with him knew better than to try to resist once he had laid a hand on one’s wrist or gripped a fistful of garment.
They had left most of their weapons and all of their armor above, as it seemed foolish to go clad in heavy maille, carrying a three-foot-long sword, when creeping through a cellar to look at an old saint’s bones. The men were all carrying rondel daggers, and Vera had a single-edged knife in her belt. Thus armed, they would go into combat against knights. Aboveground, in the light of day, it would make for long odds. At close quarters in the dark, however, the Livonians would be hindered by the length of their swords. And piercing maille was precisely what rondel daggers were made for.
Still, it was a desperate venture, and during the helter-skelter rush through damp and darkness that followed, Raphael had time to understand that the fight that was about to take place in the tunnels beneath Kiev would be marked down, in the annals of the Shield-Brethren, as a suicidal last stand-supposing any news of it ever reached the surface. Just the sort of fight, in other words, that they had all been trained to undertake at a moment’s notice without hesitation. Raphael was not certain that he was equal to it. The quest to find and slay the Great Khan was at least as hopeless, but the nature of that undertaking gave him much more time to prepare himself for the fate waiting at its end. This, though, had been sprung upon him and promised to be much more ignominious.
And so he was thankful in a way when he tripped over something heavy and soft on the tunnel floor, fell down full-length, and realized that he was lying on top of a dead Livonian knight. Roger had taken him from behind and shoved his rondel into some part of the man’s anatomy that had brought about instantaneous death.
Running his hand down the front of the dead knight’s body, Raphael found a belt buckled over his maille shirt, then followed that to the man’s left hip, where he felt the cold steel pommel of a sword still in its sheath. Raphael drew this out as he clambered to his feet, and knew from its weight and the size of its handle-big enough only for a single hand-that it was an arming sword, relatively short bladed and not too out of place in these cramped settings. Thus fortified, he stumbled forward toward the sound of the fighting. He had fallen well behind the others as the result of his discovery of the dead Livonian. The candles had gone out. It was impossible to make any sense of what was happening. Then-his foot encountered another body. He nudged it, heard the soft jingle of its maille, and stepped over. A few more paces and he found another corpse. Roger had taken down at least three of the Livonians before they could even become aware of his presence.
Others, sensing that something was terribly wrong, were now calling out in alarm to their brethren farther ahead. Percival, seeing that the advantage of surprise had been lost, now bellowed out the war cry of the
Caroming around a slight bend in the tunnel, he came in view of a chamber, dimly illuminated by the guttering, hissing flame of a torch lying on the floor-apparently dropped by one of the Livonians. It was only a few paces ahead of him, its light partially eclipsed by the silhouette of a man, clad in maille and a helm, moving crabwise. Raphael immediately understood that this man was trying to get around behind Percival or Vera.
Raphael flexed his wrist, bringing the tip of the arming sword up, and at the same time brought his left hand across his body to grip the flat of the blade between the heel of his hand and the balls of his fingers. The technique, called half-swording, enabled finer control of the weapon’s tip, and a moment later, Raphael took full advantage of it to insert the blade beneath this Livonian’s aventail and ram it up into the base of his skull. The man’s head snapped backward, which Raphael found odd until he realized that Vera, whipping around, had backhanded the pommel of her knife into the bridge of the fellow’s nose at the same instant.
The Livonian crumpled to the floor between them, and Raphael’s eyes met Vera’s for an instant. Then they returned their attention back to the chamber, a wider space where at least three passageways came together. Raphael gathered quick impressions: Roger collecting a downward stab with his right arm and turning it into a hammerlock, bending his foe to the ground and prying the dagger from his hand in one fluid motion; Percival, having locked up another man’s sword arm, sweeping around like a compass tracing an arc while shoving his hands downward to dislocate the shoulder. A bobbing light approached from up the leftmost tunnel-other Livonians hurrying back to help their brethren. Raphael hefted his stolen sword and hurled it like a spear in that direction.
At the same moment, Percival’s foe collapsed to the ground, snuffing out the only torch in the chamber. The left tunnel went dark as well. Raphael’s thrown sword seemed to have found its mark.
“Vera! It’s me,” he called, groping through the dark until he felt her hair beneath his hand. She spun toward him and he felt a momentary apprehension that she would put her blade into his heart-but instead, she gripped his elbow, patted his chest with a strong hand, and said, “You aim well, sir.”
“I stand here,” Percival called from off to their right. But Roger’s plight they knew only from his war cry, as he went into combat with one who had, it seemed, emerged silently from the tunnel-a more formidable foe than the others, since Roger was unable to instantly dispatch him. The combat was turning into what sounded like a grappling duel, both men going to the ground, gasping and grunting as they struggled to achieve dominance. Raphael scarcely had time to wonder what sort of man could challenge Roger in that kind of fight when he felt Vera’s grip shift on his arm, and a moment later, she spun about and slammed up against his back. Other Livonians were entering the dark chamber. A voice-not one Raphael recognized-let out an unearthly shriek as Percival did something terrible to him. Perhaps warned off by that sound, other foes shied away, instinctively seeking the silence around Raphael and Vera-a quiet space, but hardly empty, as they quickly discovered.
A long, exquisite confusion followed-a shifting scrum of bodies, flick after flick of Raphael’s dagger blade, the press of Vera defending his rear as they circled around each other, the clang and spark of swords striking the roof of the cave, shouts of pain, pig-like grunts as blades struck home-finally broken by a light bursting into the chamber. Raphael and Vera looked up to see Yasper holding a torch and Finn brandishing a lance, and in the dimness behind them, Cnan darting left and right, trying to peer around their shoulders.
“They are with us,” Raphael said, laying a steadying hand on Vera’s knife arm, which was covered with blood to the elbow. He looked up into her face, fearing she might have been wounded during the struggle in the dark. She was blood-spattered but seemed unhurt and resolute. She gazed curiously at the newcomers, but Yasper and Finn were staring aghast at something on the other side of the chamber. Following their gaze, Raphael saw Percival-but there was no sign of Roger.
Percival was kneeling, intent on a body slumped on the floor, and there was no aggression in his posture. In that moment, Raphael understood whose body Percival knelt over. Roger was dead.
Raphael, unwilling for the moment to accept such a loss, turned his attention to the scene. Dead or dying Livonian knights almost covered the stony floor. One of the latter managed to push himself to his feet, but his leg gave way immediately, and he collapsed against the wall. Frantic, he tried to roll along the wall and feel his way toward the entrance of a narrow side tunnel.
For a moment, he glared at them from stark white eyes set in a bloody face. Then he toppled into the passageway, pushed himself up onto all fours, and began to crawl. “Kristaps!” he called. “Kristaps! Take me with you!”
Raphael saw now a faint gleam of firelight reflected from the walls of that passageway. Kristaps was making good his escape-leaving his dead and dying fellows behind.
They all reacted at once, and in the same way, but Finn happened to be closest and entered the tunnel first, hefting his lance onto his shoulder as if he might hurl it at the retreating Kristaps. He planted his foot on the collapsed and wounded Livonian’s back and slammed him down onto the ground, then trod up and over him.
“Finn!” Percival called. “Hold!”
Had he said it in anger, or in a voice of stern command, Finn might not have heeded him. But Percival spoke in the pleading tones of a man whose heart was breaking, and this was so shocking that it spun the hunter around. He, and all the others, gazed in astonishment at Percival’s face, which was streaming with tears.
“Were it our purpose to seek revenge,” Percival said, “none would burn for it nor pursue it more ardently than I. Perhaps I shall have it one day. But duty calls us upward into the sunlight. Even now, the Shield-Maidens may be under assault. We must go to stand by them in the defense of their hospice.”
The whole struggle had lasted but a few moments. Raphael’s impressions of it were now as dim and blurred as one of last night’s dreams. And yet, a month later, he was still unable to purge it from his mind.
For many days now, they had been riding over the steppe, surrounded by a sameness of grass and low hills,
