Mok. Mok the drunkard! Blade stepped close to the cornet and scowled at him. «The message, then? Get on with it, man.»
Sesi would not be hurried. Evading Blade’s eye, staring at the floor and the walls, he labored through it.
«Gath bade me speak thus — a fat man came to the house of Nizra, the Wise One, looking for Sire Blade. I, Gath, halted him and took his message instead. The fat man said: ‘The girl Ooma, of whom Blade knows, is in danger and has great need of him. Ooma begs that Blade come at once to her.’ «
Ooma! Blade’s heart pained and remorse struck at him. He had been so busy, so caught up in a frenzy of events, that he had spared the girl little thought.
He seized the young officer by the shoulder. «You saw this fat man?»
Sesi shook his head. «I did not, Sire. I was given the message by Captain Gath. He saw the fat man.»
But Blade had turned away. «No matter. You will come with me. I have a bodyguard of six below stairs. You will take command of them and follow me without question.»
He went vaulting down the stairs, three at a time Ooma in trouble, in danger. Again he cursed himself for his thoughtlessness. He owed the girl much, had a tenderness for her and yet had been so neglectful.
Blade set a blistering pace out of the city. Through the gates to the south where no guards challenged them and no death carts rumbled. His orders were being obeyed.
The young sublieutenant and the six soldiers panted along behind the big man as he increased his pace. There was no semblance of a formation and they were all trotting to keep up with Blade’s long strides. He had noted it before — most Jedd men were short of leg.
They skirted the charnel pit and the rocks behind which Blade had lain in wait for the corpseburner and his cart. He spared them hardly a glance as he started up the hill to the house of Mok and the aunts. The soldiers and Sesi came after him as best they could, sweating and cursing and stained with dust and smoke from the smoldering pit.
Blade could see the house now. There was no sign of life. The humble little cottage brooded, desolate and alone, on its hilltop. The path here wound through a copse of melon trees and Blade halted just at the edge of the grove. His followers slumped to the ground, panting.
Blade studied the cottage. The door stood half open and his heart contracted painfully as he saw the mark — a splash of yellow paint. The plague mark. Ooma?
The young cornet and the six men saw the mark also. There was a frightened burble and Sesi came to stand beside him. «There is plague in that house, Sire. The men will not go nearer.»
Blade shot him a sideways glance. «I have not asked them. And you?»
Sesi would not meet his eye, but mumbled, «Nor I, Sire. My duties do not require that—»
He was cut short by a peal of maniacal laughter from the cottage. The young officer shuddered and stepped back a pace or two. Blade stared up at the cottage. That had been a man’s laughter. Laughter?
Peal after peal now, of a man mad with fear and pain, the eerie laughter of a man who sees Death looming out of the black mists. Mok. It could only be Mok.
Blade snapped an order over his shoulder as he sprang up the path. «Remain here, Sesi. Form up your men and keep discipline. Wait for me.» He broke into a run.
The yellow plague mark was like a running sore. Blade kicked the door open and entered. Mok lay on the floor near the table where he had passed out that night. He was on his back, his face saffron and twisted with pain, his mountainous stomach thrust up. He was laughing, the gaping mouth disclosing the ruins of blackened teeth. Laughing and laughing.
Blade, ignoring Mok, vaulted up the stairs, calling out as he went. «Ooma? Ooma — Ooma?»
Echoes mocked him. No voice answered. He peered into the room where he had left her sleeping. Empty. He ran down the corridor and glanced into the only other room. Both the aunts lay in their beds. One look at their yellowed faces was enough. Dead of plague. But where was Ooma? She had sent a message and surely she would wait here for him.
He ran down the stairs and approached Mok. The man still lived, though for the moment he had stopped that terrible laughing. Blade knelt beside him. «Mok! Mok — do you know me? It is Blade.»
The little eyes, lost in folds of jaundiced fat, slowly opened and Blade could discern a last intelligence in them. The mouth opened and words tried to slip past the swollen black tongue and were blocked. Blade bent closer, trying to understand, to make sense of the jumble and slur, of the agonized attempt to speak. Nothing.
He glanced at the table. There was a clay vessel of the powerful fermented melon juice. Blade seized it and dashed half the contents into Mok’s face, then he pried open the mouth and poured the rest down the fat throat. It was a faint hope, but the stuff might jolt Mok into a few last moments of lucidity.
The fat man choked and retched and spat. Blade knelt and put his ear close to the frothing mouth. «Mok — Mok! It is Blade. Ooma sent for me. Where is she, Mok? Where is Ooma?»
The fiery liquor did its work. Mok’s eyes cleared for a moment and he looked up at Blade with comprehension. His first words nearly tore Blade’s heart from his chest.
«Api,» burbled Mok. «Api came. They — they took Ooma and used her, all the Api soldiers, and then bound her and threw her alive into the charnel pit. She would— would not tell them of you, Blade. They would have spared her, the Api, but she would not tell them of you. A-alive — in the pit—»
Mok closed his eyes and let out a deep groan. Blade struck him hard across the face while his guts twisted with horror and remorse. Api? They were immune to plague. And who controlled the Api? Who but Nizra. The Wise One. Blade struck Mok again and damned himself bitterly for being the fool of all time.
Mok was speaking again. «Trap, Blade. T-trap. Ooma did not send for you. She was content to wait until you came. B-but Api came first. Took her. G-gave us all plague with knife. You see—»
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It was his last moment of lucidity before death. He raised a fat arm and Blade saw the cruel knife gash. They had inoculated Mok and the aunts with plague. Simple enough. Let a dagger fester in a corpse for a time, then plunge it into living flesh and plague would follow almost instantly. But this time it had not struck fast enough. Mok had lived long enough to talk.
There came a scream from the copse where he had left his bodyguard. Then a clash of arms and more screams and cries and the curses of men locked in battle. It was a trap. The Api had been waiting.
Mok’s arm dropped to the floor. The fingers curled, stiffened, then relaxed. Mok was dead.
Blade drew his sword and ran to the door and peered out. Three of his men were already down and the remaining three were retreating up the path toward the cottage and giving a good account of themselves. They were being hard pressed by half a dozen Api warriors, as hairy and long-snouted as Blade remembered them.
Blade stepped outside the door and raised his sword and bellowed, «To me, guardsmen. To me! Break off and form around me here.»
His stentorian roar for a moment broke off the hot little battle. The Api paused in their attack and stared at Blade, their pale eyes feral beneath the horned helmets, the pointed baboon muzzles dripping with sweat and slobber. The goons rested for a moment, leaning on their long wooden swords edged with flint; and Blade’s remaining three men broke off and ran to join him.
One of the soldiers was bleeding badly from a shoulder wound. Blade ripped away part of his tunic and bound it up as the man gasped out his story.
«They were concealed in the melon trees, Sire. We were betrayed by Sesi, who led us here. And now we die, for there are many of them all around the house.»
It was true. Blade could hear the high-pitched, effeminate calls of still more Api as they emerged from the trees at the foot of the hill behind the cottage and began to ascend. But he patted the wounded man on his unhurt shoulder and smiled at them all. «We are not dead yet, guardsmen. Only obey me — obey me absolutely and keep your courage and we may come out
alive yet. They are only Api after all and we will out-think them.»
Yet as he gazed down the hill to where the Api leaders and the traitor Sesi were conferring, Blade did not feel so confident. It was going to be a near thing. Yet such was his rage and despair at the moment that he welcomed it. Let them come on. They would find a Blade as cruel and brutish as themselves. His eyes narrowed as he sought out the young sublieutenant Sesi. How skillfully, how carefully, the cornet had carried out his master’s orders. Blade cursed himself again and again. He had made what might be a fatal mistake — he had underestimated the Wise One. What was worse, Blade had ignored the clear indications that this might happen. Nizra had told him of signals from the Api, and Nizra had carefully avoided mentioning the girl Ooma. Blade, busy and full of his own conceit, had let it pass unnoticed. How Nizra must have chuckled, how that ghastly head must have lolled. For by torturing Ooma he could learn the truth about Blade, at least to a point, and thus seek to discredit him as the avatar. Fool, Blade called himself. Fool — fool — fool!
At the foot of the hill the conference broke up. Sesi turned away and sat down beneath a melon tree. Blade smiled grimly. The cornet had done his part and would not fight.
The Api leader, a goon not so large as the slain Porrex, but who looked to be shrewder, began to squeal out his orders. Blade followed suit.
«Into the house,» he ordered. «There are four windows and the door to guard. I will take this door and the near window — each of you will take one of the remaining windows. They are large and clumsy, these Api, and not made for climbing through narrow windows. Now — keep your spirits up and fight for your lives.»
One of the men gazed at the yellow mark on the door and cringed away, crying out, «But there is plague in this house, Sire. We will—»
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Blade gave him a brutal shove in through the door. «There is a greater plague out here, fool. In! Must I think for all of you?»
The Api were slow in approaching and Blade understood why. He reckoned some two score of the goons, against four. Impossible odds. Once inside the cottage he cast about for some manner of evening them a bit. He stared at the corpse of Mok and had an idea. There was still time, for the overconfident goons were shouting and jesting among themselves as they moved in to slay the four men.
Blade pointed to the vast body of Mok. «Wedge him into one of the windows. Quickly. All that blubber will barricade it as well as an iron shutter.»
And so poor Mok, and his bloated body, did some service as he was thrust head first through a rear window and wedged tightly there by men who groaned and sweated as they lifted the great bulk.
Blade glanced through the remaining rear windows and saw a line of Api coming up the back slope. They were fifty yards distant, some twenty of them, and squealing with battle glee as they swung their long, pointed swords over their heads.
Only two of his men had lances. The remaining guard, he who had been wounded, had only his short iron sword, as had Blade. Blade posted the men with lances at two of the remaining three windows, one facing to the rear, the other forward, and he himself took the door and the window nearest it. He posted the wounded man in the center of the room as a reserve and indicated the body of Mok where it served as a stopper.
«Keep an eye on him,» Blade commanded. «If they dislodge the body, or cut it up or pull it out, then you must guard the window. Otherwise you will be alert for a call to aid any of us that needs it.»
He advised the men with lances: «Make your thrusts short and fast. In and out, quickly. Do not let them seize the lances or break them off. If any of them succeed in getting halfway through a window do not kill them until they are well wedged in and blocking the way to others. You understand why I say this?»
One of the guards, younger than the others, laughed and pounded his companion on the back. «We understand, Sire. Do not fear but that we will do our duty. If we must die here we will make it a dear victory for the Api.»
Blade smiled. «Good man. I do not ask for more. Now take your posts and make ready, for the fight is here.»
As he stalked to the door he heard the other lanceman mutter, «I have heard that he is the avatar — now I begin to believe it. I do not think fear has yet been coined for him, and I am a Jedd who does not believe in much.»
Blade grinned. He stood in the open door, hands akimbo, and watched the Api storming toward them. They had been bunched into two files, each of ten men, and Blade made a sound of derision. This was not the way to do it, not at all, but who was he to tell them? They were twenty-five yards distant. Fifteen yards. Ten yards. Five yards.
Blade leaped from the door with a bull-like roar, a shout that sounded up and down the smoky valley like a horn calling men to battle. A fine tremor beset his nerves and bloody mists moved in his brain. He knew the signs, knew that the battle madness was upon him and he welcomed it.
His great hoarse voice sounded over the clash and the screaming. «Come, Api! Come to me. Come to Blade. Come to my sword, my thirsty sword that lusts for Api blood! Come and die, Api.»
For a split second, the shock of his voice halted them in confusion. The forward files milled in confusion. Blade leaped at the nearest goon and swung his sword in a glinting arc, slashing off a hairy arm. He lunged and put his iron into a massive chest, through armor and bone, and kicked swiftly with his foot to disengage. Then, before they could recover and move in on him, he was back in the doorway, brandishing the bloody sword and screaming defiance.
For a moment the Api seemed on the verge of breaking and running. So terrible a foe as this was new to them, though by now they had all heard the tale of how Blade had bunded Porrex. But this was different. Now it was they who must face this mad creature, this warrior whom their quasimasters, the Jedds — and all Api despised Jedds — whom the Jedds called avatar and obeyed as some sort of god.
Blade had a moment of surcease. He made a brief glance of inspection. Mok’s corpse was holding up well and both lancemen had bloodied points. There were no Api snouts at the rear windows. Blade nodded and turned back to his own affairs.
The Api officers, a senior and a junior, were flailing at their troops with the flats of their swords, trying to drive them on. Near the door was an Api corpse, and the beast that had lost its arm was lying nearby watching itself bleed to death.
Over the squealing and screaming and cursing, Blade heard the Api commanding officer shouting threats and promises.
«Forward! On! Are Api warriors to be halted by four men? You had the woman, all of you, and now payment is due. On! And think — you all heard the promises made in the name of the Wise One. Power in Jedd and women — women for all. Think — power and women and food and easy duty for the rest of your lives. Now forward and kill them!»
Even besotted as he was by battle lust, Blade heard and understood. This was Nizra’s great ploy. How carefully he must have planned it all in advance. First to discredit Blade as avatar by information tortured from Ooma; this failing, to trap and kill Blade and then loose the fierce Api on the Jedds. Blade cursed himself again, grimly It was by his orders that Crofta had pulled out all the Jedd troops and taken them to the north of the city, thus leaving the southern approaches wide open to the Api.
No more time for thought. The Api had been whipped into line again and charged forward. Blade slipped out of the door and lilted one of the goons, suffering a slight gash in his thigh, then as fast as a heartbeat he was back and defending the door. The Api were hindered by their very numbers. The door was narrow and Blade could only thrust, not swing, his sword, but he did fearful execution. The short iron sword was a live thing in his hand, slashing and hacking, in and out with serpent speed. A long wooden sword slammed down across his helmet and broke in two. Blade killed the Api who had wielded it, had trouble extricating the weapon from the goon’s leather harness, daggered another Api who charged him from the flank, and finally got his sword free and darted back into the doorway. Just in time.
One of the s
maller Api was trying to get through the near window and take Blade from behind. He had his head and shoulders through and was being shoved by two of his comrades. The Api could not use his weapons, but snarled and lunged at Blade’s throat with his fangs as the man brought his sword around and up and down in a terrible stroke. The goon’s head fell into the room and bounded across the floor. His headless trunk twitched and writhed and remained stuck in the window.
Now two of the goons were trying to get through the door at the same time. Blade found foot room and thrust them both through, hacked their awkward swords from the hairy paws and cut their throats with backhand strokes. Blood sprayed him. He let the bodies settle in the doorway as a barrier.
The junior Api officer snarled and thrust at Blade. Blade barely turned the point in time, let his short sword slide up the other weapon and slashed the young officer across the eyes. The Api fell back with a high scream. At this sight, the remaining Api in front of the house began to fall back to rally around their remaining officer. Blade, his head roaring with blood frenzy, drenched with sweat and the blood of Api mixed with his own, had a moment of respite.
It was just as well. The Api attacked the rear of the house with no liaison with those in front and did not know the battle was going against them. They were attacking with zeal, in waves of ten, and just as Blade turned he saw the corpse of Mok, hacked to bits, being pulled out of the window. He shouted at the guardsman in reserve, the wounded man, who had already seen the danger and was running to the window. As he reached it a spear was hurled squarely through the window and took the guard in the chest, piercing his armor and standing a foot out behind his backbone. The man fell to the floor with a dreadful scream and began to thrash about.
There was no time for mercy or compunction. Blade needed the spear. And the man was as good as dead. Blade turned him over, seized the shaft just below the point, and drew it on through the dying man’s body. The shaft was slimy with blood and gut tissue and he wiped it on his tunic. An Api face appeared at the window and Blade thrust hard with the spear into the beast’s braincase. The Api fell back with a shrill death cry.
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