Sword-Singer

by Jennifer Roberson

  “Hounds of hoolies,” I muttered.

  Del’s horse was next to me. “What did you say?” she asked.

  “—bedtime story in the South.” It was hard to talk over pounding hooves and the noisy breathing of running horses. “Supposedly they’re the familiars of Dybbuk himself.”

  “Who?”

  “The lord of hoolies, which is undoubtedly the place I’m bound for, if we keep going the way we’re going.”

  “Oh.” Her sorrel stumbled. Del snugged reins, drew up the gelding’s white-splashed head, set him to running again.

  “For what it’s worth,” I said, “I don’t think Garrod’s turning us over to slavers.”

  Del tilted her head in consideration. “Maybe not at the moment. But once we’re free of the valley, who’s to say what he’ll do?”

  I grinned. “A pair of sword-dancers, maybe.”

  “Tiger—watch out!”

  Something snapped at the stud’s hocks. Swearing, I saw the flash of teeth and the shine of pale, slanting eyes. The river had reached us at last.

  “Keep going!” Garrod called, twisting to shout over one shoulder. Pale braids whipped. “If we slow, they’ll pull us down. Just hold on and let the horses go!”

  Massou and Cipriana were hunched forward, clutching reins and flying manes. They made themselves very small, pulling knees and ankles upward to present smaller targets to the leaping “hounds.” Massou certainly was small enough to succeed, clinging to his bay like a tick to a dog. Cipriana and Adara, longer-legged, had more trouble, but managed, just as Del did. I was bigger than any of them and on a less predictable mount; inwardly I swore and reached to jerk Theron’s sword from the sheath slung across my back.

  “Bascha—let’s cull the pack, shall we?”

  Del glanced over, saw the metallic glint, smiled. And freed her own blooding-blade.

  Answering immediately, the beasts began to bay.

  “Through the canyon!” Garrod called. “The opening’s just ahead.”

  We went into the canyon, all six of us, cutting a path through blood and bone. Del and I flanked the others, swept around the edges, closed in. The hounds snapped and howled and yipped, trying to pull down the horses, but they were no match for slashing blades or crushing hooves. We cut them down, smashed them down, broke through their vicious ranks. And left them for their brothers.

  Blood sprayed up. Del and I were liberally splattered. But it was nothing we didn’t know.

  The river continued to flow. The hounds didn’t slacken pace, somehow keeping up with the horses. Garrod led us through the canyon and out of the kymri valley onto an open plain that stretched on into forever. It provided better footing, spread the river into a flood, allowed us to judge the numbers better.

  “Hoolies,” I said curtly. “How many of them are there?”

  “Too many.” Del was snappish in frustration. “Why do they keep coming? Why don’t they turn back?” A glance at her face showed me anger and an unrelenting grimness. “If it’s only a meal they want, there are plenty of dead back in the valley.”

  “So they’re after something more.” I leaned down to the right, unleashed my sword in a vicious swipe, took off the head of one of the hounds. “I told you it’s sorcery, Del. They’re not doing this on their own. Someone with power sent them.”

  “You’re sandsick.” She used my own expression. “There’s no reason for anyone to kill everyone at a kyrmi.” Del shook her head, sword flashing in her hand. “There are fights, yes, sometimes, and men do die, but there’s no reason for this. Why kill everyone?”

  I swore as the stud jumped over a shadow, caught my balance, gripped harder with knees and ankles. “Not everyone is at the kymri anymore. Six of us are out here, and the hounds are following.”

  “Not all of them…are they?” Del twisted to look back the way we’d come. “Oh, Tiger—”

  “I know. That’s what I meant. One of us is the target.”

  “Or maybe all of us.”

  “Not all of us are in danger of being proscribed for killing a Northern an-kaidin.”

  “You think it’s me?”

  I shrugged. “It’s a thought.”

  Del swung her sword. I heard a hound yelp. “No, Tiger—no. It doesn’t work that way. They would send men, not beasts. And they’d never kill the innocent.”

  “I said it was just a thought.”

  “Keep that one to yourself.”

  The flood rolled out across the plain, flanking six fleeing riders. No longer were the hounds leaping at us, trying to catch flesh and tear. Now they appeared to be herding us, running us straight toward the edge of the plain.

  It was, I thought, past time to take the initiative.

  Garrod still rode ahead, but just barely; Del and I galloped abreast to break a way through the flood. But the flood was beside us now, giving us acres of plain before.

  I crowded his gray, still holding my bloodied sword. “Turn,” I urged. “Swing left. Cut through the flank. Let’s get off this plain.”

  He nodded and suited actions to my suggestion. Del and I dropped back to play outriders to Adara and her children, knowing they might be too tired or too slow to heed the change in direction. As it was Del and I squeezed them in between us, knees banging, legs caught between quivering horseflesh, hunching forward to guide the horses.

  “They can’t run forever!” Adara cried. Her hair had come loose and streamed in the wind like a ruddy pennon. “If one of them goes down, the rider will be killed…or one of us could fall—”

  All true. But we had no other choice.

  “Just hang on,” I told her above the beat of pounding hooves. “Stay with the horse; he’ll follow Garrod. Del and I will hold off the hounds. Just ride.”

  “I have children—”

  “—as well as yourself.” I bent across, lowered my sword in a flat-bladed slap across her sorrel’s rump. “Massou and Cipriana are doing fine. Del and I are watching.” I pointed at Garrod, whose fair-haired braids flapped behind him. “Stay with him…don’t fall behind!”

  Adara looked over one shoulder at the running hounds. “They haven’t come for us.”

  It was distinctly unappreciated in light of the risk Del and I were taking for the Borderers; without them, we stood a better chance of escape. “Well, then,” I said rudely, “why don’t you just stop? If there’s no need for you to run, don’t waste the horses.”

  Adara flicked a glance at me and shook her head in denial.

  “Then run, woman! Do what I tell you to do!”

  It was, I admit, a bit on the heavy-handed side, but it had the desired effect. Adara ran.

  The stud, I knew, was tiring. He was tough, he was game, he had heart, but even tremendous stamina gives out when tested too far. I couldn’t begin to say how shredded his legs might be from repeated attacks, or his belly, or how much longer he could run before he stumbled, falling, to tumble me onto the plain into the river of beasts.

  Not a happy thought. So I made myself stop thinking it and begged the stud for all the heart he had to give.

  The hounds started to fall behind. Their yapping faded, the eyes winked out, the flood began to abate. I didn’t for one minute think the distance would be enough—they’d proved to have a single-minded devotion to their task—and I knew they wouldn’t stop. Fall behind, yes; stop completely, no. They had settled on their prey.

  Garrod reached the edge of the plain and took his gray northwest, skirting the shadowed drop. Moonlight was helpful, but it didn’t really give us much to go on. We all swung left as he did, saw the flood spread out behind us, and knew without speaking we’d have to find another course.

  Del sheathed her sword and thrust out a splayed hand. “Wait,” she said, “there may be a way.”

  We slowed as she did, hideously conscious of the hounds. Intently Del searched the edge, and then stabbed a hand at it. “Earthfall,” she said. “Follow me down.” And plunged off the edge of the plain.

  The e
arthfall was soft and deep, swallowing legs past the fetlocks, teasing at hocks and knees, threatening heaving bellies. But it slid easily aside as the horses floundered, plowing through; breaking way soundlessly to carry us down from the plain. The stud snorted and quivered, disliking the shifting earth, but he obeyed a firm hand on the reins—the other clutched his mane—and didn’t try to leap away.

  Four pale heads bobbed on rigid necks. Then ruddy-haired Adara, leaning back against downward momentum. And me, the Sandtiger—brown-haired, brown-skinned, green-eyed—bringing up the rear: Southron sword-dancer on Southron stud. Somehow, I didn’t fit.

  Was it me they might be after?

  I shook it off; maybe. And if I was? So what. I’d handle it, as always.

  “Hounds of hoolies,” I muttered.

  The stud was sweating. Dampness soaked through my woolen trews. Salt and horsehair made me itch, but at least it was easier to stay astride a wet horse than a dry. I hugged him with legs and leaned back, staying off his withers. A misstep could render me temporarily uninterested in women—or, rather, incapable—for at least a day or two; I sort of wanted to spare myself unnecessary discomfort.

  Down and down we went, sliding through soft earth. And then we hit bottom, firm bottom, and stopped long enough to stare back up at the edge of the plain. It was black against the sky, nothing more than a silhouette. For the moment, it was empty, but we knew it wouldn’t last.

  “Where are we?” Massou asked, gasping.

  The earthfall had funneled us down into a rocky canyon. To the left—the south—stretched a wide, dry riverbed, fouled with sand and boulders. To the right the riverbed narrowed significantly, turning into little more than a crack between the plainside cliffs and another mottled wall.

  Garrod shook his head. “Let’s just keep riding. We don’t dare stop now, not with those beasts on our trail…maybe at sunrise.”

  “Sunrise!” Adara blurted it. “You can’t expect us or the horses to go on throughout the night.”

  “If we have to, we will.” Cipriana surprised us all with her vehemence.

  Garrod’s brows went up. He tilted his head thoughtfully and grinned. “We do,” he said, “and we will.”

  “Let’s go,” Del said abruptly, jerking her chin north. “Let’s try this way…the riverbed is too open. We’ll just follow the canyon and see where it goes. It’s better than being up there with those hounds.”

  “Besides,” Garrod said, “we can’t let the horses stand.” He turned his gray and headed north, patting the lathered right shoulder. Talking to him, maybe?

  “Go,” I told Adara. “Del and I ride behind just in case they follow.”

  “They will,” Massou declared.

  I frowned. “Why do you say that?”

  “I just know.” He glared back, still sulking over the bite.

  I flapped a hand at him. “Go.”

  He went. Cipriana fell in behind him. Del and I brought up the rear.

  “They will follow,” Del said quietly.

  “Yes. I think so.”

  “If they corner us—”

  “I know. Let’s just pray this isn’t a trap-canyon.”

  Del drew in a deep, slow breath. “I have always known I might die,” she said quietly, “but never like this.”

  “We’re a long way from dying, Del.”

  She turned her head sharply and looked at me, very deliberately, for a long, arrested moment. And then she smiled a little. “You told me that once before, when the Hanjii left us to die in the Punja.”

  “And I was right.”

  She nodded, lost in the memory. “But there are no Salset here to rescue us.”

  “Maybe we’ll rescue ourselves.” I smiled at her and shrugged. “It’s not impossible.”

  Del sighed. “Maybe not.”

  “Have faith, bascha.”

  Pale brows rose. “In what, Tiger? I thought you didn’t believe in things like gods and divine deliverance.”

  “I don’t. I believe in myself.”

  “Oh, good.” Her face was perfectly blank. “Now I can relax.”

  I grunted. Grimaced. Glared. “Now you can make your horse stop rubbing his head—and his teeth—against my knee.”

  Del looked. Laughed. Pulled aside her horse…after he bit my knee.

  Such a helpful girl.

  Twenty-one

  Our flight ended as abruptly as it had begun. There, suddenly, was Garrod, reining in his gray before it could run smack into a cliff of looming stone. There too was Adara, white-faced, hissing something bitterly in vicious Borderer. And also her son and daughter, drooping on their horses, turning back to look at Del and me hopefully as we stopped our weary mounts.

  “Trap-canyon,” I said briefly. “All we can do is turn around.”

  “Turn around! and go back?” Adara stared at me in shock, face half-curtained in tangled hair. “You mean, we’ve come all this way—”

  “We had no choice,” Garrod told her, quietly interrupting. “At least it bought us a little time.”

  “Time,” she said bitterly. “Time to die here instead of there?”

  I looked at her children. Massou was mostly asleep on his horse, all hunched up and stiff as if he’d locked his joints hours before. His head bobbed a little and eyelids drifted closed, no matter how hard he tried to keep them open. Cipriana wasn’t much different, although her lids were more cooperative. Legs hung slackly against her mount, mostly bared by rucked up skirts to show woolen leggings. Blonde hair straggled limply; she shoved it back with effort.

  “What do we do?” she asked.

  I looked around at the place that now entombed us. We’d made our way through a narrow, winding conduit cutting through plainside cliffs and freeside rocks, all knuckled from wind and water. The ground itself was solid rock with only a thin crusting of dirt, and in some places it was nothing at all but naked stone. After a while, in darkness, the canyon had blurred into nothingness, defined only by looming walls and a trace of diluted moonlight.

  But now dawn replaced the darkness. And in the distance I heard a howl.

  The hounds would, I knew, follow very soon. At this very moment they were probably at the edge of the plains, eyeing the earthfall into the narrow canyon. Maybe they were even over the edge already, pouring down in a white-eyed river.

  I looked at Del, who sat quietly on one of Garrod’s sorrels. “We could go back to the narrowest part of the canyon and block them, you and I. Turn them back. Keep them from getting through.”

  It was, I knew, only a temporary device; it seemed likely the hounds, with their vastly superior numbers, would eventually kill us both and continue on to catch the others.

  Unless, of course, we were the ones they wanted. In which case, maybe they’d leave the others alone.

  Del unsheathed her sword. “I have a better idea.”

  I looked at Boreal. It occurred to me to wonder why Del hadn’t used her before now. “Bascha—”

  “You saw what happened before.” She knew perfectly well what I meant. “You felt what happened before. Loosed like that—uncontrolled, undirected—she can injure the innocent as well as destroy the enemy…on the plain I didn’t dare.”

  I glanced around. Dawn was filling the tiny trap-canyon with a weak, pinkish light, divulging countless holes and crevices cut into the walls themselves. And it occurred to me that Boreal’s backlash might be redoubled here.

  “Del—”

  She thrust out a rigid hand. “Do you see the throat? I’ll use it to direct the power, and let the walls protect all of you.”

  Throat. As good as another word, I guess. At the mouth of the trap-canyon was a bulging of wind-sculpted stone that forced a narrower entryway. A natural shield, of sorts, swelling from either side—a throat of solid stone—barely wide enough to offer admittance to a horse, though it had swallowed six of them.

  “What are you going to do?” Massou demanded sharply.

  Del glanced back at him. As always, with hi
m, her expression softened. Massou was Jamail to her. “I’m going to try and turn back the beasts.”

  Blue eyes widened. “How?”

  Del was never one to lie, or even to blunt the truth. Not for anyone’s sake. “With magic,” she said evenly.

  Cipriana urged her bay closer to Del’s white-faced sorrel. “Magic,” she said. “Magic? How? What will you do?”

  Adara shoved tangled hair out of a tired face. Something glinted in her eyes: an odd, bright awareness. “She’s going to use her jivatma.”

  Four pairs of eyes fixed themselves on the sword. I didn’t bother, having seen Boreal before; instead, I looked at them. At Garrod, clearly startled, who only now realized Del was precisely what she claimed; and at Adara and her children, staring avidly at the blade. As if they were dying of thirst and knew it would succor them.

  Lastly, at Del, who was sliding off her horse. “You would do well,” she suggested, “to find places in which to hide. That way if I fail, perhaps you’ll still escape the beasts.”

  Places in which to hide. Were there any? The trap-canyon was little more than a pen of rock, and we the gathered livestock.

  Garrod tipped his head back, looking up. Beaded braids dangled, sweeping against his mount’s gray rump. “There are holes,” he said. “Ledges and shelves and holes.”

  So there were. The walls, curving around to trap us within something akin to a semicircle, were freely pocked with hollows and holes. It was possible the walls that trapped us might also provide a means of escape from the hounds.

  In the distance I heard the yapping of the beasts, threading down through the narrow canyon. I jumped off the stud and went over to the nearest lobe of cliff. The morning light was very thin, but growing stronger by the moment. Shadows slid down mottled rock onto a stone floor stair-stepped by a now-banished river, losing themselves in smudgy darkness. “Any holes large enough? Any we can reach?” Methodically I checked for cubbies we could use. “Massou—over here.”