Maggie Furey - Sword of Flames

“Stand clear!” Yanis called softly from above, breaking into Zanna’s train of thought. She barely had time to step back quickly, before two heavy packs (much to his indignation, Zanna, discovered, they had refused to let Vannor carry one) came hurtling down from above to be caught by Benziorn. The Nightrunner leader followed, easing the grating back into place before scrambling swiftly down the ladder.

“Done it!” he said cheerfully. “It wasn’t so bad after all, getting here—though I must admit that my heart was in my mouth when that patrol came by and you pretended to be drunk, Vannor, and we made out that we were carrying you home.” As Yanis spoke, Zanna caught the flash of his smile in the lamplight, and was consumed by a surge of irritation. How could the idiot be so complacent? They still had to get through the sewers yet—and in the meantime what about poor Tarnal, who’d been risking his life out in the open? What if he hadn’t been able to find a boat? What if he was lying out there somewhere in the darkness, hurt—or even dead? With a shudder, Zanna turned her mind away from such appalling thoughts. He’d be all right, she told herself firmly. Tarnal, at least, had sense.

Wearied as Vannor was from his long journey through the city streets, he had no desire to linger in the sewers a minute longer than he had to. So on they went, with Zanna lending a supporting arm to Hebba and carrying her basket while Benziorn helped the merchant. Yanis, who was most familiar with the route, took both of the packs and went ahead with the lantern down the dank and dripping tunnel.

How Zanna hated those sewers! Though her second long journey beneath the city was proving less difficult than the first, she still had to deal with the stench, the slime, and the scuttling, squeaking rats—not to mention Hebba’s hysterics on account of the latter, which nearly plunged the pair of them, more than once, from the slippery walkway into the slurry-filled channel. Since they were already at the level of the river, there was no climbing to be done, though there were some tricky places to negotiate where the walkway narrowed at the junctions of tunnels. Nonetheless, their progress seemed painfully slow to Zanna, for Vannor was reaching the end of his endurance and had to stop and rest more and more frequently as time went on.

Just as she was beginning to give up hope of ever seeing daylight again, she caught a waft of fresher air, fragrant with the pungent mixture of wet grass and wild garlic. Zanna’s tired heart lifted within her. At last, they were coming to the end of this dreadful place! Within moments they had reached the sewer outlet, and she had time for one deep breath and a rapid glimpse of jeweled stars caught in a black net of tree-tops before Yanis pulled her quickly down the bank and into the shelter of the willows. In the darkness beneath the trees she could hear her father cursing softly, with a desperate edge of worry to his voice. Immediately, Zanna realized what had happened, and her blood turned to ice within her veins. Tarnal was not there to meet them!

By the time she turned her attention back to her surroundings, Yanis was speaking. “Well, it’s no good us waiting here, this close to the city walls. Trust Tarnal to go and mess things up! I should have gone myself. Vannor, can you carry on a little farther tonight? Maybe if we can somehow make it down to Norberth in easy stages, we can steal a boat from the port…”

Already his voice was fading as he led the way along the slippery bank in the darkness, the others close behind him. Even Hebba was trailing obediently after him, too tired by far now to complain. Zanna gritted her teeth and followed, quietly seething. How could Yanis be so bloody heartless? In her own distress, she had missed the anxiety in his voice, which he’d masked with anger. It’s a good thing the beast is so far ahead, she fumed. Why, for two pins, I’d push him in the river!

Lost in her angry thoughts, she followed blindly. The going was difficult, with tussocks and roots to trip over in the darkness, and patches of slippery mud. Before too long, Zanna’s knees were scraped and bruised from falling over so many times, her hands wore dripping gauntlets of black mud, and both her feet were soaked from straying too near the river’s edge. She didn’t care about any of it—she was too frantic over Tarnal’s fate to worry about such trifles.

Then, from the darkness ahead, she heard a low, delighted cry from Yanis. “By all the gods—there’s a boat here under the trees!”

By now the moon was rising, and as Zanna hurried forward, she saw the Nightrunner leader silhouetted against the silvery water as he reached out to pull on the rope that moored the little boat. Suddenly a dark shape rose up in the bows, causing Yanis to drop the rope with a cry of alarm and reach for his sword.

“Yanis? Is that you?” The sleepy voice made Zanna’s heart leap for joy, for it belonged to Tarnal.

A minute later, a happy reunion was taking place on the riverbank—or, at least, Zanna was happy. “What do you mean, you fell asleep?” Yanis was demanding indignantly of his friend. “What kind of a stupid trick is that? Here’s us trailing all this way in the dark while you lie there snoring like a pig… And is this little washtub all that you could get? I didn’t expect to row all the way to Wyvernesse.”

Tarnal’s gray eyes flashed dangerously in the moonlight. Without saying a word, he grasped Yanis by the shirtfront and hurled him bodily into the river. “Swim, then, you ungrateful bastard,” he told his spluttering leader as the dripping Yanis scrambled, cursing, out of the shallows. Zanna had to stuff her cloak into her mouth to muffle the sound of her laughter.

After that, things went more easily, though they had a struggle to lift their craft down the narrow portageway that bypassed the weir. “I’ll wager you’re glad I didn’t get a bigger boat now,” Tarnal goaded the panting Yanis as they staggered beneath the boat’s ungainly weight. They managed to sneak through the port of Norberth before the sun rose, and laid up through the hours of daylight in one of the little coves along the coast. Though they were hungry and damp, they dared not risk a fire, but they were all far too weary to pay much heed to such hardships. Besides, the weather seemed unseasonably warm. Rolled in their blankets in a hollow of the sheltering dunes, they slept most of the day, trading watches, before setting out again on a still and stifling evening in the fading light of a lurid, purple sunset.

Luckily the coastal current had been with them, and so far the sea had stayed calm enough not to swamp the little boat, though Hebba had remained rigid with terror throughout the entire trip. Now, however, just before they were due to set out once more from the sandy cove, Zanna noticed Yanis and Tarnal looking at the sea and frowning before going off into a huddle to talk in low, worried voices. “What’s wrong?” she asked them, looking at the ocean with a puzzled frown. It seemed fine to her—there was barely a ripple to disturb the sluggish, oily swell. “Surely it’s calm enough?”

“Aye—for now,” Yanis muttered. “But it’s setting itself to blow up into the mother of all storms before this night’s out. The question is, do we risk going now, and pray we can get there before the storm front reaches us—or do we stay here and wait until it’s over? By the look of sea and sky, it’s going to be a bad blow; and even when it’s over, it could take days for the sea to calm itself again.”

Zanna could have wept. Not now—not when they were so close! At that moment Vannor joined them. “Do my eyes deceive me, or does that sky have a particularly ominous look to it?”

Yanis nodded. “There’ll be a storm, all right—but what shall we do? Stay here, or risk it and go on?”