Mother of Lies

by Dave Duncan

  Every shelter had been provisioned with enough food and fuel for a two-night stay. Each morning the men were allowed to load up as much as they could carry of whatever had not been consumed. Then the huts and their remaining contents were burned. At the fourth shelter the weather turned so bad that they had to stay three nights, huddled together in fetid misery, listening to the wind howling through the chinks. The food lasted, just, but the fuel did not. On the last night they could drink only if they sucked on fragments of ice.

  Next morning the weather was little better, but now they must move on or die. The march was resumed in a thick blizzard. Snow was drifting in a few places, but mostly it just blew and the ground was scoured to bare rock. Fortunately the way was marked and led mostly downhill, in a long but easy slope. When Saltaja judged that the day was near to ending, she passed the word for Cutrath and he came to trudge alongside the chair. He was just another huge man swathed in furs. It was not until he spoke that she could be sure it was he.

  “Another pot-boiling to go, Aunt.”

  “Why do we keep going down? We are not over the Edge yet, surely?”

  “No, Aunt. We are coming to Mountain of Skulls, they say. A big climb tomorrow. Stralg lost more men there than he ever lost in battle. So they tell me.”

  She thought it was also where his brothers, Finar and Fitel, had died, but did not say so, not being sure. “I was not satisfied with my quarters, these last three days. I want you to go ahead with the advance party and pick out a place next the fire for me.”

  Cutrath sighed. “My aunt is kind.” He disappeared into the mist. His father had used exactly that sort of impudence when he was young.

  It seemed near two pot-boilings before she saw him again. The hut was smaller than ever—absurdly small for four sixty men—and still icy cold. It was also dark, full of grumbling, jostling shadows as the men filed in, but there was a fire. Cutrath was sitting on a keg beside the hearth, and she went to claim it. She sat and pulled off her mitts to warm her hands.

  “I need Guitha,” she said. “Find her.”

  Cutrath loomed over her, very big in his furs. “The huntleader is carrying her. She has frostbite. She can’t walk.”

  How annoying! “Then my military attaché will have to deal with my chamber pot, won’t you? I need the curtains put up.”

  Cutrath knelt at her side. “Aunt,” he said quietly. “Listen!”

  The front of his hood was open. Under the grime and stubble, he looked scared, and that infuriated her. He should be beyond such weakness now. She had been Shaping as fast as she thought safe. Must she resort to even more drastic surgery?

  “What’s wrong?” she demanded.

  “Sh! We mustn’t start a panic. When we got here, I went to light the fire. Aunt, the hearthstones were still warm under the ashes! I swear it!”

  Her first, unthinking, response was, “Late couriers coming from Florengia! We missed them in the snow.”

  “We couldn’t have missed them! The road’s too well marked. Aunt, suppose it’s someone ahead of us?”

  Fear ran through her like a peal of thunder. “You’re imagining things.”

  “No! Aunt, I could smell the fire! The last supply party stocked this place a sixday ago. The fire wasn’t that old. It was recent.”

  “That’s im …” Was it impossible? “Ahead of us? We would have seen traces of them before now.”

  He shook his head. “In these pigsties? Who would notice? Nobody counts the pemmican. Outside … The wind wipes away footprints.”

  Her heart began to pound frantically. Cutrath was right to be frightened. Rebels? Celebres again? The Orlad one? It could be all four of the accursed Celebres, but the Werist was the one who knew the country. He could have killed Therek and then somehow gotten ahead of her. And she had closed all the doors behind her! She gasped for breath. Holy Xaran defend me! “Find Heth! I must speak with him!”

  “I’ll tell him when he arrives.” Cutrath went away.

  She crouched over the fire, shivering constantly. She must have a hot drink, something to eat. Then she would feel better.

  Soon Heth dropped to one knee beside her. Evidently Cutrath had told him the news, because his eyes blazed blue, like chips of ice. “You think we may have cut our own throats, my lady?”

  “It’s the Florengians, isn’t it? That Orlad?”

  “It could be. He’s a warrior to reckon with.”

  “You must send some fighting men ahead! Catch them and kill them! There can’t be many of them.”

  Heth shook his big head. “No. I think that dizzy nephew of yours is imagining things. Even if he isn’t, it’s too late to worry about it. Tomorrow we climb the Mountain of Skulls, assuming the bridges and ladders are still there. If Orlad or anyone is ahead of us and wants to stop us, then this is where he’ll try. He’s had all day to break the staircases and cut the ropes.”

  “We can’t go back!”

  “No, we can’t. But there can’t be very many men ahead of us or we’d have found the rations short. I have lots of men! We’ll need a few days to repair the damage, that’s all. We may get hungry, but we can do it.”

  She peered inside his mind and confirmed that he was still loyal. He was giving the best advice he had. But she still had to ask, “You’re quite sure?”

  “Quite, my lady. The men are exhausted. They need food and rest. The worst thing we could do is start a panic!”

  She could agree with that. “Are there other bridges after this?”

  “A few. Nothing we can’t repair or jump over if we have to. No, the place to close the trail is right here, my lady. If it’s going to happen, it already has. We’ll know in the morning.”

  MARNO CAVOTTI

  heard the fighting before he saw it, but that was the whole point of his journey—this country was just made for ambushes. At first sight it seemed absolutely flat, but in fact it was dissected by a network of shallow channels. In the days before the Vigaelians came, the peasants had grown crops on the plain and planted palm vines in the lower, moister hollows. Now the level ground was mostly weeds or pasture and the vine trellises had collapsed into a sort of jungle tangle that could easily hide the entire population of Dodec. Every day without fail, the ice devil host camped outside Tupami dispatched foraging parties to rustle cattle, and that sort of dirty habit just cried out for a reprimand. Two days ago they had hunted north, toward Celebre, and yesterday east, so hopefully today south, to where Hostleader Vespaniaso was waiting with a couple of hunts.

  Vespaniaso was quite capable of running a routine massacre, but a leader should attend a battle if he possibly could, just to show his men he cared. Cavotti had decided to make the effort. The chance to spend a night with Giunietta had helped. The fifth or was it six now? He had even started thinking of their relationship as a romance, until he had been quietly warned that he was far from her only partner. She almost never refused a Werist, he was told. Half the army knew Giunietta. But raw sex was better than nothing for a man without a home or family.

  The six guanacos pricked up their ears nervously and hummed, but the wind was behind him, so they should not be smelling blood. Marno cracked his whip to warn them that he would not tolerate nonsense. The chariot continued to rattle and bounce along the dusty track. For the first time in ages, the wind felt cold. The sky was a lead plate and would likely drop some rain soon to make an official start of winter. Florengia had very little in the way of seasons, but very little rain could slow down a lot of war.

  Stralg had been pulling back, concentrating his forces in the northwest of Florengia. So far he was avoiding towns and cities, having learned at Miona that they were flammable. At the moment the Fist’s prime objective was undoubtedly to protect his supply lines and his road home. Cavotti had closed in around his perimeter and the rest of the Face was basking in the delusion that it had been liberated, that the war was over. It wasn’t, but how long the present standoff would continue was in the lap of Weru Himself. A year of victori
es had boosted the partisans’ morale enormously and they were collaring new men far faster than Stralg could bring in reinforcements. Another year should do it, two at the most.

  Today, if all went well, the bloodlord would lose another sixty men. The bestial sounds of battle grew louder; then the road dipped and Cavotti saw evidence of recent carnage in the hollow ahead. The track was flanked on either side by jungle, an exemplary ambush site. Vespaniaso had chosen well. There were bodies in open view on the ground and thrashing shrubbery showed that the fighting continued on both sides. The vultures had not arrived yet.

  The llamoids unanimously decided that they did not want to go any closer. Marno battleformed his throat to release the growl of a hunting cat-bear, a sound that never failed to curdle their blood. The chariot shot forward like an arrow, down the long slope. By the time he managed to rein in the team to a walk, he was in among the bodies—ten Florengians and four Vigaelians. That was a puzzling, bothersome ratio. If the ice devil foragers had been running along the road, they should have died on it when the jaws closed. How had the battle gotten into the shrubbery?

  What he was hearing now, over the guanacos’ terrified humming, was mostly just screaming. Werists roared a lot during a battle. When it was over, the surviving losers screamed. Heroes could recover from incredible wounds. With proper care, they could take an amazingly long time to die, and the winners were usually in no hurry. Butcher had been known to keep men dying for days, using nothing more complicated than a sharp stick. Something along those lines was going on in the shrubbery.

  It didn’t sound quite right, though … It took the Mutineer a moment to realize that the spectators were jeering in Vigaelian.

  He yelled at the team and lashed out with his whip. The llamoids were happy to oblige. The chariot jumped forward, careering wildly along the trail, rocking wildly, zigzagging between bodies, gathering speed. For a moment, as the car cleared the last corpse and began to climb the long slope ahead, Cavotti could hope that he was actually going to get away unnoticed. The Vigaelians in the shrubbery had more amusing things to do than keep an eye on the road. Then an animal throat bugled. Three golden warbeasts scrambled out of the brushwood and came after him, closely followed by two more, all baying like hounds to summon more.

  The chase was on. There was no hope of a chariot outrunning Werists, but he had about a fifty-yard start and might as well save his breath as long as he could.

  What had happened? Had the consistent foraging pattern been a trap? Had the notorious ambusher himself been ambushed? Perhaps he had been betrayed, or Vespaniaso had. Giunietta? Or perhaps this was just the chance of war and the Mutineer’s good fortune had run out at last. In ten years he had never been seriously wounded.

  The luck stops here.

  That had not been Vespaniaso’s main force at all, just some of his scouts running into the ice devil foragers and dying for it, a minor skirmish. The main forces were elsewhere.

  Cavotti kicked off his sandals and ripped away his chlamys, leaving himself wearing only his collar. He battleformed just enough to let the guanacos smell him. They hummed like a million beehives and increased their pace. The chariot raced up out of the hollow, onto miles of empty plain, in danger of flying apart from the battering it was taking on the ruts. He saw no cover, nothing much in sight anywhere except a few clumps of fruit trees, usually with a cottage and outbuildings nearby, now deserted. The roofs of Tupami were visible in the distance, across an empty plain that somewhere hid Vespaniaso and eight sixty men.

  Having stayed biped, Cavotti could grip the rail with taloned, black-furred paws while twisting around to view the pursuit. He saw the same five yellow brutes behind him, all quadruped and more or less feline. Another three farther back had chosen to go more equine for greater speed. He had taken on long odds before, but eight to one was unthinkable. The three leaders were so close that he felt he was staring straight down their slobbering maws and had to struggle against an urge to battleform all the way; he must keep his wits working as long as he could.

  He wondered if they knew who he was. After so many years of battle-forming, he had grown absurdly big, even for a Werist. Only Filiberno could match him for size, and Filiberno was so battle-hardened that he looked more like a bear than a man. Very few of the Freedom Fighters traveled by chariot and only Cavotti and Filiberno drove teams of six. If the Vigaelians knew that they were about to become famous, they would try not to kill him too quickly. His dying days were likely to be long ones.

  The road swung north in a long curve. The right-hand ice devil cut the corner, which was clever for a warbeast and stupid by human standards. Cavotti waited, watching, judging distances … angle … and speed, because the team was tiring. The two closest pursuers were almost close enough to stroke, keeping their eyes fixed on him but unable to board the speeding, bouncing chariot. The corner-cutter was moving in on the right, aiming for the team, being animal-stupid.

  It closed on the lead right guanaco and everything happened at once. The team swung left to avoid the predator. The left-hand pursuer found itself almost under the wheel and tried to come aboard. Gripping the rail for balance, Cavotti swung a killer back-kick to smash its head in. The chariot left the trail, such as it was, and the axle broke. He vaulted over the rail; cleared the tumbling wreck of llamoids, warbeast, and chariot with one giant step off the pole; and hit the ground ahead going flat-out. One of the pursuers lay alone in the dirt, howling as it tried to heal its shattered skull. Distracted by the guanacos’ screams and wildly flailing limbs, the other three had leaped in on the kill. Stupid! He would have gained a hundred yards before they realized their main prey was escaping.

  Cavotti sprinted away along the trail on cloven hooves, gradually increasing the length of his stride as he went. Biped was his standard warbeast because it gave him an overview of what was happening on a battlefield. His front limbs were armed with claws, his mouth with fangs, and his forehead sprouted a conical horn about a handbreadth long. Being still fresh, he should be able to keep ahead of the pack for quite a while.

  The problem was that he had nowhere to go. Eight sixty friends concealed somewhere along this road or one of the many other trails close by were absolutely no help when you had no idea exactly where they were and had—he risked a backward glance—a lot of enemies after you. Human-Marno would be able to count them. Now he just knew they were too many to fight. He had nowhere to hide and they could follow his scent anyway. Oh, Weru’s armpit! The road was bending to the left for no reason. He went across country, cutting the corner, but the pack would cut it more.

  Why stay on the road? Human-Marno had had a reason. Oh, yes, friends on the road maybe somewhere, if lucky.

  Livestock ahead … from where? … more livestock … golden … They were warbeasts, Vigaelian warbeasts rising out of the ground. Many, many, many … Another Stralg patrol coming out of a hollow. They had seen him, were heading his way. Human-Marno would have been able to work out who they were but it didn’t matter. He was between enemies. No escape.

  He changed direction, heading for a lonely tumbledown shack under some spindly, unpruned trees, a farm abandoned when its owner died in the war, long ago. Peasants lived in villages now. Safer. Cover would not save him, but if he got his back against a wall he might take a few more of the brutes with him. He hurdled fences. He was slowing now, but he could still reach the ruin before the opposition reached him—conserve his wind for the fight.

  He hurdled a last tumbledown fence into a wasteland of weeds and shrubbery. He was probably the first man to set hoof in there for fifteen years, nearly sixteen. He was thirsty. There was no defensible position, not even a stoop he could stand on to gain some height. He chose a barn wall where he would not have the sun in his eyes. Nothing to do now but wait.

  The luck stops here. One more year and he would have learned how victory tasted. Now it would be Stralg who got Marno stuffed, not contrariwise. The devils might guess who he was. Biped warbeasts were unusual.
Memo: Fight to the death.

  He had little time to catch his breath before a long tawny beast came over the fence and without breaking flow gathered in its back feet and sprang at him like a golden flame. His hoof caught it full in the muzzle. He was slammed back against the wall and it went down in a splash of blood. Two came in together. He slashed and kicked. Something massive crashed into his groin, but his genitalia were retracted deep inside and covered by a bony plate. Jaws caught his right wrist and crunched it. They were all over him now. He clawed and jabbed and tried to kick, but they were too many, smothering him. Talons raked his chest, rattling off every rib like rocks on a washboard. He sank his horn in an eye socket and was blinded by blood. Teeth at his throat—

  He had never imagined that there could be such pain. Some of the howling must be his, bubbling through blood … not all of it his. He’d hurt some of them. But his limbs were all twisted and broken and would not obey him. He was down in the dirt, howling and bubbling, writhing to try and escape the pain and only making it worse, bleeding … hurting. Oh, Weru, help me! Two naked Vigaelians were standing over him, mocking, laughing, and systematically stomping him so his bones wouldn’t set. Another had found a pointed fencepost.

  ORLAD CELEBRE

  located the strip of pemmican he had dropped on the cave floor, gnawed off another piece, and went back to lacing up his boot. The boot had spent the night inside his bedroll and was warmer than his hands. The pemmican gritted on his teeth as he chewed.

  “A hot bath,” Fabia said, busily doing much the same things at his side. “I would give its weight in gold for a tub full of hot, scented water.”

  Waels looked up from folding his blanket. “It would freeze with you in it. How long did you say you spent here, my lord?”