Off Armageddon Reef (14 page)

A sudden bloodcurdling scream came out of the woods on the slopes above them.

No one who'd once heard an enraged slash lizard could ever mistake its war cry for anything else. The high-pitched, wailing whistle somehow still managed to sound like the tearing canvas of a sail splitting in a sudden gale. It was the voice of pure, distilled rage, raised in furious challenge, and the entire hunting party wheeled towards the sound as the broad, low-slung creature who'd made it erupted from the woods behind it.

It wasn't a fully mature slash lizard after all, a corner of Falkhan's mind noted as he muscled his eight-foot lizard spear around. This one was barely eleven feet from snout tip to tail tip, but all six legs churned furiously as it charged, gaping maw spread wide to show all four rows of wetly shining fangs.

The lieutenant was still wrestling his spear into position when Prince Cayleb shouted back at the charging lizard. The prince's shout was as obscene as it was loud, accusing the creature's mother of certain physically impossible actions, but content was less important than volume. Although it shouldn't have been possible for the slash lizard to hear
anything
through the sheer racket of its own bellow, it obviously heard Cayleb just fine. And, with the single-minded, territorial fury of its kind, it recognized the raised voice of a puny counterchallenge.

Falkhan swore even more obscenely than Cayleb as the hurtling predator's trajectory altered slightly. It thundered directly towards Cayleb, as fast as or faster than any charging horse, and not one of the prince's bodyguards was in position to intercept it.

Which, of course, was precisely what the crown prince had intended.

Cayleb turned his body almost at right angles to the slash lizard's charge. His lizard spear's long, broad, leaf-shaped head came down with the precision of a Siddarmark pikeman, his right foot extended slightly towards the lizard, and his left foot slid back and came down on the butt of his spear shaft to brace it. It all happened almost instantaneously, with the muscle-memory instinct of a swordsman and a polished perfection of form any of the prince's hunting mentors would have been proud to see. Then the lizard was upon him.

The creature's thick, squat neck stretched forward, the white lining of its opened mouth and gaping gullet shocking against the dark gray-green of its winter pelt as its jaws reached for the foolhardy foe who'd dared to invade
its
territory. And then the wailing thunder of its challenge turned into a high-pitched squall of anguish as the prince's razor-edged spearhead punched unerringly into the base of its throat.

The twenty-inch spearhead drove into the center of its chest, and its own hurtling weight hammered the knife-edged point home with a power no human arm could have achieved. The stout eighteen-inch crossbar a foot below the base of the spearhead prevented that same weight from driving it straight down the spear shaft to reach Cayleb. The shock of impact still nearly bowled the prince over, despite his impeccable form and braced position, but it didn't, and the slash lizard's squall turned into a choking scream as the spearhead punched straight into its heart.

The lizard slammed to a halt, writhing and thrashing in pinned agony, blood fountaining from opened mouth and nostrils. Its death throes almost accomplished what the force of its charge had failed to, shaking the crown prince like one of the port's mastiffs shaking a spider rat. It could still have killed Cayleb with a single blow from one of its massively clawed forefeet, but the prince clung to his spear shaft, using it to fend off the half-ton of mortally wounded fury.

To Lieutenant Falkhan, it seemed to take a brief eternity, but it couldn't actually have been anywhere near that long. The lizard's screams turned into bubbling moans, its frantic thrashing slowed, and then, with a last, almost pathetic groan, it folded in upon itself and went down in a twitching heap.

“Shan-wei take it!” the shortest of the men lying belly-down on the ridgeline snarled in disgust. “Why couldn't that accursed lizard have done its job?”

“Never really much chance of that, Sir,” his second-in-command observed dryly. “That was as pretty a piece of work as I've ever seen.”

“Of course there wasn't,” the leader acknowledged sourly. “Still, I could
hope
, couldn't I?”

His subordinate simply nodded.

“Well,” the leader sighed after a moment, “I suppose it just means we'll have to do it the hard way after all.”

“Well,” Ahrnahld Falkhan said, looking at his crown prince across the slash lizard's still shuddering carcass, “that was certainly exciting, wasn't it?”

Cayleb's answering laugh was exuberant, despite his chief bodyguard's less than fully approving tone. Then the prince braced one foot on the lizard's shoulder, gripped the spear shaft in both hands, bent his back, and grunted with effort as he pulled the long, lethal head free.

“Actually, it was,” he agreed as he began scrubbing blood off the spear by wiping it through the low-growing near-heather.

“I'm glad you enjoyed it,” Falkhan said repressively, and Cayleb grinned at him. The lieutenant tried to glower back, but despite his best efforts, his own grin leaked through. He started to say something else, then shook his head and looked at one of his subordinates instead.

“Payter.”

“Yes, Sir?” Sergeant Payter Faircaster replied crisply, although he couldn't quite suppress a smile of his own. The prince's bodyguards might all deplore the way their charge's insistence on doing things like this complicated their own duties, but there was no denying that it was more satisfying to protect someone who wasn't afraid of his own shadow.

“Take someone back with you for the horses. And send someone else back to take a message to Rothar. Tell the Mayor to send out a cart to haul this—” he poked the lizard with the toe of one boot “—back with us. I'm sure,” he gave the prince a sweet smile, “that His Majesty is going to be fascinated to see what sort of small game the Prince was out hunting this morning.”

“Oh, that's a low blow, Ahrnahld!” Cayleb acknowledged, raising one hand in the gesture a judge used to indicate a touch in a training match.

“I know, Your Highness,” Falkhan agreed, while the rest of the prince's bodyguards chuckled with the privilege of trusted retainers.

“Luhys,” Faircaster said, pointing to one of the other troopers. “You and Sygmahn.”

“Aye, Sergeant.” Luhys Fahrmahn's broad mountain accent was more pronounced than usual, and he was still grinning as he touched left shoulder with right hand in salute and jerked his head at Sygmahn Oarmaster. “We'll do that thing.”

He and Oarmaster handed their spears to Fronz Dymytree; then the two of them trotted off with Faircaster, leaving Dymytree and Corporal Zhak Dragoner with Falkhan and the prince.

“Now isn't that handy,” the short man on the ridgeline murmured in much more satisfied tones.

“It suits
me
right down to the ground, Sir,” his second-in-command agreed feelingly. Charisian Marines had a well-earned reputation, and they didn't get assigned as royal bodyguards for their sweet dispositions and retiring ways.

“Well,” the leader said after a moment, “I suppose we'd best get to it. And at least we've got ground we can work with.”

He and his men had been shadowing the prince's party ever since it left Rothar, and while he would have preferred for the lizard to do their job for them, the opportunities the present terrain offered were obvious to his experienced eye.

“Let's go. And remember—” He glared at the rest of his men. “—I'll personally cut the throat of anyone who makes a sound until the crossbows are into position.”

Heads nodded, and eleven more men, all dressed in the same gray-brown and green garments, two of them armed with crossbows, climbed to their feet behind him and his sergeant.

“Just as a matter of curiosity, Your Highness,” Lieutenant Falkhan asked as he paced the length of the slash lizard's outstretched body, “how did you come to hear about this?”

“Hear about it?” Cayleb repeated, eyebrows raised, and Falkhan shrugged.

“As a general rule, palace gossip spreads faster than a crown fire in a pinewood,” he said. “In this case, though, I hadn't heard a whisper about this fellow.” He jerked a thumb at the dead lizard. “That's why you were able to get this little expedition past me. I'm just curious about how you managed to hear about it before anyone else?”

“I don't really remember,” Cayleb admitted, after considering it for a few seconds. He scratched one eyebrow, frowning thoughtfully. “I think it may have been from Tymahn, but I'm not really sure about that.”

“Tymahn would've known about it if anyone did,” Falkhan acknowledged. Tymahn Greenhill, one of King Haarahld's senior huntsmen for over eighteen years, had been Cayleb's chief hunting mentor, since the king's crippled leg had prevented him from filling that role himself.

“He does have a way of hearing about things like this,” Cayleb agreed. “And he—”

“
Get
down,
Your Highness!
”

Ahrnahld Falkhan's head snapped up as a voice he'd never heard before in his life shouted the four-word warning.