by J. L. Doty
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 w
anted 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 l
ight 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.
~~~
Something woke Morgin, some noise or sound. It was near dawn, the sky beginning to brighten, and the fear had come upon him, the fear that came with Kulls nearby. He still sat at the bottom of the ravine, the horse’s reins tied to his wrist, his shadowmagic strong and active. He sat very still, careful not to move in the slightest, and he thanked the gods the horse was too exhausted to do more than stand silently beside him with its head hung low.
He heard a gruff voice say something, though the words were hushed and unintelligible. Another voice whispered a response. He was seated with his back to the edge of the ravine, so he turned his head very slowly to look both right and left: nothing. But to his right the ravine took a sharp turn.
He heard the hushed whispers again, so he stood, rising carefully and silently. He tied the horse’s reins to some brush, lowered himself to his hands and knees and crawled slowly to the turn in the ravine. He checked his shadows, then peered carefully around the turn.
Like Morgin, two twelves of Kulls had tied their horse’s reins to brush at the bottom of the ravine. Then they’d all climbed up the slope at the side of the ravine and were looking over its lip at something.
Morgin eased back away from the turn, climbed the slope and looked over its lip. In the predawn mist, about a hundred paces distant, he saw a line of shadowy figures he recognized immediately. It must be the sentry line for one of the Benesh’ere encampments. The Kulls were setting up a predawn attack.