The Right Hand of God (55 page)

'More luck!' Tua said. 'But it will not last. We die here.'

'Yes,' the Deruvian said sadly. 'Here we die. But not yet!'

Despite his bravado, the Prince of Deruys groaned inwardly.

Their enemy numbered so many - or, more accurately, their

own numbers were so few - that now two warriors climbed

the hill of the slain to match swords with him.

'You are not a friend,' came the voice from over his shoulder, and for the first time Wiusago could hear the exhaustion in it. 'You are a brother. You are my brother! I name you husband to my sister, and one day we three will walk in the Glade of True Sight and talk with our ancestors.'

Perhaps it was the tears filling his eyes, or the sound of laboured breathing behind him signalling that Te Tuahangata

had taken a hurt, but the prince could not avoid the stroke that came without warning from his left. It glanced off his shield and crashed into his upper arm, opening a horrific wound. One final, futile parry . . . Prince Wiusago did not see the slashing blow that took his head from his body.

Tua gave a great cry of anguish, threw down the three men opposing him, and turned to his brother's slayers - but spun too quickly and tripped, ending on his back with three blades at his neck. One of the men lifted the visor on his helmet, and a muffled voice spoke, the common tongue harsh but identifiable: 'We honour you. You are a mighty warrior!' His arm drew back for the final thrust.

Te Tuahangata closed his eyes, content.

'They are down . .. the last of them is down. There, the standard is captured. It is over.' The philosopher's voice sounded hollow. 'It is over.' The voice of the Destroyer drifted over from the far side of Vulture's Craw, offering the use of some of the Bhrudwan warriors, since their own had proven so inadequate.

'What now?' Leith said quietly, ignoring the gloating. 'Should we try to escape, hide somewhere, and maybe one day raise another army to drive the Destroyer out of Faltha? Or do we simply surrender?' He could not imagine handing the Jugom Ark over to the owner of the smug voice. He would die first.

'We do not surrender!' came a voice, one he knew well. Leith spun around and there, at the top of the path, stood his mother.

'We are bested today,' Indrett said, steel in her voice, 'but we are not defeated. Things have happened even the Destroyer does not know about.'

The young man regarded his mother, but did not allow hope to stir, not yet. 'What things?'

'We will talk as we go,' she replied, 'for we are not safe here. But one thing I will tell you.

More than half our army remains alive, and is hidden from our enemy's sharpest eyes.'

TAKING GREAT GULPS OF air, Stella tried to find some way of getting to her feet without using' her ruined hands. The skin on her fingers bubbled like boiling fudge where she had touched him, yet he had been the one to cry out in pain. A reckless impulse, a desperate reaction to the slaughter below and the final ruination of her last hopes, had driven her to try to cast the Destroyer from the top of the bluff. It had come so close to working! She waited until he had his full attention on the battle, then lunged for him, hands and arms first but with all the weight of her body, hoping to carry him into the depths; and hoping that she might fall with him. Oblivion was the best she could hope for now.

But it seemed the gods had not yet finished punishing her. If she understood correctly the forces at work, she should have been able to at least touch him without harm, perhaps the only person alive who could do so if he did not wish it. But he burned her, the excess of power he contained almost consuming her as she tried to make him fall. For a blessed moment he had stumbled, dislodging a rock which tumbled into the gorge below; but then he turned and, with a snarl, cast her backwards to the ground. She tried to move, to continue her attack, only to discover the Destroyer had pinned her to the ground, though she could see nothing holding her down.

In her mind she followed the imagined progress of the rock as it spun slowly towards the waiting river. Rock-face, sky, ground, river; all tumbled through her mind as she visualised herself falling. Her arms spread wide, hungrily seeking the finality. A moment of pain, then bliss . . .

She managed to get herself into a sitting position by using her knees and elbows, scraping the skin raw as she tried to deal with the blisters and the still-awkward misshapenness of her right side. When finally she could raise her head to see what had happened, the Undying Man stood over her.

Stella braced herself for pain . . .

'You continue to amaze me,' the Destroyer said lightly, as though discussing the ability of a child to cause trouble. 'Your power is walled off where you cannot use it even if you knew how, you are bound to me so tightly I should be able to read your every thought, you are in so much pain you ought not to be thinking of anything else - yet you can still take me by surprise. Do you know, girl, that I came closer to failing just then than at any time since I wrested the Water of Life from the Most High?'

He jerked his hand, and she sprang to her feet under the influence of his power. His eyes were perhaps a hand's-breadth from her own. 'There is something about you, Stella, that remains a mystery. I am not angry with you. How could I be angry when you have already provided me with so much -and with so much more left to discover? 1 may revise my plans for you after all, particularly if the boy with the arrow continues to walk into my traps. He may govern Faltha in

my stead, while you rule as queen in Andratan, enthroned beside your eternal king!'

Then he closed his fist, and her mind burst into multicoloured shards of pain. 'But don't touch me again,' he hissed. 'Not until I find out how you resist my will.' She nodded, eyes filled with proper fear, and he grunted his satisfaction.

'We will return to our army, O queen,' he said. 'Now the destruction of the Falthan army is complete, we will receive their surrender. The boy will place the arrow into the hands of my representative. Assuming her hands are not too troubled by pain, that is,' he added, and laughed. 'Come on!' His power compelled her forward. 'I have a triumph to share with you,'

'Half our army remains alive?' Leith regarded his mother with scepticism. 'Is this real? From this place I saw the whole battle. No one escaped. They all died. Where is this army? How is it hidden?'

'Alive and uncaptured,' Indrett told her son as they made their slow, careful way down the hill.

'We could see that the forces of Deruys and the Mist were surrounded, as were many soldiers from Straux and Deuverre, but we could not help them. There were far too many Bhrudwans between us and them.'

'Deruys and The Mist were destroyed,' Leith said bitterly. 'We watched them die. Wiusago and Tua were there, I saw the prince's standard fall. They must be dead.'

'But some survived,' Phemanderac added gently. 'Look. The Bhrudwans have many thousand captives.' And indeed, illuminated by the dying sun Leith could make out the enemy's brown horde encircling perhaps five thousand of his soldiers. 'Straux and Deuverran, mostly,' the tall philosopher

added, his sharper eyes able to pick out their colours. 'No doubt they have surrendered.'

Anyone alive is a victory, Leith told himself, but his mind counted the numbers. Fifteen thousand lost in today's battle. The total was - the total was unthinkable. How many children would never see their mother 6r father again? How many families would soon be so devastated by the news that the identity of the ruler of Faltha would make little difference to them? He knew how many, but would not think it.

'And the others? My father and grandfather? The Company? Who remains?'

'Your family is safe, thanks to Achtal who hacked a path to safety for us. We were drawn to confront the singing men, and somehow Hal took our resistance and fashioned it into a weapon against the unnatural storm they sang into being. Then Achtal made a way of escape, though he was wounded for it.' Indrett drew a shuddering breath. 'In my youth I watched many a duel where money changed hands on the outcome. Such things are common in the Court of the Firanese king. Nothing I saw there prepared me for the power and grace of Hal's Bhrudwan protector. It was like - like he instinctively knew at what tempo to fight; a speed, fast or slow, that defeated his opponent. No matter.' Indrett shook off the effects of an event that had obviously marked her. 'What he might have done to us on the Westway if Hal had not befriended him!

'So we escaped,' she continued. 'We stood in wonder and marvelled at the rainbow in the sky above us, and it seemed to signal the end of the conflict, although why we thought this way when the Bhrudwan army remained undefeated, a goodly portion of our own army was under siege, the Maghdi Dasht had yet to be seriously challenged and the Destroyer stood on a hill high above, 1 do not know. But we celebrated nonetheless. We then realised that much of the Falthan army had been scattered by the rain and the lightning, and began to gather them together, with the aim of setting the trapped Falthan soldiers free. Before we made any real progress, however, the singing began again and the great hand formed in the sky. After that... for a while few of us could think clearly, so great was our sorrow. Again, I don't know why we felt this way. We were not completely defeated, the Jugom Ark did not lie in the hands of the Destroyer, and with care we could conserve our forces, the better to fight another day; yet we despaired. Hal cried out that it was magic, that the Destroyer poisoned our hope, but we could not hear him for a time.

'By the time we recovered our senses, the Bhrudwan army had been bolstered by the return of many warriors scattered by the rain and the lightning. Kurr exhorted us to rescue those trapped by the Bhrudwans, but Hal counselled another way. He spoke to certain of the magicians in our party -there are many more than we thought, and some did not know themselves that they held the power until today - and together they wove a magical net of some kind, one which hid us from the eyes of the Bhrudwans.'

Phemanderac took a pace forward, eyes large. A Net of Vanishing? You were hidden under a Net of Vanishing? Hauthius wrote about such a thing, but no one in Dhauria took his words seriously!' Then his eyes narrowed. 'But -such a net must surely have been visible to the Destroyer, whose eyes will pierce any illusion of Fire or Water?'

Indrett laughed, a fresh, clean sound. 'Yes, you are right, and so Hal reasoned. But the magicians he employed to construct the net were of the Fenni, the Fodhram and the Widuz, and

these peoples are of Earth and Air. The Destroyer evidently cannot sense such magic, and has forgotten to take it into account. Thus it may be that Hal has provided us with a key to victory

- and might have done so much earlier had he been consulted.' Indrett very pointedly did not look at her son.

'Where is the army now?' Leith asked, more bluntly than he intended. He could have come and offered his insight. There was nothing to prevent him. How many lives might have been saved? How many surprise attacks could we have launched? His suspicion of his brother flared again: why could the others not see it?

'Still under the net, awaiting our next strategy,' his mother replied. 'I will take you to them. On the way we will give thought to how we might best use this new weapon to our advantage.'

One hundred and sixty-nine heads bowed as one when the Lord of Bhrudwo, supported by his servant-girl, stepped ashore. Utter silence spread across the battlefield, the place known by locals as The Cauldron, as the black-booted figure trod across the muddy, body-strewn ground. He approached his army in an atmosphere which might have been mistaken for reverence by some of the captive Falthans, if they had been able to think of anything other than their growing terror, but was in fact part awe at the power they had just witnessed, and part fear at what might happen now. The servant-girl followed along behind, limbs working awkwardly, obviously a cripple, struggling to keep up.

The Undying Man raised his hand to the commander of the Lords of Fear, acknowledging their efforts with a salute. Then his army roared his name, and he permitted himself a small smile.

'Flatterers,' a voice hissed from behind him. 'They fear your shadow!'

He laughed richly, then said: 'I am more and more certain that I made the right decision to keep you, Jewel of the North. You add a piquancy to everything!' Nevertheless he clenched his fist, and the girl fell to the ground and writhed in the mud.

The Destroyer addressed his warriors, congratulating them on their courage in overwhelming superior odds. He spent some time describing the lands to the west, explaining to them that they could claim the lands of anyone who had fought against them thus far, or who resisted them in the future. They would leave this valley soon to commence the march to Instruere, which city would be wholly Bhrudwan from the moment the gates were opened to them; but first they would assemble to witness a number of executions and the acceptance of the Falthan surrender.

As night fell, the Bhrudwans moved their camp from around the two hillocks to the centre of the battleground. Soldiers were dispatched to bury the Bhrudwan dead, leaving two hillsides strewn with Falthan corpses. Six far more sinister holes were dug just outside the Bhrudwan encampment, six thick posts driven into them, and limbs hacked from the nearest tree, a bare oak growing in the centre of a small depression perhaps a hundred paces in front of the camp.

Later that evening, after a very poor meal made from the little that remained to them, just over twenty thousand Falthan soldiers began to march westwards from the mouth of a small valley perhaps a league east of the northern bluff upon which Leith had stood. Slowly, so slowly they moved, knowing the net that covered them would not prevent any sound they made from carrying down the valley. All during the long night they crept forward, rank after rank of Instruian Guard led by their incredulous captain, followed by the losian Army of the North - still over five thousand strong, and including almost all the aurochs -