By the Sword (67 page)

She nodded reluctantly, once he'd called up the memory. “Did you really want to strangle that idiot that much?”

“Yes,” Eldan replied. “He made me angry, then made me look like a fool in front of a lot of people because I acted out of anger before I thought. I wanted to strangle him. You managed to persuade me that the best way to deal with him was to ignore him. But you know—I
still
want to strangle him.”

She laughed, silently, and shook her head. All she'd done with him was talk mind-to-mind—which was probably why she was no longer so awkward at it—and take and give advice. The same kind she'd have taken and given if they'd been talking face-to-face. That wasn't so bad....

In fact, she'd enjoyed it.

I probably should be angry at him, but
I
can't be.
“Are you sure you're up to this job?” she asked, after a long pause. “You don't have to be my liaison. I'm not the easiest person in the world to get along with. And I wasn't joking about calling me ‘Captain,' at least in public.”

“Not a chance,” she snorted. “Come on, tagalong. I've got a war to run.”

Then, shyly—

That put a whole new complexion on things.

:Only if it doesn't interfere.:
He was adamant.

So was she.
:Only if it doesn't interfere. So far it hasn‘r. Let's ride this out.:

He smiled.
Captain, you've got yourself a bargain. And a recruit.:

Today the plan called for her Company and Selenay's cavalry to combine, and give Ancar just enough of a taste of combat to make him think that they really were trying to keep him out of Valdemar. Then they were to pretend panic, and run for the next set of Guards, posted farther north.

The trouble was, that little taste turned into a rather large and painful bite.

They spent most of the day leading the enemy overland, keeping just out of range, exhausting his horses while they changed off on their remounts at noon, and had fresh beasts to his tired ones. Then, just before sunset, they pretended to make a stand, teased Ancar's men into a charge, and retreated, under covering fire.

The spot for their stand had been carefully chosen; a rocky hillside with plenty of cover, and too many boulders for Ancar's cavalry to charge. Kero watched with a critical eye, carefully gauging the weariness of Ancar's fighters. She let three successive waves approach her position, and be driven back—waiting for Ancar's officers to call in the tired men for the night.

Instead, they kept coming; a fourth wave, and as the sun set, a fifth.

And under torchlight, a sixth.

They were running out of ammunition, energy—and still the enemy kept coming, though he left his dead and wounded in heaps at the foot of their stony shelter.

After the eighth wave had retreated, Kero put down her bow and sagged against her boulder with exhaustion. Her arms were like a pair of lead bars; her legs shook with weariness. And she was in relatively good shape. Selenay's people, far more inclined than hers to risk themselves for a good shot, had managed to populate the rude shelter the Healers had assembled with their wounded. Not too many Skybolts wore bandages yet, but if this kept up....

She watched the torches bobbing and dancing out beyond firing range and longed fiercely for her mages. It looked—dear gods!—like they were massing for attack-wave number nine.

“I don't believe this,” she muttered, staring at Ancar's lines.

“I don't either,” said Shallan from the other side of the boulder, in a voice fogged with fatigue. “They're not human.”

“Or they're driven by something that isn't human,” Eldan said grimly. “The bastard has some kind of hold over them. They'd rather face our arrows than what he's got over there.”

Kero turned around and looked over her shoulder. “Is that a guess, or information?”

Eldan looked like the rest of them; his white uniform was smudged and filthy, there was dirt in his hair, and sweat-streaked dust on his face. “A guess,” he said, staring past her at the enemy. “I'm not an Empath, like Talia. And they have some kind of shield over them that prevents me from reading their thoughts. But I think it's a pretty good guess.”

“Seeing as they had one mage with them that was willing to charge right in after us, you're probably right,” Kero said, turning back to look at the enemy herself.

“If they have mages, why haven't they used magic on us?” Eldan wondered aloud. Kero gave him a sharp look out of the comer of her eye, but it didn't look as if he was being sarcastic or asking a pointed question; merely as if he really was puzzled.

She shrugged. “Maybe because we're inside Valdemar,” she said. “Maybe he only had the one mage. Maybe because he's saving the mages for when he has a target worth their while.” She watched the milling of the enemy troops for a moment more, then made her decision.

“Tell Selenay and the rest that I've just changed the plan,” she told Eldan. “Get the foot troops out first, then Selenay's horse, then we'll play rearguard. We've got the advantage of knowing this country in the dark; they don't. I don't think
they
plan on stopping until every last one of us is dead, and I think we'd better get our rumps out of here while we have the cover of darkness.”

“Yes, Captain,” Eldan said—he didn't wander off in a trance when he MindSpoke with someone like his fellow Herald had, he simply frowned a little, as if he was concentrating. “Selenay and the Lord Marshal agree,” he said after a moment. “The foot is already moving out.”

“Fine,” She turned to Shallan. “Pass the order. The retreat is for real.”

It was a retreat, not a rout—but only because no one panicked. That retreat didn't end with morning, either.

When dawn broke, Kero sent scouts back, more because she believed in being too cautious than because she really expected anything.

She knew there was trouble when they returned too quickly.

The first one in saluted her, his face gray with exhaustion. “They're right behind us, Captain,” he croaked, as she handed him her own water skin. He gulped down a mouthful and poured the rest on his head. “I swear by Apponel, there's no way they can be behind us, and they are anyway. Some of ‘em are dropping like whipped dogs, but the rest are still on their feet and it don't look like they plan on giving up any time soon.”

She swore and gathered the officers; hers, and Selenay's and together they goaded their weary troopers into another push.

That set the pattern for succeeding days—and sometimes nights—as they retreated farther north, and deeper into Valdemar itself. Every step westward galled Kero like spurs in her side. Never before had she hated to give up land so much. Always before it had been a matter of indifference; what mattered was the final outcome, not whether a few farmers were overrun and burned out. But this time was different. The farmers pressed everything Selenay's forces needed on them as they passed, then abandoned their farms with unshed tears making their eyes bright. She knew these farmers as people, however briefly they'd met, and it made her seethe with rage to see smoke rising in their rear and know what Ancar's troops were doing to the abandoned properties.

Every time she took provisioning from another farmer, and watched him drive off into the west with family and whatever he could transport piled up onto pitiful little wagons with his stock herded behind him, the rage grew.

It's so damned unfair,
she told herself,
And I know that life's unfair, but these people never did anything to earn losses like these.
She'd never felt quite so powerless to help, before.

And she had never hated any foe other than the Karsites with the fierce hatred she developed for Ancar.

The fool drove his men as if they were mindless machines. She couldn't imagine why they weren't deserting in droves—unless the mages were somehow controlling them, either directly or through fear. That might explain why the mages hadn't attacked Selenay's army—they were too busy keeping Ancar's own troops in line. She was a good leader—and she couldn't hate men who were being forced the way these were. But she certainly could hate the kind of man who forced them.

Or the kind of man who tortured for the sheer pleasure of it. Eldan told her what he'd done to Talia—and she'd felt Need waking during the tale, with that deep, gut-fire rage that was so hard to control. But Ancar wasn't within reach, so the blade subsided; though for once, Kero agreed with it.

But most important of all, one of the other officers in Selenay's army who had once lived in Hardorn told her what he had done to his father and his people, and why they had left. Kero had encountered tyrants before, but never one who so abused his powers as this one. The way he drove his men was a fair example of the way he treated his people as a whole. Worse than cattle, for a good farmer sees his cattle cared for.

She finally called her Company together one night when they dared have a fire, and told them everything she'd learned, figuring that they should know what would happen to them if they ever fell into Ancar's hands.

They listened, quietly. Then Shallan made a single, flat statement for all of them. “He's an oathbreaker,” she said, her mouth set in a grim line. “And he's just lucky we haven't a mage with us, or I'd set the full Outcasting on him.”

Kero looked from one fire-gilded face to another, and saw no sign of disagreement. Several, in fact, were nodding. The Guild was full of people with disparate and sometimes mutually antagonistic beliefs. The one thing every mercenary in the Guild commonly held sacred was an oath. They reserved terrible punishment for an oathbreaker in their own ranks. For rulers and priests there was another form of retribution—the Outcasting. Kings were bound by oaths to protect their lands and men, usually from the time they were old enough to swear to the pledges, and Ancar had broken his oaths—as surely, and as dreadfully, as had the late, unmourned, King Raschar of Rethwellan, the monarch Tarma and Kethry had helped to unseat. Kero learned that night that she was not alone in her hatred of Ancar—as her troops had heard more tales from the Hardorn refugees, one and all, they came to share her cold rage.

It gave them an extra edge they'd never had before. But rage was not enough, not when confronted with the desperate strength of Ancar's men.

They were worn thin by running alone, and when you added the steady losses, manpower that wasn't being replaced, you had another kind of drain on them.

Of course, Ancar was losing an equal number of men in those encounters, but Ancar could afford to lose them. Selenay's army couldn't.

Kero tried an ambush at one point, splitting her forces on either side of a river hoping to catch him with a good part of his men still in the water. But she'd discovered, only through the vigilance of the scouts, that he had outflanked her.

He brought his foot in to surround the ambush-party on his bank and only years of experience had enabled her to get them out again. Those years of experience had taught her to always have an escape route—in this case, an unlikely one, the river itself. Profiting from her escape by water, she'd engineered a more controlled version of the same, by making sure the ambushers were all strong and experienced swimmers, with horses capable of pulling the trick off.

Even so, the escape had been a narrow one, and their luck ran down from there.

Every day meant a succession of tricks and guerrilla tactics, just to keep Ancar from closing with the entire force and finishing the job. With the Heralds acting as links between them, they split their forces by day, pecking away at the edges of the massive army, and rejoined by night. The individual groups, some as small as Kero's original scout group, could dart in and out to whittle away at Ancar's more cumbersome foot—but to offset that mobility, they were a great deal more vulnerable. Quite a few of those little groups vanished, Herald and all, when Ancar's troops could surround or entrap them.