The Jack of Souls (Multi-award winner!)

Chapter 34b - Despair

"Harric!" Caris called, softly. She scanned the rock pile of their around her, painfully aware of the fact that Willard would notice and become iritated. No sign of him around their vantage on the rock pile. Her gaze swept the road behind, where the horses stood hobbled. Still nothing.

"Where the Black Moon is Harric?" Willard grunted, craning his neck to check by the horses. 

Brolli turned his huge eyes to the road behind, then again to where it approached the fortress. After a moment, he made a noise that might have been a rueful laugh. "There." He pointed to a distant point on the road below them.

Shielding her eyes from the light of the enemy's fires, Caris saw movement behind the fortifications. A dim figure jogged down the road toward the wall. Harric. He slowed, seemed to pause when he was almost to the fortress, then left the road, climbing up to the side and out of sight. Stairs? Yes. A dark line of stairs with a low wall as rail or cover.

"He grew tired of the old men arguing," Brolli said.

"Gods leave him," Willard muttered. "What the Black Moon does he think he's doing?"

"Making a look at that cliff ledge, I think."

Caris felt a stab of anxiety. Surely it was as clear to him as it was to Harric that running out on that ledge was suicide. He appeared again at the top of the stairs; the angle of her view had him silhouetted against the illuminated cliff rocks beyond. Surely he would turn about soon and come back to report some new reconnaissance. She'd sensed over the last few days a desire in Harric to impress Willard — to somehow appear capable of more than dressing the old knight or buffing his saddle. Did he think this sort of spying was the way to show he was useful? Gods leave him, why'd he leave without telling me?

"I see him," Willard muttered. "He'd better not get any ideas of heroics. Girl. Get him back here. Take a shield," he added. "And I don't want you taking any risks, so stay behind cover. Keep that shield between you and the tower in case you're spotted. Understand? No heroics."

Caris clambered down the rock pile. She grabbed the tall shield from Harric's horse and set off at a trot, her armor clacking with every stride. With every boot fall, her anger at Harric compounded. Why didn't he tell me? Did he think I'd stop him? Betray him to Willard? The notion galled her, but in truth she knew she might well have stopped him, and the fact he was justified in his secrecy galled her even more.

When she reached the place where Harric had turned aside, she saw the stairs, but their protective wall was much too low to allow her to climb normally; she'd have to crouch almost double. Nor could she see the top of the stairs from the bottom, as the staircase curved around an outcrop. So she climbed. She took the stairs two at a stride, bent double in her armor. When she rounded enough of the bend to see the top of the stairs, she was breathing quite hard and sweating into her quilting. Worse, Harric was not in the stairwell.

Her eyes pried through the dark of the stairs, looking for where he might have hidden, but found nothing but the uniform lines of stair after stair.

Another stab of panic. Where the Black Moon are you?

She reached the top of the stair to find no sign of him there, nor on the ledge of the path across the cliff. She was certain she had not passed him on the stair, but was so baffled that she glanced behind her just to be sure. There was nowhere above her he could have gone, unless he'd fallen off the ledge.

Her breath hitched, and she swallowed a hard knot in her throat.

She could not look over the edge without revealing herself to watching crossbowmen, but if she did it quickly she could be back again behind the wall before they could aim and shoot. She looked back up the road above the pass to the pile of boulders where Willard and Brolli still watched. She could see their shapes in the dim light of the moon. Was one of them motioning her to return?