a woman named Ereta, spoke up. “And now Col’een is dead.”
Nali looked up into the sea of hostile faces before her. She had never felt as small and uncertain as she did that moment.
“Enough.” Leela stepped forward to the table. “What is done is done. We all knew the risks of trying to hunt the creature, Col’een included. That we did not know the Wayfinder’s suspicions about this Fallen at the time we were hunting it changes nothing.”
Nali tried not to show her surprise. She had not expected the Gar’Mel to come to her defense.
“If the Wayfinder is right, then we only have once choice.” Zolne looked around at the Gars and hunters in the room. “We must leave. This…Fallen will keep killing everyone in the village. There is no hope here, not anymore.”
Leela stiffened, but did not speak.
“We would never make it,” Too’na said. “There are too many—”
“I’m not talking about the entire village.” Zolne rubbed self-consciously at her bruised face and gave Leela a furtive glance. “I mean us, the Gar’Noomren, and whoever else is fit to travel and fight. We might stand a chance of making it.”
“You would leave the others here to die?” Illa shook her head. “Have you no honor, sellsword?”
Zolne’s eyes flashed. “Like you said, lowlander, I am a sellsword. And there is no profit in dying, is there? Perhaps if your vaunted Jalara Hesdeen had considered this village worthy enough to defend with her own precious Tals, you would not--”
“And what would happen when we all arrived back at Reteel?” Leela pinned Zolne in her unflinching gaze. “Would you have us crawl back to Noom’Tela and explain to the Gar’Melar that we lost our nerve and abandoned the village that was under our protection, Zolne? What do you think her response would be to that?”
Zolne lowered her head, silent.
Leela looked around the room. “We must find this abomination and destroy it.” She turned to Nali. “Now, Wayfinder, how do we do that?”
Nali looked around the room at the faces staring at her. She searched her memory, trying to remember every detail she could about the Fallen, every bit of information she had been given during her training over thirty standard cycles ago.
“There must be somewhere this Fallen is hunting from,” she said, thinking aloud. “Ruins, a city—”
“The necropolis of Kai’Li is more than three hundred watches’ travel away,” Illa broke in. “There are no ruins near Veel’na.”
Nali opened her mouth to speak, but did not receive the chance.
“There are ruins nearby,” came a quiet voice from the back of the room. “I’ve seen them.”
All eyes turned towards a hunter standing by the chamber’s entrance. Her blue hair was pulled back into a ponytail and a necklace of deathstalker teeth hung from her neck.
Illa cocked her head. “You’ve found Highborne ruins here, Sayla? You’ve never mentioned it.”
The hunter called Sayla shrugged. “Never saw the need to. There isn’t much to see. Even less to talk about. Just a building, a temple or tomb, maybe. It’s Highborn, though. Made of the same obsidian blocks that Kai’Li is. I found it by accident a few cycles ago when I was caught in a vortex storm. Needed shelter fast, and I was too far away from the nearest lodge. That’s when I found a cave and discovered it was an ancient building of some sort, mostly covered over by the jungle. If not for the storm I would have walked right by it and never have seen the entrance.”
“Where?” asked Leela.
Sayla thought for a second. “About two rotations’ full march from here. Northeast.”
“You can find it again?” Nali hardly dared to hope.
Sayla smiled. “Please, Wayfinder. I’ve been hunting the lowlands for more than two hundred cycles. I think I can find something just six watches away from my home.”
“So we know where it’s coming from,” Too’na commented. “How does that help us kill it?”
“It gives us a chance,” Nali said quickly. “If we can catch the Fallen unawares, flush it out of hiding—”
“You think it’s returning to its lair between kills?” Zolne gave Nali a hard look. “How is that possible?”
“It moves far faster than us,” Nali responded. “In leaps and bounds, through the treetops from branch to branch. Yes, I think it periodically returns to its place of habitation. At any rate it is the best chance we have to find it.”
Leela nodded. “I wouldn’t mind turning the tables on this thing for once.” She turned to Sayla. “We’ll need you to guide us.”
The hunter nodded. “Figured as much.”
Leela turned to the rest of the room. “Alright, ladies, enough being hunted. It’s time to be the hunter.”
It was part-way through the third watch’s march that one of the greelaks stumbled and wouldn’t get back up for several long minutes. It lay in the mud of the rainforest trail, whining and moaning.
“We have to take a break,” Sayla announced as she came back up the trail to Leela and Nali. “For the greelaks if nothing else. Riding them into the ground doesn’t do any of us any good.”
Leela scowled, but nodded. “Alright. A short rest.”
Nali glanced behind her. Ereta was practically asleep in the saddle. Zolne was hunched forward on the back of her greelak, rubbing her face. Illa was more alert, scanning the blackness of the jungle to either side of them.
They were all exhausted. Nali guessed that most of the women in the party had not slept for ten watches or more.
“I don’t know if the women can keep going like this,” Nali said softly. “We have at least two more watches’ ride ahead of us. Maybe—”
“We’re not bedding down,” Leela said. “We’ll have time enough to sleep when this thing is dead.” She turned to the other women. “A short rest, no more.”
Nali gave Kili a pat, then dismounted and stretched her legs.
The lizard nuzzled her with his beak, grateful for the break.
Behind Nali the other women dismounted as well, some just collapsing to the side of the trail by their mount. There were three Gars, two slaves, and two hunters besides Sayla. Everyone else had been left behind to defend the village under Gar Too’na’s command.
Nali gave Kili a feedbag of needle seeds to munch, then wandered down the trail to check on the rest of the convoy, rifle in hand. She was met by Sayla as she returned up the trail.
“I hope this Gar’Mel knows what she’s doing,” the hunter commented.
“She doesn’t want anyone else to die.” Nali wasn’t sure why she was suddenly defending the Nevagan.
The hunter shrugged. “If we’re all asleep on our feet when we confront this Fallen, there’ll be a lot more dying.”
Nali glanced off the trail.
Leela sat in the crook of a gnarled tree a short distance away, facing away from them. Blue smoke twisted and curled around her.
Nali walked over. She shouldered her rifle and peered into the dark jungle beyond.
“You disagree with me, don’t you Wayfinder?” Leela took a kalish pipe from her mouth and blew out a stream of smoke into the rain-shrouded air. “You think we should bed down for the watch?”
Nali put her rifle down and leaned against the wet bark of a nearby tree. “You’re the Gar’Mel, not me.”
Leela grunted. “I wish to Moraana I wasn’t.”
Nali did not answer for a moment. She looked down at the pipe that Leela held. It was made from stone, carved in the form of a dragon. “That’s beautiful,” she said. “Where did you get it?”
Leela pulled the pipe away from her mouth in surprise. “This?” She chuckled, shaking her head. “I’m amazed what you Llathese can see in the dark. I can barely see my hand in front of my face.”
Nali glanced back at the trail behind them. The soft glow from the firefly lamps attached to the saddles of the greelaks didn’t penetrate this far into the jungle. “Your eyes get used to it.”
“Mine don’t.” Leela turned t
he pipe in her hand as if seeing it for the first time. “My mother gave this to me. Back on Nevaga, when I was still a girl.” She sighed and stuck the pipe back in her mouth, speaking around the stem. “I know the lowlanders here on Llathe prefer to chew the leaf. I never took to it. Some things are hard to change, I suppose.”
Nali said nothing. The rain tapered off a bit, the drops splattering amongst the leaves and ferns all around them.
“Have you ever been off-world, Nali?”
“No.” She tried to hide her surprise. It was the first time Leela had addressed her by name.
“You’re better for it,” Leela said. She puffed on her pipe. “The Two Rings are a cruel place for a woman. We’re treated like chattel out there. Slaves, jameens. Goods to be bargained, sold, or stolen. Here, on Llathe, there’s freedom.” She glanced up at the falling rain. “It’s worth all of…this. The eternal rain, the skies that are so clouded you never even see the sun, the rotations that last longer than cycles, a jungle that’s always trying its best to kill you—”
Nali chuckled. “I suppose when you put it like that, it sounds worse than the Burnside.” She plucked at the lizardskin cover on her rifle, making sure it was still tight. “Llathe’s my home, though. Always has been.”
“Raiders off the Dune Sea attacked our town when I was fifteen cycles old,” Leela said in a quiet voice. She sucked thoughtfully on her pipe for a moment. “The town was unprepared, the Tals were outnumbered and taken by surprised. My mother was killed right in front of me. I never knew my father, though I had heard that he was a Tal for one of the