The trail cut a less-than-clear path through the forest. While it was artfully concealed in the beginning by dragging sod to and fro across the deep tracks, it became less and less so the further they followed it along. Eventually their quarry didn't even bother to avoid snapping branches or having their clothing catch on brambles.
They just keep getting lazier and lazier.
"I can't believe no one has captured this person yet," muttered the Inquisitor. "If we had more men up here we could flush every espiri witch out of the Shalewarrens inside a month."
The Enkiri clenched her fist in a concentrated effort to hold back the visceral reaction Tiernan's words caused. Every instinct she had screamed at her to kill him now and be done with it. If the Shalewarrens were invaded by the Inquisition and their foolish hunt for heretical witches, there was no way she would be able to hide everyone. She had to protect the people of her clan, regardless of the monster it forced her to become.
Freedom carried a blood price, and it was one she was more than willing to continue to pay in their stead. It was the only thing that had remained constant since their escape from the Empire.
Drystan caught her eye and gave a small shake of his head, knowing better than most what was going on in her mind. He was one of the very few outsiders that had seen what she so fiercely guarded, one of only three that knew why she was so diligent in guarding them. Obviously he was of the opinion that his friend was not like the rest of the religious zealots that would kill her on sight. Akkali knew better-everyone was capable of anything, and involving religion only made it easier for them to write off their worst atrocities as righteous acts of divine bidding. That Tiernan happened to be his friend did not exempt him from being one of those people. It merely blinded Drystan to what the man was capable of becoming.
Clamping down on her emotions, she returned his silent admonition with a sneer and turned her attention back to the trail. She knew Drystan would never let this particular subject go, but he was smart enough to leave it be until they were somewhere safer than a tunnel full of shattered skeletons or off in the woods chasing after the people who had left them there. The man knew how to pick his battles, at least, and he usually saved arguing over any serious disagreements he had with her when they were somewhere there would be little risk of significant collateral damage.
Tiernan lead them on for hours as they hiked through the normally raider-plagued hinterlands outside Baedorn. The rolling hills and towering treeline made for perfect ambushes, either from the branches overhead or the shallow but steep-sided valleys that provided ample cover for a large crew of cutthroats. Akkali herself preferred launching attacks from the branches; few ever bothered to look skyward for their doom. Many and dead were the fools upon whose skulls she had simply dropped a heavy log or rock. Because of this she kept a watchful eye on the canopy as they went along, but as with their journey into the city, she spotted nothing more than apathetic birds and damp moss.
The trail wound into a dense stand of bent trees that looked as though they had been lighting-struck in recent years. They were gnarled and dead, blackened and hollowed with fire. Among their roots were the signs of a hastily abandoned hunting camp. Unfletched arrows were scattered where they had been dumped in a rapid retreat. The fire pit still had the faint glow of embers lodged away beneath logs burned stark white and merely waiting for the wind to blow them away into ashes. Tracks from half a dozen horses trampled whatever was left, all of them hastily headed for the main road.
Arms crossed flat against his chest and lips pursed into a thin, calculating line, Tiernan paced to and fro from the camp to the trail that lead away towards the road, eyeing the tracks and occasionally the whole of the area where they had been made in absolute silence. Finally he stood up straight and shook his head. "We'll never catch them up now. They have four or five hours on us on horseback in the open country."
"Well shit," said Drystan, crossing his arms against his chest in a manner disturbingly similar to Tiernan, "guess we really should have gone back for the horses, Akkali."
Eyes narrowed, the Enkiri peered down at the fire pit from where she stood in the shadow of a gnarled and burned-out tree trunk. She could see scraps of unburned leather and metal sticking up haphazardly through the still-smoldering heap. There had been more than sticks and logs put to the flame. She grabbed the nearest unfletched arrow and proceeded to sift through the ashes by stabbing through them in a circular fashion.
Behind her Tiernan seemed to have decided that now was as good a time as any to berate Drystan for whatever past slight he had perpetrated. "So this is what you've been doing these past seven, eight years?"
Drystan gave a halfhearted shrug. "No. I went back south for a while."
"Find what you were looking for, or did you just piss away eighteen years of your life because you were stupidly drunk?"
"Listen, Tier," he said with a sigh, "I'm sorry. I'm not like you; I was never fit to be an Inquisitor."
"That is a piss-poor excuse for walking out on everyone you bled with the night before we were all supposed to take our vows," muttered Tiernan with an irritated scowl.
Akkali rolled her eyes at the poorly concealed disconsolation dripping from Tiernan's words and stabbed the arrow shaft deeper into the fire pit. It had been dug unusually deep, perhaps two feet straight into the ground. The arrow easily disappeared into the ash and swallowed up half her forearm before it connected with packed earth.
No one would dig a pit this deep unless they planned to burn and bury everything.
She crab-stepped her way around the fire and continued to methodically prod the ashes in the pit, ignoring the strange look she was occasionally getting from the Inquisitor. It was difficult to tell whether he was amused or simply in shock that he was still in the company of an Enkiri. He didn't seem to be a man capable of much in the way of mirth, not like the irrepressible grinning fool Drystan, at least as far as she could tell by his demeanor.
"You're not going to accept my apology are you."
"Of course I'm not, you idiot!" retorted Tiernan, turning to face the other man in order to properly argue with him.
The arrow shaft connected with something solid. She stabbed at it a few more times to determine how big it actually was, then plunged her hand into the ash and plucked it from the embers. It was a leather-bound book, half-charred but still legible near the bindings. With a chill she realized that she had seen its like hundreds of times before, bound in well-worn black leather with intricate gold stitching to keep the pages in place. Dusting it off, she scuttled back to a nearby round rock and sat down to witness what she hoped would be a very good fight. She needed something to take her mind off what she had just discovered and watching an Inferi and an Inquisitor attempt to beat the sense out of one another would be amusing.
Tiernan had one finger up and was stabbing it at Drystan to emphasize his sentences. The man was on a furious tirade on par with those of wives whose husbands ran off to drink and gamble at all hours of the night. "You walked out on me, on the whole church. You walked out on Marshal Inquisitor Æbenforth for Junan's sake! How could you do that? You, of all people?"
Shoving Tiernan's hand aside, Drystan began shaking his own finger at him just so he could seem as angry as the other. "Don't you stand there and tell me that if you were in my place you'd have stayed!"
"I would have!" shouted Tiernan. "You don't just abandon your brothers, Drystan!"
"You speak as though the church is at war and I left you all on the battlefield."
The fact that the Inquisitor was nearly a head taller than the Inferi made for quite an interesting confrontation. He towered over Drystan and glared down at him like a slightly less deformed giant out of a fairy-tale. Akkali would not have been the least bit surprised to find the man demanding a toll for crossing some bridge over a bottomless gorge in some misty and forbidding kingdom somewhere. "Didn't you? What else is it, if not a war between us and the bastards who create things like that killing field back there?"
Despite the height difference Drystan railed right back at the man as though they were eye-to-eye. Nothing intimidated the Inferi, least of all mortal men. They had faced things more terrifying by far than one angry Inquisitor, and she had yet to see the man do much more than make an offhanded comment about being terribly outnumbered and without a gift for the host of the horde during those situations. "I've done more in these past eight years against fiends like that than you'd get done in eighty as an Inquisitor, questioning every little thing before acting! Don't tell me it's a war; I've been to the trenches and back, damn it, and I know exactly what it is! The only thing I would have ever achieved in the Inquisition is a fat ass and a fancy shield."
Each seized the other's tunic and raised their fists to strike. A staring contest began between the two of them, with Tiernan's narrowed green eyes fixed on Drystan's face and Drystan's equally squinted blue-eyed countenance just waiting for him to make the first move. Occasionally one would twitch his nose or the corner of his mouth, almost as if they were daring the other to flinch.
The entire thing was such an amusing spectacle that Akkali barely noticed the fact that the leather-bound book she had plucked from the ashes had been fanned by the evening breeze and sparked a flame. She swiftly smothered it in the damp earth and let the bickering and tunic-pulling continue on uninterrupted. It had been ages since she had witnessed something as hilarious as the fight between the Inquisitor and the Inferi. She almost wished she could get in contact with Arathron so she could have someone to wager on the outcome with. No doubt the revenant was enjoying the spectacle just as much as she was, and he had the better seat from which to watch the whole event.
"I'm not going to stand around and let you make light of everything I've worked for," hissed Tiernan after a few long minutes of staring.
Drystan returned his remark with a sly grin. "I'm gone for eight years and just look at how big your head's gotten. It's carrying you right a foot off the ground these days."
"I should hammer you into the ground like the leftover nail you are."
"Leftovernail?" The Inferi cocked his head to the side. "Oh now what the hell kind of insult is that?"
"Yours was the worse."
"I take umbrage to that you man-troll!"
"As well you should you lecherous prick!"
Suddenly, as if nothing at all was wrong between them, the two men laughed at each other and embraced in an unexpected and brotherly fashion. Akkali sighed heavily, her hopes of seeing a drag-out fight between the two smothered like the ashes of the fire she had been digging through. The entire day was now officially one big disappointment; she had been hoping for a little blood to lift her spirits and had come up with absolutely nothing.
She stood up and crossed the encampment silently, startling both men with her appearance as she dropped the half-burned book on Drystan's shoulder. "If you two are quite done with the posturing and the man-hugging we should get a move on."
"Aa-hah!" Tiernan looked at her with an amused half-grin. His expression gave her pause; she had only ever seen an Inquisitor smile when he was about to lop the head off a witch. For a moment she thought she had slipped up and done something to tip him off as to her nature, but he merely smirked at her, completely unaware that she could melt his face off with a bit of concentration. "You do have a voice! I didn't think Drys would travel with anyone who couldn't tell him to shut up on a daily basis."
Sneezing from the ash dust flicked in his face by the pages, Drystan grabbed the book off his shoulder and rifled through it. Not seeing anything that interested him, he looked at her questioningly. "Special?"
Akkali planted her knuckles on her hips and rocked back slightly on her heels, looking up at the gathering mist sifting through the branches overhead. "A dissertation on the Five Unholy Magics by a very old and very dead espiri mage. Galenfyr carried a copy of it on his person all the time, called it his 'Verses of Reincarnation'."
Like a shuttered lantern the mirth was wicked away from Tiernan's face and he instantly returned to the dour-faced Inquisitor she had grown accustomed to over the past few hours. "An edition of Aetern's Choimre."
It was unsurprising that the man would know the actual title of the book; Akkali herself never cared to memorize it, but she had seen so many of them the name had merely become stuck in her head as an image of gold stitched letters on a leather cover. "The words in there have never graced a printing press. The pages are always hand-copied, the bindings always hand-stitched, and getting one's hands on a tome can be very expensive. Or not, if you manage to kill the man who had it before you."
"Odds are they're from the Empire," said Tiernan, his eyebrows knitting together over his narrow nose. "It looks like an illuminated copy. No one bothers putting that much work into a book north of the steppes."
"It's an Oratio," she clarified, sneering at his unwillingness to point out what was obvious to everyone in the clearing. She turned to Drystan. "You two had better hope it's just an army of walking corpses this fool is raising. I'm not going to sit out the siege with you if it turns out to be one of the more fun hexes in there. Like the one involving goats."