Count Scar - SA (33 page)

I spun my horse around to dodge one sword while knocking away the other's stroke with my shield. My horse screamed and kicked out as the sword point grazed him. The kick almost jolted me
from the saddle, but I heard the dull and satisfying thud of hooves landing against the side of one of the others' horses.

With that rider momentarily out of the fight, I rained blows on the other, but the advantage of surprise was gone now, and he defended himself well, not risking an attack but waiting for his
companion to come at me again from the rear.

That is, until I paused for a second to glance backwards. Then his blade flashed out. I just managed to catch the blow on my shield, but it ricocheted from the bosses and sliced into my leg.

For one second I felt nothing at all. Then the cut began to burn like hellfire. My only advantage was that it took him a moment to draw back his bloody sword, during which moment his shield
was swung wide. And during that moment my own sword bit deep and true.

And I jerked my blade free just too late to whirl to face the other heretic warrior.

But he stopped short in the middle of aiming steel at me. He cut off his war cry in the middle, his sword raised but the blow not coming. For a second he looked wildly around as though he could
not see me. And in that second I charged.

Whatever blindness had seized him passed off almost immediately. He saw me all right, and his eyes widened as he swung his shield, just in time, in front of him. The second blow he deflected as
well, but it was not for nothing that I had spent years fighting in the imperial army. In spite of my wounded leg, when I faced only one enemy I was more than a match for him. A tiny
miscalculation on his part, an overly enthusiastic swing of his sword, and I had him. In another second he lay on the ground with the other two heretics, his throat gurgling as he died.

My chest rose and fell in great breaths, and I began trembling all over as the battle rage left me. I started to wipe the sweat from my forehead with one sleeve, then realized it was soaked in blood.

I managed to capture one of the three horses, but the other two galloped away riderless down the mountain. I let them go, suddenly too tired to bother. Black spots floated for a moment before my
eyes, but I bunked until I could see clearly again. My leg was bleeding hard, and if I lost consciousness now I would die before regaining it. I used a harness strap from the captured horse to make a
tourniquet around my leg, managed with gritted teeth to maneuver myself back into the saddle, and turned to ride up the mountain, leading the heretic's steed.

A caw came from the top of the stunted evergreens, and I looked up to see two ravens—drawn by the scent of blood. Just waiting, I thought, for me to be gone. Far up, almost invisible, I could see
other great birds beginning slowly to circle and circle.

One of the three heretics lay with his dead face turned toward me and his eyes open, seeming to stare accusingly. Heretics or not, I didn't like to leave any enemy unburied for the carrion-eaters to
find. But if I took the time and effort to try to dig a grave in this stony soil I might as well climb in myself.

I did not look back to see the ravens come flapping down from the branches. It had almost been me lying there instead. If it had not been for the third heretic's moment of hesitation, he would have
had his sword in me before I could react. Had that, I wondered, been Melchior's magic? The heretics' Magian yesterday had made his warriors invisible, and Melchior, watching the fight with
what he called his second eye, might have briefly been able to cast a spell that hid me in the same way. But at what price would that magic-working have come, even a brief second's magic-working, with him already so weak?

As my horse picked his way up the mountain I kept hoping that my leg would grow numb. But the pain only became stronger. Well, I told myself grimly, I had been limping on that leg already—

only now the limp would be permanent.

I tried to distract myself by thinking about the dead warriors. They seemed very different from the rather scruffy heretics I had found hiding in the village of Three Cuckoos at the border of
Nabarra. Did they perhaps live openly in that principality, practicing their fighting the compliance of Prince Alfonso, in spite of all his more with the protestations about his hatred of heretics?

Wondering about the heretics' organization was doing nothing to make me forget the pain. Red lines like giant spiderwebs kept dancing across my vision. Several times I found myself imagining
that the young Duchess Arsendis rode before me up the track, smiling over her shoulder and beckoning. I mumbled prayers, probably not what Father Melchior would have counseled, but a soldiers
prayer: "Lord, let me live. If I don't live, Lord, let me die quickly. And forgive my sins—I can't remember them all, beyond killing three men just now, but You know them and know how much I
need forgiveness."

The evening mists were rising from the valleys as my horse made his way up the final slope toward the sheltered hollow where Melchior lay. I was swaying in the saddle, staving conscious by
sheer will, and might have gone right past the place had not the priest's tethered horse heard us and whinnied.

Father Melchior himself lay still and white in the dim light. But his rapid, shallow breathing showed that his magic-working had not finished him yet. I washed myself off with water from the
spring, not wanting the ravens to be attracted next by me; probably I should have boiled the water, but I was too weary to care. The gash looked ugly and ragged from what I could see, but I didn't
look at it very closely. At least the flow of blood had mostly stopped. I found the last of my bandages, that I had been intending to use on the priest, and bound up the wound. Then I loosened the
tourniquet, lay down next to Melchior, my cloak over both of us, and let unconsciousness claim me at last.

Sleep brought solace and forgetfulness, but when I awoke, just before dawn, all the pain was waiting for me. I clenched my jaw to keep from crying out and looked toward Brother Melchior. He
slept peacefully. His color had somewhat improved, I tried to persuade myself, thinking that I had done a much better job doctoring him than I had done on me.

I forced myself up, feeling the scabs ripping free at the slightest motion, and found my wounded leg would bear no weight at all. But I managed to hop to the spring for a drink, then belatedly
thought to look in the dead heretic's saddlebag for food. All I found was stale bread, but I broke off some and devoured it ravenously, forcing myself to save the rest for Melchior.

My forehead was beaded with sweat and my limbs trembling as I stretched out next to him again on the stony ground. We were both still alive, I told myself determinedly, and we had three horses
between us. Now all we had to do was find our way back to Peyrefixade. In Peyrefixade we would be safe.

I slept again, but now evil dreams stalked me. It was not Arsendis who beckoned me now, but heretics with faces like demons who swelled to enormous size, threatening to engulf me when I tried
to stare them down. Again and again bloody swords lashed out at me, swords dripping with my own blood, and when I tried to fight back there was no strength in my arms. And then I realized
that my opponents were already dead but fighting anyway. At the edge of my dreams was a constant muttering, which, when I briefly woke to roll over and try to pull my cloak closer against the
chill, I knew was the wind, but which became a voice as soon as I settled down again, telling me enormously complicated things I was supposed to remember and ponder, but which I did not even
understand. Through all my dreams floated the image of Peyrefixade, the red thumb of its great tower thrust against the sky, both repellent and inviting, but always impossibly distant.

At one point I came awake to find Melchior sitting up beside me. "You're not supposed to be moving," I told him, thickly but loudly. "If the infection spreads to your brain you'll go mad and
die." He looked at me in concerned pity, and I took the warmth of that look back with me into nightmare.

Later, much later, I awoke with a strange sense of well-being. My muscles all ached and my leg was a dull throb, but I had the sensation of having slept, truly slept without dreams, for a long
time. The sun sparkled in the eastern sky, but I realized it must have been at least a day since I had last been fully conscious. For a minute I lay without moving, relishing the almost euphoric
sense of peace yet knowing that soon I would have to examine whatever hash the heretics and I between us had made of my leg. Then my nose caught a faint whiff of something familiar. Frying
eggs?

I rolled over and tried to focus. On a piece of cloth lay a pile of barley cakes and three sheep's-milk cheeses. Beyond the cloth a small fire burned, and Brother Melchior sat beside it, frying eggs on a
hot stone.

This made no sense at all. I pushed myself to a sitting position. He turned and smiled. "There's water beside you in the helmet if you'd like a drink. The eggs are almost ready."

I sat quietly, trying to sort out what had really happened and what had been nightmare. The priest's shoulder was bandaged rather sloppily with a tattered strip of blue cloth, not the bandage I
had last tied there. It looked as if he had tried to do it himself one-handed. A glance at my leg showed a similar if much tidier blue bandage.

With eggs and barley cakes in my mouth I slowly began to revive. "We're both alive," I said. Establish the key point first. Good thing my prayers had been answered; I really needed to recall and
repent of all my sins if I had any hope of divine mercy. And I had not looked forward to entering Hell where the three heretics I had just killed would be waiting for me.

"I hope you will forgive me, Count," said Melchior, "that I attended to my own needs before yours." Because I had no idea what he was talking about I made an affirmative sound through another
mouthful of food. "But I feared that if I did not treat myself first I would not have the strength for the necessary magic to treat you."

"I've been treated with magic?" I looked at my leg in horror. But it really did feel better under the bandage than I had any right to expect.

"Yesterday, when I awoke with just about enough strength to crawl to my saddlebags, I determined I would be able to work one small spell, and that that spell must be the one to activate a
strengthening draught for me. I believe I may have fainted on the spot from the effort of working that spell, but with the draught inside me I found my powers slowly returning. That is when I
took out the powders that act against infection. I used them on my own arm, and then began the much more wearying work of practicing healing magic on another."

"And what does this powder against infection do?" I had finished the eggs and started on the cheese. He still hadn't said where the food had come from.

"It fights, of course, against the decay of flesh in a living man."

I thought this over, while resolutely pushing the last of the barley cakes toward him. Only then did I admit to myself what I had feared most of all, living but losing the leg, so that Count Scar
would also become the one-legged count. "If the emperor knew of your Orders powers, he would have a Magian accompany all his armies."

"It would not be that simple. To heal another, even one person, may temporarily take all a man's strength." Although he was sitting up, I noted that he still appeared extremely tired, and he had
been eating much more slowly than I. "The aftermath of a battle would exhaust all a Magian's powers long before he had advanced far down the ranks of the wounded. That is why, Count, I had
to delay in treating you, even fearing that delay might be fatal, until I was at least somewhat recovered myself."

"Maybe if the emperor had a whole brigade of Magians—" I mused.

"There is the danger, of course," and for a moment he gave me what might have been a look of amusement, "that the emperor would not like it if 'his' brigade of Magians started healing the
wounded on both sides."

Remembering the dead heretics, I wondered if Melchior would have felt compelled to try his magical arts on them. I would have to ask him to shrive me for their deaths. "I guess all your magic
works to heal or to defend rather than bring active harm," I suggested, "and while the damnable Perfected may study battle magic, the Magians of the Order of the Three Kings learn at most how
to distract an enemy or ward off a blow."

"Oh, no, Count," he said, looking very serious. "We learn all of magic, even if we do not practice the most terrible sorts unless it is absolutely necessary. I know the same spells to overthrow and
destroy as the Perfected do. My own knowledge of these terrible matters is so far only theoretical, beyond the bits of magic I worked the other day and the brief sending that clouded the eyes of your
last opponent. I do not have anything like the skill and ability of the great old magus who once commanded the Perfected in your castle. He gloried in using such powers, while I always pray that
I shall be spared their necessity, but my training is the same as his."

We both fell silent a moment. Small birds, not ravens, darted among the rocks, singing in the morning sun. "I gather that this is one of the Perfected's horses?" he asked then. Since he had clearly
been watching my battle with his "second eye" he must have known I had killed at least two heretics, and when I returned alive he would have known that I had also overcome the third, even if he
had fainted right after dazzling the fellow. "There was a tunic in the saddlebag which I ripped up to make us bandages."