impudence when he was young.
It seemed near two pot-boilings before she saw him again. The hut was smaller than ever-absurdly small for four sixty men-and still icy cold. It was also dark, full of grumbling, jostling shadows as the men filed in, but there was a fire. Cutrath was sitting on a keg beside the hearth, and she went to claim it. She sat and pulled off her mitts to warm her hands.
“I need Guitha,” she said. “Find her.”
Cutrath loomed over her, very big in his furs. “The huntleader is carrying her. She has frostbite. She can’t walk.”
How annoying! “Then my military attache will have to deal with my chamber pot, won’t you? I need the curtains put up.”
Cutrath knelt at her side. “Aunt,” he said quietly. “Listen!”
The front of his hood was open. Under the grime and stubble, he looked scared, and that infuriated her. He should be beyond such weakness now. She had been Shaping as fast as she thought safe. Must she resort to even more drastic surgery?
“What’s wrong?” she demanded.
“Sh! We mustn’t start a panic. When we got here, I went to light the fire. Aunt, the hearthstones were still warm under the ashes! I swear it!”
Her first, unthinking, response was, “Late couriers coming from Florengia! We missed them in the snow.”
“We couldn’t have missed them! The road’s too well marked. Aunt, suppose it’s someone ahead of us?”
Fear ran through her like a peal of thunder. “You’re imagining things.”
“No! Aunt, I could smell the fire! The last supply party stocked this place a sixday ago. The fire wasn’t that old. It was recent.”
“That’s im…” Was it impossible? “Ahead of us? We would have seen traces of them before now.”
He shook his head. “In these pigsties? Who would notice? Nobody counts the pemmican. Outside… The wind wipes away footprints.”
Her heart began to pound frantically. Cutrath was right to be frightened. Rebels? Celebres again? The Orlad one? It could be all four of the accursed Celebres, but the Werist was the one who knew the country. He could have killed Therek and then somehow gotten ahead of her. And she had closed all the doors behind her! She gasped for breath. Holy Xaran defend me! “Find Heth! I must speak with him!”
“I’ll tell him when he arrives.” Cutrath went away.
She crouched over the fire, shivering constantly. She must have a hot drink, something to eat. Then she would feel better.
Soon Heth dropped to one knee beside her. Evidently Cutrath had told him the news, because his eyes blazed blue, like chips of ice. “You think we may have cut our own throats, my lady?”
“It’s the Florengians, isn’t it? That Orlad?”
“It could be. He’s a warrior to reckon with.”
“You must send some fighting men ahead! Catch them and kill them! There can’t be many of them.”
Heth shook his big head. “No. I think that dizzy nephew of yours is imagining things. Even if he isn’t, it’s too late to worry about it. Tomorrow we climb the Mountain of Skulls, assuming the bridges and ladders are still there. If Orlad or anyone is ahead of us and wants to stop us, then this is where he’ll try. He’s had all day to break the staircases and cut the ropes.”
“We can’t go back!”
“No, we can’t. But there can’t be very many men ahead of us or we’d have found the rations short. I have lots of men! We’ll need a few days to repair the damage, that’s all. We may get hungry, but we can do it.”
She peered inside his mind and confirmed that he was still loyal. He was giving the best advice he had. But she still had to ask, “You’re quite sure?”
“Quite, my lady. The men are exhausted. They need food and rest. The worst thing we could do is start a panic!”
She could agree with that. “Are there other bridges after this?”
“A few. Nothing we can’t repair or jump over if we have to. No, the place to close the trail is right here, my lady. If it’s going to happen, it already has. We’ll know in the morning.”
MARNO CAVOTTI
heard the fighting before he saw it, but that was the whole point of his journey-this country was just made for ambushes. At first sight it seemed absolutely flat, but in fact it was dissected by a network of shallow channels. In the days before the Vigaelians came, the peasants had grown crops on the plain and planted palm vines in the lower, moister hollows. Now the level ground was mostly weeds or pasture and the vine trellises had collapsed into a sort of jungle tangle that could easily hide the entire population of Dodec. Every day without fail, the ice devil host camped outside Tupami dispatched foraging parties to rustle cattle, and that sort of dirty habit just cried out for a reprimand. Two days ago they had hunted north, toward Celebre, and yesterday east, so hopefully today south, to where Hostleader Vespaniaso was waiting with a couple of hunts.
Vespaniaso was quite capable of running a routine massacre, but a leader should attend a battle if he possibly could, just to show his men he cared. Cavotti had decided to make the effort. The chance to spend a night with Giunietta had helped. The fifth or was it six now? He had even started thinking of their relationship as a romance, until he had been quietly warned that he was far from her only partner. She almost never refused a Werist, he was told. Half the army knew Giunietta. But raw sex was better than nothing for a man without a home or family.
The six guanacos pricked up their ears nervously and hummed, but the wind was behind him, so they should not be smelling blood. Marno cracked his whip to warn them that he would not tolerate nonsense. The chariot continued to rattle and bounce along the dusty track. For the first time in ages, the wind felt cold. The sky was a lead plate and would likely drop some rain soon to make an official start of winter. Florengia had very little in the way of seasons, but very little rain could slow down a lot of war.
Stralg had been pulling back, concentrating his forces in the northwest of Florengia. So far he was avoiding towns and cities, having learned at Miona that they were flammable. At the moment the Fist’s prime objective was undoubtedly to protect his supply lines and his road home. Cavotti had closed in around his perimeter and the rest of the Face was basking in the delusion that it had been liberated, that the war was over. It wasn’t, but how long the present standoff would continue was in the lap of Weru Himself. A year of victories had boosted the partisans’ morale enormously and they were collaring new men far faster than Stralg could bring in reinforcements. Another year should do it, two at the most.
Today, if all went well, the bloodlord would lose another sixty men. The bestial sounds of battle grew louder; then the road dipped and Cavotti saw evidence of recent carnage in the hollow ahead. The track was flanked on either side by jungle, an exemplary ambush site. Vespaniaso had chosen well. There were bodies in open view on the ground and thrashing shrubbery showed that the fighting continued on both sides. The vultures had not arrived yet.
The llamoids unanimously decided that they did not want to go any closer. Marno battleformed his throat to release the growl of a hunting cat-bear, a sound that never failed to curdle their blood. The chariot shot forward like an arrow, down the long slope. By the time he managed to rein in the team to a walk, he was in among the bodies- ten Florengians and four Vigaelians. That was a puzzling, bothersome ratio. If the ice devil foragers had been running along the road, they should have died on it when the jaws closed. How had the battle gotten into the shrubbery?
What he was hearing now, over the guanacos’ terrified humming, was mostly just screaming. Werists roared a lot during a battle. When it was over, the surviving losers screamed. Heroes could recover from incredible wounds. With proper care, they could take an amazingly long time to die, and the winners were usually in no hurry. Butcher had been known to keep men dying for days, using nothing more complicated than a sharp stick. Something along those lines was going on in the shrubbery.
