Exile

XVII

They almost caught her in the night. She did not want to stop and rest, not even for a moment. Her body overruled her mind. As she staggered through a darkness that the half-obscured moon barely touched, she lost her footing one time too many. Her injured ankle howled its protest. When she made to raise herself up, her arms shook and folded as if boneless.

It was all she could do to crawl into a sheltered corner between two boulders. She spread her blanket as best she could over her body and made a ball of herself beneath it. Her stomach growled. Every limb hurt and shivered. Despite all of that, she fell towards sleep in moments.

They did not find her, but it was close. Their voices woke her. They drifted past in the night. She could see nothing, just hear those harsh cries. Some were distant. Her alarm perhaps exaggerated it, but the closest seemed to come from no more than a few dozen paces away.

As the sound of her hunters faded into the distance, she did not dare to move. She stayed there, pressed into the shelter and moonshadows of the protective boulders, glad of the darkness. However good at tracking the Huluk Kur might be, a deep night and a clouded moon were enough to defeat them. A small piece of good fortune to set in the scale against all the ill.

She remained in her hiding place until she judged the night well on the way to its end. Until she had not heard a Huluk Kur voice for hours. She doubted it would pay to test the generosity of her newfound luck.

The dawn found her climbing again. She craved open, high ground where she might see what was coming for her and what lay before her. She marked the first hint of light on the horizon and took that for east. As best she could tell – which was only a little more than a guess – the Huluk Kur had been heading in that direction when they passed her in the dark. She headed north, where the land allowed it. She thought the Hung Gate might lie in that direction.

For much of the morning, as she laboured along a bleak ridgeline, her left arm would give an involuntary shiver every so often. It worried her, but only a little. There were any number of greater concerns to occupy her mind, and before long she stopped noticing it. By the time she stopped to drink from a puddle of meltwater, around the middle of the day, the arm had remembered itself and returned to her control. She still felt dull and slow of thought. Her ankle still hurt. Yesterday had been worse though. Tomorrow would be better, she told herself. All she had to do was live to see it.

Soon she was high enough to see for miles. Ahead of her, the view was deeply uninviting. More rock than grass. More snow. Her mind turned to possibilities she had not allowed herself to consider until now. She was a Clever. The world was hers to shape, if she was willing to pay the price such shaping demanded.

Could she make mist of herself and flow over the cliffs and obstacles before her? Could she pass into the earth beneath her feet and emerge, remade, somewhere far away? Could she make of herself a bird and truly spread wings for a time? Perhaps. Perhaps, too, doing so would take everything she had to give, every last piece of her.

There had never been anybody to tell her how such marvels might be performed without losing herself to the entelechs entirely. She was all but certain that, in her already weakened state, she would never come back from such extravagant spending of body and soul. It would be the kind of desperate gamble that invited a Permanence into the world, and plotted a course for her out of existence. She was not ready to risk that yet. Not quite.

She slept for a few hours on a bed of moss in the lee of a rocky overhang. It gave her some shelter but little comfort. It was lucky, she supposed, that wind or snow did not come in the night. That might have been too much for her. As it was, in the watery dawn that followed she discovered what desperation looked like. She saw what was needed to make her consider gambling everything.

At first she did not know what she was hearing. A grinding, as of a distant, lazy rockslide? It went on too long and deep for that. More like an entire river of rock slowly rolling its way over the land. With that image coming to mind, she guessed what it might be.

She eased her way along a ledge from where she had slept and clambered onto the top of the ridge, wedging her staff into crevices to lever herself up. She shuffled on hands and knees over slabs of rock and patches of flat turf. The heavy rumbling note grew slowly louder.

When she came to an edge, she lay flat and stared down across a long, tumbling scree of boulders to a plain of grass below.

No hunting or scouting party this. No handful of warriors. It was the van of the Huluk Kur host. Hundreds of horsemen. Behind them, indistinct in the weak light of the morning, came the head of the main column. They must have broken their camp before dawn, she thought. Or perhaps marched through the hours of darkness.

For long minutes she lay there, lost to herself. She was too slow, too weak to race this vast, remorseless people. Her body had too little left to give. Nothing remained to her but to hide herself away somewhere in these mountains. Exile herself from whatever was happening and was going to happen. Hide and be quiet and be what – and who – Ammenor had been.

Unless she was willing to risk everything. Unless she was willing to flirt with death. Might she after all become mist or bird or…

‘Stand up.’

The sudden command set her heart skipping. She rolled and turned slowly, expecting nothing good.

Behind her, four men were standing in a loose arc, horses patient and silent at their backs. They had bows at the ready, arrows on the strings. All aiming at her. She cursed herself inwardly for becoming so lost in the maze of her own thoughts that she could not even hear four riders drawing near. Then she belatedly recognised the closest of the men.

‘Oh ho,’ Hamdan cried. ‘Put up your bows, boys. It’s the river girl! It’s the one I told you about. Dislikes the Clade so much she chose the Hervent over their company!’

He sounded genuinely pleased. Delighted, almost.