Thirty: The Barrens

"Storms are coming." Yddris craned up at the sky, and then went back to peeling carrots with deft flicks of his knife. Jordan eyed the angry clouds above them with trepidation. They'd only been travelling for a few days, and had a long way to go yet. He didn't want to be caught in whatever that indigo mass was carrying. He turned back to the pot and gave it a stir. Earlier in the day Koen and Astra had gone out hunting and caught several small black animals that strongly resembled marmots, which Jordan had tried and failed to skin before his tutor had taken pity on him. The party had agreed that Yddris could help cook as long as Jordan didn't let him anywhere near the pot, an arrangement that suited them both.

A little way away, the rest of their group sat around the wagon and chatted. The previous few days had been a slightly surreal experience for Jordan; he was so used to having his days and his mind cluttered by dozens of wildly different tasks that spending hours upon hours simply trudging along, with only conversation or surroundings to occupy him, was unnerving. It was boring, but energising. His body was exhausted, but it was a clean exhaustion, from hard walking rather than fear or lack of sleep. His mind had not felt clearer since he'd fallen through the portal.

"Are we going to get caught in them?" Jordan asked. He tore his eyes from Astra, who was conversing freely like he'd never heard her do before. He seemed to be the only one in the group she wouldn't talk to, except when it was necessary – to change places in the wagon or pass her something while she cooked. Everything she said to him was purely functional, and watching her laugh at something Chip – a complete stranger - had said stung a little.

"Hopefully not." Yddris peered up again and threw another carrot onto the pile he'd made beside him. "If it catches us in the last couple of days, though, we'll have done pretty well."

"How long do they last, normally?"

"End of every dark season, storms blow down through the districts from the North Wastes. They move pretty quickly, don't normally stay in one area for more than a week or two. Couple weeks' grace and then the Guildtown usually gets a sea-storm from the east, as well. Those generally aren't as bad though, since it has to get through the Whispering Wall and over a mountain chain before it hits. Lasts a couple of days. Some years it just doesn't have enough force to get far enough inland to start with."

"You didn't strike me as a weather expert."

"Need to be, living here. As Unspoken we travel a lot. Knowing when the heart of a storm is going to hit and where can be a case of life or death."

"They're that bad?"

"Some years, aye." Yddris stretched and started on the potatoes. They were limited in fresh supplies and by the second week would probably be living on hard bread and cured meat, no matter how well they rationed the fresh food. "But even if it's a good year, it's a daft bastard who finds himself in a mountain pass when a gale gets up."

Jordan had never been all that fond of the wilderness. Even though it was a damn sight better to be travelling on the plains than stuck in the Reach and all that came with that, the openness made him uneasy. Ren seemed to disagree; she regularly went out hunting around the camp and brought back wriggling beetles or grubs she'd dug up from between the grass roots. She'd dump them in Jordan's lap, looking pleased with herself, and then gobble them up with a sulky huff when he didn't eat them.

Of Arlen's dire predictions of bandits, he'd seen no sign. Demons had been regular visitors, usually skinny thralls drawn by the smell of the cooking pot, but they were easily repelled by the nets Hap and Koen set every night. Since the Marrowhawk they'd encountered only one other larger demon at close quarters, a young Firebull that Yddris had chased off to Chip's enthusiastic cheering. Others they only saw from a great distance. Jordan was starting to get more nervous about the lack of people than he was about danger from demons. Grace had always been the one who came home with muddy hands and bleeding knees, while Jordan had preferred his bedroom and the bustle of a town centre. Aside from drawing he had never had a dazzling variety of interests and only went camping on family trips or at Grace's behest. Civilisation had always felt safer to him.

He also found crapping in a hole at the edge of the camp while trying to keep his cloak out of it very trying.

"So how's travelling treating you?" Yddris said. He sat back once he'd finished the potatoes, and Jordan started throwing carrot into the broth he'd been boiling up for the last hour. When he'd first come to Nictaven he'd thought they didn't have carrots, but then surmised that the slightly gritty, crunchy white ones were a variant of the ones he'd grown up with. Nictavian vegetables were almost all colourless, with a few exceptions, but when he'd made a comment about chlorophyll to Nika he'd been grilled so mercilessly on what it was that he'd remained silent for the rest of the afternoon. His brain had forcibly expelled a good proportion of what he'd learned in school a long time ago.

"My legs have never hurt this much and when I go to sleep all I can smell is the shit-pit," Jordan muttered. "But other than that, yeah, it's alright."

Yddris grunted. "You've never done anything like this before, have you?"

"I think we established that I'm having a lot of firsts a long time ago," Jordan replied. He swept the potatoes in and glanced away to avoid getting splashed. He gave the broth another stir, then joined Yddris on his makeshift seat, which comprised of a large boulder covered in sackcloth. They had stopped for the night in a wide valley, bordered on one side by scree slopes and on the other by a large hump of rock and mud that could just about call itself a hill. The mountains were close enough now to see the faint threads of green in them, like veins. "But it's better. It is better."

"Good," his tutor replied gruffly. "I'll give you a few days before doing any more teaching. And we'll start with magic. You're behind on magic theory."

"I have a challenge for you," Hap said, wandering over to join them. He leaned over the pot and sniffed. "Nika seems to have taught you well, Thorne. That smells excellent."

Jordan thanked him quietly, trying not to grin like a fool. He'd quite taken to cooking in the few days before they left, and he knew enough from back home to make up for the things there hadn't been time to learn. Nika had taught him how to make a broth with animal bones and herbs, and he thought he'd done quite a good job with the marmot lookalikes.

"I have a challenge," Hap repeated. "I'll give you a couple of nights for it. I want you to watch when Koen draws his nets, and then tell me how they're linked."

"Can I give hints?" Koen asked. "Oh, that smells good. Astra, you have competition."

Jordan cringed. He didn't want to draw more attention from the other apprentice than he could help, but if Astra was bothered it didn't tell in her voice as she said, "So I see."

Soon they were all sat around the fire. Hap said, "Vague ones, Koen. Don't let your enthusiasm run away with you. I want Thorne to try for himself first."

"I won't, I won't." Koen shuffled onto Jordan and Yddris's rock. "Hey, Yddris, how do you think your old man will react to finding out you got another one?"

Jordan blinked, wildly thinking that Koen meant Yddris's father, and then realised it must have meant his tutor. The idea was surreal, that Yddris had had a teacher.

"Enthusiastic," Yddris muttered. "Whatever you think my teacher is going to be like, boy, you're probably wrong."

Jordan had pictured Thirris – when he'd remembered Yddris had a tutor at all – as an older version of Yddris. He had concluded that he'd been horribly wrong the moment 'enthusiastic' was used, but nodded anyway. He was surprisingly nervous to meet the man, who he'd only ever heard about in passing. He hadn't quite figured out whether it was some sort of rite of passage.

"The jovial, upbeat man in front of you was not always so cheerful," Hap said, a laugh in his voice. "When Thirris brought Yddris to the Guildtown for the first time, he managed to roundly insult everyone he met on the first day."

Jordan found his thoughts unwillingly drifting to Arlen – if his Devil teacher somehow manifested the Gift, he was certain the first visit would go much the same way. Arlen Blackheart seemed to delight in finding just the right thing to say to upset someone. It was uncomfortable to think of Yddris like that, but the man had been a Devil, possibly from a young age. And he was still very fond of stinging comebacks.

"Yeah, alright," his tutor muttered. With his boot his scuffed some sparks in Hap's direction. "I did also roundly apologise."

"Only on the end of Thirris's boot, though." Hap did laugh that time. "Good job for the Guild he persevered, though."

This, Yddris seemed to dislike even more than the ribbing criticism. His grunt was more of a growl. "I'm going to check the camp before we settle down."

He got up abruptly and walked away, leaving Jordan staring after him in bewilderment.

Hap only shook his head. "There's a tip, boy. If he's driving you mad, just start complimenting him. Nothing gets rid of him faster."

They had a quiet meal as the dark thickened around them. Once or twice Jordan thought he might have even glimpsed a star or two through the cloudbank, and something in his chest loosened at seeing them. He hadn't realised he was missing them, but it was a familiar touch in a wild and unfamiliar landscape. He hadn't expected the Barrens to be exotic – the name had well prepared him for that – but the wind-blasted scrub and bare slopes were still a shock to the system. This close to the mountains the winds howled like demons, though their valley protected them from the worst of it.

His stew turned out pleasingly well. They ate it with hard bread and slugs of cold ale from a barrel Chip contributed to the supplies. Slightly fuzzy, Jordan went to relieve himself near the horses, then propped himself on the side of the wagon and rolled himself a ham-fisted attempt at a cigarette. The blackweed made the vastness around him feel more like a freedom than a fear. He must have fallen asleep where he sat, because one moment he was staring blearily at a distant mountain peak and the next he was on his side, a piece of folded sackcloth under his head and Ren curled up in the space under his chin.

A horse whickered and Ren stirred as he sat up, feeling foggy and more tired than when he had fallen asleep. His half-finished cigarette lay on the ground where it must have dropped from his hand, and the rest of the group were little more than humps around the fire, the Unspoken lying in their cloaks on bare ground and Chip and his son seeming determined to make up for everyone else's lack of bedding. A low thrum echoed all around that he dimly recognised as Nictaven's current, closer and more resonant than it had ever felt in the Reach.

He frowned and slipped off a glove, pressing it flat to the cold earth. Frost on dead grass prickled at his skin, but he barely noticed as he closed his eyes and found the rhythm.

He gasped and drew back almost straight away, but the blossom of warmth in his core continued to spread.

"It sounds like music," he told Ren in undertones. "Like really weird...beautiful music."

She looked up at him, her eyes flashing like coins as they caught the firelight. He stroked her with his bare hand, marvelling at how her fur felt against his fingers. It was like all his nerves had received an amplifier.

"I've always thought so."

Astra's voice took him sharply out of the moment. Heart pounding, he whirled round and found the other apprentice perched on the wagon bed above him. She wasn't looking at him, but stared out at the landscape. He cursed himself for not staying awake to hear the watch allocations.

"Is it my turn?" he gasped stupidly, only afterwards realising the significance – she had spoken to him just to make a comment, and he'd potentially ruined it.

"You're last," Astra replied. "Yddris said you needed the rest."

Jordan blinked. He had no metric for working out how far away his watch was. The dark looked very much the same no matter what hour it was.

"How come it's so different out here?" he asked, hoping to keep the conversation moving. "The current, I mean."

At first he thought she wasn't going to reply, and had just resigned himself to a continuation of the status quo when she spoke again. "It's the proximity of the mountains. We're near a fault line where the current runs close. You can tell it's just a fault line because the Barrens are right next to it." She must have sensed him grappling to make sense of that comment, because she added a moment later, "There are faults and there are wellspots. Faults bring it to the surface through cracks. Wellspots are where the ground is thin between the surface and the current. That is where the settlements are, because it allows for crop growth." She gestured at the barrenness around them. "Hence the rarity of anything that's not grass."

"But the current is fainter in the city."

"The current is not at the surface in the city. It is below. And it is heavily built over."

He sensed then that the conversation was over; something switched in the air around them that told him she wasn't open to more questions. Too gratified that she was talking to him at all, he kept his questions to himself and got up instead, walking stiffly to the fire and sitting down between Yddris and Koen's sleeping forms.

Jordan had quickly discovered on this journey that Nika had been right all along about Yddris's snoring.

Despite the rumbling racket at his feet, Jordan did manage to snatch some more sleep, and he dreamed of that strange otherworldly music. It was the closest he had ever felt to home since he'd arrived, rocking gently in its rhythm, until the approach of the day made it fainter. He opened his eyes again just as Koen was creeping over to wake him up for his watch, and suddenly understood how Yddris and Nika always seemed to know what time of day or night it was.

The next day was much the same as the previous ones, but Jordan occupied himself this time with finding the signal from the fault-line nearby, trying to glimpse any evidence of it between the mountains. He wondered if it was simply a great crack in the earth that brimmed with green, or whether a casual passer-by would even recognise it for what it was. They soon left the valley, and had started to drift apart from the mountain chain they had been following so far, but he could still find it if he concentrated hard enough. Then, suddenly, as they trudged over a hump in the landscape, it returned stronger, even though the mountains were no closer. Nestled on the hillside was a tiny cluster of pale stone cottages, just visible in the dim light. Small crop fields surrounded them, and others contained livestock.

"Little Dunbauern." Yddris produced a plume of smoke with the words. "A grand name for not very much. Dunbauern itself is off over there, but we won't be passing through."

"It's a marker point," Koen said from Jordan's other side. "We're almost halfway there."

"There's a wellspot here, then," Jordan said aloud as he realised it. Yddris grunted.

"Where'd you hear that? I didn't think we'd covered it."

"Astra explained it to me last night."

"Ah." For some reason, Yddris sounded pleased. "Did she tell you about the fault we've been following? I thought I sensed you questing for something."

"I...yeah." Jordan fidgeted. "It feels nice."

Yddris made a noise that was hard to read, and then sighed and followed the wagon down a narrow rocky track that led into the hamlet. As they reached the bottom, Koen stopped, and used a hand to signal the cart to a stop.

"Something's wrong," Hap said.

"What?" Jordan said, blinking, but the Unspoken and his apprentice were already hastening over. He looked round at Yddris, who had put his pipe away and was staring after them, the habitual crackle in the air around him growing.

"Bad news, I think. We'll stay with the cart for now, just in case. Should've known something was up when we crested that slope, there's no smoke in their chimneys."

"They might've just not lit the fire."

"In this? You're Gifted, boy, aye, but you should be able to tell when it's cold enough to freeze the nads off a statue."

Jordan blinked. "I can't say I've heard that one."

"Keep it. Chip, keep moving, but go slow. Boy, swap with Astra."

Jordan clambered into the cart as Astra hopped out, settling in among the crates as it began moving again, much more slowly this time. Hap and Koen came out to meet them as they reached the borders of the hamlet, and Jordan craned his neck to try and catch a glimpse of what might have given them misgivings. He could see nothing – and no one. All the windows in the cottages were dark and the roads were empty. When they came even closer, Jordan saw evidence of demon damage and his heart sank. A door kicked in, deep gouges in walls, upset pots and barrels and spatters on the road marked demon passage, though he didn't sense any around now.

"The nets were marred," Hap said. It was the first time Jordan had ever heard him genuinely furious. "These people were sabotaged."

"How do you know?" Jordan blurted. It hadn't occurred to him that the demon attack was out of the ordinary, until he thought about it again and realised what was wrong. The houses should have had their own nets to protect each individual building – what were the chances of every net in the village failing at once?

"Someone's messed up the order and broken the chain," Koen said. "They left the livestock alone. It was a deliberate attack on the people here."

"Only magic-users can do that," Yddris growled.

"Well, it wasn't an accident," Hap replied. "No one accidentally mars eight separate nets and avoids those that don't protect people. The real question is why anyone would do it."

"So," Jordan blinked, trying to reason it out in his head, "you're saying an Un..."

"No," Yddris interrupted sharply. "No Unspoken would do this."

"There's no astral signature I recognise here." Hap sounded very old suddenly. "This was not a guild member, and thank Kiel for that small blessing."

"Angels?" Chip whispered hoarsely from the box, as if he thought they might be hiding somewhere nearby.

"I doubt they would come so far east for a hamlet," Hap said. "And to leave the crops and livestock? It makes no sense. It's...it's just slaughter."

Jordan shivered. The bleak landscape around them couldn't hide anything for long enough to get close to them, not even in the dark, but he still found himself eyeing the bumps and dips in the earth, the distant mountains, the empty windows of the cottages. He found himself saying, "You don't think it was those same things that attacked Unspoken in the city?"

"What things?" Chip asked, face blank. Yddris, however, seemed to give it some thought.

"It's possible. It's very possible. And in that event, very important that we get out of here before full dark."

"But there's still not a motive," Hap argued. There was a thread of anxiety in his voice now.

"There was no apparent motive for anything they've done so far," Yddris said. "Turn the livestock loose. Some might reach Dunbauern before demons get them. They'll just starve here." He strode away towards the pens where some very skinny goats and cows were staring blearily at them through the slats. Hap and Koen split up to check the village for unlikely survivors. In Jordan's ear Ren had set up an insistent, distressed whine.

"What?" he whispered, reaching in to calm her with a finger. She only retreated further inside and sat against his neck, shivering.

The windows of the cottages seemed to watch them.