Bazil Broketail (42 page)

The Baguti men quieted, and wavered. More than thirty had already paid with their lives for this ill-considered assault. This was not their kind of fighting. But the spear chieftain was there and he bellowed and shrieked and drove them forward once more.

“The drags are at ‘em,” shouted one of the spears-men.

But the Baguti were coming and the men of Marneri were spent; they could not hold the enemy any longer. Then Lessis bounded to the top of the wall while blowing frantically on a cornet. An arrow missed her by less than an inch.

“Down!” screamed Kesepton, and everyone threw themselves to the ground as Lessis raised an arm and opened her hand and shouted the final word.

The world shuddered, the ground seemed to heave.

Relkin fell off the wall with a crash. All the breath was driven from his lungs with a single explosive grunt, but he kept his eyes screwed tight as commanded.

And the darkness became light! The world was filled with a blaze so intense that it was brighter than any sun and then it was gone and all seemed darker than it had ever been.

He opened his eyes, there were red and green spots floating on his vision, as if he had stared at the sun too long.

But he could see, while the Baguti could not. From the nomads now came wails of terror mingled with screams of outrage.

The captain was back on his feet.

“Now men, let’s to work,” shouted Kesepton.

Lessis was scrambling over the wall.

Relkin dropped his heavy shield and got to his feet, lungs heaving with the effort to get his breath back. He crawled up the wall.

The Baguti were in chaos. Some men fell from their horses and crawled on the ground, others rolled here and there wailing like wounded animals.

The men of Marneri stumbled past them, following Lessis who was running down the valley as fast she could go. They followed and went past the shrieking Baguti women and the panicked horse herd that was streaming up the canyon in blind flight.

By the river they found the dragons sitting beside smashed food wagons, helping themselves to horsemeat sausage and whole sides of dried salmon.

Nearby, standing in a dazed group, mostly blinded, were about a hundred men and women, chained together at the ankles. These were the slaves bound for a grim future in the works of the Blunt Doom.

All bore the marks of the lash.

“Poor devils,” said someone.

“Free those people!” ordered Kesepton.

The men surged forward and began to free wrists and organize the cutting of the chains between them. A fire was started, and burly Cowstrap brought out his hammer.

Now Lagdalen and Rosen Jaib rode up with the horses, which had been kept in a distant canyon to preserve their vision. Eagerly the surviving Talion troopers swung into their saddles. The Marneri men followed suit, and so did Lessis who climbed aboard her white mare and galloped down to the river’s edge.

Here she moved back and forth, scouring the place with anxious eyes. Where was the magician?

They had captured a handful of the black-shirted troopers of Tummuz Orgmeen, but the magician and the princess were not with them.

Lessis rode to high ground and cast about her for some sign of them, but there was nothing to see in the gathering dark. They rode back, Lessis in a storm of impatience driving her mare harder than she had ever driven her before.

“Search the wagons!” she called, her voice cracking with anxiety.

The man had to be here—he couldn’t have escaped again!

Thrembode counted himself among the fortunate, despite his sodden clothes, his loss of all the troopers and his now uncomfortable loneliness on the steppe.

He was fortunate indeed, because despite all this he could still see with both of his eyes. Furthermore, the horses could still see and were able to pick out their way across the steppe. The horses indeed had found the hidden pass that got them off the riverbank and up onto the Gan. So luck had not abandoned him entirely.

Besita, on the other hand, was partially blind. The flash had struck while her right eye had been closed, just as she plunged into the water as her horse fell. Her left eye had caught the flash. She could see nothing with it, and barely comprehended what might have caused it. She seemed bewildered, almost witless, and on a couple of occasions he had used his whip on her out of frustration with her stupidity.

Besita might not be able to understand what had happened, but Thrembode could and he knew the source of the problem.

It had been the witch, damn her! And she had used something enormously powerful for an Illuminant, something so powerful that it was far beyond anything he knew of.

He had seen that flash, while underwater and with his eyes closed. The world had gone as bright as day for a moment. Anyone in the canyon with their eyes open would have been blinded, perhaps for life.

He caught himself marveling at the audacity of it. She could not have more than thirty men, plus a few dragons.

The moon was high now and very bright. The steppe was transformed into a grey velvet flatness beneath a dark vault in which the stars gleamed like jewels on velvet. It was cold though, damnably so, and their clothes were soaked and would have to dry in the wind. There was no time to waste.

Thrembode thanked the dark gods again for the fact that he had escaped the witch’s trap. But for those dragons and the panic they’d raised, he’d have been there with the rest of the poor fools, completely blind, helplessly awaiting the pleasure of the witch.

Instead he was giving her the slip once more, cutting west across the High Gan to the land of ash canyons that he knew lay a day’s ride away. Once in those canyons he would be able to lose his pursuers.

And then it would be a flat out race to the north, to the gates of Tummuz Orgmeen. The witch was sure to find his trail, but she would be hours behind them. She would have to choose between following it into the canyon land or cutting her losses and heading north to try and get ahead once more and take them in ambush somewhere in the lava lands.

He nodded grimly—that’s what she would do. She would go north and work up an army of spying birds and animals and try and take him in the night. Well, there were precautions he could take against that!

And being alone meant he could make good time, at least as long as these horses held up. And he was free of the immediate worry about the damned Baguti. Another night with hot-eyed braves circling them, lusting after the princess, would have been impossible. Tension like that could only lead to a horrible incident, most likely a massacre.

Yes, it was better to be free of Dodbol and his braves and to be able to make their own pace. Thrembode just wanted to reach the Shtag in safety and hand over the wench. Then he wanted an assignment in some other part of the world. He cursed to himself—it was a wretched business being so wet and cold!

Far away, floating in the dark with an ethereal light, the ice atop the White Bone Mountains formed a mocking palisade above the horizon. Thrembode had had enough of ice and cold and witches. He would head for warmer climes just as soon as he had completed the task at hand.

The Princess Besita was also miserably cold and wet. The half-blindness was horrifying; she was terrified that it might be permanent. She thought again and again about that bright light, that incredibly vivid flash.

Thrembode just said it was witch magic, and she supposed it was. And it had blinded her.

It seemed awfully unfair.

Dimly she stared at the distant mountain ice. She tried not to think about her destination, there, in the far north, beyond the ice mountains, where lay the city of the Doom. All her life she had lived with the vague terror of that entity and now she was going to be taken to it. When she looked north her heart quailed and she felt as cold inside as she was on the outside.

And then she looked at Thrembode and felt her heart warm in the fire of her infatuation. She hoped they would stop soon so she could give herself to him, even wet and cold, under the stars; she would writhe with him, do anything he wished. None of her many loves had ever been as intense as this! With Thrembode she lived at a higher level of mortal tension.

Of course it had been her handsome magician who had found her, who had plucked her from the water. He was a good swimmer; like everything that he did, he did it well.

He had found the horses and managed to walk them out of the torrent and onto a sandbar that connected on the shore. And of course he would not let her lie on the sand and weep and moan about her half-blindness. No, he had driven her mercilessly on down the riverbank, stumbling through the rocks and now out onto the Gan, into this cutting wind.

When the moon slipped behind the mountains, Thrembode dismounted and urged Besita out of her saddle as well.

In the dark they would walk, leading the horses and being careful not to let them step into a coney hole. Without the horses the damned witch would still be able to catch up with them.

And though Thrembode was cold, he still felt something much colder pass through him when he thought of the consequences of being captured.

The men were subdued around the campfire. They ate provisions stripped out of the Baguti larders and drank some whisky and passed out, exhausted.

The dragons lay down after the meal, dragonboys perched amongst them, and dragon snores soon reverberated through the camp.

Lagdalen, however, did not sleep immediately. She relived her own memories of the day, of waiting with the horse herd a dozen miles to the west until the sky above the river went white suddenly in an enormous flash of light. Then they’d ridden hard for the canyon and arrived to find the men of Marneri and Lessis down by the shore, completely ignoring the shrieking Baguti who were stumbling helplessly around on the canyon floor amidst their blinded horse herds.

Lagdalen still had spots before her eyes from that flash of light. Brighter than any lightning, brighter even than the sun, indeed she was still awed.

Lessis had explained it to her in a matter-of-fact way as they were helping to build the wall. She was going to liberate the energy in some of the Thingweight matter that they had taken in that grim place in the city of Dugguth. To do so had required the witch to commit blasphemy and use the techniques of the enemy, for the Rose Magic of the Isles would not affect the matter of the Thingweight, an entirely alien substance.

The result of the flash was that the Baguti would be blinded for a few days, some for weeks, a few for years. They were no longer a threat.

It was so fantastic that she wondered briefly if she was really living this life, or whether it was all a dream. To think that just a few months earlier she had been confined to the Novitiate, scrubbing floors and learning catechism day after day. All that seemed like someone else’s life on another world somewhere.

But after so many days of living in the saddle, Lagdalen was unable to continue this reverie for long and soon slipped into the oblivion of slumber.

Lessis, on the other hand, spent the night in a turmoil of nerves. She interrogated the troopers from Tummuz Orgmeen, but they knew very little. The magician had turned back into the stream when the dragons had burst out, but then the light had flashed and they knew no more.

Lessis had ground her teeth. The man’s wretched luck was endless! He must have floated downstream, possibly not even affected by the flash. Despite everything the damned man had got away again, and he had the princess still. It was insupportable.

Worse of course was the fact that they’d taken casualties in the fight at the wall, and she knew that it had been a much closer thing that she’d anticipated.

The thought that it had all been a waste of lives and effort made it irretrievably bitter. When this was over she would beg for a sabbatical. Perhaps she could herd sheep on aft-upland farm, perhaps it was all she was good for. When dawn finally broke she roused Lagdalen and went south to hunt along the riverbank.

Her worst fear, of course, was that she would find the princess dead, drowned and washed up on the riverbank. But by mid-morning they reached the hidden pass to the Gan without seeing any bodies, not even a dead horse. Lessis dared to hope that Besita was still alive.

She dismounted and went over the ground with a careful eye. It was difficult to pick out the trail from that of the fifty horses they’d brought through there the day before, but eventually she was sure the man and the princess had been there and walked up, leading a pair of horses. Their tracks were just a bit sharper, almost clean in comparison to the others.

At the top, amidst the chaos left by their horses and themselves the day before, it became more difficult, the ground was harder, the tracks innumerable.

When Kesepton and his men caught up with her she sent them to track around the edge of the trampled area and find the trail. It took a while, but eventually they found it. Two horses had gone down a rocky streambed and then climbed out and gone west onto the short grass steppe.

Lessis felt her heart sink. The magician was heading for the canyon lands. They would reach the ash plain tonight and be in the canyons by morning. The chance of finding them there was slim.

It was just as she had feared, a total disaster.

The men were waiting in a tense group, standing by their horses on the edge of the cliffs. A fire had been made to brew some tea and warm some porridge. The dragons were sitting on the cliff edge with their boys alongside.

Lessis felt her heart breaking. They had fought so well and come so far, and all for nothing.

Captain Hollein Kesepton strode up, leading his horse behind him. The lady seemed more pensive than he had ever seen her. And the girl was standing about fifty feet away, holding the horses with an averted face, a sure sign that Lessis was thinking hard. He had to tell the men something; he would have to intrude on her solitude.

“Lady, what are your conclusions?” he asked.

She seemed calm, almost unconcerned.