In the Earth Abides the Flame (33 page)

'Before, I'm sure. We must go back!' Stella cried. He can't abandon me now!

'Hold on!' Perdu shouted. 'We can't all go rushing off. We need to stay together! Leith has thus far displayed enough sense not to have done anything foolish. Likely he is in a better position than us! Perhaps even now he is working on some plan to save us.'

'Or perhaps he has tried to save himself,' Farr said quietly. Stella rounded on him, eyes blazing.

'There is no time for this,' Phemanderac said, and his voice carried authority. 'Since I am not one of the Company, and therefore am dispensable, I will go and look for him. The rest of you stay together, as Perdu suggests. Keep out of sight of the guards. Hide if you can, fight if you must. Now is the time to trust what you have seen, to trust what you have felt. The Most High overshadows us, and for

good or for ill he has a plan which involves you. He will provide a way of escape, but will not force you to take it. It simply depends on whether you are prepared to be patient and wait for his deliverance.'

'I know what the Haufuth would say to that, were he here,' commented Farr.

'Then it is just as well he is not here. I will be back with Leith as soon as I can,' and saying this, he left them, darting down a side road.

'Shouldn't we follow him?' Indrett asked. 'If he can find a way out of this maze, maybe we could all escape.'

'He'll have a much greater chance on his own,' her husband replied.

Leith found himself staring incredulously, unable to take his eyes from the scene.

The Aleinus River was completely dry.

It was not a trick of the light. It was not a fantasy of his mind. There in front of him; stretching out into the misty distance, lay the mighty Aleinus River, the Mother of Rivers; only there was no water flowing between her banks, just the odd pool in low-lying areas of light grey mud. Finally, released from his paralysis, Leith rushed down to the bank. Boats sat bottomed on the sand, fish flopped about on the mud, struggling for breath. The scene was eerie. I thought it was mid-tide, Leith thought. But how long ago was that? How long have 1

been lying unconscious? He was soaked through, but this rain could have achieved that in a matter of minutes. Surely low tide did not empty the river? Water must contin' ually come from upstream, that cannot be the answer.

Whatever the explanation, he still needed to find the rest of the Company. Turning his back on the preposterous spectacle, he began to scramble up the bank.

Straight into a contingent of the Instruian Guard.

They were even more taken by surprise than he, and before their rough hands could close around him he had squirmed free and, half rolling, half falling, tumbled down the riverbank.

'Leith! This way, this way!' It was Phemanderac, also on the riverbank, about a hundred yards to his right.

The youth scrambled to his feet, the guards already halfway down the slope. Behind Phemanderac more guards came running.

'Look behind you!' Leith cried.

Now Phemanderac ran for his life, and in a moment they were together, surrounded by guards who were rapidly converging on them.

'The river!' Leith said. 'We must go across the river!' He held out his arm, pointing over the bank. Phemanderac followed his arm, and his mouth opened wide. The guards looked up, then stopped in their tracks, stunned. For a moment no one moved, and in the silence Leith heard the cry of gulls as they came to take advantage of a most unexpected feast.

'Indeed, my friend; let us cross the river,' Phemanderac said, and his voice rippled with laughter. The joy had come upon him, the first time since he had left the Vale, and he shook with the power of it. Leith made ready to jump down on to the sand, but the philosopher cried,

'No! Don't jump. Trust me! Climb down the bank as best you can!'

So down the bank they clambered, fighting their way through the sedges and water plants, until their feet touched sand. Meanwhile the guards recovered their wits, having been awed for a moment at the sight of their river empty, seemingly at the command of the northerner; and were even now at the bank, perhaps ten feet above the pair below, making ready to follow them.

Leith and Phemanderac sprang away from the bank, the willowy philosopher leading the way, trying to avoid the treacherous mud. Behind them the first of the guards jumped from the bank and, to his chagrin, sank up to his knees in the soft sand.

'Fool!' his captain cried, but his words did not deter half a dozen others from jumping and suffering the same fate. 'Pull them out!' he ordered the others, but the bank was too far above them. 'Get down there and help them!' the exasperated captain said, then thought better of it as he saw his quarry making their escape. 'Forget these fools. Chase those two northerners!'

They were by now a few hundred yards from the bank, and Leith was already exhausted. The ordeals of the last few days had stolen his reserves of strength, and the sucking sand and mud turned his legs rubbery. He lost one shoe, the result of a misplaced footstep, and as yet the far side of the river was not in view. Behind them the guards had made it to the riverbed, and were setting out on the chase.

'Keep going,' Phemanderac panted beside him. 'The run will tire them also.'

Fear lent him further energy, but only for a time. Some distance and many minutes further on Leith came to a halt, hands on knees, gasping for air. They were near the centre of the river now, and here the rising tide still filled a wide but shallow channel. The guards were three hundred yards or more behind, giving the fugitives a minute or so to rest.

'What happened to the river?' Leith asked between deep breaths.

'I thought you might be able to tell me!' Phemanderac replied. 'You stuck out your arm, and there was no water!'

'I'm sure I didn't do it. What about the others?'

'Still trapped, I'm afraid.'

Leith shook his head.

'Time to take to our feet again,' the philosopher said, as the guards drew closer. 'They're going slower now.'

'So am I,' Leith said.

The next hour was like a nightmare. While Phemanderac picked a way through the bog-like mud on all sides, Leith just plodded along behind him, concentrating simply on putting one foot in front of the other, his eyes on the philosopher's boots. He had no idea how far behind them the guards were.

Phemanderac had a better idea. The occasional glance behind told him the guards were faltering in their chase, but still close enough to prevent them stopping to rest. There was also the matter of keeping ahead of the guards once they made the shore.

Finally the line of the far bank came into view. Minutes later the two weary northerners climbed the steps to a small dock. As they made the safety of the wooden structure, figures came running out from the trees ahead.

'Leith! Phemanderac!' cried a familiar voice. 'You're safe! But what of the others?' It was Kurr and the Haufuth, along with Hal and two of the Escaignians.

'The others are trapped back there,' Leith replied in a drained monotone. 'We barely made it here. There are guards close behind us.'

They all cast their gaze over the waterless river, and at the edge of sight they could see the guards, fanned out into a long line, working their way towards them.

'No one here knows what has happened to the river,' the Haufuth said. 'We were about to launch the boat to come back and get the rest of you when the water simply drained away.'

'We don't have time to wonder about it now,' Kurr observed. 'We need as much of a head start on those guards as we can get.'

'But what about the others? Shouldn't we try to get back to Instruere and rescue them?'

Phemanderac asked. He was preoccupied with the realisation that the Five of the Hand was incomplete. The Book of the Golden Arrow talked constantly of the Five of the Hand, though there it was named the Arkhimm. What of Stella? Could the Arkhimm, the Five of the Hand, achieve anything at all when one of its components was missing? Would an expedition to recover the Jugom Ark be futile without her?

But Leith was not listening to the discussion, nor worrying about the Arrow. His eyes were fixed on an awesome sight upriver. One by one the others noticed his silence and turned to him, then followed his outstretched arm to see it too.

It was a brown smudge on the horizon, stretching from bank to bank and beyond; it was a roiling, frothing, debris-laden wall of water; it was the Aleinus returning to her bed.

'Run!' shouted one of the Escaignians. 'Run for higher ground! The river returns!'

His voice broke the spell they were all under. As one they ran across the jetty and towards the trees planted on a low hill. Leith cast a glance over his shoulder. The wall of water had already drawn much closer, and ahead of it came a sound that would haunt him forever; a horrible grinding, gnashing noise that set his teeth on edge and drove him on between the trees and up to the crown of the low hill.

Down on the riverbed the Captain of the Guard had watched the northerner stretch out his arm again. To his horror the wall of water responded to his gesture. He tried to block out the awful sound battering against his ears.

'The shore! The shore!' he shouted, but no one could hear him. He motioned for the others to follow, and ran hard for the Straux shoreline in the distance. To the left the wall of water approached at an incredible rate. His men would not make it to the safety of the far bank.

Mercilessly he drove himself on, willing himself to safety. Behind him his men struggled forward, but in their panic one after another of them became mired in the thick mud and could do nothing but watch with terror-filled eyes the doom that rumbled towards them. Knowing there was little he could do for the men now, their captain redoubled his own efforts to survive. The dock was a hundred yards in front of him, then fifty, then twenty. On the crown of the hill Leith watched his race for life and, though the Instruian was an enemy bent on capturing or slaying him, he willed the man on.

The men trapped in the riverbed threw up their hands in a last futile defence as the water exploded over them. Most were killed instantly by the debris in the dark brown flood, while the others were drowned by the water that flowed many feet over their heads. The river stretched out a foamy arm towards the Captain of the Guard as he mounted the steps to the jetty, crooked a finger around his legs and dragged him cursing back into the swiftly flowing flood. As an afterthought the waters pulled the jetty itself away from the bank, sending it spiralling out into the centre of the river.

The last few unsearched buildings were all that remained between the Company and the river.

They would provide no refuge for the beleaguered northerners. The guards had continued their systematic search, and were undoubtedly closing in on them. So little time remained.

No words were said now. They all knew each other too well to waste words.

From the direction of the river, behind them and somewhat to their left, came a shout. Some of the Instruian Guard had discovered them. Their slender hopes of avoiding capture were at an end. Only Achtal had not given up hope of escape, or perhaps his aggressive response came from instincts developed by his Bhrudwan training. He stepped forward from the group and hefted an improbably large log.

A sound intruded on their bleak thoughts. A murmur at first, it soon mounted to a roar. The guards down by the riverbank turned and looked upstream, then became extremely agitated, dropping their weapons or clasping them carelessly and running towards the Company. At the same moment the remainder of the guards emerged on to the street, drawn there by the fearsome noise, and there confronted the northerners. But for the moment no one struck a blow. Clearly, from the ever-increasing noise, some catastrophe was about to descend on them all.

The brown wall of water struck the island of Instruere with an earth-shaking blow, knocking many residents abroad that day to the ground. It surged around the low-lying land, ate at the very wall of Instruere at its eastern extremity, undermined and then overtopped the riverbank and surged through the Docks as the divided flood sought to reunite. Those unfortunate enough to be close to the shore were swept screaming to their deaths by the merciless, indiscriminate floodtide. Fishermen trying to earn an honest living, smugglers bringing gold and ivory traded with the savages from the unguess-able south, members of the Instruian Guard trying to run to higher ground; all tried in vain to escape. The Company and the main body of the guard watched helplessly as the water took soldier after soldier down into its brown depths. Further and further up die surge came until the foam bubbled around the very feet of the Company, and then just as suddenly retreated as the main body of the flood passed them by, leaving a brownish residue on Farr's boots. The noise was indescribable. Though only a tithe of the stupendous sound of the Thunderfall, from which this calamity originated, all who heard the Aleinus return to its bed were rendered powerless, incapable of flight or even thought. The dreadful power clapped a vice-like grip on the mere humans who witnessed it, overtopping their senses by such a distance as to drown them in fear and wonder.

All except Achtal, the Bhrudwan warrior. He advanced on the guards, many of whom did not even see him, so powerfully engraved on their eyes and minds was the image of their fellows being pulled to their frightening fate.

Achtal swung the log in a wide arc, felling half a dozen of the guard. This served to waken the remainder, some thirty or more, who drew their swords. 'Strike at the man, not at the weapon!'

their leader cried, but in vain. So many of his men had ears full of that terrible sound that few took heed. Every blade that struck the swinging log bit deep into the wood, lodging there; Achtal jerked the log, plucking the swords from their owners' hands. Thus were a dozen or more rendered harmless.

The remainder struggled to empty their minds of the cataclysm that still echoed around them.

As they came to themselves, they remembered the stories of this warrior's power and bloodthirsti-ness in the depths of The Pinion no more than a week earlier, and their courage flowed away from them like water. A number of them took a step or two backwards in the face of the Bhrudwan's onslaught. Seeing this, Farr gave a yell and sprang forward to join Achtal. Perdu, Mahnum and Stella followed a moment later.