Lauren Haney - Path of Shadows

“No!” Suemnut yelled. “You can’t go after him. It’s too near nightfall and you don’t know the mountain.”

Bak slowed his pace, torn between common sense and a desire to snare the attacker.

“Come back!” Suemnut yelled.

Snapping out a curse, much against his wishes, Bak or dered the men back. Though he had not had a good look at the man with the sling, his basic physical appearance was too familiar to ignore. He had to be the watching man. The man who had, less than two weeks earlier, tried to entice him and

Nebre into an ever more confusing landscape, where they might well have become lost, where they could easily have died from lack of food and water.

Bak plodded down the trail behind Suemnut, seething with fury. The man he sought had an uncanny ability to choose a place and time that would give him the advantage.

Bak had vowed to snare him, and he knew he would, but when and how?

The path was no longer as difficult as it had been, but each step he took jolted the bruise on his thigh, making it ache with the intensity of an open wound. A dark lump had formed and was beginning to extend downward, blood spreading below the skin from the injury. To make matters worse, the day had been long and he was tired and hungry.

The deepening shadows of the peaks to the east were spread ing across the landscape, harbingers of night. At least the heat of the day was waning.

“There you are, sir.” Suemnut stopped and pointed almost straight down.

Bak looked upon the wadi below with mixed emotions. He thanked the gods that their goal had shown itself at last, but it looked impossibly far away. Huge slopes of broken red sand stone fanned out below them. A thin pale line traversing the lower incline marked the path to the wadi floor. Acacia trees sent long, late-evening shadows across the broad strip of bur nished sand, which meandered away between high reddish hills, maybe spurs of the mountain of turquoise.

“We’re not far from the nearest slope of fallen rock,” the sergeant said. “After we reach that, it’s simply a matter of placing one foot in front of the other.”

The troops who had passed them by, physically fit and ac customed to the descent, were nowhere in sight. Bak as sumed they had gone around a shoulder of the mountain or had descended into a ravine and would reappear on the path below. Or they might have already reached the wadi and walked on to Huy’s camp. A depressing thought considering the distance he and his companions still had to travel.

With a quick glance backward to be sure the men for whom he was responsible were keeping up, Suemnut walked on. Bak also looked back. Psuro was close behind, walking with Nebre, trying to convince him that even if they had gone after the man with the sling, they could not have caught him.

The Medjay, furious at having to let him slip away yet an other time, wore a scowl that would have sent fear into the heart of the lord Set himself. Bak, who felt no less angry, sympathized.

Bak sat on a thick pillow stuffed with straw, his leg stretched out before him in the faint hope that he could ease the pain in his thigh. No amount of pampering would heal the injury, he knew. Only time would erase the ghastly black bruise and the constant nagging ache.

Lieutenant Huy, eager for another game of senet, had urged him to accept the pillow. Now the officer sat on a stool on the opposite side of the game board, setting up the playing pieces. As before, he had taken the blue spools for himself and had given Bak the white cones. Lieutenant Nebamon sat on a rock, his back to the wall of the rough stone structure

Huy and his scribe used as a dwelling and office. His face was hidden in shadow, while the light of the torch mounted on the wall behind him illuminated the game board and the two men preparing to play. A yellow dog lay at Nebamon’s feet, twitching and moaning in its sleep.

Bak allowed Huy to take three of his pieces before he asked, “How many men who toil here are nomads?”

“Twenty or twenty-five. They labor atop the mountain, carrying away waste taken from the mines, helping in the quarries, and performing any number of other tasks that are easy to learn and require physical strength rather than wit or talent.”

Huy studied the pieces on the game board. Blind to an opening Bak had given him, he made an ineffectual move. A partially smothered chortle escaped from Nebamon’s lips.

If Huy noticed, he gave no hint. “Three women and their children remain in this camp to care for the livestock we keep, while their men toil on the mountain.” He studied the board, then nodded his satisfaction. “You’ll have noticed that any number of nomads come and go, seeking to trade or to cadge some small item they need.”

Bak was forced to take the spool Huy had moved. “Do any men come from the Eastern Desert?”

“Not many,” Huy said, blinking surprise that he had lost a piece, “and they seldom remain for long.” With his mouth tight and determined, he moved another spool. “The local men look to us as a source of wealth. They resent sharing with outsiders.”

“Are any here now?”

“Possibly. My scribe would know.”

“All who wish to toil at the mines report to the scribe when they arrive,” Nebamon explained. “Each day a man remains, his foreman makes a mark on a shard. When he’s ready to leave, the shard goes to the scribe and he gives the nomad a token to deliver to the port for payment in kind.”

Bak muttered an oath. A man could pass through the camp and climb the mountain of turquoise without ever report ing his presence. An individual from the Eastern Desert, shunned by one and all, might come and go virtually unno ticed or, more likely, would be looked upon as invisible. He was willing to wager a month’s rations that the man with the sling had walked in and out without so much as attracting a glance.

Bak lost the game by a narrow margin and insisted Neba mon play the next. He found losing to be much more difficult than winning. Offering the caravan officer the pillow, he moved to the rock. The dog woke up, curled into a tight ball, and went back to sleep with a grunt of contentment.

While the officers played, Bak’s thoughts turned to the at tack earlier in the day and to the man who had used the sling.

The watching man, he felt sure. Had someone in User’s party told him they meant to come to the mountain of turquoise?

Or had he simply followed them, with no one noticing? His knowledge of the wadis and mountains on this side of the sea was especially puzzling. While Bak and his Medjays were tied by their ignorance of the land and its people to the cara van and the army, as were User and his party, their foe trav eled with no such constraints. How did he manage?

The question turned Bak’s thoughts to Minnakht. He had vowed to stay close, but had he? Bak thought about the man he had met in the Eastern Desert, the man he had heard so much about through the last few weeks. A man of courage who traveled the barren land undeterred by adversity. One who… suddenly, without conscious intent, a new idea leapt into his heart, a thought that would not be dislodged.

“Do you know of a place nearby where a man might find wa ter, where he could stay alone and undisturbed by other men?”

“Where you find water, you’ll find nomads.” Huy’s voice was curt, agitated. “Women and children bringing their flocks to drink. Sometimes a man or two.”

Realizing something was wrong, Bak glanced at the senet board. Nebamon had taken more than half his fellow officer’s pieces.

“The closest spring is at the copper mines west of here,” the caravan officer said, capturing another spool.

Bak did not know if Nebamon’s thoughts were elsewhere or if he believed Huy had had enough pampering for one night. “I’m seeking a more solitary place, one where a man might slip out of sight should nomads bring their flocks.”