The Prince of Shadow (28 page)

Llesho rose awkwardly to his feet, knees and ankles protesting the hours spent in their strained position. Grabbing his knife from the altar of the goddess, he hobbled to the door of the shrine.

Fire glinted from the rooftops of the wooden houses of the compound closest to the road. A soldier wearing the neck chain and wrist guards of the governor's house guard ran by, stopping long enough to push him back from the open door with a hand to his chest. “Get back inside,” she ordered him. “We're under attack!”

“I can fight!” Llesho returned, and raised his knife to show that he was armed. An arrow whipped past his ear and he ducked as it embedded itself in the thick lintel.

“Find your squad, then,” she said, and ran to join the fray.

Llesho slipped out of the shrine, keeping low, his knife held lightly in his steady fist. This time he was not a child; he had both the skills and the strength to defend himself. But the guard had been right: he had to find his squad. Master Jaks had trained them to fight as a unit, and he felt naked without his friends at his side.

Crouching in the shadows of the reeds and low plant life that bordered the lawns and canals, he made his way back to the house he shared with the other novices. Before he could pull himself over the threshold, however, a voice he dreaded sounded nearby.

“Search everywhere—I want the Thebin!” Overseer Markko's insistent shout came from a more solid mass of shadow just steps away, silhouetted by the rising flames. “He's here somewhere!”

Llesho froze, paralyzed by that voice. Master Markko had gone to Lord Yueh at the death of Lord Chin-shi, but what had driven Yueh's army to attack the governor's compound? Why was Master Markko looking for him? To kill him outright, or to throw him into chains again? What did the overseer, or his new lord, know or suspect about Llesho's true identity that they would seek him out in the midst of battle?

Llesho had no time to ponder the answers to his questions; the sounds of fighting were getting closer. Suddenly, a hand snaked out of the window of his house, grabbed him by the arm, and pulled him into the large room. Bixei. Lling and Hmishi stood back to back in the center of the room with their knives drawn. Kaydu was missing.

“Where have you been?” Bixei hissed.

“The shrine in the garden,” Llesho hissed back. “Where did you think I was? Opening the gates for Lord Yueh?”

Bixei didn't have to say anything; it was clear on his face that the accusation shocked and offended him. “What, then?” he asked.

They looked at each other, and it was clear they each had unanswered questions. Lord Yueh's armed guard wouldn't be tearing the governor's compound apart to find a common slave, but they had all heard Master Markko order his troops to look for Llesho.

“Who are you?” Bixei pushed for an explanation in spite of the danger they were in, “What does Markko want?”

Llesho uttered a single Thebin curse. He didn't want to know what kind of rumors had spread. “We can talk about this later.” If there was no later, explanations wouldn't matter anyway. “If you want to live, we are going to have to fight or run
now
.”

The attack had come through the main gate, the only way in or out that Llesho knew. “Where is Kaydu?”

Little Brother chose that moment to swing from the roof by his tail and pop through the open window with a chittering rebuke for their tardiness. Their young instructor followed him. “I'm right here. Let's go. Jaks has horses waiting.” She disappeared again.

Llesho ran for the window and would have been first out, but Bixei held him back. “In case of ambush,” he said, and darted out the window after Kaydu. Llesho followed, and turned around as Lling, and then Hmishi spilled out of the novice house. Kaydu said nothing, but gestured for them to keep low as they crept along the side of the house, hidden by the reeds and bushes.

Kaydu moved so silently that Llesho was surprised to hear the clatter of heavier feet when Bixei followed her over the footbridge. He tried to imitate Kaydu's silence with no success, but had to turn around to be certain Lling was still behind him. She was, and Hmishi next to her. Hmishi stumbled and came up again with a sword in his hand. Already a battle had passed through here, leaving its scattered dead and their weapons behind. Lling hunted around until she, too, had a sword in her right hand, switching her knife to her left. Bixei gathered up a spear, and a short sword which he wedged into his belt.

Llesho remembered his own knife in his hand, and realized—damn!—he'd left his scabbard by his bed, along with the few possessions he had acquired while at the governor's compound. Once again, he was starting out with nothing. But he was starting out alive. Llesho scrounged among the dead as well, and found a short spear that he took up in his free hand. He had begun to think that they would make their way clear when a sound to his right was followed by the flare of torches.

The oiled parchment screens of a small house burst into flame. A shout rose from the fire, and shadows formed around it, resolved in the light into men on foot. Yueh's men, dark against the fire that backlit them, had seen Llesho's squad. Soldiers ran toward them brandishing weapons. Bixei caught the first across the ribs with the staff end of his spear, turned the long weapon quickly and finished his man with a lunging stab to the breast.

Lling and Hmishi slid to either side of Llesho, swords poised high, knives pointed low. They joined the battle with a flurry of clashing swords, vanquishing their attackers, who fled with screams on their lips that they had been bested by demons. Llesho gave a grim laugh, but did not count his victory too soon. A horse loomed out of the darkness. Its tall rider urged the beast up on its hind legs to lash out at the Thebins with its sharp front hooves.

With an enraged howl, Hmishi leaped to the defense, driving his sword into the rider. The sword passed through the man, who tossed him aside and laughed with the sound of ice breaking in his voice. Master Markko—Llesho recognized him even in the dark—bled from no wound, though Hmishi's thrust should have sliced him in two.

“You are mine, Thebin!” The magician pointed a short spear at Llesho, and cold terror pierced his heart. Frozen, he could not have moved, except for the warmth radiating from the short spear he held in his own hand. He raised the weapon between them, and it seemed to glow in the light of the silver moon. “Never again, witch!” he shouted, and Markko's spear burned and shattered. The magician growled his wordless rage and brought his horse around to attack, but the animal bucked and fell, screaming, with the point of a spear buried in its flank.

“Move!” Bixei shouted, and Hmishi was pushing him, and Lling was pulling her knife out of the gullet of a soldier who stared up at the sky with blank, dead eyes.

Kaydu ghosted up to Llesho and whispered, “This way—Jaks has the horses.” They had entered the peach grove, the smell of the ripe fruit cloying over the sickening reek of blood and burning flesh and sweat and fear. Llesho followed the direction she pointed, moving deep into the darkest corner of the grove.

Around them, troops were mounting up, too many for Llesho to judge in the dark, but it felt as if the whole household must be saddling to fly. Shadowed by a thick growth of trees and hedges, Master Jaks awaited them with their mounts. Fortunately, their warhorses were intelligent and trained to battle; the creatures stirred restlessly at the smell of blood on the hands and clothes of Llesho's squad but did not balk when they gathered their reins and mounted. Llesho noticed with satisfaction that someone had strapped his cavalry-style short bow and a quiver of arrows to his saddle. The governor's lady had been as good as her word, and his squad could ride now, and shoot from the saddle as well as on foot. They might need to before this night was out.

Kaydu took the lead of their small party, finding their place at the center of a longer train of mounts and pack animals moving quietly in single file through the grove. Llesho allowed his horse to fall in step behind her, with his three companions following. When he saw where they were heading—toward a place of thicker shadows in the garden wall—he wondered if it were a trap.

“Master Jaks!” Llesho turned around in his saddle to throw a whisper into the black on black murk, but he received no answer. There had been no sixth horse waiting; Jaks was staying behind. Llesho smelled blood, and saw the face of his teacher on the dead corpse of his bodyguard, and he knew that Jaks would die if he did not come now. Unthinking, he communicated his distress to his horse, which quaked under him in fear of the night and its shadows, and the dark emotions of its rider. Llesho rested a calming hand on the horse's neck while his thoughts spun in turmoil. He knew right to the core of his being that the memory-vision was true. Time itself skittered out of control, the past and future colliding in the vision of Master Jaks, dead. The house guard could not hold the compound against the fires of the attackers, and Master Jaks would give his life to hold the attackers at bay for their escape.

“I'm not through with you yet,” he muttered to himself. Turning his mount out of the column, Llesho headed back toward the low fires that marked where graceful houses had dotted the watery space.

“Where are you going, boy?” An outrider caught his horse by the bridle and stopped him, staring hard into his face until it registered who Llesho was. “The midnight gate is the other way!” He turned his horse around to lead Llesho back the way he had come, but Llesho pulled back on his reins to bring his horse to a stop.

“Where is Master Jaks?” he said, using his best imitation of his father.

The outrider jerked his head in the direction of the burning compound but continued to urge Llesho's horse toward the bottom of the orchard.

Llesho dug in his heels and refused to be moved. “I am not leaving without him.” He kept his jaw firm and hoped the man couldn't see the shaking of his hands in the dark.

“The lady will have my head,” the outrider muttered, but he turned his horse. “He went this way—I'll take you.” They rode back, into the chaos and the fire, toward a tight knot of grunting bodies and clanging swords. The fighting was on foot and the outrider made quick work of it. He swept into the fray with a blood-curdling battle cry, cutting down one attacker and sweeping another under the hooves of his charger. Then he angled his horse between Master Jaks and the fires lighting a hundred battles like the one he had just fought.

The outrider slipped from his horse and held out the reins. “His excellency wants that boy out of here, and the boy says he won't go without you.” With that he was gone, lost to sight in the fray.

Jaks lifted himself into the saddle, swearing softly under his breath. “Now, Your Highness?” he asked. The words dripped with sarcasm, but even so they served as a reminder to both of them.

Llesho tilted his chin at the exact angle to receive his title, letting Master Jaks know in the doing of it that he read all the levels of anger and submission in his words. If they were going to use him for their own secret agenda, however, they would have to accept him at his rank, and not as just another stone in their game. He would not go quietly to anybody's slaughter.

Master Jaks dropped his head. “I know,” he said, and Llesho thought that maybe he did, too.

Together they entered the shadows at the bottom of the peach grove, and passed through a hidden gate that opened to the country northwest of the city. Outriders galloped up and down the line now, and when the last of their party had come through the gate, the order to ride hard came with the slaps of the outriders on the rumps of the trailing horses. For a moment Llesho felt wrenched in time, a small boy again, and Jaks was wearing the bloody uniform of his dead bodyguard and the travel stained clothes of the long march.

But the horses stirred restlessly, reminding him that he was not alone, and not helpless. He had an army at his back. And, if they were fleeing by dead of night, at least they were running toward help, and not into greater danger. Llesho kicked his own horse to a faster gait and quickly found his squad again.

“We ride for Thousand Lakes Province,” Kaydu informed them, “Pray that we are not too late.”

 

 

Gradually, the outriders herded the refugees into a tighter, more defensible group plodding slowly toward the inner provinces. Llesho fretted anxiously about their pace. Once the decision to flee had been made and acted upon, he wanted to put as much distance as possible between their makeshift caravan and Lord Yueh's troops. But the outriders kept them at a pace that protected the mass of the household and the servants who had fled on foot. Gradually, however, fatigue ate away the desperate compulsion to run that coursed through his bloodstream.

Farshore lay on a sandy flat, but beyond the city limits, to the west, the foothills stretched north and south as far as the eye could see. Llesho felt the road angle upward into the hills and fell forward over the neck of his horse to balance himself into the ascent. His legs were sore from riding, and his horse was setting down its feet with the heavy indifference that spoke of exhaustion louder than any words of its human rider could do.

“How far to Thousand Lakes Province?” he asked Kaydu.

She shook her head, eyes grim, and curled one hand around Little Brother, who rode tucked close to his mistress' body, his arms clinging to the rise of her saddle. “Too far. More than five hundred li.”

Llesho looked around them at the shuffling horde pressing into a narrow line again on the mountain road. His nose wrinkled, assaulted by the moist warmth of animals and humans, fear mixed with the dust of the road in a pungent taunt at his sinuses. He remembered another long march, staggering through the night until strange arms swept him up, passed him on, as the road stretched in a neverending blur of light and dark, hunger and thirst. Out of memories he'd long tried to submerge, images arose of bodies dropping by the wayside, beaten into the dirt by the hooves of the Harnish horses. So powerful were the old feelings that Llesho braced his body for the staggering jolt of a horse stumbling over a human obstacle in its march.