Get Her Back (Demontech) Read Free Page A

Looking over the landscape again, Haft realized that he would have to change his double-sided reversible cloak from mottled green to brown-side-out. Rising ripples in the air made the High Desert looked sere, which it probably was. At first he thought the ripples were caused by heat, then he realized with a shudder that they might be a form of demon he’d never heard of—the wind didn’t seem to affect the ripples, and there didn’t seem to be much heat in the High Desert.
          In no place was there any sign of habitation. Not a house, not a tent, not a tendril of smoke rising from a cook fire. There wasn’t even a road or a track that could lead to people or their places.
          “How can anyone live here?” Haft wondered out loud. He twisted to his left and shouted, “Jurnieks! Which way?”
          “You don’t need to shout, Lord,” Jurnieks said from just a few feet to Haft’s right rear, “I’m right here.”
          Haft jerked to his right and glowered at the guide. “Well, why didn’t you say so?” he demanded.
          “You didn’t ask, Lord,” Jurnieks said in a fatalistic tone.
          Haft jutted his face toward Jurnieks and said, “Your place is to the left rear of your commander, not the right,” snarling to cover his embarrassment. He looked toward the horizon that, because of its gentle rise, looked a little bit too near, and said thoughtfully, “Actually, you’re the guide, you should be in front.
          “Yes, Lord. In front.” Jurnieks swallowed, then eased his horse forward, looking uncertainly at the ground and the too-close  horizon.
          “What are you waiting for,” Haft asked. “You’re the guide. So guide.”
          “But I—, I don’t recognize anything here.”
          Haft gave him a look that was more astonished than he actually felt—he could well understand someone not recognizing anything here. He didn’t think there was much to distinguish any part of the landscape from any other part.
          “But you came this way only two days ago,” he said.
          “Yes, Lord,” Jurnieks said, bobbing his head. “Two days ago. Two days caravan travel that way.” He pointed south. “I didn’t come across here.” He made a sweeping gesture at the landscape to his front.
          Haft groaned. Why hadn’t he, or anybody else, thought of that? This wasn’t even where Alyline and her Zobran Royal Lancers had climbed to the High Desert’s plateau!
          “Balta!” he shouted.
          “Yes, Sir Haft,” the Bloody Axes’ commander replied, also from very near by. He had a scarf wrapped around his face to keep wind-blown dust out of his nose and mouth.
          “We need to backtrack to where Alyline climbed the palisade.”
          “Certainly, Sir Haft,” Balta said with a knowing nod. He turned in his saddle and raised an arm to signal his platoon. The Bloody Axes set out in good order to the south.
          “You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you?” Haft muttered. “And you didn’t tell me!”
          “Sir Haft? I didn’t quite catch that,” Balta said, smiling.
          “Never mind, it was nothing.” Haft nonetheless made a sour moue.
          Before the entire platoon got moving south, there was a  commotion at the edge of the plateau where they had come up.
          “Sir Haft!” a Bloody Axe near the edge called. “Sir Haft!” someone closer to Haft repeated, and another yet closer and another, until a grinning Bloody Axe a mere fifteen yards from Haft called out, “Sir Haft!”
          At the second call, Haft had turned back to see who was calling him. Well before the closest called, he could see that the only way for him to know why he was being called was to go and see for himself why several of the Bloody Axes were clustered together at the edge of the plateau.
          “Wait here,” he told Jurnieks. “Stay with