He may not have achieved his initial aim—he had carved a life for himself as a Senior Clerk in a frontier town in the Middle Kingdom, not an ambassador or a speaker—but he had helped our tribe innumerable times with disputes and trade agreements. When Inyene had started her campaign of ‘lawful’ indenture (oh, how I hated those words!) then Tamin had apparently become one of the main defenders of our cases.
Which is why Inyene cooked up some reason to throw him down the Mines of Masaka.
But we had escaped, hadn’t we? I thought as he folded me in his wiry arms, arms that were still alive with a core of strength, but were far diminished from the giant of a man that I had known in my youth.
“I am so glad to see you,” he said as we broke from our hug, both with tears in our eyes. “What happened? Montfre said that he could understand some of what the dragon was saying—that there had been some kind of attack, and that Abioye was injured, and that you were captured…?” He looked at me with clear worry in his eyes as he searched my face, doubtless looking for the telltale signs of trauma or injury.
“I’m fine, Uncle, really—I’m fine,” I said, before my voice wavered. “The other Daza might not be so fortunate however.” I took a deep breath.
“Wait, there is food and warmth at the oasis. Let us sit and eat and tell our tales in greater comfort,” murmured the younger man with the white hair beside us. Montfre, the would-be dragon mage of Torvald, had been tricked into being one of Inyene’s indentured servants many years ago. It was he who had come up with the way to enchant the simple mechanical automata—children’s toys, really—that had been the inspiration for Inyene’s mechanical, draconic monsters.
“Montfre,” I said warmly, and he accepted a brief hug from me. He was a young man—of around my age and Abioye’s—but he had also been scarred by Inyene’s incarceration. He had that same haunted, shadowed look that every Daza slave had—and what I think that any imprisoned person, left alone with their own hopelessness, had.
But, the mage was looking far stronger than he had been when I last saw him—that had been that night in Inyene’s Keep, when he had taken the blame for killing Dagan Mar and the guards, letting Inyene’s household see him before fleeing with Ymmen.
Our eyes met for a moment in somber recognition of what had happened, and what he had done. He had saved my life.
“Food is an excellent idea,” Tamin said with a broad grin, leading the way back through the trees, as Ymmen jumped into the air, telling us that he would meet us on the inside of the tree cover.
The oasis was large, and I had an idea that it was probably one called Yelda’s Refuge in our stories. If it was, it was one of the largest oases nearest to the Sunset Mountains. As we walked, the green of the vegetation around us started to show, and shafts of light split the canopy. I walked into the dawn, and arrived at the cool mere of a large, circular oasis, where Ymmen was calmly hunkered at the water’s edge and drinking from its surface.
“Ooof.” I let out a low murmur. I had forgotten how beautiful the Plains were, in all of my rush of marching across the hot and dry lands as a ‘Navigator’.
“Yes, this is a good place,” Tamin agreed with a nod of his head, as Montfre hung back.
There was already a bonfire lit, and it burned with a cheery crackle. Tamin, it appeared, had gathered fish in that Daza way of always storing and collecting what would be needed, and he quickly set them to roasting. As I sat down by the water and the fire’s edge, I realized then that Ymmen had been right—I had needed this.
Tamin made small words as he worked, commenting on this fish or that—on how the fire needed stoking or dampening. Montfre, for his part sat down a little way off from me and said nothing. I realized then how lucky I was, in having friends and family like these. They realized how tough it must be, inside the expedition, and they allowed me my space to unwind.
Very slowly, I started to feel a long-held knot of tension start to loosen a little. Not unwind completely—after all, we had much to do yet, but I felt just a little more like myself.
“We were attacked,” I began, as Tamin brought to us roasted fish, wrapped in leaves from the nearby Spindle Tree that added a tang of lemon to the meal.
“Hm,” Tamin urged me on as we all ate, pulling at the succulent flesh with burning fingers.
I started to recount everything that had happened to me over the last two days—from the sandstorm to Homsgud rounding on me, to first meeting Nol Baggar and losing half of the map—and then my eventual capture and loss of the entire map.
“And now, Nol Baggar and his Red Hounds have at least eight or nine of our fellow Daza held captive,” I ended bitterly. “And they know the stories that will lead them to the Stone Crown.”
“Red Hounds?” Tamin looked up at me sharply. “Did you say Red Hounds?”
I nodded that I did.
My god-uncle pulled a face. “Then, I am sorry to say that perhaps it is worse than even you feared. I have heard of these Red Hounds before—”
“As have I.” Montfre cleared his throat, gazing out into the water. “Inyene hired them, many years ago—and she would complain that they were too expensive,” he said, his brow furrowing.
Is that it? I sensed a story here, and when Montfre raised his eyes to meet my questioning look, I saw that he understood my need to know.
“They were the guards hired at the time of the alchemists’ disappearance,” he said abruptly, and needed to say no more.
I knew that Montfre had once been high in Inyene’s favor, as he had worked on whatever she had wished, eager to please the woman who had raised him and his Torvald family from poverty. She had led him down ever more arcane and strange pursuits of study, at the same time as her entourage had moved from this place to that. The would-be mage had told me himself that he had not understood what it was that Inyene had been building up to, but looking back, every season in their lives had seemed like another step on the pursuit to her current goaclass="underline" ascending to the High Throne of the Middle Kingdom, and using it to announce herself as the rightful ruler of the Old High Kingdom—the one that united all three North, Middle, and Southern lands.
It was a total fantasy on her part of course, but it appeared that Inyene would stop at nothing to achieve it.
The mage Montfre had shared with me a little of his story when I had freed him from Inyene’s captivity. After his developments with the enchanted model dragons (no bigger than alley cats, at the time), Inyene had then urged him to start investigating crystal lore—and especially that pertaining to Earth Lights.
She had acquired teams of alchemists and scholars to help in the scientific study of the strange, light-collecting, glowing crystals—but they were to be in her employ only a short time, it seemed… As soon as the mage Montfre had discovered a way to use the power of the rare Earth Lights themselves to enliven the mechanical toys—that very night—all of the alchemists and scholars vanished, never to be seen again.
“You don’t think…?” I said, to which Montfre shrugged.
“I cannot say, only that they were hired for that ‘festival weekend,’” he said the words caustically, “and, while I was allowed to leave our compound, when I returned—they were all gone. Each and every man and woman of them, and Inyene announced the next day that I was to lead the next development of her project.”
I nodded, although my heart was churning in horror at what he had said. I knew that from there, as soon as Montfre had realized that Inyene was attempting to build a cohort of mechanical dragons, he had destroyed his workshop and would have destroyed the control staff that he had made for her, had Inyene not subdued him and incarcerated him. For years.