me. My mind suddenly cleared and a fierce strength flowed up my hand into my arm, a strength that felt as bottomless as the sea. It was as if I were drawing Altaru's surging blood into me, and more, the very fires of the earth itself.
The Bright Sword flared white then, so brilliant and dazzling that the nearest knights cried out and threw their arms over their eyes. But other knights and the three Blues pressed toward me. Kane was near me, too, cutting and killing and cursing. Horses collided with each other, snorted and screamed. Altaru, steadying me and freely lending me his great strength, turned his wrath on any who tried to harm me. An unhorsed knight tried to hammer my back with his mace; Altaru kicked out, catching him in the chest and knocking him over. And then, even as Urturuk, the Blue with the missing ear, came for me with his huge axe, Altaru backed up to trample the fallen knight with his sharp hooves. He struck down with tremendous force, again and again until the knight's head was little more than white bones and broken brains beneath his crumpled helm.
'Val – on your right!'
I narrowly pulled back from Urturuk's ferocious axe blow that would have chopped through Altaru's neck. Altaru, now sensing the enemy's strategy of trying to kill him to get at me, furiously bit out at Urturuk, taking a good chunk of flesh from his shoulder. Urturuk seemed not to notice this ugly wound. He drove straight toward Altaru again, his mouth fairly frothing with wrath, this time trying to split open his skull.
At last I swung Alkaladur. It arced downward in a silvery flash, cutting through the axe's iron-hard haft and into Urturuk's bare chest, cleaving him nearly in two. The spray of blood from his opened chest nearly blinded me. I almost didn't see one of the Count's knights coming at me from the other side. But a sudden whinny and tensing of Altaru's body told me of his attack. I whirled about, swinging Alkaladur again. Its terrible, star-tempered edge cut through both shield and the mailed forearm behind it, and then bit into the steel rings covering the knight's belly. He cried out to see his arm fall away like a pruned tree limb, and plunged to the ground screaming out his death agony.
'Take him!' Count Ulanu screamed to his knights scarcely a dozen yards from me.
'Can't you take one damned Valari!'
Perhaps his men could have taken us but for Kane's fury and the sud-denly unleashed terror of my sword. Then, too, they were disadvantaged by trying to cripple and capture us rather than kill. With knights now pressing us on all sides, I urged Altaru toward Count Ulanu. But Liljana, with Master Juwain still holding out the shield to protect her right side while Kane bulled his way forward on her left, had already reached him. She struck her sword straight out toward his sneering face. The point of it managed to slice off the tip of his nose even as one of his knight's horses knocked into hers. Blood streamed from this rather minor gash. But it was enough to unnerve Count Ulanu – and his men.
'The Count is wounded!' one of his captains cried out. 'Retreat! Protect the Count!
Take him to safety!'
Although it hadn't been Count Ulanu who ordered this ignoble retreat, he made no move to gainsay his knight's command. He himself led the flight back down the hill.
Two of his knights guarded his back as he turned his horse's tail to us – and paid with their lives. Kane's sword took one of them clean through the forehead while I pushed the point of mine straight through the other's armor into his heart. And suddenly the battle was over.
'Do we pursue?' Maram called out, reining in his horse at the top of the hill. He was either battle-drunk, I thought, or mad. 'I'll give them a taste of fire, I will!'
So saying, he drew out his gelstei and tried to loose a bolt of flame upon Count Ulanu and his retreating knights. But although the crystal warmed to a bright scarlet, it never came fully alive.
'Hold!' I called out. 'Hold now!'
Atara, who had her bow raised, fired off an arrow which split the mail of one of the retreating knights. He galloped away from us with a feathered shaft sticking out of his shoulder.
'Hold, please!'
With the three men I had killed lying rent and bleeding on the grass, I could barely keep from falling, too. Kane had dispatched two knights and the other two Blues.
Atara had added two more men to her tally, while Maram, Alphanderry, Liljana and Master Juwain had done extraordinarily well in beating off the assault of armored knights without taking any wounds themselves. But now the agony of the slain took hold of my heart. A doorway showing only blackness opened to my left. The nothingness there beckoned me deeper toward death than I had ever been. To keep from being pulled inside, I held onto Alkaladur as tightly as I could. Its numinous fire opened another door through which streamed the light of the sun and stars. It warmed my icy limbs and brought me back to life.
'Val, are you wounded?' Master Juwain asked as he came up to me. Then he turned to take stock of the corpse-strewn hummock and called out to the rest of our company, 'Is anyone wounded?'
None of us were. I sat on top of the trembling Altaru, gaining strength each moment as I watched the last of Count Ulanu's men disappear over the same ridge from which they had come.
'What now, Val?' Liljana said to me as she wiped the Count's blood from the tip of her sword. 'Do we pursue?'
'No, we've had enough of battle for one day,' I said. 'And we don't know how close the rest of the Count's army is.'
I looked up at the blazing sun and then out across Yarkona's rocky hills, calculating time and distances. To Liljana, to my other battle-sickened friends, I said, 'Now we flee.'
They needed no further encouragement to put this hill of carnage behind us. We eased the horses down its slopes into the grassy trough through which we had been riding when the Count had surprised us. And then, wishing to cover ground quickly, we urged them to a fast canter toward the east. The pass into Khaisham called the Kul Joram, I guessed, lay a good twenty-five or thirty miles ahead of us. And beyond that, we would still need to ride another twenty miles to reach the Librarians' city.
We kept up a good pace for most of five miles, but then one of the pack horses threw a shoe, and we had to go more slowly as the sun-scorched turf gave way to ground planted with many more rocks. Here, too, there was a little ring-grass and sage pushing through the dirt, which the horses' hooves powdered and kicked up into the air. It was dry and hot, and the glazy blue sky held not the faintest breath of wind. The horses sweated even more profusely than did we. They kept driving onward through the murderous heat, snorting at the dust, making choking sounds in their throats and gasping until their nostrils and lips were white with froth. When we came across a little stream running down from the mountains, we had to stop to water them lest our dash across the burning plain kill them.
'I'm sorry,' I whispered to Altaru as he bent his shiny black neck down to the stream.
'Only a few more miles, old friend, only a few more.'
Alphanderry, gazing back in the direction from which we had come, spoke to all of us, saying, 'I'm sorry, but this is all my fault If I hadn't opened my mouth to sing, we'd never have been discovered.'
I walked up to him and laid my hand on the damp, dark curls of his head. I told him,
'They might have found us in any case. And without your songs, we'd never have had the courage to come this far.'
'How far have we come?' Master Juwain said, looking eastward. 'How far to this Kul Joram?'
Liijana brushed back the hair sticking to her face as she caught my eye 'There's something I must tell you, something else I saw in the Count's filthy mind. After Tarmanam, he sent a force to the Kul Joram to hold it for his army's advance into Khaisham.'
Maram, bending low by the stream to examine the hooves of his tiring sorrel suddenly straightened up and said, 'Oh, no – this is terrible news! How are we to cross into Khaisham, then?'
'Don't you give up hope so easily,' Liljana chided him. There is another pass.'
'The Kul Moroth,' Kane spat out as he gazed into the wavering distances. 'It lies twenty miles north of the Kul Joram. It's an evil place, and much narrower, but it will have to do.'
Maram pulled at his beard as he fixed Liijana with a suspicious look. 'I thought you promised that you'd never look into another's mind without his permission? This was a sacred principle, you said.'
'Do you think I'd have let that treacherous Count nail you to a cross because of a principle?' Liijana said. 'Besides, I promised you, not him.'
Master Juwain came up to look into my eyes and said, 'It seems that you're growing ever more able to put up
