“You’ll be laughing from a slit throat if you let your wits wander around here, m’lad!” a sharp voice said, and he turned his head to look down at his own commander.
Hartan was another dwarf, some sort of kinsman of Kilthan’s. Only a dwarf could keep the various dwarven relationships straight, but Hartan hadn’t gotten his job through nepotism. Few dwarves had the length of leg for a horse, and he looked a little odd on the oversized hill pony he rode, but he was as hard and tough as his people’s mountains and the only person Bahzell had ever seen who could wield a battle-axe with equal adroitness on foot or mounted. He was also atypical, for a dwarf, in that he revered Tomanak, not Torframos. Bahzell had little use for any god, and he knew some of Hartan’s own folk looked upon him askance for his choice of deity, but he understood it. If a man was daft enough to put his trust in gods at all, then the Sword God was a better patron for a warrior than old Stone Beard. Even a hradani could approve of Tomanak’s Code-as Hartan practiced it, at least . . . except, perhaps, for that bit about always giving quarter if it was asked for.
The dwarf took people as he found them, which meant he treated anyone assigned to his outsized platoon with equally demanding impartiality. He considered his command the elite of Kilthan’s private army, and all he cared about was that his men meet his own standards in weapons craft, loyalty, and courage. If they did, he would face hell itself beside them; if they didn’t, he’d cut their throats himself, and his ready, if rough, approval of the hradani had gone far to ease Bahzell’s acceptance into the tight-knit world of Kilthan’s personal bodyguard.
Now the dwarf swept his battered axe in a one-handed arc at the steep, overgrown hillsides visible through the streaming rain, and frowned.
“This here’s a nasty bit at the best of times. We’re all strung out from here to Phrobus, the horses’re tired, Tomanak only knows where all the valleys and gullies in these hills come out, and our bows’re all but useless in this damned rain Chemalka’s decided to drop on us! If
Bahzell glanced around at the terrain, then nodded.
“Aye, I will that,” he agreed, and stripped off his cloak and tossed it up into the wagon. The drover handling the team’s reins from his own sheltered perch caught it with a grin of mingled sympathy and rough amusement at another’s misfortune, and Bahzell grinned back. The cloak was soaked through anyway, and it had covered the hilt of his sword. Now he reached back to unsnap the strap across the quillons, and Hartan bestowed a sour smile of approval upon him. He touched a heel to his pony and cantered ahead, and Bahzell heard his flinty voice issuing the same warning to the man beside the next wagon.
Rain trickled from the end of Bahzell’s braid in an irritating dribble and squelched in his boots with each step, and more water found its way under his scale mail. Long, miserable miles dragged past, marked off in beating rain, splashing hooves and feet, and the noise of turning wagon wheels and creaking harness. He was cold and wet, but he’d been both those things before. With luck, he would be again, and neither of them distracted his attention from the dripping underbrush and scrub trees of the hillsides. Hartan was right, he thought. If a man wanted to hit the train at its most vulnerable, these miserable, rain-soaked hills were the best spot he was likely to find.
Someone slipped and fell on the far side of the pay wagon. Someone else laughed at the splashing thud, and the unfortunate who’d fallen swore with weary venom as he climbed back to his feet. Bahzell’s mouth twitched in wry sympathy, but even as he started to turn his head and grin up at the driver, something flickered at the corner of his right eye.
His head snapped back around, ears cocked and eyes straining through the rain as he tried to pin down what had drawn his attention. A full three seconds passed, and then he realized. The sweep rider picking his way through the underbrush high above the road wasn’t there anymore . . . but his horse was, and its saddle was empty.
“Man down! Right flank!”
Bahzell’s hand flashed back over his left shoulder even as he bellowed the warning, and his fingers closed on the hilt of his sword as the muddy hillside suddenly vomited men.
The brigands came down the slope, howling to chill the blood, and he spared a moment to admire the skill with which they’d used the underbrush for cover. The missing sweep rider must have ridden straight into one of them without knowing. He’d no doubt paid for his inattention with his life, but Bahzell’s shout of warning had come before the raiders were fully in position. They had sixty yards of tangled, mud-slippery undergrowth to cross, and bugles began to sound. Their strident signals brought Rianthus’ outriders galloping through the rain to close on the column while the closest patrol wheeled towards the point of threat, and Bahzell heard hoarse breathing and splashing feet as Hartan’s platoon reacted. Every other man from the train’s left flank hurled himself around, over, or under the nearest wagon to slot in on the right side, deadbolts clattered and iron rang as hands wrenched open firing slits in the pay wagon’s high wooden sides, and the brigands’ howls took on another note-one of fury-as they found themselves facing not a spread-out file of surprised victims but a steady line. It was a thin line, with too few people in it, but it was unshaken and spined with steel.
Hartan thundered down the line on his pony. He yanked the beast to a halt as he reached Bahzell, so abruptly the beast slid on its haunches in the mud, then wheeled it to face the enemy at the hradani’s right shoulder.
“Good man!” he shouted through the oncoming bellows, and then a dozen outlaws hurled themselves over the edge of the road and straight at them.
It was obvious they knew their exact target, for another score of brigands came in their wake, charging headlong for the pay wagon. Others split to either side to face off any relief force while the central force cut its way through to seize the strongboxes, but bowstrings twanged as the drover and the men detailed to the wagon itself fired through the slits in its thick sides.
A half-dozen raiders went down, yet the others kept coming, and there were too few guards to break that charge. Bahzell knew it, and he snarled as he gave himself to the Rage.
Hot, bright heat filled him like some ecstatic poison, and Hartan’s pony shied in terror as a wordless howl burst from his throat. His dripping ears were flat to his skull, fire crackled in his brown eyes, his huge sword blurred in a whirring figure eight before him, and the brigand running at him gawked in sudden panic. The raider’s feet skidded in mud as he tried to brake, but it was far too late. He was face-to-face with the worst nightmare of any Norfressan, a Horse Stealer hradani in the grip of the Rage, and a thunderbolt of steel split him from crown to navel.
The body tumbled away, blood and organs and shattered bone steaming in the rain, and Bahzell howled again as his sword whirled before him. His arms and blade gave him a tremendous reach, and a trio of brigands found themselves inside it. They flew back, only one of them screaming as he held the spouting stumps of his wrists up before his bulging, horrified eyes, and Bahzell stepped forward into the splendor of destruction.
An arrow whizzed past him into a raider’s chest. The man screamed and twisted, trying to pull it back out, then went down without another sound as Bahzell’s sword struck his head from his shoulders. Two of his fellows came at the hradani desperately, and that terrible sword smashed one of them aside even as a booted foot drove into the other’s shield. The brigand lost shield and footing alike and rolled frantically, trying to get his sword up to cover himself. But Bahzell simply brought the same foot down again, and his victim’s terrified shriek died with shocking suddenness as a boot heel took him in the face and smashed his skull like an egg.
A thrown hand axe whirred, and Bahzell twisted aside and lashed out again. Another brigand screamed as sixty inches of steel took him in the right thigh and his leg flew like a lopped branch. Someone else drove a desperate cut into the hradani’s left side, and a rib snapped, but the blow rebounded from Bahzell’s mail. His sword came around in a blood-spattering loop that claimed another head, and his howl of triumph bellowed through the rain.
The entire attack slithered in confusion as he waded into it. Few of the raiders had ever fought hradani; none had fought Horse Stealers, and the sheer carnage appalled them as he split their charge and shattered bodies flew aside in a bow wave of wreckage. A dozen were down before anyone even reached Hartan’s line, and those who did reach it were shaken and staggered, already sensing failure. Bahzell heard Hartan shouting orders, the clash of steel, heaving breath, gasped curses and prayers and the screams of the wounded, and their music sang to the fury at his heart.
Other folk thought the Rage was simple bloodlust, a berserk savagery that neither knew nor cared what its target was, and so it was when it struck without warning. But when a hradani gave himself to it knowingly, it was as cold as it was hot, as rational as it was lethal. To embrace the Rage was to embrace a splendor, a glory, a denial of all restraint but not of reason. It was pure, elemental purpose, unencumbered by compassion or horror
