Promise of Blood

Adamat barely heard as he ran out of the building. He needed to tell Tamas about Charlemund before it was too late.

Chapter 35

Taniel’s chest heaved, his legs ached. A few short hours of rest just before dawn was all they’d taken in the last two days. Only his powder trance let him keep the pace, but he always found himself outdistancing his companions. Two of the Watchers had collapsed from exhaustion. They left them where they were and continued on. Those men would find their own way back down the mountain.

The going was easier than Taniel’s last ascent. Some snow had melted, the rest had been cleared by the Mountainwatch. There’d been some travel between the Mountainwatch and Novi’s Perch for resupply since winter. Campfires and old horse droppings remained from resupply caravans sent to the monastery.

Those didn’t concern Taniel. What concerned him was the more recent passage. They’d yet to catch sight of the Kez, but they’d found two camps. There was scat and tracks enough for at least a hundred men and pack animals to boot. That many men shouldn’t have been able to sneak past the Mountainwatch, yet somehow they had.

They found the third camp midday. It was tucked away off the main trail, down by a waterfall that was still half-frozen despite summer being almost upon them. Taniel checked the ashes of a cook fire. They were still warm.

He took stock of the camp. It brought back memories of camps not so unlike this in faraway Fatrasta when he and the natives tracked Kez patrols and lay ambushes for them. Only that hadn’t been in the high mountains, and those patrols weren’t filled with Privileged. And Wardens.

His chest went cold as he kicked something with his toe. He picked it up, flipped it around in his hand. It was a metal ball just about the size of a man’s fist. An air reservoir from a Warden’s air rifle.

“How far behind them?” Bo asked when the rest of the group had caught up to Taniel. Bo looked less well each day. His cheeks were sunken, his eyes underlined by black bags. Their punishing pace had done him ill.

“Hours,” Taniel said. He tossed Bo the air reservoir. “I should have expected this.”

“Where there are Kez Privileged, there are Wardens,” Bo said.

He dropped the metal sphere, only to have Ka-poel swoop in and pluck it from the ground. She examined it closely and tucked it into her rucksack.

“We’re gaining on them,” Taniel said.

“Close to the top, too,” Bo replied. “We’re not far from Novi’s Perch.”

“Everyone rested?” Taniel asked Fesnik. The young Watcher staggered to the waterfall to refill his canteen.

Fesnik groaned. “Pit, no. We supposed to be able to fight after a climb like this?”

“Fight and win,” Taniel said. He nudged Fesnik with his toe.

“Right, right,” Fesnik said. He climbed to his feet. “Come on,” he called to the others. “We’re moving again.”

Taniel watched them head back to the main trail. These were hard men, Mountainwatchers. Yet none had his advantage with the powder, and even he felt sapped from the climb. What good would they do against Julene and the other Privileged? How could they possibly win a fight?

Taniel fell in beside Ka-poel on the trail. She held a blank-faced wax figurine, pushing and shaping the wax with her fingers.

“What are you doing?” he asked her.

She tucked the doll under one arm. Expecting an explanation of hand signs, Taniel leaned closer. She punched him in the shoulder.

“Ow.”

She shooed him away with one hand and returned to her project. He fell back beside Bo.

Bo looked troubled.

“You seem cheery,” Taniel said. Bo’s expression didn’t change. The sarcasm seemed lost on him.

“We might be too late,” Bo said.

“We’re making better time than I expected.”

“We have to be there during the solstice.”

“Don’t worry,” Taniel said. “We will.” Taniel spotted smoke in the sky. He grabbed Bo’s shoulder and pointed.

“Is that the mountain?” Taniel said. He couldn’t remember being able to see the smoking crater from here on his last journey up.

Bo paled. “No,” he said. “Too close. That’s Novi’s Perch.”

Word spread and they redoubled their efforts. They reached the Perch within an hour.

The wall of the monastery that effectively ended this portion of the trail had been smashed in. It looked like a giant had stepped up to the side of the mountain and simply slapped it with the flat of his hand. Some of the old rock remained where it met the mountain. The rest had fallen away into the abyss and was invisible against the stone of the gulch far, far below. The monastery was exposed like the side of a dollhouse, hallways and stairs bare to the elements.

The ruins lay like a smoking animal carcass, splintered timbers jutting out from the rubble like broken ribs. In some places the rock itself had melted away. The invisible fist that had destroyed a great part of the monastery had also destroyed a chunk of the cliff, and the hallway that led from one end of the monastery to the other was now divided by a fissure twenty paces across.