broach the subject of her mother’s death. Jyn Hêl lay close to the Valley of Eloth, close to Tuauch and the hidden Tombs of Aldrn. More importantly, Newlym was on the way. In Newlym, she bought a horse and boarded the only northbound train.
The final stop was Menin’s Pass.
The station was actually closer to Ell’s Lake, a cluster of brick warehouses and fat, decayed mooring towers for airships out of the Duchy.
Sena left the crumbling platform with her horse and melted through the fog. The Highway of Kafree wasn’t part of Miryhr’s official infrastructure. Ruined and bereft, it had been built by one of the north’s fallen empires. After sixty miles it forked. The east arm ran slightly north to Menin’s Pass. The west drooped south toward Esma.
Despite thick fringes of moss and weed, the stone blocks still formed a remarkably serviceable road. And yet, even with the horse, she guessed it would take her two days to reach the place she had hidden the Csrym T.
Sena glanced over her shoulder. Just to be safe, she pulled her sickle knife across her horse’s croup. The creature’s orchid colored skin bled black, six tails expressing anguish in a squirming mass.
“Shh—”
She spoke the Unknown Tongue and the tails drooped. The beast’s withers relaxed.
It didn’t hurt to cover her trail.
Shrdnae Witches tracked by numbers, a kind of dead reckoning based on humidity. If Megan was having her followed, Sena’s pursuers would use coordinates based on the water memories of her own sweat inscribed molecularly into thin air.
She didn’t bother peering for a hidden stalker in the fog. Shrdnae operatives wouldn’t be anywhere she looked. The tiny numbers they cut into their corneas neatly tabled the pre-echoes of what they called blind line of sight.
Sena was in the Seventh House, merited or not, but had decided against making the cuts. Until now, she’d never had a use for better invisibility than what she could manage as a common thief.
Unfortunately, if Megan had put a tail on her, that wouldn’t be enough. She rolled the horse blood into a hemofurtive equation, testing the new concept she’d learned in parliament’s basement, and laid a jumbled trail of numbers in her wake. In answer to water memory, she encrypted air.
On her second day in the Valley of Eloth she left her horse to fend, marching downhill from the road until she found a set of abandoned stone huts near a lake. Ragged green thickets grew in profusion along the shore. She hugged the waterline and made good progress. Her side still pained her and she rested often but a gnawing anxiety filled her stomach. Eloth belonged to long-toothed predacious things.
Sarchal hounds, with jaws capable of killing a horse, hunted the wilds. And there were other horrors. Enormous black otter-things with tiny malevolent eyes and twitching ears, long dark muzzles bristling with whiskers and gharial teeth. Unknown numbers of them lay in wait below these northern lakes.
Sena kept her eyes open and moved quickly. The undergrowth gave her no choice but to skirt the shore. Eventually the pebbled beach gave way to a shadowed drop-off overhung with flowering thickets. She could see several large fish, backs like dull battered tin, gliding in the murk below.
She scrambled up a soft embankment and found an animal track that led her back to the water through a garden of cattails that sprang from semisolid ground.
She tread carefully on the shifting sod of what seemed to be floating dirt and vegetation. The rich close stench of metholinate burbled up through black, snot-thick water. She couldn’t see four inches down.
After half an hour, breathing through her mouth, the cattails thinned and the track emerged but ended in disappointment.
Sena looked with disgust at a stinking morass of deep feculent mud and squalid pools. Ruby-bellied reed flies darted through the vapor. The mire looked impossible to cross and her trail had given out far from shore.
Her eyes cast about for a way of crossing the muck and landed on a series of large flat rocks. They were east of her, farther out, vulnerable to one of the otter-things but she knew she could leap the distance between them without much strain and decided to risk it.
The hungry flies swarmed, bellies like gemstones. She leapt to the first then the second and in such fashion crossed the inlet.
The insects pursued her until she reached the top of a slide of boulders at the lake’s north end. There, the storm front struck relentlessly and a cold freshet