Lords of the Shadows, page 5
part #4 of Raven Series
Raven ducked low beneath a savage blow from a wizened old warrior, raised her stolen shield to take his next attack and took advantage of his momentary surprise at seeing his own emblem facing him to send him to the Haunted Hills with a swift and accurate jab to the heart. As he fell dying he cried his thanks and Raven turned back in surprise. Thanks for death? She realised then that ever man who died cleanly was screaming the same, on both sides, young and old. Not all the ritual was being ignored.
“I shall never understand this way of thinking,” she cried, half angry, half amused; she parried the furious blow of a man before striking him through the neck with a bitter, “Thank me for that, then, and go to the wind!”
The man had no windpipe with which to obey.
It was as she sat there, tense and bloody in the middle of this mayhem, that she saw the yellow sword again, the great blade that had signaled to her.
The man who carried it rode swiftly through the shattered gates, striking left and right. Where he reached the blade seemed to extend to sever not one but several heads and limbs with every stroke.
As he came towards her, a giant man dressed all in black with not a detail to be seen but the skeletal thinness of the hand that grasped the curled and jeweled hilt of his bizarre sword, so Raven turned her steed and rode swiftly, almost panic-stricken, out of his path. She rode across the muddy area inside the gates and drew Tu’ilza’s horse from where it stood in the shadows of a building. She led the girl deeper into safety, then reached out and pulled the arrow from her flesh. It had entered shallowly and was not a deep would, nor a dangerous one; but it was painful and the girl cried out in agony as the head was torn from her skin.
A slung stone clattered on the wooden walls of a house close by and she turned, rode back to where the fighting was most furious. Mogall shouted to her from the ramparts, and she glanced up. He was blooded but undiminished, and was pointing into the town. Around him the dead were piled high; his own warriors seemed to have won the day.
Raven struck back through the seething hand-to-hand fighting and saw the strange, dark warrior riding deeper into the fortress town, followed by a cavalry band of some twenty men; one who rode with him was also dressed enigmatically in dark, but carried an ordinary sword. They struck down the bands of Jhargan who opposed them.
Raven went in pursuit, fascinated by the bizarre, yellow sword.
From safe shadows she watched the warrior fight, saw how the blade seemed like flame, flickering and daring from the hilt, reaching long, then drawing shorter, adjusting itself, almost, to the requirements of the blow.
The warrior’s great white steed was saturated with the blood of men, but he himself seemed untouched. As he turned to wade his way back through the struggling men of both tribes, Raven drew a star from her belt and cast it straight at his face.
Though he could not have seen it coming, the warlord sensed it and his blade came up faster than Raven could follow to know aside the star. It skittered onto the harder ground of the roadway but Raven had not time to retrieve it; she sensed hostile eyes upon her.
The dark warrior kicked his horse through the fighting men, touching here, there, killing with every effortless movement of his sword arm.
Raven rode out to meet him.
Somewhere the familiar shrilling of war pipes sounded loud above the clamour of steel and war cry. Raven hesitated, glanced quickly down towards the broken gate, and recognised the bright steel body of the man, she had come to find.
She raised her own sword in salute and cried out his name. As the sound died from her lips she screamed a more angry cry and swept towards the dark warrior.
Her first blow deflected with all the ease of a man swatting an irritating midge. She wheeled about, realised that her whole arm was tingling and useless from some unfelt energy in that deflecting blow. The warrior laughed and came at her, and his strange blade flickered, seemed to shift in his grip as if it were not there, then there again, then somewhere else, held in a ghostly hand close to his fleshy one. Raven felt dazzled by that movement, had to twist hard to avoid the blow, but felt the stinging pain of a wound inflicted in her leg. Again she drew a star from her belt, flung it with all her might from quarters close enough to cause a man’s neck to be severed. The sword, without effort, deflected the thrown weapon, and stabbed at her. She twisted out of the way, using her sleeve-shield frantically to stop the cutting edge from running in on her.
This arm too she felt numbed and tingling.
“Who are you?” she cried, desperate to escape this enigmatic warrior and his weapon that defied all her training.
She was answered with a sound like the howl of a storm wind; the warrior’s cloak flowed about him in some unfelt wind, his featureless black mask wrinkling with an emotion she took to be pleasure.
Then the black mask split, and gleaming white teeth showed in an alien smile that sent shivers through her body; short, sharp teeth, row upon row of them, his tongue licked out fleshy and black. She thought she saw the eyes behind that shining face of jet—narrow eyes, gloating eyes, eyes that watched her and sensed things about her, knew her for what she was.
He came back at her.
There was a sound close by and a blot of blue flame curled about the warrior. Raven saw Spellbinder, seated astride a grey mare, his arm outstretched, his face tense with the effort of the spell he cast. Silver was close by, hacking down on both sides to keep the men of the dark warrior’s army at bay. His naked flesh gleamed bright, like metal, reflecting the light of burning thatch as much as Spellbinder’s dark mail armour.
Then something happened that could not happen, something unexpected, something frightening. The dark warrior seemed to wrap his sword about the blue, as if slicing through the air that held it; the energy faded and died. Spellbinder gasped and jerked backwards in his saddle. He stared aghast at the warrior on the white horse, then screamed, “Raven—retreat at once, run for your life!”
Silver cast his spear, but the weapon was knocked aside with insulting ease. But that moment of minor distraction allowed Raven to slip from her steed, massaging her numbed left arm with her still-tingling right. She raced for cover as Spellbinder rode between the dark knight and his prey. Their swords clashed with a deep and mournful ringing sound, then Spellbinder was struck on his arm, and Raven heard the sound of mail links snapped. Spellbinder cried out as Raven had never before heard him cry, his face a mask of agony, his eyes intense and narrowed as if he tried some magic, and failed.
Silver raced for her and swept her onto the back of his horse.
“Why did you dismount?”
“I thought to run the faster through the shadows. Ride!”
The dark warrior pursued them, his own voice loud and triumphant. They rode between houses that burned now, flaming bright, the heat scorching them as they passed beneath flaring eaves.
Abruptly they found themselves blocked by the fighting crowds below the ramparts. Silver reined in the horse and turned. Spellbinder was close behind, slumped forwards and distressed, holding on for dear life. Silver growled, “Have no fear, Raven. My life before yours.”
She grinned and slapped him on the arm, then slipped from the horse and watched as Silver became bright as burnished steel, every feature of his naked chest and face reflecting the blazing houses and bright flame about him so that he himself seemed to burn.
Sword to his side, shield held before him, he rode to meet the dark warlord. His foe raised the fire sword and uttered a weird and frightening cry; Raven grabbed for Spellbinder’s sword and, though her arms were weak, she raced after Silver, maddened by pain, and fear and the thought of her friend being struck down.
But as she came close to the determined tribesman she realised that all was not well with the dark rider.
The sword seemed to dance in his grasp, and now he had to struggle to hold it; it moved about him and he watched it, and there was anger in his cry, and something of surprise.
Suddenly he turned and his white steed was racing through the fires, out of sight of Raven. The fighting broke up around them and the invaders fled the streets, pursued by the Jhargan, still fighting. They had won the gate and now defended their retreat. As Raven reached them, watching the warriors stream back from the fortress, so the white horse rode through their ranks, the dark warrior bent low in the saddle, his sword no longer to be seen. His black armoured companion rode close behind, turned once in the gateway, his horse kicking the air in pain and anger, then was gone as well.
The town burned until dawn, while every able man and woman tried to save whatever could be saved. A light and icy rainfall, shortly before the sky to the east began to brighten, helped the final fire to die. With the new day came the first clear idea of what damage had been done.
Half the lodges had been gutted, but enough had survived—mostly the stone built—to take in the homeless until the task of rebuilding had been finished. The gate, smashed so effectively with slingshot when Mogall had thought it would stand for days, was already half mended, and now was being strengthened. The palisade was also under repair, and the streets were filled with men carrying long, sharpened poles from the woodsheds carved out of the hill itself.
The dead numbered more than a hundred. Among them lay less than forty corpses of the enemy, which Raven learned had been tribesmen of the Ginnin, western tribes that the Jhargan had thought peaceable at this time. The fight that had seemed so fierce and so bloody had in fact been almost one-sided. Raven knew that most of the credit should go to the dark warrior, whoever he had been.
Her wounds were tied tight, and well pressed with healing herbs. Her leg hurt the most, and yet this was her least serious wound. Her arms were recovered, but there was a stiffness in her right shoulder where a blade had found its mark and crushed one of the links of mail that protected her.
Spellbinder too was sorely troubled by the wound he had received, and by something else that he was reluctant to speak of. He was angry, but Raven was more surprised.
“Too easy, Spellbinder, to think ourselves invulnerable because are better trained than most.”
“Aye,” said the warlock grimly, watching Raven through his pale eyes, now narrowed with worry and concern. He seemed drawn, this man, almost ill. “Myself especially. I use my magic too frequently for my own good. It makes me lax.” He touched the place of his wound and looked away from Raven, remembering the moment of its reception. “Although against that sword I am amazed we have survived.”
Raven agreed with him. She had known the sword was more than just a simple weapon, she had known it the moment it had gleamed like that during the previous night. Now Spellbinder hinted that perhaps there was something mystical about the weapon, and he indicated further that he was afraid of it.
Raven said quietly, “The wound goes deeper than the flesh, I think. Something is troubling you beyond your pain.”
The warlock’s face was white as he turned to look at Raven. He nodded his head almost imperceptibly, and Raven thought she saw a moment of panic in his eyes, a flash of tears. “You observe me well, Raven; perhaps you know me too well.”
Raven remembered the destruction of the magic energy, something that she would have thought impossible except by an equal magic. She said as much to Spellbinder.
He smiled ironically. “The more you learn in training, the more there is to forget. I forgot something I had learned as a child training in the magic arts, practising both simple spells and the certain ways of the ancient peoples of these lands. So much I was warned about, so much told I should be wary of…last night I forgot something, and that part of me that can give energy to the spells I form has been numbed. Not destroyed, but I have no knowledge of how long it will take to return.”
Raven was deeply shocked. She dropped to a crouch and took the warlock’s hands in hers, letting him known of her concern. Spellbinder leaned forward to press his lips against her face, then drew back, a shadow on his face, but a certain resignation there as well. “I will resolve it. As an arm, numbed and useless after battle, recovers to full strength, so shall my magic. I am confident of that.”
Raven stood again and watched the bustle in the streets for a moment, the wounded being carried to various lodges, the materials for repair being carried on carts and on men’s backs, down to the walls and the lodges that were most severely burned. “Where is Silver?” she asked, for the last she had seen of the angry warrior he had been with Spellbinder.
“Helping the girl you saved. Her would is slight, but Silver has found it to be worth fussing over.”
Raven remembered Tu’ilza, the fresh faced girl, so young, so desperate for her blood initiation. “It was her first battle, and she did well; she made that mistake that we all make, of thinking on the death of the first one she killed.”
Spellbinder smiled thinly, remembering, perhaps, his own first fight. “Aye, I sensed that in the child. She will survive the wound, and she will be a great warrior. She has compassion, and compassion tempers the cruelty of steel.”
“You sound like Argor,” said Raven, and laughed, walking away from Spellbinder towards the lodges where the wounded had been taken.
She found Silver and he came to her and embraced her. The air in the hall was foul with the smell of death and blood, but Tu’ilza lay bright and cheerful, her young face hardened now, but not so much that Raven felt a sense of disappointment in her. She knew her own face was hard, and that it was determination to survive that put the tension there in the muscles and skin around mouth and eye.
She stepped outside with Silver and turned to look at him, at the sparkle in his pale eyes, the flush on his tanned cheeks, the devil in his thoughts, so transparent in the way he held her hands, and held her gaze.
“By the Seven Valleys, Raven, you are more beautiful than ever.”
“I know.”
“I am glad you know, because you are. I had thought, when we met again, to share a feast with you perhaps, and then a dance and perhaps an embrace. Instead I found myself fighting for our lives.” He grinned and shook his head. “Raven, I would not have wished a better meeting; to use my sword so quickly in your defence…I would have died for you.”
She drew her hands from his and prodded him in the ridged muscle of his belly. He was as strong and as sparkling as she remembered him, and she was glad of it. They had chased across the Worldheart together in pursuit of Donwayne, and he was an invaluable companion, swift of arm, and cheerful of temperament. Though he fawned over Raven like a lovesick youth, playing the part with gusto, he nonetheless recognised that there was much that was a game in his behavior; when there was fighting to be done, the game playing stopped.
“You are too eager to lay down your life for me, Silver. I shall need saving a hundred times. What use will you be if you are dead after the first danger?”
“My spirit,” he said, “shall always ride the winds that blow beside you; I shall be the dust in your enemy’s eye, the hair that blows across his gaze, the dark cloud that depresses him, the bright sun that confuses him. Dead or alive, Raven, I am yours to command.”
She turned and walked towards the lodge where Mogall waited for her. They had found a single living Ginnim in the piles of the fallen, and though he was obstinate he apparently thought nothing of bragging his master’s deeds. There was information to be had from him, and Mogall had sent for Raven to come to the shield hall.
Silver walked beside her, proud in his bearing, loving in his relentless mischievous gaze.
Raven caught his eye and said, “I had heard that after we left the Ice River you went home and bonded with a tribeswoman of the Poirithin, one of the valleys.”
“True enough,” said Silver miserably. “When the skirmishing against the Braigdanas, a tribe of the Dubthag, was finally ended I was allowed to take a mate. People like me, bizarrely formed through no fault of their own—it wsa the distant Tower that made me as I am…”
“I know, you told me once before.”
“Well, normally we are allowed to live unhampered in the tribes, but without ritual mating. I had proved myself in battle, and I couldn’t resist the opportunity. I took the prettiest, fastest and most admired woman I could find and slapped the bonds on her as quickly as she slapped them on me. But I swear, Raven, I have never slept with her. I keep her in a cage at the bottom of the lodge.”
Raven’s sudden anger surprised and shocked him. There had been something in his voice that told not of the joke his words implied, but of a deeper desire to deny his feelings of love for another woman to Raven. Furiously she said, “If you must lie, Silver, then lie like a man!” the smile vanished from his face and he lowered his eyes, caught wordless by confusion. “A bond of live is strong, like steel. If you forge it, forge it well. If you bonded with this woman without your heart wanting it, then you are no man who shall wide with me, not ever again. If you are bonded truly, then you should be proud of her, you should brag of her beauty, her skill. I’ll hear no more, Silver, and I’ll brook no more of your youthful passion. Ride from me, or with me, but ride with the truth upon your lips.”
And angrily she walked away from him, leaving him standing, saddened and bitter by his own behavior.
In the wide, smoke-filled shield hall that was the lodge of the warchief Mogall, Raven found Spellbinder standing quiet, listening to the clumsy interrogation of the captured Ginnim warrior. For a second, though, Raven’s gaze was taken by the shields that covered the walls and hung from every beam and every supporting post. She gasped at the number and variety of them, shields of all shapes, all ages, piled one on top of several others, some still smeared darkly with the blood that had ended their wearer’s life. All raths had a shield hall, but in the tribal lands of the north there were four halls that contained the shields of a hundred generations, perhaps more, relics of a past that was every bit as honourable and violent as the present. Bacrag, quite obviously, was one of these.
