The Other Lands (73 page)

“Forget it,” Dariel said. “Keep going.”

“I’m sorry,” Tam said. “I thought—”

“It’s floating,” another observed.

Dariel cursed. There was no retrieving it, as it bobbed under the pier, just out of reach. “Leave it,” he said, hoping it would stay trapped among the pier’s many pylons. Tam continued to apologize, but Dariel cut him off, not as kindly as Skylene had been with him earlier. “Just keep working. Try to look like you know what you’re doing.”

A few minutes more, and Tunnel had had enough of waiting. He crammed himself into Birké’s shirt, though he could not button it and his bulk threatened to burst the seams of the shoulders. He went to work, and Dariel was glad he did. Where the rest struggled to carry one barrel between them, Tunnel somehow got his arms around two at a time, carrying one under each arm. With this help, the stacked rows on the boat’s main deck grew quickly. Dariel kept busy making sure they were properly secured. A few more minutes and they could—

“Dariel?” It was Skylene. Just one word, but the tone in which she spoke it told him everything. Instead of looking at her, he scanned the docks. He spotted the problem quickly.

An Ishtat guard stood at the end of their pier, watching them. Dariel turned to Skylene and, with a motion of his eyes, reminded her to stay hidden. By the time he had turned around again, the guard had started toward them.

“We’re going to have company,” Dariel said, just loud enough for those hefting the barrels to hear him. “Keep working. Except you, Tunnel—get out of sight.”

The Ishtat strode toward them now, eyes fixed. He wore the cloak of his order, bright white and trailing behind him as he walked. A thin sword hung at his side, and one gloved hand rested on its hilt. “Hey!” he called. “What are you doing? You think you can just drop barrels of league pitch to float away? Look!” He pointed toward the water on the other side of the pier. The barrel had floated free. “Get out there and fetch that!”

Dariel bowed his head and motioned his apology with his hands. He called the others and acted as if he would just pull out and pick up the floater. The man carried on toward them, however. As he got closer his steps slowed. And when he was near enough to make out individuals, he squinted, for a moment so perplexed he could manage nothing else. And then he said, “Who are you? You aren’t one of ours.”

Dariel smiled. “I?” He leaped from the deck to the pier and walked toward the Ishtat, holding an amiable expression. “Who am I?” He laughed and cocked his head in a manner that suggested he had a story to tell, one that would explain all this, one that would make them both laugh, even if the tale did not make the teller seem entirely free of guilt.

He tried to convey all this in the few steps it took him to reach the man, and it must have worked. Instead of drawing his sword or signaling an alarm, the guard had his chin raised and his hands planted on his hips. “Yes. Who are you, and what do you—”

Dariel swept his hand up, bringing with it the dagger. He slammed the blade in the soft center of the guard’s neck. The man’s face registered shock. His arms hung limp, and this may have fed his terror. His eyes cast about as if demanding that his body do things that it refused.

The prince said, “My name is Dariel Akaran, if you must know.” He yanked the blade to the side, and pushed the guard’s body over, so that the spray of crimson jetted away from him. Moving with the body’s momentum, he kicked the guard from the pier. As the body splashed into the water, Dariel cast his eyes over the harbor, the deck of the nearest ship, portholes in its side, and the street leading away from the water. Nothing. No one seemed to have noticed. Not yet, at least.

He spun and said, “Last of the barrels in, lads, and then let’s go!”

The others, Skylene included, stared at him. Birké’s jaw dropped, exposing his canine teeth. Tam was so wide-eyed it looked like he feared for his own life. Even Tunnel looked uneasy.

“What?” Dariel asked, leaping back on the boat. “You think this could be bloodless? Gape at me later. Now let’s keep moving or there’ll be a lot more blood in the water. Quickly now, quickly.”

The last barrels went on the deck. The ropes were untied. Dariel steered the boat away from the pier and turned it toward the open water. This was the part he had feared most. To be so close to success but needing moment after moment after moment in clear view of anyone watching. Work on the docks might not draw much attention, but a ship outbound in the middle of the night was a different matter. Dariel felt a hundred eyes drilling into the back of his head. He fought the urge to turn around as much as he held back from surging forward at full speed.

Steady
, he told himself.
Just steady forward. Off to make a delivery, that’s all. Nothing suspicious here
.

Right there before him, bobbing for anyone to see, floated the loose barrel. He wanted to ram the thing and fly, but if anybody saw him sail by it without retrieving it … He angled the boat toward it, pulled up until it bumped the side, and then instructed the crew to pull it aboard. Seconds passed as they grasped for it, but it slipped out of reach.

Skylene appeared beside him, looking back where he would not. “The body is in plain sight now,” she whispered.

For the first time that night, sweat beaded on his forehead and ran down over his temples. He had to wipe it from the corners of his eyes. Still he did not turn around. He slid the boat toward the barrel, gently. Tam appeared with a boat hook. With it, they got the barrel secured against the side at the stern. Finally, they hauled it up.

Steady forward.

“They’ve seen it,” Skylene said.

Dariel cursed. He tried to find something else to say, but nothing came.

“One guard is motioning to some others. He’s pointing at the water.”

“Giver!” Dariel ground through his teeth, watching as the headland crept closer. It might have been a plea, but it sounded more like a threat. Skylene glanced at him a moment, and then looked away.

“They converged on it,” she reported. “It looks like they’re preparing to launch a boat.”

Steady forward.

As they neared the spit of land that would take them out of the harbor’s sight line, he asked, “Well?”

Her elbow brushed his as the hull crossed into the deeper current coming around the headland, changing the boat’s rocking. She did not answer until they fell into shadow. “I don’t think they picked us out, but perhaps we should make haste.”

And so they did. Dariel pushed the vessel even faster than before. They sped under the light of the stars, and then turned and ran around the bottom of the island as the eastern horizon warmed their faces with the coming sun. They were back at the soul catcher in no time.

If Tunnel had been impressive on the docks, he was a wonder now, stripped shirtless, muscles glistening with sweat as he heaved barrels onto his shoulders and ran up the steps. And though Tam had bumbled twice in as many days, he worked all the harder to make amends for it now. Dariel almost told him to slacken his pace, but the young one was working so hard he did not have the heart to dissuade him. Of course, they feared a league ship would arrive at any moment, but the hours passed without anyone showing. Before the noon hour they had the chamber stuffed with all but one of the pitch barrels, and soon after they had soaked a length of rope in pitch to create a wick.

All told, they had searched, debated, planned, sailed, loaded, run, and hauled throughout an entire day, a night, and into the next day. Still, when the work was complete and the others cleared the chamber to wait at the boat and Dariel stood alone with a torch burning in his hand, it seemed the moment had come too quickly. All he had to do was finish it.

Standing with the torch clouding the air of the chamber with black smoke, he pushed himself forward. One step and then another, and then he bent and brought the flame close to the pitch-soaked rope. Even then it was hard. He had to tell himself that this was not the same as on the platforms. He was not Val, going to his death. Nor was he Spratling, a child being orphaned for a second time. He would live through this act, and no souls would be lost by it. Just the opposite. This would save lives. Save souls. Perhaps even his own.

The wick took the flame and bloomed to life. Dariel watched it long enough to verify that it was good, and then he turned and dashed out and down the stone stairs, glad to feel the sea air on his face, unreasoningly gleeful that a vessel full of friends awaited him.

Years before, as he had raced away from the exploding platforms on the black-sailed
Ballan
, he had not looked back. He had feared whatever demon was rising there, all the rage roaring up into the heavens, the hands reaching out toward him. He could not have defined just what frightened him so, for it was many things overlapping, some submerged in memory but no less powerful. This time, he turned. He held the wheel as the prow cut the sea, but he twisted around and watched. The others around him clapped and cheered each explosion, for there were many. Hands grasped and patted joy to him, and he returned it.

What he saw was a plume of white smoke that rose slowly above the concussions of flaming rage. It tilted like a giant, like an enormous tree of ash unfurling into life. It looked wonderful. Peaceful. Thankful.

T
hree days later he beached the Lothan Aklun vessel on a sandspit in a shallow marsh area of Sumerled, just up the throat of a river that the People called Sheeven Lek. He watched as Tunnel directed the others to uncap the last barrel of pitch and let it pour out into the hull of the vessel. They lit it, and it went up fast, with a great
whoosh
that was a monster inhaling and then a burst of warmth that tilted Dariel back on his heels. He did not say a word of protest. No matter how beautiful the lines of the boat and how incredible the power within it, that was stolen power, trapped unwillingly. Enslaved. It could never be his and should be freed. So it was, and he almost felt he could hear the relief of the souls escaping.

And two days after that he met Mór and a small group of the People at the edge of the wilderness. Skylene presented him to her, all of them gathered on a stone slab elevated above the tamed woodlands to the east and the wilds stretching off to the west as far as the eye could see. The wilderness looked like it went on forever. Granite stones ran north to south in great undulating, weather-round ridges, like the crests of waves. At first, Dariel was not sure where to set his eyes: on the abundance of nature or on Mór, beautiful in the full light of the sun. He chose Mór.

Skylene briefed her on all that had happened: the stealing of the boat, the plan to destroy the soul catcher and the success at doing so, and then their destruction of the boat. It was an official report. Dariel knew that Mór would have heard the details already. Still, they all waited through it, Dariel searching for any signs of thoughts behind Mór’s eyes. He could not read her at all. Just looking was a pleasure of sorts, though. Was it because of who she was, or because beneath the shivith spots he saw Wren in the shape of her eyelids and the roundness of her face and the way her cheekbones rose to prominence? Was it Mór he loved looking at, or the lover Mór reminded him of? He really wasn’t sure.

If Mór received the news of the soul catcher’s destruction with any personal emotion she did not show it. She did, however, take Dariel’s hand in hers. She pulled him forward a half step and placed his palm against the center of her chest. “The People praise you,” she said, “and thank you. You have done for us something we had not managed to do in all our years here. You arrived with knowledge we do not possess and used it to aid us. Likely, you cannot know the good you have done, but still I praise you for it.”

Her expression while she said this was as firm as a nanny’s measuring out a disobedient child’s punishment, but after a short pause the corners of her lips—first the right and then the left—and then her cheeks as well tilted into a grin. “It’s a start, at least. We won’t kill you … yet. Come look at this with me.”

The two moved away from the others, climbing the sloping stone, which was coarse underfoot, with granules that crackled and popped free beneath their weight. A flock of long, slim birds flew toward them over the hillocks to the northwest. They were black silhouettes against the reddening sky, until they dropped into shadow and stood out white against the deep green of the trees.

“Beyond here, the land is wild,” Mór said. “The Westlands. It is not unpeopled. Just wild. Beautiful beyond measure. Before the Lothan Aklun arrived, the Auldek tribes had settled portions of it, but their inland cities are ruins now, their cultivated fields reclaimed by forest and jungle.” Her voice had grown conversational in a way it had never been with him before. “The Auldek like to hunt us on their kwedeirs, but there are regions of Ushen Brae that even the hunting parties have never reached. The Auldek are powerful in their way, but they live only on a thin sliver of coastline, afraid of the sea on one side, with a wall against the continent on the other. They were satisfied with that.”