Summerblood (37 page)

But maybe Rrath would slow those who pursued him enough to permit escape. If that was even possible.

In any case, the corridor continued on, and so did Avall, maintaining a steady trot past stonework that didn't change. And then he saw a different light ahead—the light of two moons filtering down what looked to be a shaft leading upward. Hope made him redouble his pace, and he sheathed his sword while he ran. Briefly, he considered abandoning the shield entirely, but his foes would have it then, and the entire masquerade would dissolve if they determined it wasn't magic. For they'd realize that there was no way he'd discard it if it was.

Which meant he'd have to wear it on his back, like a turtle's shell. He was already shrugging out of it when he reached the bottom of what proved to be a stone-walled well, with spikes driven into the walls at exactly the right intervals to serve as
hand- and footholds. And while his pursuit had not ceased, neither had it grown closer. Desperate for haste, he fumbled with a shield strap that had caught on the wrist guard of a gauntlet. But then it was free and sliding off, and he slung it onto his back one-handed, praying that the catches would hold as he began to climb.

It was hard going, yet the spikes were spaced so that his legs did most of the work while his hands merely served for balance. In spite of his haste, his foes had reached the bottom before he reached the surface. A chill hit him abruptly—hard.
Maybe they had bows!
Lethal little crossbows, probably. Maybe any moment he'd feel a bolt lodge in his back, hips, or thighs. Or worse, given their angle of attack.

He pushed harder, breath loud within his helm, while sweat threatened to blind him.

But the opening above was growing larger, only to be obscured by two faces looking down. “He's coming,” someone yelled. “And not alone.”

Rann
, he realized.
Rann
.

In spite of his situation, anger flared through him. Rann (and probably Lykkon) had somehow found him—and by so doing, placed themselves at risk. But hard on the heels of that emotion came a mix of relief and panic that almost made him physically ill.

Hands grabbed him as soon as he came in range, hauling him upward so quickly he nearly lost his grip and fell. A spike jabbed his thigh. Another raked his belly, ripping his surcoat and snagging on the mail beneath. He kicked outward, found surer purchase with his boots and half climbed, half dived the rest of the way over what proved to be the rim of one of the fumeroles that pocked the landscape thereabouts.

Abruptly, he was face-to-face with Rann and Lykkon—in full armor—with another twenty Royal Guardsmen—hastily assembled, to judge by their disheveled appearance, but likewise armed and armored—standing close at hand. Avall had never been so glad to see soldiers in his life.

For a moment he stood there swaying, then found his balance. “Pursued,” he gasped. And was relieved to see a dozen swords and almost as many crossbows flash into the moonlight from the surrounding cover. It would be easy now; they could pick off his pursuers as they emerged.

But they did
not
emerge. More than enough time had elapsed, and Avall was on the verge of easing forward to look down the shaft again when disaster struck.

A crossbow quarrel took the man beside Lykkon in the belly, even as he started forward. Another swished past Avall's chin so close he felt the fletching against his flesh. “Attack!” someone yelled. “Behind us!”

“All
around
us!” someone else cried.

Avall had just time to unsheathe his sword and to note that their foes numbered twice their own number before the attack began in earnest. “Out of other holes,” Rann spat beside him. “We should've looked. We should've known.”

And then there was no more time for analysis. Someone in a blue surcoat was running straight toward him—no,
two
someones—rushing in from either side, past his confused Guard. They were unarmed, so he thought—until, too late, he realized that the dark mass they clutched before them was a net. The first cast merely tangled his sword arm; the next enclosed him neatly.

Avall struggled frantically, even as those men bore him back toward the shaft from which he'd just emerged. His helm slipped enough to block vision from one eye, but with the other he could see his Guard, one by one, cut down. “Rann!” he yelled desperately. “Lykkon!”

Maybe they heard. He didn't know. All he knew was that reality was spinning, his balance was out of kilter, and very large men were trying with all their strength to wrestle him down. More bolts swished. Men cried out and swore. Arrows thudded. Metal belled against metal, and at least one fullfledged sword duel was in progress, to judge by the sounds of combat.

He'd been a fool. He'd tried something stupid, and now he was caught and there was nothing he could do to alleviate the situation. And he desperately wanted out, away. And if he bloodied the gem, he might well manage that. Desperately, he fumbled at the chain around his throat. If he could crush the glass with the gauntlets, maybe he still had a chance. Maybe.

It was no use. His efforts only entangled him worse, and one of his captors saw—or suspected—what he was about and dragged his arm back with such force he feared it was dislocated. He gasped but did not cry out. He was still who he was, after all. King of all Eron. And more to the point, Avall syn Argen-a.

They'd ringed him now: a circle of tall men in blue surcoats— maybe fifteen, if he guessed correctly. More than enough right there to give his Guard a hard time. His only hope was that Rann and Lykkon had escaped. And that Riff, Myx, and Veen had not been involved.

And then it didn't matter, because someone clamped a cloth soaked in some kind of fluid over his face. It smelled like imphor, only a thousand times stronger. He fought it, but there was no way to pinch his nostrils closed, so he tried to take shallow breaths—until someone punched him smartly in the stomach, and he exhaled. The ensuing gasps were more than enough to take him away from himself into a place where there was neither dark nor light.

When reality returned, Avall found himself on horseback. Someone had bound him, blindhooded, into a saddle, with his feet firmly trussed into the stirrups and his hands tied around the saddle horn. As best he could tell through muddled senses and an aching head, he still wore mail—but the helm, shield, and sword were gone. Horses pounded along to either side at close to full gallop, which said a lot for their riders' horsemanship—and
for whoever had trained the mount he rode, which seemed to match their moves precisely.

They were traversing woods—by the sound of hooves on leafy ground. But they seemed also to be on a path, else they'd not be able to make so much haste. Others rode around him, moving steadily onward. To where, he had no idea. He only hoped his army was intact enough to follow.

From what little he'd heard from his new companions, he wasn't certain. The force that had captured him had not been the only one; another had attacked the camp. Beyond that, he knew nothing. Nor wanted to know, just now. And so, tied there in the saddle, he slept. Or passed out. For him, at that moment, it didn't matter.

“I'll raze that place to the ground!” Rann raged, flinging his helm on the table in the royal strategy tent. He would, too, as soon as—well, as soon as he could get a counteroffensive mounted. He should be out there now, leading a force to take that pile of rock apart—grain by grain, if he had to.

“Maybe so,” Lykkon murmured, laying an arm across Rann's shoulders and drawing him to his usual seat at the council table—the one to the right of Avall's empty one. “But not now,” he continued. “Not until we can take stock—”

Rann flung the arm away. “Stock of what? My bond-brother's taken captive. Half his Guard are dead or wounded. I shouldn't be alive and neither should you. And”—he sniffed the air for emphasis—“the camp's on fire.”

Only then did he pause in his rant to take true stock of who else joined him there. They seemed to have assembled of their own will, having seen to their various duties. Tryffon, Preedor, and Vorinn of War; Veen, Riff and Myx, himself, Lykkon and Bingg, and one or two others.

Veen shook her head. “The fires in camp have been put out. It wasn't much of a raid, actually. In fact, as best I can tell, it
was mostly a feint to draw our attention from what I can only assume was a calculated attempt to capture Avall.”

“Effort, my ass!” Rann spat. “They
did
capture him—and threw him on a horse and rode away with him before any of us managed so much as a shot.”

“It was very well orchestrated,” Tryffon agreed. “They have to have had us under close observation.”

“Then why didn't they capture Avall when he wound up underground, if they knew he was down there?”

Tryffon stroked his beard. “I don't
know
, Rann. It was a rash—a crazy—thing to do. They can't have been expecting him to do anything quite like that. They also had good reason to think he was wearing the Lightning Sword, and I guess they assumed it was foolish to stand against that.”

“The same way,” Vorinn continued calmly, “that they knew it was foolish to attack our army with any real intent to defeat us.”

“How so?”

“Because we almost certainly outnumber them.” Vorinn paused and produced a sheet covered with tightly spaced but very neat figures. “I've been doing some ciphering. It's easy enough to guess the basic dimensions of their citadel. Based on analogy to other structures, we can make a rough guess as to how many rooms the place contains and how many of those are barracks. They'll have read the same manuals we have regarding such things, and I don't think they'll depart from them much, since men who are comfortable tend to be happier than those who aren't. Therefore, the place can't have been crammed to capacity, so that leaves us with a finite number it could actually hold. Subtract the number we think would be needed to subdue Gem, and we're left with a force maybe a tenth our size. And obviously not all of them took part in the attack.”

“So you agree that the attack on the camp was a ploy?”

Vorinn nodded. “Put together on the spur of the moment
once they realized Avall had all but walked into their hands.” He glanced sideways at Tryffon, whom he'd effectively contradicted.

Rann pounded the table—hard. “And I'll never forgive myself, either.”

Preedor regarded him tolerantly. “It could've been worse,” he observed. “If that link you lads share hadn't alerted you that something was wrong and given us a notion of where he was, which at least gave us time to make a stab at protecting him—”

“What?”
Rann snapped. “He'd still be here? I don't think so! The first torches were already being thrown when Riff caught up with me. I couldn't find anyone—”

“Enough,” Preedor said quietly, but the force of his personality silenced the assembly. “I was going to say that if you hadn't gone out there, we'd have even less idea how to proceed than we do now. They threw him on a horse and rode west, correct? They did
not
take him into the hold, that much is clear. That tells us two things. It tells us that whoever is in charge of this enterprise is probably at Gem-Hold; and it tells us that whatever stand they intend to make, they don't plan to make it here.”

Tryffon nodded. “I think they've written this place off, frankly. Which implies that they have other bolt-holes. But I think that if we follow the route Avall took into that place, we'd find it all but deserted. We already know there are several ways out just in the field of fumeroles. There have to be others.”

“At least one of which has to be large enough to accommodate horses,” Riff noted. “We really should put a ring of scouts around the place.”

“Several rings,” Vorinn corrected, “if we're going to do that at all—which I think is like pouring drink from a broken bottle. In any case, we have no idea how far outside the hold itself such an exit might be. The one at War-Hold was almost a shot.”

Rann glared at him, though he had no reason to. “So what
you're saying is that there's no sense staying here to besiege what may now be an empty citadel, when we now have two reasons to proceed to Gem?”

Vorinn fixed him with a calm, if compassionate, stare. “That's exactly what I'm saying. And another thing I'm going to say, though I may be out of line. They won't kill Avall as long as he's King and they have—or think they have—the armor. They'll want him to explain how it works, and he won't. He'll know we're out to rescue him, and that will give him strength to endure … whatever they do to him.”

“They can do a lot!” Rann shot back. “Avall could still be alive and not have even one of his fingers. We've already seen their thinking about that. But if they really want to hurt him, they'll do it in a way that hurts forever.”

“Oh, Eight!” Bingg groaned in the corner, then blushed furiously. Rann spared him a glance. The boy, though he fought very hard against it, was crying.

And that did it. Oblivious to the powerful men and women gathered round him, Rann likewise buried his face in his folded arms and wept. Lykkon was there in an instant, holding him, as was Myx, from the other side. The rest—he could feel their tolerant stares as though he actually saw them. Probably some of them were misty, too. For not one of them didn't have—or once have—a beloved bond-mate.

Finally, Preedor cleared his throat. “Rann,” he began softly, “you were his second because he trusted you and you knew his mind and had actually met the Ninth Face. But I'm telling you nothing you don't know when I say, that for what may be coming up, you might not be the best commander.”

“No,” Rann managed. “I wouldn't be. I assumed Tryffon—”

Tryffon cleared his throat in turn. “It should be me in theory, but in fact there's someone better qualified to lead this army.”

Rann looked up, blinking, startled and confused.

Tryffon smiled at him, then shifted his gaze to the right. “Vorinn has the best grasp of the minutiae of campaigns like
this I've ever seen. He thinks well on his feet and he's charismatic. I know Avall was already talking of making him subcommander.”

Rann shifted his gaze to the young man beside him. He was sitting there completely unself-consciously, neither beaming with pride nor denying the praise they'd already heaped upon him. Impervious: That was a good word for him. And thorough. He
would
make an excellent commander. And since he was from War-Hold already, as well as being brother-in-law to the King, he effectively united two potentially disparate factions: the royal party and Warcraft. Preedor was too old for actual battle, he freely admitted. And Tryffon was a better fighter than strategist—which deficiency he likewise acknowledged. But since they'd known Vorinn for years, they'd have no qualms about calling him down if need be. And Vorinn would know to a fine degree what they knew about this or that, and what they didn't.