Get Her Back (Demontech) (7 page)

      “Corporal Kaplar,” Balta called before he stepped off, “You’re in charge until we return. Keep the men together.”

      “Aye aye, sir.” Kaplar snapped to attention and popped a salute.

      Jurniaks tried to slip away, but Sergeant Korona grabbed him by the arm and dragged him along.

CHAPTER NINE

      Itzuli led them to the large, elaborate hut—the Great Chief’s hut. The door flap was open, and the entryway was high enough that none of them had to duck to pass through. Four arrow slit windows and the smoke hole at the top of the dome along with the opened entry gave enough light to see fairly clearly. All but the center of the ground inside the hut was covered with rugs of cured hide; a small fire of comitelot dung smoldered in that uncovered center. Several chests, none of greater length than a man’s forearm, were lined up against the walls. Stacks of furs were spaced about the hut’s single room. Animal skulls and horns hung from the wooden posts that supported the thatching of the walls.

      Not only animal skulls, Haft suddenly realized—there were at least three human skulls hanging among those with horns and antlers.

      Chief Nagusi sat facing the entryway. His stool appeared to be a high cantled saddle set sideways so the front and back served as armrests. He wasn’t wearing armor, but a sword leaned against the right side of his stool, canted so that its hilt was in easy reach. Also within reach were a spear, a recurved bow already strung, a long knife, and what looked like a lance that belonged to one of the Royal Lancers. Half a dozen nomad warriors flanked him, and every one of them looked anxious to use the short swords he held in his hands.

      Nagusi grunted something and made a sweeping gesture.

      “The High Chief bids you sit,” Itzuli said. He indicated the stacks of furs.

      They sat; Lieutenant Balta and Tabib the mage to one side of Haft, Sergeant Korona and Jurniaks to the other—Korona had to physically seat Jurniaks facing Nagusi. It took a moment for them to settle into position as the stacked furs were laid over low benches that weren’t immediately visible under the furs. When they stopped shifting about, Nagusi began talking and gesturing.

      Itzuli translated: “The Great Chief Nagusi wishes you to know that he is lord and master of all the lands within three days comitelot ride of this camp. Whenever Great Chief Nagusi wishes, the people of the Deitua Clan break down the eurts, load them onto pack animals, and the people and their animals move to wherever the Great Chief Nagusi wishes them to, at which place they establish a new camp from which to graze their animals and hunt the food animals, of which the desert has in plenitude.”

      Nagusi stopped waving his arms about; he planted one hand firmly on his left thigh and leaned forward over it. He fixed a steely look on Haft, and dropped his voice to a low growl.

      “
No one,”
Itzuli translated, “enters upon my land without my leave.” Nagusi’s voice dropped into an even deeper register. “And when I take my people near the borders of my lands, should anyone be near enough those borders to be seen, heard, or smelled, I lead my warriors to attack them and kill the men and rape the women and take the animals and other goods.”

      As soon as the chief mentioned the warriors attacking, the guards inside the hut let out throaty growls, while stamping their feet rhythmically, and shaking their swords.

      Nagusi smiled, baring his teeth, and leaned back to study his guests and their reaction to what he’d said and the display his warriors were putting on.

      If he expected them to quail, he was mostly disappointed. Haft leaned forward, his left forearm laid on his upraised knee, his right hand on the spike that backed the blade of his axe. Balta looked nonchalant and tapped the hilt of his axe in its scabbard. Korona, grizzled campaigner that he was, rubbed a thumb up and down the hilt of his axe and grinned a “Let’s you and me rumble” grin at one of the nomad warriors—that warrior missed a step in his stamping. Tabib smiled in open mouthed delight when Nagusi started to sound threatening, and started weaving his hands through the air in front of his belly. Only Jurniaks reacted in a manner that might have pleased the chief; he fainted.

      Nagusi’s eyes darted to Jurniaks, then he burst out laughing, stamping his feet, and slapping his thighs. After a few moments Nagusi stopped laughing and got his gasping breath under control. His guards stopped their stomping and sword shaking. Itzuli resumed translating.

      “You are worthy warriors,” he said, adding with a nod to Tabib, “and magician. Nearly every man when faced with what you just saw would have wet himself like a little girl, and deserved nothing more than to be handed over to our women. But you were not cowed.” He flicked fingers, dismissing Jurniaks from consideration. “We shall feast most richly tonight.

      “When you arrived here, you said you are in search of friends of yours. We shall discuss them while we eat.” He stood and turned away, indicating that the meeting was over and they should leave.

      But Haft wasn’t finished with the meeting, not yet.

      “You have some of our friends bound in cages at an entrance to your camp. I want them freed and returned to me. Now.”

      Nagusi spun at Haft and took a stride toward him. He leaned forward aggressively and snatched up the sword that had rested against his stool.

      “You come to my camp without permission, and you make  demands of me?” he roared. Itzuli had to rush to translate.

      “I told you why we came,” Haft’s voice sounded firm in his own ears, but he could only hope that the shaking in his knees and the quaking of his belly weren’t visible. “We want our friends.” He caught a glint in Nagusi’s eye, and added, “Unharmed.”

      Nagusi stared at Haft for a long moment, before softly growling words that Itzuli translated just as softly, “I will release your friends in the warning posts. Unharmed. And you may have the chance to prove your courage with more than just words before you leave my camp. As for the others, you will see them in good time.

      “Now get out of my hut before I change my mind and kill you.”

      Itzuli led them to an area outside the rings of huts and told them this was where they would stay.

      Lieutenant Guma was one of the four Royal Lancers who was brought to the area outside the camp that was given over to Haft and the Bloody Axes. All of them suffered from exposure and dehydration and needed attention from Tabib and his Aralez. Thanks to the filth that had accumulated on them during their encapsulation, they looked worse off than they were. None of them had known what was in store when nomad warriors took them from the place where they’d first been held when they arrived at the camp. Seax was in the worst shape, he’d resisted going and been severely beaten. Tabib got to work on him first, Haft and some of the Skraglanders were able to tend to the lesser ills of the other three.

      Sergeant Korona and Corporal Kaplar set the rest of the platoon to setting up a camp; none of them had any idea how long they might be at the nomad encampment. They laid out sleeping areas, established two cooking pits, dug as many latrines, and unobtrusively laid out gear and hobbled their horses in positions where they could be useful in defense.

      “Where are Alyline and the rest of your platoon?” Haft asked Guma as soon as the Zobran officer had been watered and the worst of the filth washed off of him.

      “I don’t know, Lord,” Guma said through cracked lips. “They put us in the cages on the first day. We weren’t able to see where the rest of the platoon was taken.” His voice was rusty.

      “You’ve had no hint of where Alyline went?”

      “None.”

      Haft quickly filled him in on the visit with Nagusi, and finished, “We didn’t see any sign of Alyline or the rest of your men. We didn’t see the musician she came in search of, either. Have you seen him?”

      Guma shook his head. “I haven’t seen or heard any musician since I arrived here.”

      Haft looked a question at Lieutenant Balta.

      “I’ve asked my men about the musician,” Balta said. “No one has seen or heard one.”

      Nomad warriors were spotted around the Bloody Axes’ designated encampment area. They were obviously guards even though the Skraglanders weren’t inside an enclosure. In addition, they were likely observers who would report everything they saw to Nagusi. And everything they heard. So far, there was no evidence that any of the High Desert Nomads except Itzuli spoke a language other than their own. But they needed to know for sure. To that end, Lieutenant Balta and Sergeant Korona told their men to wander about and say insulting things within hearing of the guards.

      The men didn’t need any further instructions, they knew how to get a rise out of soldiers—or barbarians. Every one of the Skraglanders spoke some of at least two other languages, among them they spoke a score or more. They intended to speak all of them in the hearing of the guards.

      “When we’re through here,” Hegyes said with relish to Asztalos when the pair had wandered within ten feet of two of the nomads, “I’m really going to enjoy chopping the heads off some of these barbarian nomads. Beginning with these two.”

      He said that in Skraggish. Asztalos repeated Hegyes threat, but in Matigule. He gave the two nomads a friendly smile. They smiled back, and gave no indication that they understood what the two Skraglanders had said, or even that they had spoken two different languages.

      Thirty yards away, Kes and Parduc stood facing each other in conversation a few yards from a knot of three nomads.

      “Don’t look now,” Kes said in Bostian, his voice pitched to easily carry to the nomads, “but that one behind your left shoulder? The word is, his sister is working as a pleasure girl for the Low Desert  Nomads.”

      “You mean the ugly one, the one whose mother can’t keep  her skirt down and her knickers on when she’s near a Dartmutter.” Parduc managed to get the words out in Kondivian.

      “Hey, you heard that too!” Kes exclaimed in Frangerian. “Then it must be true.”

      Elsewhere, Halasz and Acel slowly wandered past a guard.

      “Have you ever seen such a pathetic excuse for a warrior?”  Halasz asked in Bostian.

      “Never, not in any of my wanderings through this whole wide world,” Acel averred in a version of the Zobran dialect spoken in the Penstons. “They’ll be so easy to kill when Sir Haft gives the order that even children could wipe them out.”

      Kevekoto declared in Ewsarkan, “Do you know that when the warriors of this clan get too close to another clan, the other clan makes them lay down so they can piss on them?”

     “Yes, I know about that,” Lovag said in Apianghian. “And be careful that you don’t drink water that any of them offer you, not even if it’s been boiled. After the other clans piss on them, these warriors have to gather the liquid, and that’s all they’re allowed to drink!”

      Kevekoto shook his head. “Disgusting. These people are simply disgusting.”

      “They are that,” Lovag agreed. “They’re so disgusting that I wouldn’t bed one of their women with your manhood!”

      And on and on, different Bloody Axes speaking in a score or more of languages, all in easy hearing of the guards, and moving on to speak close to others. By the time they finished, each of the guards had heard insults in at least seven or eight languages. None of them gave any indication that they had understood a single word spoken for their benefit.

      Soon after, satisfied that the warriors watching over them didn’t speak any of the languages they knew, Balta sent Sergeant Korona with three men to walk the circumference of the nomad camp, in search of where the Golden Girl and the Zobran Royal Lancers were being held.

      “We have traveling companions,” Maros said.