'I understand.'
'Then you won't hurt me? That's wonderful. We can have a good time here, really.
Whatever you want and as much as you want, and we won't go back until it's time to eat.'
'I didn't say I wouldn't hurt you.'
Her face, which had been wreathed with forced smiles, fell, and she looked at the ground. I suggested that she might ruaway.
'That would only make it more fun for you, and you'd hurt me more before we were through.' Her hand crept up my thigh as she spoke. 'You're nice looking, you know. And so tall.' She made a sitting bow, pressing her face into my lap to give me a tingling kiss, then straightening up at once. 'It could be nice.
Really it could.'
'Or you could kill yourself. Have you a knife?'
For an instant, her mouth formed a perfect little circle. 'You're crazy, aren't you? I should have known.' She leaped to her feet.
I caught her by one ankle and sent her sprawling to the soft forest floor. Her shift was rotten with wear a pull and it fell away. 'You said you wouldn't run.'
She looked over her shoulder at me with large eyes.
I said, 'You have no power over me, neither you nor they. I am not afraid of pain, or of death. There is only one living woman I desire, and no man but myself.'
XX
Patrol
We held a perimeter no more than a couple of hundred paces across. For the most part, our enemies had only knives and axes the axes and their ragged clothes recalled the volunteers I had helped Vodalus against in our necropolis but there were hundreds of them already, and more coming.
The bacele had saddled up and left camp before dawn. The shadows were still long, somewhere along the shifting front, when a scout showed Guasacht the deep ruts of a coach traveling north. For three watches we tracked it.
The Ascian raiders who had captured it fought well, turning south to surprise us, then west, then north again like a writhing serpent; but always leaving a trail of dead, caught between our fire and that of the guards inside, who shot them through the loopholes. It was only toward the end, when the Ascians could no longer flee, that we grew aware of other hunters.
By noon, the little valley was surrounded. The gleaming steel coach with its dead and dying prisoners stood mired to the axles. Our Ascian prisoners squatted in front of it, guarded by our wounded. The Ascian officer spoke our tongue, and a watch earlier Guasacht had ordered him to free the coach and shot several Ascians when he had failed; thirty or more remained, nearly naked, listless and empty-eyed. Their weapons were piled some distance off, near our tethered mounts.
Now Guasacht was making the rounds, and I saw him pause at the stump that sheltered the trooper next to me. One of the enemy put her head from behind a clump of brush some way up the slope. My contus struck her with a bolt of flame; she leaped by reflex, then curled up as spiders do when someone tosses them among the coals of a campfire. She had been white-faced beneath her red bandana, and I suddenly understood that she had been made to look that there were those behind that brush who had disliked her, or at least not valued her, and who had forced her to look out. I fired again, slashing the green growth with the bolt and bringing a puff of acrid smoke that drifted toward me like her ghost.
'Don't waste those charges,' Guasacht said at my elbow. More from habit, I think, than from fear, he had thrown himself flat beside me.
I asked if the charges would be exhausted before night if I fired six times a watch.
He shrugged, then shook his head.
'That's how fast I've been shooting this thing, as well as I can judge by the sun. And when night comes '
I looked at him, and he could only shrug again.
'When night comes,' I continued, 'we won't be able to see them until they're only a few steps away. We'll fire more or less at random and kill a few score, then draw swords and stand back to back, and they'll kill us.'
He said, 'Help will arrive before then,' and when he saw I did not believe him, he spat. 'I wish I'd never looked at the damned thing's track. I wish I'd never heard of it.'
It was my turn to shrug. 'Give it back to the Ascians, and we'll break out.'
'It's coin, I tell you! Gold to pay our troops. It's too heavy to be anything else.'
'The armor must weigh a good deal.'
'Not that much. I've seen these coaches before, and it's gold from Nessus or the House Absolute. But those things inside who's ever seen such creatures?'
'I have.'
Guasacht stared at me.
'When I went out through the Piteous Gate in the Wall of Nessus. They are man-beasts, contrived by the same lost arts that made our destriers faster than the road engines of old.' I tried to recall what else Jonas had told me of them, and finished rather weakly by saying, 'The Autarch employs them in duties too laborious for men, or for which men cannot be trusted.'
'I suppose that might be right enough. They can't very well steal the money.
Where would they go? Listen, I've had my eye on you.'
'I know,' I said. 'I've felt it.'
