Chapter 11
Like Sister, Like Brother
“You found her then,” Homsgud muttered darkly, looking about as cheery as the last time I had seen him. We had landed (again, much to my certain belief that the mechanical dragon was going to crash) outside the encamped ‘fort’ and Homsgud had limped out to meet us, along with a gang of several other burly-looking guards.
I could feel the tension high in the air as soon as I set foot on the ochre sands of the Plains. Why aren’t they already breaking camp? I thought as I looked beyond the shoulders of the approaching guards.
“We have our navigator back! We can continue on our mission,” Abioye said in as optimistic a tone as he seemed to be able to manage. There was a mumbled grumble from Homsgud and a snicker from the other guards behind them, and Abioye’s jaw tightened.
Something had happened between them last night, I thought, sensing the way that the guards glanced shiftily between Homsgud and Abioye, not eager to give ground and yet seeming unsure of who had the real authority here.
Well, clearly it was ‘Prince’ Abioye, wasn’t it? I thought. But I had no position in this confrontation, I knew. Homsgud and his cronies would never listen to me anyway—being a lowly Daza slave—and if I were to speak out in favor of Abioye then I would probably only weaken his position—why would he need a servant to defend him?
“Many of the troops are still, uh, resting, sire,” Homsgud said, and the fact that he was currently on one crutch only brought his point home. “And we barely recovered enough ponies to give all the guards a seat…”
“Then get the wagons operational!” Abioye snapped at them, striding forward, straight towards the middle of the group. I took a quick breath, and followed him a little way behind as Abioye continued his orders. “We have enough ponies to pull two wagons, don’t we? Then all the injured can ride on the wagons.”
“It’s not like we have the supplies to load them with anyway…” I heard one of the guards mutter behind our backs. I was sure that Abioye was going to ignore the slur, but to my surprise he spun around, almost bowling me over as he scanned the rest of the guards imperiously.
“Luckily,” he cleared his throat, “we have at our disposal many people who know full well how to survive out here in the Plains.” He jerked his head towards me. “I will expect the Daza to go on hunting trips, every morning at dawn, for the duration of the journey!”
He called it the Plains, I thought—and it made me feel a little proud. Perhaps Abioye didn’t see my home as ‘Empty’ anymore…
“Excuse me, sir—but the last time we tried that it didn’t seem to go very well—” Homsgud spoke up. I saw some of the guards around us start to rile towards Abioye, their eyes sparking with anger, their shoulders squaring.
And Abioye saw it too, apparently, as he reached a gloved hand into his jerkin very carefully and obviously, pulling out something that I hadn’t seen before. It was a pendant, with a gleaming blue Earth-Light crystal held in place. Just like the ones that we had mined for the mechanical dragons, I realized.
Abioye clutched his fist over it, and behind our little group, there was a sudden grinding sound as the gears of the mechanical dragon started to chug and whirr. The thing raised its snout and coughed a sudden belch of thick, oily black smoke as its eyes flared with the same blue light.
“I’m not particularly fond of having my orders questioned, Homsgud,” Abioye said in a low and menacing voice, as the guards around us stepped back, making surreptitious signs with their fingers to avert evil. “I guess you could say I share that trait with my sister…” Abioye added a little more genially.
His words—and the command of the monstrous abomination—had done the trick. Several of the guards shuffled nervously, flushing with shame or fear or both. Not Homsgud though, who just kept his eyes locked onto Abioye’s.
“I was just making an observation, sir,” Homsgud said defiantly, in what was either a stupid or a very foolish move, given the smoking mechanical dragon behind him. “Of course, whatever my lord orders we’ll see gets done—it’s my job to make sure that we can protect ourselves from whomever those raiders were that attacked us yesterday, and the night before…”
“Wrong, Homsgud. It’s my job,” Abioye said, and immediately I saw Homsgud’s trap and Abioye’s error as the guard pulled himself straighter (as much as he was able, leaning over the crutches) and as a small, victorious little smile played on the corner of his mouth.
“I’ll tell the men to have more faith in you, sir,” Homsgud said, and I looked across to see Abioye’s eyes flicker with doubt as he recognized the trap that Homsgud had laid too.
He was making Abioye take responsibility for the raiders, for the storm, for every calamity that had befallen the expedition so far… Even though Abioye had always been the head of the expedition, I could see how he had kept himself a little removed from the soldiers and had left it to Homsgud to ensure the ‘guarding’ of our little group against wild animals and threat.
Now that Abioye had stepped up and taken direct responsibility—then as soon as anything happened that endangered the expedition, then Homsgud would use it as a weapon against him. Perhaps it would even be enough to provoke a full-scale mutiny next time.
“See that you do,” Abioye said irritably, turning around and stalking forward, before his voice returned, imperious and cold and sounding chillingly like his sister, “Come here, navigator! I need you to tell me the route ahead!” he barked.
“Yes sir,” I picked up my feet and hurried after the Lord D’Lia.
“The man’s a slug!” Abioye growled as soon as I got to his side, and we marched towards the fort that Homsgud and the others had built. “Did you know, that just last night, he advised me to abandon you to the Red Hounds?” He shook his head in outrage.
“He did?” I wasn’t particularly surprised. But I was surprised that Abioye felt so strongly about it.
He stood up for me, I thought, and the knowledge made me feel a little nervous and my heart thump just a little faster.
“This Sea of Mists—how far is it?” Abioye’s eyes looked beyond the encampment to the distant horizon. “We’ll have to travel on foot, and I don’t know for how much longer that I can keep dancing around Homsgud like that…”
“No more than a day, I think,” I guessed.
“Just thank the stars that Homsgud and the others are too damn stupid to realize that I could no more have got that mechanical dragon to attack them as if I wanted it to rain fish from the sky!” Abioye stopped suddenly and breathed a deep sigh.
What? I thought. “You couldn’t?” Now that he had brought my mind to it, my eyes went to the Earth-Light pendant that hung around his neck, no longer glowing with a bluish light anymore. The very sight of it made me feel nervous in an entirely different way. It was a tool of the enemy.
“No!” Abioye said a little too loudly. “The mechanical dragons require fuel and Earth Lights, I was just relying on the fact that its harnesses were still running warm…”
“But that thing controls it all the same?” I thought of Inyene’s scepter, made of many encrusted Earth Lights and metal, made by none other than Montfre himself—back when he had believed in what Inyene had been doing.