Brian Ruckley - Exile

Hamdan nodded. He lowered his voice, slipping into a conspiratorially soft tone. ‘The thing is – what’s your name, anyway?’

‘Wren.’

It ran against her instincts to give the truth like that. She had spent many years wearing other names, the better to avoid unwanted attention. But the time for that was passing, she supposed. As likely as not, she was leaving Hommetic lands for the last time.

‘So, Wren,’ Hamdan continued, still in that near-whisper, ‘the thing is, we broke the Wardle Bridge because we need the Huluk Kur to try to cross at Homneck. The only way they can get there is through the Hung Gate Pass, and that’s our chance to stop them. If we fail, if they get across the river, there’ll be no sun for a month with all the corpse-fires that’ll be burning.’

‘If you say so,’ Wren said grudgingly.

‘I do. Our Captain’s got a hundred of our fellows and a thousand of the King’s spears up at the Hung Gate. He’s expecting us. Waiting for us to bring word. Soon.’

Hamdan was reasoned. Calm. Almost sympathetic. But Wren knew her cause was lost and her indignation futile. Her dashed hopes meant nothing to anyone but herself. So be it. So it had been for many years.

She turned her back on the Free and retreated into the solitude she knew so well.

Not for the first time, Wren wondered if she had made a terrible mistake. Not that she could tell what that mistake might have been. Perhaps running for the north in the first place. Just as easily, it might have been running too late. If she had made for the Hervent years ago, the Wardle Bridge would still be standing and the Free would not be blithely commandeering barges without regard for anyone else’s intent.

All in all, she felt a powerful urge to break something. She doubted that would please the crew, so she contented herself with staring fixedly out over the water. She glared at the innocent landscape as if it were to blame for all of this.

The contrast between the north and south banks of the Hervent was marked. South, for almost as far as the eye could see, lay wide fields. Hamlets and farmsteads, trackways and barns. To the north, nothing but hills rising steadily into dim and distant mountains patched with pockets of snow.

Wren would be seeing plenty of what lay to the north before very long if all went according to what little remained of her plan. So she faced south and watched the villages drift by.

Eventually, what drifted by was an array of wooden quays jutting out into the river like fingers, and a cluster of stone buildings behind them.

‘Hamming Ferry,’ one of the passengers leaning against the gunwale muttered.

Wren glumly noted the many little boats lining the quays and drawn up on muddy beaches beside the village. Any of them might have been the one to carry her across the great Hervent and send her on her way. As it was, she was condemned to float along, impotently watching all that might have been pass her by.

Had she not been so preoccupied, she might have realised what was happening rather sooner. She might have had time to prepare herself, or consider what to do more carefully and calmly. Instead, by the time she noticed that a long, thin boat had put out from Hamming Ferry, it was already cutting across the current, carving out a course to intercept the barge.

Her first thought was to rush to the prow and hail it. Promise whatever it took to somehow get the oarsmen to rescue her from this moving prison and take her ashore. That notion died like a snuffed candle flame when she saw who manned the approaching boat. Saw the colour of their raiment, to be precise. They wore light blue tunics. That meant the Clade, and the Clade meant the School. And the School… Wren had spent most of her life hiding from the School.

In all the land there were only two great warbands that were beyond the King’s control: the Free and the School’s Clade. The School might have begun as just that – a school for the care and training of Clevers – but it had long since become something much more complicated and powerful. Along the path of its ascent it had acquired, in the Clade, an army all its own.

Now Wren watched half a dozen of those blue-shirted warriors closing quickly on the barge and felt fear like a hollow in her gut. Things, as it turned out, could always get worse.

Six months ago she had killed two Clade men. That, more than anything, was why she was here now. She had looked down at their rotting corpses and known that she had slain not only them but any hope of continuing her own furtive, itinerant existence in the Hommetic Kingdom.

She was a Clever unsanctioned by the School, one who did not serve or submit to their purposes. One guilty – by their definitions – of grave crimes. Those two Clade spearmen had meant to make her a prisoner, or quite possibly a corpse. When the first of them set his hand on her, she had called up from the Autumnal entelech the very essence of decay and set it loose within the bodies of those two men. A mistake perhaps; done out of instinct and desperation. Panic. She was not certain she had even intended to do it. She regretted it. Part of her did at least. Not all.

Even as the stench of the corruption that consumed them filled her nose, she had known she had to run. Make of herself an exile and seek out one who had done that before: Lame Ammenor.

Now, seeing the comrades of the men she had killed drawing near, her mind raced. It raced uselessly, like a dog chasing its tail. No plan or stratagem emerged. She found herself turning and bending to gather her blankets, her few modest possessions.

If the Clade found and recognised her for what she was, they would kill her or – little better – make a captive of her. Or she would have to kill them, unleashing the entelechs here on a floating splinter with only innocents and the Free for company. That was unlikely to end any better than was capture by the Clade.

The barge’s master was shouting, ‘You’ve got to let me heave to! It’s the Clade, man!’

He was up near the prow, gesturing frantically at Hamdan and Kerig and Ena Marr. The Free appeared entirely unconcerned.

‘Not much I can do about it,’ Wren heard Kerig saying. ‘What’s done is done, and I can’t just unpick it like a little loose stitch.’

He was smiling, Wren realised. He found all this amusing: the captain’s panic, the frustration of the Clade warriors as they watched the barge surging on.

Wren slung her rolled blankets and her sack of rations over her shoulder. She tightened her grip on her walking staff. There was no real reason these Clade men should know she was here, or what she had done. Their comrades had found her by chance, and she had hidden their bodies as best she could. Buried them a yard down. They’re not here for me, she told herself. They can’t be. But they were here nonetheless, and they served the Clevers of the School. Anything was possible.

It seemed for a moment as if her luck was going to take an unexpected turn for the better. No matter how the oarsmen heaved, the barge was going to rush past the Clade boat. Perhaps even ram it and brush it aside. That was how it looked to Wren at least.

The two vessels were so close she could see the faces of the Clade men quite clearly. Their smaller vessel rocked and trembled in the spreading bow wave of the great barge. Then came grappling hooks. One bounced away and splashed into the Hervent. Two took hold and ropes sprang taut. Which as far as Wren was concerned should have been enough, in any just or gentle world, to overturn the Clade boat and spill its blue-clad occupants into the river. They were whalers, anchored to a vast and remorseless beast by carelessly thrown harpoons, and they should have paid the price, but they did not. They knew their business.