Good Company

by Dale Lucas

  But where was the lord marshal? Or the Lady Tzimena?

  A thunderous knocking suddenly sounded from the cart bed, as though arrows were thumping against the underside of the carriage. Rem released his hold on the fore wall and fell back into the cart, arms shaking from the strain of holding himself up. Torval stared at the cart bed, clearly puzzled by what he was hearing.

  It came again, fast, urgent. Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump.

  “What in the sundry hells is that?” Rem asked.

  “Help us!” someone said from underneath the cart. It was a woman’s voice. “There’s a hatch down here!”

  Was that Tzimena?

  Rem and Torval stared at one another. A hatch? At the moment all they could see was the tools, weapons, and supplies piled in the cart bed, clearly covering any hatch that might exist beneath. Torval started yanking items aside first. Rem followed suit an instant later.

  In seconds they’d cleared a span of the cart bed and revealed that there was, indeed, a small, square hatch in the floor. Rem pushed aside the wooden bolt that held the hatch in place and lifted it. Below he saw the mud of the road and two dirty, flushed faces: the Lady Tzimena and the swordswoman Elvaris.

  Torval offered a hand. “Hurry up, lass. Come on!”

  Tzimena took the dwarf’s proffered hand and clambered up through the hatch into the cart bed. Elvaris followed. The two women scooted away from the hatch, and Rem slammed it shut. The four of them sat there, trying to catch their ragged breath, hunkered down in the cart, listening as arrows continued to thump into the outer walls of the cart or whiz overhead.

  Rem studied them both. Elvaris, though a hardened soldier, was clearly shaken by something. Rem guessed what it might be.

  “Sandiva?” he asked.

  Elvaris shook her head. “Tried to charge an archer behind a tree. Took two in the chest.” Rem could see the need to lament her lost companion vibrating through her—the lost look in her eyes, the way her lip trembled and her hands shook. But he also saw that Elvaris was fighting the urge to indulge that feeling at present. She was distracted, lost in thought, probably trying to work out some plan to protect the lot of them.

  “Kolia, too,” the Lady Tzimena said miserably. “She grabbed me, shielded me. Aemon’s tears—if we don’t find a way out of this, they’ll kill us all.”

  Torval was making a racket, hastily searching the weapons arrayed in the cart by the lord marshal’s men. “We’ve got axes, spare swords, a few pikes, even some shields . . . but not much that can help us against those bastards surrounding us.”

  “Wirren had a crossbow,” Rem suggested. “That’s something.”

  “Aye,” Elvaris said, “but just one. Accurate, yes. But fast? No. You won’t get far against experienced bowmen with that thing.”

  Outside, someone screamed. It was a sound of shock and surprise—a man suddenly overtaken by an unseen adversary. A breath later, the scream was choked off.

  “On your right!” Rem heard. It was the bandit woman, the one who’d first addressed them on the road. “There’s one among the trees! He got Wicklow!”

  Rem sighed.

  “Music to my ears,” Torval said.

  “What’s happening?” the Lady Tzimena asked.

  “One of our party made it off the road and into the woods. Clearly they just took out one of the bandits.”

  “But they know there’s an enemy among them now,” Elvaris said. “Advantage spent.”

  “But not ours,” Torval said. “If only a few of them start watching their own backs and seeking the killer, they won’t have the time to rain arrows down on us. If we could just find something in here to give us an edge—”

  “What’s in there?” Tzimena asked, suggesting a heavy, locked chest crammed into a far corner of the cart. The chest bore an iron padlock—the sort only employed if something very valuable lay within.

  Torval snatched up an ax from the weapons pile. “Let me try to break into it.”

  “Wait,” Rem said, then scurried to the fore of the cart bed and yanked Wirren’s corpse down to join them. The driver hit the bed with a heavy thud, in a most disrespectful position. Rem hastily rolled him over, laid him flat, and started searching his clothing.

  “What are you after?” Torval asked.

  “Keys,” Rem said. “Infinitely faster if we can find them—and we just did.”

  His hand plunged into a pouch on Wirren’s belt and emerged with a set of keys on a brass ring. Rem hurried to the locked chest and tried every key in the heavy lock. The first three didn’t even fit its keyhole. The fourth slid in. He unlocked the chest with shaking hands. When he threw back the heavy, reinforced lid, he froze.

  He wasn’t sure what he’d thought he’d find, but this wasn’t it: the interior of the chest was divided into nine square cubbyholes, each packed with knots of dried meadow grass, hosting several round, smooth objects about the size of large apples. The apples even had stems of a sort: a thick, stiff piece of tightly wound cord protruding from a small hole in the crown of each. Though there were nine holes, there appeared to be only six of the curious little objects.

  Rem drew one from the chest and examined it. It was heavy—probably made of iron—and smooth all over except for a line of engraved script around the middle.

  The script was runic—dwarven, to be precise.

  Rem looked to Torval. He saw his partner’s eyes grow wide and his mouth fall open in wonder.

  “Impossible . . . ,” Torval muttered, eyes never leaving the object in Rem’s hand.

  “What is it?” Rem asked. He saw by the expressions on Tzimena’s and Elvaris’s faces that they were just as ignorant of what the iron spheres in the locked chest might be. But clearly Torval was not.

  Torval snatched the heavy object from Rem’s hand. “Do you have your flint and steel?” he asked.

  Rem was even more confused. Flint and steel? “Right here,” Rem said, reaching for the pouch at his belt where the stone and the steel rod lived.

  Torval tipped the sphere in his hand sideways, to allow that stiff cord protruding from its crown to stand out. “Light it, then. Hurry.”

  Rem had no idea what Torval was getting at, but he did as commanded. He fished the flint and steel from his belt and began striking them together, producing sparks that never gave Torval the flame he was after.

  Rem heard something metallic, far off to his left. It was outside the cart. The Red Raven’s cage. Voices followed the ringing and the creaking.

  “Hurry,” the Red Raven said. “Your hands are shaking.”

  “Hold your cock,” someone else said. “I’ll have this popped in a jiff.”

  “We’ve got to find Tzimena,” the Raven said quietly.

  “Forget about her,” a third person snapped. This one was female, her voice husky. “Tymon says—”

  “Hang Tymon!” the Raven snapped. “I’m not leaving without her!”

  Rem looked to Tzimena. She’d heard it, too. The sick look on her face told Rem that she wasn’t sure where she’d rather be—sheltering in this cart, or out there on the road, with her secret lover who was about to be freed from his birdcage.

  “Hurry!” Torval growled, and Rem realized he’d stopped trying to light the cord. He raked the flint along the steel rod two or three more times before some of the sparks finally did the trick. Suddenly the cord was burning—and the sparkling, sputtering flame moved along the cord’s length with startling swiftness.

  “Torval,” Rem said, staring at the crawling flame. “What is that—”

  Torval stood and lobbed the sphere up over the high wall of the cart, off into the woods. The instant the sphere left his hand, he dropped into a crouch again and clapped his hands over his ears.

  Rem, Tzimena, and Elvaris all stared.

  Torval lifted his hands for just an instant and clapped them back in place again. “Cover your ears! Hurry!” he said.

  Rem just managed to do so before a sudden sound like a striking thunderbo
lt shook the world around him.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Rem felt the cart—the whole forest—shake beneath and around him, some swift, sudden, godlike force that registered as a deep, unsettling vibration in his own chest. A billow of smoke belched up from the forest over the lip of the cart. The air stank of sulfur and char. When he removed his hands from his ears, he could hear the woodland outlaws shouting back and forth to one another: What was that? Where’d that come from? Crikey, they’ve got magic! Behind all their inquiries, there was another sound, close by.

  Someone screaming.

  Elvaris and Tzimena lowered their own hands from their ears. They stared at Torval as if he’d just awakened a dragon and asked them to pet it.

  “What was that?” the Lady Tzimena demanded.

  “That, milady,” Torval said with an evil grin, “was dwarven mining craft, weaponized.”

  Rem looked to the open chest, to the five objects remaining, then back to Torval. “Blasting powder?” he asked.

  Torval nodded. “The same.”

  “I thought . . . I’d heard . . . I mean, we were taught those were just stories!”

  “Well,” Torval said, indicating the chest and its deadly contents. “We’ve got five more stories to tell. Let’s not dally, eh?”

  Rem nodded, snatched another powder sphere from the chest, and tossed it to Torval. They repeated the ritual, Rem seeking a spark with his flint and steel, Torval lobbing the blasting sphere after its cord was lit—to the right side of the road this time—the four of them hunkering down and covering their ears just before an earthshaking explosion jostled the cart and filled the world once more with wafting smoke and the stench of sulfur.

  “Somebody hit the ox wain!” one of the bandits cried. “Take to the trees if you have to!”

  Another: “Up and over, lads! High arcs, just like in practice!”

  Rem and Torval were busily trying to light a third blaster when something suddenly thunked down into the bed of the cart not a foot from them. It stood vertical, vibrating a little from the suddenly arrested force of its descent.

  An arrow.

  Cack.

  Elvaris scrambled to grab the riders’ shields stowed in the cart. She shoved one toward the Lady Tzimena, tossed another to Rem and Torval, then grabbed a third for herself. She held it over her head as though expecting rain.

  “Milady,” she said to Tzimena, suggesting the proper positioning for the shield.

  Tzimena followed suit, and just in time. Two more arrows thunked down viciously, one landing in Wirren’s unfeeling torso, the other just behind Rem and to the right.

  Torval snatched up the shield Elvaris had thrown him and tried to position it so that it might cover both him and Rem at once. With his free hand he held the third blasting sphere. Rem’s hands busied themselves trying to get a good spark to light the blaster’s fuse.

  There. A hiss and a hungry flame. Torval lowered the shield just long enough to stand and lob the sphere—forward and to the left this time, farther away than his prior tosses. Just as he fell to his knees and raised the shield again, drawing Rem into an uncomfortably close embrace, a trio of arrows whistled down in rapid succession. One landed an inch from Rem’s extended boot; the other two slammed into the upraised shield and held fast. Rem dared an upward glance and saw the leading edge of one arrowhead peeking through the thick wood of the shield’s inner curve.

  The tossed sphere exploded. Rem, who hadn’t had time to cover his ears before the thunderous roar, suddenly heard a terrible ringing. It was like a bell was struck and allowed to ring indefinitely, its knell sounding on and on into eternity, a single, unbroken wall of metallic gonging without interruption. Everything he heard was suddenly distant and muffled, the ringing drowning it all out.

  He looked to Elvaris and Tzimena. Each had a shield to herself, which gave them greater protection, but their shields bore several arrows each, while still more stood in haphazard arrangement throughout the cart.

  “We can’t stay here,” Rem shouted at Torval. “If they keep sending these arrows down upon us, one of them will hit its mark sooner or later!”

  Elvaris broke in. Rem knew she was shouting, as well, but her voice still sounded deep and far away, as though she spoke from the bottom of a well.

  “They’ll have snipers in the trees soon!” she said. “If one gets a good angle, they can pick us off!”

  Torval yanked his maul near. “Down the hatch, then!” he said, suggesting the ladies’ means of ingress to the cart. “You two will have to make a break for the tree line while we cover you!”

  Rem stared at Torval, the two of them impossibly close—close enough to kiss—under that upraised shield. The look that passed between them said all that needed to be said: if they left this cart and tried to cover the women while they fled, they’d have very little chance of surviving the encounter.

  “There’s nothing for it, lad,” Torval said quietly. Rem couldn’t hear him, precisely, but he knew what the dwarf had said.

  “Eyes open, fists clenched, backs to the wall,” Rem answered, and offered a mordant smile.

  “Let’s grab the last of these,” Torval said, leaning sideways to try to pluck out the final three blasting spheres.

  Something suddenly slammed into the outer wall of the cart. Rem couldn’t be sure, because his ears still rang, but he thought it might have been glass, because it made an unmistakable shattering sound upon impact. The shattering was followed by a foul smell—sulfur again, and the unmistakable acridness of burning wood. Rem turned and saw flames visible just over the right-hand wall of the cart.

  “Sundry hells,” Torval growled. “They’ve got firebombs of their own . . .”

  As Rem stared at the cart wall, saw the flames leaping over its far side and black smoke starting to swirl away into the woodland sky, his eye caught swift movement. It was an object of some sort—small, oblong—arcing from out of the trees. It looked as if its path would take it right into the cart bed.

  He yanked Torval aside, suddenly unconcerned about trying to stay under the protection of the shield. The two of them sprawled toward Tzimena and Elvaris, putting a few more feet between themselves and the space they’d just occupied. As they hit the haphazardly piled supplies scattered around the women, the falling object hit the cart bed. It shattered upon impact.

  Flames spread everywhere.

  Some of the street urchins in Yenara called them dragon gobs—bottles or jars of lamp oil or some other incendiary stuffed with a rag or scrap of cloth soaked in the same substance and set on fire.

  And now the front end of the cart bed—including poor dead Wirren and the chest of blasting spheres—was in flames.

  The blasting spheres!

  Rem realized what was about to happen just as Torval yanked him backward, roaring as he went.

  “Out the back!” the dwarf commanded, and threw the considerable weight of his compact body against the trifold gates at the rear of the cart. One strike was all it took. The gates flew wide and Torval toppled out onto the road. Rem shoved the women out ahead of him, and the three of them hit the ground running, making straight for an old, half-rotten log near the side of the road. They caught air and dove behind the log just as the blasting spheres succumbed to the flames.

  The cart exploded, a roaring wall of thunder, smoke, and blunt concussive force. Rem felt himself hit the ground . . . was vaguely aware that the ladies had landed in a tangle within arm’s reach . . . dared a glance up and saw the air roiling with poisonous black clouds, swirling embers, and flaming debris. The knelling bell in his ears had changed tone, but not fierceness.

  They’ll be coming, Rem told himself, trying to will his body to respond to his commands to move, to rise, to arm himself.

  Any minute . . . coming . . . from the trees . . . from the road . . .

  Torval? Where’s Torval?

  He forced himself up onto his knees, half tumbled against the enormous roots of a nearby cedar, blinked, and t
ried to orient himself. His head was swimming. His ears were useless. The whole world stank of fire and brimstone.

  He kept his back to the tree and looked to Elvaris and Tzimena. Tzimena was bent over her bodyguard, studying a horribly bloody wound in the swordswoman’s leg. A giant splinter of wood, as big as three fingers side by side, protruded from her thigh, crimson rivers spilling out around the site. As Tzimena struggled to tear cloth from her dress and stanch the bleeding, Elvaris kept trying to push her mistress off and get herself upright.

  Rem pushed hard, feet on the ground, back against the tree. Clumsily he managed to get himself standing and drew his sword. He was searching the swirling smoke that swaddled them on all sides, wary of any attackers, when a pair of them simply materialized out of the haze.

  They were right behind Tzimena, on the other side of the log the three of them had used for hasty cover. One was a man, nondescript in every way except for his woodsman’s greens and the bow drawn tight in his hands. An arrow point gleamed, trained right at Rem, shaking a little as the man struggled to hold the draw. Beside him was the Red Raven. He had a sword in his hand, but it was at rest, hanging in a loose grip at his side.

  “Tzimena,” the Raven said. Rem could not hear him, of course, but he could read her name on the outlaw’s lips easily enough.

  Tzimena offered some terse response, barely sparing a glance over her shoulder. She was more concerned with tending to Elvaris’s wounded leg. When she did not immediately leave Elvaris’s side and answer the Raven’s call, the outlaw stepped forward, grabbed her arm, and yanked her to her feet.

  Rem lunged, ready to put his sword to use.

  The archer at the Raven’s side stepped forward, making the lethal closeness of his arrow, the lethal ease of his shot, all too apparent to Rem.

  Rem froze. He slowly lowered his sword, but did not drop it.

  In answer to his grip, Tzimena jerked away from the Raven and took a step back. The Raven’s face betrayed an instant’s frustration and fury. He lunged, holding her arm more tightly this time, and yanked her to him so forcefully that Rem thought her arm might pop from its socket. Tzimena’s soot-covered face was streaked with tears, and she beat at the Raven and wriggled in his grasp, eager to be back at Elvaris’s side. The Raven seemed to struggle now to control himself. He let her beat at him, but he held her firmly and made no attempt to block her haphazard blows. He seemed to be trying to honestly calm her, to get her to understand that hysteria would not serve her in the present moment.