The kidnappers were clearly going somewhere. They crossed the moors in a steady, straight line and eventually struck a road, a well-used-looking road with high bushy banks and wheel marks on its stony surface. Blade and Reville pursued mostly by letting the group get out of sight and then translocating to where they could see them again. In between, Reville was too bruised to do much except sit and look gloomily at the ruined wristwatches on his arm and worry about Sukey. He thought there must be an outlaw stronghold that the men were making for. He told Blade that the Thieves Guild knew of hundreds of people who had been kidnapped for no apparent reason, over in the east, and that nobody ever found where they had been taken. “We must rescue her before they get wherever they’re going,” he kept saying.
The road made things a little easier. The soldiers seemed to relax once they were on it, and Blade found that the high banks made it possible to get quite close to them. Whenever the trudging group stopped, Blade took hold of Reville’s skinny, muscular arm and brought them behind a clump of gorse or some small trees on the bank, where they lay flat and listened to Sukey’s high voice, arguing.
“This is not going to do any of you the slightest good, you know. Where do you think I’m going to run to, anyway? You’ve all got great long legs. You could catch me at once if I ran away.”
None of the men seemed to attend much to Sukey. They treated her more like a valuable animal than anything else. But during the second day of sneaking after them along the road, Reville nudged Blade as they lay behind some dead blackberry bushes, and pointed. Blade saw that Sukey now had only one rope on her, around her waist. It was also clear that the men had expected to get wherever they were going before this and were running out of food.
“We can manage one more day, with luck,” one of them said. “How far is it now?”
“Take us at least two days more,” replied another, who had a tattered map. “More like two and a half at the rate she walks.”
Blade felt he had known these two men for a long time. He had first seen both of them when he and his family had helped Barnabas get the newly arrived army to the camp near Derkholm. He had pushed past them on Nancy Cobber and noticed that they seemed less drugged than the rest. Meanwhile Reville was plucking at Blade’s sleeve in an alarmed way. After the party had heaved to its feet again, cursing and grumbling, and hauled the arguing Sukey off down the road, Reville said, “We’re running out of time. As soon as they get to their hideout, we’ll have no chance.”
This was certainly true. “What do you suggest?” Blade asked.
“I think,” said Reville, “that I’ve got the hang of this translocating now.” Blade stared at him. Reville grinned. Despite the big yellow and green bruise on his face, it was almost his usual jaunty smile. “I’m a magic user,” he told Blade. “Most thieves have to be. I’ve been watching fairly closely what it is you do when you translocate. And if I can do it, too, then we can both jump in among them, cut that rope, grab Sukey before any of them can stop us, and jump out again with her. Mind if we practice a bit?”
They spent the rest of that day practicing. At first Reville could only move himself a few feet and his direction was unpredictable. Blade got used to dodging fast. But Reville’s face set in stern, determined lines. “It’ll come,” he panted. “I was like this over picking pockets, and now I’m up with the best. I’ll fetch up by that rock over there by this evening, you’ll see.” And he did. Blade was impressed.
At sunset Blade took himself to the bank above the place where the kidnappers were camping in the road. After a pause Reville arrived, too, muddy down one side. “Slight mistake. Ditch,” he explained. “Where is she?”
To their disgust, Sukey was once more attached to four ropes for the night. They waited anxiously for daybreak. At dawn they shared a hard, greasy end of cheese and watched the kidnappers share much the same between themselves and Sukey. Then someone tied a rope to her waist, and the band moved off.
“Thank Wiksil!” whispered Reville.
“Who’s Wiksil?” Blade asked.
“God of thieves. Are you ready?” said Reville. Blade supposed he was. “Then go!” Reville cried out.
He went. Blade went a scared instant later and found himself in among black armor, sweaty smells, and startled, unpleasant faces. Sukey was partly behind him. He grabbed her by her travel-stained blue silk and, as his fingers met in it, he heard Reville shout, “And go!” So he took off again. After that it was highly confusing. Sukey screamed all the time, which made it even more confusing. Blade rather thought that he tried to translocate in one direction while Reville went in another. However it happened, they went in a set of wild zigzags. Blade saw moor, mountainside, different moor, a sucking marshy place, and—for one terrifying instant—the men in black all around him in the road again. He and Reville leaped frantically away from that—road, bank, more bank, another stretch of road—bundling and wrenching the screaming Sukey between them. And at this point Blade sorted out that it was no good expecting Reville to get it right and tried pushing the next time Reville pulled. He pushed hard, to get as far away as possible.
They ended up staggering and splashing in the edges of a barren little mountain lake, high in a cup of khaki-colored hills somewhere. Blade realized he had hold of Sukey by the seat of her trousers and let go quickly. Sukey stopped screaming and flung herself on Reville.
?
??Oh, Reville, darling! I knew you’d rescue me!”
“I was behind you all the way, my love,” Reville said. “Now I’ll never let you go.”
The two of them stood kissing passionately in the water, regardless of wet boots.
Well, well, thought Blade. Perhaps she wasn’t just leading him on after all. Feeling rather let down, he waded and squelched among spiky rushes until he reached drier turf, where he stood and looked around the barren lake for some clue to where they might be.
It was not so totally deserted as he had first thought. A low green spit prodded out into the water just below a place where the mountains formed a kind of saddle. There was someone fishing from the end of the spit. He must have been very much engrossed in his fishing because he had not even turned around to see what the screaming and splashing had been about. Blade squelched along the lakeside toward him. It was, he found, one of those confusing landscapes where everything is smaller than you think. He reached the spit of land quite quickly, and the mountain rearing above was only a hill really.
“Excuse me,” he said.
The man fishing turned around with an inquiring smile. He was wearing huge wading boots and clothes the color of the hills surrounding them. He seemed young and good-natured. “Good morning,” he said cheerfully. “Can I help?”
“We’re a bit lost,” Blade explained. “Can you tell us the best way to go?”
“The nearest big place is Costamaret,” the fisherman said. “It’s more than a hundred miles southeast of here.”
“Oh,” said Blade. He thought about translocating there and realized, just by thinking about it, that his ability to translocate had been completely drained for the moment by the mad zigzag struggle with Reville. “Is there anywhere nearer than that?”
The fisherman shifted his rod carefully into his left hand and pointed with his right at the khaki saddle of hill above them. “Up there. You’ll find somewhere on the other side of that.” He smiled, obviously feeling for the dismay on Blade’s face. “It’s the only way really. I’m sorry.”
Blade looked up along his pointing hand. It was not so far to that lower part of the hill, though it looked steep. He looked back at the fisherman.