Page 41 of The Summer Pass

The interior of Tagra Degra was grim and grey under the night sky. Houses with several storeys were packed closely along narrow streets, giving it almost the feel of a town, except that it was quite small and all ringed around with high grey walls. The great house on the north-east corner loomed tallest of all, gaunt and ungainly.

It was easy for a slim, small person all dressed in black, with a black scarf pulled up over the lower half of his face, to slip through the shadows in the dark fortress, unseen even though the place was overfull of inhabitants, with people camping in the streets and in the dour, treeless gathering place in front of the great house. It was easy to find the location of the dungeon under the great house, down a flight of dirty stairs, behind a heavy, locked and guarded door.

It would have been harder to get through the locked door or find a way around it, but that turned out not to be necessary. There was a group of men sitting around a fire outside the front door of the great house, glumly making arrows under the supervision of a yawning guard. One of them was Shan.

Lill crouched in the dark angle formed by a wing of the great house and watched the men making arrows, waiting for his chance. A grey cat stalked past, seeing him but choosing to ignore him. He thought of Vanu kneeling down in the gathering place of Umtúshta to pet his daughters’ cat, the gentle way his long fingers curled around the animal’s small head.

He glanced after the cat. They were not common in the mountains, pet cats, and that cat in Umtúshta had been grey too. That was a coincidence.

A loud group was coming up the main street through the fortress from the gate. When they passed through the gathering place, that would provide a good distraction. Lill edged closer to the men making arrows.

The group approaching the great house had evidently been out on a raid against the enemy camp and had brought back a prisoner. Only one, but he was obviously a significant find: a Zashian nobleman with a black beard and bright red coat. He looked startlingly out of place in the grey mountain fortress, walking stiffly—with outraged dignity or fear or both—between the big blond Hawakhaba swordsmen on either side of him. Lill had a feeling like he’d had when he saw the cat, of seeing something familiar. Not that he knew this man, but he knew the world to which this man belonged, the faraway world of the Zashian court. Who, he wondered, had they managed to take prisoner?

He shook himself. He was in danger of being distracted by the distraction he’d intended to exploit. Refocussing, he chose his moment, ran forward to the bench where Shan was sitting, and dragged him backward off it into the shadows.

“Lill?” Shan squeaked, when Lill judged it safe to take his hand away from Shan’s mouth.

“Shh. Yes, it’s me.”

“How—what⁠—”

“No time to talk. Follow me.”

Shan was as sensible as Lill had counted on him being, and he followed without further questions. Lill led him back through the dark fortress, between tents and under arches where houses were built out over the streets, until they reached the wall on the side of Tagra Degra where the mountain rose up, bleak and black against the sky.

At this point, if Lill had been alone, he would simply have gone back over the wall the way he came in. But he couldn’t expect Shan to do that, so he led the way to the postern gate, whose location he had noted on his way in. It was guarded from above, and the guard’s attention was directed outward; he wasn’t worried about anyone leaving the fortress. Lill hefted the bolt that held the gate closed, and Shan, seeing what he was doing, hurried to help. Together they got it silently out and laid it carefully on the ground. Lill eased the gate open, and they slipped out onto the mountain.

He didn’t like leaving the gate unbarred on the inside, but someone would notice soon enough and bar it again.

“Wh-what do we do now?” Lill could hear the tremor in Shan’s voice, although he could barely see him in the shadow of the fortress wall.

“Wait until it starts to get light,” he whispered back.

Firuduna had advised him that he’d need to do that, and Firuduna had been right. Lill found the two of them a relatively comfortable place to sit, where he judged they would be well hidden from the guard on the wall above even when the light started to return. Shan curled up and fell asleep. Lill had slept earlier, so that he could stay awake now, and he was glad of it. He was yawning by the time the sky began to lighten over the fortress walls behind them.

He shook Shan awake and pointed out the route down to where he had left Firuduna on the edge of the forest.

“We have to go quickly,” he warned. “They could see us from the walls now, if they’re looking.”

Shan swallowed nervously, but he nodded.

They set off down the slope, Lill going first, Shan following cautiously. It was not all climbing; there were portions where there was almost a path, and you could walk, other bits where you had to turn and go down backwards, which seemed to bother Shan a lot. He didn’t have very good shoes, and Lill wondered whether to suggest he take them off and go barefoot. Lill was wearing the boots that Vanu had given him, which were good for everything in the mountains.

For the last few hours of the night, maybe just because he was tired or maybe for some other reason, Lill had felt a sense of expectation, as if he was waiting for something more than the dawn. Now, as the sky grew lighter, the feeling intensified. The first sliver of the sun broke the horizon, and Lill judged that they were out of sight of the guards on the fortress wall now, hidden by the angle of the mountain. They had passed the ledge where the helmet had fallen. He looked up toward Shan, intending to tell him that they could slow down.

Beyond Shan and far above him, above the towers of Tagra Degra, a shelf of bare rock, rather like the one where Umtúshta was built in the Spring Pass, leaned out from the mountain. Someone, during the night—because it had not been there the day before, Lill would swear to that—had planted a pole there with a banner on it. The breeze was tugging the banner out against the pale sky, and the light of the rising sun touched the device woven in gold on a black ground. It was a lion.

Chapter 17

Lioness

Firuduna had seen the banner too and was beside himself with excitement. If Lill had wanted to go back to Tsuruva without looking for Vanu, Firuduna wouldn’t have let him.

“It’s bee-fuckery, absolute bee-fuckery!” Firuduna kept exclaiming. “Planting his banner on that peak in the night? He got past all those troops in the pass, and he must be camped in the forest somewhere around here. I wonder how many men he has with him? That’s what they’ll be wondering down in the Zashian camp, too!”

Not very many was Lill’s guess, and he thought that’s what the Zashians would think, too. But they wouldn’t be sure, and they would know it didn’t really matter. The Lion of the Summer Pass hadn’t come to engage them in a pitched battle this time. He was using the territory he knew best, returning to his old tricks. They had already got a taste of that if they’d heard what he did down in the Tawa Valley with the dead boar and the Protector’s horses.

“I can take Shan back to Tsuruva by myself,” Firuduna offered before Lill could ask. “I’ll say he’s my prisoner, like we talked about—you’ll explain that to him, right? So he’s not alarmed. And you go find your husband.”