Lord of Mountains: A Novel of the Change (13 page)

“One up,” Alleyne said calmly. “Two down and then in.”

The two young women took a dozen rapid paces away, fanning out on either side of the approaching rider, and sank down as they gathered in their war-cloaks. It was amazing how much like a rock you could look in the dark. A man on horseback appeared out of the wet blackness, muffled in his own cloak against the rain and swearing under his breath.

“Goddammit, it just doesn’t
feel
right,” she could hear him say in the peculiar tone you used talking to yourself when you were all alone and the rather harsh accent of the far interior. “We’re missing something and I don’t know what.”

Not a cavalryman, though he rode with a careless ease peculiar to those raised on horseback; there was a traverse red crest on his helmet, and in his free hand was a swagger stick, a vinestock about three feet long, gnarled and twisted. A big oval shield was slung over his back, and she could just make out the brass thunderbolts-and-eagle on it.

US of Boise officer,
she knew.
Maybe the one I saw earlier. Some conscientious type working a hunch. Too bad for him.

Alleyne stood and reached over his shoulder to draw his longsword, the steel a bright streak in the rainy dimness; if someone was going to see you anyway, you controlled how they did it. That way you held their eyes. To an experienced man, the way he set himself and held the blade and the way his left hand stripped his round buckler off its clip on his belt
would
hold the attention. They all marked someone you didn’t turn your back on if you wanted to live.

The Boisean flipped the vinestock to his left hand and drew his own short gladius with smooth speed; he didn’t shout for help, which meant he really
had
come alone. Alleyne was probably smiling behind the cloth mask as the Boisean raised his sword for a moment in salute and then prepared to charge. He and his father had both been soldiers before they came to Montival-to-be, but of a particular sort—SAS, it had been called before the Change and still was, over there in the Empire of Greater
Britain. So had Sam Aylward been. They’d taught the Clan and the Rangers still more.

“
Take him down,”
he said in a conversational tone.

Mary and Ritva moved in like the chucks of a drill-bit tightening, Ritva moving a fractional second first to draw the man’s eye. The Boisean shouted and cut to his right, leaning over to reach with the short sword.

Mary leapt, her long legs taking her to the horse’s side in six bounding strides. Her hands clamped on the man’s foot at heel and toe, and she ducked, heaved and twisted with all the strength in her five-foot-nine of lean muscle. Steel split the air a fraction above her head as he cut left and backhand frantically at the last instant; the man was
fast
. But the point of the sword just tugged at the tip of her hood rather than striking the steel cap beneath.

And the shove shot him out of the saddle and off to the right like something launched from a catapult. The horse started to bolt forward with a whinny of alarm, and Mary dove through the space where it had been. That was just in time to see Ritva landing on the man’s back in a cat-jump, something flashing in her hand—a length of linen bandana, doubled and with a gold coin in one end to give it weight. The wet cloth whined through the air as she flicked it forward in the same instant as her feet left the ground.

The man had lost his sword as he fell, possibly deliberately; it was all too easy to come down on the edge when you pitched over like that. The strap holding his shield broke, and it went away end-over-end like a flipped coin. Both his hands flashed up to grab for the bandana as it struck his neck and whipped around snake-swift, the coin slapping into Ritva’s gloved right hand and the cloth making a complete overlapping circuit of his throat. He was too late; she already had her wrists crossed and wrenched them apart, driving the fabric into the flesh under his chin with terrible leverage as she grappled him around the waist with her legs.

The twin assaults of the
rumal
-noose and a hundred and fifty pounds of Dúnadan on his back toppled him forward onto the muddy ground. Half a second later Mary landed on his kicking legs, wrapping her limbs
around them, snatching the dagger out of his belt and tossing it aside before he thought to draw it.

“Quiet!” Ritva hissed in English. “Or else!”

He went limp in acknowledgment of defeat, wheezing in a breath as she slacked off a very little. Mary’s fingers did a light flickering search for holdout weapons. If there had been anyone close, they could have cast their cloaks over him and done a fair imitation of a lump in the ground within moments. Instead Ritva came up as Alleyne approached, with one leg out and a knee planted between the man’s shoulder-blades.

“
Hîr
?” she said.
“Boe?
”

That meant
Is it necessary, lord
? It was probably fortunate that the man they’d defeated didn’t understand either that or the unspoken codicil:
to kill him?

“It’s a
girl
?” the man under her knee choked out in surprise. “I got dry-gulched by a
girl?
”

“No, it’s a woman Ranger,” Ritva snapped in English.

“Two, actually,” Mary added.

“So
no dhínen
! Which means
shut up
,” Ritva finished.

He made a gagging noise as her hands poised for the second twist that would snap the neck. Mary could feel the tension in the man’s body through his legs and hips as he strained up with his neck creaking.

The
Hîr Dúnedain
swept his hood and face-mask back with the same motion. His handsome face and trimmed blond mustache were blurs in the rainy night.

“Do you yield yourself?” he asked the man softly, going down on one knee as he sheathed his sword without looking back.

“I yield,” the man grunted, slapping one palm on the ground in a wrestler’s gesture of concession. “Obviously!”

“Let him live,” Alleyne said softly, with the very slightest hint of a smile, and in English.

Shifting back to the Noble Tongue: “We’d have to carry the body out anyway. Better not to kill without need and he might be useful one way or another. Make him safe, though.”

Ritva nodded, and muttered:

“
Oltho vae
,” to the prisoner, which meant
sweet dreams
, or close enough.

She let the
rumal
drop. The man went on his face, choking and gasping for a moment. Before he could recover Ritva had a sealed container opened, and another cloth in her hand; that she clapped across his nose and mouth, holding them firmly and planting her other hand on the back of his head. There was a moment’s sweet smell, and she removed it as soon as he went limp. It was rather too easy to overdose someone on chloroform, given that the stuff had to be made out of seaweed by a complex chemical process and that you never really knew for sure how strong any batch was.

No point in sparing someone and then having him die of heart failure
, Mary thought as she helped bind and gag the unfortunate Boisean.

Or extremely lucky Boisean
, she thought.

Her snicker and Ritva’s came at the same instant, and Mary knew they were sharing a thought:

He’s obviously brave and that means he leads from the front. Thousands are going to die before the next sundown, but now he probably won’t end up on the receiving end of a lance or an arrow or a roundshot. As opposed to say, the blameless and far more deserving personal
me,
who’ll have to go through the whole ghastly damned thing from beginning to end doing Rangerishly dangerous damned stuff to live up to our doubly-damned reputations.

That sort of mental communion had been happening between the Havel twins all their lives.

H
alf a dozen more Rangers were there around Mary and Ritva and the Lord of the Dúnedain by now, kneeling silently in a half-circle about them with arrows on the string, bows hidden by their cloaks to keep the rain off the sensitive recurves until the instant they had to draw. Wax and varnish did a good deal, but it wasn’t wise to count on them.

Another had caught the Boisean’s horse, gentling it and offering it an apple while two more quickly went through the saddlebags and the bedroll strapped behind the saddle for anything that might be documents or maps. It shifted and laid back its ears, backing its stern in a half-circle, then consented to take the fruit, though its eyes still rolled nervously. Horses were conservatives who thought a strangeness probably meant something wanted to eat them.

“
Rochiril, novaer
,” the Ranger crooned softly, stroking the mare’s nose. “Be good, horse-lady.”

“Imlos,” Alleyne said to him. “Mount. Ride east; abandon the horse where you can make your way to the riverside about ten miles east of here without leaving a trail. Take his sword, shield and helmet and drop
them somewhere along the way where there are plenty of tracks. You know the Ranger shelter.”

“I know it, lord,” the young man said; it hadn’t been a question. “I helped build it.”

Well, alae, duh,
Mary thought.
Why do you think he picked you?

They’d all memorized the hideouts and blinds the Dúnedain had established along the river before and during the war; most were merely small camouflaged dugouts with supplies…often including an inflatable boat. Still, there was knowing and
knowing
.

“Rejoin when you can, Imlos, but don’t take unnecessary chances,” Alleyne said. “Go!”

The man nodded, bowed slightly with right hand to heart and vaulted into the saddle amid murmurs of
galu
—good luck—from the rest. Even as the hoofbeats died away in the hiss of rain, the others were examining the surroundings, blurring footprints with careful speed. One flipped the Boisean’s broad-bladed dagger to Mary, and she tucked it into her boot-top. The captured officer was stripped of his sword belt, tied into his cloak and slung between two rangers. One of them flashed Ritva a thumbs-up sign as he helped carry the prisoner downslope.

That was
not
a Ranger gesture, but Ian Kovalevsky was from the Dominion of Drumheller. Originally the slim fair young man had been a liaison between the Questers as they passed through on the last stage of their journey back to Montival and the Force, a red-coated equivalent of the Rangers which helped keep the peace in the Dominions. He’d ended up as Ritva’s new boyfriend, and might well drift into the Rangers as well—it wouldn’t be the first time something like that had happened when an outsider fell for a member, and Mary thought Ritva was serious about him. He’d been along on the rescue mission in Boise, too, for which Mary rather envied him.

Though getting snatched off a roof in the middle of a hostile city by an airship that
almost
missed, with the usurper’s troops closing in all around in a shower of crossbow bolts, then getting tossed hundreds of miles in a thunderstorm with lightning crackling around the highly-inflammable gasbag…that sort of thing was a lot more fun in retrospect.
On a cold winter afternoon in Stardell Hall back at Mithrilwood, say, lying back in one of the big leather chairs in front of the fireplace and roasting chestnuts, with the carved timber of the walls all dim up by the banner-hung rafters, a mug of mulled cider in your hand, a cat in your lap and a bunch of kids and noobs gathered around, sitting on the floor and listening with
that is just
so
cool
expressions on their faces.

They went down the slope faster than they’d climbed it, doing their best to leave minimal tracks; as they cleared each party of two or three the little groups would cover trail as they fell back. Two light galleys were still waiting in the little cove, but they’d been pushed back into the water and the camouflage netting removed, their oars waiting ready in the locks like the legs of a water-spider. Both were fragile-looking things like racing shells, with aluminum masts folded down and stored in the well between the oar-benches.

John Hordle and his wife, Eilir Mackenzie, were there; this was a
very
important mission, enough that all three of the remaining founder-leaders of the Rangers were on it. Uncle John was six-foot-six and broad enough to seem squat, built like a hobbit crossed with a troll, with a face like a good-natured ham. He leaned on the hilt of his sheathed greatsword and chewed a grass stem with his graying reddish-brown hair gleaming with raindrops as the rest came up, his shrewd little russet eyes missing nothing. After a few mugs of shandy at festivals and feasts, one of his party tricks was to bend horseshoes straight and then toss them to the unsuspecting, who then howled and danced after they’d gripped the torsion-heated metal.

Aunt Eilir was Juniper Mackenzie’s eldest child, black-haired, pale-eyed and slender-strong and just short of forty. She had a clipboard and was checking people off as they arrived, soundlessly…which was appropriate, given that she’d been deaf from birth and was one of the reasons Rangers used Sign so much. No matter how well-trained and experienced troops were, it was always shockingly easy to lose someone in the dark if you weren’t
very
careful. Eilir and Astrid had re-founded the Rangers a few years after the Change, and a few years before John and Alleyne and Sir Nigel had arrived from Greater Britain fleeing Mad King Charles.

Mary had always thought it was all madly romantic, especially the part where the two young comrades had courted and won the
anamchara
-sworn Ladies of the Dúnedain. Though she knew Uncle John had always quietly considered Aunt Astrid barking mad and wouldn’t have had her on a bet. And she suspected that Uncle Alleyne had thought she was crazy too, but just didn’t care, the way Uncle John didn’t care that Eilir was deaf. Both of which facts
were
romantic too, when you thought about it, in a more grown-up way.