Ethereals.'
'They're shooting blind,' Fost said. Evidently the Vridzish had spotted the Ethereals at a distance and knew they were near, but couldn't pinpoint them. With their eerie self-control, many of the Ethereals died without a sound, without stirring.
The rafts came close enough to speed missiles at the mounted pair. Fost steeled himself. He had no shield and his mail vest would provide little protection against hard-driven arrows.
Synalon waved her hand. The barrage of missiles dropped, arrows and javelins aflame, the stones molten lumps.
'Had they enough archers they could swamp me,' she said. 'But they don't.'
The skyrafts veered off, milling aimlessly in the sky. Fost awaited a new spell from Synalon. None came. 'I do what their mage does,' she explained. 'I conserve strength.'
The rafts spread out, formed a circle around the two and touched down. The craft each held six to eight Vridzish. Six to eight too many for Fost's liking.
The Hissers rushed forth, the nobles splendid in their cloaks and armor, the paler scaled lowborn warriors clad in loincloths and carrying obsidian spears and axes. Some of the latter carried short-swords of plain steel looted from a human armory. Oracle had predicted this would happen. Obsidian held a keener edge than steel but it was brittle. As Vridzish weapons were broken or lost, they had to be replaced. Picking up fallen human weapons proved easier than chipping new ones from glass.
It was small comfort. Two of the shortsword-armed Hissers stopped and hauled an Ethereal woman to her feet. Her face never lost its dreamy look as they plunged their swords repeatedly into her body.
Synalon pointed three times with her finger. Three lines of blue lightning stabbed forth. The two slayers and an officer nearby charred and fell. Synalon laughed delightedly at her handiwork. 'The whoreson can't guard against that!'
The Vridzish commander shouted and waved his sword. The Hissers advanced on Fost and Synalon at a trot. Both dismounted, preparing for battle.
Lightning flared in such rapid succession that Fost was momentarily deafened and blinded. But if the Zr'gsz mage couldn't fend off her deadly short range lightning, neither had Synalon speed or strength to cinder all their enemies before they reached the embattled pair.
Instinct made him lash out even before his vision cleared. Fost felt his blade slash through something brittle; then came the unmistakable sensation of steel cleaving flesh. A Hisser gasped and fell, the broken halves of a mace dropping to the Steppe.
A score of the reptiles surrounded the pair. Fost's dog snarled and leaped, taking a deep gash down one side but bearing two of them to the ground. A trio of lowborn Hissers closed on Fost. His eyes searched rapidly and found a small stone lying near his foot. He kicked it between two of the Vridzish.
They were stupid. Their eyes followed the rock and then not even their inhuman speed saved them from Fost's whining blade. He swung left, right, left again and black blood gushed over him.
A noble loomed up ahead swinging an obsidian-edged sword. Fost hurled himself backward. The black stone blade moaned past. Fost felt nothing but as he backpedalled he saw that his tunic was parted in a line running across his chest and blood welled through a sleeve.
Synalon glided forward, her rapier twitching before her like a giant insect's antenna. She attacked the officer, and he retreated a step. Steel rang on stone, and then the tip of the slender sword whipped around a parry to score a heavily muscled forearm.
The Zr'gsz whistled in rage and struck, battling Synalon's blade out of the way. She danced back. He smiled then, teeth bright in his dark face, and advanced.
As quickly as he had advanced, he stopped. His eyes rolled up in his head showing greenish white balls. He stiffened. Every muscle swelled into relief on his powerful body, and he began vibrating in the grip of an awful spasm. A keening sounded only to be drowned in a froth of blood. He fell, kicking grooves in the soil. He finally lay still.
'My sword skill's too paltry to put all my faith in it,' Synalon said from behind Fost. 'Come on then, bastards. My venom's good for many more!'
And they did come on, barely giving Fost time to clamber to his feet. He and Synalon fought back to back as the Vridzish rushed. It seemed that each new attack must be the last; Fost didn't know how he parried the blinding strokes of mace and axe and sword. The Zr'gsz crowded in on all sides, jostling each other, making it difficult to attack. Fost buried his sword over and over until he was black with their blood. Synalon's poisonous sting littered the ground with convulsing victims. But there were too many Hissers, and beyond the circle of hard, dark faces Fost saw several score others still hunting down the Ethereals.
His face and arms stung from myriad shallow cuts. He dared not even glance over his shoulder at Synalon, but from her constant low-voiced cursing he guessed she was in no better shape.
He refused to have it end like this. The thought of dying filled him with rage.
'O, Ust!' he bellowed. 'Give me the strength to slay these sons of darkness!' Madness came on him, and he waded in among the Vridzish.
He scattered a dozen of the lower caste warriors. Another officer faced him. His speed outmatched Fost's berserker fury. Each stroke of his mace drove Fost's blade perilously near the man's own flesh. Sweat blinded Fost.
Then the noble's head departed its shoulders atop a column of blood.
'Again I greet you, O Chosen of Ust,' said Jennas, hetwoman of the bear clan, as she flicked black blood from the six-foot blade on her greatsword. 'This is getting to be a habit,' she added in a quieter voice.
The timely arrival of the Ust-alayakits threw the Zr'gsz into confusion. Jennas wheeled her bear Chubchuk away and launched herself against their common foe. The long hair and body fat of the bears provided excellent armor; the beasts absorbed savage blows without harm. Fost saw the plumed Zr'gsz captain fell a male bear rider only to have another rider roll down on him like an avalanche. The rider was a grossly fat woman with a steel cap strapped atop wiry red curls. The Hisser threw up his shining green blade. A giant axe swept down with all the force of that huge body. The green sword snapped. The axehead hurled on. Through gorgeous plume, through green helmet, through skull and body until it sank into the cold ground of the Steppe. The Zr'gsz was sheared in two, the halves quivering over dead legs for a second before falling in separate directions.
The Hissers ran for their rafts. The fat woman laughed and threw her giant axe into the air. It cartwheeled up until it was outlined against the swollen disk of the setting sun. Then it returned, a huge hand snared it and the battle was done.
Flames danced high against the nighttime sky. Drunken and boisterous, the bear riders staggered in a victory dance around the bonfire.
Fost sat with Jennas and the monstrous redheaded woman, Vancha Broad-Ax. Her great axe, Little Sister, was laid carefully on the ground by her huge rump where she patted it from time to time and crooned appreciatively to it. The Bear folk still talked about the way she'd struck down the Zr'gsz noble that afternoon. Fost had never seen anything like it, and to judge from the talk of the Ust-alayakits, neither had they.
'I had the proper motivation,' Vancha boomed in a voice as big as she was. 'Ust has kept little Jennas appraised of what goes on in the world north of our Steppe, by means of visions.' She laid a companionly slab of arm across 'little Jennas's' shoulders, who was every bit as tall as Fost and just as powerful. The hetwoman smiled, but her amber eyes were troubled.
'It's good to see you again, Fost,' the hetwoman said as Vancha poured herself a fresh mug of rakshak, the liquid fire that these nomads drank. 'It is as Ust foretold.' She looked away quickly.
Fost felt a tingling and glanced over his shoulder. Synalon sat away from the fire on a saddle taken from the corpse of Fost's dog. Her arms were folded beneath her breasts, and she regarded the courier with sullen, smouldering eyes. He bit his lip and turned away.
When the Vridzish had fled, Synalon had seized him and hugged him tight. Her lips had sought his; the slaying had aroused passions in her that wouldn't be put off. Yet he had shrugged her off to share a tearful embrace with Jennas. Only when he had literally felt Synalon's gaze laid across his back like a whip had he turned from Jennas to see the anger and hurt glowing in Synalon's eyes.
Though Synalon drank nothing, she had grown more sullen since the sun fell from the sky. When a young bravo had swaggered up and tried to put his arm around her, she had given him a glare charged with more than
