The Wayward Knights

by Roland Green

  He stopped howling when he saw the writhing snake. Instead he drew his own curved sword and slashed down. The snake stopped writhing as its head flew from its body.

  "Thanks, Sir Pirvan," the man said. He rushed on ahead, vanishing in the murk before Pirvan could reply.

  Scorpions followed the snakes, but the rain seemed to slow them until they were almost easy prey. A few men were stung, however, by scorpions perched on branches at face level. They did not die—the scorpions being less poisonous than the snakes—but only wished they could die. Some of them begged for friends to kill them, and one or two found friends who were willing.

  But even Istaran healers were equal to the scorpion stings—when they came up and started to work. Pirvan wondered if they would refuse to heal "sea barbarians," Vuinlodders, or others without virtue. He thought the best cure for that reluctance would be a foot or two of steel fed to enough Istarans to improve the manners of the rest.

  But that would take the approval of Sir Niebar and Gildas Aurhinius, at least, not to mention his own conscience. The two senior leaders were well back in the column by now, as speed came to mean survival and youth, in most cases, meant speed.

  Pirvan decided to catch up with the vanguard before his seniors caught up with him. He really wasn't supposed to be that far forward, but in for a piglet, in for the sow.

  He took two steps, and a branch above dumped a bird's nest onto his face. He wiped dead leaves and bird dung out of his eyes with the back of his hand, then held his face up to let the rain wash it clean.

  A hand clutched his arm.

  "Where do you think you're going without me?" Haimya said.

  "Forward."

  "To the lead?"

  "I'm not going back to Eskaia and tell her that I didn't try to be at her son's side," Pirvan said.

  "Then I have an older right to go up there than you do."

  Pirvan spat his mouth free of foulness and grinned. "I don't think we have time to argue," he said, looking at her. Wrinkles and crow's-feet, gray hair and thickening waiste vanished in the rain, and he saw again the battle maiden, Haimya.

  "Pity you don't have a shield," he said. "We've never gone into battle with shields locked."

  Haimya kissed him. "It's not as useful a way of fighting as you think, against most opponents," she said. "Now let's waste no more time arguing."

  They did not lock shields, but they took their first few uphill steps hand in hand.

  Sirbones was using only his staff for healing those stung by the scorpions. He had enough different potions to fill several cups, as well as many pouches of herbs. He did not want to expose any of these to the wind and the rain for anyone not already sliding into the Abyss.

  The staff did not completely heal the scorpion-stung; they walked haltingly and with pain written large on their faces. But they could walk, away from the battle if they had the sense the gods gave lice, and back to more potent healing.

  If the Istaran healers honored their vows to those not of Istar. Sirbones had heard too many tales of the kingpriest demanding that healers and others violate their vows, to have full trust in those who lived where the kingpriest held sway. He also had too much work at hand keeping his own vows to spend much time worrying about those who would break theirs. Indeed, Sirbones had so much work that he did not see the new attack before he had become its first victim.

  Twenty paces ahead of the vanguard, consisting of two of Torvik's fighters and an Istaran, all apparently at peace with one another as they fought the common enemy, a stout tree branch bowed upward. It went on bowing upward until it snapped, to dangle by strips of bark and a few fibers of wood that seemed to glow in the storm-murk.

  Then the lower portion of the branch, closest to the trunk, reared back. It hurled the broken portion forward like a plains rider's throwing spear. In midair, the broken portion spun end over end, until the jagged end was foremost.

  It was this jagged end that drove spearlike into Sirbones's chest. It struck with enough force to knock him off his feet, but as it had pierced his heart as well as driving shattered ribs into his lungs, he felt no pain from the fall.

  Indeed, he had only time to feel surprised, before he lost the power to feel at all.

  Fulvura was not quite up with the vanguard of the human column. She did not entirely trust her back to this many humans in a battle so confused, deadly, and dark. It would be far too easy for someone to slip close in the rain, the wind, and the rest of the battle-din, and hamstring or even kill her.

  She wished to avoid this, although not out of fear, being of a line that had never flinched from battle, raid, or arena, and produced at least one emperor they were willing to acknowledge. She was instead loyal to her brother's plans, which hung on some measure of peace with the humans, at least until they could all quit Suivinari Island with their work done.

  Those plans would go sadly awry if Zeskuk had to avenge her death or wounding. Of course, he would also be without her help if she were killed or wounded in an ordinary battle, or merely fell overboard and drowned. But he would have no blood-duty of vengeance.

  It was as Fulvura considered these matters that Sirbones died. Indeed, his body landed almost at her feet. Two long writhing tree roots snaked across the rich soil, gouging the leaf mold, reaching for the human healer's body and for the living man he had been trying to heal.

  Fulvura stepped over Sirbones's body and chopped down with her battle-axe. The wounded man screamed, convinced that the axe blow was for him. He was still screaming when the descending blade hacked through the first root.

  The minotaur jerked the man to his feet with her left hand and sent him stumbling toward the rear. Then she stamped hard on the other root, as it groped for either Sirbones or his staff. She could not be sure which was its intended prey.

  The root stung her exposed foot, as if its sap were an acid. She smelled even in the storm the reek of scorching hoof. She was bending over to snatch Sirbones clear of immediate danger when the root brushed against the dead healer's staff.

  There were legends of how the priests of Mishakal bound into their healing staves secret spells that kept anyone else from using their magic. Whether the legend was true, or whether the collision of healing magic and killing magic was simply too violent for matter to endure, Fulvura had the sense of standing on the lip of an erupting geyser.

  Wood of every kind and in every form from whole trees down to splinters, mixed with sand, mud, hot water, steam, dead creatures and bits of creatures that the minotaur neither could nor wished to name—a mighty column of all these and more towered an arm's length from her. It soared into the treetops, then started to collapse.

  Before a ship-long and minotaur-thick tree trunk fell where she had been standing, Fulvura had leaped backward, with agility more like a leopard's than a minotaur's. She had Sirbones's body firmly clutched under one arm and the battle-axe was still in the other.

  "Hope I won't have to do that again, to prove anything to anybody," she muttered. She did not dare look about her for humans who might relieve her of her burden, but she hoped they would not be long in coming.

  She would not leave the healer's body prey to twisted magic, but this was no battle for even a minotaur to fight burdened and one-handed!

  Pirvan saw Zeskuk's sister standing with Sirbones's body under one arm about the same time as he noticed three other things.

  One was Hawkbrother and Young Eskaia hurrying to catch up with him and Haimya.

  The second thing was a quivering in the ground, not far from Fulvura.

  The third was a misshapen form crashing through the undergrowth, ready to burst out of the trees. What it had been before magic transformed it, Pirvan did not know. He was only sure that it was no friend to anyone in the column.

  Lightning flared again. This time it flung no snakes or anything else. It nearly dazzled Pirvan, but the remnants of his vision let him tell what was coming at him.

  Once it had been a wild boar, or at least a wild p
ig. Now its snout was a razor-sharp spur of bone, its tusks were barbed, its teeth were pointed like a shark's, and its hooves left red smoke curling up where they touched. Pirvan rather hoped that its hide had not been turned to armor as well.

  " 'Ware!" he shouted. Fulvura turned, and so did Hawkbrother, who had a throwing spear in one hand, which gave him the readiest weapon. The spear flew. It struck the once-boar in the left eye and stuck in the socket. The boar outbellowed a minotaur and charged the nearest enemy, who happened to be Fulvura.

  The quivering ground flew apart in a shower of dirt and things too long dead to be looked at, let alone smelled, without revulsion. Fulvura reeled backward, nearly losing her balance. The monster boar turned aside and caught sight of Pirvan.

  As the glaring yellow eye steadied on him, Pirvan wondered if Wilthur the Brown's magical creations were falling afoul of one another. This would not save him from the boar without some further exertion on his part, however, so he leaped, slashed, fell, rolled, and sprang to his feet again in a single flow of movement, knowing as he did that he had been as fast as he had ever been. He had also hamstrung the boar, but it seemed to be quite as fit to charge on three legs as it had been on four. Pirvan, on the other hand, doubted that he could death-dance with the boar for as much as another minute.

  He did not have to. Before Fulvura could fall, Eskaia and her mother caught the minotaur and steadied her. She rumbled something that did not seem to convey gratitude, but then being rude to lesser races was sometimes a point of honor with minotaurs.

  Meanwhile, Fulvura flung the axe down, all but threw Sirbones's body at Hawkbrother, unslung the shatangs from her back, and snapped the finger-thick leather thongs binding them as if they were pack thread. Then she put one shatang between the boar's ribs. As it staggered around to face her, she put the second into its throat. It fell too quickly to need the third.

  Fulvura and Pirvan met, facing each other over the boar's body. They fell somewhere between shaking hands and glaring at each other, until at last Fulvura jerked her head. Pirvan saw, and wondered how he had escaped noticing it before, that one of her horns was painted in spirals of red and gold, and the other in purple and green.

  "Well struck," she said, looking back at the trio grouped around Sirbones's body. "Stop gaping and either get out of the fight or find someone else to oil and wrap him. I'm done with scavenging this thrice-cursed battlefield!"

  Then she stared, as if she could not understand why Pirvan was shaking with laughter, and many more than three humans were shouting her name as if it were a war cry.

  Tarothin wished he could shout louder than the storm and the battle together. Then this Istaran witling might listen to him!

  Instead he turned away, to nearly run into a medium-sized, sharp-faced woman wearing a robe that sun and salt air had faded from black to a dubious gray. The Red Robe almost made a gesture of aversion. Revella Laschaar, the oldest and most powerful Black Robe woman with the fleet, had come to the battlefield.

  Karthayan by birth, she now lived in Istar. It was said that she was much in favor with kingpriests over the past twenty years, and Tarothin suspected this was true. She would never have risen so high otherwise.

  "Tarothin, friend of the wayward and the unvirtuous!" she called.

  "I do not answer to those titles, O servant of Nuitari," he said.

  "So be it," Revella replied. "Waste my time, waste your time, waste the lives of those who need our help."

  Tarothin bit down on another sharp reply, so hard he thought for a moment he had broken a tooth. Well, there was Sirbones to put it right if so. Meanwhile, no one ignored Revella Laschaar without paying a price.

  "Reverend Lady Revella," he hissed, "do you wish to speak, or may I?"

  "Answer a question first, then I will listen."

  "I will tell all that I know."

  "All?" The Black Robe laughed, throwing her head back so far that Tarothin half hoped something would fall into her mouth and choke her. Then she pierced him with an arrow-swift glance.

  "We have no time for that much," she continued. "Only tell me this: When you and Rubina fell out with one another—was that feigned or real?"

  Tarothin groped for his scattered wits, trying to throw them back across the years to the Black Robe who had been his lover during Waydol's War. As he groped, he looked more closely at Lady Revella. It seemed now that something about her features echoed Rubina's, or perhaps the other way around. Almost certainly a blood tie, somewhere.

  But that was a mystery whose answer could wait. An answer to Lady Revella could not.

  "It was all an act," Tarothin said. "Well, perhaps not wholly on her part. She did take another lover, until we met again. After that…"

  Briefly, Tarothin was glad that it was raining. Otherwise someone might have noticed that his eyes were wet.

  "Ha!" Revella spat. "That is the answer I hoped for. Now I can help you."

  "Help?"

  "You haven't changed your mind about needing some magic worked for more than healing, have you? And stop gaping as if you didn't have a mind to change!" The lady's tongue certainly lived down to rumor.

  "We certainly need all the help against Wilthur we can find," he said. "What is your price?"

  "Already paid. You made Rubina happy. Darin trusted her. Pirvan honored her with his youngest daughter's name. Gildas Aurhinius would have saved her. Your stand at Belkuthas avenged her."

  Tarothin's memories had now caught up with the Black Kobe's babble. It had been the unlamented Captain Zephros who killed Rubina at the end of Waydol's War, and met his own end in the siege of Belkuthas.

  "She wished us no ill, and helped us when she could. More than we would have asked," Tarothin said. "Why should we not honor her?"

  "Too many people these days give reasons or excuses why not!" Revella snapped. Then, without waiting for permission as wizardly custom required, she touched her staff to Tarothin's.

  He neither sprouted wings, fell senseless, nor began to speak in the tongues of the gods. But Rubina's old spell for linking his magic to another's thundered back into his mind, like rampaging minotaurs. He pressed hands to his ears, in a futile effort to fight a noise that was trapped within his skull.

  "Hold Rubina's spell, and let me give you one of mine, that we can cast linked," Revella said. "Well, what are you waiting for? Is your brain so soft Rubina's masterpiece has sunk out through the bottom of it?"

  Tarothin shook his head and was surprised when it did not fall off his shoulders. "No," he said. "But—I won't ask why you do this. I will ask that if we are not enough by ourselves, will the rest of Istar's magicworkers follow you?"

  "They had cursed well better," Revella snapped. "Or have a good explanation. Now, put your staff across mine just there…"

  Sir Darin was not the first to notice the break in the storm. The minotaurs had thrown out scouts to the flanks as well as to the front, and in between hacking at maddened vegetation and poisoned monstrosities of animals, they felt the wind and rain ease.

  Then they saw breaks in the clouds, and began bellowing the news, loudly enough to be heard over the last of the storm and the battle. They had to outbellow the battle for quite a while.

  Darin had never fought side by side with Rynthala in such a deadly fight. He found that it was a curiously intimate experience, in which he could feel as close to her as when they were wrapped in each other's arms.

  It did not, fortunately, affect the iron detachment Waydol had taught him to bring to war, and which helped make him almost as formidable as a minotaur. Minotaurs might be stronger, but they fought, too often, in hot fury.

  It was in that hot fury that the minotaur column set about clearing a path to their comrades high on the mountain. Some minotaurs fell, past healing; others fell and were carried to momentary safety. The enemy's magical creations gave way before trampling hooves and flying steel. Darin even saw minotaurs using their horns, to hook animated branches away from comrades, or gore sorcerous beas
ts trying to leap down from above.

  Darin and Rynthala had armor, while the minotaurs often relied on their tough hides, so the humans kept well to the forefront. It was just behind the head of the column, indeed, that they saw an obscenity with wings and teeth swooping down on a minotaur.

  Rynthala had long since shot off all her arrows, retrieved none, and found no far-striking weapon lying on the battlefield. Minotaurs, of course, were not much for archery, except sometimes at sea—which Darin thought just as well. He did not want to think of the power of an arrow shot from a bow that a minotaur could honorably wield; it would go through plate as if it were cheese.

  But a shatang lay near, the head bent but otherwise serviceable. Darin snatched up the fallen weapon, hefted it to judge its balance, then threw it.

  The bent head sent the shatang a trifle awry and the winged creature had time to claw at the minotaur's eyes before the shatang transfixed one wing. Darin ran in and chopped off the other wing with his sword, then jerked the shatang loose and pinned the creature to the ground with it.

  Meanwhile, Rynthala was trying to wrap an herb-steeped dressing around the minotaur's bleeding, blinded eyes. It was her last one, but Darin judged the risk was fair. The battle must be close to a lull, if not an end, regardless of who would claim victory.

  The herbs were supposed to bring calm, ease pain, and stop bleeding. It was a formula handed down from Rynthala's parents, and Darin had seen it save lives before.

  It nearly cost him his.

  It had not occurred to him that the winged creature might have a mate or at least a companion. He only thought of that in the moment after claws ripped at his exposed cheek and hand, leaving both feeling as if they had been branded and set aflame.

  Rynthala cut the creature out of the air with her sword a moment later. It screamed in dying, and Darin wished the scream would go on long enough so that he himself could cry out without being heard. Instead, he bit his lip until blood came, then tried to force out sensible words that would keep Rynthala from lamenting her ill-timed generosity.