Nine to the right, all in a clump, and only three to the left. One more needed on the right; but instead, a mob of seven flew left while the right side stayed clear. He followed the seven; six of them carried on but one peeled off, circled behind him and came back in on the right. Monach sighed. Did that one count, or would it constitute cheating? He shrugged. The way things were going with him, if he'd decided to flip a coin instead the wretched thing would probably have ended up landing on its edge.
Just to be awkward he went down the track, realising after a few yards that it was probably a mistake. After all, Shance was on the top of a hill, so didn't it stand to reason that he'd have to go uphill to get there? Unfortunately it wasn't quite as simple as that. He'd been going uphill whenever possible for a long time now, several hours at least, and where was he? Lost.
But he carried on nonetheless, and was rewarded by a sudden violent change in gradient. No question about it, he was going uphill now, for sure. This was promising, even if he did have to stop and lean against a tree for a few moments to catch his breath. The comforting width and straightness of the trail was reassuring too, a trail that gave every sign of knowing where it was going. Or coming from.
But it wasn't in any hurry. Once again he lost track of how long he'd been walking, and he couldn't help thinking that Shance Hill hadn't looked anything like this high or steep when he'd seen it in the distance from the road that morning. He was wondering whether it wouldn't be better after all to give up and retrace his steps when he came round a corner and saw a house.
Not just a shack or a shed, a real house, with a chimney and a porch, large enough to be a farmhouse or something of the sort. Better still, there was a cart outside, conspicuous in the small bald patch immediately surrounding the building. Monach got closer, and was rewarded with the sight of four horses tethered to a rail. It looked very much as though somebody was at home.
He knocked at the door-oak, grey with age but hanging straight and recently scraped clean of moss and lichen-but nothing happened. He couldn't quite understand that; the horses hadn't got there by themselves and tied their halters to a post, so it stood to reason that whoever had brought them here was still in the immediate vicinity. He pushed the door gently with the edge of his left hand, waited for a moment in case there was an ambush or booby trap, and walked quietly inside.
Ah, he said to himself, that would explain it.
There were two people sitting in chairs on opposite sides of a table, a man and a woman. The man had been killed by a single thrust to the heart, and was lolling backwards, his arms hanging down parallel with the legs of the chair. The woman's skull had been split by a square-on overhead cut, delivered with a sharp weapon and a lot of force. He recognised them as the god in the cart and his priestess, the two frauds he'd interrogated in the prison at Sansory.
Well, they weren't going to tell him the way out of the wood. He sighed, and made a closer examination. From the tone and texture of the dead flesh, not to mention the smell, he reckoned they'd been dead for two or three days, just conceivably longer since the house was more than a little chilly In which case that cart might well be their cart, but those horses weren't their horses, or if they were, someone else had fed and exercised them recently. Monach frowned. There was a reasonable chance that this mystery was nothing to do with him, and he certainly didn't have time to indulge his curiosity. On the other hand, if these two characters were spies or agents who'd been masquerading as frauds (a thoroughly unsuitable cover, but possible, and the manner of their deaths suggested something other than robbery or mere dislike), they might turn out to be very relevant indeed. Or not. He found he wanted very badly to know who'd been looking after the horses.
It was also curious, to say the least, that they were sitting facing each other, since the wounds that had killed them were the sort almost invariably inflicted from in front, and the table didn't look ferocious enough to have killed both of them before either of them had a chance to run away. Deliberately propping up dead bodies in chairs so as to give someone else a shock, or a warning? Monach shook his head. There was a lot of evidence to be read here, but he wasn't in the mood.
A horse, on the other hand, would come in handy. He shut the door quietly behind him and headed across the clearing into the trees, then made his way round in a circle through the briars and saplings and other tiresome undergrowth to a point where he could watch the horses for a while; the concept of bait was floating about in his mind, and he wasn't in such a tearing hurry as all that.
True, he'd had an exhausting time of it lately and not nearly enough sleep, but his first reaction, on waking up with a crick in his neck and one leg completely numb, was self-disgust and shame. That was quickly followed by fear; he'd been woken up by the sound of something coming towards him through the wood, and with his right leg asleep he couldn't move. Everything wrong, he told himself resentfully, all my fault. Of all the stupid things to happen He'd managed to crawl-hobble a few yards towards the edge of the wood when it occurred to him that he was going in the wrong direction. Out in the open, he'd be even more vulnerable, unless he had time to get to one of the horses-but even if he did make it that far, how was he proposing to get on the creature's back with one leg out of commission? He stopped, leaning against a tree as the pins and needles surged up his leg as far as his groin. He couldn't face going back, directly towards whatever was making the noise (more than one of it, whatever it was). Going forward didn't appeal. Staying put was very probably a bad idea too, but he didn't feel up to anything else. He closed his eyes and begged for it all to have been a dream.
They came out of the undergrowth around him as if by magic, like fish jumping up through the mirror surface of a still lake; eight men, armed. 'Where the hell have you been?' one of them asked.
Monach slumped a little against the tree he was standing by. 'I could ask you the same question,' he said. 'I got fed up waiting for you, so I set off on my own. Bloody fine back-up squad you turned out to be.'
They were, of course, sword-monks, eight of the ten men he'd chosen specially for the job of tracking down and killing the commander-in-chief of an imperial field army. He'd posted their orders on the chapter door two hours before he was due to leave, and they hadn't shown up. Now, apparently, they were here, having followed his trail and tracked him down in the depths of this impenetrable wood, where even he hadn't a clue where he was. He couldn't help feeling impressed. 'All right,' he said, 'we'll go into all that later. Which way is Shance?'
One of them grinned. 'You mean to say you're lost?'
'Yes,' Monach admitted, tentatively pressing the sole of his foot on the ground and wincing. 'And we're very short on time.' He paused. 'Do any of you know anything about the two dead bodies in that house?'
One of the monks shook his head. 'We've only just got here,' he said.
'Oh.' He thought for a moment. 'You three, you're coming with me. Get that cart spanned in, and you'd better know the quickest way to Shance. The rest of you, follow on as quick as you can. And keep your eyes open; somebody killed a man and a woman, possibly spies, in there; those are probably their horses.'
'Our spies or theirs?' one of the monks asked.
'Haven't a clue,' Monach replied (define ours; define theirs). 'Don't get sidetracked, mind; if you see them, keep out of their way, that's all. Understood?'