The spearmen ran yelling on their doom.
For a short space only I fronted them with the deadly Krozair longsword singing, and then Targon and Naghan and Dorgo and Korero were there, with the others of my choice band clad in their stolen ochre and white uniforms, and the blades clanged and rang. The spearmen were either cut down or ran. The fight was brief and bloody, swift and savage.
“Well met!” I bellowed. “Now back through the gate and into the swamps before they gather their wits.”
“You are safe?” demanded Korero, and blood dripped from his tail hand and the blade he bore.
“Aye! Now — move!”
So we ran.
Brun lifted the carpet and I stuffed Dayra back, whereat she squealed and tried to slash me. I looped the silk around her wrists and drew it tight, tight, and said: “Daughter. Bide you still or earn a father’s wrath.”
“And what else have I ever had?”
There was nothing I could say to that. Filled with a sudden and blinding sense of infamy, I ran with my comrades out through the gate and past the dead guards sprawled there, and along the causeway and through the other gate where the guards lay naked, and so out and into the bog of Trakon’s niksuth. Well into the slimy stinking labyrinth we slowed down and caught our breaths, and I let them tell me the story as we pressed on. Inky the Chops had vanished when the risslacas attacked. My men had gone on, finding their own way through the boggy maze, half-blinded, choked with the miasmic stinks, but coming at last to this gate and so making their way through determined to rescue Lol and me or burn the place down. I said: “I regret we had no time to do that. It would have been — useful.”
“Useful,” growled Targon. “Aye, majister, and overdue.”
The riding animals were gone and so we must walk. So we did. I reflected that the reasons that had impelled my fellows to choose a double-walled entrance, so that they might obtain uniforms without arousing suspicions inside, and the reasons impelling Vaxnik, that we would have a double chance of being caught, had coincided nicely. My band would have wrought fearful havoc looking for me: chance only had decreed we should meet when we did. Now chance, or fate, decreed we should walk. We reached an area somewhat less boggy than most and opened the leather bag carried by Brun. Its provender gave us all a slender meal, and then it was done. Ros the Claw was brought out. I told her that she would walk, seeing she was so limber and lithe a lass, and that Hyr Brun would carry Vaxnik. She was amenable to this, having an affection for the boy.
No one knew a certain way out of the bog, and so we walked in as straight a line as we could contrive. We knocked over a few risslacas on the way, and Brun smashed in the head of one ugly monster with a single swipe of that giant sword. We kept alert for sounds of pursuit on the backtrail. We heard none and so got clean away. At last we emerged from the miasmic labyrinths of Trakon’s niksuth and breathed in air that tasted like best Jholaix.
“However,” said Targon, hitching his belt. “We are as like to be out of the frying pan and into the fire. All this country would as lief chop us as say a cheery Llahal.”
“They would find us a prickly mouthful,” I said.
That night we made a cheerless camp; but were able to catch up on our sleep. Our sentries reported all’s well during the hours of darkness and by dawn we sat up, hungry and thirsty, and contemplated the labors of the day.
I do not propose to give a blow-by-blow account of the shifts we were forced to in the ensuing days. We headed south and we foraged for food and we picked up a few riding animals here and there; but of fliers we saw no sign. During this period I was obsessed with what was going on in Vondium, and cursing myself that I should have been so blind or foolhardy as to leave the center at this moment. That no other invasion armies had been reported now, in retrospect, appeared to me, tortured by guilt, to be totally irrelevant.
Dayra, quite naturally, would say nothing about her plans or the voves. I am a zorca and a vove man, each superb animal supreme in the tasks nature has intended for each. The vove — well, yes, there is the supreme riding animal of Paz, as I understood then. Powerfully built, large, with eight muscle-packed legs, the vove boasts both fangs and horns through his mingled ancestry, and a coat of a glorious russet color. He is exceptionally ferocious to those he does not know. And he will run and run until his heart bursts asunder, for his strength and his loyalty are well-matched; but his devotion is the stronger. The obvious answer to the problem was an ugly one. Zankov must have gone to Segesthes, the large sprawling eastern continent of the Paz grouping, and there contracted an alliance at best, or a mercenary undertaking as the more probable, with clans hostile to the clans owing allegiance to me as their Zorcander and Vovedeer. Hap Loder, my old blade comrade and the man who stood in my stead with the clans of Felschraung and Longuelm and Viktrik — and any others he had taken over lately — had been with us to the Sacred Pool. He must have been pitchforked back to the Great Plains of Segesthes. Well, I could send a flier to him — when we got back to Vondium, Drig take it — but the logistical problems involved in shipping an army of the massive voves staggered. Phu-Si-Yantong could have done it. The galleons of Vallia could do it. The skyships of Hamal could do it. And, by the disgusting diseased entrails of Makki Grodno, so could the ships of the great enclave city of Zenicce. That was the answer. And here was I, traipsing about like a loon in the backwoods of Vallia instead of being in Vondium.
It was enough to make a man swear off strong drink for life.
No, I will not go into that journey or into my state of mind.
The occasion is worth a mention when, during the night of storms when the wind blew streamers of screaming fury across the sky and the moons remained hidden so that the world became bathed in darkness like a night of Notor Zan, Hyr Brun, Vaxnik and Dayra escaped. They hardly escaped. They simply staggered off into the darkness, holding on to one another and with Brun like a massive anchor to hold them to the earth. They vanished within a couple of arms’ lengths and we did not see them again, or for a very long time thereafter.
In order to bolster my failing sense of direction and to give some semblance of rationality to what I was doing, to counter the absolute loss and waste of my efforts with Dayra, I told myself that this journey had been worthwhile for the rescue of Thelda and my discovery of the misery in store for Seg and Thelda, and for Lol Polisto, too. So I told myself.
In the fullness of time we trailed into Vondium.
We had obtained vollers for the last part of the trip and when I vaulted out on the high landing platform of the palace and searched the faces of those who waited to greet us for just the one, and failed to see her, I felt another and more treacherous feeling of loss. I needed Delia near me now. And then — well, I looked again at the faces of the crowd.
Glum. Drawn. Haggard. Cast down as though sent reeling by some ghastly catastrophe. Many of the women were mourning. A chill gripped me. And, of course, I already knew. But I did not know the full horror of what had befallen the pride of Vondium, capital of the Empire of Vallia. Kyr Nath Nazabhan, a good comrade, a fine fighting man, commander of the Phalanx, Kapt, was so cast down in his pride that at first he would not look at me, merely cast himself down in the full incline, trembling, clad in black, contrite, ashamed, grief-stricken — and guilty.
“For the sweet sake of Opaz, Nath! Stand up straight and tell me. Openly and honestly, as we are comrades.”
“Majister — majister — the army. My Phalanx…”
“Voves, was it?”
His gray-carved face looked up. “Majister? How could you know that?”
“You forget, the Emperor of Vallia has eyeballs everywhere.”
Well, how can one remain unamused and not essay a feeble jest in the face of disaster?
So the story came out, brokenly, the grim, ugly, cold story.
I sat at my desk in that book-lined room with the maps and the weapons, and presently Nath was persuaded to sit across from me. He stabbed the map as he spoke. Lines, arrows, routes of penetration, ambush and surprise, and, at the end, the battle. News had reached Vondium that an army had at last been sighted, an army marching southwest from Vazkardrin on the east coast. I nodded. Vazkardrin lay between the coast and the Kwan Hills which demarcated the borders of Hawkwa country thereabouts. Zankov clearly had inserted his tendrils of power into the vadvarate of Vazkardrin, which had been run by canny old Vad Rhenchon, a numim, who had always kept himself
