The Last Blade Priest by W P Wiles

Author:W P Wiles
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857669834
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

22

ANTON

While they slept, fog had descended across the Hidden Land, so thick that it seemed their little niche under a flat stone was a nest in the face of a great cliff, looking out over nothingness.

Franj was pleased. “We are favoured indeed,” she said. Perhaps it was a night of rest, but her attitude had undergone a marked change – her wariness and reserve had retreated and a sparkle shone in its place. In this state she reminded Anton of Elecy, and he found he missed his sister-in-faith. He hoped that she was safe. Hers was a terrible and deadly game, and he could not escape the thought that she had taken his place in the dungeon.

“Will we find our way?” Anton asked. He did not share his companion’s favourable view of the fog – it seemed to him a disquieting medium in which to travel, half-blind, half-lost.

“Yes,” Franj said. “Scouts would not be much use to the Tzanate if they were lost in a little mist, would they? You ride, I’ll guide. Today we should find the pilgrims’ way to the Mirolinian road.”

“Where our pursuers might wait,” Anton said. In this weather, every stone seemed to conceal a company of Zealots.

“Then we had better be careful, hadn’t we?” Franj replied, setting off with a bounding gait that had few of the characteristics of care.

As they travelled, Anton began to understand part of the reason for Franj’s renewed vigour. A good night’s rest had made its contribution, of course, and she was no doubt buoyed by Anton’s message that the Custodians were pleased with her. But it had another component, one that became steadily more clear: she was enjoying herself.

Crossing the lake-bed had been a simple matter of flight and pursuit. There had been little wit to it. Now, however, Franj was engaged in evasion. Her manner was different because the task was different.

Scouts accompanied armies, and were counted as soldiers. But scouting was not soldiering – or rather, it was a special and strange part of soldiering. Scouts made their own path, they went as they pleased. Fighting was not their purpose, but to say that they shrank from the fight was unfair, because it made them sound craven and they were anything but that. They did not aim to fight, but they did not shrink from the enemy. That was not what evasion was. Franj, Anton realised, was seeking the enemy. She wanted to know where they were. That was the stuff of her skill: not putting the maximum distance between herself and the enemy, but maintaining a fixed and watchful distance. She was not running, she was hunting, and the job evidently agreed with her.

After a hurried middle meal – soldier-cake again – Anton offered her the saddle, and she refused. “Quicker on my feet, here at least,” she said. For several miles, she had been bounding on ahead, scrambling to the top of the mighty shards of stone that defined their path like buildings in a city, and trying to make out signs and clues in what lay ahead.

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