“Does anyone feel up to carrying me down into the hole?” Zeb asked.
Across the distance came the dull bang of a handgun and the men all flinched, but it was followed only by shouting and the clash of arms, echoing from the hollowed-out cavern of the manor. There was a clear, pained scream.
“The redlegs have all cleared out,” someone said. “Who is it at that?”
“Maybe the Daulies are fighting over who gets to light the fuse.”
Men fingered their axes and crossbows, but no one felt like rushing toward a building that might ignite explosively at any instant. It seemed to have gone quiet over there anyway. A minute passed that seemed much longer.
“Who’s this, then?” someone said.
The men watched a figure exit the manor and approach but from his position Zeb could not see who came, and he was becoming too lightheaded to ask. The voices of his companions were making little sense to him.
“Is that a Destroyer?”
“No, they wear black plate with spikes.”
“That is part of a helmet, right? Not your man’s face?”
“What’s with the birds?”
“Good gods, is that a woman behind him?”
“That’s a Farthest Westerner, else I’m an elf.”
The Leftenant stepped to the front of the band, the others moving aside for him. Zeb saw the subject of speculation arrive, and was himself perplexed.
In addition to too many wounds and more than enough battle, Zeb had seen a great deal of armor over his military career. Leather cuirbolli, plate and chain, banded and splint. Scale and studded. Spiked and hobnailed and bronzed. But he had never seen anything quite like that adorning the man who stepped up to face the Leftenant.
It was beautiful, in its way, and altogether more complicated than seemed strictly necessary. It was composed of angular pieces, light blue to a dark gray and laced together with reddish cord, oversized at the joints to turn aside any thrusting or cutting blade. It covered the fellow almost from head to toe. Decorating the chest, arms, and legs were single rows of stylized images of white birds, little herons or cranes with wings that seemed to flutter as the man strode forward. At his waist were two sheathed swords, black pommels with matching diamond-pattern designs, one sword much longer than the other. On his head was a great helm with long neck guards extending around a banded steel dome, framing a leather half-mask of grinning lips and a pronounced, hooked nose, above which the man’s own dark eyes were set deeply beneath his brow, and at a slight tilt. They flashed about at the Axmen before settling on the Leftenant in their fore. The stranger stopped and undid the cords at one side of his half-mask, dropping it to hang free from his helmet and revealing a full face of olive complexion and indeterminate age, with a hard line of mouth framed by a long, wispy black mustache. He spoke with a thick accent.
“Zay-bu-ron Baj-an-if.”
Zeb would have winced had he not been doing so already. A few of his fellows glanced at him, but at least none of them actually turned around and pointed.
“Pardon me?” the Leftenant asked.
Everyone’s attention was on the swordsman, though the fellow was not alone. Two more people had followed him from the manor and now reached the cluster of men, one a frowning Ayzant in the silver armor of a Kingsman and the spiked helmet of a sergeant, carrying a large mace. The other now drew many stares from the Axmen who had been staring only at each other for weeks.
She was a woman and pretty, though she could have been far more so. She was as Far Western as the swordsman with fine narrow features and eyes at a graceful tilt under thin, jet black brows. But she was garbed rather rudely in a battered, shapeless brown coat from throat to thighs, with patches on the elbows matching those on the knees of worn cloth leggings. She wore gray woolen socks and strapped sandals with wooden soles that clopped even on the bare ground. Finally her hair was just a fright, a tangled mass of inky black, unkempt and unacquainted with a brush.
The swordsman said something in a foreign tongue to her, barked a command really, and she spoke in halting Codian. That language was close enough to Kanalborg Common to be understood by the Axemen.
“Is one of you men called as Zebulon Baj Nif?”
No one, bless their hearts, said anything. Neither did they glance again at Zeb, who for his part continued to bleed quietly.
The Ayzant sergeant started bellowing, in Zantish naturally, which of the group Zeb alone understood as he knew the related Ghendalese dialect. His Leftenant did not turn around to ask Zeb for a translation, but with a sigh Zeb started speaking anyway, from habit.
“He says they have it from Colonel Rierden himself that this is the post of the platoon of Leftenant Kagsfold, under whom is ordered the soldier Zebulon Warchild, who himself has knowledge of both the Zantish and Codian tongues.”
Zeb blinked.
“So, I’ve pretty much just given myself away then, haven’t I?”
Indeed, the woman frowned at him and stepped forward. Zeb liked to think his fellows might have moved to obstruct either the swordsman or the sergeant, but they politely if uncertainly moved aside for the woman. She knelt and looked closely at Zeb’s arm. Her face and neck could have stood a washing, Zeb noticed, though of course so could his.
“You are wounded.” she said.
“That is what they tell me. I am trying not to look at it.”
“It is very bad.”
“Yes. Thanks.”
The woman spoke over her shoulder and the swordsman snapped an answer. The Westerners’ language between themselves was a rush of short vowels, similar in sound to what Zeb had heard a time or two from an excitable half-Zokuan bartender he knew in Bowgan, the only Far Westerner he had ever met. Zoku, the Celestial Empire of Cho Lung, and the islands of Ashinan were the three fabled realms located far, far to the west of Noroth and Kandala, beyond even the Miilark Islands and all the way across the vastness of what was accurately known as the Interminable Ocean.
“Lie still,” the woman said.
“Well, if you insist…” Zeb began, but stopped with a sharp intake of breath as the woman laid one cool hand on his forehead, and jammed the fingers of the other into the shredded remains of his right elbow.
The seashell roar returned, the rising sun blazed and washed out the sky, and a wall of pain allowed not even a peep through it. But it was only for an instant, and then Zeb felt as if all his remaining blood was draining out of his body and sinking into the ground. The pain went with it, but so did his awareness. He felt himself sliding into a void.
“Are you…are you a priestess?” he managed. The last thing Zeb could see, and that but dimly, were the woman’s two narrowed eyes. He heard her voice in the darkness.
“No.”
*
Amatesu had to tug her fingers free as the wounds closed. The man Zebulon Baj Nif’s clear blue eyes rolled to white and his tense body went slack. With him well and truly out, Amatesu took a hold of his right wrist and lifted the arm, bent his elbow, and moved it side-to-side. The joint moved smoothly without grinding, and Amatesu felt a moment of satisfaction before reminding herself that this was the will of the spirits and the gods, not her own. The strength for the healing had in main been Baj Nif’s own, though that had not really been necessary. Amatesu could have drawn power from the land and the wind and the sun, but this way the man would likely be unconscious for several days. That should make things to some degree easier.
Not a bad piece of work, all the same.
The other mercenaries made various murmurs to see their companion’s arm healed, and as Amatesu stood and looked around at them their faces were reverential. Their officer, a thin yellow-haired man, took a step closer.
