Sir Remmik leaped to his feet. Disbelief and anger warred for his self-control. Resisting the impulse to leap on the Tarmak and strangle him, the Knight turned his back on the Akkad-Ur and crossed his arms, the figure of adamant. “I will not betray an innocent people.”
The Tarmak sighed. “I am not asking you to betray them. I am asking you to tell them the truth, that we are coming and that we will destroy their homes and villages if they do not surrender to us. You know we can do it. You know we will do it. If you can persuade them to surrender, you will be saving many lives.”
“You would have to let me go,” Sir Remmik said without turning around. “What makes you think I would obey your orders?”
The Akkad-Ur gave a dry laugh. “Someone else asked me how he could trust my word. Well, Sir Knight, I have learned enough about you to be confident that if you gave me your word that you would deliver my ultimatum to Duntollik. I could trust you to do so.” He drank some more of his kef re and went on. “I have messages for you to carry. I will give you horses and three of your Knights to accompany you, and I expect you to take them to the leaders of the people of Duntollik. What you do after that is up to you.”
“What about the rest of my men?” Sir Remmik demanded.
“They will stay with us. If you care to return with a reply, I will consider releasing all of you. There are hardly enough Knights left to pose a serious threat to my army.”
Remmik tried to hide a grimace at the reminder of his missing Knights. Slowly he turned to face the Akkad-Ur. His face was red under the sweat and the stubble of a gray beard. For a long, painful run of minutes he stared into the distance while his mind worked over the possible traps and pitfalls of such an offer. The Tarmak silently ate his meal and waited.
Finally Sir Remmik’s eyes focused on Crucible again. The dragon had not moved and still sat staring north in the direction of Sanction. The Knight’s brow lowered. Tight lines settled around his nose and mouth. “Sir, if I may ask, do you know where the militia is?”
“Most of them are headed for Duntollik,” the Akkad-Ur answered. His eyes bored into the Solamnic, but Sir Remmik did not flinch or even seem to notice.
“I see.” The Knight stood for another minute, his thin frame as unbending as an oak tree. At last he sighed a long breath of resignation. “I will go,” he said. “My only wish is to bring order to this troubled realm. On my word as a Solamnic Knight, I will deliver your message. I will not guarantee that they listen to it.”
“Agreed.”
The Akkad-Ur sent the proper orders to his subordinates and with pleased graciousness offered a seat and food to the Knight once again.
Once again Sir Remmik refused it. “If I may, I will wait with my men for your horses and your messages.” At the Akkad-Ur’s dismissive wave, he started to leave, but his steps were slow as if he fought an internal debate that dragged at his intentions. He stopped in a decisive movement that set the Tarmak guards’ hands to their weapons.
Ah, thought the Akkad-Ur, the bait has finally been taken.
“If I may ask,” Sir Remmik said slowly, “were your people involved in the ambush of our Knights the night of the storm before your invasion?”
“We sent a small party of warriors who volunteered to enter the city early, yes. And yes, they were the ones who killed the honor guard.”
There was a pause, then the Knight went on. “Did you have inside information? An informant?”
“Of course. We could not have taken the city so easily without someone on the inside. She’s been feeding us information for over a year. Even now she is on her way to gather more valuable information on Duntollik.”
Sir Remmik’s lean face paled and he looked truly pained. “And the Wadi?”
The Akkad-Ur laughed a rough, patronizing sound of derision. “Why do you think only the Solamnic Knights were captured and everyone else was slain?”
The Knight Commander obviously reached his own conclusion, for he stepped back, storm clouds building behind his gray eyes. He forced a slight bow and turned on his heel. The guards hurried to catch up with him.
The Akkad-Ur watched him go, satisfied with the interview. His informant thought the Knight would certainly lead their trackers to this woman and possibly bring her back as a hostage to save the other Knights. But after looking into Sir Remmik’s eyes and seeing the red rage within, he felt sure the Knight would not hesitate to impose his own Solamnic justice. He had better warn the warriors sent to trail the Knights to be on the alert.
18
Dreams and Arrows
Linsha. A voice whispered her name over the rustle of the flowing river. She did not hear the voice as much as feel it caress her mind.
Startled, she sat up straighter, for the voice sounded familiar. Her eyes scanned the riverbank to her left and right, but she saw no one in the heavy gloom. This was a night of a dark moon, a night of dense shadows and velvet darkness. The only light came from overhead where the stars glittered in brilliant clusters, freed from the moon that often stole their fragile light. Around her insects hummed in the grass and on the river, a mist was rising from the water, pale and ethereal, reflecting the distant starlight.
Linsha. Wake up, my lovely.
Linsha’s heart skipped a beat and tripped forward in a rapid pulse. Her breath caught in her throat.
A pale figure stood in the middle of the river perhaps ten feet away. It had no solid form. It looked to her like an outline of a person drawn with silver ink. The mist swirled about its feet and rolled upward, defining its limbs and filling out its shape with a spectral glow as pale as starlight. The last to appear was his face, as handsome as she remembered. She fancied she caught the faintest hint of blue in his eyes.
Linsha pitched a rock at him. “For the gods’ sake, am I dreaming you again?”
He watched the rock sail through the area of his chest and shook his head. 7s that any way to treat an old friend?
“What do you want now, Ian?” she demanded. “You’re supposed to be dead. Why do you keep coming back? What enigmatic warning are you going to give me this time?”
He laughed, that same roguish rumble of good humor she remembered from Sanction. It seemed another lifetime ago she had loved him-or thought she had.
He held out his arms to her. Come kiss me, Green Eyes.
“Drop dead, Ian.”
Thanks to you, my lovely, I already have.
“Right. So what do you want now? Still want to warn me about some nameless rogue?
You are in a had mood. Even in your sleep. Anything to do with that dragon of yours?
Linsha leaned forward, another rock in her hand. “He’s not my dragon,” she snapped.
So you say. He grinned again. I don’t have to tell you to be wary. You already know. Listen to your heart. No, I just came to tell you to wake up. Wake up, Green Eyes. There is trouble coming.
“Wake up!” A real voice, a human voice spoke in her ear. “Linsha, wake up.”
Linsha nearly leaped vertically off the rock she was sitting on. She turned huge eyes to the speaker, snatched his padded jacket, and yanked him closer. “Don’t you ever sneak up on me like that again!”
Sir Hugh calmly put a hand on her wrist and pushed her away. He moved quietly and sat down beside her on the rock.
“Sorry. You were mumbling something. I thought you were dreaming.”
She turned back to look at the river, but the spectral form was no longer there, only the mist that flowed in currents above the water. Had she been dreaming? She didn’t think she’d been asleep. She knew how to sleep sitting up or even standing up when necessary-every active Knight learned that trick, but she’d never fallen asleep on guard duty before. Of course she was still bone-weary from days of work and worry and travel. Perhaps Ian had been only a dream. Yet… she had felt his presence so intensely, just as she had in Sanction those years ago.
“Did you see something on the river when you came?” she asked softly.
He loo
ked at the mist and the shadows and said, “Like what?”
“Nothing. I suppose I was dreaming.” She was not about to explain Ian Durne to Sir Hugh. The young Knight still believed in her. She was not going to shatter that illusion by telling him about her love affair with an assassin from the Knights of Neraka.
But if she had been asleep then, she was very awake now. Awake and vividly aware of the night. She sat up straighter, her senses reaching out around her. Something did not feel right. What had Ian said? Trouble is coming.
Brush rustled somewhere to her left. Gravel crunched softly under a heavy foot. Linsha reacted instinctively. She lunged against Sir Hugh, shoving him off the rock onto the ground. She landed heavily beside him just as a crossbow bolt cracked into the rock where they had been sitting.
Both Knights shouted a warning to the sleeping camp.
The effect was immediate. Another sentry blew a horn. The sleepers in the camp, trained by months of danger, slept fully clothed with their weapons close at hand. The shouts brought them instantly awake and on their feet just as a mob of dark figures charged the camp. Voices rang out in war cries and challenges. Swords clashed in the dark.
More crossbow bolts slammed into the rocks around Linsha and Hugh, then three dark forms barged out of the brush and dashed toward them, swords and bucklers raised for an attack.
“Damn! They’re carrying scimitars!” said Sir Hugh, who only had a light long sword and a padded jacket.
Linsha, who had managed to scrounge a heavy rapier and a brass — hilted poniard before she left Sinking Wells, wasn’t any happier. “Damn,” she muttered. “They’re draconians.”
They leaped to their feet and stood back to back. There was no time to retreat up to the camp or make an offensive move. The draconians were on them in a blink of an eye, screeching and smashing in for a quick kill.
In the dark Linsha could not easily identify what type of draconian they were. They were not skilled fighters. That much was clear, for they got in each other’s way and used their curved scimitars to hack and beat down their opponents. They’d probably stolen the blades and their armor, too. Thankfully two of them were short for draconians, which meant they were probably baaz, the warped, evil perversions of brass dragon eggs. The other was taller and heavier. A bozak perhaps.
“If you kill one, pull your weapon out fast!” she cried to Sir Hugh.
He managed a grunt in reply and fended off another wild swing at his head from the bozak.
The draconians jeered at them and pressed harder. Their scimitars slammed into Linsha’s blades until both her arms ached and quivered from the force of the blows. Her left arm, wounded in the melee with the Tarmaks, flared with pain every time she used the poniard to stop a swing.
Fortunately her rapier was a well-built weapon, strong enough to survive the blow of a scimitar, balanced for speed and slashing cuts, and not too heavy for good point work. Linsha often preferred a good rapier and had trained with one for years. Using all of her skill she forced one opponent to back away and, ducking under another wild blow, she slipped by his arm and rammed the point of her blade into the draconian’s chain mail vest. The sharp point burst through the chain links, slid between his ribs, and pierced the heart.
She yanked the blade out of the body as it toppled over, but she had no time to watch what happened to it. The remaining two draconians pressed their attack harder, and in the dark it was difficult to see, to watch the enemy’s face and muscles and look for the subtle clues that often gave away his next move.
Behind her she heard Sir Hugh gasping as he swung his long sword at the bigger draconian. He sounded tired, and she knew she was wearing down fast. At least they were fighting only two draconians now. She parried a wild thrust and jabbed with her poniard at the creature’s midsection. It snarled and deflected the blow with its buckler.
All at once it paused, its long nose sniffing the air. “You!” The baaz hissed. “You are the one! The woman with the bounty. Vorth! This is the one the Brutes seek!”
The second and larger draconian hissed in glee. Giving his large wings a powerful flap, he leaped up and came crashing down to smash Sir Hugh into the rocky riverbank. Linsha could not look. She had her hands too full to help. The first draconian, seeing steel coins in his mind, switched from trying to kill her to trying to disable her. Her came at her using his buckler like a ram to push past her blades and shove her backwards. She tried to get a point under his guard, but his larger size and weight bore her back. She banged into Sir Hugh behind her, twisted to get out of his way, and tripped over something hard in the dark. Her foot caught on the thing and she fell over it, landing on her right arm and side. Pain ripped up her ankle and through her back. Her elbow hit a rock so hard her entire arm went numb, and her sword fell out of her nerveless fingers. By sheer force of will she kept a grip on the poniard and made her body relax over the uneven lump she realized was the first dead baaz. It was a terrible gamble, but she hoped greed would overcome bloodlust in her attacker.
The draconian hooted with derision. Lurching over her, he grabbed her hair and yanked her head up to see if she was still alive.
As fast as a Tarmak, Linsha pulled back her good arm and rammed the poniard through the joints of the old armor into the draconian’s gut. Hot blood spilled over her hand. The creature screeched and tried to pull away, but the point of the long dagger slid up through a lung and hit an artery. In moments, the baaz’s heart failed.
Although Linsha tried to pull the weapon out of the dying creature, she wasn’t fast enough. It toppled over her, ripping the handle out of her hand, died, and, like every one of its kind, its body promptly turned to stone. Linsha’s weapon became trapped in a petrified statue.
Pinned between the two dead draconians, Linsha struggled to free herself, then fell back panting for air and feeling nauseous from the pain. The stone body that held her down was too heavy for her to move alone. She either needed help or an hour’s worth of patience to wait until the draconians’ bodies crumbled to dust. Frantic for Hugh, she squirmed around to see him. What if he was dead already? But when she finally worked her upper body into a place where she could catch sight of him, she paused, taken with surprise.
Hugh had fought off the bozak’s air attack and had disarmed him. He had lost his own sword as well, and as Linsha watched, the two opponents went after each other with tooth and bare fist. Bozaks were known to be dirty fighters, but she was astonished to see Sir Hugh fought dirty as well-with head, teeth, elbows, fists, knees, and feet. He used moves the trainers never taught Solamnic Knights. Kicking and punching, he slowly drove the draconian away from Linsha and away from the fallen swords.
The bozak looked wildly over his shoulder for help, but there was none. The riverbank was black around them and apparently empty.
In that second of inattention, Sir Hugh slipped a foot under the scimitar, kicked it upward, and caught the grip with his hand. He brought it around in a vicious arc that took the draconian’s head off at the shoulders. The head bounced once and rolled to the water’s edge.
“Get down, Hugh!” Linsha shouted.
The Knight dove for cover behind the rock just as the skin on the bozak began to crumble. Unlike the baaz which turned to stone and eventually disintegrated, dead bozaks swiftly deteriorated into skeletons which a minute later exploded in a hail of shrapnel and bone fragments. Linsha threw an arm over her face just as the dead draconian blew apart. Shards of bone whizzed over her head.
There was a polite smattering of applause from the top of the bank.
Linsha and Hugh looked up to see four figures standing on the bank watching them. Someone had built up the campfire, and it illuminated the watchers from behind in a yellow glow. All four held swords and one carried a loaded crossbow. Linsha sagged back with a groan. In all the rush of battle, she had forgotten about the camp.
“Well done, Sir Hugh!” Falaius called. “I see you have taken care of things down there. Is Linsha injured?”
Mariana sprang lightly down the bank, and with Linsha’s help from underneath and the aid of Sir Hugh’s strong arms, they lifted the heavy stone baaz off Linsha and heaved it aside.
With a grin Sir Hugh pulled Linsha to her feet. As she came upright, she tried to put her weight on both feet and was immediately reminded of her injured ankle. The damaged joint refused to hold her. She gasped and fell forward against Hugh’s chest. His arms automatically went around her, and they clasped each other close. She wondered briefly if she should pull away, then he looked into her eyes and in the same breath they started laughing in relief and in the pleasure of being alive.
Mariana studied them both for a minute in her cool, detached way and rubbed the sweat from her face. “Linsha, go soak your ankle in the cold water for a while until I can attend you. Sir Hugh, stay with her and try to wash some of the blood off so I can see to your injuries.”
“What of the others?” Linsha asked.
“They’re alive. Your warning alerted us in time. Most of our attackers were human and not skilled. Falaius thinks they were just bandits. You had the greater number of draconians.”
“Just lucky I guess,” Sir Hugh said, still holding Linsha and still grinning like a lunatic.
Mariana raised an elegant eyebrow. She had seen this reaction before. People sometimes felt drunk after a mortal battle. “Fine. I have a few other people to attend to, then I’ll be back.” She strode up the hill into the firelight.
Sir Hugh’s head dropped to Linsha’s shoulder. “Is she gone yet?” he groaned. At her reply his whole body seemed to sag into her arms.
By fits and starts and careful hops, Linsha and Hugh worked their way over to a grassy patch by the water’s edge and collapsed side by side.
“By Helm’s sword, Hugh, where did you learn to fight like that?” Linsha said while she pulled off her boot.
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