Reaper Of Sorrows (Book 1) (24 page)

Rathe tried to rouse his fleeing strength, only to grow weaker. With every heaving breath, the dagger gouged deeper into his rib, inching along the bone’s length, the blade slicing through skin and muscle as it went. Sweat poured over his brow, stung his eyes. He ground his teeth against the biting agony, but could not escape it. A finger’s width more, and the dagger would plunge. If he tried to butt his head against Sanouk’s, the dagger would skewer him. Neither could he shift the lord’s balance without suffering the same fate—

The dagger slipped, burrowing an inch between two ribs. Rathe bit back a howl, and Sanouk leaned his weight against the pommel of the dagger. Rathe squirmed, seeing not Sanouk’s over-bright black eyes before him, but Nesaea’s deep blue. Somewhere below his shifting feet, she waited for him to return.

“I will remember this night,” Sanouk snarled, pressing his nose against Rathe’s. “The night the Scorpion’s sting was made impotent. After your heart stills, I will drain your blood and trade it to a witch to use in her potions. I will remember—”

A bearlike growl rose above the discordant, steely clashes of battle. The lord jerked his head around, eyes going wide at the sight of a lumbering shape surging out of the shadows. A spasm of fear rippled his muscles, and the dagger pressed deeper into Rathe’s side.

Loro flew out of the fire-gilded night, smashing aside all obstacles, a woodsman’s maul raised above his head. At the last instant, Sanouk flung himself away from Rathe. The head of the iron maul crashed down, shattering the flagstones upon which the lord had stood. Off balance from his failed attack, Loro tripped and crashed headlong into a collection of empty crates and barrels.

Rathe plucked the dagger free of his flesh and hurled it at Sanouk’s face. The lord’s sword flashed, slapping the twirling blade aside. Still seeing Nesaea’s eyes in his mind, imagining the pain and horror Sanouk had wrought upon her and the others, Rathe charged.

Their swords clashed, and Rathe drove Sanouk back. With his free hand, he struck the lord’s chin a thudding blow. Eyes rolling and glazed, Sanouk fell. Rathe knocked aside the lord’s clumsy block and rammed his sword deep into the man’s groin. Sanouk shrieked like a woman, but with strength lent him by agony, he kicked Rathe away. Rathe reeled back, caught his balance, and again fell on Sanouk, his spirit burning with the need to dispatch this beast before him.

The lord came up before Rathe reached him, sword at the ready, but all his previous confidence had fled. Fear lit his eyes, and his lips trembled. He fought defensively now, with Rathe the aggressor. Rathe shouted his rage, and his blows crashed against Sanouk’s blade, again and again. Sanouk stumbled once more, and threw up his free hand in a warding gesture. Rathe’s sword flashed, and a pair of fingers flew. The lord staggered away.

“Your god awaits,” Rathe growled, and lunged. The tip of his sword skipped over the bridge of Sanouk’s nose and pierced one eye. Sanouk retreated, wailing. Rathe followed, each step deliberate, poised to take the lord’s head with his next blow—

A spear flew out of the night. Rathe twisted to the side, narrowly avoiding having his bowels skewered. With a vile curse, he spun back, but Sanouk had vanished. He cast about and found the lord racing toward the open gate. Rathe gave chase, but his rage gave him less strength than a man running for his life. For every step he took, Sanouk managed two.

“Stop him!” Rathe shouted. “Close the gate!”

Heads turned at the force of his command, but with the heat of battle still high, no one moved to obey. Unhindered, Sanouk leaped over the abandoned ram and sprinted free.

Rathe followed doggedly, but stumbled to a halt at the far end of the drawbridge, all his pains and weariness falling on him at once. He pressed a palm against the wound in his side, gulping breaths, and slowly sank to his knees.

Get up!

He tried, but could not. There was no strength left in him.

The night loomed all around, a motionless black curtain. He could make out the dim shapes of abandoned siege engines dotting the open field beyond the curtain wall, but nothing stirred.

“This is not finished between us!” Rathe bellowed.

“No, you shite eating cur, it is not.”

Rathe jerked around at that soft, hateful voice, and saw a smirking, blood-covered face floating in the gloom. He clambered to his feet. Before he managed a single step, an arrow cleaved the night and buried itself in his shoulder, scant inches from his throat. He staggered back, tugging at the offending shaft.

Missing fingers or not, Sanouk managed to nock another arrow. “You will fall by my hand,” the lord snarled. He raised the bow and drew back the string, making the weapon’s limbs creak.

Despite the darkness, Rathe saw his death in the man’s one-eyed stare. “I may fall,” he growled, “but I will watch you die before drawing my last breath.”

One arm dangling uselessly, Rathe gritted his teeth and ripped the arrowhead from his shoulder. He saw the hot wash of blood soak the sleeve and drip off his fingertips, but his wrath had grown beyond feeling such a trifling scratch.

Sanouk’s expression shifted from morbid glee to open-mouthed shock. And all the more so when Rathe rushed for him at a dead sprint. Rathe heard the snap of the bowstring, felt the shaft score his temple, but he did not slow, did not so much as flinch.

Out of arrows, Sanouk lifted the bow like a club and delivered a cracking blow across Rathe’s face. Stunned though he was, Rathe ducked the next swing, and rammed a hand’s span of the arrow’s length under Sanouk’s ribs. The breath blasted wetly from the lord’s mouth. Rathe ripped the arrow free, then jammed the crimson slathered broadhead into Sanouk’s throat. Before Sanouk could draw back, Rathe gave the slippery shaft a wicked twist, and then jerked the arrowhead free.

Sanouk stumbled back. Blood poured from his neck, and more bubbled over his lips. He tried to speak, but could only manage a gurgling hiss. Rathe struck once more, driving the arrowhead into Sanouk’s remaining eye, and deeper, piercing his brain. Jittering violently, Sanouk fell at Rathe’s feet, and abruptly went still.

“May you dance for Gathul,” he said, thinking on that other place he had seen behind the god’s teeth.

After a time, Rathe turned back to rejoin the battle, doubting he would achieve anything beyond getting himself killed. A triumphant shout gave him pause.

Loro burst through the gate, trailing a tangle of rope from one foot, and holding a broken barrel stave in each huge fist. He halted and caught Rathe in a rib-cracking bear hug. “You have done it!” he declared, settling an unsteady Rathe back to his feet.

“Done what?” Rathe asked, blinking in confusion. Only then did he recognize that the din of battle had ceased.

“When Sanouk fled,” Loro answered, “most of the men who sided with him dropped their swords and surrendered.”

“And those who did not yield?”

Loro’s face wrinkled sourly. “Those who the Maidens did not shoot full of arrows while scampering along the battlements, escaped over the wall.”

Rathe clapped Loro on the shoulder, and ended up leaning on the man. “If not for you, brother, that bastard might have gutted me. From now on, I should call you the Scorpion.”

Loro bellowed laughter. “I am a boar, not a creeping bug. Always was, always will be.” He grew serious. “You don’t suppose one of those fine wenches would let me nuzzle her—”

“I cannot help you with that,” Rathe interrupted, grinning wearily.

At that moment, Loro’s gaze fell on Sanouk’s corpse. “Gods and demons, you caught him? I thought he had escaped with the others.”

Rathe considered how the lord had waited for him in ambush—the man’s last and greatest gamble—but instead of trying to explain the encounter, he shrugged. Loro nodded, though questions burned in his eyes.

“Ask me on the morrow,” Rathe said, and Loro nodded again.

They walked back through the gates, Loro half-carrying Rathe. All the while, the fat man turned from victory to prattling about plans for seducing any number of the Maidens of the Lyre.

Rathe laughed at all the right places, but all he wanted was to get Nesaea out of the catacombs, and find somewhere to sleep.

Chapter 30

A
steady rain fell from a leaden sky hung low over Valdar. Save that no watchmen stood in the turrets, the village looked much the same as the first time Rathe had gazed on its weathered wooden palisade.

“You think any of Sanouk’s men are in there?” Loro asked.

Rathe shrugged. “If so, then Erryn must have captured them, and is now sharpening an axe for their necks.”

Half a turn of the glass gone, the young woman, accompanied by a handful of Hilan men and the wagon driver Breyon—who turned out to be her distant cousin—had passed unmolested through the rickety gates. The sound of clucking chickens and a shutter banging against a windowsill were the only sounds from within Valdar. All had remained too quiet to think anyone with ill-intent waited behind the palisade.

Quiet or not, if Erryn did not show herself soon, Rathe meant to ride in, despite her insistence that she be allowed to deal with Mitros, and anyone else she found who had played a part in making her people suffer. “This fight is mine more than yours,” she had told him. “If any remain when I am finished, you can have them.”

Ringing the village wall, a number of the Maidens of the Lyre stood ready for battle atop their shiplike wagons. The rest aimed wheeled ballistae or mangonels much the same, Rathe suspected, as they had against Hilan. It astounded him that the Maidens had gone to such elaborate extents to rescue their leader, even using one of their own to bewitch Sanouk. Without the young woman Milia, who had garnered the lord’s affections and earned a place in his bed, the gates of Hilan might never have opened to her sisters.

Rathe caught Lady Nesaea’s eye. She smiled coyly, a striking figure, again the goddess of silver and snow he had seen on that distant night against the plainsmen. Like a true general, she cast her gaze back over her warriors, ensuring they were arrayed and ready. Nesaea had not spoken of her time behind that infernal barrier below Sanouk’s keep, but more than once she had screamed herself awake, then lay shuddering against him until sleep once more stole over her.

Thinking of sharing her bed furrowed his brow. She was a fine, strong woman, to be sure, but he suspected that his life—the uncertainty that awaited him—was not for such as her. He would have to broach that topic at some point, but a few more days delay would not hurt anything.

“I don’t think anyone from Hilan is here,” Loro stated, scratching himself, then taking a swallow from a wineskin. He wore as many scabs and bruises as Rathe, earned by fighting his way through the forest back to Hilan along with Erryn, Breyon, and the other prisoners taken from Valdar.

“They wanted to go to Valdar,” Loro had explained, “but I told them Hilan was the riper plum—and the first that should fall, if they had any hope of taking back their homes. It took little enough to convince Erryn that I needed to pull you out of the fire.”

Afterward, Loro had come across the Maidens of the Lyre, and learned of their plan to attack Hilan in order to rescue Nesaea. He promptly aligned himself with the woman Nesaea had freed after being taken captive. Fira was her name, a beautiful if stern woman who had since taken Loro into her wagon, and into her bed.

From what Rathe gathered, during the confusion of the plainsman attack north of Onareth, Treon had ordered Fira, Nesaea, and Carnala taken captive. No one knew if Sanouk had commanded Treon to specifically target the Maidens of the Lyre, or if their capture had merely been coincidental. By design or not, it had proven to be a grave error, for the full fury of the Maidens of the Lyre had fallen upon Sanouk and his fortress.

“Sanouk’s men may not be here,” Rathe said to Loro, “but do not forget their tracks. If they are not here now, they were at some point.”

On the dawn after the battle at Hilan, once Nesaea and the others who served as Sanouk’s sacrifices had been tended, along with those wounded during the battle, Rathe had trailed Sanouk’s devoted soldiers far enough to know that they had made for Valdar. It had been in his mind to pursue straight away, but there had not been enough able-bodied soldiers to form even a small company. Moreover, his own strength had been so limited that tracking Sanouk’s men a few miles had left him feverish and weak. Faced with that, and knowing that Mitros and his bandits were entrenched at Valdar, Rathe had reluctantly decided that attacking the village would have been a fool’s errand.

Near on a week had passed before he had enough hale soldiers and Maidens of the Lyre to set out. Another week had been squandered traveling the unforgiving mountain road to Valdar. His instinct, though he loathed to accept it, was that after coming to Valdar, Sanouk’s men had refitted and turned south for Onareth and the lord’s brother, King Nabar. As such, Rathe knew he must soon get as far from the Kingdom of Cerrikoth as possible. King Nabar’s affections for his brother might have been weak, but not so weak as to allow what would doubtless be spoken of as Sanouk’s murder.

Rathe sighed heavily, finally accepting what he had avoided thinking on over the last few days. “I accept your advice.”

Loro cocked a scabbed eyebrow at him, then poured more wine down his throat. “What advice is that, brother?”

“That we live the life of bandits, mercenaries, and gods know what else, in order to earn coin enough to feed ourselves.”

“I will miss Fira,” Loro said without batting an eye. “Truth be told, she’s a bit vulgar for my tastes.” His eyes went wide, oblivious to the irony. “Some of the things she does would make a slattern blush! By all the gods she—”

Rathe cut him off with a raised hand and a chuckle. Before he could tell Loro to keep such things to himself, Erryn strode through the gates, her motley retinue trialing behind with hard grins. In one hand, fingers curled around a few thin strands of hair, she bore Mitros’s head. Where the rest of him was, Rathe could only wonder.

“His days of raping and torturing are over,” Erryn announced when she drew closer, holding up the grisly trophy.