Page 1 of Engines of Reason

Sendra

THEY HAD RUN UNTIL Dimo died, and until Sendra felt as though he was dying, too. Not the hammer of his heart, the frantic wrench of drawing breath into lungs, but he’d taken a dart in the side. Sendra had gone through shock and pain, carried past them on a tide of adrenaline, but the wound had been sitting there and eating his strength like a hag strangling him. They had run until Dimo died, then probably some way after that because Kaille had Dimo’s arm across her broad shoulders, thinking she was helping the man along. Only discovering after the fact that the self of him had left the flesh of him. Her revelation brought Sendra’s own weight down on his bones like the strings holding it up had been cut and he crashed down into the turf.

They hadn’t even got that far. The fires of the burning encampment—their wall, their cabin, their store—were still visible, a beacon in the night. A beacon to run from, not to. And the soldiers would be spreading out, searching for survivors.

“Sendra,” Kaille said, “keep moving.” She was kneeling beside him as his chest heaved. Beyond them, Dimo also lay there, but without the fuss. Almost reproachful. Listen to you puffing and blowing. Just be dead like me, how much more dignity you’d have! Dimo had just seen in his fourth Storm-season. Not quite a grown man. Never would be, now.

The others—was it only three, still alive and still with him—squatted on their haunches, sat, or in Irkon’s case stayed standing, pacing, as though desperate to keep hold of some illusory momentum. As though he’d be able to save up all that wandering and just launch himself at the horizon when the soldiers found them.

“I’m done,” said Sendra. Said Sendreth Brand-Mark. His true name. Once just Sendr of the Enclave, when there had been an Enclave. But he’d earned Sendreth, the outlaw, the raider. A man who wouldn’t take the knee to laws, not take it lying down.

He was lying down now. Not to get up again, surely. Amazed he’d run this far with a dart hole in him, but the excess of strength that had carried him along was escaping through that gap in his hide now.

Irkon was demanding to know how the soldiers had even found the hideout. It was a hideout. That meant it was supposed to be hidden. And Sendra wanted to say, We all knew where it was. It only took one turncoat, or someone getting caught and talking. Better lose your fingers than your neck, as the saying went. Not as though any of the regencies went easy on bandits, and least of all Lannesite.

“Go,” he said to them. “Take off. I’ll…” He had been about to say, I’ll hold them here, but there was no here, no choke point or bridge a single hero with a sword could hold. There wasn’t even a them, because the soldiers hadn’t caught up yet. But he could hardly say, I’ll just lie here and die slowly, and expect that to count as inspiring last words for his followers.

Oh I have led you poorly, my friends. But then this was the history of every bandit gang. Maybe a handful got out of the game with all their digits, went somewhere new, started a fresh life with a false name. Most lived wild, died hard, and died soon.

“Get up,” said Kaille.

“I don’t think I will,” said Sendra. “My feet have come over all brave. They say they won’t run any farther.”

“Where the hell even are we?” Irkon demanded, because he was a brigand but a piss-poor outdoorsman. We’re literally in sight of our camp. Even at night you should know where we are.

“You go. I’ll bury Dimo. He should have a proper grave.” Utter nonsense. He imagined Kaille enumerating the different axes of the lie. One, if you can’t run you can’t dig a grave; two, the soldiers would catch you before you’d dug a foot into the earth and I don’t imagine they’d just lend you a spade and sit back to watch; three, if everyone who deserved a proper grave was to get one, we’d be turning the ground for a week. And that was true enough. Out of his gallant sixty-eight, he had no reason to believe that any more than the four of them had lived. When Lannesite planned an attack, they didn’t just go off at half-tension. Amazing any of us got out. Amazing how a nice defensive position can turn into a trap. We should have had a back door. Except whoever blabbed about their hideout likely wouldn’t have omitted that detail, and so they’d just have found a squad of soldiers with spears and gutbows all ready.

“Get up, Sendra,” Kaille said. Honestly he was impressed nobody had said, Leave him, he’s done for and just taken off. Genuinely flattering. But, as he reckoned he really was done, also useless. Discretion, valour, you know.

“This is the barrow country,” said Blennardt in that clipped accent of hers. “Haunted, not-so?”

Not that people didn’t go into the barrow country, or cross through it, but nobody lived there. A stretch of moorland warty with oval mounds, too regular and uniform to be natural. The bones of ancient regents interred within them, some said. Or the more fanciful notion that this was where the monstrous servants of Lucef Half-Elder had been entombed when the sorcerer-hero had come to the end of his long life. A few of Sendra’s people had tried digging into some of the mounds, but none had found anything more than dirt, nor had they kept at it long enough to find anything. There was a stillness and a strangeness to the barrows that put the chills up you.

Sendra reckoned the chills currently getting into him were because of the blood he was losing, and the barrow country could wait its turn. “Kaille,” he said. “I’m spent. I see my strength loping away there, between the mounds, and I want you to go catch it now. I’ll wait here till you get back. But if you wait with me, then we’ll all be eating Lannesite hospitality. Just this once turn coat on me, Kaille. While you’ve a whole hide to save.”

She sobbed. It tore at something inside him. Kaille, the broad-shouldered, the knife-woman, the ruthless, was crying over him. And she was a murderer and a thief, and she’d stood over more than a couple of merchants with a dripping blade when they’d held out on where the valuables were. And he was the same. So where had these noble sentiments come from, that she’d weep for a wretch like him?

Irkon yelped. From Sendra’s prostrate position, he had the impression of sudden movement, a little distance away where the man had wandered. Then a beat of silence, in which Sendra turned his head and found Irkon as gone as if he had been snatched away from the world by a demon. And then weak, furious swearing, slightly muted.

“Hell-now?” Blennardt demanded. She had her gutbow loaded—the fancy one she’d brought with her from wherever it was had exiled her and put out her eye. Fanciest weapon Sendra ever saw, in the hands of a woman with no depth perception. Like an omen, honestly, of how the whole venture was headed. I should have got out the moment she joined with us. Unfair, to put that on the shoulders of someone who’d only been doing their best, but, if a man was superstitious …

“Found a hole,” Irkon’s voice floated up to them. Because of course he had. If there was a hole to be found, then Irkon was your man for falling in it. And then, sure as rain follows cloud, “Done my ankle.”

Great, you can keep me company when the others run away. The others, then, being Kaille and Blennardt, fifty percent of his gallant brigands.

“Found a door,” came Irkon’s voice.

Sendra, who’d been very much looking forward to just losing interest in the world and then dying, frowned. “What?” he croaked.

“Door,” Irkon said. “Found a door. Down here.”

That actually got Sendra propped up on his elbows, no matter how much it hurt. It had Blennardt over there and peering down.

“Yes—so,” she reported. “Hole, is. Door, is.”

Maybe I really am dying right now and this is all in my head. Maybe they did leave me. In which case it couldn’t really hurt to go have a look, given that he’d still actually be lying here dying. He might as well satisfy his curiosity, if only in his imagination. “Give me a hand, here,” he said to possibly-not-really-there Kaille. Her broad shoulders were freed of the deadweight of Dimo, after all. She might as well do something useful with them.

She got him over to the hole, which was as advertised. About four feet across, and Sendra could see where the turf had just given way beneath Irkon’s weight. It went down about ten feet, which made it amazing that Irkon had just “done his ankle,” honestly. A shaft, in fact; square sectioned. And he could see the pale matting of plant roots writhing out of the top foot of soil, but below was oddly smooth for earth. Not to mention oddly still a hole, and not just collapsed in on itself.