them out from other warriors and decided whether or not a man would last in their ranks. A ferocity of will that could override fear and adversity. And an unswerving commitment to hard labour; a recognition that life and death were not always decided in the moment of blade to blade clash, but often in the months and years of hard, constant practice and training that had gone before.

Every man of the Free spent countless hours in the saddle. Rudran trained them all, not just his beloved lancers, in the mastery of horses. In the space of a year, all that labour had turned Brennan from a merely competent rider into an accomplished one. Not a natural, but a passable imitation of one.

Flying down the side of that hill tested him almost to his limit. It was not the kind of ground anyone in their right mind would fling a horse down. In almost anyone else, it would be rank recklessness. For the Free, it was the kind of thing that won them battles and turned their deeds into stories. Brennan tried to hold onto that thought. But it was snatched away by the chaotic, furious demands of keeping him and his horse alive.

The animal slipped and slid, almost stumbling more than once. Brennan wrestled the reins this way and that, back and forth, trying to give their wild descent some kind of rhythm. He didn’t succeed in that but at least no bones were broken, no skulls cracked.

He risked a glance up now and again, trying to judge what awaited them below. It did not look overly promising. He glimpsed Marweh-the first, perhaps, to hear their approach-stopping and looking up. Pausing for a moment in some kind of indecision and then running for the trees. He glimpsed armed men at the edge of those trees. Men with spears and swords in hand. Faintly, above the clatter of horses’ hoofs and tumbling pebbles, he could hear shouting.

On and on, down and down, into the waiting furnace. Men ran out from the shelter of the trees, making for Marweh. Thinking, no doubt, that they could reach her first and gather her up into their less than loving embrace. Three mounted madmen, as likely to break their necks as anything else, must not yet seem an overwhelming threat.

That changed as soon as Lorin’s mount got a shallower slope beneath its hoofs. The hill began to level out into the plain, and horse and rider alike drew new strength from the easing. Lorin charged, not for Marweh but for the slavers rushing towards her. He thundered past her, and she swerved to one side and stumbled and fell. Brennan’s own horse sprang over her and he had a momentary vision of her prone form there beneath him, passing behind him.

Lorin was not here to capture or rescue one wayward slave, Brennan understood. They were going to war now. All or nothing, to be won or lost by strength of will and strength of steel.

The slavers understood as well, but too late to do anything much about it. A couple ran back towards the trees. Another couple set their spears to greet Lorin. One more loosed an arrow which skimmed past Lorin’s shoulder and flew within a hand’s breadth of Brennan’s cheek behind him. Brennan would have liked to send an arrow of his own back along that track, but he had his sword in his hand and that must be his tool for this labour.

Lorin swung his horse around the waiting spearmen without breaking its stride or shedding any speed. It was a small movement, just enough to make a spearpoint slice across his calf rather than punch into the horse’s breast. Enough to give Lorin the space for a wide, leaning slash of his sword which snapped the spearman’s head back and sent his leather cap spinning away. Then Lorin was past them and pounding remorselessly on.

The second spearman rose and began to turn, unnerved by the fact that Lorin was behind him now, and Brennan killed him with a single blow to the back of his neck. The blade went deep and he could sense the flesh and bone separating beneath it, but it came free easily enough as his horse carried him onward.

The archer was running. Brennan charged him down. The man was knocked flat, his bow flying loose from his hand. Brennan hauled his horse around and stretched down to hack once, twice at the fallen man. That was enough.

Lorin, with Manadar close behind him, had plunged in among the trees. Brennan could see swords rising and falling, and hear cries of alarm and anger. He looked for Marweh. She was on her knees, watching everything unfolding before her with an expression that was impossible to read. She did not, at least, look likely to be going anywhere quickly. Brennan urged his horse on and made for the copse.

It was hard and bloody work in there. The trees stood well apart, and the soft ground was all but clear of undergrowth or tangles. Still, it was not ideal for mounted men. Brennan, by instinct more than considered choice, jumped down and left his horse behind him.

‘There’s only three of them,’ he heard someone shouting. ‘Call the tyrant!’

Only three, Brennan thought. Three of the Free’s enough, if we are indeed worthy of the name. He heard a horn, ragged and trembling. Nothing like the graceful note the Orphanidon had blown. Just as ill-omened though. That, he supposed, was what calling the tyrant meant.

He followed the sound, sprinting through light and shadows. The man with the horn was not far. He had his back to Brennan. The sound of footsteps made him begin to turn. The slaver spun and flung the horn at Brennan’s head. Brennan ducked it and cut at the man’s weight-bearing leg. The blade nicked his thigh but did not cut away his support as Brennan had intended.

If the man had the kind of training and experience Brennan had, he might have lived longer. As it was, his instincts were bad. His clarity of thought about what it took to live and kill in such a moment came up short. He was right-handed, and had used that hand for the horn. His short, slightly curved sword was in his left hand. The wrong hand. His mistake was to try to change that. He made to pass the sword from one hand to another.

Brennan understood what was happening in an instant. His body reacted to the opening without need of any prompting. A reverse sweep of his sword to knock the other man’s blade to the side as it was changing hands. A roll of his wrist and a fast cut back and up to the underside of the chin.

It was not a killing blow, but it staggered and dazed the slaver and had him reaching up to staunch the immediate rich flow of blood. Brennan rushed in and landed a hard two-handed slash on his ribcage. He heard the click of breaking ribs. That felled the slaver. Brennan killed him on the ground.

Breathing hard now, he turned about to take the measure of his surroundings. He could see Manadar plunging back and forth among the trees, whooping with furious excitement as he cut and hacked at scattering slavers. Closer, he saw a huddle of men and women and children. They sat on the ground, arms around one another. Their clothes were ragged and filthy. Some were ripped, revealing the fresh welts left by whips. Their faces were drawn and grimed. Villagers. Slaves.

Brennan hesitated. There was still fighting to be done but these people were his purpose here, in the end.

‘Get up-’ he began to shout.

Then something hit him, hard. He went down, the air rushing out of his chest. Someone was on top of him. He knew he was injured. It was not so much pain as a point of pressure, an awareness of a presence in his body that did not belong. A knife, he thought surprisingly calmly, in my flank. No time to worry about that.

He twisted with all his strength and smashed the pommel of his sword against his attacker’s head. They rolled, the two of them. And of the two, it was Brennan whose furious refusal to die was the stronger. He pounded again and again, beating at the same point in the man’s head. No skill, no artifice, just anger and violence. The slaver slumped aside. Not dead, but quivering, his eyelids fluttering and his lips trembling.

Brennan got stiffly to his feet, clamping a hand over the wound in his side. It was not serious. It did hurt though, now that he could allow himself to feel the pain.

‘Get up,’ he repeated to the villagers, leaning on his sword.

They did, one by one. Some looked hesitant and fearful. Others less so. A couple of the men and one of the women rushed to the slaver and began kicking and beating him. The woman grabbed up a fallen branch and belaboured him with it. The man made no response to these assaults. He had already lost his grip on life, Brennan suspected.

‘Leave him,’ he snapped.

Somewhat to his surprise, they did.

‘That way,’ he told them, gesturing with his sword back towards where he could see his own horse, patiently waiting at the edge of the trees.

The first few paces he took were difficult. He limped a little. It was tightening up where the knife had gone in. He forced himself to straighten, walking tall and even.

Lorin appeared before him. His horse reared and snorted. There were more slaves-former slaves, now-appearing from among the trees.

‘Have we done it?’ Brennan asked, not quite ready to believe it.

‘No,’ Lorin said emphatically. ‘We’ve got a few folks set free for now, but now might be a short, short time.’

He nodded past Brennan’s shoulder. Brennan looked back, out beyond the limits of the thicket. A knot of horses and men was coming around the haunch of the hill, from the hidden far side. A lot of them. Called by the horn, Brennan assumed. A handful of slavers had escaped the struggle among the trees unhurt and were sprinting across the open ground towards those newcomers. They would tell them they only faced three men, should they wish to reclaim their precious captives.

‘We need to get back on high ground,’ Lorin said.

His voice sounded slightly strained. There was a lot of blood over his boot, flowing from the wound where the spear had cut him. There looked to be some in his scalp too. Another blow collected along the way.

It was Lorin who asked ‘You hurt?’ though.

Brennan shrugged. He glanced at his left hand, still pressed hard against his side.

‘Not bad enough to slow me down.’

‘Good.’

Lorin swung his horse away and moved off.

‘Manadar!’ he shouted. ‘Manadar! Get back up the hill, you lazy whelp.’

‘Up the hill,’ Brennan shouted at the villagers around him.

He ran-hobbled, really-for his horse. Before he reached it, he found Marweh. She was sitting on the ground, cradling a man’s head in her lap. A boy stood at her shoulder. He looked to be about six, just as she had said.

‘This is them?’ Brennan asked, standing over her.

‘Yes,’ she said without looking up. She had eyes only for her husband’s pale face.

He did look sick. Fevered. And there were ugly marks where the tips of the thorns he had been whipped with had curled around the side of his neck and face. His eyes were closed.

‘Can he walk?’ Brennan asked.

Marweh’s husband opened his eyes.

‘I can walk,’ he said.

And they did walk. All the two dozen or so people Brennan and the others had freed found the strength-despite all they had already suffered-to stagger their way up the hillside. A few had picked up spears whose owners were slain or fled. They leaned on them like walking staffs. The sun was starting to get low in the sky now, and it threw their long, lean shadows across the rocks. Like weights, dragging them back.

Lorin and Brennan and Manadar rode at the rear. Their horses were running short on strength, struggling almost as much as the villagers to make the climb. Brennan could feel his own vigour flagging now that the urgency of combat had retreated, like a wave pulling back from a beach. Taking some of the beach with it.

Only Manadar of the three of them had come through the skirmish unscathed. He still had the fire of battle burning in him.

‘They’re goats, these slave-takers,’ he crowed. ‘Running around, bleating. They’re no test.’

‘Glad you think so,’ Lorin said. ‘You get up ahead, make sure none of your goats’ve topped the hill before us.’

They watched him labour to overtake the little crowd of villagers. Brennan saw some of those men and women looking up at Manadar as he passed them. Some of the children too. What did they see? he wondered. The figure out of legend that he and his friend had imagined when they talked of the Free years ago? Manadar did not look much like a legend. Nor did Brennan feel like one. Not any more, if he ever had.

‘Up! Up!’ Lorin shouted.

Almost like a shepherd trying to hurry along a recalcitrant flock.

Brennan was close beside him and heard the dull thud before Lorin reacted. That reaction, when it came, was little more than a sharp breath and a momentary lurch in the saddle.

‘They’ve got someone down there who knows how to use a bow after all,’ Lorin grunted.

The arrow had hit him in the back of his upper arm. The muscle was transfixed. Brennan reached across to steady Lorin in his saddle, but the older man shook his head.

‘It’s nothing.’

Another arrow rattled off the hard ground behind them.

‘Be good if it didn’t happen again though,’ Lorin muttered. ‘I’m running out of fresh bits of my body for them to bloody. Let’s get out of sight or out of range. One or the other.’

XI

‘I was a lucky man before I met you two,’ Lorin grumbled, tearing a rag from his sleeve and struggling to bind it one-handed about his wound. He was sitting with his back against a sloping rock. He had broken the arrow and pulled it out of his flesh himself.

‘You’re not blaming us, are you?’ Manadar said with an affected plaintive air. He pushed Lorin’s hand away and set to bandaging his wound.

Lorin winced as Manadar pulled the rag tight.

‘This look like luck to you?’ he growled through gritted teeth.

‘Not much,’ Manadar conceded. ‘But you look luckier than you would as a corpse. And the day’s not done yet. Never know what might happen.’

Lorin snorted.

‘I know what’s going to happen if we ever get out of here. I’m going to Sussadar, and then to Armadell. Then back to Sussadar. Those two cities and the road between them, between my fine ladies. That’s going to be my world.’

‘Sounds like a noble plan,’ Manadar smiled. He glanced at Brennan. ‘What about you? You need some of my tender tending?’

‘No,’ Brennan said.

He had packed some bandaging in under his jerkin, tight over the knife wound. It was not a deep cut as far as he could tell. Messy, but not dangerous. He was more interested in watching the slavers moving to and fro at the base of the hill. Close to a hundred of them in all, by his count. A few had herded a crowd of captives into the cluster of trees and were presumably guarding them there out of sight. That left at least eighty or ninety who were arraying themselves in groups on the lower slopes. Some had ridden away, rounding the hill and out of sight.

‘Seems to me they’re going to try us before night falls,’ he observed.

‘Most likely,’ Lorin agreed. ‘Don’t suppose they like fighting in the dark. That sort never do.’

‘We going to get out of the way?’ Manadar asked.

‘These people aren’t going anywhere fast or easy,’ Lorin said.

He meant the villagers they had freed. Twenty-five of them. They were sitting around the cairn, feasting on the last of the food and water Manadar had given them. All of their food, in fact. There was nothing of that left for the morrow. Enough water to quench the thirst of this number for perhaps one day.

‘And I know you don’t mean to leave them in our wake,’ Lorin continued pointedly. ‘They’re the reason we’re here. To fight for them. So that’s what we do.’

‘I know,’ Manadar nodded. ‘I’m just curious about how we’re going to do it. There being three of us and… oh, I don’t know, what do you reckon, Brennan?’

‘Ninety or thereabouts.’

‘There you are. Ninety of them.’

‘We don’t do it alone, that’s how,’ said Lorin. ‘We’ve got a lot of their coin sitting up here with us in those twenty-five bodies over there. As long as they think they’re only against the three of us, they’ll stay here and make the attempt. All we need to do is keep them here, trying to kill us, until Yulan and the rest get here.’

‘Oh,’ Manadar said. ‘Yulan’s coming, is he?’

‘He will be once you light a fire.’

‘With what?’

‘You’ve got flint and steel, haven’t you?’

‘Yes.

‘Well, then. Cut up one of the bedrolls. Fray it apart. It’ll take a flame if you get it ripped up fine enough. Then burn whatever you can. Your clothes, anything, I don’t care. If we don’t get smoke in the sky before darkness falls, we’re all dead. And we’ve won nothing, worse than nothing, if we just moved the place these people die up a bit of a hill.’

The villagers watched Manadar struggling to get a fire going for a while. Eventually, one of the women went to him and gently but insistently took the task over. Soon enough, she had a little blaze started, crackling and spitting through the wreckage of one of the bedrolls. Brennan had a feeling it was his bedroll in fact. He should have watched more closely when Manadar was making the selection.

Manadar must have told the villagers the purpose of the fire, for they began shedding any odd pieces of inessential clothing they had left to them. Headscarves and thin shawls. Ruined shoes. Strips torn from the hems of skirts. It all went into the flames. A black line of smoke, thin but strong, climbed into the dimming sky. Just in time, perhaps. A fast dusk was close upon them.

Marweh came to Lorin and Brennan.

‘We can fight,’ she said levelly.

‘You’ll have to,’ Lorin replied.

He worked his knife a little clumsily out from its sheath in his boot.

‘Here. Give that to someone. You’ve a couple of spears. The rest of you should gather rocks. Anything small enough to throw, big enough to hurt. Take the cairn apart.’

They did. Brennan watched for a time. However long it had stood there for, the cairn ended in a few minutes. The villagers roughly dismantled it, making many small piles of stones from that one larger. A dozen good archers would have been much better, but still Brennan found it an encouraging sight. A rain of stones, thrown from on high, might be enough to discourage an assault, depending on the temper of the attackers. It might even crack a few heads.

‘You spotted this tyrant of theirs yet?’ Lorin asked him quietly.

Brennan shook his head. He had been searching for any distinguishing sign that might mark out the leader of the slavers. The distance was just too great to be sure.

‘If you do, put an arrow in him, would you?’

‘Of course,’ Brennan said.

He had his bow ready by his side, and the quiver resting against a rock within easy reach. He could see men moving slowly and cautiously up the slope below them. They were rushing from boulder to boulder, just as he and Lorin had done when they first climbed this hill. They used every wrinkle in the land to conceal their approach. Soon, soon, they would be close enough for him not to worry that a shot was a wasted arrow. He had counted his shafts. Twenty-seven. Every one might have to count if things went badly.

‘You want me to stay here or cover a different approach?’ he asked Lorin.

The older man heaved himself onto his feet with a groan of pain.

‘I’ll go,’ he said. ‘Think you’ve got most of them on this side, and that’s where the archer should be.’

‘The closest thing you’ve got to an archer,’ Brennan said.

‘As you say.’

Brennan waited. He watched slavers coming closer and closer, inch by careful inch. Many of them.

He was not at all certain he was sufficient for the task fortune had allotted to him. Not strong enough, not brave enough, not skilled enough. But that task was advancing upon him anyway. His doubt would not stay it.

He reached for an arrow. He could smell the fire and the smoke behind him. It was a dense and acrid stench. Things that were not really meant for burning were going up in flames. That was good. It made for good smoke.

XII

Just before he loosed his first arrow, Brennan finally spotted what he thought might be the tyrant. Sitting on a big horse, alone, way down beside the trees. A stocky, motionless figure. Staring up towards the hilltop.

It was hard to tell but it looked as though he was wearing a helmet-the only one Brennan had noticed among any of the slavers. The horse he was astride had sheets of padding over its neck and flanks. A crude kind of armour. Something in the man’s posture, even at this distance, spoke to Brennan of arrogance. He was just out of an arrow’s reach. I’ll kill you later, Brennan thought.

He drew back the bowstring and sighted down the length of the arrow. He imagined a line, extending out from the sharp point of the arrow to the nearest of the advancing slavers. The man was bent almost double, working his way across a steep bit of slope, making for the lee of a big, split boulder.

Brennan waited. One step, another. Close enough. He let the arrow fly. It darted downhill, skimming low over the ground. Because the man was so hunched over, it hit him in the top of his shoulder. It seemed to find the notch between the bones, because it looked to go deep, punching into his upper chest. The man howled and fell.

Brennan paid him no more heed after that. He reached at once for the next arrow. Men were scattering on the slope below him, suddenly desirous of better cover now that they knew what was coming. Brennan tracked one of them-just for a few heartbeats-then let his aim drift a little ahead of the scampering figure and loosed the arrow. It darted down and smacked into his thigh.

‘Close enough to an archer,’ Brennan murmured to himself.

He could hear rocks rattling down on the other flanks of the hill. He ventured a quick glance over his shoulder. The villagers had scattered from where the cairn had once been. Many of them, even the children, were flinging stones down at attackers Brennan could not see. He could not see Lorin either, but Manadar was there, crouched low, sword at the ready. He saw Brennan looking and smiled. Then he peered down the far side of the hill, picked some unfortunate target and ran. Brennan lost sight of him.

He put an arrow in another man who, braver or more foolish than the rest, attempted a quick sprint straight up a stretch of bare ground. The arrow punched into his groin and stood there, trembling, as the man yelped and turned about. He half ran, half hopped downslope. Brennan shot him again, in the back.

After that, no one seemed inclined to test his aim. He began to feel that he and his bow could hold this small piece of ground for a long, long time. Even against dozens. There was too little shelter for anyone to get close without him having at least a chance to put a quill or two in them. But neither he, nor his bow, could be in more than one place. And sooner or later, he would run out of arrows.

Even as he noticed one or two slavers beginning to fall back, slinking away to reconsider their approach, he heard harsh, rending cries break out behind him. He spun about.

There were slavers on the summit. Driving villagers before them, snarling and cursing. Spittle flew from their lips as if they were raging dogs. Somehow, they must have got past either Lorin or Manadar, and the shower of rocks. They just did not have enough defenders to hold this hill secure, Brennan realised. The smoke from the fire was swirling about, wreathing everything in black coils.

He dropped his bow, drew his sword and ran to meet the invaders. Some of the villagers tried too. One of them lunged with a spear, but it was knocked aside and the backhanded sword stroke that followed cut halfway through his neck. Even as the man fell, limp as a child’s doll, a woman sprang onto the back of the slaver who had killed him. She clawed at his eyes and face, hooked a finger into the corner of his mouth and pulled his lips back.

Brennan saw what was going to happen and cried out in pure anger at his inability to get there fast enough. A second slaver strode up and hammered the woman across her spine with a big, heavy cudgel. She screamed, loosened her grip and began to fall. The man hit her again. Then Brennan was on him and had sunk his sword into his soft belly and was lifting him up and carrying him backwards. The slaver stared at Brennan for a moment, startled. Then his eyes rolled up into his head and he fainted. Brennan wrenched his blade free, pulling the stink of gore and gut loose with it.

He could feel himself faltering. The knife wound in his flank felt fresh. Wet. It was bleeding anew, he could tell.

He turned in time to meet the first slaver. Their swords clanged against one another. As they pushed back and forth, Brennan could see other fell men among the villagers. They were seizing men and women by hair or arm, sweeping up children. He was filled with an almost blinding rage that all should have come apart so quickly. It gave him the strength to set his opponent staggering. He dipped his shoulder and drove it into the man’s midriff, just below the centre of his ribcage. That splayed him out on the ground. Brennan stamped on the man’s outstretched sword arm, dropped onto one knee and plunged his sword straight down into the man’s chest.

As he got to his feet, someone barged into him and he was sent staggering. The churning smoke burned at his eyes and he was left blinking and gasping. A spear jabbed out of the smoke and went into the meat of his leg, halfway between knee and thigh. Screaming, more from anger than pain, he broke its shaft with his sword and slashed through the smoke before him. Whoever had pierced him was gone though.

He clamped his fingers to his thigh. There was not too much blood yet. He grasped the stump of broken spear and pulled it from his leg. He hissed at the agony of that, far worse than anything he had felt before. But it was brief, flaring in his flesh then dulling away.

Limping, he tried to get clear of the smoke so that he could see what was happening. He found a pair of slavers, retreating from the hilltop. One dragged a man, bleeding from his mouth, after him. The other had a child, a boy, under his arm like a sack of grain. The boy was struggling, but weakly. It was Marweh’s son, Brennan thought, though his stinging eyes made it hard to be sure.

He went after them, battling his failing leg as much as the smoke and sloping ground. Another reached them first. Manadar rose from concealment. He had lost his sword somewhere, somehow, but had a slaver’s spear. He tripped the man carrying the child with its butt. The two of them fell heavily, the boy rolling away from his captor, crying in fear.

Manadar spun the spear in his hands as he rushed in. He planted its point in the slaver’s neck and swung his whole weight on it, vaulting over the pinned, screaming man. He launched his feet at the second slaver. The spear snapped, midway down its length, but Manadar was already striking his target. He hit the slaver in the chest with both his heels, knocked him sideways. Of the two of them, Manadar landed better. He sprang up and leaped forward in a single lithe movement.

Somehow, in the midst of that leap, Manadar conjured two of his throwing knives into his hands. He hit the slaver with them. Rammed them both into his upper chest on either side of his breastbone.

Brennan reached the adult villager with the split lip first. The man was bewildered, confused.

‘Get back up to the top,’ Brennan hissed.

He rushed to the boy, who was still on the ground. Still wailing. Brennan knelt beside him. It was not Marweh’s son. A year or two older.

‘It’s not him,’ Brennan said.

‘Not who?’

Manadar was coming towards him, smiling. A knife, bloody now, still in each hand.

‘I thought it was Marweh’s son,’ Brennan said.

‘Does it matter? He’s someone’s son.’

Brennan was going to say, ‘Of course. Of course it doesn’t matter,’ but the words never left his mouth.

A slaver came flying down the hillside. Fleeing. He came so suddenly and without warning that Brennan did not even have the time to turn what he was going to say into what he needed to say: ‘Look out.’

Manadar saw something in Brennan’s eyes. He began to turn. The slaver swept past, behind him, like a dark fleeting thought. As he went, he swung a studded mace in a wild arc. For no good reason since his fight was done. He was free of it, taking wing.

The mace crunched into the side of Manadar’s face. His head rocked on his shoulders. His legs crumpled. Brennan surged to his feet, trying to catch Manadar as he fell. The slaver was already gone, bounding away down the steep slope. Manadar slipped through Brennan’s hands and slumped down.

His face was a half-ruin. All buckled bone and ruptured flesh. He was dead. Dead in the instant the blow landed.

Brennan bowed his head. There was a passing sickness in him. In his chest and throat. The boy was whimpering behind him, and that drew him back. He carried the child up to the summit. The hole in his side, and the one in his leg, pounded and burned. He barely noticed.

XIII

There were four slavers dead on the hilltop, more on the slopes below. Three villagers. A woman and two children knelt beside one of the corpses, weeping. Holding one another.

The fire was ebbing. The heart of it still glowed in the deepening twilight, but it was giving out little smoke now. What it had given before would have to be enough. Or not.

Two of the horses were gone. Brennan was not surprised at that. If anything, he was surprised that one-Lorin’s-had stood firm amid the tumult and confusion and smoke. The other two might have simply bolted or been seized by slavers. There was no way to know.

Lorin himself lay against the stump of the cairn. It was nothing now but a tiny heap of loose stones. An uncomfortable bed. He had taken another wound, somewhere amid the chaos. One that exceeded those he had gathered before. Blood was oozing thick from a puncture wound in his side, high up under his armpit. Marweh was beside him, trying to soak away the blood with the sleeve of her shirt.

‘Killed three,’ Lorin said quietly as Brennan drew near. ‘How many did you get?’

‘Never mind cleaning,’ Brennan told Marweh wearily. ‘Stop up that wound. Plug it.’

She ripped her sleeve off and did what she could.

‘Manadar’s dead,’ Brennan said.

‘Oh.’ Lorin sounded weak. Distant. ‘Bastards.’

‘Bastards,’ agreed Brennan.

‘Will they come back?’ Marweh asked.

She was pressing and pushing hard as she tried to stem the flow of blood. Lorin was not responding-feeling no pain, it seemed-which Brennan thought was probably a bad sign.

‘In a while maybe,’ Lorin said. ‘Once they’ve licked their wounds. Convinced themselves it was just bad luck that we piled up their dead the first time around.’

‘Or they might turn tail,’ Brennan said.

He sat down heavily. He too was bleeding more than he would have liked. He could feel exhaustion creeping through him, claiming him bit by bit.

‘They might,’ Lorin murmured. It did not sound as if he believed it any more than Brennan did. ‘Is it getting dark?’

Brennan looked up. He could see stars, faintly. The plains, far out, were sinking into night. He wondered what Lorin’s eyes were seeing, if he could not tell how far the day had gone.

‘It is.’

‘That’s good. They might not want to be scrambling about up here in the dark.’

‘We’ll find out, I suppose.’

Brennan wanted very much to close his eyes. But he did not.

The hours of darkness crept by at an agonisingly slow pace. Brennan circled the crest of the hill like a restless cat. Not as nimble as a cat though.

Once she had finished with Lorin, Marweh had bound his wounds as best she could. There was heavy strapping around his leg and his stomach. Tight. It helped, but he would have struggled to keep moving if she had not gone with him. She held him up; her and his own stubborn refusal to yield.

‘Will he die?’ she asked him softly, somewhere around the deepest of the night.

‘Lorin? No. He’s strong as a bear.’

He did not know if that was true. Admitting as much to Marweh would be admitting it to himself, so he did not.

‘None of us will go back into bonds,’ she said. ‘We’ve all said that. We’d sooner die here on this hill.’

‘Good for you.’

Brennan was light-headed, feeling detached from the world like a boat that had slipped its moorings. That was not why he could not bring himself to share in Marweh’s strength, or lend her any of his own though. Not the whole reason anyway. There was still some part of him that felt this must all have come to pass, in the way it had, because of her. The chain of events which had brought Manadar to his high dying ground. Brought Lorin to a stony bed under the stars, with his life-perhaps-leaking away. Would any of it have happened if Marweh had not bargained for the lives of her family with the slavers’ tyrant?

He did not know. And he could not bring himself to care too much. The world, this night, was as it was. The path it had followed to get here probably did not matter greatly. In a way, Brennan felt that the path he had followed himself did not matter. He was here, atop a hill in the Empire of Orphans, with a hundred cruel men surrounding him. Two dozen or so more innocent folk at his side. A dead friend. He was here, instead of riding the sea with his childhood friends in some rickety fishing scow. That was all there was to say, or think, of it.

Except that his own personal tyrant of doubt was still there, writhing like a worm beneath his thoughts. If Yulan or Hamdan-any of the truly great warriors of the Free-were here instead of him, Marweh and the rest would have been in better hands. The candle of their lives would have a longer wick. Manadar would most likely still be alive.

Somewhere out in the darkness, someone was moaning. Whimpering like a maimed hound. One of the slavers, no doubt. Broken in the attack; abandoned by his fellows. There were villagers scattered around the heights, told by Brennan to listen for the slightest hint of movement on the slopes. So far, they had heard none. There was nothing to hear, save that unseen moaning man.

Further out, further down, there were torches moving about. Little points of yellowish flame. Fools, Brennan thought. Greedy fools. If they had any sense, they would be on the move. But they wanted their human goods back. Or perhaps just the tyrant did, and there was no one brave enough to tell him it was time to make for the deep Empire.

Lorin was right, of course. There were not many peoples in the world eager to travel, let alone fight, in the darkness. The Free did it. They trained for it as they trained for everything else. For others, the night could conceal too many unpleasant surprises. Their fear made them wait for light. Perhaps that was all that held the slavers here still. Fear of what might await them in the blackness. Perhaps they would depart in the dawn’s first breaking.

Brennan doubted that. He suspected that at dawn he was going to die on this bare summit. They all were. So be it. A lot of slavers were going to die too, if it came to that.

‘Can you move?’ he asked Lorin later, kneeling beside his friend.

Lorin had been sleeping. That had worried Brennan, who thought he might never wake. But those old eyes had flickered open.

‘I can probably stand up when the time comes. Swing a sword if I have to, if that’s what you mean. Don’t think I’ll be leaving this hilltop though.’

Brennan made to protest. To deny that undeniable truth. But it would be pointless. Childish, even.

‘I’d rather have died in either of your places,’ he said instead. ‘You or Manadar.’

‘Well, it’s too late to die for me, son,’ Lorin rasped. ‘You could die for the name of the Free if you want, but you want my advice? Die for them.’

Lorin extended a trembling finger towards the men and women and children huddled together in the darkness.

‘Everyone else chose to be here. Not them. Die for them if you must.’ He coughed. Tiny bubbles of blood marked his lips. ‘If we three hadn’t come here, they’d be gone by now most likely. Carried off into the deep Empire. Slaves of the Orphans. They’d be wishing, begging, for the chance to die free on a barren hilltop in the middle of nowhere. We gave them that much. If you can give them any more, whether it’s by living or dying, you’ll have done well.’

‘Is it enough, you think?’ Brennan wondered.

‘Oh, never ask if it’s enough,’ Lorin grunted. ‘It is what it is. It’s what’s possible.’

XIV

They did come at dawn. As soon as the dome of the sky above began to lighten, Brennan could see figures moving about at the base of the hill. They were not spreading out this time. Their tyrant had a new plan, and it looked to mean that thirty or forty of his feral warriors were coming straight up one flank of the hill. The blunt force of that blow would sweep the summit clean, Brennan knew.

He knelt with his bow and laid arrows flat on the ground beside him. Neatly arrayed so that they would not foul or hamper one another as he picked them up, one after another.

Marweh and a handful of others were with him. They had a few rocks to throw. Not many. One or two had spears or knives. None of them looked happy about what was happening, but nor were any crippled by fear.

Brennan saw a new kind of bravery in these commonfolk who stood alongside him. He had thought that lone Orphanidon brave for riding into the camp of those who were not his friends. He had thought, of course, every man and woman of the Free brave just for leading the lives they led. But this was different. More. This was the bravery of those cruelly undone by circumstance and ill fortune; trapped and doomed.

That made him smile as he watched those ranks of men begin their careful ascent towards him. He had always thought he would die for those who fought alongside him. He had meant the Free but he was content enough for it to be these villagers. These people so like those who would have been his family and friends, had he never left them.

And perhaps he never should have left them. Perhaps he had only ever been fit for casting and raising nets, scaling and gutting fish. And now, today, perhaps he and everyone else atop this bleak mount was going to learn the truth of that.

He glanced back over his shoulder. Lorin was getting unsteadily to his feet, leaning heavily on a couple of the children, who were trying their best to help him.

‘They’re coming,’ Brennan called.

Lorin only nodded.

The slavers had learned from the day before. They were expecting arrows. It made them careful, made them work even harder to find approaches that offered some concealment or cover. Even in the grey light, though, the hill was not generous in that regard. Brennan found his targets, and took his shots.

One, two, three. The arrows whispered through the morning, thudded into their warm new homes. Marweh threw a couple of stones, her arm strengthened by sheer anger. As far as Brennan could tell, they hit no one. But they sowed a little more caution, a little more unease among the attackers.

The slavers spread out, stretching their lines further and further until they encompassed perhaps a third of the hill. And they kept climbing. Brennan could hear someone shouting-screaming almost-furious orders. Or it could have been simple abuse; he did not understand the words. The tyrant, he guessed, and he searched eagerly for what would have been a worthy target.

Once or twice, he thought he glimpsed that shining helm. The tyrant, if it was truly him, was keeping himself well to the rear. He clung to the shelter of boulders. Cowardice and cruelty often went hand in hand to Brennan’s way of thinking. He loosed a couple of arrows in the tyrant’s direction but they rattled harmlessly off stone.

‘Move round that way,’ he murmured to some of the villagers beside him. ‘Do what you can.’

They went without protest. A spear, a knife, a handful of rocks. Bare feet. Arms and legs enfeebled by thirst and hunger. What they could do would be little enough.

That was when Brennan set down his bow. This was going to be a slaughter. It was a tale with only one ending, unless he changed its course somehow. So he would try that. If he was going to surrender his life, he was going to do it trying to kill the tyrant. He could, if nothing else, draw as many of the slavers to him as possible. He could keep them from the summit for a little longer. Perhaps someone might escape.

‘Have you still got that knife Lorin gave you?’ he asked Marweh quietly.

She did. It was tucked into her belt. She gave it to him without protest, though she wore a slightly puzzled expression. He took it in his left hand, his sword in his right. He did not look at her. He was staring down, searching for the tyrant.

‘I know you don’t want to,’ he said, ‘and I know you have no food or water. I know it’s no kind of answer. But you should all perhaps make for the plains. Scatter. Me and Lorin, we’ll be staying here.’

‘They’d hunt us all down in an hour,’ Marweh said fiercely. ‘And any they missed, the sun’d kill in a day.’

‘I know,’ nodded Brennan. ‘I just thought you might want to consider it.’

And he lurched to his feet, more than a little stiff and unsteady because of his wounds, and ran.

He had last seen the tyrant perhaps two hundred paces down below. Near some stunted bushes. That was as good a place as any to head for, so he did. The rock was hard beneath his feet. He could feel the first real suggestion of the day’s heat on his face. For a moment or two, he felt good.

An arrow whispered past his ear. Another rang off stone. A third hit him, in his left shoulder. It twisted him about slightly and he almost fell. He was barely in control in any case. He was falling as much as running.

Slavers came to meet him, but they had not been ready for this. They had not foreseen this kind of madness. Brennan laughed. He battered one man aside with nothing more than weight and speed. Another barred his path with a crude wicker shield.

His body was making Brennan’s choices for him now. He simply watched. Let it carry him. His lead foot went up and he sprang into the air. Hit the top of that flimsy shield, smashing it back into the face of its wielder. He ran over the man, slashing down with his sword as he went. The blade hit something, but he did not see what.

His injured leg was far too weakened for such acrobatics, and he landed badly. He tumbled, scraping his forehead and hand on rough stone. The impact jarred the wound in his side. The arrow in his shoulder snapped. He gave a short, sharp cry of pain. Just one.

He staggered to his feet. Kept moving. Down, always down. He saw the flash of the early sun on metal. Might be the tyrant’s helmet.

Come on, he imagined himself shouting. Come to me. Bring your blades, bring your bodies.

There was a kind of mad delight in him.

They were coming to him, as his madness desired. Many of them. And mad delight could only carry him so far.

He parried a spear thrust with the flat of his sword. Lunged in behind it with the knife, turning it as it went into the slaver’s stomach. There was a glancing blow on his back. He spun, squatting and swinging low in the hope of catching a leg. He did. The blade hacked into a slaver’s knee and cut him down.

Brennan wheeled and staggered on. He was getting dizzy. Sweat or blood was on his face. He could hear running feet, converging on him.

Come to the lion, all you hounds, he thought. I’ll die with my teeth on your neck.

He caught a sword stroke on the hand-guard of his knife. Broke his attacker’s forearm with his own sword. His left arm had been numbed by the blow though, and his knife fell from his fingers. Someone tackled him, enfolding his hips in strong arms and lifting him bodily from the ground. Throwing him down.

Brennan kicked free and rolled. A spear sparked off the stone where he had been lying. He managed to get onto one knee and somehow caught the shaft of the spear with his left hand when it came in for a second thrust. He pulled at it and stretched out his sword for the slaver to meet its point with his belly.

As the man fell, Brennan could see half a dozen more coming up behind him. Axe and mace, sword and spear. All coming for him. He was of the Free, here at the end, he thought. But even for a man of the Free, there was a limit to what wonders could be performed.

Then Lorin came on his horse. Charging wildly downhill. Scattering and trampling slavers. Flailing about almost blindly with his sword. Men fell. Lorin swayed in his saddle. Someone must have strapped him in there, Brennan thought.

He tried to rise, to follow after Lorin as man and horse went plunging on madly down the hill, but his legs were barely his own to command any more. He slumped sideways, leaning on a boulder.

Lorin brushed aside an axeman. He cut down a fleeing archer. Then his great, frightful horse put a hoof in a crevice and broke its leg and fell.

It twisted, crashing down on its side with Lorin’s leg beneath it. It rolled onto its back, crushing him. So hard and fast had been its charge that it slid like that, grinding Lorin beneath it, for another few yards. When it came to a halt, the animal screamed and writhed, trying desperately to rise. Lorin was not moving.

Brennan staggered over to them. He plunged his sword into the horse’s neck, setting his full weight onto the pommel to drive it home. The animal died.

Brennan looked at Lorin. He was dead too of course. Brennan sat with his back to the great horse’s flank. He could barely breathe. His chest heaved, and the air it hauled in and out was not enough.

And that, inevitably, was when the tyrant finally came to him. As he fought for breath, and his blood wetted the stone beneath him, and his body started to tremble, that was when the tyrant came. Brennan saw him advancing up the bare rock slope, a grimace that was half-grin, half-snarl on his face.

Cowardly as a vulture, Brennan thought. Come to pick at the broken carcass, now that others have done the hard breaking. The tyrant’s helmet shone, flicking shards of the morning sun this way and that. He held an old sword. Now that he was drawing near, Brennan could see that he had some kind of battered, dulled jerkin of chain over his breast. And pale, pale skin, like a drowned corpse.

Brennan had to lever himself up with his sword to regain his feet. It hurt a great deal. It was worth it for the passing shadow of surprise and hesitation that crossed the tyrant’s face. The man kept coming though. Brennan could guess what he saw before him: a bloodied, feeble victim. Closer to death than life. Easy.

Brennan took a couple of steps away from Lorin and his dead horse. Instinctively giving himself room to move, and to swing. Not that he had the strength to do much of either.

The slavers’ tyrant was muttering in a language Brennan did not understand. Cursing him perhaps, or promising him a painful death. Even had he understood, Brennan had nothing to say in reply.

He was not certain how long he could keep on his feet, so he went forward. No point in waiting. His sword felt heavier than it ever had before. He swung it though. He fought.

The tyrant was no trained warrior, no swordsman of skill or guile. But he was uninjured and angry, perhaps even desperate to recover some of the pride and authority that must have seeped away with the blood of his men on these barren slopes. Whatever the reason, he seemed to Brennan terribly strong, terribly fierce.

Every meeting of blades sent tremors through Brennan’s arm. Every step he took to avoid a thrust or swing felt unsteady. One of those thrusts caught him, slow-footed, and laid a cut across his upper arm but it was such a small wound among so many greater he had already taken that he barely noticed. And the tyrant paid for it. Brennan slashed under the slaver’s outstretched arm and landed a blow across his flank, his sword ringing on that vest of mail. There was not enough weight behind the stroke to do more than bruise and startle the tyrant, but it rocked him. It bought Brennan a few more heartbeats.

He felt light, as if his body or something within it was trying to rise away into the blue sky. There was a softness to his vision that took the hard edges off everything. He wondered, in a very detached way, whether this was what it felt like when life slowly loosed its hold upon a man.

The tyrant was shouting, his face contorted by anger. He rushed at Brennan, sword upraised. Brennan noticed absurdly that the man’s helmet had slipped just a little, slumping to an almost comical angle on his head. It made him want to smile.

He raised his sword to block the falling blade, and could do no more than turn it aside. He felt a glancing blow on his shoulder.

Enough, he thought. It was in the nature of the Free to find another way when things went awry. And never, ever to die easy. So be it.

He ducked his head and tackled the tyrant about the chest, trying to pin his arms to his flanks. The man was short and solidly built, but Brennan had the advantage of slightly higher ground, and of the reckless certainty that his cause was lost in any case. He bore the tyrant over backwards.

They landed heavily, locked together. Brennan’s sword sprang out of his blood-slicked grip. His hands, beneath the tyrant’s weight, rasped across the rough rock. For some reason that pain cut through where others had not, and he cried out as they rolled.

In that rolling they were somehow parted. Brennan came to rest face down, feeling warm stone against his cheek. He twisted his head. The sun’s glare all but blinded him. That and the wet smear of blood or sweat that he could feel spreading from his brow. Through it all he dimly saw a figure rising: the tyrant perhaps, though he could not be sure. He rolled onto his side, trying to get to his feet. There was nothing left though. No last store of strength to call upon.

Then the figure was gone. Or he could not see it any more at least. Brennan crawled-dragged himself, really-to a great boulder and managed to raise himself up on its face just enough that he could set his back to it. All the while, he expected the last blow to come.

He sat there, panting, and waited for it. He would have liked to do more, but he did not think he could. He did not think he could rise again.

XV

Brennan heard shouting and running feet. The tyrant’s lackeys coming to finish the job, he assumed. His end drawing near. It was not. Something strange was happening. He blinked. That did not clear his eyes as he hoped. He had to wipe blood away with the back of his hand.

There were arrows flying again. Down among the trees, some kind of battle was happening. He saw a handful of mounted men ranging through the little copse, spilling beyond it. Cutting down fleeing figures. Slavers.

Confused, his mind unable to take hold of the world, Brennan looked around. Some of the tyrant’s men were running past him. Arrows were chasing them, arrows flickering down from the heights. He saw the tyrant himself mounting a horse, down on the very lowest slopes. Riding away.

‘Can you get up?’

Brennan glanced round. Hamdan was standing there, holding out a hand.

Wordlessly, Brennan took it and heaved himself unsteadily to his feet. He left blood all over Hamdan’s palm. The archer regarded it impassively.

‘You’ve been busy,’ he said.

‘You came,’ Brennan murmured. His voice sounded faint even to his own ears.

‘We did. Later than we would have liked. I’m sorry.’

Hamdan looked out into the waste. Nodded his head that way.

‘They came too.’

A line of reflected light out on the plain. Dust rising behind it. A hundred glinting chest-plates and shields and helmets of polished metal. A hundred giant horses clad in the gleam of the rising sun. Orphanidons.

‘We can’t press the fight as we’d wish,’ Hamdan said ruefully. ‘Not with such a fierce kind of audience.’

Brennan breathed out. A great gust of released tension.

‘Another few heartbeats and one particular beast is going to be out of your range, I’d say,’ the archer said, squinting after the retiring slavers. At the tyrant who rode near the rear of the company.

‘Would you like my bow?’ Hamdan asked.

Brennan took the bow. Hamdan gave him an arrow. Uncertain, Brennan set it to the string.

‘Should we not…?’ he began, conscious of the bright wall of Orphanidons advancing slowly and steadily upon them.

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ smiled Hamdan. ‘There’s time to do the world this one small favour. I’d do it myself, but I thought you might want the privilege.’

‘You’re less likely to miss,’ Brennan murmured, raising the bow and drawing back the string. His body felt wholly unequal to the task.

‘Well, I’ll do it if you shoot wide. He’s at the edge of your range, not yet at the edge of mine. But I don’t think you’ll shoot wide, will you?’

Brennan said nothing. He eased the point of the arrow a little higher against the blue sky. His wounds protested furiously. He shut them out of his mind. Forgot them for just those few moments. They could have him when he was done with this.

‘Breathe steady,’ Hamdan said quietly. ‘Feel the breeze.’

Brennan did both. He loosed his grip on the bowstring. It snapped forward and the arrow sprang up and away. Brennan saw it spinning as it climbed, then it was just a long fleck against the blue. And it was turning down and falling. Seeking a home.

‘Very good,’ said Hamdan, already turning away.

Brennan watched as that frail fleck of wood fell and fell and found the home it sought. The slavers’ tyrant twisted a little in his saddle. His horse drifted sideways as he slumped.

They had saved forty-six of those who would have been slaves in the end. They had slain more slavers than that. Brennan still did not know if it was enough. But it was what had been possible.

There were no horses for the slaves, save a few Rudran and his lancers had taken from men they killed. Children rode on those, and the weakest and sickest of the adults, Marweh’s husband among them. The rest walked.

The Free-the eighteen of them who lived-rode behind the weary, ragged company of villagers. Between them and the two hundred or so Orphanidons who were shadowing them on their journey out of the Empire. Always just on the edge of sight. Always there, their steel catching the sun, their horses raising pillars of dusty earth. Always watching.

Brennan did not care. It was over. He watched Marweh and her son as he rode. They walked at the front of the group of village folk, hand in hand. His head dropped now and again as his exhaustion tried to claim him. He would start awake. Remember himself after a moment’s confusion. His many wounds were bound and salved, his thirst and hunger quenched. Wren, who had done the binding, had told him he would not die. But the weakness remained. And the pain.

Yulan came to ride beside him for a time.

‘You did well, you three,’ the Captain of the Free told him. ‘All these people’d be lost to us, and to themselves, if you’d not done what you did.’

‘They did well, Lorin and Manadar. They died well.’

‘Their shares will go to those they named,’ Yulan said. ‘Just as they wanted it.’

‘Lorin had two wives,’ Brennan murmured numbly.

‘He did. Kallina in Sussadar and Janeth Lena in Armadell-on-Lake. One half of his share to each. Manadar left his to a mother and a father and two brothers in Harvekka. And one tenth part to a serving woman in an inn near Armadell. Who is about to become richer than the inn’s owner, at a guess.’

Brennan glanced at Yulan. It had never occurred to him that the man would know so much of just two among the many scores who followed him. But seeing him now, seeing the sorrow etched into his handsome features, he understood a little more of what it meant to lead the Free. What it took.

‘You could be among the men who carry the word and the coin to those who don’t yet know they’re awaiting it, if you want,’ Yulan said.

Brennan nodded.

‘Yes, please.’

They rode along in silence for a while. Both of them watched the horizon far ahead. Safety, and home, should appear there before too much longer.

‘And you?’ Yulan asked. ‘Will you come back afterwards, or do we need to portion out your share too?’

‘I don’t know,’ Brennan said without thinking. It was honest. He had not known how honest until he said it.

‘You will know, in time,’ Yulan told him.

‘Maybe tomorrow will mend it,’ Brennan said softly. An unbidden thought he had meant to leave unspoken, that somehow would not stay that way.

The Massatan looked at him, a fleeting puzzlement on his face. Then smiled sadly.

‘Maybe it will, Brennan. It does sometimes.’

Yulan closed his eyes.

‘Some tomorrows are a long time coming,’ he said. ‘For now, tell me how they died. I’ll want to remember that.’

Brennan did. And so, as they rode together, he shared some small part of his burden with the Captain of the Free.

Content

Brian Ruckley
Tyrant

I

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VIII

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XV