Chương 9: Chapter 8 – Where the Road Gives Out

The cracked stretch didn't last. Within a mile the road gave up trying to be a road at all, narrowing to a pale track of packed dirt that wound between low humps of broken stone, and Ant kept to it out of habit more than any real belief it was still leading somewhere. He saw the lantern light before he heard anything. Two points of orange bobbing along a rise off to his left, moving in steady rhythm — riders, not walkers, the pace too even for feet on open ground.

Ant dropped off the track without thinking twice about it, into a fold of dead scrub low enough to swallow him whole, and lay flat with his face turned toward the cold dirt. The riders passed close enough that he caught the colors when the lantern swung wide — dull red and iron grey, a hawk-and-blade badge stitched plain at the shoulder. Ravensworth.

A clan he knew only by reputation, territory running somewhere south and east of the city proper, apparently close enough to claim this stretch of nowhere as theirs to watch.

"—nothing on this stretch since the Marrow boy," one of them was saying, voice carrying flat and easy across the quiet.

"Waste of a route, if you ask me. Nobody's stupid enough to walk this far south without a bond behind them."

"Command doesn't ask me either," the other said.

"We ride it, we log it, we go home. Same as every other night this month, and every one before it." They didn't slow. Didn't look. Ant lay still until the lantern light had shrunk to nothing and the sound of hooves had faded under the wind, then pushed himself back up, dirt clinging to his coat, his pulse taking longer to settle than the riders had taken to leave. Nobody's stupid enough to walk this far south without a bond behind them.

He kept that thought where he could feel it and kept walking anyway, staying off the open track wherever the ground let him, cutting through the low humps of broken stone instead and losing time he didn't have to spare doing it. Every shadow past that point earned a second look before he trusted it to be nothing. He nearly walked into the second pair before he saw them.

They'd stopped to rest their mounts at a bend in the track, close enough that Ant heard the horses first — a soft, wet snort, the small metal click of a bridle chain — and went still exactly where he stood, one boot half-raised, before easing back a step at a time into the cover of a boulder split down its middle by some old weather he couldn't guess at.

He crouched there with his back pressed to cold stone and waited while the two riders talked low between themselves, their words too quiet to carry, until one of them finally clicked his tongue and the horses moved on north, back the way Ant had already come. He let his breath out slow once they'd gone, and didn't trust his legs again for a good minute after. Two patrols in half a day, on a stretch of road one of the riders had called a waste of a route.

Whatever this land was worth to Ravensworth, they weren't taking chances with it, even while calling the effort pointless to each other's faces. By evening the light had gone the color of old bruises, and Ant found a shallow hollow off the track, walled on one side by a slab of rock tall enough to break the wind. No fire — the smell of woodsmoke carried further than any lantern, and he'd already seen how closely this stretch of road got watched.

He ate a third of the roll in three careful bites and didn't let himself think too hard about the other two-thirds. Sleep came in shallow pieces, broken twice by nothing he could name and once, properly, by hoofbeats passing distant and unhurried somewhere north of him — a second patrol, or the same one circling back. He didn't move until the sound had been gone a long while. Morning came grey and raw.

He'd barely covered a mile before he heard voices again, closer this time, coming from directly ahead where the track curved around a stand of dead trees. Ant went to ground behind a fallen trunk, close enough now to make out real figures instead of just sound — four of them, on foot this time, Kithren moving loose at their sides, one of the creatures lifting its head and turning it slowly in his direction like it had caught something on the wind.

Ant flattened himself further into the dirt and dead leaves, willing his own scent to mean nothing against whatever the creature was actually reading. He didn't breathe.

"Territory ends at the old marker," one of the patrol said, oblivious, pointing south with a lazy hand.

"Past that's not ours to walk, and I'm not walking it on a guess that something's out here worth finding."

"Command still wants the boundary checked." If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

"Command can check it themselves, then. I've got a wife who'd like me home with both arms attached." The Kithren's head stayed turned a moment longer, ears forward, before its handler called it back into step and the whole group moved on, their voices fading into the dead trees. Ant counted to a hundred before he trusted his legs enough to stand. He'd gone another hour, the trees thinning behind him into the same broken stone as before, when he found the boot.

It sat half-swallowed by the dirt at the track's edge, cracked leather gone stiff and pale with age, the buckle rusted solid. He didn't stop long over it — a good boot once, well-made, belonging to someone who hadn't been careless and hadn't mattered any more for it. Three expeditions had come through here before him, properly equipped, properly bonded. Somewhere out past this rise, that boot had belonged to one of them. He kept walking. The man came at him not long after.

A figure stumbled along the track ahead, moving fast for someone with nothing chasing him that Ant could see, a pack bouncing half-open against one hip. Ant stepped aside to let him pass. He didn't take the offer.

"Turn around," the man said, before Ant had said a word.

"Whatever's got you walking this way, turn around."

"What's out there?"

"Nothing you'll believe until you've seen it. I had three of us. I'm the only one still walking." His hands were shaking.

"Proper gear. A bonded pair leading. Didn't matter." His eyes flicked past Ant, back toward the city neither of them could see from here.

"There's still time for you. There wasn't for us." He didn't wait for an answer. He cut off the track entirely and ran, and Ant watched him shrink into the grey until there was nothing left to watch. He kept walking anyway. Turning around had never been a real option, not after the tournament, not after the market bench — but for the length of a dozen steps he actually weighed it as one, and that told him plainly enough how badly the man had rattled him.

The trees gave out an hour later, and it was there, in the last stretch of dead scrub before the ground turned properly bare, that Ant heard the growl. Low. Close. Coming from somewhere off to his right, in a stand of brush he'd already half-passed. He froze, every muscle locking at once, the way his body had learned to do it long before his mind caught up and told him why.

It came again, longer this time, and through the brush he caught sight of it — a creature built low to the ground, four-legged, easily his own height at the shoulder, matted grey fur hanging in ragged patches across a hide scarred in more places than looked survivable. No collar. No handler's mark anywhere on it, no bond-brightness to its eyes, nothing but a raw, hungry attention fixed somewhere just past him. Wild. Unbonded.

Whatever it had been born as, nobody had ever claimed it, and five years of studying Kithren from the outside told him exactly how much worse that made this than anything he'd have faced from a bonded pair. A bonded creature answered to something beyond its own hunger. This one answered to nothing at all. He didn't run. Running was an invitation.

He lowered himself instead, slow, into the lee of a rock half his height, and made himself as small and still as five years of surviving in doorways had ever taught him to be. The creature paced closer, nose low, working the ground where his own tracks crossed the dirt. It stopped an arm's length from where he'd stepped off the track and stood there a long moment, head swinging side to side, testing the air.

This close, Ant could smell it — wet fur gone sour, and under that something coppery he didn't want to think too hard about either. Ant didn't breathe. He didn't let his eyes track it directly, either — some old instinct insisting that even the weight of a stare could be felt by something built to hunt. A muscle bunched along its shoulder.

For one long second Ant was certain it had found him, certain the next sound out of it would be the last warning he got before it closed the distance, and his hand found the coil of cord in his pocket without any conscious decision behind the movement — useless against something this size, and he held it anyway, because empty hands felt worse than a length of rope that wouldn't help him. His heartbeat filled his own ears loud enough that he half expected the creature to hear it too.

The growl dropped lower, uncertain now, and then the creature turned, drawn off by something Ant couldn't see or hear, and loped away northward with the same raw hunger still hanging off it, back the way he'd come. He stayed exactly where he was for a long time after the sound of it had gone, counting his own heartbeat down from somewhere near his throat back to somewhere closer to his chest. Even once he trusted his legs, he didn't stand straight away.

He checked the ground first, the way it had checked his — no fresh tracks doubling back, no sign it had only pretended to lose interest — before he let himself believe it had actually gone. When he finally moved, his hands weren't steady, and he didn't pretend otherwise. He'd survived two patrols and a length of rope's worth of luck to get this far. This was the first thing out here that had actually been hunting him, and it wouldn't be the last.

He found the rise not long after, the road giving out beneath him all at once, fading into pale grey soil that ran to a horizon with nothing on it to break the silence. A marker leaned at an angle nearby, lettering worn past reading, the wood gone soft and grey the same as everything else standing this far south. Behind him sat everything he'd ever known — a district with no name, a doorway that wasn't his, a city full of people who'd never once wondered where he'd gone.

Ahead sat a place he understood only by rumor, patrolled at its edges by a clan with no reason to know his name and hunted somewhere past that by things with no handler at all. He'd made it further than most people ever gave him credit for managing, and the hardest part hadn't even started yet.

Ant tightened the coat around his shoulders, checked the cord was still where he'd left it, and started down the rise toward whatever waited on the other side of the grey, the last of the wind at his back and the marker fading behind him with every step.