Phoenix Unbound (Page 10)
Time slowed. Road dust hung in the air in a choking miasma. Pedestrians stood flattened along shop walls or leapt into the shallow safety of doorways. A soldier bore down on her at full gallop, his mount’s hooves pounding out a relentless beat as he consumed the distance between them. Gilene glimpsed the rider’s eyes—as green and hard as sea glass. Familiar.
“No,” she whispered and spun away in a futile bid to avoid him.
Too late. He leaned from the saddle, arm outstretched toward her. A terrific force wrenched her upward, almost garroting her with the collar of her own shift as the fabric pulled tight. She landed belly down across a pair of muscled thighs. Air gusted from her lungs in a hard whoosh.
It was nothing compared to the crippling shock of pain that torched her back and thigh. Reduced to emitting only breathless grunts, she arched and twisted in her captor’s imprisoning grip.
The world careened in all directions as the horse balked at her struggles, and Azarion fought to bring it under control. Snarled curses, her brothers’ diminishing shouts, and the mount’s protesting whinnies all blended into a mad cacophony while Gilene thrashed even harder on the gladiator’s lap.
A sudden crack of agony blossomed across the side of her head. Her vision went dark, and she knew no more.
CHAPTER FOUR
The captive agacin twitched across Azarion’s lap like a dying trout. His mount, stolen from one of the cavalry stables, snorted in protest at the strange movements and jerked against his rider’s guidance. With a hand on the fire witch’s back and another holding the reins, Azarion maneuvered the horse across the narrow bend of a feeder stream that traveled down the mountains and merged into the Holstet river. Kraelag lay behind him, hidden by a cloud of wind-stirred dust and the blinding rays of the setting sun. He kept an ear tuned for voices, the bays of hunting hounds, even the thwang of a bowstring as an archer loosed an arrow to bring him down.
This was a temporary reprieve. He’d barreled through the city’s crowded streets and out the main gates without raising a single warning cry from his guards. Some of the soldiers he passed had even laughed and cheered him on his way at the sight of the unconscious woman draped in front of him across the saddle. No one was the wiser that the Gladius Prime, a priceless slave and a favorite toy of the empress, had just escaped his prison. Dressed in the military garb of the Empire, he was only a soldier, hot for a woman and eager to tup her, willing or not, in the nearest straw heap.
He needed to put as much distance as possible between him and the capital before the alarm sounded and a contingent of trackers hit the trails to find him. They wouldn’t kill him—only return him to the Pit and the arms of the empress.
East and north of the stream lay the belt of Krael’s farmland, its fertile plains fed by the silt drained from the river. Two days’ ride on a fast horse and he’d reach the northern edge of the capital’s immediate land holdings—from there, a dangerous trek across the vassal lands of the Nunari and finally to the steppes of the Sky Below. If he was lucky, he’d manage to evade capture while crossing open fields, avoid being shot by Nunari clansmen for trespassing, and keep the witch from escaping or setting him alight when his back was turned.
“Be my protection, Fire Mother,” he prayed to Agna. “Be my strength.”
For once, the vicious games so loved by the Kraelians played to his advantage. No one cared if a Pit guard lay dead in the catacombs, and Azarion’s handlers would assume Herself’s favorite had once more been summoned to her chambers. He had until the small hours, when the celebrations and street parties ended, before the hunt began. He might even have until dawn if Hanimus was too far gone in his cups or the arms of a whore to notice no palace guard returned his best gladiator to his cell.
Capture wasn’t an option. He had learned to cut a throat long before his cousin sold him into slavery, and he had lost count of the number of men who had choked on their own blood from the slide of his knife in the arena. He would drown in his before he let Kraelian hunters drag him back to that cell.
Many years had passed since he’d been on a horse, and he felt clumsy in the saddle. The invisible daggers stabbing his side didn’t help. The agacin’s wrap eased some of the discomfort, but every beat of the galloping horse’s hooves against the earth was a punch to the side. He gritted his teeth and did his best to ignore it. He had three things to accomplish: stay in the saddle, keep hold of the agacin, and find shelter for them in a place far enough from the capital that he could rest for a few hours before taking to the road once more.
The sun had dropped far below the horizon, and night filled the sky with stars when the tired horse finally topped a small rise and slowed to a walk. The witch had regained consciousness, but only enough to give a small moan. She didn’t open her eyes. Azarion frowned as he glanced down at her, laid across his thighs. In his bid to keep her from tumbling them both from the saddle, he’d accidentally clipped the side of her head with his knee, hard enough to knock her out, but not for this long. This torpor of hers stemmed from something else.
“Agacin.” He tapped her lightly on the back. She moaned again but didn’t wake. He was tempted to stop the horse and lift her off his lap for a better look at her. She might well be sick. Her face had been ghostly under the mask of her illusions when she unlocked his cell door. Shadows painted crescent moons under her eyes, and her lips had lost what little color they possessed. His hands tightened on the reins to slow the horse to a stop when a sound reached his ears that turned his blood to ice: the baying of hounds.
Someone had discovered his escape.
He slammed his heels into the horse’s sides, and the animal leapt forward, galloping toward the jagged silhouette of a woodland in the distance.
They rode at a dead run, the echo of the hounds and the horns of hunters pursuing them. The horse labored valiantly up a gentle incline where a line of evergreen trees began their march down the opposite side of the slope.
Azarion slowed their wild ride to a nervous pace once they reached the ridge, as much to rest the tired horse as to gain his bearings. They couldn’t stay long. The moon’s light slanted away from them to illuminate the trees and cast him and the agacin in shadow. It wouldn’t last, and the hunters closing the distance would see them.
At the bottom of the slope, where the trees parted on either side of an overgrown path, the remains of a city lay in darkness. Not a single flame from an oil lamp or candle could be seen, and the silence pulsing from its heart was a palpable thing, a waiting hush that tainted the breeze. No song of night birds, no drone of insects. Not even the watery call of frogs.
Azarion stared down at the dark city, pondering what to do. He was nearly cross-eyed with exhaustion, one arm numb from keeping the agacin from sliding off the horse. The animal was worn out by the hard, steady pace and the labor of carrying two riders. Its sides swelled and shrank like hard-worked bellows.
He could run the horse into the ground until it dropped from under him. It would put more distance between Azarion and his pursuers, but he’d then be without a horse and forced to leave the agacin behind while he fled on foot. Injured as he was, his chances of hiding from or outrunning a hunting party were nonexistent. Below them, the abandoned city crouched, offering a roof over their heads and a place to hide for a short time while the horse rested.
Still, Azarion hesitated while an uneasy feeling crawled up his spine. Surely even the hunters, driven by duty, a promise of bounty, or fear of the empress, would hesitate to follow them into this place. They would think him mad for hiding there. All made wide berths around the haunted city of Midrigar.