Bared Blade (13 page)

I
t
happened while we were in deep forest. I was riding lookout about a half mile ahead of the wagons. That’s the only reason I’m alive to tell you this story, Aral, that I drew the straw for forward scout that morning. It’s almost funny. The first couple of days had gone smoothly enough, well-kept road all the way, and no cause for alarm. It looked like we’d slipped out of the Citadel clean.

There was nothing at all to mark the day out as special, though you’d think there would have been. So many Dyads lost, and not just mere cadets, but high lords at the peak of their power and fame. A couple of them were practically legends in the Dyadary. And the numbers …more Dyads lost at one time than have fallen anywhere else short of the great battles.

VoS’s voice burned with pain and loss as she spoke now.

There really ought to have been a red sun rising, or a falling star, or a flight of black eagles. Something more to mark their passing than a bright morning that ended in blood and the smoke of a mass pyre.

I couldn’t have been more than a mile ahead at the
utmost when the attack happened—and that far only if I’d badly misjudged the little caravan’s speed—but I heard nothing. Nothing. I didn’t even
suspect
anything had gone wrong till the sun hit noon and my relief didn’t show. I reined in my horses and waited then, nearly an hour, figuring that things had just gotten a bit distracted. But time passed and no one came and I began to worry. I didn’t want to send up the alarm signal—a red smoke spell kept always to hand and set to trigger in the event of my sudden death. There was nothing wrong on my end and I didn’t want to give away our presence.

Finally, Vala convinced me and I let her send up a column of bright blue smoke—a standard signal requesting orders—though not one that had been authorized for this mission. I expected a royal chewing-out to come along with my response. None came, nor any answering smoke, nor any signal at all. Finally, I turned my horses around and rode back to meet the wagons. I was worried by then, but not yet afraid. What could possibly happen to a dozen well-trained Dyads and forty support staff? I was about to find out.

My fears started to rise after I’d covered a second mile without encountering any of the wagons. It was possible they’d fallen farther back than that due to some delay, but I’d have expected a signal if so, and none had come. Three miles, and I started to panic. I drove my horses hard after that, pushing them to a very fast trot for the last couple of miles. The attack had come early in the day, not long after I’d ridden out judging by the distance I had to cover to get back to the site of the attack.

They were all dead, Dyad and solo alike, or that’s what I thought then. All those bodies…

VoS closed both of her sets of eyes then and shuddered. I could see she was fighting tears, so I didn’t say anything, just scratched Triss behind the ears and waited for her to recover. After a time, her breathing smoothed and she nodded.

I couldn’t believe it for the longest time. Not even with
their corpses there in front of me like so many discarded dolls. They were strewn randomly along the road and off into the forest for a few yards on either side. Nothing could have done this. Nothing. I think the multiply repeated dichotomy of bloody ruin and apparent peace was the worst.

She canted her Stel head to one side and looked a question at me.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a fallen Dyad, but it can happen like that if death comes fast enough. One half shot in the back of the neck and the other dead without a mark on her.…

Dagger in Waiting had been the leader of our expedition, the best eavesman and nightcutter Kodamia has produced for at least three generations. Or spy and assassin if you want it spelled out plainer. Impossible to surprise and a deadlier close-in fighter than many a spinner. His Watt half looked like it had been crushed between great stones, covered in blood and with all the bones broken. Dag, his other half, was lying peacefully on his back not five feet away, as though he’d just lain down for a quick nap. If not for Watt’s shattered corpse, I might even have tried to wake him to ask what had happened.

Seven of the ten Dyads that had ridden out with the Kothmerk that morning had died that way, killed too quick to respond to whatever slaughtered them. Three more had gone down fighting, leaving both halves badly injured. Several of the fallen had been crushed like Dagger in Waiting. Others had been torn asunder or sliced up. Malice in Mysticism had been run through by something the size of a fence post. Clash of Remorse, who was the trailing rider, had come late to the battle and almost certainly better prepared. He had all four weapons drawn. But it hadn’t helped. He suffered a double beheading before he’d made it forward of the last wagon.

There was even something of that weird mix of destruction and peace to the battlefield itself. Perhaps for the same reason of a quick end. Kodamian bodies lay everywhere,
along with tipped over wagons and their wildly strewn contents. All the horses were dead as well. But the road itself, where most of the action had taken place, looked remarkably clean and unmarred. It had none of the rucking and ridging I’d come to associate with a battlefield. But that observation was driven out by another and even stranger one.

What about the enemy fallen?
That
was the question that really got my mind going again. Curiosity is a powerful force and acted now like spurs on a reluctant horse, forcing me to move.

There wasn’t an enemy body to be seen. Not one. Yet I was sure there must have been casualties, because Malice in Mysticism’s blades were covered with dried blood, so dark it looked black—you don’t lose that much and walk away. Not even with a good combat healer ready to hand. And his weren’t the only weapons that had spilled blood; it spattered the grass in places where none of my people lay.

So, where were the enemy bodies? And, since I was asking questions, what about the Kothmerk? Had any of our solos survived? Their bodies were scattered amongst the fallen Dyadary, but I hadn’t yet taken their number. What right did I have to stand around like an idiot when there was a mission to finish?

That last I heard in my head in Master Sword’s voice, and it galvanized me as only your first drill instructor can. I had work to do, and a damned lot of it. I had to figure out what had happened, see to the bodies in an honorable fashion, and recover the Kothmerk if possible. Gawping wasn’t an option and mourning would have to wait for later.

I looked for the Kothmerk first, as that was the whole point of my mission. Dagger in Waiting had been carrying it in a small, locked, chainmail bag fixed around his Dag waist and hidden under his shirt. The bag was still there but it had been neatly opened and the Kothmerk was gone. Not a surprise, but it got through the numb I’d been feeling and made me angry enough to gut someone.

A quick check of Dagger in Waiting’s person revealed
that was the only thing taken, and the same was true of every other body I checked. If anything, that made me angrier, all this death for one damned little trinket. I mean, there must have been a couple of thousand gold riels’ worth of jewelry and equipment there, plus the mission purse and personal coin.

I think that’s when I realized that it must have been the Durkoth who killed them. That, and how very inhuman the Others really are. No human, solo or Dyad, would have left all that money just lying around for the next person who came along to pick up. We’re simply not made that way. Even I couldn’t do it, and they were my friends and companions, though I only took the mission purse and that for emergencies. The rest, the durable personal items and individual purses, went into a spell-dug hole for later recovery and return to the heirs.

I went back and took a closer look at Malice in Mysticism’s swords then and the blood on them. I hadn’t noticed before because it was dried and I was in a hurry, seeing what I expected to see, but it was more purple than red, the color of royalty, not humanity. Then I started gathering bodies and piling them up for a mass burning, not having the leisure for proper individual pyres. I worked fast and hard and I burned through my nima like a maniac, but night had long since eaten the sun by the time I dropped the last of the fallen onto the heap.

I had numbered the fallen several times by then. Each time, I’d come up one short, Reyna, the girl groom. I hoped that she’d escaped, of course, and that I could find and question her. But if she
had
gotten away, she was almost certainly long gone into the hills. If she were still alive and around, she would certainly have come out by now. But I hadn’t the energy left to do anything about that, much less the more urgent task of going after the Durkoth.

So I called fire down upon the dead and collapsed there beside the burning bodies of my companions. Exhausted beyond bearing, I slept only a little less deeply than those I’d just bid on their way to the wheel of judgment.

It turned out to be a good thing I’d waited to leave, for the morning brought me fresh eyes. When I looked over the battlefield one last time, hoping for some sign of the missing girl or the departing Durkoth, I found the dead spots I had missed the night before. They were about seven feet long and three wide, loosely diamond shaped, board flat, and completely devoid of any plant life.

They lay perhaps twenty feet off the road, in a small clearing in the wood, well beyond the main area of the battle. The four of them formed the radiating points of a star. When I touched the bare earth of the nearest, it felt wrong somehow, as though the dirt had been fused into something approaching the consistency of stone. I couldn’t break it with my fingers, and jabbing at it with a dagger left by one of the fallen, barely made any mark at all.

I went and got a shovel, and dug down several feet along the end of one of those diamonds, but I couldn’t find a bottom to the fused area. I had no other evidence for it, but they
felt
like tombs to me, and I believe that they were Durkoth burial sites. Somehow that made me feel better. Knowing that they’d paid a price for what they had done to my people.

There was a very clear, if very strange, trail leading away from the graves and on up into the mountains, as though a dozen or more of the raiders had gone that way. So I hobbled my horses and I headed up the path on foot—they’d have made noise I didn’t think I could afford, the trail was that fresh. I don’t know how they do in their element, deep under the mountains, but out in the woods the Durkoth are apparently shit at covering their traces.

They’d followed a deer path up into the hills. And, while they’d left no actual footprints, the trail of bent and broken branches along the way would have led the blindest hunter to their camp. But that wasn’t the odd part. No, that was the way the trail itself looked as though someone had come along with a fine-tipped calligraphy brush and removed every trace of irregularity from its surface.

A deer path is generally a rough thing. It widens and
narrows and bumps up and down, even grows the odd bit of foliage. But this had none of that. This trail looked as though it were maintained by a team of deer engineers with a fetish for precision.

It reminded me of the state of the main road, which I now realized had shown some of the same signs of smoothing and evening out. Normally, at the site of a battle the road gets churned up by the action. You get scars and clods and horrible red mud from the spilled blood. It’s awful and ugly and you can tell something terrible has happened there just by looking at it. But not this one. I still don’t know why, but the Durkoth seem to abhor the sight of torn earth. Knowing that’s saved my life a couple of times since then.

The trail they’d left was my first luck. The second was finding several of the Durkoth still at home. They had shaped a cavern out of the living rock of a cliff face maybe two miles from the place of the ambush. I don’t know whether they’d waited for the caravan there for a couple of days, or if they just casually move rock around like that for a single night’s camp. Whatever the case, they’d scooped out a space the size of a small manor house, with what looked like multiple rooms, many of them with windows.

They were arguing when I arrived, and loudly, or they might have spied me before I spotted them. Like an idiot, I’d walked practically up to the cliff face before I realized what I was hearing. I’m only middling fair at woodcraft on my best day, and I don’t speak much Durkoth. Though I’d been studying my heart out since I’d gotten my orders for the mission, I just didn’t recognize it at first.

Spoken fast and angry, as they were speaking it, Durkoth sounds more like the weirdest cat fight you ever heard than anything a person might say. Eventually though, I did realize what I was listening to. I threw myself down under some brush then, about three feet from what turned out to be the nearest window.

“What were they fighting about?” Triss asked VoS.

The Kothmerk, but you’d probably guessed that part already. More importantly, they were arguing about whose
fault it was that the thing had gone missing. One of ’em swore up and down that he’d felt a little human girl running off into the woods right before he discovered the thing missing—and maybe one of those ishka-ki Kodamians had survived.

The others thought that was ridiculous and just an excuse for his failure on guard duty. How could any human, much less a young one, have possibly gotten into their krith without someone seeing her? And why would a human thief leave the ring box behind when she took the Kothmerk? But even with that, a bunch of them had gone off along the durathian road—whatever that was—to try to get ahead of the possibly mythical girl, and they’d only just left a short while before. I felt a nasty little chill at that, thinking how lucky I was that they’d taken some other route than the deer path.