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  A Tale of the Free: Tyrant

  Brian Ruckley

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  I

  Brennan was as hot as he had ever been. Sweat was pouring out of him, and felt like it was boiling off his face. The skin on the nape of his neck had been burned by the sun and hurt every time his collar touched it. He had been bitten in the night by some evil kind of insect. A whole swarm, in fact, since his ankles and the backs of his knees itched and stung almost unbearably. His tongue and lips felt fat and clumsy from want of water. In short, he was suffering.

  And yet he was happy. His body might be chest-deep in misery but his heart and mind revelled in every hard moment of it. He was where he wanted to be.

  His two companions were not of quite the same mind.

  ‘My mouth feels like it’s full of sand,’ Manadar complained.

  ‘Probably is,’ said Lorin. The older man was usually a reassuring, encouraging presence, full of stubborn resilience. Apparently that resilience was at a low ebb.

  Brennan glanced down at the bare earth beneath his horse’s hoofs. He did not think it was really sand. More like dust. Ancient, exhausted soil that had forgotten the taste of water. And, if he was honest, he rather liked its colours. Looking out towards the horizon, he could see all the subtle changes of the vast plains in hue and texture. More browns and ochres and faint reds and yellows than he had known dust could be. Somehow, he doubted the other two would be interested in that.

  ‘Wet your tongue,’ he said instead, holding out his goat-hide water bag to Manadar.

  He could tell from the weight of it in his hand that it was more than half empty.

  Manadar looked at the bag, smiled–or grimaced perhaps–and shook his head.

  ‘I’ve some of my own still. We wait our thirst out till dusk. That’s the rule.’

  ‘We drink sand until then.’ Lorin nodded approvingly.

  ‘It’s more like dust than sand though,’ Brennan observed as he hitched the water bag back onto his saddle.

  ‘Grit,’ Lorin suggested. He brushed his horse’s mane absently. The fine cloud that rose from the hairs still looked like dust to Brennan.

  ‘Does it matter?’ Manadar grunted. ‘It’s dry; it’s in my eyes and my nose and my mouth. It’s in my ears. I can feel it rattling around in there like salt in a pot.’

  ‘No, you can’t,’ Brennan said. He had known Manadar long enough–more than a year now–to recognise that the man never met a slight discomfort that fell short of agony, nor a small pleasure that fell short of ecstasy.

  ‘You don’t know what’s going on in my ears,’ Manadar said. ‘You want to slip your finger in there? It’ll come out dressed in sand, I promise you.’

  ‘Grit.’ Brennan smiled.

  ‘One of you boys put your young eyes to work,’ Lorin said quietly, ‘and tell me what that is out there.’

  Brennan looked where Lorin was pointing. There was a shimmer and a sheen across the meeting point of earth and sky. Like water or glass. He blinked a bead or two of sweat away from his eyes. It hardly helped. The distance was still a blurred and tricky place.

  But he could, just about, see what Lorin was talking about. A dark hint of a shape. ‘Whatever it is, it’s moving,’ Manadar observed.

  ‘It’s human,’ Brennan said. He was not certain of that beyond all doubt, but wanted to say it before anyone else did. Eyesight was almost certainly the only weapon he could best the other two with. ‘Should we hide ourselves?’

  He twisted around in his saddle, surveying their surroundings. Hiding places were not exactly abundant. The three of them were sitting on big horses on a gently falling slope, with the pale earth at their backs and not a bush or rock more than knee-high anywhere to be seen.

  ‘They’ll have seen us by now, unless they’re blind,’ Lorin grunted. ‘Seems to me they’re coming straight at us.’

  ‘We wait, then?’ Manadar asked, resting his hands one atop the other on his horse’s neck. He leaned slightly to one side and spat on the ground.

  Lorin frowned at him.

  ‘You should swallow that,’ the oldest of them said. ‘Waste of wet to spit it out.’

  Manadar wrinkled his nose.

  ‘My mouth’s as full of sand as my ears.’

  ‘Grit,’ Brennan murmured.

  He was not really paying attention. His narrowed eyes were locked on that distant figure; he was sure it was a figure now. A solitary human being out there on the hot, flat plateau. And just as Lorin said, that lone madman was indeed coming closer. There were birds up above. They were too far out to be sure of their kind, but it was easy enough to guess. Corpse-crows or vultures. They knew a madman when they saw one too.

  ‘It’s going to take them a while to get here,’ Manadar observed, reaching inside his jacket.

  ‘You bring that flute of yours out and I’ll ram it so far up your nose I could scratch my name into the inside of your skull,’ Lorin growled.

  Manadar shrugged, unperturbed. He withdrew his hand.

  Lorin glanced over his shoulder, back the way they had come.

  ‘Brennan,’ he said, ‘get up on top of the rise. Make sure there’s no evil creeping up behind us.’

  Brennan began to turn his horse, even though it seemed a waste of time. They were the ones doing the tracking, not the other way round. They had only come over the top of that low ridge a few minutes ago, and these vast, bare plains were not the kind of place surprises could creep up all unseen and unexpected. Not during the day, anyway.

  ‘Never hurts to take every care,’ Lorin said, as if he knew the shape of Brennan’s thoughts. ‘I’ve lived through twenty and more years of the Free by holding fast to that notion.’

  Which was better than ten times as many years that Brennan had been riding with the Free, so he was content to do as he was told.

  His horse’s hoofs slipped and sank a little in the soft, loose dust. Or sand, or whatever they were calling it. The animal was tired. They all were. Two days and a night out in these searing wastes would tire anyone or anything that was not born to it. And as far as Brennan could tell, the only things born to it were biting flies, carrion birds and the little lizards he had noticed now and again scurrying around among rocks.

  Cresting the ridge, he thought for a moment he felt the faintest brush of a breeze across his face. So brief and faint it might have been imaginary. It was pleasant, real or not. He looked down the line of their tracks. Nothing but stones and bare ground and a few clumps of dried grass as far as the eye could see.

  He was struck by the reality of what he was doing, what he had become. It was so easy to forget when the day offered so many difficulties and discomforts to occupy the mind. But sitting astride his horse there on the high ground, with emptiness all around him, he smiled to himself.

  Here he was, a child of fisherfolk, grown to be a man who rode among the Free. He had heard tales of the Free, the last and greatest of the independent warbands, from his earliest childhood. They had been figures of wonder and terror alike to him and all his friends. Their wa
rs and victories–only victories, never defeats–were the stuff of games and dreams and shared longings. His friends were grown now, as he was. But they lived the lives of their parents, riding the boats and hauling the nets; he lived the life of stories and legends. He fought with the Free. He had friends of a very different kind now. Another kind of family in its way.

  And staring at the many-hued desolation which surrounded him he could only smile again at the absurdity of how things turned out. He could so easily have been out there on the waves. Instead he was here, miles into the Empire of Orphans, the dread and constant enemy of his homeland, the Hommetic Kingdom. An Empire riddled with madness and cruelty, built upon the backs of slaves and conquered peoples. Over centuries, it had spread like a bloody stain across the land and now the Emperors in Arnothex ruled over much of the continent.

  It was said that most of those emperors barely knew what lay outside the walls of their palace of course. Half of them inherited idiocy from their incestuous ancestors; the other half were too busy competing with their nobles in the invention of savageries and debaucheries to pay much heed to the wider world’s turning. And still the Empire grew, and gathered subjects into its feverish embrace. Armies of not just warriors but tax-harvesters and torturers, bailiffs and sheriffs, did their remorseless work on behalf of even the most delinquent of emperors.

  Brennan had a sword at his belt and a bow on his back, and he was an uninvited and unwelcome guest in the most powerful, most dangerous domain the world had known in centuries. He should have been afraid; uneasy, at the very least. He was neither because he was one of the Free, and the Free were powerful and dangerous too.

  He had killed two men since he had joined the Free. He would be killing more soon. Very soon. It was a part of what he did now.

  Gazing out over Lorin and Manadar’s heads, he saw that indistinct figure drawing slowly closer, becoming a little less indistinct with each passing moment. It was a person, beyond doubt.

  ‘There’s no one at our back,’ he called down to Lorin.

  The older man waved a hand in casual acknowledgement without looking round. He and Manadar were both staring fixedly at the approaching wanderer. Brennan looked too, as he allowed his horse to step gingerly back down the slope towards the others.

  Was that a dust cloud out on the glassy horizon, some way behind that lone figure, rising from some other feet?

  ‘There more than one out there?’ he asked as he drew up alongside Lorin.

  Lorin grunted, but said nothing. He scraped a fingernail absently down the length of the scar on his right cheek. He did that sometimes, when turning thoughts over in his head. Brennan had never heard the story of the scar from Lorin’s own mouth, but by all accounts a man had put it there while trying to steal Lorin’s horse. By those same accounts, the trade of injuries had been uneven: Lorin acquired a scar; the would-be thief acquired a broken neck.

  ‘Something’s stirring things up, further out,’ Manadar mused.

  The dust cloud was small, little more than a faint, brownish smudge at the very limit of sight, but it was enough to put all three of them on edge. Brennan was still not afraid. He could admit to the stirring of a little unease though. This was the brutal Empire of Orphans, where death might come in many forms, any one of which might raise a small cloud on its approach for all he knew. Even setting aside all other possibilities, the men they had followed here–the men they were hunting–were cruel and numerous. Though they were far from the worst the Empire had to offer, they were not by any means a safe or easy quarry. If they had been, it would not have required the Free to hunt them down.

  ‘Takes four or five horses to raise dust like that out here, I’d guess,’ Lorin said thoughtfully.

  ‘One on foot, followed at a distance–pursued perhaps–by four or five atop horses,’ Manadar said, and Brennan could hear the amusement and anticipation in his voice. ‘That sounds interesting, don’t you think? Doesn’t that sound like it might be interesting?’

  ‘Might be, might be,’ Lorin acknowledged.

  Which was enough to light a little spark of excitement in Brennan’s chest. His hand had gone to the hilt of his sword before he even knew it was moving. He had his own guess now about what it was they were seeing out there on the hot ground: a slave running from slavers. The same Imperial slavers the Free had chased into this land of the Orphans.

  ‘If it comes to blood-work, you’ll be wanting your bow, not your blade,’ Lorin observed without looking at him.

  Quite calm. If he shared Manadar and Brennan’s eagerness, the sentiment was well hidden. Brennan took the advice and unslung his bow. He felt for the arrows quivered at his horse’s side. An unnecessary, almost unconscious gesture: they were hardly likely to have disappeared since he put them there.

  ‘We’re only supposed to be scouting the trail,’ Lorin said. Which was true, of course. Their task was to forge the path for the seventeen others of the Free who were not far behind them; to read and mark the way that the hundred or more slavers they were hunting had taken.

  ‘But this does look a little interesting,’ Lorin went on. ‘And we’re going to have to get around to killing slavers and saving slaves some time if this contract’s ever to be done.’

  Manadar grinned at Brennan.

  ‘Might be nothing though,’ Lorin cautioned, frowning in what Brennan suspected was pretend disapproval. ‘Might be nothing to do with our business at all. We kill the wrong man out here, we could all wind up in the bellies of corpse-crows and lizards. Empire’s like a hive of mad bees: you swat one of them and soon enough you’ll be breathing the whole swarm into your chest. So don’t either of you go starting anything until we know which way the river’s running.’

  ‘Never have, never will.’ Manadar smiled.

  II

  They rode slowly out in line abreast, well spaced. Brennan strung his bow as they went. He was still somewhat clumsy and unpractised at it. The whole notion of using a bow on horseback was new to him. Like several of the Free, he had been learning from Hamdan, a Massatan whose people knew the skill from birth as best Brennan could tell. It would never come as naturally to him, he imagined, but then it hardly needed to. There were few other horse archers in the Hommetic Kingdom. Having even a handful, late learners or not, gave the Free another small claim on the fear of their enemies. One among many.

  ‘Anyone looses a shaft without my word, I’ll make you walk all the way back to Yulan to explain yourself,’ Lorin said.

  Brennan tugged at his bowstring, testing it. He steered his horse with his legs and his weight just as Hamdan had taught.

  The sun was off on their left, high and hard. At least it would not be in their eyes. He had no sooner thought that than he had cause to doubt whether the sun’s place in the sky mattered.

  As the distance closed between them and the staggering, stumbling figure and the riders further out, that figure stumbled once too often. Fell to the ground. And the riders beyond, dark shapes all but obscured by their own dust and the heat shimmer, appeared to draw to a halt. Brennan did not know whether to be relieved or disappointed at that.

  Lorin kept his horse to the same steady pace. The three of them advanced upon the fallen man. The other horsemen–there were half a dozen of them, Brennan could see now–remained still. They held at a longbowshot’s distance. Brennan slid an arrow from his quiver and set it to the string. There was no harm in being prepared, but he did not draw the bowstring back. Not yet.

  The solitary figure rose, not far ahead of them now, and Brennan realised with an involuntary grunt of surprise that it was a woman. She came unsteadily towards them. Her hair was matted and lank; her clothes dirty and ragged. She was dressed as any villager might be, in a long, heavy skirt and a light cloth jacket. To Brennan, she certainly looked as someone might after they had been seized from their fields by raiding slavers.

  She almost fell once more as she drew near, but kept her footing. She showed no sign of injury. It was exhaustion, p
erhaps the weakness of hunger and thirst, which made her so unsteady.

  Lorin drew his horse to a halt and Brennan and Manadar did likewise, flanking him.

  Brennan made to dismount, ready to help the woman. Lorin forestalled that, not sharply but firmly.

  ‘Keep your saddle, boy. You don’t go to ground when there’s folk with blades sitting on horses close by. Let her come to us, if that’s what she wants to do.’

  ‘Help me,’ the woman called out, almost as if answering Lorin’s words.

  Her voice was a cracking, crumbling rasp. Brennan doubted any water had passed her lips in a long time.

  Manadar beckoned her.

  ‘Come to me; I’ll lift you up,’ he told her.

  They watched in silence as she staggered to his horse. She took hold of the arm he reached down much like a drowning woman grabbing hold of a branch. Manadar hooked his hand under her armpit and swung her up. It was clumsy and far from elegant, but she ended up slumped at his back, sitting on the bedroll tied across the horse’s rump. She clung to his shoulders.

  ‘Where are you from?’ Lorin asked loudly, keeping his eyes on the six riders.

  She did not reply at first and he asked again, louder.

  ‘Wyven Dam,’ she murmured.

  One of the two Hommetic villages the Imperial slavers had despoiled. Thirty or so folk had been taken from there, as best Brennan could remember. The same again from the other hamlet. Torn from their huts and hiding places and carried away into the Empire of Orphans. Those who were not killed, in any case.

  The Free had ridden through Wyven Dam at the very start of their hunt. A few days after the slavers had come visiting, and still there were some corpses on the ground. There were too few left there to bury or burn all the dead quickly. Those dead were mostly old men who had tried to defend their people and had no value to slavers alive. And old women.

  ‘Wyven Dam,’ Lorin repeated. ‘Good enough. Well, we can’t be sitting out here trading stares with slave-takers all day. Too hot for that. Send an arrow down their necks, Brennan. I imagine, one way or the other, that’ll move things along.’