ambushed. From there, the survivors of the ambush circled around and continued on into the jungle.
Their path took them over a small mountain pass and down to a major road that intersected two other major roads within a few leagues in each direction. Those who had escaped the fortress had camped by the road for the night and then gone in different directions, melting away into the jungle. Isabel looked at the trampled roadside where several dozen people had camped along it all at the same time and shook her head.
“Any idea how we can track the Sin’Rath from here?” she asked. “They could be anywhere by now.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Trajan said, then smiling suddenly and pointing before taking off at a dead run down the road. Some distance away, another man scrambled out of the jungle, running away from Trajan down the middle of the road. Trajan stopped and returned, smiling and schooling his breath.
“Now we have something to track,” he said.
“Who was that?”
“One of my father’s men, a watcher assigned to wait here and see if anyone showed up. He will run back to my father and report our arrival.”
“So the witches will know we’re still tracking them,” Isabel said. “We might not want to just follow that guy blindly back to them.”
Trajan hefted his club. “The witches have no power.”
“Maybe not,” Isabel said, “but they can always give bows to the hundred men they have working for them. A hundred arrows may not be magic, but they will kill you just the same, club or not.”
“I’ll send two men ahead to scout,” Trajan said.
“Fair enough,” Isabel said. “Let’s go … but carefully.” It was becoming painfully clear that Trajan was going to do what he was going to do, regardless of Isabel’s suggestions. She turned her thoughts to figuring out how she was going to get close to Phane, and exactly what she was going to do once she did.
The man’s tracks doubled back and looped around the other direction, meeting up with a set of almost forty older tracks marching two by two along a narrow jungle path away from the road. The scouts continued to range out ahead of them, searching out the path taken by the watcher, marking the trail and pressing forward.
After several hours of steady movement, the scouts were waiting alongside the path for them. They were in a rough part of the jungle. Cliffs, sudden steep hills and rocky outcroppings were the norm, with all manner of vegetation clinging to every surface possible. Travel was treacherous and slow.
“They left the trail up ahead,” Trajan whispered, as his scouts followed the trail farther. Everyone was quiet, waiting for word from the two men, but time passed and they didn’t return.
While they waited, Isabel started to worry that the Sin’Rath had captured them and were sending soldiers. Her idle worry seemed to take on a life of its own within her mind, expanding into fear and full-blown panic within the space of a few moments. She crouched with the rest of Trajan’s men, shivering in fear of some imagined threat. Ayela noticed something was wrong and touched her arm with an inquiring look.
Isabel nearly leapt out of her skin at the sudden contact, her panic breaking and fading away like water. She shook her head to Ayela and went back to her own thoughts. Never before had she experienced such sudden and irrational fear. It couldn’t be Azugorath, or the darkness, or anything else magical.
That left two possibilities: either she was becoming a coward … or it was the bone.
Chapter 46
After it had become painfully clear that something had happened to the scouts, Trajan led everyone along the path they’d taken and were relieved to meet them returning to make their report. They’d found a cave with a door at the back of it about ten minutes away. Had the Sin’Rath and House of Karth not left so many footprints, the cave would have remained completely hidden.
“So that’s one way in,” Trajan said.
“You think there might be another?” Isabel asked.
“I’m certain of it. There will be at least one escape passage and probably another entrance as well.”
“If we could find the escape tunnel, I bet it would lead straight to the king’s chambers. We could get behind them,” Isabel said, “and avoid fighting your men altogether.”
“That may be more difficult than you imagine,” Trajan said. “Escape tunnels are often deliberately unfinished, with three or four feet left to dig so