The Starfollowers of Coramonde (35 page)

Van Duyn
stayed to one side, as defenders on the hilltop finished off those
Southwastelanders who’d made it to the top. He watched men below stagger
through the smoke in tears, nausea, hallucinations and hysteria. Those who were
able to lurched off the field to escape southward.

After several
minutes, the smoke below began to thin as the fire burned itself out. The
victors gathered. “That was no clean triumph,” the captain alleged, “but
smacked more of conjuror’s tricks.”

“You have the
high ground,” Van Duyn grated, “and your casualties are small. The enemy’s in
route, and has lost heavily.”

Reacher,
watching stricken Southwastelanders crawl from the field or huddle down close
to the ground, said nothing.

The last
prisoners had been herded together when Katya arrived, the main body of
Freegate coming in ranks behind her. With her was great Kisst-Haa and several
of his kin, the reptile-men. Bringing up the rear were the laughing,
unregimented Horseblooded, singing and cavorting among themselves. Spying Reacher,
they forged ahead, calling, “Wolf-Brother, we are here!” They had given him
that sobriquet, as they’d named his sister
Sleethaná,
the Snow
Leopardess.

Now she
vaulted from the saddle and caught Van Duyn and her brother up in a boisterous
double hug. “I did worry,” she admitted, “but mounted archers were hitting us
side and side, and outran even our fleet Horse-blooded there, where southerners
alone know the twisty canyons. I perforce set them a little trap. Staring hard,
you may see the carrion birds from here. How went matters by you?”

“Well
enough,” Reacher allowed. He held up a captured standard, the black scorpion on
crimson field.

She puzzled
aloud, “Why is this emblem still flown?”

The
Wolf-Brother didn’t know, but was concerned as much as she. But he remembered
to say, “Congratulate Edward; his inspiration gave us the day.” She bussed Van
Duyn soundly; he hung an arm around her and returned it enthusiastically. She
was first to stop for breath.

When she got
around to checking the lay of the land to the south, she was delighted. “There
is no fortress or impediment as far as the eye can see; only open plains. With
Horseblooded outriders and heavy Freegate knights, we will make good way.”

Reacher was
still distracted. With Van Duyn’s arm around her waist, the Snow Leopardess
took her brother’s hand. “Leave off; a day’s work is done.”

The King went
with them then, letting the defeated banner fall. But the black scorpion had
awakened a disquiet he couldn’t set aside.

In desperate matters the boldest
counsels are the safest.

Livy

Histories

SPRINGBUCK and Hightower sweated,
coaxed, ranted and had the army off-loaded within a day and a half. Shifts of
men trudged burdens through breaking surf. Flailing, blindfolded horses were
set down by winch, knee deep in the waves.

Among those
was Fireheel, Springbuck’s favorite. The long-legged gray, ill-humored from
shipboard confinement, went high-stepping, eager for a hard ride.

Hightower
sent out deep patrols while craftsmen assembled carts, water barrels and other
equipment from parts they’d brought. In the meantime, men worked staleness and
stiffness out of themselves.

In planning
the route, Springbuck made himself think more as burglar than invader; contact
was to be avoided, and standup combat eschewed, unless there were some clear
advantage to it.

Early on the
second morning after their landing, horns sounded and drums beat. Tents were
struck, columns formed, and for the first time the
Ku-Mor-Mai
saw his
entire corps drawn up. They were formidable in their thousands, but hardly a
match for the hordes rumored to be in the Southwastelands.

Except for
the war-drays, water wagons and baggage wains, the column would be entirely made
up of horsemen, including infantrymen who’d dismount to fight afoot if needed.

Springbuck
left the unmounted portion of his infantry as security for the city, hoping to
keep an escape path open.

Most of the
men had removed part of their armor or cut up light blankets to supplement the
protection of their tabbards. Springbuck accepted Kalakeet’s offer of a light
robe makeshift-tailored for him. To the spare Alebowrenian outfit, he’d added a
hauberk of light rings suitable for the warmer climate. Though it was early
morning, the sun was hot, a demonstration of what was to come.

He met
Hightower and Gabrielle, who waited at the head of the formation. The sorceress
wore a white burnoose, untroubled by the heat as she sat her sidesaddled mare.
At her cantle hung her brother Andre’s sword, holding within its pommel the
gemstone Calundronius. Nearby stood Balagon, who’d mustered the One Hundred of
his Brotherhood. Springbuck called Brodur, and they trotted in hasty review.

The Legions
were ready with the preparation of a lifetime’s professional soldiering. Rank
on rank of light and medium cavalry, mounted pikemen and bowmen and panoplied
knights, they were used to biding their time against the order to march. Behind
them, Alebowrenian bravoes joked and boasted, decked out in their finery,
calling greetings to the
Ku-Mor-Mai.
Next, archers of Rugor tested their
bowstrings and squinted at the morning light.

The men of
Teebra, hardy mountaineers, had raised their animal totems, and worn their war
bonnets of eagle feathers. Over their hauberks they’d donned their necklaces,
strung claws and fangs of beasts of prey.

At the rear,
the war-drays of Matloo were drawn up. They were sturdy wooden wagons, faced
and strapped with iron. Their bodies were halved, articulated, to make them
more maneuverable. Their wheels, fitted with spikes, slashing rims and
hub-blades, could do terrible damage. Each was pulled by eight giant armored
war-horses bred for the job. The driver held his handfulls of reins in a turret
at the wagon’s prow, and his riders could either close their side plates for
protection or open them for the use of spears, bows and the over-long swords
they used. At the fore, astride the lead horse, sat the Lead-Line Rider,
practicing the most perilous, prestigious calling there was for a man of
Matloo. Without him to control and direct the team, the driver’s guidance might
be inadequate. In rigorously puritanical Matloo, no one was more esteemed than
the champions who rose to that rank.

The men of
Matloo were set to depart, all Lead-Line Riders in their high-cantled saddles,
but around them a dozen of the Yalloroon had gathered. Springbuck and Brodur
stopped. Drakemirth, the grim old step-chieftain who led the contingent, was at
words with Kalakeet the Speaker. Drakemirth was almost the size of Hightower,
his slate-gray hair and beard plaited and clamped in dozens of small braids. He
stood with mail-gloved fists on hips, listening to pleas that he let some of
the Yalloroon go with him in the drays. Noticing the
Ku-Mor-Mai,
he
said, “Your Grace, here is a decision for you.”

Springbuck
got down. The little Yalloroon repeated the request. “Kalakeet,” the son of
Surehand said, “I promise your people will go with the ships if trouble comes.
What would it profit for you to come with us into the heart of Salamá?”

Kalakeet was
unswerving. “Protector-Suzerain, we do not ask all to go; only a few. Who has
endured more at the hands of the Five than the Yalloroon? Who has a better
right to send witnesses, to bring back the tale of this faring? Any of us would
risk it, but we know only a few may go. Is that so much to petition?”

Springbuck
found himself conceding that it wasn’t. “What think you, Drakemirth?”

“We can tuck
along such small passengers as these,” he granted. “We have four drays, room
enough for two of them in each. Speaker, mind you, do as you are instructed and
be no distraction to us, should battle come.”

Kalakeet
bowed low, but the Speaker’s voice held an amused note. “Exalted Drakemirth,
calm in the midst of peril is our single aptitude.”

They went
with all the speed they could maintain, raising choking dust in the heat of the
wastelands, discovering the special rigors of travel there. Scouts came across
what seemed to be a well-traveled route. It was decided that the army would
trace it to its source, paralleling it but keeping well off it. It was
Springbuck’s order that they cold-camp each night.

On the third
evening, the value of that was proved. They’d stopped early, on the edge of a
long plateau, to keep the advantage of high ground. Toward dusk a long file of
men and animals wound its way up from the south. It settled down for the night,
not three miles from them. Hightower pointed out that the northerners had a
clear advantage of numbers, saying they should take this camp for the
information they could gain.

Springbuck
let another factor decide him, that there were many strings of spare horses
among that column, while his own forces lacked a single remount. The men of
Coramonde quietly resaddled in the gloaming. When night had come on, they made
their careful way down, and formed up on the plain. The wagons and war-drays
were left behind for consideration of noise. Advancing at a walk, the army came
stealthily to within a quarter-mile of the camp.

For the first
time, the battle flourish of the
Ku-Mor-Mai
sounded south of the Central
Sea. Heavy lances were clenched. Men whooped forward at the gallop.

There were a
few guards in wicker armor wound in leather, carrying light target-shields and
slim, straightbladed swords. Most had the simple sense to dive for cover. The
ground shook from iron hooves drumming in the darkness.

The attackers
hadn’t hit a military unit, but rather a supply caravan headed northwest. Only
a handful of its escorting soldiers ever got to their saddles. Women who’d been
cooking dinner or kneading camel dung into rings for fuel, and men who’d been
tending this or that chore, screamed and flattened to the ground. Giant
northern chargers soared out of the darkness, hurtling campfires. Pack animals
brayed in fear, fighting their tethers, their harness bells ringing. Any man
who raised a sword was struck down. Captives, most of them caravaners and their
families, were rounded up and guarded. The freight was unremarkable, provisions
and livestock bound for an army in the field.

The desert
men’s gabbled responses were barely coherent, the only clear fact being that
they’d traveled for many days now.

In the
largest of the tents, Springbuck assembled all the documents and maps he could
find. He’d learned from Gil MacDonald what a treasure house of military
information captured papers could be. He called in Kalakeet, who’d stayed back
with the war-drays and whose knowledge of the area, vague as it was, was
superior to his own. As the
Ku-Mor-Mai
and the Speaker bent over the
papers, Gabrielle came in, cooling herself with a silken fan.

As best
Springbuck could make out, there lay between the northerners and their way
south a mountain range some dozens of leagues long, the Demon’s Breastwork, one
of Salamá’s great natural defenses, a palisade of jagged, impassable cliffs. To
the west, it descended into a low-lying, searing desert called Amon’s Cauldron.
Much farther to the southeast, the Demon’s Breastwork ended, but that circuit
was a well-traveled convoy route, much patrolled, on which the northerners
would run a high risk of battle. The caravan had departed a major fortress
somewhere south of the Breastwork, its destination the northwestern tip of the
Masters’ domain.

“You have
been south of the Central Sea before,” Springbuck said to the sorceress. “Have
you any comment?”

“I came by a
far different path,” she replied cryptically, “and went by it too. Yet, that is
the terrain as I heard it.”

Springbuck
was holding a document that, composed of paragraphs and lists and bordered with
official seals, had the look of an orders letter. Neither he nor Gabrielle
could read its southern characters, and Kalakeet’s people had been forbidden
literacy, but at Springbuck’s urging, Gabrielle labored over the date of
signature, set down in the eccentric lunar reckoning of the Southwastelands. It
was four days previous.

The
Ku-Mor-Mai
ruminated, “There is some discrepancy. The orders would have come at this
fortress we hear mentioned, not somewhere en route. Yet, how could a shuffling
caravan skirt this Demon’s Breastwork in so brief a time?”

“There was
once a passage through these mountains,” Gabrielle recalled, “or so the story
runs in my family. But that was said to have been destroyed, to further isolate
Shardishku-Salamá. Not destroyed, perhaps, but only hidden? And now, when it is
so vital to speed supplies up to their army in the Crescent Lands, in use once
more?”

“A question
for the caravan leader,” said the
Ku-Mor-Mai.

Hightower brought
the man, whose teeth chattered as he refused to give any information, his
terror of the Masters outweighing any threat the northerners could bring
against him. Gabrielle moved the
Ku-Mor-Mai
and the Warlord apart with
her soft white hands, slipped an arm through the astonished captive’s, and
walked him out of the tent.

They watched
her draw him aside a short way, fanning herself and speaking in words too soft
to hear. He listened, then shook his head no, violently. She spoke again,
leaning close, holding a palm up. The blue glow of deCourteney magic came up
off it, illuminating both their faces. She let it fade, and bespoke him again.
This time, he seemed to yield. Leading the sweating, trembling caravaner back
as if he were her swain, she smiled. “This one has seen the blue light of
reason. There is indeed a way through the Breastwork. Salamá is using it more
and more to hurry troops and materiel to its campaign.”