The Worlds of the Sheaf

Fechlon - Part 5

     They ran for the rest of the day.

     Thomas surprused himself by being able to keep up with the others, but the soldiers were concerned by the trail they were leaving through the dense undergrowth, a trail a child would have been able to follow.

     "Don't worry about it," said Thomas, grinning, as they paused to catch their breaths in the lee of a low, overgrown wall. "In fact, it's good. It works right in our favour."

     "How's that?" asked Matthew uncertainly.

     "They'll follow us," said the wizard. "They'll all come this way, and when they've gone a few miles we teleport back to the building they smoked us out of. We spent all night and half the day there, I know it well enough to teleport accurately. They'll all be gone from there by then, following us, and we simply move out in a different direction, this time taking care to cover our trail."

     Drenn grinned with delight. "Sanclair, my old teacher, would have been proud of you. I'd like to let them catch up with us first, though. I want to catch one of them."

     "What for?" asked Matthew.

     "Information," said the priest. "He can tell us where their centres of population are. The best places to hide out while we wait to hear from Saturn. Otherwise, we're likely to blunder into one of their cities and find ourselves captured before we know what's happening."

     "And what do we do with him when he's told us everything he knows?" asked Matthew doubtfully. "If he's told us where to hide, he'll tell his friends when we let him go."

     "We don't let him go," the priest replied grimly. "We..."

     "No!" snapped Thomas firmly. "We don't kill him. It would be murder, pure and simple."

     "They have made themselves our enemies," pointed out the priest. "Samnos allows us to..."

     "I don't care what Samnos lets you do!" cried the wizard, his eyes burning with determination. "We're not at war with these people. It's a simple misunderstanding, one that we may still be able to sort out. We're not killers."

     Drenn examined the wizard sharply, his steely grey eyes narrowing, but then he nodded. "Very well," he said, "but we need the information. What do you propose we do with him?"

     Thomas had no answer to that, though, and shortly afterwards they got back to their feet and trotted on.

     They'd covered about ten miles by the time the sun sank behind the towering, ruined buildings, but the darkness of the stretching shadows was offset by the soft, silvery glow of the ring arching overhead like a sholog's scimitar. The soldiers, trained in the art of travelling through hostile territory, made good use of the light to scan their surroundings, alert for the slightest sign of human activity, and several times Drenn spotted furtive movements in the buildings towering on either side of them.

     He called the others' attention to it and the Tharians, expecting that they were about to come under attack again, began looking for a defensible position, but any building they entered might already be occupied by the enemy. As the hours went by and nothing happened, though, they cautiously allowed themselves to relax.

     "I don't think they're hostile," said Matthew, squinting through the darkness at a grove of trees they were passing in which he thought he'd seen movement. "I think they're different people from the soldiers who attacked us."

     "I thought I got a glimpse of one back there," agreed Jop Sonno. "The impression I got was of feathers and war paint. Barbaric tribesmen rather than organised soldiers."