But the Captain did not cut, he stabbed, and not at Tilda but above her bent body. Warm fluid that was certainly, sickeningly, blood splashed her back.
Guilders were trained not to scream no matter what happened, not giving away one’s position being critical to much of their work. It was not much of a comfort to Tilda that the sound that came out of her was more of a squeal than a scream, but it was in any case covered by wild whinnies from the mare and pony as both horses bolted.
Something hit the Captain but Tilda did not see it as the pony shot off between trees like a gray arrow, while the mare barreled away down the length of a row. Tilda’s right foot was in a stirrup but not the left, and she nearly toppled off the side before her knee wedged against the saddle. The reins flapped loose but she got a handful of mane, though her scrambling only succeeded in banging her heel against the mare’s belly. That did little to calm the horse down. Tilda pulled against her wedged knee, straining legs and hips, until a fumbling hand found the saddle horn and with a grunt she managed to haul herself up to a closer approximation of the manner in which one typically rode a horse.
The mare broke from the orchard and raced up the grassy lee of a hill, less oppressive and with better light. She began to slow down, whinnying now as a call for her pony, but just as Tilda made a grab for the reins the horse screamed and drove back into a gallop.
She can smell blood, Tilda realized, for she could smell it herself, soaking the dark cloak now clinging to her shoulders. She reached for the collar thinking to pull the garment off over her head and looked back for a moment past the mare’s bouncing tail. Her hand froze as something else broke from the tree line and zipped into the gloaming light of dusk.
Shadows and Tilda’s bouncing vision made it hard to distinguish detail, but what she saw was too much. Something like a mosquito, but the size of a house cat. Pumping wings with red feathers, more like a bird than an insect, though they sprouted out of the creature’s back while four limbs hung under it. It had beady yellow eyes that fastened on Tilda’s, set above a hollow snout like a foot-long stake.
Tilda turned and lay flat on her belly against the mare’s back, hissed “Run!” at the horse’s ears, and held on tight for a life that suddenly seemed desperately dear.
She looked back to see the beastly thing closing the distance, and a second one emerging from the trees behind it.
The mare clambered halfway up the hill before entering more trees, swerving madly as these grew wild and disordered, nearly shaking Tilda off her back. Tilda did not like where this was going and made another reach for the reins, but they were completely loose now, twisted and flapping out by the bridle. She leaned further, one hand clutching the saddle horn, but that only brought the bloody stink of her flapping cloak closer to the mare’s nose. The horse tossed her head as she ran and finally, inevitably, bucked. Already leaning forward, Tilda took to the air.
Flash of memory, too short and specific to be Tilda’s entire life before her eyes, but vivid all the same. Running full-tilt down the length of a platform in the cellar of the Guild house, throwing herself off one end into air thick with the smell of sweat and the mildewed stink of seawater. Block’s voice booming in the damp, subterranean space.
“Roll with the fall! Do you want to hear bone snap like tinder?”
Tilda did not want to hear that, not then and not now. Her outstretched hand hit a branch and she did not lock her arm, only let it slide over roughly even as she kicked both legs backward and up. She was half-way through a turn when her breast and then hip smacked into the thick, unyielding bough, and though her desperate momentum carried her over the top, it still hurt about as much as any physical blow she had ever taken. Her hooked left knee caught, the arm wrapped by reflex, and Tilda hung suspended for a shuddering moment, bruised but unbroken, eyes screwed shut and teeth clenched so as not to bite through her tongue.
The sound of the running mare faded, and was replaced by flapping. Tilda’s eyes snapped wide open.
One of the beasties was on a bee-line right for her, close enough now that she could see the yellow claws on four mammalian legs hanging under it, and the unsettling absence of a face as the thing’s whole head was shaped like a cone, terminating in the sharp, hollow proboscis that pointed right at her.
Tilda’s club, sword, and gun were riding away on the horse. She strained toward a dagger in her boot but seized only the hem of her Guild cloak, caught around the hilt. The thing flew at her like a ponderous bird and there was no more time to think, only to move. Tilda hissed as she rolled her bruised body over the top of the bough, and as the creature hove in she lunged toward it, swinging her damp cloak by the hem like a fisherman casting a net. The inner lining of emerald green flashed, Tilda bagged the creature with an angry whistling through its snout, and her hooked knee came loose as her momentum carried her clean off the tree limb. Not knowing just how far off the ground she was, nor when to begin a tumble, Tilda instead tucked her chin to her chest, wrapped both arms around the struggling thing in her cloak, and shifted so that she hit the ground with the bundle between her right shoulder and the forest floor.
The impact jarred Tilda from head to toes, sending shooting pains around bruised ribs and down both arms. It was much, much worse for the thing in her cloak, which did in fact snap like tinder.
Tilda flopped to her back and lay in a heap, mouth open, eyes shut, cloak soaking through. She let out a ragged breath that tasted like bile in the back of her throat, and concentrated on neither passing out nor retching.
More flapping broke her concentration, but now fear kept her conscious and her last meal, an unfortunate choice of words, stayed down where it was. Darting eyes found the movement that was the second creature hovering among the hanging boughs. Tilda lay perfectly still but the thing was already drifting on beating wings in her direction, sharp snout swinging this way and that until it snapped to point at Tilda on the ground. Red wings beat harder and it came at her fast.
Tilda tried to move but found that she scarcely could, having more or less pinned herself by her twisted cloak. Her feet scrambled across the soft carpet of the forest floor kicking needles everywhere, and both hands scrabbled though she could get them neither to the dagger in her boot nor the one at the small of her back. The thing was already around the nearest tree and diving at her, shaft level as a lance to stab her, all four claws extended to dig in and hold on as it fed.
All training aside Tilda did begin to scream, but it caught in her throat as someone vaulted over her prone struggles to stand facing the diving thing. Captain! Tilda thought at first, but the man was a full-sized human. Muscled calves bound across with cords to the knees, sandal lacings over cloth leggings, landed at what was presently Tilda’s eye-level. The man swung a length of branch like a Miilarkian boy, or girl for that matter, playing stick-ball between the passing carts and wagons on a street of the capital city. He connected for what surely would have been a good hit.
The flapping thing made a flute-like hooting through its snout as it tumbled through the air and bashed off the nearest tree trunk. It fell twitching to the ground and the man made another bound, coming down on it squarely with all his weight on both feet. Feet in the thick-soled, round-toed marching sandals of a Legionnaire of the Empire of All Lands Under the Code. There was a crunch of bone, and the man quickly spread his feet apart as the ruined creature between them began to ooze.
Tilda lay as though paralyzed and the man was stock-still as well, makeshift club before him in a two-handed grip, head tilted as he listened intently. Tilda did not need to be told to hush, and made no sound anyway. Besides the sandals laced up his calves, the fellow wore a rough cloth tunic, belted at the waist and falling skirt-like down to his knees. The rough garment had no sleeves, but he had a blanket wrapped around his broad chest, fashioned like a Doonish serape. His back was still to Tilda and she could not see his face, but his hair was dark as the gloomy shadows and cropped very short, which made sense. Legionnaires cut their hair almost to
the scalp, but the men of the 34 had been under arrest and then renegade for a month. Discipline, not to say grooming standards, had certainly been eroding.
“I don’t hear any more of them. No god loves a stirge.”
The man’s voice was startling in the silence. It was deep as befit his physique, and had the flat Beoan accent all legionnaires tended to acquire in time, no matter from what part of the sprawling Empire they originally hailed.
“Loves a what?” Tilda asked from the ground in her smallest voice.
“Stirges.” The man poked his club at the wreckage at his feet. “Blighted, blood-sucking trouble they are. A flock will drain a horse or beeve dry in an hour. Less for a man.”
The man turned to face Tilda, and her eyes flicked to the fat blade of the legionnaire short sword thrust naked through his belt on his left hip.
“Are you all right?” he asked, reaching Tilda in a stride and kneeling close enough for her to perceive his features in the gathering gloom. Her spirits were divided by what she saw.
First, the fellow was quite handsome, which was a good thing in and of itself. Legion regulations tolerated no facial hair but this fellow had a beard and mustache coming in along with the hair on his head, still short but black and thick. It framed rather than hid what were good features. Strong jaw, high cheeks, and a brow that was a bit on the thick side, giving neat dark eyebrows a slightly forward-thrusting look of intensity. His deep-set eyes in the plunging shadows looked to be a murky shade of brown however, which, while not unpleasant, were certainly not emerald green.
But really, odds of 500-to-1 against had been far too long to bet.
“I think I need to burn my cloak,” Tilda said, and indeed the man’s nose wrinkled as he got a whiff of the gore from Tilda’s garment.
“You fell on one?” he asked with a note of amusement, obviously having missed Tilda’s haphazard acrobatics. “Come on, let’s get you on your feet.”
Tilda accepted the offered hand and felt the rough calluses of practice with weapons. Her hands were much the same, though she still had her gloves on. She let the man help her up and gave a shudder and a groan as the bloody mess of the first stirge slid out of her cloak and plopped to the ground. She had almost straightened fully when her long braid swished loose over her shoulder in what was rapidly becoming only moon and starlight. Tilda felt the man’s hand tighten on hers and then suddenly release, and she pitched forward off-balance to fall headlong back to the ground as he danced several steps away. He cast aside his branch, gripped the hilt of his sword, and snarled.
“You are a Miilarkian!”
Tilda, with the wind knocked out of her, groaned neutrally.
“What in the hells are you doing out here? And alone?” The man barked with the voice of command, surely as he would have were he still a soldier of the Legions. Before Tilda could muster enough breath to answer the fellow said, “Or are you alone at all?” He drew his sword cleanly while taking several more steps away to put his back against a tree trunk.
Horses approached at a trot and swiftly appeared, dark shapes that were the Captain on his pony, leading the mare. Both animals hung their heads in a manner distinctly sheepish for horses, but the dwarf’s hood snapped about as his shadowed eyes raked the surroundings. His gaze passed over Tilda with nary a pause, then locked on the legionnaire. Block was out of the saddle quick as thought, advancing on the man and striking a spark from a flint in one hand. The oil-soaked head of a torch bloomed and the Captain thrust it toward the legionnaire’s face. The man scowled and squinted in the sudden light, teeth and sword bared, but Block stared only at his eyes.
Brown.
“Damn your eyes,” the dwarf growled, sounding both angry and suddenly tired. The man only stared back, blinking, and Block shifted the torch so the light fell on Tilda.
“Are you alive?”
Climbing back to her feet, Tilda felt like she had fallen off the Ghost Mountain, bouncing the whole way down.
“Mostly.”
The torch swung back to the gaping legionnaire. He had recognized Tilda for what she was by her braid, but seemed utterly dumbfounded by a likewise braided, beardless dwarf. Tilda could scarcely blame him, for the Captain was one of a kind.
“Soldier,” Block barked. “What was your company of the 34 Legion?”
The staring man answered by rote.
“Second Century.”
That was at least something. Tilda felt a flutter of hope in her chest, which at this point only made her ribs ache worse.
“We seek your commanding Centurion,” Block said, his voice suddenly quiet. “The man called John Lepokahan.”
The word gave Tilda a twinge, for le po ka han was a biting oath in the old language of the Islands. It was also the name that luck, or else some subtle magic inherent to the Captain, had led them to discover that their quarry had assumed when he enrolled in the Codian Legions, six years ago now.
The renegade just went on staring. The mare and her pony had been moving toward Tilda, but they stopped short as if even they were anxious to hear the man’s answer. The crackle of Block’s burning brand was the only sound in a moment that lingered on toward painful.
“Soldier…”
“Lepokahan was not his real name,” the bedraggled deserter of the Legions said softly. “He said it was John Deskata, before he was exiled from Miilark.”
Chapter Four
It was unthinkable to stop and talk at any length in the midst of a stirge infestation, much less to set up camp nearby. Yet with night settled about the forested hills and out on the steppe, blundering far through the darkness was hardly an option.
The ex-legionnaire retrieved a pair of saddlebags from nearby and slung them across his shoulders, then led the way westerly while creeping widely around the infested orchard. Tilda followed close behind his dark silhouette leading both horses from the ground, while Block rode the pony. She made an unvoiced vow to herself that the next time she was in an otherwise healthy orchard left to spoil, with overripe fruit hanging neglected and no sound of birds, she would not just take a moment to wonder why it was so, but just get gone out of there right away.
The trudge through the trees was tricky in the dark, and every misstep and stumble sent a throbbing ache around Tilda’s midsection. But soon it was over. The two-horse column descended one last hillock and emerged again onto the grassy steppe, blonde stalks looking silvery in the waning moonlight. The renegade marched west with a long stride for perhaps a quarter mile, and just as Tilda was deciding to remount her horse, he stopped and about-faced. Though there was not enough light to make out his expression, his posture was now relaxed. He put both hands on his hips, which did keep one close to the sword at his side.
“When stirges come down from the mountains, they hunt in a narrow corridor back to their main nest. They won’t find us out here.”
“Where is Lepokahan?” Block growled in a manner that made the word sound less like an assumed name and more like the oath that it was.
“I told you,” the renegade said. “Gone. Him and a few others cut out two days before the fight with Duke Gratchik. Deserted from the desertion, if you will. But I know where they are going, and I am going after them myself. You, gentle Islanders, are welcome to tag along.”
The dwarf leaned forward in his saddle to add something colorful, but the renegade held up a hand.
“Your further satisfaction will have to wait until morning, Guv. I am plain done-in, and the two of you cannot be much better off. Particularly not your girl, there.”
Tilda turned to look toward the Captain, but stopped halfway and closed her eyes as a stitch flared in her neck. The renegade took the set of saddlebags off his shoulders and started tramping a narrow flat spot in the long grass. Block spoke at Tilda.
“You will stand the first shift, as ward.”
The renegade sighed, stacking his bags as a pillow and unfastening his sword belt.
“The stirges won’t come out here. I promi
se.”
“She will not be warding against those.”
The man snorted, unwrapped the blanket from around his chest and shook it out.
“I am not going to run off, nor do anything else untoward,” he said, dropping out of moonlit sight as he sprawled on the ground. “If it weren’t for you two galloping about those stirges would have sucked me dry in my sleep. I suppose there’s worse ways to go, but I’ll take life just the same.”
After a last rustle in the grass the renegade settled into silence with a grunt of finality. Block remained glaring at the spot for a time before allowing Tilda to help him off his pony, with a wince he did not see. The Captain settled his own bedroll a short distance away from the renegade and left Tilda to see to the horses.
After doing so Tilda walked her turn at guard more than stood it, bone-tired but knowing that her bruised muscles were going to tighten as soon as she stopped moving. The dwarf’s internal hour glass woke him in the small hours before dawn, and he relieved Tilda to crawl into her own bedroll and drop instantly into a sleep not untroubled by dreams. Dreams of mosquitoes big as oxen.
She awoke with dust motes hovering about the grass stalks in front of her nose, started to stretch, and caught her breath. Tilda had a moment of sheer terror, thinking she was paralyzed, but realized that it was not a matter of being unable to move. It was just that her body really did not want to do so.
Tilda’s knees were nearly touching her chest for in her sleep she had constricted, actually shriveled like fruit gone bad. Her shoulders throbbed, one knee felt wrenched, and worse than either was a band of purple pain that beat across her torso and belly in time with her heart.
Matilda Lanai had loved adventure stories as a girl, the old ones from tribal times that clan elders had once told around campfires and that Islanders still shared in taverns and family rooms. She did not recall any of the bold heroes of those tales waking up to a morning quite like this. She uncoiled slowly and with several shuddering spasms, and crawled out of her bedroll. She got to all fours, took as deep a breath as she could manage, and stood with a motion that from a distance might have looked smooth. Unless one could see the trembling hands and mouth locked in a grimace.
The Sable City (The Norothian Cycle) Page 4
