Chapter 4


The walk up the riverbed was sheerest hell. The depth of the stream was irregular, as was the strength of its current. Beronal insisted that they not leave the water at all, and while Cassia could appreciate the reasoning behind that, it was a far from easy instruction to follow. She could see the riverbank next to her, glowing faintly in the moonlight. To walk on a floor she could see, which wasn't pushing against her, trying to break her ankles and pull her under, and which wasn't so bleeding cold – it was an incredible temptation. It was only the lingering stink of karas that reminded her that to leave the water was to risk their entire escape.

They didn't cover the entire twelve miles worth of river during the night. The dawn came while they were still slogging. It had been a full moon, and a high moon, which had illuminated things at night, but Cassia had expect that once the sun came up, they'd be able to see the bottom of the river, and pick up their pace. No such luck. Wolf River was a muddy red, as opaque by sunlight as it had been at night.

Still, dawn did help a little. In the moonlight, obstacles loomed larger than they were, or were hidden by the shadows. Cassia could not count the times she had lost her footing due to not seeing where she was going. With the light of dawn, it was easier to see logs or similar obstructions, and to avoid them. When the sun finally broke the horizon, Beronal paused for a few minutes, looking through his pack. Cassia came up next to him, willing to take whatever break she could.

He found a piece of dried beef, started gnawing on it. "It'll be a few hours before they find what wreckage there is of the cart, or at least signs that something went off the bridge over Wolfmouth." He looked around. They had just about left the coastal range. Instead of walking through a canyon, they were in a river that was passing through hills. The Wolfmouth canyon cut straight through the coastal range; Cassia hadn't realized that.

They weren't in the forests of the central plain proper, at least not yet. There were patches of tree on open plain, or unwooded hills. "If they've got a hawk or two, and a wizard to ride them, we'll be having trouble soon enough," she said.

"We're not that far from the road," replied Beronal. "We should push on."

Cassia groaned at that, but push on they did. Soon the dark branches of Riend's forests were overhead, and they relaxed a little. Sunlight still danced off the Wolf River, but the edges were in the shade, so as long as they didn't go too far from the river bank, it would be difficult to spot them from overhead. Loggers had worked these forests for some time, but they hadn't made much of a dent. Here and there rough piles of stone that had once been fences marked where the edges of fields had been during Aurian days, but massive oaks and maples grew in those fields, rather than waving corn.

Most of Riend had been given back to the forests with the fall of Auria, and while men were once again pushing up in the interior, it would be a long time before they reached the numbers there had been during Aurian days, if they ever reached those numbers again. The wars that had ended the Aurian Empire had given the world a lesson as to what combat spells could do to armies, to civilian populations.

Birds sang out warnings as Beronal and Cassia headed upstream. The water was shallow, and it felt a good deal warmer. It was also a good deal clearer. Most of the cold, fast, dirty water had come from the streams in the coastal range. From time to time, they startled deer who had been drinking at the edge of the river. They bounded up and away into the woods, with a crashing explosion of noise and sound.

When they reached an eddy in the stream, Beronal pushed off into the middle of the stream, testing the depth of the water. "This will serve," he said.

"Serve what," asked Cassia.

As an answer, he pulled the soap that he had used for shaving from his backpack. He broke it, tossed half of it to Cassia. "We'll be leaving the water soon, and we've spent a bit too long in the presence of karas to avoid leaving a scent trail. We don't want to leave a scent trail."

"I would think that our clothing would be just as much a problem."

Beronal nodded. "Right. The second set in the packs should be a bit safer, but we're going to have to wash those as well. Not that smell hounds won't pick up a trace of karas on the trail. But it's not something that will jump out from a mile away. And that's what we need. Even given the amount of attention they've been giving to tracking you down, the amount of time it'll take before they pick up the trail again will either mean that the dogs don't get the trail at all, or have problems keeping on it."

Cassia couldn't exactly argue with his reasoning. "After you," she said, and headed behind a rock a bit upstream to wait for her turn at the pool. At this point, she wasn't particularly interested in letting Beronal control the situation.

After a long while, Beronal came up behind her. The redthorn stain had long faded, and he had already grown a layer of stubble on his head and face. "Your turn," he said, and she went back to the pool to bathe.

Beronal hadn't come back to watch her bathe, which was nice of him. "Don't leave anything here," said Beronal, as she was getting undressed.

"Thanks. I had been planning on leaving my clothing strewn about the trees in a festive manner."

There was no response, so she stuffed what she had been wearing into her pack, and got to work. Cassia had never spent as much time on her personal appearance as society women were expected to, and this wasn't an exception. The water where she was bathing was warmer than the river had been downstream, but it wasn't warm, and she was cold, and she was going to have to wash the second set of clothing before she could get dressed.

After she had bathed and changed, it was more walking upstream. Not much more walking upstream, though. When the Aurian roads were in good repair, there had been a stone bridge where it crossed Wolf River. That bridge was long gone, washed away in some spring flooding. The road was still clearly visible, and though some of the paving stones had been squeezed out of their place by thirsty tree roots, it was still recognizable as a road.

"Three hours down the road, and then we head off into the wilderness," said Beronal.

"Do we have to worry much about traffic?"

"No. Ventrium isn't a popular destination these days, and most foresters and trappers tend to stick closer to established camps."

"Ventrium...."

"The Aurian capital of Riend", said Beronal, misinterpreting her silence. "Currently the green man capital of Riend."

"I know what Ventrium is," said Cassia. Beronal didn't appear to hear her.

"We came up on its walls during the war," he said. "The biggest damn goblins that I've ever seen. They were using the walls, too. Throwing things off the tops, dodging in and out of gaps. Hell of a fight. Good thing that the generals weren't ambitious enough to try and take Ventrium, or they'd have killed us all."

So he was a veteran. Not particularly surprising, giving the way he worked with the sword. It also explained his degree of familiarity with the geography of Riend.

"As I said, I know what Ventrium is," she said. "But to me, the interesting thing about it, is that it's currently full of green men, or goblins, if you prefer. While human traffic might not be a concern, I'm not certain that green man traffic will be much friendlier."

"Third year," said Beronal.

"Beg pardon?"

"It's the third year of the ten year cycle, since the war. And I'm not even sure if there were enough goblins left after the last war that they'll be getting aggressive at the end of the next ten cycle."

Cassia grunted, unconvinced. "Whatever the rate of the green man population expansion, if they happen to be hunting in this area, they'll use the road, because it's a convenient way to get through the forest. And if they happen to spot us in on the road, they'll kill us."

"No, they won't. Goblins aren't people. They don't hold grudges like that. If there's enough space for them to avoid people, they'll do that. And the last goblin war gave them a whole hell of a lot of space. They see us, they fade away. Even if there are a dozen of them, and there's only two of us."

Cassia paused. "I'm guessing that you weren't an officer," she said, "just judging by the way you fight, and the fact that you were working in the fighting pits, rather than in the Duke's service."

"Conscript, second from platoon leader," he said, undisturbed by her apparent change of subject.

"For a conscript, second from platoon leader, you seem to have made somewhat more of a study of the green men than I would have expected."

"More than the officers did, if that's what you mean. A pity I lost my sketches; I had been considering writing a book."

Cassia shook her head. "Who the hell are you, anyway?"

"I am Beronal Mantar, son of Telmak Mantar, of the Mantars of Oren," he replied. She couldn't tell if he was irritated at her question, or if he thought that a perfecly reasonable response.

"A Dexan of some sort?" she asked.

"I spent some time working with Dexan prisoners after the sack of Cair Ternis, during the Five Nations War."

"A veteran of more than the green man wars, obviously. And with literary ambitions?"

"The goblins were interesting enough to attract my attention."

"So why were you working in the fighting pits?"

"Eight silver pennies for a win – that's good money. Speaking of which, you owe me another hundred and twenty."

Cassia sighed and counted it out. Three more days was what she could afford.

"There's better money to be made in Caniphor than eight silver if you win a fight."

"Perhaps. But there isn't a good deal of easier money."

"Sure there is, you could-"

Beronal cut in. "It all depends on your definition of easy. Look, we'll talk about this a bit later. We're leaving the road soon, and I don't want to mistake the landmarks."

Cassia looked around. They were passing through a stand of hemlock; there were trees, there was a road. She didn't see much else in the way of landmarks. And though it wasn't like she had much experience finding her way around in forests, Beronal didn't seem to be the sort of person who needed to focus his full attention on a task like that. She had the distinct impression that he was avoiding her questions. Which was a bit impolite, but her money was running out; she didn't really want to insist on her rights as his employer at this point.

They left the Aurian road where it was crossed by a trickle of water – what might have been a stream in the spring, but which would soon be gone. The stream slipped through substantial patches of underbrush, and they tried to do the same. Cassia was a good deal better at slipping past things than Beronal was. It was partly a question of size, and partly a question of agility. While Beronal was far from stiff and inflexible for his size, he was no match for Cassia.

She felt quite a sense of accomplishment when they left the streambed, and compared the extent to which the bushes and low hanging trees had scratched Beronal and herself. Beronal had stretched himself out on a grassy bit of riverbank, and she sat down next to him. "This where we're camping?" she asked.

"For a meal, maybe a few minutes rest," he replied. Then, with a groan, he sat up and started unlacing his boots.

"A few minutes?"

"Perhaps more than a few minutes."

Taking her boots off seemed like a good idea, so she followed his example. The boots that the Dexans had packed for them were of good quality, but after the walk they had taken in them, they were beyond soggy.

The food that had been packed for them had gotten dunked with the rest of their packs when they had gone over the cliff, but the packs hadn't remained submerged, and the sort of food that was packed was robust enough to handle a little dunking.

They sat and ate smoked beef, and small rock-hard mealcakes. "Were those corpses a delaying tactic, or what?" asked Cassia.

"I think that they'll be enough to make them think that we went over the edge."

"So the Dexans won't be telling the Duke's men that they gave us those bodies?"

"I do not believe that they will. I've asked them not to spill that particular bit of information. Their going to be forced by circumstances to admit that we were there, and that we left in a karas cart. But I don't think they'll give away more than they have to."

"But surely the Duke's wizards will be able to get a better description of us than those people will match, and when they get their hands on the corpses, the bodies will tell them more then enough to know that they aren't us."

"If they ever got their hands on those corpses, I'm sure that would be true. But the waters around Riend are good fishing waters."

"And...."

"And the fish will eat those bodies quickly enough. Anything they don't eat is going to be washed out into deeper waters. But I'd expect it to get eaten fairly quickly."

Cassia considered. "I've seen enough people dropped in Caniphor bay come up a few days later, mostly intact."

Beronal nodded, took a healthy bite out of his mealcakes. "True enough. But the outflow from Wolf River should take the bodies out to where the deeper water currents will get ahold of them. And even if I'm wrong about that, when those corpses come up in Caniphor bay, you'll not see the mages getting much of a read out of them; water breaks up the magic."

"If you think that the corpses are going to get eaten, why did you bother with them in first place?" asked Cassia.

"Ah. I'm a thorough person. If they put a net down around the Wolf River outflow, they might pick up a bone or two, or more likely, one of the fish that saw the bodies hitting. And fish aren't going to be giving a particularly detailed description, no matter how good the wizard picking their brains is."

"Makes sense. And why were they wearing our clothing?"

"Clothing's been known to hold simple memories. If they get scraps of clothing before the water's washed that away, they'll remember being worn by someone who was eaten by fish. Add a description of our clothing from the rifle scout that fled, and that should be enough for the people doing the investigation."

He leaned back, and smiled. "Of course, they'll realize that if we were planning on dumping the cart, they'll realize that Wolfmouth Canyon was a fine place to do it. So it's not purely an excess of caution that led me to this course of action."

"I see," said Cassia. "Getting back to why you were fighting in the pits, then-"

"We should be going. There's a good place to make camp a bit further upstream."

Cassia smiled at that. He would either talk about it, or he wouldn't. The fact that he had said that he would was leaving him in a bit of an awkward position, though.

The stream actually got somewhat more substantial as they went further upstream. Cassia didn't know if this was something common, but it's not what rivers tended to look like on maps – mostly, they'd get wider and wider until they emptied into a lake or the ocean. Beronal didn't seem to be particularly disturbed by the increased flow of the stream, so she didn't say anything about it.

The source of the stream turned out to be a small lake, mostly sheltered by trees. Behind the lake was a hill; a tangle of rocks and underbrush. It was quite tall, taller than most of the hills near the coast range.

"Interesting formation," said Cassia, as they came up towards it. "Doesn't look much like the hills around Caniphor."

"It's called a devil's footprint. Aurian legend has it that when the Devil fought God, he walked these lands. The lakes are supposed to be where he set his feet, and the hills are the dirt kicked up by his feet."

"Colorful."

"Could be true, for all I know."

"That the Devil, in the form of some sort of giant, wandered around trying to get God to wrestle, and left a series of lakes and hills where he walked?"

"They also say that Lake Perian is where the devil was thrown down three times. Can't say as I personally believe it, but I wasn't there. Seems as likely as any other explanation."

Cassia shrugged. "As you say." She hadn't grown up in a particularly church going family, so the idea seemed foolish on its face. On the other hand, it wasn't as though she had any better explanation.

At the foot of the hill was a pebble beach, protected by a rock overhang. Beronal dropped his pack there, and looked around. "This place should be safe; you've kept your sword and knives. If wolves or bears show up, don't try and stab them. Also, don't run; that's just a bad idea all around. Stamp, growl, talk in a loud voice. Your goal isn't to startle them – you want to intimidate them. It shouldn't be an issue. I've been keeping an eye out for bear or wolf sign, and I've not seen any. But even if something does show up, if you keep your wits about you, it probably won't attack."

"Very reassuring."

"Also," continued Beronal, "If I take longer than an hour or two to get back, stay under cover as best you can."

"So we're not entirely clear?"

Beronal shook his head. "They haven't caught up to us yet, but they've been devoting an awful lot of resources to catching you. Could be that we're going to have to worry about wizard ridden hawks, or suchlike."

"And yet you're still going out?"

"I'll do my best to get a bit of wood, see if I can't find some berries or suchlike. We don't really have enough in the way of supplies to stay here until they lose interest. If they're not following us, great. If they are, we hope for them to lose interest. Then you decide what our next move is."

"I decide?"

"Well, once we find out that we're free and clear, what comes next is up to you – you're the one with the silver."

"For the moment, I'm the one paying the silver, yes."

"Then, for the moment, where we go next is your decision."

Beronal turned and headed off into the woods. Cassia took off her boots and stretched out. She wasn't certain what Beronal would do when she ran out of money. He probably wouldn't slit her throat, or even abandon her in the forest. At least not if she made it clear that she was out of cash before he did that day's work. He didn't seem that sort of type. But she wasn't going to be able to afford keeping him employed for much longer.

She took out her dramatically flattened purse. One mark, fifty eight pennies, a few random pieces of lesser value – copper, brass, that sort of thing. The hilt of her rapier was set with a nicely cut garnet. Since her father had turned against her, she had reversed the gem in its setting, making it look duller and of a poorer cut. It was worth at least three marks, probably more, if she went to the right jeweler. Not that there were any jewelers in the immediate neighborhoods. But it should be worth two days work to Beronal, if he was willing to accept that it lieu of cash. At best, three more days.

There had been fishhooks and line in the packs, and while she didn't know much about survival in the wild, fishing was enough of a part of Caniphor's economy that she had not entirely avoided learning how to wet a line.

Mostly, commercial fishermen used nets. But the kids and the pensioners on the docksides used line and bait, and she had been one of the kids on the dock. She found herself a sapling of appropriate length, and got to work.

It didn't take long to make herself a fairly serviceable rod. The string was tied at the far end, and a bit of smoked beef mounted on the hook. It wasn't the sort of thing that was going to be catching any particularly large fish, or a particularly large number of fish. Beronal's warnings about large predators made her rather leery of trying to fish from anywhere other than the beach he had left her on, and that warning about staying under cover meant that she wanted to do something that would let her stay underneath that rock overhang.

Beronal's trip didn't take that long. He came back with a large bundle of wood, a shirt full of butternuts, pawpaw, mayapple, and and a grim expression. By that time, Cassia had caught almost a dozen small fish, which she had laid out on the rock behind her.

"Good idea," he said, when he saw her collection of fish. "And good job at it, too." He looked around, considering.

"We can probably get away with a small fire, if we keep it well under the overhang," he said.

"I take it that there's trouble."

"Hawks," he said. "I'm pretty sure that I got under cover before it spotted me. But there are more hawks than there ought to be in the sky, and they're not hunting like hawks normally do."

"This soon?" It was hard for Cassia to believe that all they had done getting out there had barely slowed the pursuit.

"Apparently. I don't know how many wizards the Duke's Guard employs, but it seems that most of them are after us. At the moment, we can hope that they've been mostly fooled by the cart, and are just being thorough."

Beronal went as far back behind the overhang as he could manage, and hunched over his pile of wood. Cassia brought her fish in and took up a seat next to him. She could still see a great deal of sky.

"Are you sure that hawks won't be able to spot us here?" she asked.

"Pretty sure," said Beronal. "They've got excellent eyes, but they're not that good at looking in from light to shadow. Of course, even if I'm wrong, it wouldn't be wise for us to try and find somewhere better at this point; they'll spot us through the trees before too long if we take to the forests.

"So I take it you're not going out again for more berries."

"Perhaps at night, but that's not really the right time to look for berries," said Beronal.

He leaned forward, and started working on getting a fire started. It didn't take him as long as Cassia had expected it would, considering the primitive and soggy equipment he was working with.

There wasn't much in the way of spices or cooking material in the packs, but the fish were fresh enough, and they were hungry enough that didn't matter. The pawpaw and mayapple were also fantastically good, though they'd probably have been less good if she hadn't been quite so hungry.

After they finished eating, Beronal gathered his blanket up, and went to sleep towards the far edge of the beach, where the overhang touched the floor, and the floor was mostly dirt, with a few scattered rocks and mossy logs.

Cassia considered following his example, and decided against. Despite the rather strenuous night, she seldom got much sleep the following night if she slept during the day, and she had a feeling that the sort of irritable tired-but-can't-sleep frame of mind doing that would leave her in was not going to be ideal over the next few days.

She took out her rapier, and started cleaning it. After the sort of soaking it had recieved, there was always the threat of rust. And there had been various nicks and dents picked up in various brawls. Ever since her father had turned on her, she had been reacting, running, trying different counters to his moves. There hadn't been any down time at all. It was a great comfort to go through the simple routines of maintaining her sword, and then her knives.

It would have been nice to actually run through training drills, but she didn't think it wise to wake Beronal and ask if that was okay, and if he'd fence with her. He probably would have, if it wasn't likely to catch a hawk's eye, seeing as she was paying him so exorbitantly, but she was going to need him in a charitable frame of mind soon enough.

She oiled the last of her knives, sheathed it. Beronal was still sleeping, but it was getting late in the day. There was the temptation to start fishing again, but the last thing that she wanted was to get the pursuit started again. Which left the pile of butternuts. It wasn't something that she had much experience with, but she knew enough that she started rubbing the first one against a rough bit of rock, slowly grinding the outer husk off.

It was almost sunset when Beronal awoke, and she had made a depressingly small dent in the pile of butternuts. "So, getting back to the question of why you were working as fighter," started Cassia, when Beronal sat down next to her, and started grinding the nuts himself. For all that she needed him in a good mood when she mentioned that she was out of money, she couldn't resist pressing that point. Aside from the fact that she got a perverse pleasure out of needling Beronal, she had a distinct sense that there was something important worth digging at, there.

He yawned luxuriantly, and shrugged. "Why not. When I'm fighting in the pits, I'm getting paid for doing something that I'm good at, and that I enjoy. And I'm in no way responsible for anyone else but myself."

"So it's responsibility that you're trying to avoid?"

Cassia bit her lip after making that remark. It was a bit more combative then she was trying to be. But Beronal simply continued husking the butternuts, seemingly untroubled by her comment.

"To a certain degree. It is a fearful thing, responsibility. It's not just that I might do my job poorly, and get other people killed. It's that I might do my job well, and get people killed. Or that I might do my job as best as I thought I was able, and get people killed whom I could have just as easily kept alive. It's not worth it, not any money."

Cassia cocked her head to the side. "You don't seem to have had too much trouble killing people when they got in your way."

"I'm neither a fool nor a saint. Another man's blood is no redder then mine. If people seek my death, I'll seek theirs. But that's not the issue. It's getting people killed when they aren't trying to kill me. And that's something that I've been trying to avoid for quite some time now."

"Where did the two bodies come from?"

"The two...oh. Probably from the potter's field; the people who work there are the cheapest source of fresh bodies that I know of."

This was something that Cassia hadn't heard. It might make sense. "Is there really that much of a market in corpses?"

"Tanners will buy anything. Same with making glue. Hell, the Dexans have a lot of dogs to feed. Riend is still a frontier, and isn't quite, ah, civilized enough for there to be a regular market in human corpses, but I wouldn't count on a body left in the potter's field staying there for more then a day."

Odd, that her father had never gotten a piece of that action. Or not that odd. Furs, lumber, whale oil – that was where the real money was in Riend, and those were the markets he was most interested in. Well, and theft, numbers, extortion, blackmail, and so on. Something as sordid as body theft was probably not much worth his time. It could have helped pull a couple of jobs, had she known about it, though. But....

"The girl was stabbed. And she was wearing the shift she had been stabbed in."

Beronal jerked back, as though he was the one who had just been stabbed. He continued husking the butternuts, but in a purely mechanical fashion. His eyes were closed, and Cassia thought she could see tears forming.

This was not what she had intended to do by saying that; she had just been trying to understand. It didn't look like it would be a good idea to pretend that she had been joking when she said that, and she couldn't think of any other way to unsay what she had said. Maybe she wouldn't broach the subject of her thinning purse that night.

"I could have worded my request better," Beronal finally said. "It does seems unlikely that the Dexans killed her themselves. But if the people working the potter's field got that request, and didn't have a close match available, grabbing a girl from a poorer section of town would probably be the way they would go." He slowly shook his head. "Another death in my name, another ghost who will feast on my heartsblood."

He clenched his fist, squeezing the nut that he had been holding till the juice ran between his fingers. "I did what I had to, in order to survive. Let the avenging angels do what they will." He tossed the ruined nut away – husk and meaty core, Cassia noted, were equally crushed and intermixed. "There are things that can be said at the fire," he said, "and there is hair that we should burn."

It was the most minimal funeral pyre that Cassia had ever seen. Two smoldering chunks of wood, a handful of hair, and that was it. But Beronal took it seriously enough, reciting something in a deep and sonorous language that she didn't recognize until the sun set.

Once the sun was down, Beronal stood, dusted off his legs. "There's not much point in blundering around in the dark," he said, "but I'll see if there's anywhere nearby worth relocating to, and maybe revisit some of the trees that I had spotted earlier." And then he vanished into the dark.

They had been husking the nuts, but not shelling them, so she got to work doing that. Then she started laying the fishing line down on the water again, using bits of the offal from the last set of fish as bait. After landing a nice pair of catfish, she decided to call it a night; there might have been more fish available, but she was far too tired to do anything other than crawl under their rock and go to sleep.