From behind, amid the standing handful of Acoma honor guard, a warrior snickered.
Tapek roared in mindless fury. His focused might unleashed. His hand fell in a cutting motion, and a shadowy shape swooped out of empty air. The apparition reared up, then towered, a darkness like a well of moonless night. It poised for only a heartbeat, then spun in a rush toward Keyoke.
On reflex, the old man raised his blade to parry. Fast as a more youthful man, he met the thing edge on. But his foe this time was nothing solid. His weapon passed unobstructed through inky darkness. He did not twist aside in attempted flight, even as the spell cut inside his guard. Because Keyoke met the spell unflinching, it struck him full in the chest.
Armor might have slowed it; the shimmering, silk of his adviser's garb daunted the dark not at all. Its fell touch shriveled the fabric. After that, Keyoke's voluntary control was sundered. The proud old warrior who had dandled Mara in childhood stiffened. His fingers loosened. His sword fell from his hand as the shadow bit into him. His eyes lost their determination, widened in agony and terror.
And yet at the last, the fighter had the victory. His tired heart could not withstand the shock and the pain that a younger man would have endured; his spirit, its term long served, had in late years kept a light hold on life. Keyoke tottered, his chin tipped toward the sky as if in salute to his gods. Then he collapsed in a heap, his body as dead as the stones beneath him, and his face relaxed in peace.
Tapek's rage remained unquenched. He had wanted the old man to scream and beg, to howl in animal misery, that Mara, cowering in her litter, might know her beloved Adviser for War had suffered as a dog might, expressly at the whim of its master. Tapek cursed. Regret goaded his temper to new heights. He had wanted Mara dead before her old warrior's life flickered its last, so that Keyoke would see her sent to Turakamu before him, and die knowing his lifework was wasted. Consumed by white fury, the magician lunged after the litter, abandoned now by its bearers and sitting forlorn in the thicket. Tapek muttered incantations and snapped harsh spells out of air. He bit off his words and spiked each breath with gestures. His conjury raised a cluster of silvery disks that hovered, spinning, above his hands. Their edges were keener than knives, and the breeze carved by their passage gave off a dissonant hum. 'Go!' the mage commanded.
The death disks whirled away faster than sight, and carved through the thicket. Their touch sucked life. Green plants and saplings withered, shriveled in a moment to dry twigs. No object held power to stop them; no barrier could slow their course. They crossed stone as if through shadow, and sliced through the litter curtains without rending a thread. As they converged inside, a woman's choked-off scream rang through the glade. Then came silence, unbroken by the rustle of songbirds.
Every wild creature had long since fled.
The warriors at Tapek's back remained. Whipped to outrage by the attack on their mistress's litter, their Strike Leader called them to charge.
Tapek loosed a maniacal laugh as he pivoted to face them. The swords in their hands looked foolish, and the battle lust in their faces the grimace of rank fools. The magician amplified his spell. He waved his hands, sending disk after disk spinning into the ranks that rushed him.
Men fell. They did not scream, having no moment to draw breath. One instant they lived and ran, shouting Acoma battle cries. The next second, cut by the mage's killer disks, they withered. Their legs folded, spilling them like stick figures onto dry earth. Tapek's fury remained in full flood. As if determined to scorch and kill everything in sight, he continued to hurl magic. Flash after flash left his hands shaped as spells of destruction. The air chimed and sang off the edges of his spinning projectiles long after the last of Mara's warriors had fallen dead, Incomo sprawled among them in a crumple of silk robes like some incongruous trodden flower.
Tapek's strength ebbed suddenly.
Exhausted, dizzy and fighting spinning vision, the magician had no choice but to pause and catch his breath. He did not gloat. Resentment still smoldered within him, that mere men had defied him. He did not regret their demise at his hand, but that he had been goaded into killing Mara too quickly. Her end had deserved to be painful and prolonged, for the trouble she had caused the Assembly.
Tapek shrugged his robe straight, then picked his way between carcasses toward what once had been a green thicket. A scattering of slaves and servants cowered whimpering, their faces pressed to earth. The death spells had winnowed their numbers, and what few were left were half mad. Tapek stalked past and pushed through dry sticks and blackened branches toward the dead patch of earth surrounding the Acoma litter. Dried leaves and brittle twigs crumbled to dust at his passage.
Only the litter's bright lacquer was undimmed; spared the effects of life-draining magic, it seemed almost artificial in the brilliance of untrammeled sunlight. Tapek stepped ahead and swept aside the curtains with their embroidered blazon of shatra birds.
A lifeless woman reclined on the cushions, staring with eyes frozen wide in astonishment. Her limbs were clothed in the robes of a great Lady, but her features were not Mara's.
Tapek's curse rang out over the ruin in the roadway.
He had accomplished nothing but the execution of some maid wearing Mara's robes. He had been duped! He, a mage of the Assembly, had been lulled by the presence of Keyoke and a handful of officers and soldiers into the belief that he had overtaken the Lady. Instead, she had counted a victory upon him, anticipating his hot temper. The soldiers had all known, before they died, that she had bested a Great One of the Assembly; as had the old man. Keyoke had played along with the ruse, no doubt to his fullest amusement before he died.
Tapek glared through the woods in frustration. Except for a cowering handful of slaves, his spells had cut down all life. Any in the Acoma retinue of high enough station to know the Lady's whereabouts were now slaughtered, and no satisfaction could be gained by questioning or torture of witless slaves.
Tapek found curses insufficient vindication. Neither could he subside and meekly swallow the irony of Mara's triumph. He snapped up his hand, creating a vortex of scintillating colors above his head. Faster and faster he whipped the energies, then, with a flick of a wrist, cast the deadly rainbow toward the woods. The energies struck the trees and undergrowth. Magic raised a crack and a shimmer that exploded in alien blue-white light. The singed air give off a stench of cooked metal, and living matter was immolated. Where the slaves had been, there was nothing, not bones, not shadows, but only a scouring of uncanny spellcraft.
The coruscation dimmed, then flicked out. Sweat-drenched, Tapek stood panting. His eyes swept back and forth, examining the scope of his handiwork. Before his feet yawned a crater stripped of soil. The rock of the earth stood bare to view and above it, for yards in each direction, nothing crawled or flew. Revealed also were the Acoma servants who had managed to flee the farthest. No longer sheltered by brush, they lay writhing in the aftermath of the magic that had lashed them. Their faces and skin were blistered, blackened leather; their hands were seared fingerless. These few still twitched, dying in lingering agony that could find no voice even to scream.
'Splendid,' said a voice out of air.
Tapek started, turned, and saw Akani, lately arrived from the City of the Magicians. He wore a shield spell against arcane attack, that sparkled like a bubble in the afternoon sun.
Too spent to offer greeting, Tapek sagged. His strength was at lowest ebb, but he took heart at the possibility of swift reinforcement. 'Good. You are needed. I am exhausted. Find -'
Akani interrupted in annoyed acerbity. 'I will do none of your bidding. In fact, I was sent to find you. Kerolo sent word that you were acting rashly.' With cold eyes and a study for detail, Akani reviewed the ravaged countryside. 'I judge the case was understated. You've been played for a fool, Tapek. A child could be expected to react to taunts, but a full-trained mage of the Assembly? Your excesses speak ill of us all.'
Tapek's features turned thunderous. 'Do not mock me
, Akani. Mara set a clever trap to defy us!'
The litigator turned magician said in contempt, 'No need. You do an exceptional job of aiding her cause by yourself.'
'What? I am no ally of hers!' Tapek tottered forward, fiercely irked that his powers were spent.
Akani dispensed with his defenses, a subtle insult to emphasise the plain fact that his fellow mage was reduced to helpless fuming. With a regard to the last twitching bodies of Mara's servants, he said, 'You realise that if Lady Mara fled her litter in disguise, you have left not a face intact to tell.'
Tapek responded with pique. 'Then engage your strength to find her! Mine has been fully exhausted in this cause.'
'Wasted, more like. Nor will I act on this further.' Akani advanced on his colleague. 'I was dispatched by the Assembly to fetch you back. You have acted without warrant on a matter that is under discussion; that is a shameful breach of our covenant, and matters are far graver than you know. You were exhorted to use prudence, yet you let your passions rule you. If the Good Servant is not already dead, you have destroyed the very officers we had at hand who might have revealed the extent of her plot against us.'
Tapek frowned. 'Plot? Against the Assembly? You mean she's done more than defy us?'
Akani sighed. His youthful face looked tired. Moved by his background in law to examine all sides of an issue, he admitted, 'We drove her to it. But yes, Lady Mara may have in mind to disrupt our treaty with the cho-ja.'
'She'd never dare!' Tapek exploded, but the memory of Keyoke's brazen challenge contradicted that presumption. There was nothing that gods-accursed Acoma bitch would not try. Nothing.
'The Lords of the Nations never expected her to survive the might of the Minwanabi, let alone destroy them,' Akani qualified drily. 'Our kind have long been inured to struggle by dint of our exalted position. We have forgotten to guard against contention, and our past complacence brings us peril.'
Then, as he saw aggression kindle in his colleague's eyes, the ex-litigator added, 'Your part in this matter is finished, Tapek, by the Assembly's decree. Now come with me.' Taking his teleportation device in hand, Akani activated it, then firmly gripped Tapek's shoulder. The two magicians vanished in an inrush of air that sucked eddies in the drifting smoke, and wafted fresh air over the last, jerking spasms of dying Acoma servants.
The Lady's boldness had saved her. Tapek, in his impromptu search, had never thought to look off the roads, in the deepest, thickest undergrowth. He perceived no deeper than Mara's outer trappings as a pampered noble Lady, and could never have imagined how profoundly her foray into Thuril had changed her. Besides her bold strike into rough country, the direction Mara had taken when she left her litter and main company was not northward toward Kentosani. Instead, she had cut due southwest, in direct line toward the nearest cho-ja tunnels.
She and the warriors with her traveled without rest through two nights. Now, near sundown of the second day, the Lady stumbled on her feet. Saric walked at her shoulder, his touch at her elbow holding her upright, though he was scarcely more able himself.
The one scout who still maintained alertness raised a hand. Only when Mara had been restrained gently to a stop did she realise the reason for his signal.
The birds in the high, dense canopy of ulo trees had stopped singing.
She motioned for her rear guard to halt and said, 'What is it?'
Saric poised, listening. The Strike Leader on point quietly urged his warriors to search the treetops.
'Are we in danger from ambush?' Mara asked in a whisper.
The scout who had first given warning shook his head. 'Hardly here. Even thieves would starve if they staked out this area of the forest. No traffic to keep them supplied.' He cocked his head, and was fastest to note the approaching noise of armed men. 'A patrol, I think, my Lady.'
'None of ours,' Saric concluded. He glanced at Strike Leader Azawari, who nodded, while the small band of hand-picked warriors drew swords. To the scout the Acoma adviser said urgently, 'How far are we from the tunnel entrance?'
'A mile at best,' came the answer; too far to run in this company's exhausted state, even if they were not to be harried from the rear.
Saric stepped before his Lady, who sweated under her layers of borrowed armor. She had carried the added weight well enough, but her skin was chafed raw from the unaccustomed motion of walking. Still, pluckily, she kept up appearances and reached for the sword at her side.
Saric clamped her hand in a freezing grip, his penchant for questions lost to urgency. 'No. If we are attacked, you must flee and seek to hide. Save the sword for yourself, to fall on if need be, should you be taken. But to try to hold here would be folly.' More kindly he added, 'You have no training, mistress. The first stroke you met would cut you down.'
Mara looked him sternly in the eyes. 'If I must run, you will follow suit. Nacoya did not school you for your office only to see you wasted in armed combat.'
Saric managed a half-flippant shrug. 'A sword thrust would be kinder than a magician's spell.' For he had no illusions. Their small, fast-moving party might have escaped notice from the Assembly, but not for long. Yet to remain beyond reach of arcane retribution, his Lady must live to find refuge in the cho-ja tunnels.
Mara noted her adviser's sharp silence; she tried not to think, as he did, of the Great Ones. To open her thoughts to such fears, she must surely collapse and weep: for Lujan and Irrilandi, perhaps dead with all of her armies; for Keyoke, Force Leader Sujanra, and Incomo, who were all that remained of her old guard, and who had been set out as bait with her litter, their lives her diversion, and their sacrifice her last hope for Justin.
Where Hokanu was, the gods only knew. That he also might be most hideously lost did not bear imagining. Worst of all, Mara shied off from the question that gnawed at the edges of her mind: that Justin might indeed survive to claim heirship to the golden throne, but at the cost of every other life that was beloved to her.
Mara bit her lip. Poised with Saric on the edge of flight, she firmed her will to keep from trembling.
The sounds of snapping twigs and marching men drew closer. Her party's trail was plain to read, since they had taken no care to hide their tracks, as they had passed far enough from the road that their presence was unlikely to draw notice. Once in the deep wilds, speed had been deemed of the essence.
Or so her reduced council of officers had decided, and they paid for that misjudgment now.
Strike Leader Azawari sorted his options and chose. 'Fan out,' he murmured to his warriors. 'Give them no solid rank to charge on. Let it be man to man, and confusing, to hide our Lady's escape for as long as we can.'
Saric's fingers tightened over Mara's hand. 'Come,' he whispered in her ear. 'Let us be off.'
She resisted him, rooted and stubborn.
Then the rear rank scout straightened up and gave a glad shout. 'They're ours!' He laughed in stark relief and pointed to the glimpse of green armor that came and went between the trees.
Men who had begun to scatter pulled back into one main body. Swords slid into scabbards, and grins flashed in the deep-woods shadow. Somebody hammered someone else's armored shoulder, and words passed around of a wager. 'Ten to one that old Keyoke prevailed, and sent us reinforcements!'
'Hush!' rapped their Strike Leader. 'Form ranks and be quiet.'
Azawari's sternness reminded: there was grave danger still. The new arrivals might only be bearers of bad news.
Now the ranks of the warriors appeared, striding briskly through the forest. They seemed fresh. Their armor was correct, if bearing scrapes in the high-gloss finish from forced march through close brush. Mara fought the need to sit down, to steal a moment of rest while her two forces exchanged tidings and regrouped.
Only Saric's iron grip kept her propped on blistered, aching feet. 'Something's not right,' he murmured. 'That armor. The details are wrong.'
Mara stiffened. Like him, she sharpened her gaze to search faces. Threat of peril prickled the hair on her
neck. The men were all strange, and that distressed her. Too often, her people were not known by sight, since her armies had grown vast over the years.
It was Saric, first earmarked for his station because he never forgot a face, who hissed, 'I know them. They were once Minwanabi.'
The approaching force numbered thirty, and it closed in relentless formation. The Force Leader at the fore raised a hand in friendly salute, and called the Strike Leader with Mara by name.
Unobtrusive in her warrior's garb, Mara stared at Saric. Her face had paled. Even her lips were white. 'Minwanabi!'
Saric nodded fractionally. 'Renegades. These were ones that never swore to your natami. That dark-haired man with the scarred cheek: him I cannot mistake.'
One soft-hearted moment of pity, Mara recalled, and now she had treachery in payment for the clemency that had prompted her to let these foemen go free. She had only a split second to judge her call; for these warriors in another five steps would be among her ranks, dangerous as adders were they turncoats.
It tore her inside, to think they might be loyal; but Saric's memory was impeccable. Keyoke and Lujan had sworn by it. She sucked in a shaky breath and snapped a nod to her First Adviser.
Saric raised the alarm, that her woman's voice might not give her away. 'Enemies! Azawari, call the charge!'
The Strike Leader's order bellowed over chaos as the lead ranks of traitors discarded appearance, drew swords, and leaned into a fighting run.
Mara felt her arm half jerked from its socket as Saric spun her from the ranks, and behind him. 'Go!' he half screamed; even under pressure his adviser's tendency to seek subterfuge remained. 'Run and send word to the others!' he shouted, as if she were a younger soldier dispatched away as messenger.
The first swords clashed as the pair of green-armored companies closed in combat. Men grunted, cursed, or shouted the battle cries of the Acoma. They blinked sweat-stung eyes, and engaged, and prayed to their gods for the judgment to enable them to separate friend from foe.
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