Epona tossed her head and snorted, ears forward; the other horses shifted uneasily, and Macha Mongruad squealed in rage, the leather-backed steel plates of her barding clattering.
Odard thought having two destriers ready was being extravagant. I don’t think so.
A human sound rose through the hooves. The Sword of the Prophet were chanting as the lance heads fell level: “Cut! Cut! Cut! Cut!”
The fighting men of the Republic replied, a long Ooooooo-rah that rolled up and down the ranks, a deep snarling shout full of guttural defiance and threat. A sharp bull bellow of “Come, ye Saints!” from the New Deseret troops off southward.
“CUT! CUT! CUT! CUT!”
When ten thousand men shouted in unison it was less a sound than a blow, something that thudded into your face and made your chest sound like a drum. And it struck below that too, and made Rudi’s lips curl back from his teeth.
He understood what it was to look into a man’s eyes over a blade and know that one of them would die; that was how the Lord and Lady had made the world, as much as the leap of a tiger on a deer, or two buck elk locking horns in the spring. That was strength and speed, skill and luck and nerve against the same. Having a small city coming towards you with nothing but murder in its heart was something else again, and as impersonal as being caught in a mudslide . . . or lying strapped to the latest log in a sawmill.
“CUT! CUT! CUT! CUT!”
Thurston shouted to someone, loud enough to be heard above the stunning roar: “I don’t care what they’re doing; get the reserve up here now. All of them, and on the double!”
The catapults of the field batteries cut loose in unison with a multiple crashing of throwing arms against rubber shod steel. Javelins arched out, twirling as their curved fins took the air, seeming to slow as they went, and the steel balls of the round shot. Men fell, their mounts fell—sometimes an entire file of three, where a six-pound steel ball traveling at four hundred feet a second hit the ground and bounced and broke legs like brittle sticks as it spun whirling forward.
The Sword of the Prophet came on at a steady hand gallop, opening out around bodies thrashing and screaming and bodies lying still, closing again like a flood around a rock in a display of horsemanship that would have been beautiful if it hadn’t been so frightening. The companions turned their mounts towards the front and raised their shields, barding and the kite shaped lengths of plywood protecting them and the horses against the bale wind of arrowheads whose farthest spray began to fall around them.
Ground and center, ground and center, Rudi thought; not trying to calm himself, but instead channeling the building fear and fury, until they opened doors in his soul.
When you did that Someone was always likely to answer. The world flashed for an instant into black outlines veined across with red, like the feather of a skeletal raven dipped in blood drawn across the surface of existence. Coolness ran across his skin, turning muscle and nerve to silk and fire, balanced and pure, moving to the beating heart of Earth that was his own pulse. Talons gripped all creation, and wings beat a wind whose dust was stars.
Doubt flickered out of him, like a candle flame’s in stant death in a gale. This is right, it is, he thought. This is just where They wanted me to be.
Arrows whickered up from the rear ranks of the Cutters, black against the tired fading blue of the afternoon sky, snapping down faster and faster as they arched over the huge blunt wedge. Rudi’s mind saw their course through the air, the weft of a single great loom, each etched like a thread of diamond through the world.
The lancers seemed like men without shadows as they charged into the setting sun, the heads of their horses driving up and down above the dust mist that half hid them. The catapults switched to the canister rounds, the bundles of darts sweeping forward, spreading out like the claws of leaping cats as the bands that bound them snapped.
They crossed the arrows in flight, warp to their weft, and the world shook to the thump of the loom’s hed dle; the Weaver’s face hung over it, ancient, terrible, sooty and single-eyed, scored with grief and anger huge enough for the death of suns. The massed grunt of the Boise footmen as they launched their spears made an undertone to it, part of the song the worlds sang. So was the endless flicker of their swords as they drew and crouched behind their big shields, shoulders tucked into the inner surfaces and strong muscled legs braced.
And the lances struck.
The sound went through him, thud, as if the massive impact had been in his own belly, snapping his teeth together in reflex. A crash, but the crash went on and on. Lances with a ton of galloping horse behind them struck through thick shields and steel-hoop armor, or broke and went pinwheeling up into the sky in a blur ring flicker. Men were bowled over by sheer impact, fall ing and sprawling stunned or curling under their shields against the stamping hooves; the whole front line vanished. Wedges of horsemen drilled in threes thrust into the gaps the lances and arrows had left; men stepped up from the second and third ranks, smashing with their shields, stooping for the hocking strike against the hamstring of a horse, stabbing, stabbing.
“They’re breaking through!”Odard shouted, his voice crackling with excitement.
He snatched a lance from his servant Alex’s hand and used it to lever himself into the saddle. Rudi put a hand on the cantle of Epona’s saddle and vaulted into it. The Prophet’s men had broken through, or at least chunks of them had. The Boise line kept stubbornly re forming behind them, and then the Corwinite infantry charged again. All the neat formations were gone, and it turned into a churning chaos of men who hit and stabbed and staggered forward and back, locked more closely together than lovers, sometimes stopping for a second by unspoken mutual consent to wheeze hatred at one another until they got back breath enough to fight.
Patterns, Rudi thought. It’s all patterns.
So easy to see, with eyes that could see. Three or four hundred of the Sword of the Prophet were loose in the rear; they regrouped, like beads of water sliding together on a waxed board, and spurred their horses straight for the command group where the eagle standard of the Republic stood.
“Follow me!” Rudi shouted. Then a shriek: “Morrigú!”
They had just enough room to build up momentum as their lances dipped. The seven of them crashed into the side of the Cutter wedge as it hit the line of the presiden tial guard detachment. Rudi left his lance in a man’s side and swept out his longsword; the motion ended in a cut across a wrist and the hand leaped free....
Seconds passed. A catapult lay on its side, one wheel spinning and its crew gaping dead about the tumbled metal. A horse beat its head against the ground and thrashed as it tried to stand, but both its forelegs were smashed, splinters showing through torn skin. A man crawled away from it, his face a mask of blood, pat ting the ground before him as he called, “Thumper! Thumper, boy!”
The roar of combat died away abruptly; a long trot ting line came up from the westward, threw their pila, snapped out swords and charged in a bristling unison like the hairs rising on an enraged boar’s back. The combat swept past Rudi, swept the others away from him, all but Edain standing at his stirrup and glaring, his last arrow on the string. The eagle standard stood canted to one side, the red and white and blue of the flag hanging limp. Dust blew about them again, and the sun had touched the horizon to the west, starting its slide below the plain.
Heat held him like a vise, and the hand of something more. The sword fell slowly to his side.
Rudi could see. And hear, as if the scene before him were only at arm’s length. Martin Thurston was on his knees beside his father, hand just touching the broken Cutter lance driven up beneath his ribs. Men stood around him, men with a numeral 6 above the crossed thunderbolts on their eagle faced shields; those same shields kept what happened from view.
“You’re late,” the president whispered, in a last attempt at gallantry. Then a gasp, and: “Medic!”
With that he saw something in his son’s face; his own went slack
with surprise.
“Why?” he said, the tone almost normal, despite the blood on his lips.
“I had to,” the younger man said. “You’d take my inheritance and my son’s—your grandson’s—and give it to strangers. I can’t let you do that. Not even you, Father.”
“Not . . . yours,” the wounded man gasped, as he began to struggle. “Not mine, not yours!”
“You’re old, Father. Old and out of touch, and I knew you’d never understand. And—”
His hand moved on the wood of the lance shaft, driv ing the steel head deep with a single strong wrench. The body in his arms stiffened, tried to call out, then relaxed limply with blood on its lips. He pulled the steel loose then, and laid it beside the dead man.
“I’m sorry, Dad. I’m so sorry,” Martin Thurston whispered, as the tears ran down a face rigid as a board. “I’m so sorry.”
Seconds passed, and the son bent to kiss the father’s forehead. Patterns, Rudi thought.
Only one man had been close enough to see, besides himself. Frederick Thurston stood not ten paces from him, his gaze slack and unbelieving. Rudi saw Martin’s eyes on his brother as he rose from their father’s body; they were black and bitter cold even as the rest of the face twisted with a terrible grief.
The universe moved, like a mountain balanced trembling on the sword blade of a god.
“Morrigú!” Rudi shrieked, breaking into the tense stillness of the moment, and clapped his heels to the destrier’s sides.
A trooper of the sixth regiment went down beneath the pounding hooves; following at her dam’s heels Macha Mongruad stamped on him, hard. Martin Thurston’s mind might be in turmoil, but his reflexes did not sleep; he threw himself back with a yell, rolling in a back-somersault despite the weight of his armor. The tip of the longsword tore a tiny divot of skin and flesh from the tip of his nose as it passed, and snapped his head to one side. Then Rudi tossed it into his left hand along with reins and the grip of his shield, and bent in the saddle.
Rudi knew he was very strong. Frederick Thurston was a grown man in armor; to snatch him off the ground from horseback, and that at the gallop, was something he’d have thought beyond his reach. Now he did it, though every tendon from his right hand to his hips seemed outlined in blue fire for an instant. Then he was through; the young man he’d rescued from his brother seemed sensible enough to lie quiet across Epona’s saddlebow for an instant.
As he circled around the rest of his companions gathered about him; the edge of battle was passing westward again, and the fight breaking up into clumps of men who hacked at one another or fled.
“We have to get out of here,” he said bluntly, letting the young man slide to the ground. “Martin Thurston killed his father—”
“What?” Mathilda said, eyes wide.
“It’s true,” Frederick Thurston said, his voice shaking. “I saw it . . . he was wounded . . . Martin killed him. . . .”
“There’s no time,” Rudi said. “He’ll want us all dead; he saw that I saw, and his brother too—”
Odard snapped his fingers. “That ambush we interrupted down south—the assassins—he must be working with the Prophet’s men!”
Rudi flicked a glance westward. It was several thousand yards, but he could still hear the snarl of wrath that went through Boise’s army as the news of their leader’s death went from man to man.
“I wouldn’t want to be the one to hold him to his deal,” he said.“Not now that he’s won.”
“Yeah,” Ingolf added, his lips tight. “He won’t stay bought . . . uh-oh. Cavalry headed our way. Those Cut ters who broke through aren’t trying to get back to their own lines. Looks like they’ve got orders about us.”
“We’ve got to split up,” one of the twins said. “Into smaller groups at least.”
Rudi nodded. “If they’ve got one dust trail to follow we’re all dead. Meet at the rendezvous. Fast.”
Rudi had swung down out of the saddle and stripped off the barding from Epona and her daughter as he spoke; they didn’t need fifty extra pounds.
“Right,” he said, tossing Macha Mongruad’s reins to the younger Thurston. “Fred, you’ll go with Father Ignatius.”
He met the cleric’s eye, and received a short sharp nod.
“Everyone, get going.”
* * * *
Baron Odard Liu slid out of the saddle as his horse collapsed, wheezing blood and froth as the arrowhead worked its way into the lungs. He was in the upper reaches of a defile, and he’d have had to let the beast go soon anyway, as the footing grew worse. Rock crunched and slid under his feet, and he turned with his shield up as the yelping cries of the pursuit echoed off the tall rock faces to either side.
Death tasted of salt and tears and sweat, and bitter alkali dust and the chill of morning. Awareness of it had been growing as they ran and hid and twisted through the hours of darkness.
No man could outrun an arrow.
Or his fate, he thought. Still, I’d have liked to lay a few more girls in the clover and sing a few more songs before I went . . . at eighty, by preference, and on a throne. . . .
“Sorry,” he said to Mathilda Arminger. “I’ll hold them as long as I can. Ingolf drew off a fair number.”
Her face was stiff but unyielding. Brave to a fault, he thought, then scowled as she slipped down from her own mount.
“Now, please, don’t spoil my gesture,” he said. “I would like my last heroic stand to have some point.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “I can’t climb that in a hauberk, and if I try taking it off, they’ll be on us before I’m half done. Let’s make it cost them.”
He sighed. “How deplorably practical you are, Princess,” he said. “Admirably courageous, though.”
But then, whatever anyone called her father, nobody ever said he was a coward. And I don’t think the Spider has nerves at all, just clockwork and levers inside. Whenever I regret my mother, it would be well to remember what poor Mathilda has to put up with!
There was a mouthful of water left in his canteen, and they shared it as the Cutters rode into the space beneath them. Two boulders and a dead cottonwood gave the three of them a little cover. He was a bit surprised to see Alex hadn’t slipped off; the little man was reliable, but this was beyond the usual call of duty.
That must have shown on his face. “The dowager baroness charged me most particularly to keep you safe, my lord,” he said, and turned away to cock his crossbow.
“Good man,” Odard said. Then he looked at Mathilda. “By the way, I love you,” he went on. Then at her shocked look: “Well, it may not be the opportune moment, but there may not be all that many more.”
The Cutters had sent their horses to the rear and were standing crouched with their shields up. It was middling bowshot, but they were fairly well armored, and the ground wasn’t too steep most of the way from the dry creekbed to his position. . . .
Their commander came out from his unit’s shield wall and stood with hands on his hips. “I haven’t got the time to shilly-shally,” he called. “The High Seeker wants you alive; only the Ascended Masters know why. Give yourself up—and I guarantee your safety until you’re turned over to my superiors. If you don’t, well, I didn’t promise to capture you unharmed. Just alive.”
Odard searched for a suitable reply; Mathilda pre empted him with a short pungent pair of words. The Cutter’s tuft of chin beard moved as he grinned.
“I won’t forget that, soulless Nephilite whore,” he said coldly, and drew his shete. “Ready, you servants of the Light bearer!” he called to his men.
The universe dissolved in silver light. When Odard could think again he found himself facedown, and even the dry gritty smell of the rock beneath his face made his stomach twist in nausea. He recognized the other sen sations—whirling dizziness, stabbing pain—and didn’t bother trying to stand up; getting your brain rattled around in your head wasn’t like taking a nap, and no body just sprang back to their feet and went on
their way afterwards. The coif and padding had absorbed most of the force of the blow by Alex’s crossbow butt, but enough had gotten through. . . . He gulped back stomach acid and glared at his servant’s boots.
The older man held the crossbow on Mathilda and spoke: “Your Highness, I didn’t promise the baroness to keep you alive at all costs, so please don’t move. Even that armor won’t stop a bolt at this range.”
“Traitor!” she snapped.
“I’m a Gervais vassal, and you’re not my liege,” Alex said tranquilly. “Baroness Mary saved my life and my family’s after the Change, and I’m going to keep her son alive whether he has the sense to agree or not.”
“Kill me, then!” Mathilda spit, beginning to raise her sword.
“Oh, I won’t kill you. I’ll just shoot you through the shoulder . . . and I’m a very good shot, Your Highness. The Cutters won’t hurt either of you. They’ll even give you a good doctor. But you’ll be laid out for months.”
Slowly, reluctantly, her fingers opened and she dropped the blade. Smart, too, Odard thought with punch-drunk detachment. God and the Saints, what a woman!
Alex nodded and called out over his shoulder without taking his eyes off her, much louder: “Glastonbury! Violet God flame! I have your safe conduct passwords and two very valuable hostages, gentlemen!”
Odard let his head fall to the rock and groaned slightly. Obviously Mary Liu had been giving instructions behind his back again.
Mother, must you always interfere? he thought, and then let himself fall back into the waiting blackness.
* * * *
Ingolf Vogeler laughed. “Haven’t we been here before?” he said, as he looked at the drawn bows of the Cutters.
Near-ripe wheat hissed against his stirrups, the mealy smell earthy and dusty-sweet, infinitely homelike in a way that would fill him with bitter nostalgia if he let it.