The Heart of the Sands, Book 3 of The Gods Within (11 page)

They both tumbled over the far side of the horse. Morgin
hit hard, rolled, scrambled to his feet and turned to face the Kull. But the
halfman struggled to rise with Morgin’s knife buried in his
throat. Morgin gripped his sword in both hands, swung it in a flat arc and
half-severed the monster’s neck.

A dozen paces outside the perimeter two mounted Kulls had
a lone whiteface isolated. It was the fellow with the pike, whom Morgin had
spoken to, and they were trying to herd him away from the camp alive, harrying
him on both sides and driving him outward.

Morgin glanced at the Kull he’d just killed;
no time to retrieve the knife. With the halfman’s horse close at
hand, he grabbed the saddle horn, got a boot in a stirrup and leapt into its
saddle. He struggled for a moment to find the reins, then dug his heels into
the horse’s flanks and charged. Nothing fancy, he just charged
into the midst of the two Kulls and the whiteface. With surprise on his side,
he slashed out at one Kull, and felt his sword bite as his horse slammed
heavily into the other Kull’s mount.

Both riders and horses went down in a tangle of arms and
legs, screaming horses and kicking hooves. A hoof grazed past Morgin’s
face, almost taking off his head. Still on the ground, he rolled over once to
get out of the mess, tried to get to his hands and knees, but a Kull slammed
into him, and they rolled together on the ground. The Kull came out on top
straddling Morgin, raised a fighting knife over his head. Morgin’s
sword was too long for such infighting so he punched upward and hit the halfman
in nose with the sword’s hilt. Then two hand-spans of steel
blossomed from the Kull’s chest.

The halfman froze; the knife held high, his eyes locked on
the bloody steel protruding from his chest. A sword hissed and chopped through
the wrist holding the knife high, removing the hand with the knife. The Kull
lowered his arm, looked dumbly at the bloody stump of his wrist. Then his eyes
crossed and he slid slowly forward off the steel protruding from his chest. He
lay still on top of Morgin.

“Ahhh,” Morgin shouted and
pushed the dead Kull to one side. He sat up, the two whiteface sentries
standing over him.

The swordsman said, “I think it’s
the Elhiyne. Sounds like him, at least.”

The pikeman who had been so abusive looked at Morgin now,
his eyes narrow and hard. “Does sound like him, but sure don’t
look like him.”

Morgin didn’t understand their banter for a
moment, then he realized he was still wrapped in shadow, and with that, his
heart leapt as he also realized his magic had returned. He quickly extinguished
the shadows.

“Yup, it is the Elhiyne,” the
pikeman said, and Morgin braced himself for a kick, or some other abuse. But
the pikeman merely looked at him for a long moment, his eyes still narrow and
hard. Then he nodded, leaned forward and extended a hand to Morgin. “You
fought well, Elhiyne.”

Morgin took the hand cautiously, and as the pikeman lifted
him to his feet the swordsman said, “Almost as good as a
whiteface.”

The Benesh’ere used the term
whiteface
casually among themselves, but an outsider
would be wise to be very cautious doing so, for they might easily take the term
as an insult. “Nah,” the pikeman said. “He
didn’t fight that good.”

~~~

The Benesh’ere took a couple hours to lick
their wounds. As information passed up and down the column, Morgin learned that
their perimeter had been the hardest hit.

“Them Kulls usually do it that way,”
the swordsman said as he checked a cut on Morgin’s shoulder. “Throw
a half-dozen feints with just a few halfmen testing several perimeters. That
way Jerst don’t know right away where to send help. He keeps a
squad of six twelves of armed and mounted warriors in the middle of the column
just for that.”

The pikeman’s name was Fantose, and the
swordsman Delaga. The swordsman said, “This cut ain’t
too deep, but we’d better treat it so it don’t
fester.” He reached into his pack and pulled out a small clay pot.
He pulled the stopper on it, stuck his finger in it and retrieved a lump of
brownish grease that smelled so bad it made Morgin’s eyes water. When
he rubbed it into the cut, Morgin’s shoulder lit up with fire.

“Ow! That burns like netherhell.”

Delaga grinned. “That means it’s
working.”

Fantose approached them carrying some sort of dark, cloth
bundle and leading one of the Kull horses. “You shouldn’t
let him put that crap on you.”

Delaga turned on him. “But it works good.”

“I know it works good,” Fantose
conceded as he tossed the cloth bundle to Morgin. “But he’s
going to smell like you now.”

Morgin shook the bundle out to find that he held three
Kull cloaks. “What are these for?” he asked. “I’m
not going to wear them.”

Fantose shook his head. “Of course you aren’t.
They’re your kills, so your cloaks. We cut off the hood and keep
it as a trophy.”

Morgin had heard a little about that practice among the
whitefaces. “But I didn’t kill all three of them.”

Fantose shrugged. “No, but you killed the
first one, and if you hadn’t taken his horse and plowed into the
other two, they’d be stringing me guts up in a tree now. No, you
get the kills.”

The sound of a horse’s hooves on the hard
prairie dirt drew their attention. Blesset, riding one of the desert ponies at
an easy trot, reined it in a few paces from Morgin. She held a naked sword in
one hand, the reins in the other. Looking at the bundle Morgin held, she asked
coldly, “What goes here?”

Fantose said, “They’re his
kills.”

Delaga said, “They’re his
cloaks.”

Jerst, his horse moving at an easy trot, brought his mount
to a halt behind Blesset and sat astride it silently watching.

Blesset’s face could have been cut from stone
for all the expression it held. She reached out with her sword and rested the
tip in the middle of the pile of cloaks in Morgin’s arms. Then she
pressed down with it, not a slash or a stab or any real kind of sword stroke. She
merely pressed down, harder, and harder, and harder, until Morgin was forced to
let the cloaks drop to the ground.

“He earned them cloaks,” Fantose
said.

She shook her head and smiled. “He earned
nothing.” She gently nudged her horse around, spurred it lightly
and rode away into the mist.

Jerst merely sat astride his horse looking on. He looked
down at the cloaks at Morgin’s feet, his eyes hard and narrow,
then into Morgin’s face. Then he calmly reined his horse about,
nudged its flanks with his heels and rode away.

~~~

Casualties among the Benesh’ere had been
light, so they were back on the March well before mid-morning. Fantose gave
Morgin one of the Kull horses, with the explanation that, “You
ride better’n me. Stay armed, stay close, walk ’er
along the edge of the column and be ready to mount up in a wink.”

Apparently, they gave Morgin credit for the light
casualties; any advanced warning made an enormous difference. It gave everyone
the instant needed to be awake, alert and armed before the Kulls hit.

“You smell ’em or something?”
Delaga asked, marching beside Morgin.

Morgin, leading the Kull horse by its reins, shook his
head. “No. I don’t know what it is. I just woke up
scared, and knew something was wrong.”

Delaga thought that over for a moment. “Wish
I could smell Kulls like you.”

Fantose added, “We’d all have a
better chance of smelling Kulls if we didn’t have to smell you.”

Morgin knew better than to argue the point.

Near mid-morning, they heard the clash of steel and cries
of anger and pain somewhere down the column, all of it hidden by the thin mist.
The March halted, and up and down the line warriors stepped a few paces out of
the column and took up defensive positions. Morgin jumped into the saddle and
drew his sword. He saw other riders nudge their horses to a position about
twenty paces outside the line of warriors so he did the same. “Don’t
let them draw you out,” Fantose shouted. “They want
you to follow them. Then they’ll surround you and take you alive. Then
they get to have fun with you.”

Morgin waited, trying to keep the tension out of his
shoulders and sword arm. The mist had thinned further and he saw a little
deeper into it. The plain appeared flat and featureless, when in fact it was
fractured by gullies and washes. The Kulls used such features along with the
mist to spring traps on the column. It was great sport for them, and they’d
done it now for centuries.

When the excitement died Morgin saw the other Benesh’ere
horsemen dismount and begin leading their horses again. He did likewise, and
took up the March beside Fantose and Delaga.

One of Jerst’s patrol twelves trotted past. They
rode abreast, twelve warriors side-by-side, spaced about thirty to fifty paces
apart. Any one man might be hidden within the mist, but he could see three or
four of his comrades to either side. In that way they patrolled a swath several
hundred paces wide on either side of the column.

Morgin asked Fantose and Delaga, “Why do you
do this every year? Over and over. We’re just targets out here.”

Fantose considered that for a moment. “The
March? We wait as long as we can. The mist thins a bit every day as we approach
summer. Early spring it’s so thick you can’t see your
hand in front of your face. We’d be dead meat fer them Kulls. So
we wait until the heat of the sands is unbearable. We wait, and then we come
in, hoping the mist ain’t thicker than normal.”

Morgin asked, “Is this normal?”

Delaga shrugged. “Pretty much average.”

“Then why go back out? Why not just stay at
the Lake of Sorrows.”

Both of the whitefaces looked aghast, and both said at the
same time, “It gets bloody cold.”

Fantose shook with feigned shivering, and they both spoke
what was apparently a common joke, “Wouldn’t be able
to get me manhood up when I needed it.”

They considered that quite funny, laughed raucously and
slapped each other on the back a few times. But when Delaga saw that Morgin was
serious, he sobered quickly and said, “When you ask that question,
that tells us you don’t know the heart of the Benesh’ere.”

Chapter 9: A Feast for Flies

Cort and Tulellcoe followed what might have been Morgin’s
escape route. Like the farmers and their
thieves
,
they discovered only small pieces of information here and there that could have
been Morgin trying to escape going south. Then again, the obscure bits they
uncovered might have nothing to do with Morgin at all. Someone stole an old
mare at one farm, picked through a bin of cattle feed at another. It might have
been Morgin, then again it might simply have been petty thieves.

Then, about four days south of Durin, while crossing an
open field bordered by trees and hedgerows, Tulellcoe suddenly cried out. He
reined his horse in sharply, dismounted and desperately tore open his tunic. He
lifted the leather thong with the charms from around his neck and held it out
at arm’s length. On the end of it, tendrils of smoke drifted
upward from the two charms they’d keyed to their memories of
Morgin and Rhianne.

Cort dismounted and approached Tulellcoe. She leaned close
to the charms and saw that they were burning their way through the leather
thong. “Something happened here,” she said. She
looked about them and scanned the edges of the field. “Something
happened in this field to both of them, something that generated very strong
emotions. Can you tell more?”

Tulellcoe waited until the two charms had cooled enough to
hold in the palm of his hand, then he cupped that for Rhianne in his left and
that for Morgin in his right. He closed his eyes and stood that way for an
interminable number of heartbeats. Then he opened his eyes, turned and began
walking toward the edge of the field. Cort followed him, leading the two horses
as he zigzagged back and forth, searching. Slowly he worked his way to the edge
of the field and there stepped into a copse of trees. He walked about a hundred
paces into the trees and stopped, looking about. He closed his eyes again and
waited. Then he took a long, deep breath and let it out in a slow sigh. “Something
happened to both of them, but not together. Something first to Morgin, and then
to Rhianne, and the time between was not long, perhaps no more than a small
portion of a day.”

Cort asked, “You can tell no more than that?”

“No, nothing.”

Tulellcoe replaced the thong around his neck. Then they
mounted up and headed south. Two days later they came to the Ulbb, where they
dismounted and stood on the north bank of the river looking out over the
Munjarro.

Cort marveled at the oven of sand, yellowish dunes that
extended to the horizon. Even here, on the edge of the waste, the heat rose off
the sand in waves, making it an effort just to breathe. She watched blurry
lines of heat play across the sand, and she wondered out loud, “You
know, even in winter, out on the sands at midday the heat is oppressive.”

Standing beside her, Tulellcoe said, “It
cools at night, doesn’t it?”

“In winter, yes. In winter it begins to cool
even in late afternoon, and the night can carry a decided chill. But during the
summer it’s oppressive day and night.”

Tulellcoe didn’t respond to that. They were
both thinking the same thing, and it had nothing to do with the heat of the
sands. But it had to be him who voiced the thought.

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing
now for two days’ ride. No sign, no evidence, not even rumors. Nothing
since that field where the charms reacted.”

He stood statue-still staring out over the Munjarro for
the longest time. Then he said, “They both died back there in that
copse of trees, didn’t they? The rumors were true.”

~~~

Morgin had come to realize that only his shadowmagic had
returned, and it really didn’t bother him all that much that the
rest hadn’t come back as well. He’d never been very
good at most of it anyway, was plain terrible at complex spell-castings. But he
had his shadows, and he could feel his power.

“Raw power,” Olivia had chided
him on more than one occasion. “That’s all you have.”

And it was then that AnnaRail would remind her, “Don’t
forget the shadowmagic, mother.”

And Olivia would concede that point.

So shadowmagic must be intricate and refined, Morgin
decided, like complex spell-castings—not crude and raw, like
Morgin’s simple, but rather intense, control of power. Power and
shadows, with those two aspects he could do quite a lot.

Throughout that day, as one skirmish after another erupted
in the column, always hidden somewhere in the mist, Morgin pondered that. Whenever
they heard the noise of a Kull attack somewhere on the line, he jumped into the
saddle, took his position, held his ground, didn’t ponder anything
during those moments other than keeping himself alive. Though during one such
moment, sitting astride the Kull horse, staring out into the mist and waiting
for a Kull to come charging out of it, he glanced over his shoulder at the
Benesh’ere column, and he thought maybe he wanted to keep them
alive as well, these strange whitefaced people he’d come to like.

Delaga and Fantose tried to teach him the sharp whistled
warnings they used. Morgin could whistle, but with nothing close to the volume
the sentries needed. “Some can do it,” Delaga said, “some
can’t. Just shout at me and Fantose and we’ll do the
whistling for you.”

The two men kept up a constant banter about Delaga and his
smell as they trudged along. Morgin enjoyed listening to them, and was
chuckling at one of Fantose’s remarks when the fear hit him.

He turned to the two whitefaces and shouted, “Shut
up—Kulls—now—in force—here—us—”

He didn’t wait to hear their response but
leapt into the saddle. He drew his sword and slapped the horse’s
flank with the flat of the blade, took it out to the required twenty paces from
the column. He heard the two whitefaces issuing those sharp, piercing whistles,
heard them relayed through the column, but he was alone when the Kulls came out
of the mist.

It was strange that his foreknowledge of a Kull attack
allowed him to be out there a few heartbeats ahead of everyone else, strange
that such a gift meant he now faced a full twelve of Kulls, faced them alone. He’d
be a fool to just stand his ground and let them plow into him, so he wrapped a
shadow about him and his horse, dug his heels into the horse’s
flanks and charged insanely at the twelve Kulls charging him.

He screamed as he charged, an angry cry of fear. An
instant before he slammed into the lead Kull an arrow hissed past his ear. It
came so close it actually cut his earlobe, and he wanted to shout back at the
maniacs behind to hold their fire, for he was out here, among the targets, an
ally. And then the arrow punched into the right eye of the lead Kull. The
halfman was dead an instant before Morgin and his horse slammed into them, and
the Kull’s raised saber was just one more obstacle he need not
worry about.

They slammed together, a dead halfman and Morgin and their
mounts. A good half-twelve of them went down in that instant, a repeat of the
scene where Morgin had crashed into the two Kulls harrying Fantose. But this
time the carnage was beyond imagining, a shrieking chaos of snapping limbs and
twisted bodies.

Morgin tumbled into it, thinking that, like so many times
before, now he would die. But he bounced once on the ground in a good shoulder
roll, just as a massive horse tumbled over him, missing him by a hair’s
breadth. An arrow sliced under his left armpit, punching into the Kull in front
of him. Another arrow sliced his right shoulder as it barely missed him and
buried its barbed warhead into the breast of a Kull horse. Arrows right, left,
up, down—one actually between his legs—slammed into
every half-living thing near him.

The sword jerked and bucked in his hand, actually dragged
him deeper into the fight. A mounted halfman loomed over him, and for just an
instant Morgin saw his face clearly, split by a hateful grin as he thrust down
at Morgin. But the sword deflected the thrust with ease and sliced out, killing
both halfman and horse.

Another Kull thrust his saber at Morgin’s
head; he ducked and rolled to avoid it, came up next to a Kull mount without a
rider. He climbed into the saddle, deflected a sword thrust aimed at his neck,
couldn’t find the horse’s reins but dug his heels
into its flanks anyway. And with its own will for survival it carried him out
of the melee, carried him away from the fight, carried him into the mist.

He fumbled for the panicked animal’s reins,
got it under control and brought it to a stop. He turned about carefully; saw
only mist in every direction, heard the fighting and screams of battle. But in
the dim haze that surrounded him, the cries and clash of weapons seemed to come
from every direction at once. The fight and the Benesh’ere column
might be anywhere. Sitting there astride the Kull horse, breathing heavily and
sucking air into his lungs in fitful gasps, he realized he was lost.

The fighting was within sight of the column, so it would
be closer to his comrades than him. He pulled the horse about, tried to get
some sense of direction from the sounds of the battle, then nudged the horse in
the direction he thought might be right. His world narrowed to a mist-shrouded
circle about a hundred paces wide, and he quickly realized he’d
picked the wrong direction.

The column was heading west, and he’d been
defending its north side, so if he headed south he should encounter some
segment of the March. The sun was low on the horizon, dusk approaching quickly,
so it was easy to pick that direction. But after some time he finally admitted
he’d become hopelessly lost. And with the coming of night the mist
thickened, so Morgin found a deep ravine, dismounted and led the horse down
into it.

The Kull mount had been minimally provisioned. He had a
blanket tied to the back of the saddle, a few bits of journeycake and jerky,
but not much else. He ate what was there, tied the horse’s reins
about his wrist, wrapped the blanket around him, wrapped a shadow about him and
the horse, and lay down in the ravine to pass the night.

~~~

Morgin slept poorly, was awake well before dawn and
watched the mist thin as the sun rose. The strain of maintaining the shadows
throughout the night took its toll, adding to his weariness.

He’d been well forward in the column during
the March, so he’d probably gotten ahead of them. He turned west,
let the horse walk to conserve its strength and figured he’d meet
the whitefaces at the edge of the plains.

Sounds didn’t carry far in the mist, but as
he travelled he listened carefully for any noise that might signal danger, and
he scanned constantly from right to left. He quickly discovered the ravines and
gullies of the plain were frequently not visible until he was upon them, a
trick of the mist. And while in the column they were never deep enough to
require a detour, that was not the case now; the Benesh’ere probably
followed a well-known path centuries old.

He came upon a deep ravine so suddenly he almost let his
horse stumble into it. It spluttered angrily as he pulled on its reins, and the
two mounted Kulls at the bottom of the ravine looked up at him. They were as
surprised as he to find one another. But they reacted quickly, drew their
sabers and spurred their mounts, one slanting to the right and the other to the
left, both charging up the slope hoping to trap him between them.

The ravine angled away from him to the left, so he yanked
the horse’s reins that way and dug his heels in. He wasn’t
too proud to run, drove the animal over level ground at the edge of the ravine.
The Kull’s animals wasted precious moments struggling in the loose
gravel up the side of the ravine, and he got far enough away to hide in the
mist. But staying with the gully gave the Kulls an easy trail to follow, so he
turned the horse into the ravine and plunged down its side, then back up the
other side. He rode away from the ravine at a random angle; when he didn’t
hear pursuit he slowed the horse’s pace to a canter, rode that way
for a few hundred paces, then slowed it to a trot, then finally a walk.

He’d been lucky.

The next time he encountered a Kull his luck didn’t
hold. He was at the bottom of a ravine crossing it, the Kull at the top about
fifty paces down the ravine. Running wasn’t an option as the Kull
charged down toward him. He drew his sword, called upon his shadowmagic and
charged at the Kull, met him just as he reached the flat bottom of the ravine. Just
coming off the soft soil of the ravine’s slopped edge, the Kull
and his horse were a little off balance as Morgin hit them. He thrust and
struck true, but the Kull cut his thigh in passing. Morgin glanced over his
shoulder and saw the Kull fall from his saddle. He charged up the slope of the
ravine and disappeared into the mist.

The day turned into a sequence of such encounters. And as
it wore on, and he and the horse tired, he no longer had the option of running
to avoid a fight. Luckily, only once more did he encounter more than one Kull
at a time; his shadowmagic saved him more than his fighting skills. But for
each encounter, he paid a price of fatigue, for him and the horse; and a price
of blood, as he slowly accumulated an abundance of cuts and minor wounds.

The mist thinned as he rode west, slowly crossing the
width of the plains. When night descended he decided not to stop, reasoning
that the Kulls would group and light campfires. He should see the glow from
such fires in the mist long before encountering them. That worked rather well. Twice
he spotted a cluster of campfires, and detoured around them carefully. In the
wee hours of the morning, well before sunup, the horse could barely walk and he
could barely stay in the saddle. So he sought out a deep ravine, dismounted and
guided the horse into it, tied the reins to his wrist and wrapped the blanket
about his shoulders. If he slept without the shadows he’d awake
more rested, but then he might not wake at all if some Kulls found him asleep. He
wrapped a shadow about him and the horse and sat down to rest.