Tyrant

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.