“Probably just a bunch of drunken raiders brawling,” Father said.
“I don’t know,” Corlan said. “I don’t hear any laughter, and very few curses. Mostly it sounds like serious combat.”
Rieve kept listening, hoping for any clue.
And then she heard her name.
“It’s Aric!” she said. “He’s come for us!”
“How did he know where we were?” Father asked.
“I gave him a pebble that Grandmother gave me,” Rieve said. “It was meant to be for Corlan, but … well, you know.” She didn’t want to torment Corlan further about his first reaction to the news of their leaving, and why. He was sorry, he had ultimately made the right decision, and she was content to leave it at that. “It showed him where we are.”
“And we doubtless left a clear trail,” Mother added. “So many raiders, in addition to us, could hardly have done otherwise.”
“We’ve got to let them know we’re in here,” Rieve said.
“We need to do more than that,” Corlan said. “If we heard the fight, the raiders have heard it too. Aric and his friends will be overwhelmed.”
“Then we need to help them,” Grandfather said. “They came to help us, so we can do no less. Sheridia?”
Grandmother glanced at the thick wooden door, barred from the outside, that held them in the small, dirt-floored room. “There might be something I can do,” she said.
“Whatever you can,” Grandfather said. “And now would be a good time.”
“I can help too,” Corlan said. “When they captured us, they took all my belongings, but they all came to the fort with us. Which means that somewhere out there is my psionocus.”
“You have a psionocus?” Father asked. “With you?”
“Well, close by someplace. I shouldn’t have to be able to see it to activate it. I only have to be able to concentrate.”
“Can it really help us?” Rieve asked.
“It might. Just let me focus on it. And I have to deserve it. That’s what Tenavry said. ‘Deserve every gift.’ ”
He sat in the corner again, closing his eyes and clenching his fists. Rieve supposed he was conjuring up an image of the little beast he had told her about when he sculpted it.
“Focus fast,” Grandmother said softly. She had turned to face the door, and she spoke words in a language Rieve didn’t know, moving her hands in a strange pattern at the same time. After a few moments, she whispered, “Bang on the door.”
Mother was nearest the door, so she thumped on it with her fists.
“Quiet in there!” a guard shouted. “Don’t think that—”
Grandmother made a yanking motion with her hands, and there was a louder thump on the outside of the door. The first guard released a wail of terror, and a second one’s voice yelled, “What have you done to him? Let him go!”
“We’ve done nothing!” Grandmother called. “Any problem he has is of his own making!”
“What’s going on out there?” Father asked.
“I believe he’s stuck to the door,” Grandmother said. Her voice had never sounded sweeter.
Someone on the outside pounded on the door, writhing against it and screaming, “Get me off! Get me off!”
Then the bar fell from the door. Before it could be replaced, Rieve and her father rushed the door and it swung out. They bowled over one guard, and the other was still pressed flat against the wood, crying for help.
The guard on the ground tried to scramble to his feet. Grandmother spoke some more words and made another gesture, and a cloud of dust from the dirt road blew up into his face, filling his eyes and mouth. He started coughing and spitting, and, blinded by the dust, he fell back again. “Come on,” Grandfather said. “We’ve got to find Aric and the others!”
“Wait!” Rieve ran back into the room that had been their prison. Corlan was still there, sitting in the corner, eyes squeezed shut, hands undulating slightly as if floating on some wafting breeze. “Corlan, let’s go!” she shouted. “Corlan!”
Corlan didn’t move.
7
The more he fought, the more Aric’s sword fed him. At first he thought he was imagining it. But the longer he did battle, the better he felt. Stronger. Whenever his blade made impact with other steel, he felt a shock up to his shoulder, as he expected. After a while, he realized that those shocks were different from the ones he experienced when the blade struck wood or bone or stone. Those hurt, tiring him. But steel on steel—those gave him more energy, not less. They eased the ache the other ones caused.
Not only that, but regardless of what his sword touched, just the very act of holding it, of moving it through the air, seemed to strengthen and energize him. The steel was him, and he was the steel, and this was what he was made for.
Aric broke through the first raider’s defense and ran him through, the sword slicing clean and not stopping until the cross guard slammed into the man’s belly. Putting his left hand flat against the man’s chest, Aric withdrew the sword. Thanks to the fuller groove he had cut in the blade, it came away easily, without the suction that sometimes occurred. The raider fell away, and Aric swung the blood-slicked blade up to block an axe blow.
From that point, things grew ever more chaotic. Aric caught the obsidian axe head on his hand guard, twisted and flicked his wrist, and wrenched it from the wielder’s hand. He snapped the blade right to left and the razor-edge point sliced the raider’s throat so neatly that the man didn’t know he was hurt for several moments, until blood dribbled down his chest. Then he screeched and put his hands to his neck, and the wound opened up. Another raider sliced at Aric with wrist razors, three-bladed weapons attached to his arms. Aric held him off for a bit, finally slicing up into his right arm, severing it below the elbow. The raider cried out, tried to nestle his damaged arm, and stabbed himself in the biceps. Aric ended the man’s misery with a swift thrust to the heart.
More raiders filled the space between alley and building. Aric lost himself in battle. Bleeding from a score of cuts, he fought like a whirlwind, his new sword flashing this way and that, blocking an attack and slicing flesh in the same motion. He battled dwarf and dray, mul and goliath, elf and man. Somewhere along the way he ceased having to think about what he was doing and simply acted, as if possessed of a wild nature born to the blade.
When he stopped to catch his breath, more than a dozen corpses surrounded him, bodies piled upon bodies.
Ruhm, Mazzax and Amoni had been busy too, but between them the count of their dead didn’t equal Aric’s. All were wounded, but none fatally, Aric was glad to see.
“Aric, you were incredible,” Amoni said. She was winded, with red patches on her cheeks and forehead. “A trained gladiator and I only killed six.”
“Four for me,” Mazzax put in.
“Five,” Ruhm said, a little sourly. “The dwarf got one of mine.”
“She wasn’t dead yet when she came to me,” Mazzax countered.
“I weakened her.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Aric said. “We need to find Rieve and her family, before more raiders get here.”
“How will we do that?” Amoni asked.
Aric put his left hand beside his mouth and took a deep breath. “Rieve! It’s Aric! Where are you?”
Silence held, with only the distant sound of more raiders wending their way from elsewhere in the fort. Then Aric heard something else, a strange, sibilant fluttering. “Look!” Mazzax cried. He pointed into the air.
A bizarre, tiny creature flapped over their heads. Green and blue and red, with yellow and black stripes on a long, serpentine tail that gestured toward them almost like a curled finger, it turned in rapid circles, as if trying to attract their attention.
“Look at its tail!” Aric said. “I think it wants us to follow it!”
“Is it a trap?” Amoni asked.
“Only one way to find out!” The winged creature took off in a straight line, and Mazzax raced behind it. “If trap it be, then I’
ll add to my count!”
“Let’s go!” Aric shouted. He thought it was on their side, and in any event, he didn’t want to lose sight of the dwarf. He ran after them both, and Amoni and Ruhm fell in behind him.
He saw the Thrace family at the same time as the raiders did.
“Rieve!” he cried.
“Aric!”
Nine or ten raiders rushed toward them from a side road. The little creature hurtled toward them, and Corlan, who had acquired a bone sword somewhere, stared at it with a beaming smile on his face. “It worked!” Corlan shouted. “You’re alive!”
A psionocus, then, Aric knew. A manufactured beast, brought to a sort of life as the servant of a powerful psion. He remembered being told that Corlan was a student at some psionic academy.
The raiders were closer to the Thrace family than Aric and his friends were. Corlan, the only one armed, looked away from his creation in time to notice them. Aric had already broken into a sprint, but Corlan met them first, his yellowish-brown weapon flicking out and cutting the fingers of a raider wielding a lotulis.
Corlan slew that foe and moved to the next, and Aric recalled that he had been selected to teach Rieve swordsmanship. No wonder—in addition to being psionic enough to animate a psionocus, he was good with a blade.
Aric joined the fight. Almost instantly, the wildness overtook him again. He was fully immersed in the battle, but at the same time a sense of calmness filled him, as if he knew he would win—or if he didn’t, then it didn’t really matter. As if the fight, not the result, was what counted.
A minute later, perhaps less, it was done. Aric was coated in blood, little of it his own. His blade had drank deep. Amoni, Ruhm and Mazzax had barely reached them when their enemies had fallen.
“Aric,” Rieve said. Ignoring the gore coating him, she rushed into his arms, embracing him with a warm, tight fervor that almost made him forget Corlan watched. “You came for us.”
“Of course,” he said. “But we’ve got to go. There’ll be more raiders coming.”
“Which way?” Tunsall asked.
The psionocus fluttered its wings, beckoning again with that little tail, and then shot off the way they had come. “Follow that!” Aric said. “It’ll show us the way out!”
Rieve slapped at her hip. “My sword! They took it …”
“I’ll make you another,” Aric promised. “Come on!”
They all dashed off behind the tiny winged thing. Aric looked back once, noting that Rieve and Corlan ran hand in hand.
He was surprised to find that he wasn’t more upset.
8
We had better take our leave,” Myrana whispered. Raiders were opening the gate. Their numbers had decreased considerably, as something had been drawing them away little by little—something she believed must have been Aric and the rest, fighting to free his friends.
“Do you think they’re finished?”
“I don’t know, but if we don’t do it soon, we will be.”
Sellis still had his swords, of course. And she her dagger.
But the raiders’ mood had changed. She hoped that meant Aric’s group was winning, and the raiders were angry over yet another defeat.
Hope was only hope, though, not certainty. Myrana’s only certainty was that if those raiders got the gate open and attacked them, there would be a bloody battle—maybe a long, bloody battle, maybe short—which wouldn’t end until she and Sellis were dead.
“Fine,” Myrana said. “Ready to run?”
“I’m ready.”
The raiders unlatched their wooden gate and scraped it open, bumping it against the ground as it swung unevenly on its hinges. Before they could throng out after Myrana and Sellis, he hurled the bag of gold coins over their heads. It landed in the road behind them, bursting at the seams, gold spilling everywhere.
“So it’s the gold you want?” Sellis shouted. “Have it, then! It’s yours!”
Raiders stared at the two strangers, but the pull of gold was stronger. With a loud outcry, they darted for the coins.
Myrana and Sellis ran.
And as each coin fell from the bag and hit the earth, it bounced into the air, turning into a golden bubble instead of a coin. Whenever someone touched one of the gold bubbles, or a bubble brushed against any other surface, it exploded. Within moments, raiders were squealing in pain, their hands blown off, a few of them dead. Their structures suffered too, as the explosions loosened timbers or knocked stones from walls. The dozens, then hundreds of smaller bursts combined into one massive explosion.
It shook the ground, even dozens of feet away. Myrana’s legs were knocked out from under her, but Sellis caught her up and kept running. Another blast sounded, and gold sprayed into the air.
“That,” he said, “is some serious magic!”
“It’s about as dangerous as my magic gets,” she said. “You can put me down.”
He set her on her feet, and they kept running, back toward where they had tied the kanks, out of sight of the fort. “I don’t like using magic to kill,” she said. “Even to injure is bad. My magic is meant to preserve, to protect.”
“You were protecting us!”
“That’s the only reason I did that,” she said. “Even so, most of those raiders will live. They might be temporarily blinded and deafened, and they’ll think twice about giving chase. But I never meant to kill them that way.
“Look at Athas. Could it have always looked this way? Scorched by the sun, frozen at night, with little water and less shade? Could a population ever have grown under such conditions? Many believe it’s magic did this, dark magic. Magic tied to death and destruction. It’s not just in the spells themselves, but in the motives behind them. Magic meant to kill is just not something I choose to partake of.”
“I understand,” he said. They topped a low hill and the kanks were right where they’d left them. Aric and the rest had not yet returned. “I don’t mean to make you keep explaining.”
When she spoke again, any anger had left his voice. “It’s fine, Sellis. I want you to understand, that’s all. I can’t fix everything bad that happens with magic, and I won’t intentionally use it to kill. But it’s a useful tool sometimes.”
“You’ve been wonderful, Myrana. Here I thought I was protecting you, when all along it’s been the other way. I’m not sure I deserve what your family pays me.”
“When we finally get back to them, I’ll tell them you said so.”
“You won’t have to, because I will.”
They both started laughing, and sat down to wait, all tension between them evaporating like a puddle of water in the Athasian sun.
XX
CONFESSION
1
Aric and the others raced around the hill, into the little dell where they had left the kanks, and found Myrana and Sellis laughing uproariously. When Aric asked why, Myrana described the exploding gold coins, and the looks on the faces of the raiders as they reached for floating golden bubbles that blew up in their hands.
“But they weren’t killed?” Aric asked when she was done.
“Some were injured,” Sellis said. “Possibly others died.” He touched the hilt of the sword sticking up over his left shoulder. “I don’t mind killing when it’s warranted, as you know.”
“So they’re mostly alive, hurt, and furious,” Aric said. “We need to leave, now.”
“There aren’t enough kanks for everyone,” Rieve’s mother pointed out.
“We’ll have to share. I don’t need to ride,” Aric said. He found himself wishing there were fewer humans and more elves in the party. He was faster than a kank carrying a double load, and full elves could run faster, and over longer distances, than he. There had been several among the raiders. They had killed many raiders, but there were certainly plenty more who would already be gearing up to give chase.
They piled onto kanks, Mazzax riding behind Ruhm, Corlan and Myrana together, Rieve and Pietrus on one. Rieve’s grandparents rode together, with
her parents on another, and Amoni and Sellis rode on the kank laden with supplies, taking turns getting off frequently to give the beast a break. Aric, as promised, ran alongside.
They didn’t see pursuers until the next afternoon.
The whole way, they had watched over their shoulders, figuring the raiders would be right behind them. Nothing.
By late the second day, they had decided that the raiders had chosen to bury their dead and not worry about them anymore. Then they reached the top of a tall hill and looked back and saw a dust cloud in the distance, following their trail.
They pressed on, urging the kanks to greater speed. When night fell, they had to stop, build fires and rest. Aric didn’t sleep well; even though he knew it was unlikely the raiders pressed on through the cold black Athasian night, he couldn’t shake the sensation that they were closing in. Out in open desert, with vastly greater numbers, they would be almost impossible to defeat.
As the sun rose, they gathered in a fur-clad, chattering group to discuss their options. “Doubled-up on kanks,” Aric said, “we won’t be able to outrun those raiders for long.”
“We’re slowing you down,” Rieve’s mother said. Aric could only distinguish the members of the Thrace family by their relative heights, as they all wore thickly furred, hooded cloaks, and their faces were lost in shadow. “You didn’t intend to overburden your mounts so much. Perhaps you should give up on us.”
“You’re the reason we went to that fort!” Myrana said. “And we need you.” The night before, they had told Rieve and her family about Kadya and Tallik and the fact that they would need magical assistance to defeat the demon. The family discussed it, finally agreeing to return to Nibenay, just for long enough to help deal with the threat. Aric vowed to make every effort to keep them outside the city’s walls and beyond the reach of the authorities.
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