by David Weber
He shrugged, and Brandark's eyebrows rose.
"He showed you how to do it?"
"Oh, aye," Bahzell said in a casual, offhand sort of tone belied by the twinkle in his eye. "It's not so very difficult, once you've been shown the way of it."
"Which is?" Brandark was practically quivering with the burning curiosity of a scholar, and Bahzell smiled.
"Little man, your nose is all a-twitch with questions, and isn't that just a frightening thing to see when a man's so proud and fine a nose to twitch about?"
Brandark shook a fist ferociously and took a stride towards him, and the Horse Stealer held up his hands in mock terror.
"Now, don't you be after offering violence to a mild-mannered fellow like myself!" he scolded. Brandark growled something under his breath, and Bahzell laughed.
"Aren't you after being just the most predictable fellow in the world when a man's after knowing the right lever to pull?" he asked with a smile. "But I'd not like you to burst, or do yourself a mischief, so, in answer to your question, it's not so very different from healing a wound or an illness."
"You mean you act as Tomanâk's channel?"
"In a manner of speaking. It's not just Himself—there's after being a mite of me in there, as well—but that's the bones of it. It's like . . . like healing a place, not a person. I'll not say as how it's a protection strong enough to be after standing against all the forces of hell, but it's set a circle about Lord Edinghas' home manor as nothing short of Krahana herself is going to want to be crossing. Yet it's not something I can be taking with us when we go, Brandark. And it won't be after lasting forever once I leave."
"So that's why you were willing to promise Kelthys you'd wait," Brandark said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.
"Aye." Bahzell agreed. "It was in my mind as how Krahana's lot would be after coming here, to be finishing what they'd once begun. And, truth to tell, I was minded to meet them here, with the other lads from the Order and Himself's protections in place to be giving us an edge. But now I'm thinking that if they'd been minded to be coming this way, we'd already have been after seeing them." He shrugged, then frowned. "And since it seems they'll not be coming here, then it's no choice I have but to be going there."
"And once we ride out of Warm Springs, we'll be leaving its protection behind us," Brandark said, nodding slowly. "That's why you're so unhappy you didn't try to stop Kelthys from calling in his wind riders after all."
"Aye, for it's not just a matter of the protections here that we'll be leaving behind," Bahzell said somberly. "I've no way of knowing just what sort of 'champion' Krahana may have been after sending here. For aught I know whoever—or whatever—he is, he may have been after summoning up his own version of a protected a circle from her. And if that's the way of it, Brandark, then I've no way at all, at all, of knowing what those as try to cross it may find themselves facing."
"I understand that, Bahzell," Brandark said quietly. "But you have to understand that there's not a one of us—not me, not the Order's lads, and not Kelthys and his wind riders—who hasn't thought long and hard about this. You may not know what we'll find, and we certainly can't know, until we've done it. But it's not as if all of us don't know that going in."
"Brandark, this is nothing a man should be facing out of friendship," Bahzell said, speaking just as quietly as Brandark. "Tomanâk knows I've never had a friend so close as you've somehow gotten. I'll not embarrass either of us by pounding what that friendship's after meaning to me into the ground. But this I will be telling you, Brandark Brandarkson—there's naught in this world I'm wanting less than to see you riding north beside me."
"I'm sorry to hear that," Brandark said levelly, "because you don't have much choice about it."
"Brandark—"
"Just what makes you believe you have the right to tell me, or anyone else—including Kelthys and the other wind riders—what we have the right to face? You're a champion of Tomanâk, Bahzell. We all know that. And we all know that facing Krahana is the sort of challenge Tomanâk chooses His champions to face. We know the brunt of it is going to fall on you and the other lads of the Order, and that nothing we can do will change that. And so what?"
"And so it's not making any sense at all, at all, for the lot of you to be running up against the like of Krahana. If Hurthang and Gharnal and I have it to do, then what's the sense in risking others alongside us?"
"Are you going to try to tell Walsharno that he can't go along? If so, then you've just spent the last four days wearing the seat out of your breeches and pounding your arse flat for nothing!"
"Well, as to that," Bahzell began, "Walsharno is after—"
"Don't start any circumlocutions with me, Bahzell Bahnakson! You're not leaving him behind because you know he wouldn't stay, whatever you tried to insist upon. And, in the second place, because the two of you each know exactly what the other is thinking and feeling—really thinking and feeling."
The shorter hradani held his massive friend's eye almost defiantly in the lamplight streaming out of the manor house windows to throw their black shadows across the veranda. And this time, it was Bahzell who looked away.
"You know he wants to go . . . and why. And it's not just because the two of you have bonded with one another. He wants to go because he hates and despises and loathes Krahana as much as any of us. Because he wants vengeance for the herd he grew up in before he left for the Bear River herd. And because it's his right—his right, Bahzell—to choose to fight evil when he sees it.
"Well, that's my right, too. And Kelthys'. And the right of the other coursers, and of the other wind riders. All that good men have to do to allow the Dark to triumph is to do nothing to stop it when they find it before them."
Brandark stopped speaking and drew a deep breath, then chuckled with something approaching his normal insouciance.
"I hope you took notes, Bahzell," he said lightly. "Because unless you did, I doubt very much that you'll manage to keep it all straight later. And also because you're not going to hear me getting that sloppy and emotional very often."
"No," Bahzell said softly. "No, that I'm not." He looked back up at the stars again for several endless seconds, then inhaled deeply, nodded to the nail-paring moon, and slapped the Bloody Sword lightly on the shoulder.
"All right, little man," he rumbled. "You've the right of it, when all's said. And even if you hadn't, Tomanâk knows you're nigh as stubborn as a Horse Stealer."
"Please!" Brandark gave him a very pained look. "No one, this side of a Sothōii or a lump of granite is as stubborn as a Horse Stealer hradani! It's a law of nature—a physical impossibility. It's a well known and clearly demonstrated fact that nothing short of six solid inches of skull bone can produce your genuine Horse Stealer stubbornness. I refer you to the treatise by—"
His tone of lordly superiority disappeared into a sudden squawk as two shovel-sized hands plucked him easily off the veranda, despite his own two hundred and seventy pounds of solid muscle and bone. He flailed wildly as he sailed through the air, but it was a relatively short journey which ended in a tremendous splash as he alit far from gracefully upon the surface of Lady Sofalla's fishpond.
* * *
"So tell me again just why you're here?" Sir Fahlthu Greavesbiter growled, glowering suspiciously at the man in front of him.
"Because Lord Saratic told me to be," Darnas Warshoe replied with a shrug.
"Let's try this again," Sir Fahlthu snorted. "I know Lord Saratic assigned you to ride with my company. And I know you're supposed to be some sort of expert guide and scout. I even know that Lord Erathian is supposed to've personally asked for you because of your knowledge of the Bogs and Glanharrow generally. But, d'you know, Master 'Brownsaddle,' I don't quite believe that that's all there is to it."
"And why shouldn't you believe the truth?" Warshoe asked patiently.
"Because I've known a great many guides, and a great many scouts, Master Brownsaddle. A lot of them have carried bows, and some
of them have carried crossbows. One or two of them have even carried arbalests. But you, Master Brownsaddle, are the only scout I've ever met who carries both a Sothōii bow and a hradani arbalest at the same time. I can't help wondering why you do that. I mean, a man can fire only one bow or one arbalest at a time, unless you possess even more hidden talents than I believe you do."
"You know," Warshoe said, "I do believe that I somehow managed to overlook that, Sir Fahlthu. Thank you for bringing it to my attention."
Cassan's agent snorted with obvious amusement at the absurdity of the knight's suspicions, but it was an amusement he wasn't particularly close to feeling. Fahlthu was obviously brighter than he'd assumed, and Warshoe wondered if he was also brighter than Saratic and Sir Chalthar had assumed. If so, that mistaken estimate might have unfortunate consequences over the next couple of weeks or so.
"Milord Knight," he said after a moment in an even more patient tone, "I'm not sure what sort of flea you have in your ear, but I assure you that I'm exactly who and what I say I am. I'm flattered that Lord Erathian asked for me. And I'm even more flattered by it when I think about the extra kormaks he's paying me for acting as your own personal guide through the Bogs. On the other hand, if you have a problem with who's been assigned to do that, you're certainly welcome to discuss it with Sir Halnahk, or Lord Erathian, or even Lord Saratic. It genuinely doesn't matter to me."
He shrugged, watching Fahlthu's face narrowly from behind guileless, bored-looking eyes, and hoped the knight didn't decide to take him up on the suggestion. He wasn't particularly concerned about Halnahk or Saratic, but Erathian was a little too weasellike for his taste. The traitorous lord warden might just decide there was some profit for him in telling Fahlthu about the weeks Warshoe had spent acquiring his familiarity with the pathways through the Bogs. It was fortunate that Warshoe's eye and memory for terrain had always been good enough to make that familiarity convincing to someone who didn't know the Bogs himself.
"As for my choice of weapons," he continued, "of course I can only use one of them at a time. But I'm a scout, Sir Fahlthu. Sometimes that means I'm going to be riding on a horse, when a horsebow is likely to come in a bit handy. Other times, I'm going to be sneaking around in the grass, where a weapon—like, say, an arbalest—that a man can fire while lying prone in the bushes might come in handy. And this is not a hradani arbalest." He held the weapon in question out and tapped the dwarfish proof mark on the steel bow. "This is Axeman work, Sir Fahlthu, and it cost me a pretty kormak. I do have seem to have . . . ah, acquired some hradani bolts for it, but unless I'm mistaken, weren't we supposed to be muddying the water by suggesting that Bahnak's Horse Stealers might be involved in all of this?"
Fahlthu frowned ferociously, obviously angered by Warshoe's withering irony, but Warshoe didn't really care about that. Or, rather, he did care—a man like Fahlthu would be perfectly capable of arranging an accident for someone who had sufficiently irritated him—but he preferred the cavalry commander's anger to his undiverted suspicions. It might be unlikely that Fahlthu could figure out everything Saratic and Baron Cassan had in mind, but it wasn't impossible. And if he did figure out what Warshoe's true mission was, there was no telling what he might do about it. Except, of course, that a man like Fahlthu would have absolutely no interest in being saddled with the blame for the death of the Kingdom of the Sothōii's first noble.
"All right," the knight growled finally. "I don't believe for a minute that you're the innocent, simpleminded sort you'd like me to believe, 'Master Brownsaddle.' But whatever you may be is no concern of mine. Except for this." He fixed Warshoe with a cold, angry eye. "While you ride with my company, you ride under my orders. And I would not advise you to violate them in any way. Is that clear, 'Master Brownsaddle'?"
"Of course it is," Warshoe replied. "Whatever you may believe, Sir Fahlthu, I never had any intention of violating your instructions."
* * *
"Why do you think they've been so quiet lately, Sir Yarran?"
"I beg your pardon?" Sir Yarran Battlecrow looked up from the tankard of ale the serving maid had just plunked down in front of him. "Did you say something, Milord?"
"Yes," Sir Trianal Bowmaster said, then grimaced and waved one hand through the pipe smoke-thickened air. The mess hall attached to Lord Warden Festian's barracks was packed with Glanharrow's own armsmen and almost half of the ten troops of Balthar armsmen who had accompanied him here. That many raised voices, one or two of them already beginning to bawl out the words of a ribald song with more than a trace of tipsiness, made it hard enough for a man to hear his own thoughts, much less what the fellow sitting beside him might have said aloud.
"I asked," he said more loudly, "why you think they've been so quiet lately?"
"Well, as to that, Milord," Sir Yarran said as thoughtfully as a man could when he had to half-shout to be heard, "I'm inclined to be thinking it's a matter of weather and your uncle's reinforcements."
Trianal arched an eyebrow and curled the fingers of the one hand in a drawing motion, inviting him to continue. Sir Yarran grinned, then took a long pull at his tankard, and shrugged.
"The weather's finally clearing, Milord," he pointed out. "That's probably making it easier for them to get in and out of the Bogs, with or without stolen cattle or horses. But at the same time, it's taken away the cover of all those nice, thick fogs they used to run about inside, and we've moved every cattle and horse herd in the area of their original operations out to the west. That means they'll have to range further out, and the dryer, harder ground—and the fact that the rain doesn't come along and wash out any hoof prints five minutes after they're made—means we'd find it far easier to track them back to their ratholes. They'll know that as well as we do, so when you add to that the fact that Milord Baron's seen fit to send in his own armsmen—which both raises the number of bows and sabers we can send after them and simultaneously says he's minded to take this whole business a mite seriously—I'd say it's fairly plain what they're thinking."
"I see." Trianal pushed the remnants of his supper—exactly the same food any of his armsmen might have expected—around his plate with a spoon and frowned. Sir Yarran watched him and very carefully allowed no sign of his inner smile to show. Sir Yarran was inclined to think that all the good reports he'd had about Trianal had been accurate. The lad was conscientious, hard-working, and determined not to disappoint the uncle he clearly idolized. He was also not only smart but willing to actually use that intelligence . . . which all too many young nobles of Sir Yarran's experience had not been.
But for all of that, he was still only nineteen years old, and he couldn't quite hide his disappointment at the thought that his adversaries' caution—or cowardice—might deny him the opportunity to show what he could do.
"Do you think they've given up for good, then?" he asked after a moment, trying valiantly (though with imperfect success) to conceal his disappointment.
"No, Milord." Sir Yarran leaned closer to his titular commander so that he could speak without shouting—and with less chance of being overheard.
"Milord," he continued in the patient voice he and Festian had used to train generations of eager young armsmen, "there's two sides in any fight, and neither one of them's got any real interest in losing. Which means that whatever you may want the oily bastards to do, they're going to be trying to think up something you won't want them to do.
"Now, we know that whoever these . . . people are—" he avoided mentioning any names, despite the voice-drowning background hubbub "— they've already shown us as how they're pretty damned determined to make Lord Festian look like he can't find his arse with both hands, and to make your uncle look foolish for having picked him to replace Redhelm in the first place. I'm thinking it's not so very likely that they'll just decide it was all a bad idea and that they ought to go home and behave themselves. And even if it happened that they—or some of them—were beginning to lose their nerve, we've a pretty fair idea of who they are, and yo
u know your uncle better than I do. D'you really think he's going to be inclined to let them go home and pretend as how butter wouldn't melt in their mouths?"
Trianal barked a laugh at the very thought, and Yarran nodded.
"Aye, and if you and I think that, don't you think those on the other side might be thinking the same? Which means their best chance to get out of this with their skins whole is to succeed in what they started out to do in the first place. And they'll not do that by sitting home on the other side of the Bogs and letting Lord Festian put Glanharrow back in order.
"So I'm thinking that what they're doing right this minute is either sitting back and waiting to see just how long Milord Baron is prepared to leave you and your armsmen here to support Lord Festian, or else thinking about whether or not they want to reinforce their side. Or it might be they're doing both of those at the selfsame time."
He shrugged, and his expression was noticeably more grim as he drank another large mouthful of his ale.
"So the answer to your question, Milord," he said finally, letting his tankard thump back down on the plain, plank tabletop, "is that, aye, I think we'll be seeing them again. Maybe sooner than we'd like."
* * *
"Well, at least we're rid of her at last," Dahlaha Farrier said. She pouted into the mirror above her dressing table, leaning close to examine her faultless complexion critically, and her golden hair gleamed under the lamplight.
"You're rid of her," Varnaythus corrected. He sat comfortably slouched in an armchair, watching her primp for an evening with Trisu's cousin Triahm. The first evening they'd spent together since Dame Kaeritha's arrival at Thalar Keep.
"What do you mean?" Dahlaha's eyes shifted, gazing at his reflection in her mirror, and there was an edge of something—petulance, perhaps—in her tone.
Varnaythus simply looked back at her blandly. She'd already made it obvious that she resented his return to Thalar, and he saw no reason to let her guess that he resented it as well, probably more than she did. And although he had no intention of admitting it to her, he'd been more than a little frightened when he got the instructions that sent him back. He'd had no desire at all to get any closer to a champion of Tomanâk than he had to, and especially not at a time when that champion's suspicions might well have been aroused. So he'd been delighted to discover that Kaeritha had left Thalar several hours before he himself arrived back there.