The Warlord's Legacy (17 page)

He knew, then, what—or rather
who
—had lain beneath those tarps.
The whole damn caravan
had been a trap.

He’d worry later how they’d known, who must answer for this treachery. Now, through a haze of sudden panic, Cerris scanned the wagons, the road, the ongoing skirmishes, and yes, even the corpses, for a head of auburn hair …

There!
Amid a knot of Cephirans, a trio of insurgents struggled to survive. One was old Rannert, his short sword a bolt of steel lightning as it darted in and out, keeping the soldiers on the defensive, but even from a distance Cerris could see the old man tiring, his shoulders drooping, his arms beginning to quiver. Cerris couldn’t recall the name of the second fellow, younger but wilder, whose wide slashes with a woodsman’s axe would leave him open any minute to an enemy thrust.

With them, wielding a narrow blade longer than her arm, was the Lady Irrial. And if her stance, parries, ripostes were perhaps a touch stiff—the result of formal training without hint of genuine experience—then at least that training was comprehensive, and the baroness a fast learner. For the nonce, she held her own.

But for all their valor and all their efforts, they were merely three, facing an experienced band of thrice that number, with reinforcements close at hand. They would fight well—they might take several of the enemy with them—but they would lose. Of that, even a blind man could have little doubt.

His rudimentary disguise would not hold, not here, for these soldiers were a unit and knew one another by sight. Still, as Cerris rose and sprinted from the copse, his tabard bought him precious seconds before the enemy recognized him as an outsider, seconds that would have to suffice.

He stumbled on weakened legs, and his side ached as though a Cephiran blade had already punched through his hauberk, but Cerris dared not stop. He nearly collided with the first of the wagons, his chest heaving, and shattered a wheel with the Kholben Shiar. On he ran, crippling the second vehicle, then the third, while soldiers closed from all sides. At the fourth, he took his blade not to the wheel but to the harness, and clambered awkwardly atop the horse he’d freed. The beast glanced back at him curiously, but if it was not a trained warhorse per se, it had seen sufficient combat that it shouldn’t readily panic.

The first soldier reached him, stabbing with a short-hafted spear. Cerris kicked it aside and brought Sunder down upon the man’s helm. It was an awkward blow, made more so by the lack of saddle and stirrups, but still the Kholben Shiar cleaved steel and bone. Cerris hauled on the reins, kicking the body toward another of the onrushing enemy as he guided the horse about. A Cephiran broadsword swung as the beast moved, drawing a thin line of blood across a tan-mottled flank. The horse whinnied and leapt away from the sudden pain, and only three fingers curled in a death grip through its mane kept Cerris from tumbling off the rear end.

Kicks, tugs, shouts, and possibly even a few vicious threats finally brought the beast under control; and indeed, it was already heading where he needed it to go. Sunder held aloft, hollering to draw attention away from Irrial, Cerris charged the cluster of crimson tabards surrounding her.

The outermost soldiers scattered, unsure at first what sort of menace thundered their way. Two of the men nearest the sore-pressed insurrectionists split their attentions just a heartbeat too long and dropped, bleeding, to the earth.

Drawing nearer, horse surging beneath him, Cerris saw that the man whose name he’d failed to recall had fallen, leaving Irrial and Rannert to face the Cephirans alone. Sunder whirled in an underhanded arc, catching an approaching soldier from the side, lifting him briefly off his feet before shearing through him. More of the warriors who’d leapt from the charging mount’s path were up and converging once more, and Cerris could only curse, wondering if he’d could reach Irrial’s side in time.

And then Rannert—stiff, staid old Rannert—broke past the nearest soldier facing him, ignoring what must have been an agonizing blow to the ribs, and hurled himself at the wall of Cephirans separating the baroness from her would-be savior. Sword and fists, feet and even teeth pounded flesh or glanced from armor. Cephiran blades pierced aged skin, broke weakened bone, but the faithful servant steadfastly refused to fall. Not now, just a moment more …

Cerris gawked, awed, at the venerable butler as the horse galloped on, and damn if he couldn’t have sworn that, for the first and last time,
Rannert smiled at him. Then he was past, slipping clean through the corridor Rannert’s wild assault had opened in the Cephiran ranks. Cerris tossed Sunder to his left hand, reaching to catch Irrial’s arm with his right. With a grunt of sudden pain—Cerris never was certain which of them it had come from—she was off the ground, swinging awkwardly up and around behind him.

In an instant they were gone, leaving the Cephirans far behind, though Cerris knew better than to slow down lest a swift-thinking soldier free another of the horses and pursue. He felt her hands clasp tight about his chest, her face pressed against his neck, the wet touch of tears trickling down his skin.

But with his own fingers wrapped tight about Sunder’s haft and the horse’s reins, his voice trampled beneath the pounding thud of the hooves, Cerris couldn’t even try to comfort her.

“T
HERE’S ALMOST NO ONE LEFT
,” she told him softly as evening neared, the first words she’d spoken since the disastrous battle. “A few ran, but I don’t know if they got away.”

Cerris had driven the poor horse mercilessly, running it ragged across uneven grasses far from the highway. Finally the panting, lathered beast had snapped its leg in some animal’s burrow. Irrial, eyes encircled in red, had looked away as Cerris and Sunder ended its pain.

But the horse had done them proud before the end, carrying them in a wide circle behind the Cephiran wagons, almost back to Rahariem, before it fell. The fugitives had once more blended with the scurrying workforce of citizens and soldiers, still hauling rubble after all these hours, then vanished into the city. They huddled now in the cooper’s workshop where the stillborn resistance had been conceived.

Cerris, limbs aching, his entire body limp with exhaustion, forced himself to sit upright, to place what he hoped was a comforting hand on Irrial’s arm.

“They knew we were coming, Cerris,” she said. “There were so
many soldiers waiting in those wagons, they
must
have been expecting trouble.”

“It was a trap,” he agreed. “I just wish I knew who …” His shoulders bunched in a sad shrug.

“Someone in the resistance?” Irrial asked. “Is it safe for us to be here?”

“I think it should be.” Cerris rose and began slowly to pace, the mindless repetition helping his fatigue-swaddled mind to think even as it sent new complaints through sore calves. “If someone in the group had betrayed us, the Cephirans wouldn’t have
needed
to set a trap. They could have hit us during any one of our meetings.” He jerked to a halt as a thought struck him across the face like a gauntlet. “Is Andevar …?”

Irrial shook her head sadly. “He led the ambush, Cerris, and he tried to hold them off so we could run when he realized what was happening. He was one of the first to fall.”

“Damn.
Damn
. I liked him.”

“Me, too.”

Silence, save for Cerris’s pacing steps. And again he halted abruptly, brought up short this time by Irrial’s sudden intensity.

“Yarrick,” she spat. “It had to be!”

“I don’t know, Irrial. I told you before, he has no real reason to love Cephira. They—”

“They could have paid him off! Or made him gods-know-what promises. But who else could it be? Nobody outside the resistance knew we were going to hit that caravan!”

“
Yarrick
didn’t know we were going to—”

“But he knew you were asking about it. If they knew an underground was forming, and that you hadn’t fled town after your escape … Well, it wouldn’t be hard to figure out the
real
reason you were asking, would it?”

“It doesn’t sound right,” he protested, but it sounded weak even to his own ears.

No, that wasn’t true at all. He just didn’t
want
it to sound right. Because if Yarrick was a collaborator, that meant Cerris himself tipped
them off. It was
his
fault those men and women, Rannert and Andevar, were dead.

‘
It was your fault the moment you agreed to support this stupid insurgency. You’re only feeling guilty about it because they
failed.
But then, you’ve always looked smashing in that particular shade of hypocrisy.
’

“That’s not true!” he hissed, ashamed that he was once more arguing with himself, grateful that Irrial hadn’t heard him—and terrified that, just maybe, that mocking tone spoke truth.

Irrial stared at the floor, Cerris at the far wall. Neither provided them with any answers.

T
OO MANY OF THE
C
EPHIRANS
had seen them this time, Cerris reluctantly decided as Rahariem bedded down beneath its blanket of night. Even if the names
Baroness Irrial
and
Cerris the Merchant
weren’t known through the ranks of the soldiers, the
descriptions
of those who had escaped their trap would surely be making the rounds. Someone might even have sketched them. They couldn’t be seen out and about any longer, but neither could they indefinitely sit in the back of Rond and Elson’s shop. For one thing, they had to know if anyone else had escaped, if there remained any ashes of the resistance from which a phoenix might arise.

And so, with no other options available, Cerris admitted to Irrial just how he’d escaped from his work gang and his Cephiran overseers. On any other day, Irrial might have reacted to the revelation that he was a wizard on top of everything else—even one of only middling talent—with no small degree of amazement. Tonight she said only, “I wish it had been more help.”

Cerris began to wonder if something more than the loss of their companions, devastating as that might be, was eating away at her.

She brightened a little, though, when he explained that those same magics might enable them to hunt for other survivors. “Though I’m not saying it’ll be
easy,
” he warned her. “I’m tired as a succubus with a quota, my spells aren’t very potent at the best of times, and I’ve never
tried maintaining one of these phantasms on someone else at any great distance. We can’t afford to rely on them for more than a few hours, and you need to avoid speaking with anyone who knows you well. There’s a good chance they’ll see through it.”

“I understand. Do it.”

Moments later, a man and a woman who only somewhat resembled Cerris and Irrial departed the cooper’s workshop.

The better to avoid running into anyone whose familiarity might prove troublesome, Irrial headed toward the late-night taverns she’d never frequented in her prior life as an aristocrat, while Cerris donned the Cephiran tabard that was starting to feel as familiar—and as much in need of a warm bath—as his own skin, and took to the streets.

As the moon flounced through the sky, leaving a wake of brokenhearted stars, Cerris meandered from block to block, chatting with guards standing post, off-duty squads working on a friendly drunk, even an officer for whom he offered to carry a crate of charts and records (aggravating his back in the process). Most had heard only third- or fourth-hand accounts of the engagement, in which the size of the attacking force and the valor of the Cephiran warriors were both obscenely exaggerated. All accounts agreed, however, that only a very few insurgents had survived, and most of those were held under heavy guard, awaiting brutal interrogation. Cerris felt as though his heart had sunk so low he was in danger of digesting it, and he held precious little hope that anyone but Irrial and he remained.

By the time he returned to the cooper’s, it was all he could do to drag his feet across the cobblestone streets, and his neck ached abysmally from the strain of supporting a head stuffed with sand. It had been a
very
long day, filled with exertions physical, emotional, and mystical, and Cerris was frankly surprised that he hadn’t simply collapsed like a sack of grain—very, very
tired
grain—hours ago.