“Why?”
The dwarf looked bemused.
Gathrid kept his disgust to himself. Rogala was deaf to any protest.
The fourth night the enemy mounted patrols along the road to Katich. The wagons they attacked were stoutly defended. They spent the remainder of the night skirmishing with and fleeing from patrols which had begun closing in during their raid.
Gathrid could not count his worries. But one old one was important no longer. His body felt healthier than he could remember it ever being. His leg bothered him not at all.
Their fifth night of raiding was one more of confusion than one of action. “Their patrols are everywhere,” Gathrid complained.
“You expected them to put up with us forever?” Rogala snapped. “Of course they’re starting to come back at us.”
The youth studied the encampment they were scouting. It was the third they had approached. “We can’t take this one either.” The guards were numerous and alert.
“We’ll try another one.” Rogala sounded grim. He was determined to attack. His enemies were not cooperating.
The tale was the same everywhere. Ahlert’s people were waiting.
“All right,” Rogala grouched, “if you won’t play out here, we’ll just rag your main camp. You won’t be looking for us there.”
“Are you crazy? You don’t go whacking a hornet’s nest with a stick.”
An hour later, as they stole nearer Katich and the vast Ventimiglian encampment facing the capital, Rogala yielded to Gathrid’s incessant importunities. “All right!” he snarled. And muttered, “Gutless children.” He led the way in a long arc around the city, growing sourer by the mile.
Sunrise found them departing desolation for more hospitable countryside north of the Gudermuth capital. An hour later they were hidden in a wood.
“Get some sleep,” Rogala said as Gathrid consumed the last of a cold breakfast. “Pretty soon we won’t get much chance.”
Gathrid needed no more encouragement.
Shouts and the clash of arms wakened him shortly after noon. At first he thought them part of his dreams. When not being stalked by the slain Toal, he relived fragments of the pasts of Daubendiek’s victims.
The noise continued after he opened his eyes. He looked for Rogala. The dwarf and his horse had vanished.
Was Theis in trouble?
The racket came from beyond a low rise west of the thicket where they had concealed their encampment. Keeping low, Gathrid scurried to the crest.
Ventimiglian and Gudermuther infantry were locked in a death struggle on the far side. The outcome was beyond doubt. There were fifteen Ventimiglians, only eight Gudermuthers. Men from both companies lay dead or wounded. It looked like the culmination of a hunt for fugitives from some battle already fought. A Ventimiglian junior officer, mounted, watched boredly from a safe distance.
Gathrid withdrew, ran to camp, cinched his recently stolen saddle, mounted, returned — and at the crest, after having revealed himself, had second thoughts. He halted. All eyes turned his way.
The officer drew his sword, spurred his mount in the youth’s direction.
Gathrid drew Daubendiek.
He had no idea what the combatants saw. Whatever, they fled, the officer outdistancing them all. Gathrid slew one Ventimiglian, regretted it immediately. There had been no need. He had accomplished his purpose by scattering the fighters.
He fretted all afternoon. Where was Rogala? Why didn’t he show up? What would happen now?
The dwarf sensed trouble the instant he arrived. “What happened?”
Gathrid explained.
“Should’ve stayed out of it, boy. Now they don’t just suspect, they know. Plenty of witnesses. You think we were on the run before, you haven’t seen anything.”
“They were my people.”
“You’ll learn. You’re the Swordbearer. You don’t have any people now. You have Daubendiek, Theis Rogala, Suchara and Death.”
Just what Tureck Aarant had had. And Suchara promised nothing in return. “But.... “
“You’ll learn. Come on. We’ve got to get moving. They’re probably closing in already.”
They were. The first time the pair approached the edge of the wood, near where they had entered, they found a Ventimiglian battalion preparing to sweep through. The ensign of a sorcerer-general accompanied the unit standard.
“Bad,” Rogala muttered. “He spots us, our only hope is to outrun them. And that’ll be impossible if he’s in touch with the others. Better put your scruples away, boy, and get ready for a fight. A real fight this time.”
“What’s wrong with scruples, Theis? They —”
“Because you’d be the only one at the party with them. They’re going to get you hurt if you don’t turn loose.” The dwarf wheeled, led the way to another verge. The enemy had not yet appeared there, but dust clouds were approaching.
Rogala had flown to the spot like a pigeon to its coop, Gathrid reflected as they cantered across open terrain. They escaped the closing circle only a quarter mile ahead of galloping horsemen. In his way, in his field, Rogala was certainly competent. Useful, if one had need of a bloodthirsty dwarf.
“What’re we going to do?” the youth asked.
“Make a run for the border. Get over into this kingdom you call Bilgoraj. Maybe we can shame your allies into doing something.” The dwarf kicked his mount into a gallop.
The chase was on. It continued throughout the night, growing painful and exhausting. Rogala was in his element, running like a fox before hounds, enjoying himself hugely as he matched wits with the Ventimiglian commanders. He strove to keep a southwest heading, toward where the border made its closest approach, but torch-bearing riders kept turning them west and north, toward a border twenty miles more distant. Rogala conceded the ground.
Once they skirmished with a party of four, and took fresh mounts, but lost ground to the growing pursuit. Above the night, a waning moon ghosted westward like a mocking grin in cloth of diamond-studded black felt. The ominous comet led it by thirty degrees. The latter was twice the size it had been when first Gathrid had seen it.
As false dawn sketched the horizon behind them, where fires glowed and pillars of smoke wandered up to mask the lower stars, Rogala shouted, “We’re not moving fast enough. They’re guiding us. Watch for trouble.”
Trouble found them as, moments later, they crested a hill. Across a shallow, misty valley a lone dark rider waited.
A Toal.
Where one could be found others were likely to appear, including the master devil himself.
“Ride over him,” Rogala ordered.
Easy to say, Gathrid thought.
The Toal awaited them in full knight’s regalia, every piece some sorcery-haunted relic unearthed from the Mindak’s mines of the past. The Toal’s lance caught the light. It was crystal alive with internal fire. Its shield was a swirling surface from which one or another of Hell’s tenants occasionally leered forth. Its armor was the familiar black, and proof against mortal blades.
But its mount most inspired Gathrid’s awe. Dragon was the name that came to mind, yet it only vaguely resembled the huge, sinuous, winged monster of artists’ conceptions. It stood horse high. It was heavily scaled, and a third longer than a horse. Its legs bowed remarkably. The Toal sat far forward, almost astride the beast’s neck. Wings protruded behind the rider, lying close against the beast’s flanks. Gathrid wondered if they were functional. Nothing that large ought to fly.
“Guide right,” Rogala shouted as they roared toward the Toal. “Make him swing his lance across his body.”
Gathrid tried, almost collided with the cursing dwarf. He wondered how he was supposed to get inside the lance’s reach, and what the devil, without shield or armor, he was doing attacking.
The Toal swung with him. Soon he and Gathrid were riding parallel, swirling the low patches of mist in the deepest part of the vale. The youth had failed. It was he who had to swing his weapon across his bod
y.
The Dead Captain’s mount was preternaturally quick. It darted in and out, trying to catch him off guard.
At each lance thrust Daubendiek lightninged over. Each meeting produced a thunderclap, noisome smoke and a numbing shock in Gathrid’s arm. Yet Daubendiek felt no distress.
The Toal was playing with him, he realized. It was keeping him occupied while awaiting unwitting help from his mount. Over the rough ground, still concealed by the mist, his animal would stumble sooner or later.
Gathrid put all his strength into an attempt to shatter the fiery lance. He succeeded only in making the thunder louder.
But Rogala, too, was in the fray. The dwarf drifted round to the Toal’s left quarter. Gathrid redoubled his assault on the Dead Captain’s lance. Rogala planted his short blade in the dragon’s haunch.
The beast was swift. It stopped dead, leapt into the air. Its wings flashed and slapped, making a gonglike crash. It slew Rogala’s horse with a single snap of traplike jaws. It barely missed Rogala as he threw himself over his mount’s rump.
The Toal lost its seat too, yet recovered quickly. Gathrid wheeled for the kill. He found the thing setting its lance like an infantry pike.
“Forget him!” Rogala bellowed. “We’ve got to get out of here!” He pointed. Crossing a distant ridgeline, airborne on a beast resembling that just injured, trailing a fluttering black cloak, came help for the Toal.
“Nieroda!” Gathrid urged his mount toward the dwarf, scooped him up, kicked the animal into a gallop. The thing that Rogala had wounded bit a chunk from its own flank as they passed, became more enraged. The Toal had to slay it in self-defense.
“Hope that wasn’t a family heirloom you left back there,” Gathrid shouted over his shoulder.
“Knives I can replace, boy. My skin I can’t. Shut up and ride.”
The youth glanced back, saw the Toal’s arm thrust their way. It was about to use the weapon Gathrid had seen at Kacalief. He tightened his grip on Daubendiek. A chuckle redolent of the thing that haunted his dreams seemed to echo from everywhere around him.
A blast of light took his sight away.
Daubendiek quivered, groaned, absorbed the sorcery.
Gathrid looked back again, vision quickly regained. Nieroda was closer. His flyer seemed slow and clumsy.
They crested the far wall of the valley and saw that this would not be a long race. The Bilgoraji border was nearer than they had suspected. Astride a road which wandered in from their left stood a city of tents, a forest of standards. “We’ve struck the Torun Road,” Gathrid guessed. “That’s the Alliance army.” Gasping, he identified the banners of most of the allied kingdoms, and those of several Brotherhood Orders.
Rogala grunted with each piece of information absorbed.
“Why haven’t they done something?” Gathrid wondered.
“Get us there and we’ll find out!” Rogala snapped.
Nieroda had seen the army, too. He put on more speed by steepening the angle of his glide. He closed fast. Gathrid struggled to ready himself and the Sword.
There was a stir ahead. Knights and men in the robes of the Brotherhood rushed toward the frontier. They remained just beyond the customs shed delineating the border. That puzzled and angered Gathrid. A scrupulous respect for Gudermuth’s already shattered sovereignty suggested political intrigue. “There’ll be an accounting,” he muttered.
“We’re not going to make it,” Rogala told him. “He has room for one pass. I’ll tell you when.”
They were little more than a hundred yards from the border when Rogala growled, “Get ready to swerve. Now!”
Gathrid yanked his reins. His horse screamed. Rogala flung himself off, lit and rolled like a professional tumbler. A bolt from a crossbow lying across Nieroda’s lap blistered the air where Gathrid’s mount had been, struck earth at Rogala’s heels, left a fist-sized, smoking black hole. The dwarf responded with mountain-moving curses.
Daubendiek lightninged up and opened a yard of the flyer’s belly.
The creature’s soul was as alien as the thing that had possessed the slain Toal. Gathrid sensed only coldness, bloodthirst and a feeling of the thing having spent ages asleep. It was another of the Mindak’s past delvings.
The thing screamed. Its wings beat like gongs. The very air seemed to try fleeing. Nieroda roared angrily. Mount and rider hit earth in a thrashing tumble.
The Dark Champion got off another bolt while falling. This one Gathrid could not evade. Daubendiek could not turn it. Gathrid jumped. His horse took the impact, moaned, collapsed. A charred flesh smell filled the air.
The earth came up too fast. Gathrid knew he would be knocked senseless. Yet he managed to land lightly, on his toes and free hand.
Nieroda stood twenty paces away, blocking his path to the border. He swelled into a black giant behind which loomed an even larger, nebulous entity.
For an instant Gathrid was frightened. Then Daubendiek’s power flooded him as never before. He suffered a moment of disorientation.
The earth dwindled beneath him. Everything human faded into insignificance. He existed alone with his Enemy, and had a self-confidence that was godlike. Never had he felt so alive, so competent, so unconquerable. With a laugh that echoed mockingly off the hills, he brought Daubendiek up to salute his dread opponent.
This was how Tureck Aarant must have felt before his great combats. Daubendiek must have come into the fullness of its Power.
To one side a small, hairy something groveled on the earth and whined, “Suchara be praised. Suchara be praised. Your servant no longer doubts.”
“Come, Hellspawn. Come, Nieroda. Receive the kiss of Suchara,” Gathrid thundered. He put his lips to the quivering blade of the Great Sword. It had grown hot.
Over the border the Alliance ranks began to show gaps as fainthearts fled. Even those in the colored robes of the Orders looked ready to panic. Gathrid saw, and did not care.
But he could not see himself.
From across the frontier they saw Nieroda huge in an envelope of Cimmerian mist, and past him a blinding man-shape of fire surrounded by aquamarine haze. The haze had about it suggestions of a woman’s face. Some even saw blood-red eyes burning over the Swordbearer’s shoulders.
Daubendiek, too, had its apparent growth and backing aura. For a moment the Swordbearer had a fist filled with blades, as if Daubendiek itself were but the iceberg tip of an enchantment spanning multiple dimensions.
For Gathrid the world continued to diminish, to narrow, to become unreal, till his universe contained but one concrete object. The Enemy. The thing that called itself Nevenka Nieroda.
A vagary crossed his mind. Had Nieroda ever been human?
The darkness and its content remained motionless, waiting, ignoring Gathrid’s challenge. It seemed indecisive, as if no longer certain that its own challenge had been wise.
With a Daubendiek that seemed a half-dozen yards long Gathrid clove the Nieroda-darkness. A bolt like that which had slain his horse ripped into the haze surrounding him. He laughed. It tickled.
More than ever, Daubendiek demonstrated a life and will of its own. It moved in deadly patterns no mortal eye could follow, punishing to the limit the weapon which strove to turn it. That was a blade brother to the one once borne by Obers Lek. It had no hope of victory. It screamed out its life as Daubendiek chopped shrapnel from its edge. The Sword sang in a high, exultant voice.
The end came swiftly. Nieroda’s blade died with a despairing wail, becoming mortal metal which Daubendiek cut as easily as spidersilk. With a berserker’s one-handed backhand swing, Gathrid removed Nieroda’s head.
The dark mist faded. A headless little man collapsed. A susurrus of awe ran through the Alliance army.
And Gathrid knew that he had been cheated. He had won a hollow victory. He had slain another man already dead. The thing that had been Nevenka Nieroda had abandoned the body moments before the mortal blow. It remained alive to work its mischief elsewhere. They would meet ag
ain, and next time Nieroda would bear crueler weapons.
Gathrid looked around. Whence he had come a half-dozen Toal on dragon mounts had turned their backs and were departing. He would not be able to catch them even were he so inclined.
The small, hairy thing pranced and babbled at his feet, pointing westward. Gathrid stalked toward his motherland’s frontier with her protector, Bilgoraj. “Kimach Faulstich, you great King, why have you forsaken your neighbor?” He hoped his words thundered off the hills behind the Alliance army. He was in a vicious rage. King Kimach had failed to keep faith. There would be a reckoning.
They sensed his wrath, over there, though they did not hear it. Hundreds fled. Thousands remained, rooted in their fear.
But as he drew closer the aura and Power leaked away from him. He dwindled. He took his first step into a foreign land as Gathrid of Kacalief, a bewildered sixteen-year-old Gudermuther completely unhappy with the fate that had singled him out.
Calculation replaced fear in the eyes of one Brotherhood observer. He was a fat man all in red. He summoned his henchmen.
Certain allied Kings did the same.
Chapter Six
The Allies
Rogala stared at the map Gathrid had drawn, committing it to memory. The youth said, “It’s pretty rough. It’s been two years since I studied geography. Right now we’re about two hundred yards inside the Bilgoraji border, here.”
“It’s good enough. The shape of the land hasn’t changed, just the borders and names. Not much left of Anderle, is there?”
“You didn’t leave a lot to build on. The Hattori and Oldani barbarians came out of the north and overran what was left. They set up a lot of little kingdoms of their own. Those have been banging away at each other for centuries, trying to take each other over. There’re only a few of the original royal families left. Then the Emperor plays one King off against another, trying to weaken them, hoping to resurrect the Imperium’s old glory. All the Kings say, yeah, it’s great to have the Empire around — as a referee in their squabbles — but they don’t want it making a real comeback. When you add the Brotherhood to that already thick soup, you have a real devil’s stew.”