Claudja and Towsan were sitting at the rear end of the raft with their backs to her, which was strange. Tilda turned around. Three bullywugs were poling along while a few others still slept. Dugan was relaxing on top of one crate with his back to another, comfortable and calm.
No one else was on board. There was a pile of armor and swords on the front raft, along with some boots. There was blood all over the planks.
“What…?” Tilda gasped. Dugan looked over and nodded at her.
“The man on watch fell asleep. The wugs cut their throats and rolled them overboard.”
Tilda stared at him.
“When?”
Dugan shrugged. “Don’t know. The Duchess let me sleep through.”
Claudja had stood and walked over. She had tired bags under her eyes but her features were set and calm.
“You…you saw it?” Tilda asked, and Claudja nodded.
“Six of the wugs crept up on them together. In unison. It was quick.”
Tilda looked around at the wugs. They had been on the raft for more than a tenday and in that time Tilda had come to regard the creatures as harmless, and almost comical. Alien, certainly, but in no way threatening.
“Why would they do that?” Tilda asked. Claudja answered in a low voice.
“They are Magdetchoi, Tilda. Monsters.”
Dugan chuckled, and it was not a pleasant sound.
“Not like us humans, right?”
Tilda looked back at the front raft. It was amazing how much blood had come out of six men and she almost felt sick.
“How exactly do we know they are not going to do the same to us? Why haven’t they already?”
“Because,” said the Duchess of Chengdea. “They do know who I am.”
Claudja went back over to Towsan and Tilda tried not to let her gaze drift back to the stained red planks of the raft ahead. Dugan was still looking at her.
“I know what you are thinking,” he said, and Tilda turned to him. “You are wondering why, if the wugs were going to do the fellows all along, why they waited for a watchman to doze on the second night. Nobody kept a watch the night before.”
“I was not thinking that,” Tilda said, and blinked. “But I am now.”
Dugan gave a smile that was no more pleasant than his dark chuckle, and sent a meaningful glance toward the Duchess before turning back to Tilda.
“And you wonder why I don’t trust nobles.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
The river which emptied into the Norothian Channel at Souterm was called the Red at its delta, but where it arose in the Girding Mountains far to the north it was known as the Blue. The name changed where the river cut through a ridge of chalky hills that stained its waters. The hills were also called the Red and they stabbed knife-like deep into the Vod Wilds on an east-west line, rising above the tangled masses of life that thrived there. The section of the Red Hills west of the river on the Codian side was much smaller, hardly amounting to a knob on the end of the blade’s hilt. It was on this knob that the Codian town of Galdeez had been, or rather was still in the process of being, built.
There had been a town on those hills for centuries but it had long been a sleepy place far upriver from the thriving city now known as Souterm, a place to where the products of rural farms were gathered to ship downstream. With the Codification of Doon forty years ago and the extension of the Imperial Post Road the town was now a booming place, with new shops and homes springing up on the hills so swiftly that several proposed sites for city walls had been consecutively overrun. The wall was not a priority for despite the proximity of the Vod Wilds, Magdetchoi raids here were few as the river cut through the hills in a sharp, deep channel that was almost a canyon.
The spot where the Imperial authorities had allowed the Shugak to erect a ferry dock and a cluster of hide tents in which they did the business of selling passes and licenses was below the hills and to the south. Nesha- tari’s band did not have to enter Red Galdeez at all, much to their leader’s relief. At her direction Zebulon Baj Nif handled the transaction for passes with the hulking hobgoblins, while Phoarty and Amatesu went ahead into town only to buy provisions for what would be around two additional weeks on the rough Shugak road.
There were no swamps nor bayous in this region of the Vod Wilds, only the hills across which hobgoblins had hacked out a trace road through the wilderness. The trace was so bad that even the baggage cart was problematic, for the obstinate straight-line route dropped and climbed hills without an awful lot of forethought. The group was obliged to spread the baggage in heavy packs among them. Zeb got the worst of it as the Minauan now carried his crossbow, a massive weapon with a heavy hand crank for reloading. The bolts it shot were the size of long tent stakes, making even the ammunition a burden.
Despite the ruggedness of their way the group made decent time as Nesha-tari set a brisk place, continuing to march out in front. When they camped at night she went well out into the thick forests at the base of the hills to sleep on her own, typically high in a tree. Shugak hobgoblins selling water for wine prices along the way warned against straying from the path, but not even Uriako Shikashe made much of a fuss when she went out by herself. The samurai seemed to recognize that in her present state Nesha-tari Hrilamae was likely the most dangerous thing in the darkness of the Wilds.
Zeb and Phin made the journey mostly in silence for even with Nesha-tari keeping her distance, and knowing what they now did about her, both could still feel the tug of her presence. They tried to look at their feet while walking, but several times one or the other took a spill as their gaze drifted up and settled dreamily on the flitting beige figure far ahead on the rough trace. The other would help the fallen one up, and the two would exchange a long look and shake their heads.
Phin had worries about Camp Town. Once there he was set to separate from the rest of the group, and to leave Nesha-tari. Thinking about it made his palms clammy, and his breathing quickened until he felt lightheaded. Abverwar had given the wizard a disciplined mind, but the woman (if that was the right word) had invaded it. Phin’s morning meditations were becoming ever longer by the day, for it was an effort for him to muster the concentration necessary to memorize his spells. Only the hard, physical effort of the march on the Shugak trace gave Phin any relief, for he collapsed so exhausted at the end of each day that his sleep was as deep as the dead. So deep that not even the dreams roused him from it, though there were a lot of dreams. They were all about the same thing.
Phin was starting to think he might have to ask Amatesu to club him unconscious again before he would be able to let Nesha-tari walk out of his life.
*
After nine days the trace road left the Red Hills, or rather the hills sank into marshy ground while the trace continued straight across it. This was only possible because suddenly, for miles, a wide causeway ran above the fens to either side, lying on a true line due east. The causeway was surely not the work of the hobgoblins for in places the grass growing over it had been so trampled by adventurers over the last months that the dirt had given way, revealing a stone road made up of many different types of rocks all fitted together as smoothly as the finest city street. None who noticed it in passing thought it could have been the work of anyone other than the ancient Ettaceans, the Builders of Vod’Adia toward which the road led.
A day later the causeway ended at a new line of hills, and only the rude trace road marked the route again. This range in the midst of the Wilds was if anything worse than the Red Hills, with steeper sides and sharper peaks giving little purchase for plants and thus a greater air of desolation. For more long days the path rose and fell though in at least three places there were signs that a higher road had once existed here, for a rubble of ingeniously cut stones that had once been the supports of bridges cluttered the bottoms of deep gulches through which the trace ran.
