King's Shield

  A flurry at his left—he lifted his head, arm poised to block—and a Venn longbowman took aim just under his upraised arm, shooting at the shadowy gap in the chain-mail sleeve under his tunic.

  Noddy recoiled as white fire bloomed behind his eyes. He clutched at the arrow in his armpit, fighting for consciousness, bitter and furious that there was no hope after all. He swayed, fighting against his fading strength. Two Runners slashed and hacked in a frenzy to get near and catch him; one pulled him over the shoulders of his horse.

  Rage pumped through Hawkeye, the hot glorious rage of intent. He took shield position behind the Runners, fighting off a circle of Venn, as arrows struck all around him. He’d lost use of his left arm and right leg, but he stayed in the saddle even so, laying about him at a crazed pitch.

  Five, six, ten closed in; crimson blooms of pain blossomed once, again. He willed them all away, but his body no longer obeyed, and he slowed. Again and again he lifted the blade, and then once more. The roaring, rushing sound in his ears grew—

  As he fell the sweet, brassy ripple of horns echoed down from the heights. Cama’s men appeared on the eastern cliffs and began a furious barrage of arrows, each aimed with deadly precision.

  And from behind.

  Muddy to the eyebrows after four days of running, horses flecked with foam, Tuft and his men had arrived, the trumpeter blowing wildly.

  “They’re here,” Hawkeye said, as his own Runner caught him, sobbing. “Evred. Here.”

  “Charge!” Tuft roared, and horses thundered by, wild-eyed and sweating.

  Blood ran from Hawkeye’s mouth, but he didn’t feel it, he only heard the horns, the horns of triumph. Evred was here—the Sier Danas were here, he was not alone . . . the bond of brethren . . .

  With the words “Sing me” on his bloody lips, Hawkeye lost grip on his broken body, his mind winging through ethereal streamers of honor and glory until it winked out beyond the world.

  “What?” Talkar shouted, trying to peer round the shields his own men raised to protect him against the deadly arrows.

  “There! Is! A! Path! Up! The! Cliff!” one of his skirmish chiefs shouted through cupped hands, pointing at the cliffs they’d recently gained. “It looks like their king is up there!”

  Talkar waved his sword up at the men near that insolent eagle banner. “Take a Battlegroup—take two, or three—but kill him!”

  The skirmish chief grinned, for here was eternal glory indeed. He waved out a Battlegroup of the best men to follow him, and they surged through their fellows toward the trail.

  “See that?” Tau asked, pointing down at them with a fresh arrow, which he slapped to the bow and shot. It flew straight and true—and clattered against a helm before spinning away. Damn. “They’re coming up to dance.”

  “Right.” Inda swung his sword from hand to hand, loosening his arms. “You and me at the front. They can’t come at us more than three across if we get to that turn in the trail right there and hold it. Rest of you keep the cover shots, one arrow one man.” He turned to Evred. “You better stay up the path.”

  “No.” Evred gestured toward a spot directly above the high point of the pass, and the clashing, roiling forces below. “I have to see.”

  Of course he did—he was the king. Even if he’d pitched hay by your side when you were ten years old.

  Talkar watched from below as the pirate (identified by his ruby earrings) and his golden-haired companion in blue moved to a broad bend in the trail. This position kept a good fifty paces between them and the redhead in crimson, who had to be their king. The latter stood partially shielded by a large boulder from below. The king could obviously see in all directions from that vantage.

  Talkar cursed, wishing he’d arrived just half a day earlier. He would have been able to get his men on those heights instead. He waited for his skirmishers to make their way up, impatient with the lingering drifts of vapor revealing and obscuring those crimson-clad figures.

  His signal ensign came forward at that moment. “Battle Chief Vringir is a watch’s march from the pass.” He held up a slip of paper.

  Talkar smiled for the first time in days.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  TUFT and his men formed an arrowhead wedge and charged over the lip straight into the Venn, a tight-packed, fury-driven attack that shoved the Venn back again, even as it scattered the remainder of Hawkeye’s and Noddy’s lancers, far too few of whom remained in the saddle, and not a single one unwounded.

  Hay drifted through the air as straw men were flung aside and Tuft’s men leaped into the saddles of the fresh remounts, ready on signal to launch with murderous force into the foot warriors. They’d seen their own dead. They saw Noddy, bleeding from the mouth, lifted to a cart.

  The fog had almost burned off.

  Men intent on killing one another were just barely aware that it was easier to see who you were striking.

  Inda’s band of archers loosed arrows down through the swirling vapors, guided by faint silver glimmers off metal helms and chest armor when the fog thinned.

  Inda stood at the turning he’d chosen in the trail, amazed at the extraordinary sharpness and clarity of rock, water, sky. Those Venn pounding up the trail toward him seemed to move so slowly, the dust kicking up from their footsteps limned in pearlescent light. Each sound—the steady lump of his heart, the soft paff of the crimson banner that Vedrid was draping over a rock, the crunch of Tau’s heels in the dirt to Inda’s left, his own breathing as he waited for those figures toiling so slowly up the trail—each sound so clear, so distinct. So purposeful.

  He sucked in another breath, feeling his lungs fill and then empty. Each indrawn breath a pleasure, each exhalation a sigh of bliss.

  Purpose.

  The scintillation, the purity of sound, the elation of a sacred vow, it was his and yet not his. And when the corusca tion glowed into brilliance around the silhouette of Evred, embodiment of the Marlovan kings, Inda thought, Dun? Is that you?

  For Inda knew that no one else saw that aura around Evred, that it was a vision from the world of the spirit. For the first time Inda was aware of Dun looking through his own eyes, feeling with his hands, breathing with Inda’s lungs. Now Dun would fulfill his vow, a double vow, for he protected not just Inda, but the king himself.

  What Inda could not see was how Dun’s own presence in the spirit realm fluoresced like a comet, drawing unseen watchers: one mirrored the light over and over again, creating an aurora of complicated luminosity until the watchers drifted away, leaving only that one with intent.

  Strength flowed through Inda’s veins, like liquid sun.

  Then the skirmish chief, foremost of the eager Venn, reached Inda at last, and thrust his sword in a downward stroke. The two big men flanking the skirmish chief twisted to take powerful side cuts at Inda. All three had narrowed their purpose to one intent, to earn glory by striking down the Marlovan pirate Elgar the Fox.

  Time jolted abruptly back into remorseless speed. Inda’s sword ripped the air with a hissing moan. Impossibly fast, impossibly strong, three strokes killed the three leading Venn.

  Hiss, clang—Tau dealt with numbers four and five.

  Inda planted himself in the center of the trail’s turning, his eyes wide and strange. He slowly whisked the sword back and forth, back and forth, as he waited for the next group of attackers. Inda that day was two men, one standing at the gate between the worlds of flesh and the spirit as Inda and Dun both fought to protect the king.

  Evred intended to watch the battle, but he could not look away from Inda, who had captivated him once before in the contest between the two fires. Now Evred saw what only pirates had seen, the vicious concentration of deck warfare, as Inda and Tau as his Shield Arm carved tirelessly through flesh, sinew, and bone, Inda always knowing just where to turn, where to strike.

  Evred was not the only one who could not look away. As the last of the mist vanished in a faint, glaring haze, Talkar and his chiefs watched from underneath
their upheld shields, their intent focus drawing the interest of more men in the back rows as they waited for give in the mass struggling uphill.

  From across the canyon, Cama could just make out Inda, faster than a darting serpent as he faced down a line of Venn. “Inda!” he howled, a hunting wolf’s howl, hoarse and low, the sound instantly taken up by his dragoons as they shot tirelessly, one arrow to a man.

  “Inda!” Cherry-Stripe heard the cry just as he rounded the last rocky spire. He slipped and tripped down the arrow-length trail, crowded by his men.

  Cherry-Stripe nearly fell in his effort to scan and run at the same time. “We’re right here,” he yelled at Inda, who was directly across the pass, just like the villagers had told them. But too far away to hear. All right, then, let Inda see that he was here! “Shoot,” he bellowed over his shoulder. He pulled his own bow. “Arrow to man, on that cliff!”

  An arc of arrows hissed across the distance, and the Venn line wavered as a dozen or so dropped on the trail leading up to where Inda fought. Two Venn fell from the sheer rocky cliff, dead before they tumbled into the air.

  “In-DA!” Cherry-Stripe bellowed.

  “In-DA!” His men took up the cry.

  “In-DA!”

  The rhythmic roar echoed around the pass. The sound, the rhythm, heartened the Marlovans. With equal strength and speed the shouted name disheartened the Venn. The word “Trap!” followed it down the ranks: the Marlovans had scaled the heights everyone had believed impossible, and were shooting down from both sides of the pass as well as charging from ahead. Despite the ceiling of shields, their archers were finding chinks for their lethal rain.

  Obviously they’d planned it, which suggested they had entire armies of reinforcements hidden on the heights. The Venn commanders exchanged questioning looks across the sea of bobbing heads. If they had marched straight into a trap, the only hope of the speedy resolution they had been told to expect now lay with killing this king, and with Vringir’s flank attack up the pass from Ala Larkadhe.

  Talkar beckoned to his ensign, but wrote the report himself in three scrawled sentences.

  He sent it off then beckoned to another chief, pointing toward the cliff as he shouted, “Get up there and take the king!”

  Shafts of sunlight widened between the departing clouds, striking blood-bright glints in Inda’s dancing rubies. Sun glowed on the crimson battle tunic and in the splashes of blood that gouted up as Inda and his blond shadow scythed their way through men who tried to rush them, but who fell lifeless from that cliff. Venn tried to shoot them, but more Marlovans had edged themselves just below that trail’s bend, shields angled out to keep any arrows from reaching Inda or Tau.

  From his towering crag Fulla Durasnir witnessed it all, how slowly, inexorably the attention of all but the mass of Marlovans and Venn shoving back and forth at the lip of the pass shifted toward those two in crimson and blue on the trail turning, the one fighting glimmering faintly in reflected sunlight as if he had a sun-shadow at his shoulder.

  “Inda! Inda! Inda!”

  Vringir noted with sour relief that the foolish Marlovans had withdrawn with dawn’s light. As well. Though they could not possibly make any material difference, they’d done more damage than he’d expected.

  Let them have their fun now. They’d pay for it once the pass was cleared.

  He kept the men at a steady pace up the river valley alongside the wide Andahi River rushing its way toward the sea. Not ideal ground for defense, but this was not a battlefield, and the city of Ala Larkadhe, just visible beyond the sloping riverbank, was no threat.

  He rode down the columns, his men in perfect formation. As soon as they gained the foot of the pass, they’d break for another even scantier meal and then begin the march up the heights at double-pace.

  A rustle of voices whispering caused him to turn. The men faced right. Up.

  He faced right. Up.

  All along the top of the hills above the sloping riverbank horsemen appeared as it they had risen out of the ground, a thousand or more silhouettes against the westering sun.

  Then another row behind them. And as the first two started riding slowly downhill, the beautiful horses dainty as dancers, yet more silhouettes appeared.

  Shock made Vringir’s horse sidle, head tossing. Vringir reined in hard.

  The brassy fall of trumpet notes carried down the hills, and the Marlovans charged, flanked by flying archers—and smacked straight into the middle of the Venn column.

  Ola-Vayir had arrived.

  Durasnir was unaware that Dag Valda had left him alone. His focus was on Indevan Algara-Vayir, who swooped down to cut under a chopping blade to his left then lunged up and arched the blade behind him to block a strike from the right—a strike he could not possibly have seen. There was no breaking past his extraordinary guard. And the men on the trail below him knew it. Their faces had changed from battle lust and rage to fury and determination.

  “Fulla.”

  Durasnir’s head snapped around. Valda stumbled, almost falling, Dag Ulaffa at her side. Ulaffa blinked rapidly, gray-faced and haggard until he caught his breath. His skin was blotchy.

  Durasnir gripped Valda’s elbow. Under those blue robes she was no more than skin and bones held together by force of will. “I come to you first. The king is dead,” she whispered, her eyes stark. “The king is dead.”

  “Dag Erkric says the prince has demanded a cessation. We are to return to Venn so that he may claim the golden torc as king.” Ulaffa spoke in the reedy, trembling voice of a very old man.

  The king is dead.

  This is not a coincidence.

  Durasnir pinched his fingers to the skin between his brows. “A cessation?” The Venn didn’t lose—they had no drills for this situation.

  Ulaffa said, “Hilda Commander Talkar just moments ago sent a message that we have walked into a trap. The prince declared that this news joined with our king’s death means we must lay aside our endeavors here for another day. We are to go home at once.”

  Durasnir’s hand dropped. “If the prince has spoken, then there is nothing more to be done.”

  Ulaffa made a brief sign to Valda and then transferred below to Talkar.

  Valda said to Durasnir, “Erkric does not know I am here. Is it really a trap?”

  “It looks that way,” Durasnir said again, and this time she gave a minute nod, lips parted. “We were not going to win in days, or even weeks. But everyone knew that. Valda, what has happened?”

  She whispered, “This war no longer serves Dag Erkric.”

  She knows the king’s death is not a coincidence.

  And that could only mean that Dag Erkric’s hand lay behind the death of the king.

  The truth was as powerful a strike as any dealt by a weapon, though the pain was all in mind and spirit.

  Durasnir closed his eyes as he fought to comprehend just how vastly he had been blindsided. They all had. He opened his eyes. “Then the invasion was nothing more than a ruse.”

  “Oh, I think it was more than that: an experiment to blend war with magic and to get us to accept it. And a fast win would have done all that the king wished, as well as added greatly to Dag Erkric’s and the prince’s praise.”

  Durasnir shook his head slowly. The money for ships and supplies, the time for training, all of it a ruse? The men dying below—a mere decoy to keep the eyes of the homeland on the war in the south?

  Valda’s shocked gaze acknowledged his thoughts. “I traced Erkric’s movements through his scroll-case. He was returning to the king in Twelve Towers. When I was certain, I told Ulaffa. He went to investigate and discovered yesterday that the Erama Krona’s supply of white kinthus was missing the equivalent of five doses.”

  “The king’s strange sleep?”

  Valda made the sign of assent.

  Durasnir said, feeling his way along this new pathway into darkness, “And now the prince has a well-drilled, well-supplied, powerful army to sail home and secure the th
rone.”

  “Yes.” Valda tipped her head from side to side to ease her aching neck.

  They had to talk fast. “If Erkric killed the king—why? Why now? He couldn’t think we could lose?”

  “No. There is the matter of magic.”

  Darkness—Rainorec. Venn-Doom. Which is not monsters, or war against well-trained warriors. Venn-Doom is when we turn on one another. “Signi’s geyser?”

  “Yes. Erkric is badly frightened. He thinks the Morvende aided her because their magical signature was blended with her own. She must have used spells she found in the archive to bind hers.”

  The magical talk meant little to Durasnir. “Our oaths, our cooperation, for nothing.”

  “Our purpose was superseded.” Valda’s face was bleak.

  The word supersede—not just to replace but to replace something outmoded—struck Durasnir another blow.

  He had to think. Magic was Valda’s and Ulaffa’s concern, but he knew the military. “If we cease fighting now, the Marlovans will go into a slaughter frenzy. We had better save what lives we can,” Durasnir said, decision affording him a modicum of relief. “Can you take me below? Not to Talkar. To the Marlovans. There, on that bend in the trail on that cliff, the crimson tunics.”

  Valda glanced down at the blood-soaked cliff trail, and then away.

  The transfer was short and wrenching, then came another wrench when the cloying, thick smell of blood scoured the back of Durasnir’s throat. He flung up his open hand and said, “Truce!” He repeated the word in Sartoran.

  The Venn on the trail fell back, more shocked than the Marlovans at the sight of their Oneli Commander there in his silver armor and winged helm. Valda stayed well back, so that the Venn could not see her.

  The Marlovans surrounding their king slapped arrows to bows and aimed, but Evred held up his hand, palm forward. They stilled, arms taut.

  As the Venn on the trail lowered their swords and backed out of range, Inda gave one sweat-burning, weary glance at the tall man in the winged helm and exhaustion hit him like a wave of seawater. His right arm tingled painfully all the way to his shoulder. Unnoticed his sword dropped from his fingers; he sank down onto a low rock, whooping for breath.