“I don’t know,” said Mithos quietly.
“There were about fifteen of them at least,” I said. “Why didn’t they come after us? Why didn’t they kill me when they had the chance?”
“Good question,” muttered Renthrette. “Now go to sleep.”
“What?” I retorted. “Doesn’t this interest you? We interrupt these butchers in the middle of whatever the hell it is they do, they let us stroll away, and you don’t wonder why?”
“You want to know what I wonder?” she said, leaning towards me. “I wonder why you went wandering off and then started shouting names when you were about to get what you deserved.”
“I couldn’t see where I was for the smoke,” I protested, “and calling Mithos’s name seemed to help, wouldn’t you say?”
“It may have saved you,” she said with another half-grin, as if that was a minor point.
“It saved all of us,” I said.
She frowned thoughtfully, and looked to Lisha, who nodded.
“Will is right,” she said. “For whatever reason, the name of Mithos saved us. I saw them freeze as soon as they heard it. They were turning their horses around before Will could even start to run.”
“Perhaps they were afraid,” I suggested, shrugging off my irritation with Renthrette.
“Of what?” asked Mithos, rising up from his place by the fire and staring out towards the orange smudge in the sky above the village. “Of a word? Of my name? No. I may have acquired a bit of a reputation in Cresdon, but nothing to make a dozen or more heavily armed soldiers turn tail and run before they have even glimpsed me. And here, no one knows of us.”
“Then why?. ”
“I don’t know, Will,” Mithos answered hastily, adding with a touch of irritation, “Now go to sleep. We have another day’s ride ahead of us.”
Since I was avoiding Orgos (having nearly got us all killed earlier made me unwilling to deal with my combat instructor), I buried my face in a pillow of rolled-up tunics and tried to sleep. I knew that I would dream and I knew that there would be red-cloaked soldiers with featureless helms riding through the fire of those dreams. There would also be laughter and accusing fingers pointed at me. I’d been having dreams like that ever since I met these idiots.
The worst thing about sleeping outside is that you always wake at dawn when the sun hits your face. Orgos had been on the last watch and was now laying out a breakfast of the mediocre bits and pieces brought from Adsine augmented by wild blackberries and stream water which he had boiled over a tiny fire. After we had eaten we went to the still-smoldering village. We found a few charred arrows with traces of red flight feathers and a confused scattering of hoof-prints. Mithos crawled about for a while and then said, mainly to Orgos, “They came from the north end of the village, close to the forest line. I’d say there were about twenty of them but it’s hard to tell. They rode up and down the street and then some of them dismounted and entered the buildings.”
That, I didn’t want to think about. I was dealing with things rather better than I had expected, but I suppose that was because last night’s hellish encounter had taken place in a village full of red light, not this blackened ruin of frames and burnt corpses. Oh yes, there were plenty of those. I figured the count had another twenty-five to add to his death toll, and there wasn’t a hint that a single raider had fallen.
We tracked the hooves until they came to the edge of the wood, where the ground was too hard and cushioned with pine needles for there to be any further trail. The sun had shone steadily by all accounts for a week now and there had been no sign of rain for longer, so it was only the sand that the horses had kicked up that had enabled us to follow them this far. The horsemen had come and done what they obviously did so well, and then left without a trace.
Still, it was odd. Hard ground or no hard ground, there were tracks throughout the village, and there were occasional signs of where the raiders had come in and gone out, but a hundred yards or so beyond the village? Nothing. No sign that anyone had been there for weeks. It was as if they had just disappeared.
You’d think that this would have been a nicely ominous portent, an opportunity for the party to abandon the whole mission and slink quietly back to Stavis, but that didn’t seem to occur to anyone.
SCENE XXV Seaholme
Somehow, Greycoast was luckier than Shale. We hadn’t been traveling long that day before the ground started to look greener, and we were soon crossing fields of grazing sheep.
Mithos rode Tarsha, the overpriced bundle of muscle and mane they had spent our reward on.
“Are you doing all right, Will?” he asked, apropos of nothing.
“Of course,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“No reason,” he said. A moment later he added, “When we get to Seaholme we will have to organize a large defensive force and be ready for anything. No more blind terror or curious solo forays, all right?”
“All right.”
As if that was something I had
I swear, they might be strong and courageous, but sometimes they talked like they knew nothing about anything that really mattered.
It was late afternoon when we reached Seaholme, and Duke Raymon was waiting for us.
“You have made good time,” he boomed. “You have no idea how reassured I am to see you. The barges are expected around nine o’clock tomorrow evening. There’s a sizable force awaiting your instructions.”
“How many?” said Mithos, swinging down from his horse.
“A hundred,” Raymon answered. “Sixty cavalry and forty infantry.”
“Excellent,” said Mithos warmly. “I had not dared to hope for so many.”
“Frankly,” said the duke, “I can’t really spare them. But this is an important cargo and worth the extra caution.”
“If the raiders are as careful as everyone suggests,” added Mithos, “they will not risk an attack on so large a force.”
The duke nodded, but he didn’t say anything. I don’t think anyone else noticed, but it bothered me.
The following day I dressed carefully and tried to carry myself with the bearing of one who knew what he was doing. It wasn’t easy, partly because I didn’t, and partly because Seaholme was a maze of ancient streets packed with fishermen and soldiers from the moment the sun came up. I felt almost as lost and inadequate as I had in Stavis, but this time I had to strut around and look composed. I gave it a shot, throwing my shoulders back and stalking about like a rooster. Bill the tactician. The renowned General William Hawthorne. The names didn’t feel right, like I was wearing someone else’s clothes and they were all too big. I remembered the riders in the burning village and, thinking that I didn’t want the responsibility of arranging how we faced them, dropped the military swagger, hunched my shoulders, and tried to keep a low profile. For that part I was a natural.
The soldiers looked good in their blue tunics and capes, but their armor was light, and they lacked, even to my inexperienced eye, an air of efficiency and confidence. As we were introduced to the platoon captains I couldn’t help noticing a pair of young soldiers handling two-handed spears as if they were unsure what they were supposed to do with them. Still, they looked impressive from a distance, and maybe that would be enough.
In the harbor the myriad fishing boats had been moved to clear the dock for when the barges came in. Drawn up in vast warehouses close by, ten large wagons stood empty and waiting. In fact, waiting was what we did a lot of that day. Mithos and Orgos looked over the troops and drew up plans with their leaders, but they looked less happy at the end of it than they had at the beginning.
“I don’t see what more we can do,” Mithos said as we sat by the docks, eating grilled fish, “but if the raiders call our bluff and attack. ”
