The Dark Ferryman (64 page)

To bring down Bistel would likely turn the battle into a rout. He had no stomach for the senseless killing of soldiers when a decisive blow could stop a war. He turned his horse’s head toward Bistel and began to edge his way through. Before the sun set, he would reach his goal and the warlord would die.

A trumpeting winded over his drummers. He thought the winter gusts, always cruel, had come up again although they did not usually rise until dusk. Then he caught the notes, high and strident, as the Vaelinars quieted. The fighting seemed to slow, and the army parted as if a tide rolled through it, and he saw the Warrior Queen come at last to her battlefield, her right arm high in the air with white silk unfurling from it. His first thought was that she had finally come to spring her trap upon him, and his second thought was that if he could take her, he would never have to worry about his kingdom again, and his last thought was the realization that she carried the color of truce. He recognized that last reluctantly before putting up his own hand to signal his drummers. The rhythm stopped, then began a ponderous, different beat.

The fighting stopped. Warriors stepped back, falling back to their own lines, chests heaving, weapons at parry, eyes narrowed in suspicion, but they retreated until Lara rode into an empty circle manned only by Bistel and Diort. She dismounted between them, still holding her silks high. At her gesture, her lancer threw a bloody bundle on the ground and the Raymy head fell free. Death had not softened its fierce expression or settled the lips back over its many sharp and pointed teeth.

“What is this?” Diort stared at the grisly remnant.

“Raymy,” Bistel answered him distastefully. “Unless I am greatly wrong.”

“Quendius landed an army of thousands. Raymy and Ravers. I was there, I saw it,” provided Bregan from behind the lancer’s back.

Bistel eyed Oxfort. “I see one.”

Diort made a noise at the back of his throat as if in agreement.

Bregan shook his head. He dropped his hands, frustration choking his words. Lara said smoothly, “They travel the trails under the mountains, the old Pathways of the Guardians, and they’re on our heels. They
will
overrun us. Our only hope is to call truce and fight together. It took four of us to bring this one down.” The admission colored her face, but her eyes flashed in defiance as she finally lowered her hand and the silk of her undergarment flowed softly from her fingers.

“You ask us to meld the armies.”

“I do.”

Diort’s jaw tightened. “The easier, then, to stab us in the back. This is a war you insisted upon. Why should I trust you?”

She stared at him. “We have a quarrel, but I won’t see us lose every last fighter to such as this!” She toed the Raymy’s head. Its eyes glinted ferociously, death not having leeched that from it yet.

“You thought to bow my head quickly and bring me to my knees at the bargaining table.”

Lara answered slowly, “I did.”

“You could have sent an envoy.”

“Would you have listened to one?”

The corners of his jade eyes crinkled a bit. “Probably not.”

“Then I decided a slap would get your attention.”

“The dead and wounded were not slapped.”

“No.” Lara took a deep breath. “I planned other. I was delayed. I have the price of their deaths on me. But I would not accept more, unless there isn’t any choice.”

What Diort would have countered with was cut off by high-pitched screaming and yelling far behind the lines, and Lara knew they had run out of time.

Sevryn saw the battle part as if a tide had turned. Even on the stony hillside, he recognized Lariel’s armor and helm and her upturned hand with the color white billowing from it. Tranta rode pillion a horse or two behind her, distinctive for his bare head of blue-green hair. Bistane held her flank. The sight took him by surprise as did the tenor of the trumpeting and the change of the Galdarkan drummers. They called for a cessation. His pulse quickened.

Too far away for details, he still saw a circle open up about Lara and a bundle drop on the ground. He could not see what it was when opened, but he
knew
. Knew it as if he had been the lancer who had done the deed. He took a step backward at the realization.

Nutmeg clutched at his arm. “What is it?”

It was the end of all he valued. It was the last battle. He could see Bistel and Diort facing one another on either side of Lara, their hands empty for the moment, a transient truce holding. What did she ask of them? Could she bend her pride long enough to hope that Diort would join them?

He had no ears to listen to their words, but he could hear the sounds of battle rejoined again, up on the stony paths, near a gaping hole at the peak. He could hear a hiss boiling out of the depths like hot iron being plunged into salt baths at a forge. He could smell fresh spilled blood on the dirt. He knew why Daravan had taken him to the salt bay to fight that morning not so long ago, so that he would know the true enemy. He had not the eyes of the Vaelinars, but as he looked down into the river valley and over two armies poised on the brink of warfare and annihilation, he saw the threads of all the lives spilled over the lands. Find the
astiri
, the way, Gilgarran used to pound at him. It had never been easy for him to use what pure-blooded Vaelinars took for granted. It had been near impossible for him to look at the elements of the world about him and see what composed it and how it might be touched in the most minute manner so that it could be perceived better and perhaps even manipulated. No, he did not have the multicolored eyes of his lineage that gave the sight so easily, but he did have its Talent.

How do you blend two armies together and then turn them as one against the true enemy? What bugling could signal to turn from one army and merge to fight a third? What drumbeat could send the complicated rhythm for all to know what to do know, what was needed? He could hear fresh drumming from the Galdarkan front and saw the soldiers mill uneasily, uncertainly. He could hear the bugles and banners go up for Bistel and Lariel, and the Vaelinars assemble no less unsure. Word would be passed, but would it be clear enough and in time?

Nutmeg pulled at him again. “What’s happening?”

“Raymy are attacking. Ravers with them, I think.”

“Raymy?” Her voice shook in disbelief. “I thought it was just smugglers. Brigands. Quendius with outlaws.”

“No. Quendius brought the most dire enemy he could find.”

The two armies drew apart in confusion. They no longer attacked one another but they had no understanding of what poured out of the mountain after them. They would be plowed under. The disciplined ranks that had faced one another began to crumble in chaos.

“They have to fight!”

Slaughter if they did not, he knew that. Nutmeg threw herself down the hill, running. “I have to tell Jeredon to fight!”

They all had to be told. He did not have their eyes, their sight, but by all the Gods he had their
Voice
.

He pulled the winter wind to him, off the ridges, off the sharp-edged peaks and crags about him. He took a deep breath, felt the ice in that wind, its sharpness deep in his lungs prickling at him. He gathered up all the power of his ability, his soul, the threads of what he knew and what must happen and then, and only then, he Spoke. Fire and power stroked his throat.

The wind roared down off the mountains. Bistel turned as it did, touching him, and it said to him, “The Raymy come. Turn to the western peak and make your stand.” It left no doubt in his mind as to the truth and urgency.

Diort raised his chin as the wind shivered past him. “Who is that who speaks?”

“That is the Hand of the Queen.”

“Badly named, I think, Lariel.” Diort gave her a half bow. He could see the dark forms of fighters already engaged halfway up the great western peak. “I have a way to stop them, I think.” He pulled his war hammer from his back. Rakka growled softly in his hands as he tightened his grip about it.

“Close the pass.”

“Aye. I can bring the rock down on them, I deem.”

“If you can get close enough.”

Diort met Bistel’s eyes. “True.”

“Then you will. Queen Lariel, I think your guidance is needed here. I might suggest you drive a spearhead through that—” and Bistel nodded to the severed head on the ground, “—and use it as your banner. Bistane, with me.”

Rivergrace felt her heart warm as she heard Sevryn speak, ignoring the dire message, knowing only that he lived. She came out of the small tent as its canvas rippled in the stiffening breeze and Rufus joined her there.

“He live,” Rufus commented with a knowing look in his eye. He smelled of fire and iron and charcoal, and grime covered his hands.

A healer had wrapped her with fresh bandages, but she still carried pain with every movement. “I need to go to him.”

The Bolger blocked her body. “He come to you.”

“What if he can’t?”

“Then too late.”

“I can’t wait until it’s too late.”

Rufus stayed immovable. She clenched and unclenched her hands until he patted her on the shoulder and turned her to face the west. “We wait.”

Nutmeg saw the sturdy little mountain pony tethered among the fine tashya. She threw her spotted head up with a knowing eye as Nutmeg grabbed her bridle to yank her loose. “I don’t know whose mount you be, but you’re mine now,” she told the shaggy little horse. She threw a leg over the bare back and touched heel to the small mare. She ignored the soldiers scrambling to answer the wind’s summons and steered her pony across the lines to where she had seen Jeredon last. She found him in his cart, his chariot, loading quivers with arrows from a supply wagon and shouting orders at his archers. He looked up startled as she called his name.

“Nutmeg!”

“The western slope . . .”

“I know, we’re called there.” He tossed a quiver to a waiting archer before filling his fingers with new shafts.

“You’re facing Raymy.”

His hand stopped in midair. “Are you certain?”

“Do apples grow on trees?”

His hand unfroze long enough to continue loading the arrows into a new quiver. Jeredon looked about and yelled “Tressandre! I need to be on my feet!” Nutmeg watched him as if she had never seen him before, and in a way, she had not. Not like this. There was blood and grime on his dark green battle leathers and the amber glints of his soft green eyes matched the red gold that streaked his dark brown hair here and there. The teasing curve to his mouth had disappeared into hard lines as he yelled again. “Ild Fallyn! Come bring me my legs!”

Tressandre ild Fallyn did not come to answer. Nutmeg’s little pony stamped her feathery leg.

“I can get you up there. I know where to hit them from.”

Jeredon looked to the western peak and its jagged base. “I can’t drive the cart up there. I need my legs, curse it, Nutmeg, don’t you understand?”

She slid off the pony and put the reins in his free hand. “Get on.”

“My feet will drag.”

“Your feet dragging or your ass, it’s your choice.”

A pulse along his jawline that she knew well ticked once or twice before he tightened his hand about the reins. He could do that much, and they both knew it. With a grunt of effort, he swung off the cart and with Nutmeg’s steadying hand on his hip, he got onto the pony. His feet did not quite touch the ground. She took the headstall as he pulled two quivers over his shoulder and two bows.

“One for me?”

Jeredon snorted at her then, much like a mountain pony. “Lead me in and then I want you on your way to safe shelter.”

“There is no shelter in this valley,” she told him quietly and tugged the pony after her. The two of them, as agile as any creature climbing the slope, found a path straight into the heart of the new fight.

Baring his teeth at the day, Quendius tied his horse and moved upslope, among the small evergreens that grew twisted and spare among the rock. His army met with pitched effort at the tunnel’s exit but they pushed out determinedly, over the bloody and broken bodies of Vaelinar and Galdarkan alike. He savored the carnage. He knew the heroes would come to bolster the dam, but it was a tide they could not stop. It only mattered to him that they came. He had two arrows left that would answer to him. Quendius shook his vest out and took a position on a slab of rock, one that had caught a few slanting rays of the sun and held a slight measure of warmth. He waited.

And behind him, in jagged long shadows cast by stone, Narskap moved silently. He knew his master had made a deal with the Raymy. He knew of only one below who would be saved from the slaughter, the one a part of himself wanted to call kin, and that one would be saved not because Quendius had any mercy in his body but because she carried the touch of the River Demon in her and his master was greedy. That part of himself would rather see her dead than in the hands of Quendius.

Barely breathing, he crept along gravel and slate, rock and sere weed, sigh by sigh closer. Narskap knew his master’s mind as well as he knew his own. Better, perhaps. He had always been able to hear the thoughts running thinly through his own. Quendius was not the ghost who haunted him, but he was the faithful hound because he knew his master’s every inclination.

Quendius showed no inkling of his stalking. He watched as his master flexed his longbow and drew an arrow from a belt quiver, an arrow with the head chiseled from flame-red gemstone, and eyed a target below.

There were three actually. One rode a small pony that stubbornly hopped and jumped along the rockfall like a goat, led by a woman hardly taller than the pony, but on his back, oh, yes, they knew that visage well. The Warrior Queen’s brother, quiet but deadly Jeredon Eladar, son of the Anderieons, himself a master of earth, of forests and their creatures, and of death from the air. The small woman neither watcher counted, not Quendius nor Narskap, even though it was she who helped the Eladar from his mount as he moved stiff-legged over the terrain. When Quendius settled, it was on a line with the opening and farther, on a line with the two other targets in sight: Diort and Bistel. The Eladar would block any shot Quendius might have in mind unless he moved, but moving now would likely draw attention to his presence, for the mountain boiled with Raver and Raymy leaping from the tunnel and fighting their way downslope.