must have been terrible in its ferocity. Among the corpses I saw a twisted figure, wearing the brave old red and yellow, and I dismounted and turned him over gently. It was Yallan the Iron-throated, a good comrade, who had ridden with us since the Battle of Sabbator. A spear had penetrated between the hooped plates of his kax tralkish and done for him. Jilian dismounted and walked across to stand at my side.
“One of your men?”
“Aye. Just the one. The wounded would have been carried off. That is the way my men are.”
She said, “There are many dead here. Yet you mourn just the one?”
The flash of feeling I experienced shook me. We had just met and I had thought — and now, how little she knew of me! I knew nothing of her, save that she had courage, and a beauty to set a man’s pulses thumping, and a cool appraisal of life that, I suspected, had brought her through many a dangerous turn. So, just as gently, I said, “I mourn for all men slain in battle or dead in bed. Yet some must, I think in nature, mean more than others. Is that so strange?”
“No. But they look so — so pathetic. Like the offal a butcher throws to the dogs.”
I marked her words.
She was right. And, by saying that, she revealed more of herself.
Inside the marquee we found more dead guards, blegs and numims and Fristles, and all the slave girls had gone. The chains had been parted by savage blows, the cut edges of the links bright and glittering. So I knew Barty and the others, looking for me, had taken the time.
“We must leave. My men have saved your friends.”
As we mounted up — and the whip chopped two Rapas who would have taken our mounts, as the rapier snicked the life from a third — she said, “I pray you, Jak. Do not call them my friends. They were poor little shishis, slave-girls by nature. I am not as they are.”
I restrained my anger.
“No one is a slave by nature unless they are told this. A baby is born and must learn-”
“Slaves are born slaves.”
“On this, Jilian, you and I must have words later.”
“With you, Jikai, mayhap words will not be enough.”
The tip of the rapier snicked up the warrior-cloak from a body, and a flick sent it sailing like a zizil of The Stratemsk toward Jilian, who caught it deftly and wrapped its blue and green check folds about herself. Another blue and green check enfolded my red and yellow. We turned the hersany’s heads away from the marquee and the windrows of dead, as soldiers with torches ran across from the bivouac lines, shouting.
Into the shadows we rode, but gently, gently, restraining the impulses of our mounts to gallop in frenzy from the bedlam.
The noise of genuine combat floated up in a clangor of iron from the east and that, therefore, was the way my men had gone and the way I must go, too. I glanced at the girl. Erect, she sat her steed, bareback, grasping the coarse rope with a slender hand that, I could guess, would have a grip of steel. She looked across at me and the redness of her mouth, purple plum in that light, curved into a smile. And then her eyes widened and she stared across my shoulder. I switched around on the beast’s back and saw riding among torches carried by a body of zorcamen a man in armor who glittered like a golden idol, resplendent, radiant, his sword lifted high as he bellowed orders. The zorcamen surrounding him looked more competent than any of the soldiers I had yet encountered in this army. They rode hard and they trampled down anyone and anything that chanced to get in their way.
It seemed prudent for us to sidle into the shadows of an undamaged tent until this formed body of hardened veterans passed.
Jilian’s face screwed up into a fist. The whip snapped free. Her naked heels lifted out. I reached out and grabbed for the rope and her heels kicked in and the hersany leaped. My clutching fingers missed the rope. The animal bounded away. Jilian made straight for that body of zorcamen and straight for that shining golden figure. The fury in her face was colder than the Ice Floes of Sicce.
“By the disgusting diseased liver and lights of Makki Grodno!” I yelled, clapping in my heels. “Can’t you control your temper, girl!”
With Jilian in the lead we hurtled toward the zorcamen.
If the Fates, who play with us poor mortals as children play with insects, inspecting a wing here and a leg there, had a hand in it I do not know. But Jilian’s hersany caught a hoof in a guy rope and staggered sideways, twisting, hurling her from his back. The beast went down thrashing and I had time only to haul my own away. I checked him with a vicious tug on the rope and swung down. Jilian lay winded, glaring up with such a look of vindictive hatred as would make a man’s innards turn to treacle.
“Kov Colun,” she said. She spoke in a whisper. “I have sworn to have his manhood and have it I will -
I will make him into a nithing, a mewling spineless ninny, and then perhaps, if it pleases me, will I kill him.”
The zorcamen rode on, not seeing us in the shadows, our falling commotion merely a part of the greater confusion.
Jilian stood up with my hand under her armpit. She breathed deeply, magnificently. “The bastard came from that marquee, the unburned one with the golden flags. He has something of mine I would have back.”
With that, without a look at me or another word, she started for the marquee. The cloth-of-gold was not as lavish as that festooning the marquee of Fat Lango; but everything spoke of wealth and refinement and a lavish expenditure of money and the labor of slaves. Jilian’s whip lashed the life from two Rhaclaw guards, their heads shining, domed and as wide as their shoulders, bursting under the impetuous ferocity of the lash. Jilian ran on past them and entered the marquee, the whip black and cutting striking before her.
Whatever was so important as to warrant this risk was no doubt somewhere in there, if she said so. This Kov Colun had looked a different prospect from the others of this army and I deemed it expedient to stand on guard by the marquee entrance. Jilian would find what she wanted, so I contented myself by a harshly shouted: “Hurry, girl!”
She re-appeared and color stained her cheeks like flame.
“By the Rod of Halron and the Mount of Mampe!” She spoke in a breathy whisper, as though drunk, and yet she moved with a sureness that told me she was vibrantly alive with her own personal triumph. Under her arm she carried a silver-mounted balass box, about eighteen inches long. The rapier in her left hand snouted parallel to the ground and even with the box under her arm I fancied she could give an account of herself. The whip was recoiled up her arm, and her white skin was blotched and stained with blood.
I said: “You are quite ready?”
“More ready than those cramphs within.”
“No doubt,” I said, handing her across a couple of corpses and a pool of spilled blood. “They are also without.”
She laughed.
“Aye! Without much.”
The blue and green checks swathing us would serve for a space yet. But the sounds of distant strife wavered on the night air, faded and were gone. A silver trumpet note sounded, tiny and far, signaling the
“Recall” and the “Reform.” The way the notes trilled told me that was not Volodu the Lungs but one of the trumpeters of Karidge’s Regiment. They had done well, for the army encampment was in a leem’s mess; but we were left here, alone, and must make shift to get out of this ourselves. In thus pulling his men out, Nath Karidge was strictly obeying my orders. I took Jilian’s arm again and we moved silently into the shadows between the tent lines.
“Zorcas, I think,” I said.
“With a saddle this time, Jak.”
“Aye.”
With a bitterness she made no effort to suppress, she said, “You marked that tapo in the golden armor?”
“You called him Kov Colun.”
“Yes. A piece of dirt that walks about on two legs. Colun Mogper, Kov of Mursham. Never turn your back on him, never trust him. If you can, try to stamp his face flat in the mud — after I have done with him.”
“Mursham,” I said. “In Menaham. That explains the difference, for if he is one of the Bloody Menahem then he
