Cissy had fallen behind. Fetch bolted back, seized the smaller mongrel’s hand, and dragged her to greater speed.
Reaching the ridge, they found a gulch notched into its base by a strangled stream.
A choice. Up the slope or down the cleft?
Liking the narrow confines and the bed of leg-breaking rocks, Fetch scurried for lower ground. She and Cissy were soon swallowed by the embankment. Screened from view, they hustled through the gulch until the sides began to grow shallow, the depression becoming level with the land once more. The ridge rose sheer to their right. A sprawl of boulders and scrub bordered the lip to their left. Fetch scrambled up, using the cover to gain a look at their backtrail.
“Shit,” she hissed, ducking back down almost as soon as she peeked out.
Six cavaleros were on the ridge above. In their pursuit they’d seen the same choice and must have split up. The others were either risking their horses within the gulch or were riding along the lip. She guessed the latter.
Skidding down the scree to Cissy, she whispered, pointing the way they’d come.
“Head back. If you run into horses, run back here, but don’t leave the gulch. If the cavaleros are above, stop, surrender. Keep their eyes on you.”
Fearful but resolved, Cissy nodded.
“Go.”
Fetch waited until the meander of the gulch hid Cissy from sight before making her gamble. She climbed out on the side opposite the ridge, moved at a crouch through the scrub. The cavaleros searching from the high ground would notice her eventually, but the slope above this end of the gulch was too steep for them to ride down. They’d be forced to double back. She’d have to be swift.
And hells-damned lucky.
Shouts of men’s voices ahead. The lower party had seen Cissy, and it sounded like they weren’t inside the gully, but above on Fetch’s side.
There was the luck.
Shouts from the ridge. She’d been spotted herself.
Time for the swift.
Gathering the slack of her chains on the run, Fetch sprinted across the scrabble. Rounding a curve caused by a thrust of the ridge, she reached the cavaleros. They’d been riding single file, but were now turned side-facing, every man with his attention focused on a pleading Cissy below.
The lead cavalero never saw Fetch coming.
Springing, she seized his shield and yanked him from the saddle. He tumbled to the stones with a yelp, helm falling from his head. He tried to rise, but Fetch stomped his face with her bootheel, cracking the back of his skull against a rock. Blood sprayed.
One.
Nickering with agitation, his horse shied and stamped, but did not spook. It was hemmed on three sides by Fetching to its left, the gulch in front, and to its right by the next cavalero in the line. Alerted by the scuffle, the man turned, swearing at the empty saddle next to him and the escaped half-orc just beyond. Fetch ducked, scrambling for a weapon, but the lance of the man she’d brained had slid into the gulch. Before she could free the sword from his belt, the other cavalero rode around the impeding horse.
Fetch whipped the loop of her chain up into the oncoming animal’s face, causing it to rear in pain and alarm, dumping its rider into the scrub. The other cavaleros were shouting, their voices raw with anger and confusion. The struck horse continued to buck, beating at Fetch with its front hooves. Recoiling, she made another attempt for the sword and filled her hand with steel. The unhorsed cavalero was struggling in the embrace of the scrub, unable to find enough leverage to rise. Splayed out, tangled in his cloak, he could only scream as Fetch rushed in, thrusting the blade through his open mouth. The crossguard broke his teeth as the blade buried to the hilt.
Two.
She was in full view of the others now. The remaining three cavaleros had turned their mounts and were now fanning out from the edge of the gulch, getting into position to ride her down. Leaving the sword, she snatched the lance from Two’s dead hand and vaulted onto One’s horse, got her ass in the saddle. Her seat felt too tall, too precarious, the uncooperative animal beneath her legs powerful but ungainly. No hope getting her feet in the stirrups, and her bound wrists made it impossible to wield the lance and use the reins.
The cavaleros spurred forward.
“Fuck this.”
Fetch slapped a hand down on the saddle horn, bracing as she hopped up, her boots perching atop the saddle. She jumped high off the animal’s back, launching herself at the oncoming men. The lance in both hands, she drove it down, taking the center cavalero in the chest. The long, keen point of the lance pierced his armor, ripping through the scales to find his heart.
Three.
She kept hold of the lance as the man toppled over the rump of his horse. His back struck the dust, the lance driving deeper as Fetch landed on her feet, straddling the impaled carcass. Turning, she saw the last cavaleros were riding away, gaining distance to turn for another charge.
“Isa!”
Fetch whirled at Cissy’s warning, just in time to see Maneto bearing down, chain-mace swinging. Throwing her arms up in front of her face, Fetch caught the flanged head on her shackled wrists. The force of the blow knocked the iron cuffs into her nose. Reeling, she groped for the lance planted in Three’s body. Bright smears of color announced the mace striking the back of her head. A numbing weightlessness took hold.
Her sight returned, a bleary, nauseating thing. She was lying on stones, Maneto and Ramon atop towering horses above. Cissy was kneeling beside her, clutching a lance. But she’d been…at the bottom of the gulch. So was Fetching.
Maneto said something, the words muddled as they swam through the pulsing, sickening weight of Fetch’s skull.
“—better that than going down there after them.”
“Heathen way to kill.” Ramon. Not pleased.
“You can wear a hair shirt after,” Maneto needled. “You men start gathering those bigger rocks! We’ll kill these soot-skins and bury them with the same effort.”
With a groan, Fetch pushed herself up, pawed at the lance in Cissy’s hands. Wide-eyed, the woman relinquished the weapon. Shoving the butt end of the shaft into the dry bed, Fetch began climbing to her feet. The first effort made her vomit on her boots, much to Maneto’s amusement.
“Oh, ho-ho! Look here! This one don’t take to the notion a’dying, lads! Martyred Madre, if that’s not the fighting spirit to separate a chief from the common mongrel. Bear witness, boys, and count yerselves better men!”
Fetch made it upright. The number of Manetos wavered from one lout to four and back again.
He leaned across his saddle horn to better leer down at her. “What do you expect to render, Chief Cunny, skull-broke and barely able to stand in your half-dug grave?”
“Add one…more to my…grand tally of cunt cavaleros killed,” Fetch said, slurring. “Promised you’d die soon, frail.”
Maneto only guffawed.
It hurt to smile, but Fetch managed.
Maneto turned to Ramon. “Make certain—”
Fetch threw the lance. Would have been fucking awkward with shackled hands, but Maneto’s mace had broken one of the cuffs. She’d hidden it until time to make the cast. Her bashed head sought immediate vengeance for the effort, pouring on the dizzying pain, enough to send her sprawling back to the stones.
Ramon was cursing, a horse was whinnying. Clacking rocks and crunching bootfalls as the dismounted cavaleros abandoned their stone gathering to see what had happened.
Fetch forced her squinted eyes open and up. From his own mount, Ramon was snatching at the bridle of Maneto’s furious horse. Its saddle was vacant.
“Four.”
She looked at Cissy, sorry she couldn’t get them all.
And then they heard the chuckling.
It grew in intensity as Maneto stomped into view, dusty, helmless, holding the side of
his head. Still chortling, he moved his hand, splayed the glistening red palm.
“Add an ear to your tally, quim. Add an ear!” Maneto burst into fresh peals of laughter. He climbed atop his horse. “Stone ’em, lads!”
With that command, he rode away, still trumpeting his mirth.
Ramon watched him go. His men ambled back to the rocks piled at the edge of the gulch, each bending to lift one.
Cissy rose to stand beside Fetch as the men lifted the boulders over their heads.
“Wait!”
The command came from Ramon. The men heeded.
Ramon dismounted. He gestured the men away. Putting the rocks down, they gathered, lost from sight. The occasional pulse of Ramon’s lowered voice reached the gully, but only as deep hums.
Fetch met Cissy’s questioning eye, saw the uncertainty birth fresh fear.
They waited.
The cavaleros came back to stand at the lip and gaze down, but said nothing. They did not take up the stones. Ramon kept looking in the direction Maneto had gone. Nothing happened for a long while.
So long, Fetch gave up on the foolery of standing.
At last, the sounds of approaching horses roused her back to her feet.
It wasn’t Maneto. It was that rodent Blas, along with a dozen of his men.
“Come up out of there,” Ramon told Fetch and Cissy as soon as the scouts’ stockbows were trained. The climb up the slope nearly caused Fetch to vomit again, but she reached the top.
Blas and his troop weren’t the only new arrivals. There were also five fresh cavaleros, a string of pack mules.
And Womb Broom.
Fetch puzzled at the sight of her hog alive, saddled. The brace of javelins was full, and her stockbow and tulwar hung from the harness.
All hopes of being given inexplicable freedom were dashed when Blas brought forth more chains.
Fetch looked around at the twenty-six men. And held her wrists out.
“What’s happening?” she asked Ramon.
“We’re taking you to Vallisoletum,” came the terse reply.
Hispartha. Fetch gave Ramon as hard a stare as her busted skull would allow. He was angry, anxious.
“You’re all deserting,” Fetch said.
Ramon grimaced. “We are taking Garcia’s killer to the marquesa. Bermudo can choose to squander his chance of getting away from here. Not us.”
The reply wasn’t for her, Fetch realized. Ramon was trying to keep his conspirators from losing their courage.
As Blas secured the chains, Ramon fixed Fetching with flinty eyes from atop his horse. “The journey is long. You will be tempted to escape. For every disobedience, every one of my men you harm, try to harm, for every attempt at flight, I will punish her.” The hard stare flicked to Cissy, also being chained. “Get them on a mule, Blas. If they even drag their feet, notch the whore’s ear.”
Fetch went to the mule, focused on walking steadily. The nausea had faded during the wait in the gulch, but the pain matured, grew roots. The first plodding steps of the mule were a fresh hell. Wasn’t long before the rolling, rough ride summoned the queasiness back from whatever crack in her skull it had slithered into to sleep. She did not know the distribution of her captors, could not perceive the direction they traveled, though she guessed northward. The journey was the spearing glare of the sun encouraging her discomfort to become a thing near unbearable.
She had no notion where Vallisoletum lay within the kingdom. Didn’t really matter. She did know Ramon wanted her to get there alive. This marquesa cunt would feel slighted otherwise. Bermudo said her vengeance required an audience. That’s how these noble fucks thought. Sluggard and Incus were proof of that. Carnavales. Arenas. Half-orcs were a thing to witness. To fear. To desire. To master. It was the damn reason Blas had brought Fetch’s hog. A lone half-orc woman would make a poor parade to the gallows. The gathered frails would likely complain, think they’d been cheated. No, you needed the feral hog, the well-used weapons. Trappings necessary to complete the picture of the bloodthirsty, tattooed, filthy mongrel savage who killed one of their blue-blood betters.
Your time is ending.
Bermudo’s words kept slithering through the muddled morass of Fetch’s mind.
This was more than the persecution of the nomads. Jackal’s head could appear on a platter at the captain’s next meal and he would continue to make the badlands bleed. Hells, the man had declared it from his own lips. Hispartha was moving to reclaim Ul-wundulas.
Your time is ending.
Sure as shit wasn’t ended yet.
The other chiefs needed to be told, warned.
Fuck Ramon’s threats. Fetch and Cissy had to escape. Night was their only chance, when the frails would be trammeled by their piss-poor vision in the darkness. To save the Bastards, the Lots, from Bermudo’s madness, they had to escape.
And they had to do it before the border.
TWELVE
RAMON CALLED A HALT well after dusk. He’d ordered a brutal pace, clearly intent on getting as far from the castile as possible. For their camp, he chose the lee of a rocky rise, his men placing a fire and their captives close to its sheltering face. A pair of almond trees stood removed from the rise, the only other residents of the place. The cavaleros hobbled their mounts and corralled them a short distance from the rocks, out in the plain. The scouts kept their animals separate, likely because the watch duties fell to them. Womb Broom was tied beneath the nearer of the almond trees, where he immediately began to root around. It wasn’t a kindness. A contented hog, focused on finding fallen morsels, would be more difficult to liberate.
Cavalero Ramon was clever and careful. Had she a choice, Fetch would have preferred him to be a drunken, witless coward. Sitting next to Cissy, she watched him and his men closely, vigilant for any advantage. It didn’t help that Cissy’s manacles had been removed and used to adjoin Fetch’s ankles.
The men spent twilight building up and loitering around their fire. The dice soon came out and Fetch waited for the bottle to follow, but it did not appear until after the men had supped on salted meat and hard biscuit. Fetch and Cissy were given nothing.
“Courteous of them not to feed the women,” Fetch muttered in orcish.
“Lucky thing,” Cissy replied. “I remember how you get when hungry. Now you’ll be able to bite through the chains.”
Fetch snorted from her sore nose, the vibration making her head buzz with pain. “Hog’s ass.”
A pause. “We’ll have a chance tonight. They’ll remove the chains when they come to rape us.”
The chilling truth of that statement was made worse by the blunt certainty in Cissy’s voice. There was no sense denying it. Two dozen pieces of human shit who believed they held power over two women. Their actions were as fixed as the rising of the sun. But Cissy was also right about it being their chance. Men were never more vulnerable, in body and mind, than when their cods were stiff in the wind.
Cissy read her thoughts. “I’ll make them stupid. You make them corpses.”
Fetch nodded.
It happened when the dice grew tiresome.
Two of the boldest sauntered over, sharing a bottle. They merely stood for a while, staring down, features turned to blackness by the fire behind them. Their presence drew three others, the sort of men too afraid to begin the evil, but all too eager to latch on once it’s started.
“Leave off,” Ramon droned at them from his bedroll by the fire, but there was no weight in his words. Clever men know a pointless task when faced with one. Fetch was surprised he said anything at all. The cavaleros before her did not acknowledge that he spoke.
“What do you reckon?” one asked the rest. “Four enough to hold the Bastard?”
“You mad? Gonna need at least twice that. That mongrel’s savage as a lynx.”
“Not with th
at knock Maneto gave her, she ain’t.”
“Best stick with the tame one, Alvaro,” another cautioned.
“Already had her.”
A growling laugh. “All of us have.”
“I haven’t.”
“You’re a cunting liar, Luys.”
“Not! I ain’t never.”
“He lying, Cissy?” Alvaro asked, casual and kind.
“He’s lying,” she replied, voice tinged with good humor.
“Don’t recall, though,” Luys said, put off. “Drunk, most like.”
“Take her, then. I want that hoof-inked flesh.” Alvaro turned toward the fire, giving Fetch a glimpse of his mustachioed, wine-flushed face. “Some’a you, off your asses, help us here!”
“Fuck you, ’Varo!” came the reply, its speaker all but hidden behind the flames. “Ain’t your damn servant.”
“What you are is a backy fuck afraid of quim, Guillen!” Alvaro turned back, muttering under his breath. “Man-shafting pederast.”
“And take it elsewhere,” Ramon barked with far more heat than before. “I don’t have a powerful need to watch your bare asses at work.”
This was good. Less than half of Ramon’s men were indulging their monstrous appetites. Fetch could kill five on foot. All they needed was to get to Womb while unbound, and they could be gone.
Alvaro took another drink, swatted one of the other men on the chest with the back of his hand. “Get some of Blas’s boys. They’ll help.”
The man made a disgusted noise, taking the bottle. “Then we got to share with ’em. Filthy buggers all got the drips.”
“They’ll go last or not at all,” Alvaro declared. “Go on.”
Shit. Eight of the scouts were on watch. The remaining four were asleep, resting before their turn at sentry. If they all roused themselves for the promise of forced flesh, that would make nine. Far different odds.
“Wait,” Cissy purred. The five silhouettes standing over them stilled.
“You’re doing this wrong,” she told them, keeping her voice low. “You want us spoiled by poxy cocks the first night? Leave those others out of it, and I’ll show you something never for sale at Rhecia’s.”
The True Bastards Page 15
