Mistress of the Empire (79 page)

Then, as he saw aggression kindle in his colleague’s eyes, the ex-litigator added, ‘Your part in this matter is finished, Tapek, by the Assembly’s decree. Now come with me.’ Taking his teleportation device in hand, Akani activated it, then firmly gripped Tapek’s shoulder. The two magicians vanished in an inrush of air that sucked eddies in the drifting smoke, and wafted fresh air over the last, jerking spasms of dying Acoma servants.

The Lady’s boldness had saved her. Tapek, in his impromptu search, had never thought to look off the roads, in the deepest, thickest undergrowth. He perceived no deeper than Mara’s outer trappings as a pampered noble Lady, and could never have imagined how profoundly her foray into Thuril had changed her. Besides her bold strike into rough country, the direction Mara had taken when she left her litter and main company was not northward toward Kentosani. Instead, she had cut due southwest, in direct line toward the nearest cho-ja tunnels.

She and the warriors with her traveled without rest through two nights. Now, near sundown of the second day, the Lady stumbled on her feet. Saric walked at her shoulder, his touch at her elbow holding her upright, though he was scarcely more able himself.

The one scout who still maintained alertness raised a
hand. Only when Mara had been restrained gently to a stop did she realise the reason for his signal.

The birds in the high, dense canopy of ulo trees had stopped singing.

She motioned for her rear guard to halt and said, ‘What is it?’

Saric poised, listening. The Strike Leader on point quietly urged his warriors to search the treetops.

‘Are we in danger from ambush?’ Mara asked in a whisper.

The scout who had first given warning shook his head. ‘Hardly here. Even thieves would starve if they staked out this area of the forest. No traffic to keep them supplied.’ He cocked his head, and was fastest to note the approaching noise of armed men. ‘A patrol, I think, my Lady.’

‘None of ours,’ Saric concluded. He glanced at Strike Leader Azawari, who nodded, while the small band of hand-picked warriors drew swords. To the scout the Acoma adviser said urgently, ‘How far are we from the tunnel entrance?’

‘A mile at best,’ came the answer; too far to run in this company’s exhausted state, even if they were not to be harried from the rear.

Saric stepped before his Lady, who sweated under her layers of borrowed armor. She had carried the added weight well enough, but her skin was chafed raw from the unaccustomed motion of walking. Still, pluckily, she kept up appearances and reached for the sword at her side.

Saric clamped her hand in a freezing grip, his penchant for questions lost to urgency. ‘No. If we are attacked, you must flee and seek to hide. Save the sword for yourself, to fall on if need be, should you be taken. But to try to hold here would be folly.’ More kindly he added, ‘You have no training, mistress. The first stroke you met would cut you down.’

Mara looked him sternly in the eyes. ‘If I must run, you will follow suit. Nacoya did not school you for your office only to see you wasted in armed combat.’

Saric managed a half-flippant shrug. ‘A sword thrust would be kinder than a magician’s spell.’ For he had no illusions. Their small, fast-moving party might have escaped notice from the Assembly, but not for long. Yet to remain beyond reach of arcane retribution, his Lady must live to find refuge in the cho-ja tunnels.

Mara noted her adviser’s sharp silence; she tried not to think, as he did, of the Great Ones. To open her thoughts to such fears, she must surely collapse and weep: for Lujan and Irrilandi, perhaps dead with all of her armies; for Keyoke, Force Leader Sujanra, and Incomo, who were all that remained of her old guard, and who had been set out as bait with her litter, their lives her diversion, and their sacrifice her last hope for Justin.

Where Hokanu was, the gods only knew. That he also might be most hideously lost did not bear imagining. Worst of all, Mara shied off from the question that gnawed at the edges of her mind: that Justin might indeed survive to claim heirship to the golden throne, but at the cost of every other life that was beloved to her.

Mara bit her lip. Poised with Saric on the edge of flight, she firmed her will to keep from trembling.

The sounds of snapping twigs and marching men drew closer. Her party’s trail was plain to read, since they had taken no care to hide their tracks, as they had passed far enough from the road that their presence was unlikely to draw notice. Once in the deep wilds, speed had been deemed of the essence.

Or so her reduced council of officers had decided, and they paid for that misjudgment now.

Strike Leader Azawari sorted his options and chose. ‘Fan out,’ he murmured to his warriors. ‘Give them no solid rank
to charge on. Let it be man to man, and confusing, to hide our Lady’s escape for as long as we can.’

Saric’s fingers tightened over Mara’s hand. ‘Come,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘Let us be off.’

She resisted him, rooted and stubborn.

Then the rear rank scout straightened up and gave a glad shout. ‘They’re ours!’ He laughed in stark relief and pointed to the glimpse of green armor that came and went between the trees.

Men who had begun to scatter pulled back into one main body. Swords slid into scabbards, and grins flashed in the deep-woods shadow. Somebody hammered someone else’s armored shoulder, and words passed around of a wager. ‘Ten to one that old Keyoke prevailed, and sent us reinforcements!’

‘Hush!’ rapped their Strike Leader. ‘Form ranks and be quiet.’

Azawari’s sternness reminded: there was grave danger still. The new arrivals might only be bearers of bad news.

Now the ranks of the warriors appeared, striding briskly through the forest. They seemed fresh. Their armor was correct, if bearing scrapes in the high-gloss finish from forced march through close brush. Mara fought the need to sit down, to steal a moment of rest while her two forces exchanged tidings and regrouped.

Only Saric’s iron grip kept her propped on blistered, aching feet. ‘Something’s not right,’ he murmured. ‘That armor. The details are wrong.’

Mara stiffened. Like him, she sharpened her gaze to search faces. Threat of peril prickled the hair on her neck. The men were all strange, and that distressed her. Too often, her people were not known by sight, since her armies had grown vast over the years.

It was Saric, first earmarked for his station because he
never forgot a face, who hissed, ‘I know them. They were once Minwanabi.’

The approaching force numbered thirty, and it closed in relentless formation. The Force Leader at the fore raised a hand in friendly salute, and called the Strike Leader with Mara by name.

Unobtrusive in her warrior’s garb, Mara stared at Saric. Her face had paled. Even her lips were white. ‘Minwanabi!’

Saric nodded fractionally. ‘Renegades. These were ones that never swore to your natami. That dark-haired man with the scarred cheek: him I cannot mistake.’

One soft-hearted moment of pity, Mara recalled, and now she had treachery in payment for the clemency that had prompted her to let these foemen go free. She had only a split second to judge her call; for these warriors in another five steps would be among her ranks, dangerous as adders were they turncoats.

It tore her inside, to think they might be loyal; but Saric’s memory was impeccable. Keyoke and Lujan had sworn by it. She sucked in a shaky breath and snapped a nod to her First Adviser.

Saric raised the alarm, that her woman’s voice might not give her away. ‘Enemies! Azawari, call the charge!’

The Strike Leader’s order bellowed over chaos as the lead ranks of traitors discarded appearance, drew swords, and leaned into a fighting run.

Mara felt her arm half jerked from its socket as Saric spun her from the ranks, and behind him. ‘Go!’ he half screamed; even under pressure his adviser’s tendency to seek subterfuge remained. ‘Run and send word to the others!’ he shouted, as if she were a younger soldier dispatched away as messenger.

The first swords clashed as the pair of green-armored companies closed in combat. Men grunted, cursed, or
shouted the battle cries of the Acoma. They blinked sweat-stung eyes, and engaged, and prayed to their gods for the judgment to enable them to separate friend from foe.

For all were armored alike in Mara’s green.

Strike Leader Azawari called encouragement, then reached and jerked Saric from the fray. Years of training made him sarcat-quick, and he interposed himself in the adviser’s place, parrying the stroke of the foeman already engaged. ‘Guard our messenger,’ he snapped. ‘You know where he needs to be!’

Saric’s features twisted in frustration. He had been a warrior before he was an adviser; he could be so once again. Where better the need? But the teaching of old Nacoya forced him to review all options. There was his Lady, running hard through the trees, tripping over roots in her ill-fitting armor. She was no swordsman. She should not be stripped of all protection, or counsel, and Saric’s split-second knack for sound reason showed him the wisdom of Azawari’s choice.

‘Tear out the hearts of these dogs!’ he grated hoarsely. ‘I’ll see that our messenger reaches the main column. We’ll be back before you have time to kill them all!’

Then he ran in a white heat of fury. Of course, no advance column existed. The guards who defended were all here, and outnumbered three to one. That his Lady had come this far, had traveled into perils in Thuril and sacrificed her most beloved servants, for this! A petty bit of treachery, no doubt the handiwork of the Anasati Lord. Such a plot could not – no, would not! – bring down the honored Servant of the Empire. She might risk all to preserve her children, but Saric understood this race was for higher stakes than the lives of a boy and a girl, no matter how dear to him.

He raced ahead, no longer torn in his desires, but stung to greater effort by the outmatched struggles of his fellows. From behind came the rattle and crunch of swords striking
armor. Screams sounded between grunts of human effort. The false soldiers chewed into the ranks of loyal Acoma with devastating steadiness. They were Minwanabi on a long-anticipated vengeance raid. They did not care how they fell.

Mara’s men had more weighty matters on their mind as they strove to stem the enemy’s rush. They did not do battle simply to preserve their Lady’s honor. They killed when they could, harried when they could not, and painstakingly kept themselves alive to draw out the fight as long as possible.

Their fierceness did not pass unnoticed.

In bare minutes, one of the attackers recalled the messenger sent away to report. He shouted to his officer about the unlikely escort commanded by a Strike Leader who could ill spare the loss of any one available sword.

‘Hah!’ cried the Minwanabi officer in his stolen Acoma colors. Satisfaction thickened his tone. ‘You are no rear guard! Your Lady does not ride in a litter under better protection up ahead, eh?’

Azawari had no answer but the fury of swordplay. He slammed his blade down on the helm of a foeman, and stepped back as the enemy crumpled. ‘Find out,’ he invited grimly.

‘Why should we?’ Another Minwanabi dog was grinning. ‘Men!’ he commanded. ‘Disengage and pursue that messenger!’

Saric heard the cry as he raced after Mara. He cursed, and slammed through an interlaced hammock of branches that his slighter mistress had slipped through. Shouts burst through the foliage at his back. False guardsmen now raced in chase at his heels. No Acoma could win free to stop them. Every loyal sword was already engaged, and the enemy’s numbers were greater.

Saric blinked sweat from his eyes. ‘Go, go on,’ he
urged Mara. It made him ache to see how she stumbled. Her endurance was steel that she should still be on her feet at all.

He must buy her time! For soon she must rest. If he slowed the rush of her pursuers, perhaps she could find a cranny to hide, at least until her true warriors could reduce the numbers against her.

Saric ran. He reached Mara’s side, caught her elbow, and sent her in a flying boost over a fallen tree trunk. ‘Run!’ he gasped. ‘Don’t stop until you hear no sounds of pursuit. Then hide. Sneak on at nightfall.’

She landed on her feet, staggered sideways, and fended off a branch, still running. Saric had spent his last moment to watch out for her. The pursuing Minwanabi were on him.

He whirled. Three swords came at him. He parried the one that mattered, and let the dead tree entangle the others. One Minwanabi stumbled back, gagging on blood, his chest pierced.

Saric jerked his blade clear, twisting to avoid a cut from the side. A branch bashed his ribs, the same that a moment ago had spared him. He raised his bloodied blade and lashed downward. Met by a solid parry, he let his momentum spend itself on the enemy sword, then snapped his elbow at an angle. His stroke sliced past the foeman’s guard and killed him. To himself, the former officer turned adviser gasped, ‘Not so bad. Haven’t lost too much.’

The soldier left alive sought to dodge past, to extricate himself from the windfall’s weave of branches and close upon the boyish form he now suspected must be Lady Mara. Saric lunged to intercept. A searing slash along the back of the adviser’s left shoulder warned of his mistake. Another guard had rushed him. Pinned in place against the downed tree, Saric spun and lashed out, taking his attacker in the throat. The first soldier had by now won free and passed by running hard. Saric muttered an irreverent prayer. His
path was clear. He had only to keep on. Fatigue brought agony as he punished tired sinews into motion. He raced, moaning in his need for air. He overhauled the warrior in false colors, and slammed into him from the rear. Armor deflected his stroke. He found himself engaged, while yet another foe slipped past and around, running after Mara’s fleeing form.