Snowbrother (26 page)

The commanders woke Shkai'ra early the next morning. She stepped out of the sled, looked around at their faces, and snarled.

"How many?"

"Two missing," the second-watch commander said.

"Get the spook-pusher!"

The shaman came swaggering, chewing with pleasure on a piece of raw liver. His face was livid with bruises; to the experienced eyes about him, much like the wounds of glancing blows with a wooden club. It took a moment for the glares of the officers to penetrate his self-assurance.

"I thought your wisdom was going to stand over us 'like the shield of Zailo,' " a voice said. Shkai'ra was voiceless and motionless. Walks-with-Demons took a step back at the sight of her.

"I…" He wet his lips. "I held the wood-switch in fight, this night past. He couldn't have made any strong magic—"

"
Out of my sight
!" Shkai'ra said, with cold deadliness, "Out in the woods; maybe you can do some good there. You ride outer scout."

"If he can find his own arse with both hands," one of the Bannerleaders muttered.

Shkai'ra rose and stood tapping her gauntlets on the palm of one hand. There was an unfamiliar taste in her mouth, like tarnished copper; it took a few seconds for her to identify it. Fear.

"Standard procedure," she said in the same steady tone. "Make speed; push it, kill any in the coffles that drag. Zailo shield you."

"Zaik lead you, Chiefkin."

The first scattered flakes fell from a sky the color of iron, and the wind began to keen.

The Minztans found the body left bound on a leather groundsheet pegged to the packed snow that covered the river ice. They had been finding bodies all day, huddled shapes under blankets of snow. It was a moment before anyone realized that there was no snow on the corpse; it had melted off. Narritanni's second-in-command pushed forward and knelt beside the spreadeagled form, wincing at the huge splayed-open incision in the gut.

She carefully avoided looking at the face, and suspected that her single glance would stay with her far longer than she wished.

The interior of the wound was like a diagram, nothing missing but a slice of the liver.

And there was impossibly little blood. A sudden suspicion formed. She touched the blood on the leather sheet: it had had time to dry before it froze, time to blacken. She stripped off a glove and touched the victim's flesh.

The warrior turned and ran half a dozen paces into the concealing curtain of the snowfall before falling to her knees again. Her sword flashed out, and she began hacking at the ice; flailing at first, then with steady methodical persistence.

Narritanni saw the band group around the body, then suddenly back away as if from a fearful menace. He hurried forward, and stopped in puzzlement. The sight was foul, yes, but not enough to throw adrift the mind of one of his trained followers, who had seen far worse things.

He slid to a halt beside her. She was speaking, under her breath, in a tone like cursing, like weeping.

"No, no, no, oh Circle,
please
, no…"

He laid a hand on her shoulder before speaking. "What… ?" he began.

A face streaked with tears looked up at him. He waited in shock.

"The body," she said, breast heaving. Her sword rested in a pit of blue-green ice chips.

"The blood was dried, hours old-from last night."

"The Eater," he said, lips tightening. "Well, we knew—"

"
The body hasn't stiffened
," she ground out. "Barely even cold. It's been ten hours,
and she
was alive all the while
."

The one who had named himself Man of Stone hid his face in his hands, then wheeled into the wind and forced down huge breaths of the damp cold air. His body prickled, with a fearsweat that was wholly impersonal.

"Ah, ah, ah," he gasped. Then calm settled over him. "We can't attack until… We'll have to ask the Wise Man, and try the Litany for
It
to help…"

She rose, checked the sword, and rammed it back into the sheath as if that was a body.

"Tomorrow, then," she said.

Leafturn held the eyelids of the victim closed, long enough for them to stiffen in that position. He read the symbols painted on her body, with knowledge and a grimace of distaste, sinking back on his heels. Probing at his foreboding, he could not force it to become
more definite; but he had walked the Way too long not to know the smell of fate.

There was more here than he had imagined, and more than the destiny of these few scores of folk. He had an uneasy sense that he and his opponent both ran on leashes.

What was it that the steppe peoples called tragedy? His mind groped for the phrase.
The
laughter of Zaik
.

Slowly, sullenly, the walls of the forest slid by as the column moved down the thirty-meter-wide corridor of the frozen river. Above, the low cloud roiled gray, filtering the afternoon light to a pale monochrome. Wind blew, smelling of cold and the hinting dampness of snowstorm, ruffling the manes of the horses and sending lance pennants snapping out. Shivering, the slave comes bent their heads and trudged. The sound of their shuffling made counterpoint to the muffled thudding of hundreds of hooves and the hissing of runners. A crow launched itself from a skeletal maple leaning out over the ice, its
grawk-grawk-grawk
loud among the quiet murmur of the warband.

Shkai'ra followed its flight with longing eyes as she cantered down the line. High it would fly, until the struggling humans were a string of black dots on the snow, ants lost in a wilderness of trees. She shivered. Morale was bad; they had been losing the outlying scouts by ones and twos for days, more casualties than the battle had cost them. Her killers were not afraid to face death, she thought. It was the unknown lurker that frightened them. Her lips tightened. This morning, one of the scouts had refused duty.

Her Bannerleader killed her on the spot, of course, the traditional punishment for insubordination in enemy territory. But the decay of discipline shook Shkai'ra.

And they had found the first dead scout's horse— or the head, left by the riverside impaled on a pole, with runes cut in its forehead. The Horse Curse, most deadly of all doomsayings.

She looked upward; the snow had lifted for a while, but there would be more soon, pulling at boot and fetlock, draining strength and spirit. There was a scuffle around one of the coffles. She pulled up. A Minztan had sunk to the snow and sat on his haunches; the guard reined in and leaned over to snarl and strike with her quirt. The slave looked up and shook his head with infinite weariness. The Kommanza pulled her lance out of its rest, flipped it up to the overhand grip, and stabbed downward with clinical precision.

The man toppled over and flopped as she pulled the long razor-edged lancehead out of him with two swift jerks and cleaned it on his jacket. Without dismounting she used the edge to slice the body free and then left it to lie. The rest of the dead man's coffle stood, staring dumbly, motionless. The guard yelled, a shrill note in her voice, then prodded savagely with the butt of the lance. Still soundless, the Minztans slowly turned and resumed their weary plodding.

Shkai'ra shivered again, and debated getting out the bison-pelt cloak. No, she thought:
bad example
. It would be pleasant to go back to the sled and lie with her head in Maihu's lap and listen to one of those strange stories… even to that accursed flute that put Dh'ingun's fur up. But no, that would be weakness. It was more important than ever to set a standard; it was more than the lurker that was eating at her followers' hearts, it was this Zaik-forsaken, Zailo-damned country. Out on the steppe the sky was the most endless on earth, but in this forest you couldn't
see
, each
kylick
was the same as the next, and there was an infinity of places for things to hide… She jerked her mind out of that track as she passed the still form of the Minztan.

At least the ravens will be happy tonight
, she thought dryly.

She had not been listening to the whistle calls, not consciously. They were a language of their own, woven into the fabric of the mind in earliest childhood. The background mutter was conversation; mostly routine, position changes, time checks, a running commentary on the terrain. You could always pick out something meant for you, the way your hearing could filter your own name out of the babble in a crowded room. And it was a marvelously compact language, stylized, each sound standing hieroglyph-like for a phrase or sentence.

Thus the first relay brought her head up. "
Gap
," it said, and followed with identity and position references, all over in a few seconds. A chill of apprehension prompted her to send a signal of her own down the line of the column: attack-alert, left flank. And right on the heels of that came confirmation, a hostile-sighting call from the left-flank third-layer scouts—the ones next to the column itself, pacing it a few hundred meters out in the woods. That shocked her to her soul. How could anyone punch through the mesh that fast? Magic… unless the scouts were demoralized enough to close in and report false positions. Neither bore thinking about. She heeled her horse into a gallop.

Maihu and Taimi had been sitting inside the sled; there was little to see outside, and no point in enduring the cold without need. Both wore ankle tethers: linked sections of hardwood covered in sheaths of iron-hard rawhide slipped on wet and then warmed and greased. The ropes ended in maplewood rings fastened likewise, wound around with wet thongs in a massive knot that could be cut but never untied. Taimi crouched listlessly in a corner, staring fixedly at the opposite wall and picking at the bindings on his ankle.

Worried, Maihu looked up from her work. She had been carving a piece of antler for the hilt of a hunting knife, holding the bone between her bootsoles and attacking it with gouge and emery and polishing cloth. The sled was not really the place for such work—the occasional lurch set the tools awry—but it was better than letting her thoughts chase each other around and around on the same well-worn tracks. What the Circle gave would happen, and she could do no more than she was doing already. It was Taimi who gave her most concern; he had taken to copying the Kommanz isometric exercises, which was well enough, but…

It was a blankness at the back of her mind that alerted her. Even with the Eater out of the camp she was cautious, but a hint of familiarity emboldened her to probe.

And that brought shock:
It
, there was no mistaking
it
. Rage, and cunning, then concealment: no hostile mind could likely catch that perception now, unless perhaps the Eater's. Shouting resounded dimly through the padded walls of the sled, as the Kommanz threw themselves into ordered motion at the prompting of the code-calls.

Hooves thudded past, and there was a neigh as a horse was pulled up. She heard the youngling driver call a question.

"The gutsucking bark-eaters have gotten up their rabbit's courage and attacked," a harsh voice barked in Kommanzanu. "Report to your duty station. We go to our chiefs."

The youngster gave a yelp of delight. Taimi had come to life, tense and quivering; he thrust his head through the entry curtain to see what was happening. The driver cursed and lashed him savagely across the face with the loose end of the reins, then looked in to check on their bonds.

"Good," she grunted, and dropped from the seat, picked up her light bow, and trotted away to where she would help with the wounded and shuttle spare arrows. Her scalplock bobbed.

"Quick, kinmother," Taimi gasped. "This must be the rescue."

"Wait," Maihu said. Reaching inside a concealed pocket in the sled lining she produced a heavy knife, tucking it inside her jacket. Restraining Taimi with one hand, she listened cautiously. There was a slave coffle behind them. Thence came only a low murmuring, rising now as the captives realized that something unusual was in the offing. Ahead, around the bend in the river, forest and earth cut off sight. Yells, first; then the humming snap of massed archery, the whickering of shafts. Then screaming, one voice at first and the others picking it up, a shrill ululating wailing falsetto shriek that raised the hairs along Maihu's spine. Madness, and death, and hatred, quavering through the chill restless air; the Kommanz warcry. Then all sound faded with surprising speed; wood-strained ears told her why.

"They're retreating," she told Taimi. "No, it may be a trick," she continued as his face crumpled.

They jumped down from the sled. Behind it the slave lines had turned into a surging chaos where the villagers heaved against their bonds and roared out anger and hope.

Most of the Kommanz guards had been drawn forward to the combat at the head of the column, or into the left-flank woods in an attempt at counterambush. The few remaining Kommanza struggled with lancebutt and whip to keep the captives under control; only the unwieldy size of the coffles kept them from making a break for the woods a mere ten meters away. That had been the point; groups that size could walk slowly, if they moved in unison under direction, but in a situation like this where each individual tried to move in his or her own track, they hampered each other, jerked each other off their feet. Maihu saw one whole coffle go over in a tangle of limbs, with the guards lashing out as the slaves tried to regain their feet. One rider had his saber out. She knew with gruesome certainty that fairly soon it would be in use, and not the flat of it either.

They were on the right side of the sled, and so Maihu saw the Minztans come sliding down the opposite bank of the river a moment before the Kommanza did. There were many, perhaps thirty, Maihu thought. Taimi was yelling, frantic, jerking at the wood-and-leather chain that bound him to the vehicle, setting it rocking on its bone-and-fiberglass springs. The three ponies hitched to it were catching the infection, snorting and backing, their eyes rolling white against the shaggy brown hair.

"Quiet!" shouted Maihu, shaking him by the back of his jacket. "Quiet! If the horses run, we'll be dragged." On the third repetition that sank in.