The Charnel Prince - J. Gregory Keyes [154]
“Faiths, are you here?” she asked.
There was no answer, but the crane looked up and regarded her before going back to his task.
“Thank you,” Anne said.
She wasn’t sure whom she was speaking to, or what she was thanking them for.
She woke in the horz with Austra beside her, still clutching her hand. They were both covered in severed limbs and foliage. The knights had done it—they had defiled the sacred garden. She and Austra lay at the terminus of their destructive, sacrilegious path.
Well, she thought. We’re not dead. That’s a start. But if Austra was right, and the land of the Faiths was just a sort of dream, how could their assailants have missed them?
She listened quietly for a long time, but heard nothing except the drone of an occasional insect. After a time, she woke Austra.
Austra sat up, took in their return, then mumbled a faint prayer to Saint Selfan and Saint Rieyene. “They didn’t see us,” she said. “Though I can’t imagine why not.”
“Maybe you were wrong,” Anne said. “Maybe we didn’t leave our bodies behind after all.”
“Maybe,” Austra said dubiously.
“You stay here,” Anne said. “I’ll go out and have a look.”
“No, let me go.”
“If they catch you, they’ll still come after me,” Anne said. “If they catch me, they’ll have no reason to come in after you.”
Austra reluctantly consented to that logic, and Anne went back out of the horz, walking this time through the torn and trampled vegetation.
Near the entrance she found a pool of dark, sticky liquid which she recognized as blood. There was more outside, a trail of it that abruptly stopped.
She poked around a few of the ruins, but the horsemen seemed to be gone. They weren’t on the road, either, when she climbed the hill and looked down.
Cazio, z’Acatto and the horsemen were gone.
“We have to find them,” Austra insisted desperately. “We have to.” Tears were streaming down her cheeks, and Anne couldn’t blame her. She’d had her own cry before going back to the horz to collect her friend.
“We will,” she said, trying to sound confident.
“But how?”
“They can’t have gone far,” Anne pointed out.
“No, no,” Austra said. “We might have been in there for a year. Or ten years, or a hundred. We’ve just been in Elphin, haven’t we? Things like that happen.”
“In kinderspells,” Anne reminded her. “And we don’t know that it’s Elphin, anyway. I’ve never been gone more than a bell or so. So we ought to be able to follow them.”
“They might have already killed Cazio and z’Acatto.”
“I don’t see their bodies, do you?”
“They might have buried them.”
“I don’t think those men are the sort likely to do such a thing. If they don’t fear the consequences of murdering an entire coven or cutting up a horz, they wouldn’t pay much mind to leaving a couple of bodies on the road. Besides, the knights had them all bound up, remember? They’re probably taking them back to their ship.”
“Or Cazio told them some clever lie about where we’d gone,” Austra suggested, sounding calmer now, “and they’re waiting to see if he told the truth before they torture him.”
“That’s possible,” Anne said, trying not to think about Cazio being tortured.
“So which way do we go?” Austra asked.
“Their ship sailed north past Duvé,” Anne said. “So it seems reasonable that they came from farther up the road, the direction we’re going.”
“But Cazio would have sent them south, to keep us safe.”
“True,” Anne agreed, staring at the road in frustration, wishing she knew the tiniest thing about how to follow a trail. But even that many horsemen made little impression on such a well-traveled road, or at least none that her untrained eye could find.
But then she saw it, a small drop of blood. She walked a few paces north and found another, and another after that.
There were none to the south.
“North,” she said. “One of them was bleeding by the horz, and I guess he still is. Anyhow, it’s the only sign we’ve got.”
In some distant age, the river Teremené had cut a gorge in