“You could try…” the captain of the Red Hounds said, his voice lowering as he stepped farther back and back, his hands held out in front of him.
He’s up to something, I thought, as Abioye prepared to lunge forward.
“Wait!” I said, just as Nol Baggar moved in a fast flicker, raising his hand to his mouth and blowing repeatedly on a small whistle.
“He’s signaling to the others!” I shouted, jumping to grab Abioye’s shoulder and dragging him backwards.
“Hey!” the young lordling called out—but it was clear just what the danger was. There were already shapes converging out of the mists behind Nol Baggar. The dark, cloaked shapes of more of the Red Hounds, summoned by their captain’s whistle.
“Abioye! We have to go!” I pulled again on Abioye’s shoulder, as the sounds of fighting around the mechanical dragon were becoming more and more the sounds of screaming.
“I can’t leave the dragon!” Abioye said, resisting my attempts to drag him out of the oncoming danger.
Leave the dragon!? I could have screamed. If I hadn’t already dropped the wooden pole when I hit the dirt, then I probably would have hit him over the head with it and hauled his body into the fenland myself!
“Never mind your sister’s damned dragon!” I shouted. “Think about your damned people!”
The anger and scorn in my voice must have finally reached him, as Abioye shook his head and looked around—at Nol Baggar glowering as a half-circle of Red Hounds slowly spread out around us, and at the dark forms on the earth that could only be bodies…
The realization spread physically through his body in an awful tremor, before he suddenly bellowed,
“Retreat! Save yourselves!” Then he let me grab him by his unencumbered hand and we went running, staggering, into the thick fogs of the Sea of Mists…
“After them!” Nol Baggar shouted behind us as we ran into the dark.
Well—not so much running, more sloshing. With every other bounding step I took, my feet sank into the thick, grasping mud of the fenland. The only benefit to this was that our pursuers were also experiencing the same problem that we were.
“Gah!”
“I’m stuck—help!!”
The voices behind us sounded more panicked than I was—although my heart was still racing as I tried my best to flee. Whatever skills that the Red Hounds had at navigating the mud slicks of the Sea of Mists—I reminded myself that I belonged out here on the Plains, with all of its dangerous and strange landscapes. I could do better than they could. I had to.
The Sea of Mists were thick and cloying around us, keeping us in a permanent bubble of opaque white that forever showed only the ground a couple of meters ahead of us. I did my best to leap from the reedy tufts and hummocks of the land and avoid the darker black patches of mud—but slipping was inevitable. It was more luck than any sort of tracking that we didn’t hit one of the deeper muddy tar pits where you could sink without a trace.
“Keep in my footsteps!” I pulled at Abioye’s hand as I moved, gritting my teeth as I forced myself to think about my movements. There was no way that we could just flee into the night in this landscape. You have to be clever. I could hear the words of my mother, the Imanu, clearly in the back of my mind. She hadn’t been talking about the Sea of Mists of course—she had given me that advice on my first hunting trip with her, and it had seemed to apply to everything about the Plains.
‘The Plains will take care of you, if you listen to it,’ I could hear her saying, ‘but it’ll also kill you, if you let it…’
I have to be smart, I told myself, slowing down even further until I could see the shapes on the ground that much easier.
“Narissea…!” I heard Abioye’s worried whisper behind me, as the voices of our pursuers only grew louder and closer.
“Shhh!” I held up my hand to his chest, before whispering. “Trust me! This can’t be a chase. This has to be a hunt.”
Even in the dark I could guess the look of confusion that must be on Abioye’s face as he would surely be wondering what on earth I meant. It didn’t matter if he understood or not—only that he did what I said, as I slowed to a fast walk, lightly moving from one patch of more solid ground to the next.
“We’ll never find them in this!” one of the Red Hounds said, so close that it sounded like they could only be a few meters away. But sound traveled strangely out here, didn’t it? There was no way of telling just where they were—and no way of them knowing where we were, either…
I have to listen to this place. I have to treat it like I was hunting it, I thought as I studied the ground, letting this place speak to me—because running blindly wasn’t how you lived in this part of the fens. The creatures in the Sea of Mists didn’t run; they flew or picked their way slowly between places, hiding.
“Keep searching!” Nol Baggar’s voice rose through the fogs, more muted and farther away perhaps. “They can’t have gone far!”
No, we hadn’t, I thought. There were still the rest of the Daza somewhere behind us—and I couldn’t just abandon them to the fens. I thought if we could hide and lose our pursuers, then maybe we could loop back to find them…
But first, we had to survive, and to survive in this place, you had to act as the creatures who lived here did, I told myself, hunkering down and pulling on Abioye’s hand to do the same. There was a particularly tall stand of reeds and a couple of rocks that we crouched by, and I showed Abioye how to pull his cloak around him as much as he could, to break up the shape of his human limbs, and cut the gleam of his scabbard and belt. I had no such cloak unfortunately, so I settled for huddling and wrapping my arms around my knees.
We waited, and for one terrifying moment there appeared to be mercenaries all around us as I could hear the heavy slurps of mud and muttered curses. I breathed shallowly, huddled against Abioye. I could see that he was nervous, his eyes wide as he shifted a little in his crouch, his hand tight on his sword hilt.
“No.” I breathed the words, earning a look and a nod from Abioye as the voices of the Red Hounds started to fade, moving off.
I waited for still longer before I was sure that they were heading away from our location…
“Okay,” I whispered, slowly rising from my crouch—
“Hyurk!” Just as one of the Red Hound mercenaries stumbled into me, sending us both sprawling into the mud.
“I got them!” the man shouted, thrashing around with his sword as he struggled to get back up to his feet. Suddenly, there were more shouts from around us as lanterns and torches flared in the fog, and the sound of hurrying bodies were coming towards us.
Dammit! “Run!” I grabbed Abioye’s hand once more and jumped into the mists yet again, my earlier hesitation forgotten as I prayed to whatever star or deity might be listening that I wouldn’t lead us both foot-first into a mud pit…
Ymmen? Even my thoughts felt tired as I took another faltering step in the dark. I didn’t know how long the sounds of pursuit had followed us, but it had seemed like every time that I had been tempted to hunker down and hide—then the hue and cry had started up again with renewed vigor.