Changer's Moon (34 page)

Coperic grinned. “Hard to argue with you when you're right. Meet me in the taproom.” He glanced at Tuli. “Alone.” He turned to the Intii. “Write me up that list of spices, Vann. I'll put my people to scratching up what you need.”

“Come on, Moth.” Rane touched Tuli's shoulder. “You need sleep.”

Back in their room, Tuli stripped off the hateful dress while Rane changed into her tunic and trousers. Neither spoke. Tuli crawled into the bed wondering how she could possibly sleep with so much to worry over.

Rane crossed the room and stood beside the bed. She slapped her swordbelt around her lean middle and buckled it as she looked down at Tuli. “Don't fret, Moth. With his knives Coperic could split a zuzz-fly on the wing and I'm not so bad with this.” She tapped the hilt of the sword. “I'll wake you in good time; you won't miss the boat.”

Tuli found she'd made up her mind without knowing it. “Rane.…”

“What is it?”

“I'm not going with you. You were right, you've got a better chance traveling alone. And I.…” She paused. “I don't want to be herded in with a bunch of giggling girls, you know that's what Da would do. I'm going to stay with Coperic if he'll have me. If not, well, Ildas and me, we'll go after the wagons, do as much hurt as we can, maybe tie up with Teras again. He 'n a bunch from the Haven are sure to be out against the army.”

“I promised your father.…”

“This is more important. Me and Ildas, we can hurt 'em a lot more 'n a bunch of men who the norits will stomp on before they get close. You know that.”

Rane sighed. “I'll talk to Coperic. Mind if I tell him about Ildas?”

“Course not.”

Rane looked down at her. The silence became overcharged. Tuli felt tears gathering in her eyes. She wanted to turn her head away but she didn't. Rane bent over her, touched her cheek. “It's too bad you weren't a few years older,” she said, her voice husky, uncertain. She bent lower, kissed Tuli lightly on the lips, straightened and went quickly out of the room.

Tuli lay still a moment, then she sniffed and scrubbed her hands across her eyes and sat up. “Sleep,” she said to the empty room. “Maiden bless.” She blew out the candle, wriggled back down under the covers, Ildas humming against her side, a spot of warmth that spread rapidly through her whole body. She yawned, worked her lips, thought about wanting a glass of water but stayed where she was, too comfortable to move. “What do you think of that?” she asked Ildas. He crooned to her, his meaningless silent sounds soothing her jagged unreliable emotions, beating in her blood, singing her to sleep.

Ildas scampering before her, Tuli ran from tree to tree, meaning to get as close to the Highroad as she could, a task made easier because the Nor had swept a wide swath of land free of snow. The army was camped on the grassy slopes of the Earth's Teeth at the Well of the Blasted Narlim, but the Warwagons were sitting on the Highroad, sticking up there like wanja nuts on a harvest cake, a tempting target Tuli wasn't prepared to pass up. Coperic had made a half-hearted protest, then got down to planning her attack and his. He and his people were on the far side of the army, ready to hit the majilarni when she provided a diversion to take the attention of the norits off the army.

She only came across two sentries prowling through the grove, though there were quite a few traxim roosting in the upper branches. Ildas and nightsight were enough to keep her away from either. She fled through the grove like a ghost and crawled into the space beneath the desiccated air-roots of a dead spikul. While she looked over the ground ahead, Ildas trotted busily about the roots, spinning fine lines of light out of his substance, weaving them into a web of protection about her. When he was finished, he nosed against her, wriggled with pleasure when she rubbed her fingers behind his ears, then he trotted off. She settled to watch.

The bare ground between her and the last of the Warwagons was thick with norits. Some sat in close groups talking quietly, some were rolled into blankets, asleep, some had gone slightly apart and into themselves, meditating or searching about with their longsight, Tuli didn't know which but suspected the second and was very glad of Ildas's web. There were a few traxim still aloft but most were roosting in the trees or perched on the Warwagons; they didn't seem to like night flying much. Tuli suspected from what she'd seen of them that their eyes weren't all that good in daytime, let alone night.

Ildas trotted toward the last of the huge wagons, circling unseen about sleeping forms, norits or the mercenaries that rode the wagon, about meditators and talkers, coming close to them, almost brushing against them, his leisurely progress a teasing, mocking dance. Then Tuli was part of that dance and it was a small piece of the Great Dance she'd wheeled in when Ildas came to her. She knew she was lying in dark and dirt, but she was also locked into the Dance; she laughed to herself; Ildas laughed with her, their joined laughter was the music of the Great Cycle of death and birth and death, the endings that were also and always beginnings.

Then Ildas was leaping onto the Warwagon, fastidiously avoiding the hunched forms of the sleeping traxim. He pottered about, pushing his nose into the load, searching out a place that suited him. The traxim stirred uneasily as if they felt a wind sneaking through their fur, but they didn't wake. Somewhere near the center of the wagon, Ildas lifted his leg and urinated a stream of fire into the load.

There is an oil distilled from the flesh of the vuurvis, a deep-sea fish the size of a small whale; the secret of preparing it belongs to the mercenaries of Ogogehia, it is their most fearsome weapon, used in clay melons that shatter and splatter fire. The burning oil clings to flesh, it can't be wiped away, water won't put it out, it can't be smothered. It keeps eating into the flesh until the last trace of the oil is consumed. Ildas had sniffed out barrels of that oil and used it as his target.

Flames exploded into the air five times a man's height and splashed outward much the same distance, landing on norit and mercenary alike; the sleepers writhed and rolled about on the ground, living torches that filled the night with screams of an agony beyond comprehension: those on their feet howled and ran until their hearts quit and they crashed to the ground, some of them into snow that did nothing to put out the fire. Burning traxim leaped shrieking into the air, came spiraling down to crash among the trees or into the army, spreading the chaos. The few that escaped were those near the ends of the wagon that had time to flip from this world into that place the Nor had fetched them from. Most of the sleepers were dead or dying. More than half the nearby norits had escaped though they spent some minutes in frantic efforts to shield themselves from the flying oil. Tuli gaped at the damage Ildas had done with one well-placed squirt.

He came prancing back, wriggled round her, bumped against her, rolled onto his back so she could scratch his belly. “You're a one soredak army, Didi,” she whispered to him. She continued to stroke him as she watched the surviving norits go from body to body, cutting throats of any who still lived. The noise diminished here by the Highroad, but she heard screams and shouts and curses drifting from the army, the protesting hoots of macain and the high angry squeals of rambuts.
Coperic,
she thought.
No, can't be. He and his folk must have been in and out already; they wouldn't make that much noise. Should be getting out myself before they start hunting.
She began inching backward out of the shelter of the roots. Ildas walked beside her, snapping the web of light back into himself. When she was clear of the roots but still deep in shadow, she sat on her heels, looking about. The traxim in the trees had whipped into the air with the explosion of the Warwagon and hadn't yet settled back to their roosts; any sentries close at hand had rushed into the open, looking vainly for some way to help the dying, or joining other men to roll the next Warwagon farther from the fire and save that one from burning also. Soon someone out there would start thinking instead of reacting and send searchers into the trees to sniff out whoever had set the fire. But not yet. She got to her feet and fled through the trees, leaving the seething turmoil behind, heading for the redezvous with Coperic. He was probably there already, waiting with the others for her to show up. She slowed and began to relax.

A norit stepped from behind a tree, hands raised and filled with fire, eyes glaring, mouth opening in a long ululating scream that tore from his throat and assaulted her ears. He flung the fire at her.

Tuli swerved so sharply she had to scramble to keep on her feet; arms waving, kicking herself in the ankle, she plunged for the shelter of the nearest tree, a spindly brellim, knowing she couldn't reach it in time, suspecting its shelter was no shelter at all from the magic fire.

He screamed again, outrage in every hoarse syllable of those unintelligible words.

She looked back, saw Ildas leap between her and the fireballs, bat them down, the norit not seeing him but seeing his fire fail; she sucked in a breath to laugh her triumph—and crashed into the tree.

She was stunned for an instant, then got shakily to her feet. From the the corner of her eye she saw Ildas play with the fireballs, jump on them and eat them. The norit stared, open-mouthed, as his fire vanished, bite by bite. For the moment he'd forgotten her.

Tuli whipped around the still shivering tree and fled into the dark, her head clearing as she moved, her first panic settling into a mix of terror and rage. She ran furiously, twisting and turning through the trees. And Ildas kept the fireballs as well as the rest of the norit's magic away from her. But she couldn't outrun him and he was an adult male, so much stronger than her, he didn't need magic to deal with her; it was only his rigid mind-set that kept him stopping to use that magic. Not that she thought all that out; fragments of it came to her while she ran, coalescing into a sense of what was happening, adding pinches of hope and contempt to the mixture seething within her. She forced herself to slow a little and use her nightsight to plot her route, diving beneath low-hanging limbs, bounding over root tangles that were traps for unwary feet. Several times she heard him flounder and curse, felt a fleeting satisfaction that vanished into the chill realization that she couldn't get away from him no matter how hard she ran. Twice more he stopped and tried his magic on her, twice more Ildas slapped fireballs down, ate them and set himself between her and other manifestations of the norit's magic that made her hair and skin tingle but had no other effect on her.

Before she was ready, she was out of the trees, running into moonlight that nearly blinded her, through grass that whipped about her flying feet and threatened to trip her. She was getting tired, her legs were stone-heavy, the breath burned her mouth and throat, but she drove herself on. She could almost feel his hands reaching for her, his breath hot on her neck. He was so close, so desperately close. She zigged and zagged like a startled lappet, trying to get back into the thin fringe of woodland along the Highroad beyond the grove of Blasted Narlim camp.

His fingers scrabbled at her arm. With a small sobbing cry she flung herself around and away, cutting perilously close to him, trusting in the agility that had saved her so far. Again and again she managed a swerve, a dodge, a lunge at the last moment, avoiding the clutch of those long pale fingers; once she threw herself into a rolling fall past him and managed to bound onto her feet before he could bring himself around. That time she nearly made it to the trees, but in a straightaway run she was no match for him and she had to swerve again to escape him. As she had in the hallway in Sel-ma-Carth, she wanted fiercely and uselessly to know knife work, to have Coperic's skills in her hands and mind. It might have given her a chance, at least a chance. This chase had only one end, but she refused to think about that. While she had breath in her body, until her legs folded under her, she would fight him, she would struggle to get away. Ildas brushed against him, drained his strength, brushed against her, gifting her with that strength so she could keep on long after she should have dropped, exhausted. The image of the charred agli came to her.
Burn him,
she screamed silently at the fireborn,
burn him like you did the agli.
But the norit must have had stronger defenses than an agli; he and Ildas balanced each other. Neither could harm the other. And it seemed to her Ildas shrugged and told her in his wordless way that he was doing all he could.

The norit's fingers were lines of fire on her shoulder, but her tunic burned away from under them and she threw herself to one side, rolling up onto her feet and darting away. Ildas, she thought, ashing the cloth. Her legs were timber baulks, as weighty and stiff as the beams in the watchtower, her breath came in great gulps, she was beyond pain now, knew the end was near. Ildas brushed her leg, and fire jolted through her. Again the norit's hand closed on her, catching the cloth of her sleeve, again the cloth ashed as soon as he grasped it, but this time instead of rolling away from him, she dived past him only inches from his body, too soon and too fast for him to change his lunge. As he came around, his boot caught in the grass and he fell on his face. Hardly believing her luck, she forced her body into a sprint toward the trees.

And was forced to swerve away again; a straight run was impossible. He didn't quite touch her but she felt him like a torch at her back.

She heard a gasp, quickly hushed, a slithery thump, felt a coolness in the night about her as if a fire were suddenly smothered. She chanced a look over her shoulder, stumbled to a shaking stop; her legs folded beneath her and she went down on the grass with a silthery thump of her own.

Coperic knelt beside the body of the norit, wiping his knife on the black wool robe. He got to his feet and waited as Tuli wobbled onto her feet and stumbled over to him. Without asking questions or saying anything, he gave her his hand and led her toward the lane between the hedges, walking slowly, letting her catch her breath and gather her strength. Ildas trotted beside her for a few strides, then leaped onto her shoulder, draped himself about her neck, bleeding energy into her.