by Dave Duncan
And so it was done. The designated hero scrambled up the ladder and survived. The Fourth and the rest of the swordsmen followed. In a few minutes they signaled the all-clear.
Vixini was virtually asleep in the saddle when his horse began to limp. He reined in and dismounted.
“Need another change, do you, old fellow?” It was a bad sign when a man began to talk to animals. It was a worse sign when he discovered that the poor brute had shed a shoe. He had switched mounts several times, and the other was just as weary as this one. He was so exhausted he could barely stand, and he was lost. The trampled droppings that had marked the trail for him were no longer to be seen on the endless, rolling brown grassland. His last canteen was close to empty.
He hobbled the spare horse, although it wasn’t likely to go anywhere. Then he removed the lame one’s saddle, led it a short distance away, and ran his sword into its heart. He lay down beside it and constructed the best lean-to shade he could with the saddle and its corpse.
He went to sleep wondering if he would ever wake up.
By the time Wallie clambered up the ladder with Yoningu at his heels, two dozen swordsmen were searching the ruins and others were hard at work improvising a dock out of the surviving piles and the lumber brought from Ivo. At the top he was saluted by Adept Sevolno.
“No one left alive, my lords. Men, women, children, dogs, cats and a couple of horses, all dead. It must have happened several days ago.”
One of the other ships was bringing half a dozen priests and priestesses to care for the dead.
“Any deaths more recent?”
“Yes, lord. Very recent. Did you notice the blood on the ladder? And look at this one.” He pointed to a dead sorcerer Third only a few feet away. “Someone came up the ladder and flaking near cut his head off. A swordsman, and a strong one.”
He was wrong about the intruder climbing the ladder, because on the way up Wallie had noticed footprints showing that someone—a person with very large feet—had climbed the bank, using the remaining masonry as a staircase. He walked over to the corpse, took up the fallen pistol, and sniffed. It had been fired. So the swordsman had killed the sorcerer, but had himself been wounded. The bloody hand prints on the ladder were his, and the ‘he’ in question had certainly been Vixini. However much Wallie tried to tell himself that there could be other explanations, he could not believe that. He asked the awful question as casually as he could.
“Any dead swordsmen?”
Sevolno had guessed what he was thinking. “Found three so far, my lord, but all have been dead some days. All Thirds, although there’s not much left of them but boots and hair. None of them an especially large man, my lord. The inhabitants may have managed to take a few of the attackers with them, or perhaps these were the reeve and his men.”
“Show me.”
With Yoningu trailing behind, Wallie followed Sevolno on a grisly tour of the corpse-littered village. Most bodies were so bloated by heat and ravaged by scavengers that it was hard to tell what sort of people they had been in life. In some buildings there had been a last stand, and the packed remains had been burned to blackened bones by the subsequent fire. The swordsmen lay out in the open, recognizable by their trappings. Vixini was not among them.
“I doubt if Soo had more than one resident swordsman,” Wallie said, “or none at all. The inhabitants would have been trying to fight back with clubs or pitchforks. Yet look at all the blood, see?” The clay where they lay was black. “All three of them bled to death. I’d like to think that these were members of the attacking force who mutinied rather than slaughter women and children, and were consequently put to death by their less squeamish comrades. See that they are returned to the Most High with military honors.”
“Aye, my lord. Now over here…” Sevolno led the way to one of the frontage buildings. “One of those canons you described, my lord. Glad they weren’t alive to shoot at us with that! And a fourth dead sorcerer, dressed for his funeral. See the marks on his throat? He’s been throttled, my lord. I can’t find any wounds on him to account for the blood. Lot of blood.”
But there was a smear of blood on the blade of the dagger lying half underneath him. So had whoever had lowered the ladder been wounded here, and by that dagger, not the pistol? Seriously worried now, Wallie prowled around. He soon identified the cartridges of gunpowder, and the fuses leading to them. At that point he ordered everyone else out and explored the building by himself. He had not been at all surprised to discover that it had been mined. Back before the treaty, the sorcerers had used electrostatic generators as burglar alarms: touch the door handle and you got fried. In this case they had used gunpowder.
He wondered why the cannonballs had holes in them, like bowling balls. Then he found tongs, and a jar full of water with some lumps of pasty stuff in the bottom. He knew at once that it was phosphorous, which the sorcerers had formerly used to do party tricks. Pack a lump of that into a hole in the side of a cannonball, then shoot it into a wooden ship, and you’d have a cozy blaze going in no time.
The plan had been for the gun squad to fire a few shots at the incoming fleet. At that range they would have almost certainly set some of them ablaze. As soon as any survivors came ashore, though, the defenders would have lit the fuses, jumped on their horses, and ridden for the hills. An hour or so later—bang. Wallie defused the mine.
Bedding for three on the floor. Five full water bottles and three bags of food on a door at the rear. And two boots, not swordsman boots, filthy and badly crushed. How to explain those?
Once he was satisfied that the building was reasonably safe, he went out and beckoned for Sevolno to order a guard placed on the gunpowder. Fortunately the curse of cigarettes had not yet been loosed upon the World, so he did not need to warn about the dangers of smoking there. Yoningu and others gathered around.
“What else have you found?”
“Horses out back,” Sevolno said, leading the way there. “Two killed with a sword. One of them obviously damaged a leg, so maybe both of them did, and they had to be put down. Three saddles left on the rail. Maybe there were more horses, and the swordsmen who killed the sorcerers took them and rode away with them, you think?” He pointed. “Two more recently dead sorcerers over there. We may find some more if we keep looking.”
Wallie stared at the gentle brown hills behind the little town. Five canteens, three saddles, two dead horses, four bodies. It was hard to make the numbers fit. On Earth good horse country usually meant limestone, to provide calcium for strong bones, but limestone was often porous and poor at retaining water. Somewhere out there, he hoped, Addis was still alive in the hands of his kidnappers. Vixini might be only a few hours behind them, if he was still functioning. The only way to cross that griddle in midsummer would be to travel by night.
“Have you looked in the wells?” he asked.
Sevolno scowled at being found wanting. “Not yet, my lord.” He dispatched a Third with a gesture. The man ran over to the nearest well, whose windlass had been removed and, presumably, burned. Horses drank like whales and it would be easier to have wells close to these paddocks than drag water from the River. He peered down the shaft, which couldn’t be very deep, for the water table would be level with the River.
He came running back with his face almost green. “There’s something down there, my lords. I think… It may be dead children!”
Wallie nodded. River water was drinkable, but the poisoned wells would make it harder to assemble an army here, and Plo was a long way away. Every watering hole would have been treated the same way.
“How long will it take us to round up enough horses to send out a scouting party?” he asked Yoningu, who had rejoined the group. “And get them here? We’ll have to rig a derrick to hoist them out of the ships, or else clean out that ramp.”
“A week?” the Seventh said grumpily. “Four days minimum.”
“You have one day maximum. At least three horses, six better, by sunset tomorrow.”
> “Aye, my lord. Who d’you think were the swordsmen who killed all these sorcerers?”
“Just one swordsman,” Wallie said. The boots were the message. He had a lump in his throat.
“One swordsman against four sorcerers armed with thunder weapons?”
“Vixini. He was enough. Funny, I used to think he was too easygoing to be a swordsman.”
“With respect my lord,” Yoningu said, “I don’t know why you bothered to collect an army. That son of yours seems capable of handling the whole war by himself. And I congratulate you wholeheartedly on his courage.”
The listeners chorused their agreement, for that was the greatest of compliments to a swordsman. Courage could only be taught by example.
Courage was not necessarily enough. Vixini had cut down two men, shot a third, and throttled a fourth. Then he had ridden off, still searching for his stolen protégé. But there was a hostile army ahead of him and he had lost a lot of blood.
By evening, Soo was almost habitable again. The priests had tidied up the bodies, giving them to the River and returning their souls to the Goddess. Swordsmen had dragged the dead animals to the river bank and disposed of those corpses too. They had also cleaned out some of the buildings well enough to make them usable as long as the weather stayed dry.
Liege Lord Shonsu was sitting on a keg outside the sorcerers’ now-deserted lair, staring glumly at the River and contemplating failure. He had begun this war in the belief that the gods were appointing him their general because he would do a better job than Nnanji. Assuming that gods did not make mistakes—while not denying that they might get outwitted or outbid by other gods—then he had either misread their message or he had just proved that he was a complete idiot. Or both. Nnanji would have gone by the sutras. While he might have lost battles against sorcerer firearms, he would not have dug himself into the bottomless pit that Wallie had.
Oh, Wallie had known enough to avoid a few minor mistakes, but what did he do now? Ships had gone back to Ivo to collect as many horses as the garrison there had been able to assemble and could be loaded aboard. So in a day or two he would be able ride out with a mounted patrol. Every well in town had been poisoned with corpses, mostly children, who would not jam in the shafts. The obvious conclusion was that the sorcerers had also poisoned all the water between here and Plo. An enemy ruthless enough to wipe out a village would have no scruples about letting wild horses die of thirst. It was midsummer. An army could not march far without water, certainly not if it might have to fight at the other end. Water was heavy.
What galled him most was that he had no one to blame except himself. He had been in too much of a hurry, and he had tried to fight an enemy who knew his every move and whose communications moved fifty times as fast as he could. Had he known about the jungle between Tro and Ki Mer, he would not have come that way. Had he known more about the Mule Hills he would have seen how easily the sorcerers could block his access. He could see no alternative now except to call off his attack and start over, using another approach, and that would advertise to the entire Tryst that he had been outwitted.
A pair of crows started a screaming match over some tasty morsel that one of them had found. If there had been ravens, they had left, leaving the leftovers to lesser vermin like crows. There were scores of crows in Soo at the moment, cleaning up the last traces of the massacre. They were strutting around everywhere…
“Begging your pardon most humbly, my liege,” Yoningu said, looking out the window, “but you seem to be sitting on the high-ranks’ supply of beer.”
Wallie jumped. “What? Oh, I was just keeping the sun off it so it didn’t get too hot.”
He rose and stared once again at the crows. They were his answer. Now—at last!—he read the message the gods had been trying to send him. At last, and perhaps too late.
Chapter 5
Close to sunset, Addis was prodded awake, given a meager drink of water, and told to saddle his horse. He felt he ought to refuse, but he was too weak and befuddled to try. The fact that his escort seemed in little better shape than he was did nothing to comfort him. The horses, now revived by drinking from the poisoned pool, might sicken and die later, but Addis might not have much “later” to look forward to, so he was tempted to scramble down the slope and drink his fill. Perhaps fortunately, Capn ordered him to mount up before he could decide.
The last thing the swordsmen did was set the hut on fire. No doubt they wanted to deny even that tiny scrap of shade to the Tryst when it came this way, but they were also denying it to the sorcerers they had left behind in Soo.
“Move!” Capn barked. “We’ve got a long way to go yet.”
Vixini awoke as the sun was setting, emptied his last canteen, saddled up, and set off on the last leg of his journey. He was well aware now that his carcass was more likely to feed vultures than piranha; he just hoped that he would not be able to notice the difference. He had certainly lost the trail, so the best he could do was keep the Dream God at his back and head south.
As twilight began to fade, he saw smoke—far away and well to west of his route—but there had been no thunderstorms, so fire meant people. Whether good people or bad people didn’t matter now. He turned in that direction. The brighter stars were appearing, and he could use the Southern Triangle as a better marker than the Dream God.
It took his horse an hour to take him close enough to smell the smoke and see that it came from a grass fire, little flames creeping northward as a southerly breeze urged them on. He followed the trail back to its source and found a burned-out shed, whose embers still glowed. The rest of the ruins had been destroyed much earlier, and he dared hope that he had stumbled on traces of Addis’s kidnappers. They could not be many hours ahead of him.
Each on his own feet, man and horse slithered eagerly down to the water. The horse drank greedily. Vixini balked at the sight of the mules’ ballooned corpses floating there like grotesque fish. Knowing he must have water or die, he used his sword to dig himself a tiny well in the sand a foot or so from the pool edge. As muddy water seeped into the hole, he sent a brief appeal to the Goddess that She would keep it free of poison, then began scooping it up with his hands. Nothing had ever tasted better.
Now… How many hours was he behind Addis, and which way had he gone? The ground was much drier here than it had been around Soo, and he couldn’t afford to wait for daylight to hunt for tracks.
Just when Addis was certain he must go to sleep and fall off, horses whinnied. Capn called for his men to halt as a band of horsemen came galloping out of the night. Swordsmen! Addis saw ponytails and sword hilts and his heart leaped with joy.
A voice rang out in challenge. “Thirteen twelve five?”
“Twenty-four, seven, twenty-five.” Capn had halted his horse right next to Addis’s. “We don’t want any nasty accidents, hostage.”
One of his flunkies moved in on the other side. Between them they stuffed a rag in Addis’s mouth, wrapped another around his head to hold the gag in place, and then pulled a bag over his head. They must have had those ready to hand.
Capn spoke briefly with whoever was in charge of the guard, but Addis could not make out what was said. The journey resumed, up a gentle slope, down another. Addis heard muffled voices, smelled latrines, wood smoke, and cooking odors. A good swordsman being led through the enemy’s camp ought to take note of everything so he could report it all when he escaped and returned to his mentor, but this one couldn’t see anything, and nothing he heard made sense. Besides, he had very little hope of ever returning to Soo, let alone Ivo. He could still not remember what had happened there, but he knew that Vixi had almost certainly died trying to defend him. If Shonsu had any sense he would have turned around and set off for home by now.
There was no point in keeping his eyes open inside the bag. It was easier to let them stay shut and rely on the motion of the saddle to keep him awake, or almost awake.
He was told to dismount. Then his hands were tied in front of him
and a noose put around his neck so he couldn’t run away—hot chance of that happening! He was loaded into a cart, where there was straw for him to lie on. Bliss…
Some time in the night he was shaken awake, and marched along a jetty to a ship. The bare deck was less comfortable than the straw, but with his ankle tied to a rail, that was where he had to stay. He went back to sleep.
As dawn prepared to make its appearance, Vixini’s horse stumbled and stopped. He had been riding in a stupor. Shaken awake by the sudden cessation of motion, he realized what was happening and slid from the saddle. His own legs almost buckled under him, while the horse sighed heavily, as if to indicate that he should have done that long ago. Then it lay down and died.
He knelt, cut an artery and sucked out as much blood as he could. At least it removed the awful taste in his mouth, although the replacement was not much better. Now he was bloody outside and in.
Where was he? The ground looked much the same in every direction, but dawn was going to emerge to his left, so he had still been heading more or less south. He couldn’t last much longer unless he found water soon.
There being no further reason to linger, he started walking. Or stumbling. Or even staggering. After a while he saw that he had a shadow. Swiftly the World grew brighter, and a lark began to sing overhead. The grass all around here had been burned, and soon he was dusted all over by soot blowing in the wind. The ragged peak of RegiKra stood majestic along the horizon.
He wondered how long he could keep walking. This was definitely the final lap. If he lay down, he would never rise again.
The sun was above his left shoulder. Off to his right, roughly southwest, brilliant fires flamed along the horizon. Huh? Whatever was happening there was manmade, and human life meant water, so he turned and dragged his boots in that direction. Before long he realized that he was seeing sunlight reflected off bronze cannons. Furthermore, he had been noticed and eight horsemen were galloping in his direction.
