“They’re staying hidden,” he said. “The thri-kreen don’t know there’s anybody up there, and the raiders like it that way.”
“They’d rather see their fellows slaughtered than take a chance on joining the fight,” Amoni said. She spat into the dirt. “Cowards.”
“The fight won’t take long, then,” Aric said. “With the raiders at full strength, we might have a chance. But with half, we’ll be swiftly dispatched.”
He stood suddenly and drew his sword. “What are you doing?” the halfling guard demanded.
“They’ll be up here any moment,” Aric said. “If you think we’re not defending ourselves …”
“Oh, let them come,” the halfling said. “There’ll be more than a bug or two slain before they get here.”
Amoni and Myrana followed suit, rising and drawing weapons.
And across the way, a boulder sailed from the hillside, crashing to the canyon floor behind the startled thri-kreen who hadn’t yet climbed the slope.
Surprised shouts followed in the boulder’s wake.
Thri-kreen peeled off from the first wave of attack and started up the opposite hill. The battle was fully engaged, on both fronts. The raiders had the edge of height, but the ferocity of thri-kreen warriors couldn’t be understated. Aric watched one grab a raider and plant its mandibles into her arm, injecting venom that froze her in place. The thri-kreen dispatched her with a quick stab from its gythka and turned to face its next opponent.
The time had come. Aric spun around without warning and buried his sword in the one-eyed man’s chest. The raider’s single eye bulged, his jaw dropped open, and blood burbled out. Aric withdrew the blade and more blood spurted from the wound.
The halfling started toward Aric. Amoni blocked his way, her cahulaks whipping through the air. One four-bladed head sliced through the halfling’s arm, then the other sliced up his chest and chin.
Aric grabbed Myrana’s arm and hoisted her to her feet. “Come on!” he urged. “Over the hill!”
“But.… Sellis and Ruhm!”
He hadn’t yet figured out that part of it. Ruhm and Sellis were capable. Even now they had to be fighting their own way clear.
An elf raider bounded toward them with a bone axe in both hands. “Stop where you are! We’re not done with you!”
“Yes, you are,” Amoni said. She met the elf’s advance. Aric took advantage of the moment to lead Myrana up the slope. The soil was loose, sliding under his feet. They had to dig in, sidestepping up. It was hard for Myrana, so Aric took a step, braced, and hauled her up beside him, then moved on to the next.
Before they reached the crest, two more raiders raced to intercept their escape. One was a brutish human or part-human of a breed Aric didn’t recognize, the other a stout, bronze-skinned man who looked to be from Draj.
Aric released Myrana’s hand and slashed at the brute, who blocked the blow with a chitin shield and stabbed with the short spear he carried. Aric sidestepped the spear thrust. His foot came down awkwardly on the uneven ground and slid out from under him. The second man jabbed with a dragon paw. Swinging his heavy sword, Aric caught the dragon paw’s jab, deflecting the weapon and continuing his blade’s sweep toward the man’s skull.
The man raised the dragon paw to parry the sword. Aric’s heavy steel blade crashed through the paw’s wooden shaft and bit into the man’s head, carving a deep gash above his ear. The man cried out, hurled his weapon aside and clapped his hands to his head as he fell to his knees. Aric kicked him in the chest and he went down.
But the kick unbalanced Aric again. He caught himself on his hands, just as the other fellow drove his spear’s keen obsidian tip at Aric again. Aric tried to dodge but his foot slid on the rocky slope, and the point scraped his ribs. Aric, still unbalanced, batted the spear away with one hand and shoved his sword point-down toward the ground to keep from falling. Only the sword’s length kept him from tumbling down the slope.
The brute charged, spear outthrust for the killing blow. When Aric tried to turn to face the man, his weight on the ancient sword bowed and snapped it with a loud crack. Most of the blade’s length skidded down the hill. Aric dropped to one knee, ducking under the thrusting spear and bringing the remains of his weapon, about four inches of blade, up at the same time. The brute’s momentum carried him past Aric’s shoulder, and those four inches of steel sank into his gut. Blood drenched Aric’s hand and arm. The brute spun away from him, tearing the stub of a sword from Aric’s grasp, and rolled down the slope.
Aric picked up the fallen spear. It was not a weapon he had any familiarity with, but he’d rather learn it fast than be without any.
Amoni had finished off her elf opponent, and with those enemies dispatched, the way to the hilltop was clear. Below, the thri-kreen had cut a swath through the raiders. A glance at the far ridge showed the same thing happening there, but Aric was moving too fast, he and Amoni helping Myrana up the steep, treacherous crest of the ridge, to see if he could spot Ruhm or Sellis.
Then they were over the top and working down the other side, panting from the hurried climb. On this side the sunlight seemed brighter and hotter, the sky a brighter olive, the sounds of battle dimmed.
They rushed as much as they could down the slope, balancing between trying to move quickly and not wanting to send cascades of rock and dirt down to announce their presence. Somewhere on this side, three more raiders waited with the mounts.
Once they neared the bottom, they smelled the animals, then saw their guards. They raiders had corralled the beasts in a makeshift pen. Using a natural cutaway in the hillside, they blocked the open side with branches and brush. One raider slept while the other two gambled with fragments of white bone. Aric, Myrana and Amoni cut across the slope toward them.
When they were almost directly above the guards, one of the erdlus sniffed the air and gave a warbling cry of alarm. The guards dropped their bits of bone and snatched up weapons. Aric and Amoni took a couple of running steps and launched themselves into the air.
Amoni crashed into one of the guards, bowling him over. Aric landed hard, a couple of feet before his man. He bent his knees upon landing and sprang up fast, thrusting with the unfamiliar spear.
His opponent, a battle-scarred veteran wearing vestiges of a Tyrian military uniform, moved away from the thrust and swung a fang-spiked morningstar at him. The heavy weapon whistled inches above Aric’s head, as he ducked the blow and lost his footing. He sprawled on the ground, spear under his belly. The wound he’d suffered earlier sent darting pains though him, but he rolled over quickly and jabbed the spear’s obsidian point into the veteran’s ankle.
The man screamed. He put his weight on his good leg and tried to raise the morningstar again. He went off balance and stumbled to correct himself, giving Aric time to push to his feet and drive the spear into the veteran’s chest. The veteran looked at him with a shocked expression, and slowly sank to the ground.
Aric snatched away the morningstar as the man fell, with Aric’s new spear locked in his chest. The guard who had been sleeping was sitting up. Amoni, having slain her foe, spun her cahulaks on their rope, and the guard dodged right and left to avoid them. He lunged for a crossbow he had set aside before going to sleep. Aric hurled the morningstar. It struck the guard’s hand, cutting him and bouncing away. The guard snatched back his hand, and one of Amoni’s cahulaks’ heads drove into his abdomen.
The mounts were stamping and squealing, but all three guards were dead. Aric helped Myrana down from the slope.
“Grab some erdlus!” he shouted. Amoni was standing in the midst of them but had not yet moved to secure any. “We need five of them.”
“Five?” Amoni asked. “We are only three!”
“For Sellis and Ruhm?” Myrana speculated. “Yes. We have to go back for them.”
“Why?” Amoni asked. “They’re our friends.”
“But they’re—”
“What? Probably dead? They might be. But they might be alive,
too. Until we find out …”
“What of the demon? Warning Nibenay?”
“We need to see if they’re alive.” Aric said. “We can’t just leave them.”
Amoni didn’t argue further. Despite the talk he’d had with her, she was still more comfortable taking orders than questioning them. Within a few moments, each was mounted on a sturdy bird, taller than Aric and slightly heavier. They’d tied ropes around the necks of two others, which Aric and Amoni held. Aric leaned over the guard he had killed, grabbing his spear’s shaft and tugging it free.
Myrana led the way out of the makeshift corral. They left it open behind them and nudged the erdlus into a sprint. Aric glanced back to see kanks and erdlus emerging from the corral and wandering into the desert.
The erdlu’s feathers tickled his legs and arms. He tilted forward, holding onto the thing’s thick neck, a scent like almost-spoiled meat filling his nose. He directed the creature by applying pressure with his hands and knees, and after a few minutes he began to feel like he and the bird were in sync. The thing moved at a brisk but ungainly trot, swaying Aric from side to side with every long stride.
Once they were moving at full speed, Aric’s beast passed Myrana’s. He led them around the line of hills, to the canyon’s narrow end. As they neared the pass they could again hear the sounds of battle. The big bird didn’t want to enter the pass, but Aric kept up the pressure. They went into the canyon, cooled suddenly by deep shade.
To Aric’s delight, the raiders had given up fighting and were trying to escape. Thri-kreen warriors gave chase. Many had fallen, on both sides, but more raiders than insect men.
Scanning the scene, he couldn’t see Ruhm or Sellis. “Where are they?” Myrana shouted. “Sellis!”
“Quiet, Myrana!” came a hushed voice from behind a thick stand of brush. “You’ll give us away!”
Sellis emerged, then Ruhm, looking as if he’d had to fold himself in quarters to hide behind the bushes. “We hid,” Ruhm said.
“So I see,” Aric replied. “Here, we brought you mounts.”
“The thri-kreen went after the raiders,” Sellis explained. “So we decided to make for the pass. When we saw you three go over the top, we guessed that’s where you’d end up.”
“If you made it,” Ruhm added. Eternally optimistic.
“We made it,” Myrana said. “But if you don’t get on these birds we might not make it far.”
Ruhm and Sellis climbed the rest of the way down the hill and took over the erdlus. Ruhm’s staggered under his weight, then righted itself, as if considering the half-giant a challenge to which it would not concede defeat. They turned the birds around and rode back out of the pass and into open desert.
“We’ll give a wide berth to these hills,” Aric called. “Then make for Nibenay again, and pray this whole encounter hasn’t delayed us overmuch.”
Ruhm got a look at the obsidian-pointed spear Aric was still carrying. “Where’s your sword?” he asked.
“It broke,” Aric explained. “Last I saw it, I’d buried it to the hilt in one of the raiders, but there wasn’t much left of the blade by then.”
“Too bad,” Ruhm said. He showed Aric his greatclub, which the erdlu no doubt would grow to resent if they rode for long. “Still have this. Wood’s better.”
“If that club was as old as my sword, it’d be nothing but wood chips by now,” Aric said. “There’s nothing wrong with steel, but any weapon a thousand years old is going to have some problems.”
Ruhm smiled at his club and laid it across his lap. “Let you know,” he said. “In about nine hundred and ninety-six years.”
XV
FLIGHT
1
He finally gave in again.
He went back once more to the elven market, just as day inevitably gave way to night. The sun set, the wind rose, the cold began to settle in around the bazaar like an unwelcome guest who would stay too long. He intended just to watch, not to take any action.
And yet there was an elf woman there with long hair of the brightest copper, some of it piled on top of her head and held with jeweled pins, the rest cascading down her shoulders and back. In spite of the fur wrap she wore against the chill, the man could see that her body was lithe and strong. She stood at the end of the market where men met the elf women, in the glow of lanterns mounted on posts, and a human man leaned toward her, saying something. She smiled enticingly and responded, brushing his arm with her slender hand. After another couple minutes of back-and-forth, they walked away from the market, arm in arm.
The man couldn’t take it.
Once more, he raced up streets running roughly parallel to the route he knew they would take. He fingered the handle of the sharp knife he carried—the knife he had promised himself he would not use in this way again. His heart raced, and the cold air he breathed seemed to sear his throat and lungs.
The road he was on curved around and intersected the one they had taken. He reached the corner before them and stopped, breathing hard, leaning against the building. He panted and peered around the corner, watching their approach. They strolled together like long-time lovers, even though they had just met. The street was empty, but for them.
Go home, he told himself. Leave them alone. You don’t need to do this.
He had almost convinced himself of that when the human traced the elf’s cheek with his fingers, then kissed it.
A red screen seemed to descend over the man’s vision. He drew the knife. The thudding of his heart slowed and a strange calm enveloped him. He waited at the corner until they passed him.
Then he struck.
He drove the knife through the fur wrap and into the center of the elf’s back. She cried out in pain. The man dragged the blade down several inches, releasing blood in a steady stream, and yanked it out. By then the human was spinning around to face him, pawing for a weapon under his cloak. The man’s arm snaked out quickly, drawing the sharp blade across the human’s throat. Again, blood splashed his hand and the street.
A moment later, human and elf were both down, their limbs entwined, the man standing over them, wiping blood from his knife blade with his fingers.
“Murder!” somebody screeched. “Murderer!”
The man looked up and saw a woman staring at him from an open window. Before he could react, there were more shouts, and the thunder of running feet.
He would have liked to stay longer, make a few more cuts. That elf face, as pretty as birdsong … But he didn’t dare. Instead he took flight, racing back down the curving road he had taken to the intersection. At the first corner, he turned, slowed long enough to sheath the knife, then sped back up to a sprint. Another corner, and another.
The voices continued, though, screaming into the night, calling out his route. The pounding of footsteps didn’t let up. In the anxious cries he heard the news—not just an elf, but a human. Someone even mentioned the human’s name. It was a name the man recognized, not someone he knew by sight but by reputation. Ta’ak Enselti. An important person in the city.
The man had been seen, but not recognized. He was certain of that. Had his name been spoken aloud, he’d have heard it.
By a roundabout route, he headed for home. He managed to stay ahead of his pursuers, far enough ahead, he believed, to risk going there. He had to go there. There was nowhere else, nowhere safe. If the mob ran him down they would tear him apart. No one complained too much about the deaths of a few elves, but when someone of Enselti’s stature died, even the Nibenese authorities might get involved.
He didn’t dare get caught, or let himself be seen.
He ran.
2
He went in there!”
A woman had stepped from her home with a pail, intending to fill it from the nearest public cistern. Her infant son needed to be bathed, and she already had a fire going, tended by her oldest daughter, to warm the water. A shadowy form racing past her front door almost knocked the pail from her hands. “Hey!” she called after him.
“Watch where you’re going!”
The man—or so she believed it to be, although he was draped in so much clothing she couldn’t be sure—just kept running. He appeared to be panicked by something. He reached the Serpent Tower, and she could hear his footsteps as he raced up its circular staircase. Then she heard other sounds, the drumming of hurried footfalls, and shouts, angry and alarmed.
She was still standing there when the man emerged from the tower. Here he slowed to a walk, adopting a patrician air. He went to a gate, where a guard met him with obvious respect and opened the way for him.
A moment later a crowd of people rounded a curve, running in the same direction the man had. A woman saw the woman with the pail, staring at the cliff side dwellings. “Which way did he go?” she asked. “He killed someone!”
“There,” the woman said, pointing at the gate through which the person had passed. She had only recently moved to this place, after her son’s birth, and she didn’t know the wealthy people who lived in the cliff walls. “He went in there.”
The people in the mob stopped, staring at the Serpent Tower, the estates dotting the cliff’s face. “In there?” someone repeated.
“The House of Thrace!” another called.
“It’s that boy,” another one shouted. “That boy, what’s his name? The crazy one!”
“Pietrus!”
“That’s right, Pietrus!”
“I heard he killed three people!”
“Just two,” another answered. “And one was an elf. But one was Ta’ak Enselti.”
“Enselti? I’ve heard of him!”
“He’s a landowner, a merchant. He’s well known.”
“I met Enselti once! He was so nice to me.”
The woman with the pail really needed to get some water. Her daughter was inside with the fire and her baby. She wanted to get back. “Well, that’s where he went,” she said. “If you say that’s the estate of the House of Thrace, then that’s who it is. I don’t know this Pietrus, but if he’s crazy, then perhaps he’s a killer.”
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