Wayfarer by Alexandra Bracken
At the next small lane they approached, Sophia stopped, blocking him.
“Let’s go a different way,” she whispered quickly.
Nicholas held his ground as he felt Sophia pull at his shoulder, searching for what had upset her—and, with a shudder, located it. Stretched across the stone, curled up on his side as still and pale as a seashell, was a child. On closer inspection Nicholas saw that his eyes remained open, unblinking, that his skin was dotted with scabbed-over sores. He followed the line of the boy’s desperately thin arm. His fingers were still hooked around a slender hand hanging out of the bottom of a pile of bodies, already at the mercy of flies and vermin.
He kicked a rat away before it could reach the boy, his stomach rioting. The only reason he didn’t cast up his accounts was because there was nothing left in his stomach to lose. Sophia heaved once, twice, pressing the back of her hand against her mouth, and looked away.
“There’s disease here,” he said unnecessarily. “We’d better make quick work of this. Try not to touch anything or anyone.”
Sophia nodded, wiping her hands against the tunic she’d taken from the unconscious soldier.
As they approached a low hill and the stately structures atop it, the stench of the city was tempered by smoke. But rather than masking the excrement and sickness, it drew out a different flavor of it. History, as it was, stank of disease and desperation, fire and ash. The slightly damp quality of the air made Nicholas feel as though it were seeping inside of his skin, as though he would carry the proof of his visit here forever. And in the distance, the infernal clanging carried on unseen out in the dark water.
Where the Romans are lying in wait…Building something? Manufacturing the tools of Carthage’s destruction? The sound was incessant, without beginning or end, and Nicholas wondered how long it had been carrying on for. If the people of this city had been forced to listen to it each day and night, like the heavy steps of a predator edging ever closer.
A rattling up ahead drew his feet up short; both he and Sophia pressed themselves against the nearest wall, their backs flush against it.
He had only just closed his dry eyes, rubbing at the crust forming on them, trying not to dwell on the hopelessness of it all, when a familiar scent hit his nose. Swinging around, Nicholas cast about for the direction the breeze was blowing from. And there it was, just to the east of where they stood. Warm, fresh animal excrement.
“I think there’s a stable near enough,” he told Sophia, already picking up his steps, trying to fight the urge to run when his suspicions were confirmed. A long, two-level building was up ahead, with piles of dried grass tucked up against the back wall. There, stalls had been formed from arches, not unlike the ship sheds in the harbor, which opened to a kind of courtyard. Nicholas crouched low, trying to massage the burning sensation in his right arm away as he crept forward, using the tents and draped fabric for cover.
A lone soldier stood guard at what looked to be a side entrance, leaning back against the heavy iron door. Nicholas glanced at Sophia, who had caught up and crouched beside him. At her nod, he slipped out into the night’s shadows, casting one last glance around to ensure there was no one else watching.
He decided he liked these soft sandals the men of Carthage wore—they made sneaking up on a soul far easier than the leather shoes of his own era. By the time the soldier startled fully out of his light doze, Nicholas already had his arm hooked around the man’s throat.
The soldier smelled of sweat and sweet wine, and his breath exploded out of him with a spray of spittle. He thrashed, kicking his legs out and around, clawing so deeply into Nicholas’s arm that he wondered if the marks would scar. With the slightest bit more pressure, the man passed out. Despite being nearly a full foot taller, Nicholas struggled to get a grip on his weight—it was like holding an unwieldy sack of warm water, limbs spilling and flopping around as he dragged him.
Sophia rushed forward, feeling for the ring of iron keys hooked to the man’s armor. Her hands shook, either from exhaustion or excitement, as she tried each of the six in turn.
“Hurry!” he whispered.
“Hah!” she breathed out when the right key slid into the crude lock. She shoved the door open with her shoulder, and showed an enviable amount of patience in holding it open long enough to allow him to drag the soldier inside the stable’s warm darkness.
Nicholas dropped him behind several barrels, stopping only long enough to use the sword to crack the wood and see if there was water or wine inside.
Wine. Sophia doubled back to help herself to a mouthful of it and would have tried to gulp another if Nicholas hadn’t taken his turn. The sourness exploded across his tongue, but it wet his dry mouth and aching throat.
A few candles held on to their faint glow, casting shallow pools of light along the path leading to the front of the animal stalls. Nicholas balked a moment at their size, wondering how many horses they were keeping in each to require them to be that large. The walls were covered with bright paint—in the low light, he could just make out the soldiers, the scenes of ferocious battle. Nicholas felt his feet slow to a stop, and was leaning in to study the legions of soldiers depicted, when the sudden sound of heavy steps rained down over them.
There was something awake up there. Dust drifted from the ceiling with the movement, marking a path.
Sophia’s gaze shot toward the other end of the stalls, where another door, this one likely leading upstairs, stood closed. He waited a beat of silence more, his body drumming with adrenaline, but no one emerged. He waved Sophia forward.
“Let’s find the storeroom,” he whispered. “If it looks like oats or barley, take it, even if it’s from the horses’ feed bins.”
Sophia nodded and took off at a fast clip. She swung her attention up toward a stall in the middle of the long line. The candlelight caught the angle of her face as she looked up, then up again—first in surprise, and then in pure wonder.
Nicholas doubled his pace, catching up to her in a few short strides. “What’s the matter—?”
He stumbled back against the wall in alarm.
A long, leathery gray trunk snaked out from between the stall bars, coming within inches of Sophia’s face. The elephant watched them, interest flickering in its dark eyes. Its ears flapped against its neck like butterfly wings as it made a small trumpeting sound. Nicholas had never seen an elephant before—only etchings and sailors’ descriptions—and he found it almost impossible to look away. He leaned forward, only to fall back again when its ivory tusks banged loudly against the stall door.
“They use elephants in war,” Sophia muttered, her voice as soft as he’d ever heard it, her fingers brushing the trunk. It seemed to tickle the loose pieces of her hair. “Sorry about this, my handsome fellow.”
She reached between the bars and carefully, with a touch as soft as a flower petal, unlatched the door.
“Sophia!” Nicholas whispered. Scraping up the remains of her trampled body from under an eight-foot-tall beast hadn’t been included in his plans for the evening. “Stop this!”
Sophia held out a hand and eased her body into the stall. The elephant shuffled its heavy body back a step, giving her enough room to slip inside the stall and crouch in front of the large food trough, half-full of what looked to Nicholas to be grain and grass. Sophia took up her small bag and began to stuff handfuls of the raw food in it, before motioning for him to pass his bag over.
“Here.” She filled it, then threw his bag back to him. “Let’s get moving.”
He caught it easily, turning back toward the door. Sophia gave the beast’s flank one last pat before she shut its stall. Eyes scanning the ground, the walls, for anything that might be of use, Nicholas had nearly missed the one thing that wasn’t present.
The guard.
He gripped Sophia’s arm and brought a hand to her mouth, muffling her protests. Nicholas nodded to the spot where they’d left the unconscious man and felt her suck in a small gasp of surprise. Pulli
There was movement outside—shadows gliding against one another, fading in and out of the night. Sweat broke out at the base of Nicholas’s skull, his mouth shaping into a silent warning as a nearby guard was knocked out in an instant, crumpling to the ground; shadows swept in around him, covering him, dragging him away.
Hiding the evidence.
Not killing him, so as to avoid changing the timeline? He and Sophia had played a dangerous game in how careless they’d become, risking change after change to ensure their own survival. These…travelers? These warriors, men and women, were decidedly not careless.
Nicholas strained his ears to catch the murmuring on the other side. Once his eyes adjusted well enough to the darkness, he was able to count four figures of varying stature, all sweeping toward the door like a high tide. It might have been the thrumming fear in his mind playing an unwelcome trick, but he could have sworn the ring on his finger grew warmer with each step closer they took.
Sophia pointed up, but Nicholas shook his head, competing thoughts racing to best one another. There might be more soldiers on the second level, and to get out of the stables, their ultimate goal, they would need to jump onto a nearby building—but none were near enough, and all were taller. He didn’t fancy breaking his neck after nearly being drowned and stabbed already in one night.
In battle, you could fight a foe head-on until both of your ships were in splinters around you. But, when outmaneuvered, there was always the potent combination of creating a distraction of some sort and escaping at full speed, hopefully with the wind on your side.
His idea was almost absurd. In spite of everything that had occurred, or perhaps because of it, Nicholas felt a grim smile touch his lips. It hadn’t made sense to him why they would store wine here in the stables, other than to hide it from the people outside who desperately needed it. But what if the wine wasn’t for men at all, but for the elephants?
They’d pour it down the elephant’s throats, see, Hall had told him and Chase, miming the gulping. Get them good and primed. The wine would send them into a rage, enough to trample any men who stood in their way.
Nicholas ducked down, peering one last time through the lock to see if the men had moved. As if they’d somehow heard him, one of the men—the one nearest to the door—shouted something. Sophia clucked her tongue, likely at the viciousness that coated the nonsensical words.
“I have a thought,” Nicholas told her. “About what to do—”
“Is this a thought that’s going to get us murdered, our heads smashed under an elephant’s foot, poisoned, et cetera?”
He gave her an exasperated look that Sophia shrugged off as she took his place at the door. “Keep watch for a moment—make sure they aren’t planning to storm their way in.”
She gave a sloppy salute and leaned down to peer through the lock. “What are you on about, Carter—?”
He took the sword and swung down, cracking open each of the wine barrels in turn.
“Are you deranged?” Sophia whispered, jumping to her feet.
He took her by the arm again and launched them at a run back toward the nearest elephant’s stall. Before Sophia had time to question him, Nicholas unlatched the door and dragged it open.
The elephant didn’t move.
There was a sliver of a second in which he was furious with himself for wasting good drink. Then, as the air thickened with the smell of the wine, the elephant let out a deafening trumpet, as if alerting the others, and all but charged out of the stall. Sophia leaped back with a cry of alarm, even as Nicholas attempted to shield them with the stall door. The animal must have weighed well over a thousand pounds. The whole building quaked as it galloped toward the pooling wine.
“My God,” Sophia said. “That’s an animal with his priorities straight.”
“Come along,” Nicholas insisted, waving her after him.
There were two more elephants stamping and hollering to be let out, their enormous ears flapping like a ship’s colors. Nicholas leaned back, away from one of the trunks that was feeling down his front, as if trying to hurry him along, as he worked the door open.
The third elephant, larger than even the first had been, had no patience at all—he rammed his way out of the stall, his tusks tossing the barrier to the side. Sophia dove out of the way, narrowly missing the door as it smashed back onto the stone floor.
Somewhere, beyond the gray mountains of their leathery hides, the main door burst open and the shadowy attackers attempted to rush inside—attempted, because the nearest elephant lifted its head from the wine and trumpeted a warning that would have made the dead turn in their graves. The two in front had a moment to fall back before the elephant reared up, scraping the ceiling with its tusks, and forced its way out through the door, stampeding into the night.
“What now?” Sophia asked, righting her eye patch.
Nicholas pointed to the side of the nearest stall, which led into an open-air exercise or training courtyard. Hopefully there would be a way back into the city through it as well. He hoisted his full bag, switching shoulders, as he entered the stall. The soft grass padding it seemed to eat his footsteps, but it didn’t matter—three drunk elephants were enough of a distraction for their pursuers.
Nicholas edged around the nearest wall, tucking himself between two tall structures, out of sight from the street. A moment later, Sophia followed. He leaned his head back against the stone, looking down at her, brows raised. She returned the look. “Elephants. That was a first. Not bad, Carter.”
He inclined his head, accepting the rare compliment. He wasn’t such a fool to think it would be the first of many; fighting had a way of bringing even the unlikeliest of allies together. Once the haze of excitement wore off, they’d be back to circling one another like half-starved sharks.
And their brief alliance would devour itself.
“We need to find the Jacarandas,” Sophia whispered. “Now. I don’t want them to catch wind of anything strange and guess there might be travelers here before we have a chance to come forward.”
“All right,” he said. “How do you propose we—?”
The clawlike blade caught the light of a nearby torch from above, casting a glow on Sophia’s dark hair. Nicholas shoved her as hard as he could, but not nearly soon enough to prevent her from taking a kick to the face as a cloaked attacker leaped down from the roof of the building behind them.
“You just can’t take no for an answer, can you?” Sophia growled, clutching her cheek.
The fall should have broken his legs, but the man rose, pushing his hood back just enough for Nicholas to see the gleam of his bald head, his pointed features. It was a man well within the prime of his life—a life that had sliced his face into a quilt of scars.
“Give it to me,” he rasped out. “I will spare the woman. Give it to me—”
The tip of an arrow sprouted from the center of the man’s throat. The spill of blood from the wound left him sucking at the air, his claw clicking against the arrow’s crude metal tip. The fear that had coiled so thickly around Nicholas’s chest did not release—not when Sophia staggered up to her feet; not when the frail old man in a homespun tunic stepped out of the night, his bow still in hand.
“Come now,” he said, his voice frayed with fear. “The Shadows feed on the night, and they will not stop until they consume us all.”
IT WAS A STRANGE KIND of procession that wound its way through the entrance of the Winter Palace. Henry led the small flock of them, talking quietly with an elderly man with a bowed back—some sort of courier. Etta studied the two of them from under her lashes, listening to their muted Russian. A long, seemingly unending red carpet stretched out before them, running along the tile and stonework like an invitation into the palace’s hidden heart.
The cold and shock finally began to thaw out of her. Etta was surprised to find that the palace was well hea
Behind her, Julian was whistling a faint tune just loudly enough to be annoying. Winifred remained behind him, complaining to the Thorn guards about their “shocking lack of foresight” in the route they’d had the party take. Those men, behind even her, kept slowing their pace, as if trying to build more distance between themselves and the mouth spewing venom at them.
“Is there a way to shut her off? Some hidden switch?”
Etta didn’t turn back or even acknowledge Julian. He was forced to lengthen his strides to keep pace with her. When the sleeve of his formal dinner jacket brushed her arm and she took a generous step away, he gave her an amused look.
“The last girl I chased at least gave me a kiss for my trouble,” he said in a low voice, sparing a quick look at Henry’s back.
“Do you often accept kisses from deranged girls?” Etta asked.
His mouth twisted. “Don’t be sore about that, kiddo. For a second it really looked like you were ready to engage in mortal combat. It was just self-preservation.”
More like wounded pride, she thought. He hadn’t expected her to try to fight her way out of that room in San Francisco, never mind back him into a corner.
“So what do you make of all this?” he asked. “The changes, I mean. I’ve only ever known the world Grandfather created, which I’m guessing is the same for you?”
She looked ahead, breathing in the faintly perfumed air, drinking in the sights around her. It didn’t feel real—she knew that this wasn’t her timeline—but she had expected something about it to register as different to her senses, like seeing the world in a mirror’s reflection. This was a glimpse of what Henry and the others had lost. What the world itself had lost.