Valdemar Books

by Lackey, Mercedes

  So this means, what? She dismounted and put her hand back on the sword. The sullen light reappeared, and as she examined the hard ground, she saw the faint traces of hoofmarks there. This, then, was the direction the bandits had taken.

  And the moment she found their trail, the light disappeared, although she could still see as well as before.

  It's letting me do what I can do. It's—playing tutor, I guess. But the moment I'm in a position where my own abilities can handle things—then it just sort of steps back and makes me take care of myself.

  She took the blade in her right hand, the mare's reins in her left, and followed the trail until—something—told her to stop. It just didn't seem right to go on farther.

  Maybe it's about time to see what they're up to. She opened her mind, leaning against Verenna's warm, sweaty neck and closing her eyes to do so, and went "looking" for bandits.

  She found them all right. An entire encampment of them, with sentries posted all around the little valley they'd taken for their own. Drunk, most of them. Wild, disconnected thoughts. Dierna was there, and still alive—and relatively unharmed. But with her was—

  Kero slammed her protections shut, convulsively. He was there with her, that cold, slimy, evil presence she'd felt before. This time he hadn't sensed her presence, but that was because he was preoccupied. But she had inadvertently come a lot closer to being detected than she really wanted to think about.

  She looked around, assessing the possibilities; there was a tiny creek not far from where she was standing, with trees lining both sides. It wasn't much cover, but to all eyes other than hers the night was deep and dark enough to hide just about anything. With the cover provided by the bushes, Verenna would be just about invisible. Now if she could just do something to keep her from making a fuss—Well, the mare probably hadn't fed terribly well, what with all the confusion for the feast, and then the upset of the raid. If she left Verenna tethered loosely so that she could get at browse and water, that might keep her occupied and quiet.

  She led her mare into the copse, right up to the waterside, and tethered her in a tiny clearing right next to the creek. The clearing was surrounded by bushes and trees, and may itself have been part of the creekbed until something changed its path.

  Verenna should be safe—and if I don't get back, she'll probably be able to free herself.

  She left the little mare tearing up grass hungrily, and proceeded cautiously, afoot at first, then on her hands and knees; opening her mind for brief glimpses of her enemies, until she knew that the farthest sentries were little more than a hill away. She dropped down beneath the bushes, and crawled forward in their shelter.

  All this time her sight had been dimming; was the sword taking away her advantage, or losing its power? Or was it that too much profligate use of magic might be somehow visible to the unknown mage? Now her vision was about equivalent to what she'd have under a full moon.

  Well, that'll do—she thought just as she heard the careless footsteps of one of the bandit-sentries, and the rattle of the bushes as he pushed through them. She flattened herself under the cover of the brush with her sword still in her hand, face pressed into the gritty dirt, her heart pounding with sudden fear, and waited for him to pass.

  He did; making no attempt at quiet. He stalked within an arm's length of her, armor creaking and jingling, and never knew she was there.

  She didn't start breathing again until he was well out of hearing distance; didn't get her nose out of the sand and wipe it on the back of her hand until long after that.

  All right, I know where the sentries are, she thought, her right hand toying nervously with the hilt of the sword as she peered out from under the branches. So how do I avoid them? They seem to be stationed pretty closely together. Maybe I shouldn't avoid them.

  It was hard to recall the stories—the tales the old mercenaries told when she was supposed to be out of earshot, not the bardic lays. The recollections of old battles, ambushes, things that would be useful to her now.

  Dent—he told Lordan once, about how he had to get into an enemy camp. He said the sentries were posted all around, but they weren't used to working together and weren't checking in with each other, so they wouldn't know if one of them had been taken out until his replacement came looking for him. So he got rid of one, and brought his entire company in through the hole in the lines....

  Somehow all the fear and grief was behind her now, now that she was confronting her own life—or death. It was easier to think; the pain was far away and nothing was important but the next moment, and the strange excitement that sharpened all her senses.

  If I slip past them, they'll still be at my back, and dangerous. I could forget that they're there, and one of them could get me from behind. I can't just slip past them. I'll have to get rid of one.

  No sooner had she made the decision than she was crawling forward after the sentry that had just passed her. She had no real plan, it was just that this particular man seemed the most careless. She followed him with the sword still in her hand, able to move with relative silence through brush that she could see and he could not.

  Maybe if I can come up on him from behind, I can hit him in the back of the head with the pommel like Dent showed me—

  She was within a length of him; half a length. He started to turn—

  And suddenly she was no longer in control of her body.

  As if she was a passenger behind her own eyes, a puppet in the hands of an unseen manipulator, she felt her muscles tense as the man started to peer through the dark toward her. She found herself ducking down and crouching behind the cover of a bush. She hadn't even noticed the bush beside her, much less that it was big enough to hide behind. He even moved a couple of steps in her direction, but couldn't see anything, and she stayed as still as the disembodied puppeteer could hold her. Then, when he turned away, she sprang up, sword-hilt clasped in both hands; and as a wild excitement filled her, drove the blade through his body, between his ribs, using all the momentum of her leap. The edges of the blade scraped against his ribs; he arced, and made a kind of strangled gasp, dropping his own blade. She seized him around the neck with her free arm, and shoved the blade completely through him, up to the quillons.

  They stayed that way for a moment, then he fell; she braced herself and pulled at the same time, and the blade came free of his falling body. He never even made another sound.

  Then, just as suddenly as she had lost control, she regained it. She was the one who staggered two trembling steps away from the carcass, mouth open with shock, heart thudding against her ribs. She was the one who very nearly turned and ran, ran all the way back to the copse where she'd left Verenna to take her and ride home at a gallop—

  Only the knowledge that if she did, they would probably hear her and kill her, kept her from doing just that.

  I've killed a man, she thought, legs shaking, sour taste of bile in the back of her throat. Her gorge rose. I've killed a man, myself—

  Except that she didn't know the blow that had killed him. If it had been her doing, she'd have just hit him from behind with the pommel. Nothing like that was in anything Dent had taught her.

  It was the sword. It had to be. Only a magic sword would have been able to manipulate her like a puppet. And Need was, of course, a magic sword, and had been described as giving Kethry the same power it had just apparently given Kero.

  I never thought it would happen like that—just take me over like that. I thought—I thought it would just sort of show me how to do things—

  This wasn't what she'd planned at all. She looked at the blade in her hand and the blood on it with revulsion. She wanted to drop it right there—

  But then, just before she did, another thought occurred to her.

  I was going to ask Grandmother for a weapon, or a demon. Would this bandit be any less dead if I'd hit him with a lightning bolt, or let a demon eat him? What makes it any better if I kill him with my own hands, or do it from a distance?
r />   It wasn't better, of course—

  And he hurt and killed my people. Maybe even somebody I knew. She steeled herself, steadied her hands, and forced herself to clean the blade on his tunic. He could have chosen an honest living. He's helping keep Dierna captive. He had a choice, he made it. And I'm making mine.

  She went back on hands and knees and eased through the brush toward the camp, making as little sound as possible. Her hands were getting full of stickers, and her knees were bruised by rocks—but it was no worse than some of the injuries she'd picked up berrying or training Verenna. So far.

  So far, thanks to the sword, she'd been lucky.

  Thanks to the sword. It still made her skin crawl to think how it would probably take her over again. She didn't have a choice, not if she was going to rescue Dierna, but she didn't like it at all. It just takes over with no warning. And what else does this thing do that I don't know about? What if it turns me into some kind of monster?

  But her grandmother trusted it.

  There's no reason not to trust it, I guess, she thought, as a cramp seized her leg. She stopped and eased her leg out straight, waiting for a moment until it went away. But I can't help but wonder how much Grandmother really knew about it. Maybe it hid things from her, too.

  A cheerful thought.

  Just then she reached the edge of a drop-off, with a screening of brush at the edge. Bright yellow firelight silhouetting the bushes warned her that the camp was just beyond them. She wormed her way under the shelter of one of the biggest (and prickliest) of them. It was not an easy job. Tiny twigs caught in her hair and scratched her face; exposed roots caught on her belt and tunic-lacings and held her back.

  Finally she reached the edge. The branches of the bushes drooped here, down over the drop-off, making a kind of screen of leaves and twigs between her and the fire. Lifting one branch out of the way, cautiously, she peered down at the camp below, blinking against the sudden light.

  Closest to her and about a length below her were a half-dozen men, roaring drunk, playing some kind of game with dice or knucklebones. Two were standing; the rest were sitting or kneeling in a rough circle, watching one of their number cast and cast again. They had tossed their armor aside in a heap right below her, up against the side of the low bluff she hid on. They were filthy, unshaven, and dressed in a motley collection of clothing, some of which had probably been very fine at one time, all of which was now stained, tattered, and so dirty she wouldn't have used it to clean the stable floor.

  Beyond them was another collection of similar scum sprawled at fireside, sharing the contents of a wineskin, and squabbling over a heap of loot from the Keep. Then came the fire—badly built, part of it smoking, part roaring—and beyond the fire—

  Dierna.

  Her bright scarlet dress made a brilliant splash of color that attracted Kero's eyes immediately. She lay half on her side, her pretty face a frozen mask of fear, tumbled at the feet of a tall, thin man in long red robes, the skirt of his robes split fore and aft for riding. He sat on a boulder, sharpening a knife, paying no attention to the antics of his men. Nor, strangely enough, to Dierna, although her legs were exposed to the thigh by the way her dress had torn and fallen open when she'd collapsed (or been flung) at his feet.

  He reached down, as Dierna shrank away from him, and grabbed a lock of her long, unbound dark hair. He yanked her back toward him with it tangled cruelly in his fingers—Kero watched her clench her teeth and wince—and cut the lock off with a single stroke of his knife.

  Kero bit her lip with sudden speculation. That was not what she'd expected him to do.

  As she watched, he rose from his impromptu seat, kicking Dierna out of the way impatiently, and took the lock of hair to a flat rock just inside the ring of firelight.

  Maybe one of these bastards will go for his back, she thought hopefully. Having a girl within reach must be driving them mad. If one of them tries something, makes a move for her, that's sure to start a fight. Either the man holding her will react, or one of the others—either way, once a fight starts, it's bound to spread. If that happens, maybe I can get in there and get her out while the fighting is going on.

  But the bandits ignored the robed man; ignored Dierna, which was even odder. Even if this strange man—

  Mage. This has to be the mage.

  —even if this strange mage had given orders about leaving Dierna alone, scum like this would not have been able to ignore her. They'd have been watching her, hoping for the mage's back to be turned, hoping for a chance at her. But she might as well not have been there. They weren't ignoring her—they acted as if they didn't even see her.

  Kero turned her startled attention back to the mage. That flat rock—he had some kind of paraphernalia laid out on it, as if it were an altar. He set the lock of hair on a brazier in the middle of the rock, picked up something Kero couldn't make out, and began making passes over the burning hair.

  I don't like this. I don't like this at all.

  A moment later the hair on the back of her neck was rising, as a circular boundary around the rock began to glow, as if he had piled up a circle of dark red embers. The strange light pulsed at first, then settled down to a steady, sullen glow. There was one small gap in the circle, and the mage put his instrument down as soon as the glow of the boundary settled, and strode through it.

  He returned to his boulder, his steps hurried and betraying a certain impatience; he shot out his hand, and pulled Dierna to her feet by her bound wrists. She yelped, a sound that carried above the rest of the noise in the camp—and not one of the bandits looked up.

  I like this even less.

  The mage dragged the young girl stumbling along behind him, then pushed her through the gap in the boundary. He cleared the flat rock of encumbrances with a single sweep of his free hand, then kicked her feet out from under her and forced her down beside it. He waved his hand again, and the gap in the boundary closed as fire burned from each end of the arc and met in the middle. Then he pulled a knife from the sleeve of his robe, seized Dierna's head by the hair, and before Kero could take a breath, slashed Dierna's cheek from eye to chin.

  For one moment, Kero was paralyzed, with herself and the sword warring to take over her body and act. And in that moment of indecision, someone—or something—else acted.

  Outside the circle of firelight, a wild clamor went up. It was a heartbeat later that Kero recognized the sounds for the voices of half a dozen horses screaming with fear. The thunder of hooves was all the warning the bandits got before an entire herd of them, blind with panic, stampeded through the camp. Then the campfire went up in a shower of colored ball-lightning and huge sparks and explosions just as they hammered past, and they panicked further, scattering in all directions.

  And as if that wasn't chaos enough, one of the revelers fell into the fire with a bubbling shriek of pain, clutching his throat.

  And the bandits panicked as badly as the horses.

  That's an arrow! Kero realized, in the heartbeat before her attention was caught again by Dierna and the mage that held her. There's someone else out there—someone with a grievance and a bow.

  But she had no chance to think about it, because the mage caught her attention again. Something—a cloud of smoke, or blood-colored mist—rose up out of the stone. It was the height of a man, and as broad as two men, and it was lit fitfully from within, like the clouds on a summer night flickering with heat lightning. The mage stepped back, releasing the girl; it gathered itself, coiling and rearing up exactly like a snake about to strike. Then it lunged forward and fastened itself on the blood-dripping cut on Dierna's cheek.

  Dierna screamed—high, shrill, the way a rabbit screams when it is about to die.

  Kero couldn't move; now she was as paralyzed with fear as Dierna. But she didn't need to, for the moment she stopped fighting it, the sword took over.

  It flung her out of the bushes, rolling down the bluff in a controlled tumble that somehow brought her up onto her feet ju
st as she reached the bottom. The fire was still exploding, though fitfully; a handful of horses were still trampling anything in their way as they circled wildly through the camp, and there was more than enough confusion for her to get halfway across the campsite before anyone even noticed her.

  And even then, the bandits had troubles of their own, for that unknown ally out in the dark was letting fly with arrow after carefully placed arrow, picking off raiders with impressive regularity. There were at least three down on the ground that weren't moving, and two more clutching their sides and screaming. One of the bandits saw her, and charged right at her—

  And stopped dead, as Kero raised her own sword against him, without pausing in her headlong charge. Whatever he saw turned his face as pale as milk; he turned, and ran out into the darkness.

  That happened twice more as she half ran, half stumbled across the bandit camp, dodging fear-maddened horses and the fires set by the explosions in the campfire. A few unfortunates managed to get in Kero's way. The sword did not grant them a second chance. By now Kero wasn't even trying to fight the sword; she was still wild with fear, but there was a kind of heady exhilaration about this, too; she hardly noticed the men getting in her way except as targets to be dealt with, as impersonal as Dent's set of pells in the armory.

  She dodged around the now-blazing campfire, vaulted a body, cut down a fool who tried to bar her way with nothing but a short-bladed knife, taking him out with one of those unstoppable two-handed strokes—and found herself jerking abruptly to a halt at the edge of the glowing circle.

  She couldn't get across it. There was a real, physical barrier demarcated by that scarlet line. The thin band of crimson might as well have been a wall of iron.

  She looked up—and saw the thing still fastened on Dierna's cheek, the light within it growing stronger and more regular, pulsing like a heartbeat. And beyond it the mage smiled thinly at her, and gestured, making a throwing motion.