She landed on his head and bounced off again, head over heels forward and down, to land with a yowl in a clump of dark maroon thorns.
The Masked shook his head to clear it, then rolled onto his side and peered up and behind him.
A small stream of dirt and stones were still tumbling over the lip where he'd run off the edge of this gulley and brought some of that edge down with him, four or five times his height down this slope. Into what looked to be a small forest of thornbushes. A thicket, at least. Almost absentmindedly he plucked a groaning Tantaerra off her painful perch among them, then ducked down below them and peered around. It was like looking across a vast but low-ceilinged warehouse, dark thorns above but emptiness studded with thornbush trunks below.
He'd never seen this sort of shrub before, but it looked to be home to nothing but birds. Gnarled, stunted trunks rose out of a drift of brown dead thorns where seemingly nothing grew or lived, a painful, spiky carpet of dried, brittle thorns and old guano. He swept some aside with his hand and beheld bare dirt.
"Come," he told Tantaerra, and started crawling and raking, using his forearms and a dagger. "We'll hide here. Hide, so stop talking."
"Yes, sir," she snarled back, but thereafter said not a word. They crawled along under the dark, dense thornbushes, thrusting aside shed thorns until they reached a little ridge, then a hollow beyond.
The hollow ended in another drop-off, a rocky cliff that looked down on treetops. The Masked decided not to run over that edge.
"So, now," he whispered to Tantaerra. "We rest and wait. Hopefully the Molthuni will weary of the chase."
"Hopefully we'll be made monarchs and showered with gems and coins until we roll around on gleaming hills of them," she whispered back. "Hope is powerful but usually futile, Tarram."
He shrugged. "You have a better plan?"
She gave him a sour look, then settled down on her back, seeking to get comfortable.
And almost instantly fell asleep.
The Masked regarded her with some amusement. Cats and halflings; both could nap just like that.
Well, when it came to it, so could humans-if they were sufficiently exhausted. He yawned. Only his wet, clinging clothing was keeping him from drifting off …
He froze abruptly, and listened hard.
There it was again: a faint rustle, well back behind him, in-there, again-that direction. He got two daggers ready, turned to face the sound, and shifted gently sideways to where the hollow was a little deeper, giving him more room to move in his crouch beneath the thorns.
There. He could see something now, a dark bulk, moving. A human, or at least a four-limbed creature, crawling nearer.
Then the crawler came over a little rise in the ground amid the thornbush trunks, and he knew who it was.
Orivin Voyvik.
The man must have a way of tracking them, some magic or other. The mask?
Or he'd been trailing them all day, skulking along just out of sight, tracking them like a hunter.
Neither alternative was all that reassuring.
The Masked nudged Tantaerra awake with his foot, not letting his gaze leave the approaching man.
The moment he was aware of her bleary-eyed glare, he asked Voyvik grimly, "And what do you want?"
"To recruit you, friend Armistrade. To ask you again to join me, to work toward the dream." Voyvik crawled nearer. "Isn't this a beautiful country?"
"I've not had much leisure to admire or judge its beauties, since last we spoke," The Masked told him. "Too many people have been trying to kill me. Are you going to be one more of them?"
"Now would I be crawling up to your ready daggers if I was?" Voyvik asked, sounding almost petulant. "When I could just take a bow from someone and loose two arrows from back yonder, without all of this hard-on-the-knees travel?"
"Our answer," Tantaerra piped up, "is still no. For now, at least. Are you fleeing those Molthuni too?"
Voyvik shook his head. "More Nirmathi archers persuaded them to prudence. When I saw them last, those few still alive were running back east faster than you were heading in this direction. Giving you some leisure to entertain my offer."
"We want to sleep on it, and ponder. Find us late on the morrow, and ask again," Tantaerra told him crisply. "Now go away."
"But-"
"Go away, or you'll be leaning me into another refusal."
Voyvik shot an entreating look at The Masked, but Tarram curtly pointed him back the way he'd come. "You heard her."
The man with a dream for Nirmathas spread his hands, bowed his head to them, and turned away.
Tantaerra rolled to where she could whisper into The Masked's ear.
"Block his view of me, if he looks back. Stay here."
Before he could reply she was gone, scampering back along the way they'd cleared as swiftly as a bounding rabbit.
The Masked watched her go, and permitted himself a slow smile.
Voyvik just might be in for a surprise.
Luraumadar, the mask commented.
Of course. The Masked quelled a bitter laugh. Luraumadar, indeed.
∗ ∗ ∗
Tantaerra was beyond tired of feeling hounded. Shining dream for Nirmathas or not, she didn't like this Voyvik. He was one of those grinning dungpiles one couldn't trust in the slightest, about anything at all, ever. Infuriatingly cocky, as if the world always bent to his will and he knew it would.
Bastard.
This time, she would skulk and spy and pounce on any small ways she could harass him. She didn't know how, yet, but it was high time for Orivin Voyvik to be unsettled. Perhaps subtly …say, with a sledgehammer.
Tantaerra scuttled to the edge of the thorns, where the eroded cliff side rose like a wall, and slowed to creep onward as stealthily as she knew how, one fat little spider moving along the base of the cliff, listening hard.
Voyvik didn't make much noise at all, but she heard enough to know when he got out from under the thorns and straightened up. Then he turned away from her, took three or four swift steps-probably into cover, between trees-and froze.
She froze, too, listening in silence and waiting patiently for him to move again.
There. Time to scuttle and close the distance between, to lessen his chances of being able to slip away.
She almost ran into his heels as he stopped to listen again, yet managed to sidestep behind a tree trunk just in time.
Thereafter, they moved in unison, Tantaerra matching her movements-and the little noises she inevitably made-to his.
Voyvik cut through a small wood that filled a hollow, then climbed a rocky ridge beyond those trees. From a broad belt of tumbled stones and bushes, it rose to end in a high, sloping rock like the fin of a gigantic shark.
Tantaerra ducked down into a bush, then tucked her feet up. The one good thing about being her size was that you could hide where no human had even the slenderest hope of-
Voyvik stopped, spun around and down into a crouch, then slowly surveyed Nirmathas all around him, in every direction, looking and listening.
There was nothing to hear but the wind stirring leaves, and after a long and rather suspicious listen to them, he rose out of his crouch, turned, and slowly strode up that topmost rock, peering here and there.
He was obviously looking for someone, so Tantaerra stayed right where she was. After all, that someone could be lurking anywhere.
Satisfied at last, Voyvik sat down on the edge of the rock and sighed.
Whereupon the empty air right behind him erupted in a momentary flash of silent swirling sparks, and an old man stood where there'd been nothing at all a moment earlier, wearing robes and dusty black boots.