Tyrant by Brian Ruckley

Author:Brian Ruckley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2016-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

VIII

The hill was much larger than it had appeared. It was also further away than Brennan would have guessed. It took them a good two hours to get close enough to make out any details of the terrain.

Those details were not unexpected. Bare, yellowish rock. A few frail shrubs rooted in crevices and crannies. There were gullies on the lower flanks of the hill, extending out into the flat ground beyond. They shallowed and shrank the further from the slopes they reached, until they disappeared altogether. There must be downpours here, Brennan supposed. Brief, sudden storms which sent water pouring off the hard heights, scouring out channels for itself down onto the plain. Where it flowed and spread and sank away, sucked up by the parched earth.

‘I don’t much like this,’ Lorin said as they drew closer to the great rocky mound.

‘No? You amaze me,’ said Manadar sarcastically.

‘This is not so far from where I told Yulan he might find his quarry. Unless they changed course, there could be a hundred slavers on the other side of this hill.’

‘What should we do?’ Brennan asked.

‘Well, if there’re eyes up on top, they might have seen us by now,’ Lorin said, ‘but they might be careless, or tired, or not there at all. Either way, it’d do no harm to make ourselves a little harder to see.’

He angled his horse a touch to the side and led them down into the tail end of one of the long, sprawling gullies. They worked their way along the bottom of it, its sides rising higher and higher until they passed their heads. There was some dry vegetation down there in the bed of what, perhaps for only a day or two a year, must be a fierce-flowing river. Browned seed-heads that said there had been flowers here, in times past. There were no flowers now.

Soon enough, the ground beneath their feet was starting to rise. They halted, looking up the deep notch cut into the side of the hill. Lorin swung himself down from his horse. Brennan and Manadar copied him.

‘We need to walk someone up there,’ Lorin said, hooking a thumb towards the top of the hill. ‘Make sure there’s no eyes there before we take the horses up.’

‘That’ll take time,’ Manadar murmured. ‘She’s walking away from us, step by step.’

‘Do you boys listen to anything I say? Told you before: never hurts to take every care. Can you not smell it?’

Brennan looked around, puzzled. He could smell nothing but his own dried sweat, filling clothes he had been wearing for days. Manadar, similarly confounded, shrugged.

‘Trouble,’ said Lorin emphatically. ‘Bloody, bad trouble. This place reeks of it. This whole contract reeks of it. You want to see the far side of the next day or two, you’d better learn to smell the way the wind’s blowing.’

‘I’ll go,’ Brennan said, gazing up towards the rocks above.

‘Not alone. Manadar, you keep the horses here until you get some sign from us.’

Manadar started to protest as Lorin pressed reins into his hands, but the older man was far beyond any patience for debates.

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