Page 6 of The Sorcerer's Alpha
The wizard crouched and watched him in silence until Marut removed two books from one of the opened canvas bundles and set them aside. At that, he made a noise of protest and reached out a hand in an aborted gesture.
“These are necessary?” Marut asked, wondering if the books had something to do with the wizard’s magic.
The wizard massaged the bridge of his nose. “No. All right, leave them.”
“I’ll put these all—they can all go back with the pack horses,” Marut said. Someday he would begin a sentence as he meant to finish it. “They won’t be lost to you.”
“Unless something unforeseen happens,” the wizard said, watching him closely. “And we’re out in the wilderness for some time.”
“Only a precaution,” Marut said. Keerti was a wary man and tended to over-prepare, which wasn’t a bad trait. He had saved the patrol more than once. If he was wrong now, as he often was, there was no harm done.
Marut dithered for some time over their tents. A week of sleeping out in the rain would be miserable but survivable. But what if it was longer than that, or they ran into worse weather? In the end, he decided that was too much additional weight to carry. They could use their cloaks draped over a rope as a rain fly, and that would have to do.
To his own saddlebags, he added a small hatchet and some first aid supplies. He filled every spare inch of both of their bags with packets of dried meat. Then he sat for a moment and tried to think of what he might be forgetting.
“Bring my tent,” the wizard said quietly. “I can help lighten the load if need be. We would be glad to have it, I think.”
The wizard’s tent, wherever he had acquired it, was higher quality than the tents the scouts used. Marut turned his head to study the expertly sewn calfskin. “You can remove some part of it?”
“I meant help with magic,” the wizard said. His gaze flicked to Marut’s face and away.
“I see,” Marut said. Magic. Well. “You’re right that it would be good to have.”
“All right,” the wizard said.
Marut carried his saddlebags back to his team’s fire. Everyone was awake and sitting around the fire drinking tea. They all watched him approach, their faces bearing a variety of expressions.
“Ask Keerti,” Marut said. He dropped his bags on top of Agasti’s and took his own seat, accepting the cup Chandran handed him with a nod of thanks.
“There’s trouble, then,” Nilay said.
Marut shrugged. “Keerti thinks maybe.”
“The old man’s fussing again,” Agasti said. “It’s always something. Remember when we were out near Talai and he made us all stop and hide in the woods for two days? And then nothing ever came of it.”
“Your memory is short,” Nilay said. “Remember when he held us back from the pass at Troubled Waters and the other patrol that pressed ahead lost half their men? Be grateful he’s not a hothead like you.”
Chandran passed Marut a platter of flatbread and one of the partridge eggs Ganak had found the day before, neatly fried. Marut had been with this team in its present iteration for nearly two years now, and he trusted them and their skills without question. If he had to be on the run with a wizard, he couldn’t think of better people to have with him.
“Look through your bags before we leave,” he said. “Take only what you’d need for hard off-road riding. I agree with Nilay. Keerti is paranoid, but he keeps us alive.”
“This is what happens when you mess around with wizards,” Ganak said, and Marut silently agreed.
West of Naina, the elevation dropped steadily. The narrow goat tracks that were the only paths through the increasingly rough terrain made for a bone-jarring trek. Bunny disliked the poor footing and flicked his ears back and forth almost continuously, and would only be soothed by Marut whistling a folk song to him, the one about the little black snake. Ahead of him, the wizard clung to the pommel as he jolted downhill.
The transition to the badlands was abrupt; there was no tapering off of the forest or any other indication that the landscape was about to entirely transform. The patrol simply came over a ridge and there it was, the huge scooped-out basin before them filled with rolling hummocks of bare earth, striated in different colors and shaped into strange formations by the wind and weather. It was an eerie, unsettling place, bare of vegetation aside from the occasional pocket of intrepid bushes. Grass filled the low ground between formations, and wild goats lived there, and deer, and jackrabbits, but only animals had ever settled here. Aside from the mines, there was nothing in this stretch of country to attract human activity.
All chatter died out as they followed a narrow switchback down to the bottomlands, where the earth rippled like waves on the sea. They were on contested ground now, and the danger of running into a Skopoy patrol couldn’t be discounted. Even aside from that, riding through the narrow, winding canyons had a quelling effect. This wasn’t welcoming land.
Marut stayed in position directly behind the wizard and kept a close and careful watch for anything out of the ordinary. He saw nothing but clouds and heard nothing but birds. They camped that night in a small valley and lit no fires and pitched no tents. Marut was so tense from his vigilant ride that he lay awake for a long while watching the stars overhead, scattered in a bright spill across the black sky.
No Skopoy patrol came upon them. No messengers passed without stopping. Marut saw no signs that anyone had taken this route in this direction in the recent past. Keerti had been wrong before, and it was more likely than not that he was wrong this time, too. Still, Marut couldn’t shake a creeping sensation that had him turning around in his saddle, again and again, to check the way behind him. He saw nothing but Jyoti, whose frown deepened each time he looked.
“You’re spooking me,” she told him, when they stopped to water the horses.
“I’m spooked,” he said. He crouched to pour some water from his waterskin into a bowl for Bunny to drink from. “I’m sorry.”
“Keerti’s getting to you.”