'There was a battle at Tarmanam,' she said to all who could hear. 'But there were no rebellious lords - only those faithful to Duke Vikram, who has been cruelly tortured to death.'
In her frightfully calm and measured way, she went on to tell us something of what she had seen in the Count's mind. She said that he and his army had marched into Sikar even as Rinald had told us. But there had been no siege of the mighty fortifications there. As soon as the Count's engineers had set up their catapults and battering rams, his army had been joined by a host of Blues. And then Kailimun priests within the city had assassinated the Duke of Sikar and his family; the Duke's cousin. Baron Mukal, bowing before the terror of these priests, had thrown open the city gates. Hostages had been taken and threatened with crucifixion. The Sikar army had then gone over to the Count taking oaths of loyalty to him and his distant master. Thus Sikar had fallen in scarcely a day.
Count Ulanu had then gathered up both armies - and the companies of Blues. In a lightning strike, he had swept south, into Virad. Duke Vikram and his lords had had no time to watch events unfold in Sikar and to sue for peace on favorable terms; their only choice was to surrender unconditionally or to ride out to battle. With the Khaisham Librarians still preparing to send a force to Sikar, much too late, Duke Vikram chose to fight alone over bowing to Count Ulanu and the Red Dragon. But his forces had been slaughtered and many of the survivors crucified. And now his captured family awaited the same fate, imprisoned in his own castle.
'It was treachery that took Sikar,' Liljana said to us. 'And, listen, do you hear the lies in the Count's words? He promises us more treachery with every breath.'
As Count Ulanu stared at her, I was given to understand that he had been out riding with his personal guard in search of the best route to march his army through to Khaisham when one of his Blues had alerted him as to our presence.
On either side of the Count, two of his knights, clad in mail and armed with wicked-looking, curved swords, nudged their horses closer to him as if to steady him and show their support in the face of Liljana's barbs. It was to her that the Count now said, 'You know many things but not the one that really matters.'
'And what is that, dear Count?' Liljana asked.
'In the end, you'll beg to be allowed to bow before me and kiss my feet. How long has it been, old witch, since you've kissed a man?'
In answer, Liljana again held out her fist to him, this time with her middle finger extended.
The Count's face filled with hate, but he had the force of will to channel it into his derisive words: 'Why don't you try looking into my mind now?'
Then he, this priest of the Kallimun, turned upon her a gaze so venomous and full of malice that she gave a cry of pain. As something dark yet clear as a black crystal flared inside him, I felt the still-sheathed Alkaladur flare as well even through its jade hilt.
'What a gracious lord you are!' she said. She continued to stare at him despite her obvious anguish, 'I should imagine that all Yarkona has remarked your exemplary manners.'
I knew, of course, what she intended, and I approved her strategy: she was trying to use her blue gelstei and all the sharpness of her tongue to provoke the Count into an action against us. For surely there must be a battle between us; it would be best for us if we forced the Count and his men to fight it, here, upon this high ground, charging up this hill. This was our fate, perhaps written in the moon and stars, and I could see it approaching as dearly as could Atara. And yet it was also my fate that I must first speak for peace.
'Count Ulanu,' I said, 'you are now Lord of Sikar and Virad by conquest. But your domains were gained through treachery. No doubt the lords of Khaisham are preparing to take them back. Why don't you withdraw your men so that we may continue our journey? When we reach Khaisham, we'll speak to the Librarians concerning these matters. Perhaps a way can be found to restore peace to Yarkona without more war.'
It was a poor speech, I thought, and Count Ulanu had as much regard for it as I. His contemptuous eyes fell upon me as he said, 'If you are Valari, it seems you've lost your courage that you should suggest such cowardly schemes of running off to the enemy.'
For quite a few moments, he stared at the scar on my forehead. Then his eyes, which had caused Liljana nearly to weep, bored into mine. I felt something like black maggots trying to eat their way into my brain. My hand closed more tightly around Alkaladur's swan-carved hilt. I felt the fire of the silustria passing into me and gathering in my eyes. And suddenly Count Ulanu looked away from me.
'Pilgrims, are you?' he muttered. 'Seven of you, what's to be done with seven damn pilgrims?'
As the hot wind rippled the grasses about the hill, the Blue warrior with the shaved head impatiently turned to speak to the Count. His words came out in a series of guttural sounds like the grunts of a bear. He suddenly raised his axe, which caught the fierce rays of the sun. From his neck dangled a clear stone, which also gleamed in the bright light. It was a large, square-cut diamond like those that are affixed to leather breastpieces to make up the famed Valari battle armor. The other Blues sported identical gems. With the veins of my wrist touching my sword's diamond pommel, I saw in a flash how these Blues had acquired such stones: they had been ripped free from the armor of the crucified Valari after the battle of Tarshid an entire age ago. For three thousand years, Morjin had hoarded them against the day they might be needed. As now they were. For clearly, he had bought the service of the Blues' axes - and perhaps their forgetfulness of past treacheries - with these stolen diamonds.
'Urturuk here,' the Count said, nodding at the scabrous Blue, 'suggests that we do send you on to Khaisham. Or at least your heads.'
Like a perfect jewel forming up in my mind, I suddenly saw what Morjin's spending of this long-hoarded treasure portended: that he had finally committed to the open conquest of not only Yarkona but all of Ea.
'The Librarians,' the Count said, 'must be sent some sign that they've forfeited the right to receive more pilgrims.'
While the horses, ours and theirs, nickered nervously and pawed the earth, Count Ulanu stared up the grassy bill at us deciding what to do.
And then Liljana smiled at him and said, 'But haven't you already made your request to the Librarians?'
Again, the rage returned to Count Ulanu's face as he caught Liljana in his hateful eyes. And she stared right back at him, taking perhaps too much delight in her power to provoke him. Then she told us of the hid-den thing that she had so painstakingly wrested from the Count's mind.
'After Tarmanam,' she said to him loudly so that all his men could hear, 'didn't you send your swiftest rider to Khaisham demanding a tribute of gold? And didn't the Librarians send you a book illumined with gilt letters? A book of manners?'
Her revelation of the Librarians' rebuke and the Count's secret shame proved too much for him. With his true motives for wanting to humble the Librarians exposed like a raw nerve, the Count's hand tightened on his horse's reins, pulling back its head until it screamed in pain. And 'then the Count himself suddenly pointed his sword at us and screamed to his men, 'Damned witch! Take her! Take them all! And be sure you take the Valari alive!'
This command pleased the three Blues greatly. They clanked their great axes together, and in harmony with the ringing steel, they let loose a long and savage howl: OWRRULLL!
Then the twenty knights kicked their spurs against their screaming horses' flanks, and the battle was joined.
Chapter 31
The Count himself led the charge up the hill. He was daring enough to show brave, but cunning enough to know that his knights wouldn't let him ride right onto our swords unprotected and alone. As their horses wheezed and sweated and pounded up the steep slope, two of his knights spurred their mounts slightly ahead of him to act as living shields. And it was well for him that they did. For just then, behind me, a bowstring twanged and an arrow buried itself in the lead knight's chest. I heard Atara call out, 'Twenty-three!' A few moments later, another arrow sizzled thro
ugh the roiling air, only to glance off the Count's shield. And then he and his men were upon us.
The first knight to crest the hill - a big, burly man with fear-maddened eyes - drove his horse straight toward me. But due to his uphill charge, he had little momentum and less balance in his saddle; with Altaru's hooves planted squarely in the earth, the point of my lance took him in the throat and drove clean through him. The force of his fall ripped the lance from my grasp. I heard him screaming, but then realized that he was going to his death in near silence, a wheeze of bloody breath escaping from his ruined throat and nothing more. The scream was all inside me. It built louder and louder until it seemed that the earth itself was shrieking in agony as it split asunder beneath me and pulled me down toward a black and bottomless chasm.
'Val!' Kane called out from somewhere nearby. 'Draw your sword!' I heard his sword slice the air and cleave through the gorget surround-ing a knight's neck. I was vaguely aware of Maram fumbling with his red crystal and trying to catch a few rays of sun with which to burn the advancing knights. Master Juwain, to my astonishment, scooped up the shield of the man I had unhorsed; he held it protecting Liljana from another knight's sword as she tried to urge her horse toward Count Ulanu. Behind me, to the right and left, Atara and Alphanderry worked furiously with their swords to beat back the attack of yet more knights who were trying to flank us along the rear of the hill and take us from behind.
With a trembling hand, I drew forth Alkaladur. The long blade gleamed in the light of the sun. The sight of the silver gelstei shining so brilliantly dismayed Count Ulanu and his men, even as it drove back the darkness engulfing me. My mind suddenly cleared and a fierce strength flowed up my hand into my arm, a strength that felt as bottomless as the sea. It was as if I were drawing Altaru's surging blood into me, and more, the very fires of the earth itself.
The Bright Sword flared white then, so brilliant and dazzling that the nearest knights cried out and threw their arms over their eyes. But other knights and the three Blues pressed toward me. Kane was near me, too, cutting and killing and cursing. Horses collided with each other, snorted and screamed. Altaru, steadying me and freely lending me his great strength, turned his wrath on any who tried to harm me. An unhorsed knight tried to hammer my back with his mace; Altaru kicked out, catching him in the chest and knocking him over. And then, even as Urturuk, the Blue with the missing ear, came for me with his huge axe, Altaru backed up to trample the fallen knight with his sharp hooves. He struck down with tremendous force, again and again until the knight's head was little more than white bones and broken brains beneath his crumpled helm.
'Val - on your right!'
I narrowly pulled back from Urturuk's ferocious axe blow that would have chopped through Altaru's neck. Altaru, now sensing the enemy's strategy of trying to kill him to get at me, furiously bit out at Urturuk, taking a good chunk of flesh from his shoulder. Urturuk seemed not to notice this ugly wound. He drove straight toward Altaru again, his mouth fairly frothing with wrath, this time trying to split open his skull.
At last I swung Alkaladur. It arced downward in a silvery flash, cutting through the axe's iron-hard haft and into Urturuk's bare chest, cleaving him nearly in two. The spray of blood from his opened chest nearly blinded me. I almost didn't see one of the Count's knights coming at me from the other side. But a sudden whinny and tensing of Altaru's body told me of his attack. I whirled about, swinging Alkaladur again. Its terrible, star-tempered edge cut through both shield and the mailed forearm behind it, and then bit into the steel rings covering the knight's belly. He cried out to see his arm fall away like a pruned tree limb, and plunged to the ground screaming out his death agony.
'Take him!' Count Ulanu screamed to his knights scarcely a dozen yards from me.
'Can't you take one damned Valari!'
Perhaps his men could have taken us but for Kane's fury and the sud-denly unleashed terror of my sword. Then, too, they were disadvantaged by trying to cripple and capture us rather than kill. With knights now pressing us on all sides, I urged Altaru toward Count Ulanu. But Liljana, with Master Juwain still holding out the shield to protect her right side while Kane bulled his way forward on her left, had already reached him. She struck her sword straight out toward his sneering face. The point of it managed to slice off the tip of his nose even as one of his knight's horses knocked into hers. Blood streamed from this rather minor gash. But it was enough to unnerve Count Ulanu - and his men.
'The Count is wounded!' one of his captains cried out. 'Retreat! Protect the Count!
Take him to safety!'
Although it hadn't been Count Ulanu who ordered this ignoble retreat, he made no move to gainsay his knight's command. He himself led the flight back down the hill.
Two of his knights guarded his back as he turned his horse's tail to us - and paid with their lives. Kane's sword took one of them clean through the forehead while I pushed the point of mine straight through the other's armor into his heart. And suddenly the battle was over.
'Do we pursue?' Maram called out, reining in his horse at the top of the hill. He was either battle-drunk, I thought, or mad. 'I'll give them a taste of fire, I will!'
So saying, he drew out his gelstei and tried to loose a bolt of flame upon Count Ulanu and his retreating knights. But although the crystal warmed to a bright scarlet, it never came fully alive.
'Hold!' I called out. 'Hold now!'
Atara, who had her bow raised, fired off an arrow which split the mail of one of the retreating knights. He galloped away from us with a feathered shaft sticking out of his shoulder.
'Hold, please!'
With the three men I had killed lying rent and bleeding on the grass, I could barely keep from falling, too. Kane had dispatched two knights and the other two Blues.
Atara had added two more men to her tally, while Maram, Alphanderry, Liljana and Master Juwain had done extraordinarily well in beating off the assault of armored knights without taking any wounds themselves. But now the agony of the slain took hold of my heart. A doorway showing only blackness opened to my left. The nothingness there beckoned me deeper toward death than I had ever been. To keep from being pulled inside, I held onto Alkaladur as tightly as I could. Its numinous fire opened another door through which streamed the light of the sun and stars. It warmed my icy limbs and brought me back to life.
'Val, are you wounded?' Master Juwain asked as he came up to me. Then he turned to take stock of the corpse-strewn hummock and called out to the rest of our company, 'Is anyone wounded?'
None of us were. I sat on top of the trembling Altaru, gaining strength each moment as I watched the last of Count Ulanu's men disappear over the same ridge from which they had come.
'What now, Val?' Liljana said to me as she wiped the Count's blood from the tip of her sword. 'Do we pursue?'
'No, we've had enough of battle for one day,' I said. 'And we don't know how close the rest of the Count's army is.'
I looked up at the blazing sun and then out across Yarkona's rocky hills, calculating time and distances. To Liljana, to my other battle-sickened friends, I said, 'Now we flee.'
They needed no further encouragement to put this hill of carnage behind us. We eased the horses down its slopes into the grassy trough through which we had been riding when the Count had surprised us. And then, wishing to cover ground quickly, we urged them to a fast canter toward the east. The pass into Khaisham called the Kul Joram, I guessed, lay a good twenty-five or thirty miles ahead of us. And beyond that, we would still need to ride another twenty miles to reach the Librarians'
city.
We kept up a good pace for most of five miles, but then one of the pack horses threw a shoe, and we had to go more slowly as the sun-scorched turf gave way to ground planted with many more rocks. Here, too, there was a little ring-grass and sage pushing through the dirt, which the horses' hooves powdered and kicked up into the air. It was dry and hot, and the glazy blue sky held not the faintest breath of wind. The horses
sweated even more profusely than did we. They kept driving onward through the murderous heat, snorting at the dust, making choking sounds in their throats and gasping until their nostrils and lips were white with froth. When we came across a little stream running down from the mountains, we had to stop to water them lest our dash across the burning plain kill them.
'I'm sorry,' I whispered to Altaru as he bent his shiny black neck down to the stream.
'Only a few more miles, old friend, only a few more.'
Alphanderry, gazing back in the direction from which we had come, spoke to all of us, saying, 'I'm sorry, but this is all my fault If I hadn't opened my mouth to sing, we'd never have been discovered.'
I walked up to him and laid my hand on the damp, dark curls of his head. I told him,
'They might have found us in any case. And without your songs, we'd never have had the courage to come this far.'
'How far have we come?' Master Juwain said, looking eastward. 'How far to this Kul Joram?'
Liijana brushed back the hair sticking to her face as she caught my eye 'There's something I must tell you, something else I saw in the Count's filthy mind. After Tarmanam, he sent a force to the Kul Joram to hold it for his army's advance into Khaisham.'
Maram, bending low by the stream to examine the hooves of his tiring sorrel suddenly straightened up and said, 'Oh, no - this is terrible news! How are we to cross into Khaisham, then?'
'Don't you give up hope so easily,' Liljana chided him. There is another pass.'
'The Kul Moroth,' Kane spat out as he gazed into the wavering distances. 'It lies twenty miles north of the Kul Joram. It's an evil place, and much narrower, but it will have to do.'
Maram pulled at his beard as he fixed Liijana with a suspicious look. 'I thought you promised that you'd never look into another's mind without his permission? This was a sacred principle, you said.'
'Do you think I'd have let that treacherous Count nail you to a cross because of a principle?' Liijana said. 'Besides, I promised you, not him.'
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