Assail (40 page)

‘Give up your horses and you can go,’ one answered in thickly accented Talian.

‘They are ours and we will keep them!’ Lyan shouted.

One of the crossbowmen brought his weapon up to aim and a fellow near him knocked it down. ‘Don’t shoot, y’fool! Might hit a horse.’

‘Here’s mine!’ Lyan yelled and kneed her mount into a charge down the hill. She whooped a war-cry as she came and Dorrin followed in her wake.

She thundered past Kyle, who could only urge his mount onward to join her. A spearman directly in her path jabbed but she parried with her blade and the man leapt to save his life. Dorrin followed close behind. A crossbowman drew aim on Lyan and Kyle twisted his mount over to charge him; the man dropped the weapon and leapt aside.

Then they were through, galloping for a draw between the next two shallow hills. But when Kyle brought his horse over he saw Dorrin’s mount running riderless, its saddle empty.

He yelled, turned in his saddle: the lad lay in a heap on the flat between the rises. The soldiers were closing on him. Kyle yanked his mount around, just as a scream of shock and rage announced that Lyan had discovered what was happening.

Kyle reached Dorrin first. Dismounting at a run, he yanked the boy up by one arm and flinched upon seeing a bolt impaling his leg. Some crossbowman had snapped off a lucky shot. He tossed the lad over his saddle and drew a hatchet. ‘Hang on!’ he ordered. Dorrin nodded, his face snowy pale and glistening with sweat, and wrapped the reins around his hand. Clenching his teeth against the necessity of it, Kyle struck the horse’s flank with the impaling spike.

The horse screamed and reared, then took off in a spray of kicked-up dirt. Dorrin hunched low, hugging its neck. Kyle turned to face the closing men and women. He counted fifteen.

Damn the Twins’ luck. Nothing for it. He switched the hatchet to his left hand and drew his blade.

The men and women spread out in an arc, facing him. He snapped a quick glance behind, saw Lyan leading Dorrin away on his mount, the lad’s horse following.

‘Togg turd!’ one man shouted. ‘At least we can make you pay!’

Then one of the spearmen stepped forward, pointing. ‘You!’ he bellowed, and charged. In the instant the man closed Kyle noticed that he wore a tattered blue cloak.
Shit
.

‘Die, Whiteblade!’ the ex-Stormguard yelled in rage.

In a single movement Kyle swung, hacking the head from the spear, spun, sliced through the haft and the man’s leading arm at the elbow, looped his arm in an arc and took off the fellow’s head cleanly through the neck.

The dismembered corpse fell, spraying arterial blood from neck and arm.

In the stunned pause that followed, Kyle charged.

The first he reached actually turned to run. Kyle cut him across his back, severing his spine. He caught a sword blow from another with his hatchet, then swung, cutting through the sword arm. He severed a spear as it thrust, took off the spearman’s leading leg at the knee.

A crossbow bolt hissed as it brushed past his head and he wished he had a damned helmet. The thought drove him to charge the remaining crossbows. The nearest, a woman, reflexively raised her weapon to protect herself; Kyle sliced through the stock and ironwork and took her forearms with it. She woman stared in horror at the severed stumps of her arms, her eyes rolled up white, and she toppled. Kyle meant to close on the remaining two crossbowmen but four swordsmen were dangerously close. He remembered the trick he had learned from the Silent People and threw his hatchet, taking one bowman in the stomach, and charged the other. This one backpedalled, terrified. Kyle pressed forward until the man tripped then took off one foot as it flew upwards. He spun to meet the swordsmen, blade raised in a guard, but no one was pressing the attack. The survivors were running.

He eased his stance, let out a long hard breath. The wounded crossbowman, screaming curses and clutching his ankle, he left alone. He bent down to retrieve his hatchet, and walked away. Their friends may, or may not, come back for them. The lesser wounded might make it to the coast.

He didn’t care. He was just tired of the stupidity of it. The needlessness of it. He had been forced to defend himself and now he was a killer. He cleaned the blade on the blue cloak of the dead Stormguard, carefully sheathed it. This one he didn’t recognize, but it made sense that many of them would now be out selling their spears. He walked on, trying to spit, but his mouth was too dry.

Atop the next rise he found Lyan tending to Dorrin. She’d torn his trouser leg and removed the bolt and was now tightly wrapping the wound. Mercifully, the lad was unconscious. Kyle was worried; the boy had lost a lot of blood.

He cleared his throat to speak, croaked, ‘We have to move.’

‘I know,’ she answered without stopping her work. Kyle nodded, though she wasn’t looking. ‘Saw you fight,’ she said, and glanced up. He saw something new in her eyes, something that troubled him. ‘That was plain butchery.’

He went to collect the horses.

That night, across the small fire, Lyan cradled Dorrin to her chest, giving him her warmth. He’d woken only for brief moments, groaned his pain, and shut his eyes once more. Sweat now gleamed on his face and Kyle feared a fever. It occurred to him that the lad might not make it and the thought brought a terrible squeezing pain to his chest that made it hard to breathe. The boy had shown such good sense, such endurance, such patience and wisdom beyond his years. Kyle suddenly realized that if he had a son, he could only hope for one such as this. The band across his chest became a burning acid gash and he blinked away a swimming blur in his eyes.

He decided, then, what he would do in the morning.

When Lyan mounted, Dorrin held in her arms before her, Kyle did not mount as well. Instead, he stood next to her leg looking up at them. She drew breath to tell him to hurry, then realized what was going on and swallowed.

‘Take the horses,’ he told her.

She shook her head.

‘Take the horses and buy healing for the lad.’

She continued shaking her head, only now looking away, blinking.

‘Go.’

She nodded then, curtly, and lowered her head. He sought her mouth and found it hot and wet with tears. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, half choked.

‘As am I,’ he answered just as faintly.

She twisted away, kneed her mount gently forward. The two other horses followed. Kyle watched them go then turned to face the north. He had already looped the straps of a few waterskins over his shoulders, and now he set off at a jog.

*

After two days he imagined he had entered the region of desert plains that his people’s stories named the Vanishing Lands, or the Lands of Dust. It was a broad northern desert of dwarf trees, lichens and brittle brush, with a scattering of clumped grasses and tiny wild flowers. Clouds did pass overhead, occluding the sun, but none released any of their life-sustaining rains here. The air was frigid and painfully dry. His lips chapped and split. He was ruthless with his limited supply of water; one mouthful in the morning, and one at noon. The heights of the Salt range, a deep aqua-blue in the distance, taunted him with their gleaming shoulders of snow and icefield.

He passed the remains of people, and even of horses. Most lay half buried in clumps of meagre soil. Wild flowers surrounded them like burial wreaths. The bones were very old, or at least appeared so, wind-gnawed down to stumps where exposed to the gusting dry air.

The nights were the worst. There was no cover to be found anywhere. He lay wrapped in a blanket, exposed to the buffeting winds. At times these rose to storms that lashed him with tossed sand and gravel. All the warmth would be sucked from him and only uncontrollable shivering kept heat in his bones. He would wake with dunes of blown dirt gathered up his sheltered side.

One night something large banged into him, tossed by the wind. He reflexively lashed out to snatch it. It took him some time peering at the thing in the starlight to identify it, but eventually he realized that what he held was an eroded, battered, wind-tumbled human skull.

He kept it with him as he walked the next day, turning it in his hands. It wasn’t old, that much he was certain of; bones yellowed or greyed with age. This skull still held that bright whiteness of bone picked clean. Bones also roughened with age, became more porous, and lost mass. This skull still held heft, and was smooth where not abraded through rolling and bumping.

While he paced along studying the skull, something bright caught his eye on the ground and he stopped. His arms slowly fell and he let the skull thump hollowly to the bare rock beneath his feet. He had wandered into a field of bones. The remains lay as far as he could see in every direction. They gleamed whitely, humped together in small depressions where the winds had swept them up. Ribs lay snug in natural cracks of the exposed granite bedrock. Wide scapulae lay flat where the winds could not budge them. The round dome of a skull was caught up against a knot of rock.

Kyle reached for the grip of the blade snug at his side to reassure himself, and continued on. None of the bones that he passed showed any signs of violence: no shattering, or gashes or cuts. They had not even been gnawed by scavengers. Fat femurs had not been cracked open for the rich marrow.

Equipment too lay scattered about: corroded armour, metal fittings, wind-smoothed coins, and naked rusted blades. But no leather, cloth, padding, or even wood. How could it have rotted away so quickly?

That night the winds returned with redoubled violence. It was as if they wished to pick him up and send him tumbling back down to the prairie of the Silent People. They seemed to punch him from all directions and sent needle-sharp lances of sand that stung and burned any patch of exposed skin. He tucked himself entirely under his blanket in a desperate effort to escape their constant lashing and hissing.

In the morning, when he shook out the blanket, he found it full of holes. Patches of it had been eaten away entirely. Something about this troubled him far back in his mind: memories from the ancient stories he’d heard in his youth.
The Land of Dust … the Land of Winds
. He shook his head; surely the winds alone couldn’t kill a man. But perhaps they could scour the padding from discarded armour.

He rolled up the blanket, took a sip of water, and moved on. The silver heights of the Salt range beckoned. The distant peaks shimmered suspended over a layer of haze, or clouds, like ships at sea.

Towards noon a dust storm struck. It swept down from the north. A swirling churning mass of solid yellow that engulfed the entire plain ahead. Kyle tore off a strip of cloth and tied it over his face leaving only his eyes exposed. He ducked his head, raised a hand to shelter his eyes.

The wall struck like a blow of rage. Sand and grit blasted at him. It gnawed the flesh of his hand, bit at his scalp. The noise was a howling and a grinding avalanche combined. Kyle walked blind, a hand extended into the murky haze of gusting blankets of dust. There was no cover anywhere at all. If it became unendurable, he supposed he would have no option but to lie down and curl into a self-protecting ball.

And the thought came:
As so many others had done before him …

Land of Winds. Land of Dust. Put these two together and you have a desolate uninhabitable desert that scours all life from itself.

Then a shape resolved itself out of the sweeping scarves and twists of sand and dust. Vaguely humanoid; a shape of seething hissing winds and grit. A blunt arm pointed. A moaning wind-voice spoke: ‘You I would allow to pass. But you carry a thing of chaos. This cannot be allowed to pass.’

Thing of chaos?
Kyle clutched at the blade. He called uselessly into the winds: ‘What do you mean? This is the sword of Osserc!’ He heard no sound of his own voice yet the creature answered.

‘Yes. This thing he carried for a time. Yet its origins are older than he. Know you not what it is?’

‘It is a sword.’

‘It is no sword. Lay it down and you may pass.’

‘No! It was given to me by Osserc himself!’

‘Then he did you no favour. All that will be left of you will be that artefact. And that I shall grind until its dust is spread across the continent entire.’

Artefact
? ‘No!’ Kyle yanked the blade free, swinging across his front. The winds flinched. At least that was how it felt to him. He almost tumbled forward into a lull that lasted a fraction of a moment. The winds’ howling doubled. It rasped and growled in what seemed like frustration.

‘Then die!’ the creature bellowed, and raised its arms of churning dust.

Kyle charged, rolled forward, and swung. The blade bit into the shape at its broad base, and just as when he had struck the manifestation of a goddess on Fist an enormous blast of unleashed energies threw him backwards to land on the rock, depriving him of his breath and bringing stars to his vision.

When he regained his senses, he raised his head to see the dust storm dispersing. It fell in uncoiling scarves of particles that came hissing down. He stood, brushed a thick layer of it from his chest and hair. He raised the blade still gripped tightly in his hand. He remembered that someone had once told him it wasn’t made of metal – it certainly didn’t look like metal. It was creamy amber, opaque at its thick spine verging down to translucent towards the curve of its keen edge. He ran his fingers down the side of the blade. It felt organic to him, like horn, or scale. An artefact? Artefact of what? And chaos? What had that being meant about chaos? Yet he didn’t imagine he’d killed the creature. Just as at Fist, when he’d struck the Lady, she had merely dispersed for a time. So too here, probably. Shrugging, he resheathed the blade, carefully, edge up, and walked on.