darkened blade_ A fallen blade novel - Kelly McCullough Page 0,56
bait of some sort, sent Triss, though he didn’t contradict the lad. There are things that hunt gryphons here in the high mountains, and not just the rocs and garudas. . . .
He’s young yet, it’s better not to distract him with too many possibilities. I began climbing back down to the trail.
By the time I’d checked in with our other three sentries, the rest of the camp was awake and making a cold sunset breakfast before heading out.
* * *
Around midnight, Siri dropped back to find me at the trailing edge of our little column. As soon as Faran spotted her, she moved forward to put eyes on Kelos. If there was anyone who trusted him less than Jax, it was Faran. Siri nodded her thanks as they passed each other, then waved for me to stop.
Siri didn’t speak until the last of the trailing students was out of earshot and, when she did, she pitched her voice barely above a whisper. “The Kvani have found the remnants of the fire we used to get rid of the bodies. It’s nearly burned out except for a few hot spots and wisps of smoke here and there, so I can’t see much but impressions from around the edges.”
“Can you tell how big the Kvani force is?” asked Triss.
Siri shook her head. “Not in any depth, but there are several dozen of them poking around the edges of the burn, and more near enough to register as blurry shadows, so it must be at least as many as were guarding the pass.”
“Risen?” I asked.
“None visible, but fire is one of the few things that will destroy them, so I can’t imagine the more obvious sorts would . . . hang on, something’s changing. They’ve lit a fire of their own. Let me just hop over and . . . there. Oh, dammit.”
“What?” I asked.
“If that’s not the main body of the Kvani it’s a reconnaissance in force. There must be a thousand horses at least. Also, risen, and lots of them. The Kvani have four-horse chariots with wicker cages mounted to them to hold the dead. The risen are packed in so tight they can’t even move their arms, maybe eight to a box, maybe ten.”
“Wicker? That’s ridiculous,” said Triss. “It wouldn’t hold the risen for two seconds if they really wanted out.”
Siri shrugged. “There are visibly glowing glyphs at the joints of the cages, and not just to magesight. That latter means they’re mostly for show, a way to make the troops feel safe around them. If this group of risen are all controlled by the Son of Heaven’s strain of the curse and the Kvani are led by more of the same, they have no need of fancy controls.”
“True enough,” I said. “How many chariots are there?”
“Hard to say. At least a dozen, but there could be more out of my line of sight. I wish I could hear what the khans and their lieutenants are saying, but at this distance I’m lucky to be able to see out of the smoke.”
I’d been meaning to ask about her limitations there, so: “Siri, how far away can you be from a smoke source and still touch it? We’re barely a day’s march beyond this one and you’re having trouble, but you were able to contact me from nearly two thousand miles away.”
“It depends,” she replied. “Mostly, my range is right around a day’s hard travel on the flat, maybe fifty miles. But that’s only if I’ve got a solid connection of some kind to the fire, like the spell I set to burn the bodies, or the line of sight that allowed me to jump from that fire to the campfire. If I don’t have a good sympathetic link, I can only manage a mile or three under most circumstances.”
“And when you contacted me?”
“That took days of ritual preparations, a ton of help from Ashkent and Kayla, including their direct participation in the ritual, and a specially designed fire on my end that burned in the shape of a great glyph of communication. Oh, and the god wanted to possess you as well as me, so he boosted the power of my spell. Even with all of that, I don’t think I’d have been able to reach anyone I loved less, old friend. Love is the ultimate sympathetic link.”
She touched my cheek affectionately, and I covered her hand with my own. We might be divorced now, but that wasn’t from