Drakenfeld

The Search

The morning passed uneventfully and so Leana took the opportunity to work with me on my sword skills. There were no wooden practice swords so I kept alert and impressed myself by managing to deflect the majority of her blows.

‘I could have killed you twice,’ she declared afterwards.

‘I coped better than usual in that case.’

She grunted either satisfaction or dissatisfaction – I could never quite tell, even after all these years together.

A little before noon, another rider returned, on a fresh horse, having ridden through the night. While the horse was rubbed down, the messenger, showing no signs of struggling after a lack of sleep, revealed that our requests were being put into action. Our superior officers were discreetly journeying to the region. Auxiliaries were being smuggled across the border and into Detrata. The wheels of the Sun Chamber moved quickly, subtly, but to a startlingly efficient degree.

The makeshift camp was packed away leaving no trace of anyone having being there, and that afternoon we set off in a north-westerly direction, through the rolling hills. Three other groups headed along different roads, mainly to keep our numbers down to a minimum so as not to attract too much attention.

Our group followed a trail near an aqueduct supplying Tryum, but at a distance – keeping the structure in sight at all times as a navigational aid.

The following days were among the most frustrating and dull I had ever experienced. Time seemed to stretch out due to my impatience, and the vast and sun-bleached landscape expanded to the horizon without varying, rarely promising anything to break up the day.

Our journey took us through farmland first, then wilder grasslands and forests that banked up steep inclines. I hadn’t noticed it in the city, but here were the subtle changes of nature that indicated the turn towards colder weather. Certain plants were flowering, other kinds had died, and the leaves were becoming speckled with brown, as if autumn was some disease.

Our days were long and uneventful. During this time, Leana had made something of a friend in Callimar. They talked of combat technique and weapons, topics for which I could muster little interest. He was keen to learn the arts of Atrewen killing and Leana grew very talkative, to a surprising extent. Killing was something that was occasionally necessary, but I preferred it that people remained alive – these two, however, talked with nonchalance, perhaps with little regard for the shattered families or ruined futures that death could bring to the living. It was the way of a warrior and I accepted that.

I accepted, also, that I was no warrior.

‘You two seem to get on well,’ I said to Leana, lingering at the back of the train of horses.

‘We do. He will share wine with me and treat me as an equal. A nice change from Tryum.’

‘Tryum had citizens from all over the known world,’ I protested. ‘You could share wine with all sorts of people.’

‘Your idea of “all over” is very different from mine,’ Leana grunted. ‘Some people would share wine with me down-city. Up-city they treated me like a trinket. They just stared. In Venyn there were plenty of people from the south, from Atrewe and beyond, many different cultures, and many of them were successful people also. Here it is less so – the only people who hold power in Detrata are from Detrata. I grew tired of the comments, Lucan. I grew tired of the staring. Tryum is not the marvel you think it is.’

As for my own relationship with Callimar, I had grown up significantly from my days in the academy. Back then he had much to teach me, both officially and unofficially, and our friendship was one of those best left in a certain time and place, but nothing could be achieved by revealing such sentiments. I was polite and courteous to him, but found our conversations strangely lacking in substance. Memory might also have exaggerated those more innocent times back then. It seemed to me that, if not careful, one could romanticize the past beyond all recognition.

The nights were cooler, but the midday heat was still powerful. We wore light hooded cloaks for shade, and I worried for the health of our horses. We camped under the stars with a soldier on sentry duty. I volunteered to do the job myself, rather liking the idea of staring into the indigo sky as dawn broke across the grassland, but Callimar insisted a military man do the job. Perhaps I would have been more interested in the poetry of the landscape than where a particular threat may have been coming from, but I happily took my sleep anyway.

We were not, to our knowledge, being followed and we had not, to our knowledge, been seen by anyone other than traders, villagers or those toothless priests who crawled across the countryside searching for gods that I’d never heard of.

After two nights the landscape changed again to endless acres of farmland and plantations, indicating that we had finally arrived in the region of Destos.

‘You’d better be sure she’s here,’ Callimar whispered to me.

‘You already know I’m not,’ I replied.

‘I’ve not told the others that.’

At a small hamlet, which formed the hub of the local agricultural community, we managed to purchase maps from a family in need of coin. With a necessary lack of subtlety, we quickly gathered what little information we could about the region, where the larger villas were likely to be, whether wealthy people from Tryum owned any land, where small settlements were, and so on. We covered half the region’s hamlets in a day.

As we moved on, an agent of the Sun Chamber caught up with us, having received a notification about our mission. Callimar seemed to know him well enough, which put me at ease.

An expert in the region, he had discovered the whereabouts of three large villas not marked on any map, nor did they seem to be known to locals. The villas were away from a road, hidden by geography and at the far end of the region, by the coast. Callimar arranged for the agent to try to reach the others of the Sun Legion, who had headed out in slightly different directions, and for us to reconvene at a specific point along the coast.

But that night we lay under the stars, the nearest town being miles away. Beneath their cloaks, the soldiers’ armour reflected the warm light of the campfire, a stark contrast to the darkening skies around us. Callimar stood on the edge of our small encampment, regarding the distance with his usual stern expression.