By the Sword (10 page)

She left the little mare tearing up grass hungrily, and proceeded cautiously, afoot at first, then on her hands and knees; opening her mind for brief glimpses of her enemies, until she knew that the farthest sentries were little more than a hill away. She dropped down beneath the bushes, and crawled forward in their shelter.

All this time her sight had been dimming; was the sword taking away her advantage, or losing its power? Or was it that too much profligate use of magic might be somehow visible to the unknown mage? Now her vision was about equivalent to what she'd have under a full moon.

Well, that'll do
—she thought just as she heard the careless footsteps of one of the bandit-sentries, and the rattle of the bushes as he pushed through them. She flattened herself under the cover of the brush with her sword still in her hand, face pressed into the gritty dirt, her heart pounding with sudden fear, and waited for him to pass.

He did; making no attempt at quiet. He stalked within an arm's length of her, armor creaking and jingling, and never knew she was there.

She didn't start breathing again until he was well out of hearing distance; didn't get her nose out of the sand and wipe it on the back of her hand until long after that.

All right, I know where the sentries are,
she thought, her right hand toying nervously with the hilt of the sword as she peered out from under the branches.
So how do I avoid them? They seem to be stationed pretty closely together. Maybe I shouldn't avoid them.

It was hard to recall the stories—the tales the old mercenaries told when she was supposed to be out of ear-shot, not the bardic lays. The recollections of old battles, ambushes, things that would be useful to her now.

Somehow all the fear and grief was behind her now, now that she was confronting her own life—or death. It was easier to think; the pain was far away and nothing was important but the next moment, and the strange excitement that sharpened all her senses.

No sooner had she made the decision than she was crawling forward after the sentry that had just passed her. She had no real plan, it was just that this particular man seemed the most careless. She followed him with the sword still in her hand, able to move with relative silence through brush that she could see and he could not.

She was within a length of him; half a length. He started to turn—

And suddenly
she
was no longer in control of her body.

As if she was a passenger behind her own eyes, a puppet in the hands of an unseen manipulator, she felt her muscles tense as the man started to peer through the dark toward her. She found herself ducking down and crouching behind the cover of a bush. She hadn't even noticed the bush beside her, much less that it was big enough to hide behind. He even moved a couple of steps in her direction, but couldn't see anything, and she stayed as still as the disembodied puppeteer could hold her. Then, when he turned away, she sprang up, sword-hilt clasped in both hands; and as a wild excitement filled her, drove the blade
through
his body, between his ribs, using all the momentum of her leap. The edges of the blade scraped against his ribs; he arced, and made a kind of strangled gasp, dropping his own blade. She seized him around the neck with her free arm, and shoved the blade completely through him, up to the quillons.

They stayed that way for a moment, then he fell; she braced herself and pulled at the same time, and the blade came free of his falling body. He never even made another sound.

Then, just as suddenly as she had lost control, she regained it.
She
was the one who staggered two trembling steps away from the carcass, mouth open with shock, heart thudding against her ribs.
She
was the one who very nearly turned and ran, ran all the way back to the copse where she'd left Verenna to take her and ride home at a gallop—

Only the knowledge that if she did, they would probably hear her and kill her, kept her from doing just that.

I've killed a man,
she thought, legs shaking, sour taste of bile in the back of her throat. Her gorge rose.
I've killed a man, myself—

Except that she didn't know the blow that had killed him. If it had been her doing, she'd have just hit him from behind with the pommel. Nothing like that was in anything Dent had taught her.

It was the sword. It had to be. Only a magic sword would have been able to manipulate her like a puppet. And Need was, of course, a magic sword, and had been described as giving Kethry the same power it had just apparently given Kero.

This wasn't what she'd planned at all. She looked at the blade in her hand and the blood on it with revulsion. She wanted to drop it right there—

But then, just before she did, another thought occurred to her.

It wasn't better, of course—

And he hurt and killed
my
people. Maybe even somebody I knew.
She steeled herself, steadied her hands, and forced herself to clean the blade on his tunic.
He could have chosen an honest living. He's helping keep Dierna captive. He had a choice, he made it. And I'm making mine.

She went back on hands and knees and eased through the brush toward the camp, making as little sound as possible. Her hands were getting full of stickers, and her knees were bruised by rocks—but it was no worse than some of the injuries she'd picked up berrying or training Verenna. So far.

So far, thanks to the sword, she'd been lucky.

Thanks to the sword.
It still made her skin crawl to think how it would probably take her over again. She didn't have a choice, not if she was going to rescue Dierna, but she didn't
like
it at all.
It just takes over with no warning. And what else does this thing do that I don't know about? What if it turns me into some kind of monster?

But her grandmother trusted it.

There's no reason not to trust it, I guess,
she thought, as a cramp seized her leg. She stopped and eased her leg out straight, waiting for a moment until it went away.
But I can't help but wonder how much Grandmother really knew about it. Maybe it hid things from her, too.

A cheerful thought.

Just then she reached the edge of a drop-off, with a screening of brush at the edge. Bright yellow firelight silhouetting the bushes warned her that the camp was just beyond them. She wormed her way under the shelter of one of the biggest (and prickliest) of them. It was not an easy job. Tiny twigs caught in her hair and scratched her face; exposed roots caught on her belt and tunic-lacings and held her back.

Finally she reached the edge. The branches of the bushes drooped here, down over the drop-off, making a kind of screen of leaves and twigs between her and the fire. Lifting one branch out of the way, cautiously, she peered down at the camp below, blinking against the sudden light.

Closest to her and about a length below her were a half-dozen men, roaring drunk, playing some kind of game with dice or knucklebones. Two were standing; the rest were sitting or kneeling in a rough circle, watching one of their number cast and cast again. They had tossed their armor aside in a heap right below her, up against the side of the low bluff she hid on. They were filthy, unshaven, and dressed in a motley collection of clothing, some of which had probably been very fine at one time, all of which was now stained, tattered, and so dirty she wouldn't have used it to clean the stable floor.

Beyond them was another collection of similar scum sprawled at fireside, sharing the contents of a wineskin, and squabbling over a heap of loot from the Keep. Then came the fire—badly built, part of it smoking, part roaring—and beyond the fire—

Dierna.

Her bright scarlet dress made a brilliant splash of color that attracted Kero's eyes immediately. She lay half on her side, her pretty face a frozen mask of fear, tumbled at the feet of a tall, thin man in long red robes, the skirt of his robes split fore and aft for riding. He sat on a boulder, sharpening a knife, paying no attention to the antics of his men. Nor, strangely enough, to Dierna, although her legs were exposed to the thigh by the way her dress had torn and fallen open when she'd collapsed (or been flung) at his feet.

He reached down, as Dierna shrank away from him, and grabbed a lock of her long, unbound dark hair. He yanked her back toward him with it tangled cruelly in his fingers—Kero watched her clench her teeth and wince—and cut the lock off with a single stroke of his knife.

Kero bit her lip with sudden speculation. That was not what she'd expected him to do.

As she watched, he rose from his impromptu seat, kicking Dierna out of the way impatiently, and took the lock of hair to a flat rock just inside the ring of firelight.

Maybe one of these bastards will go for his back,
she thought hopefully.
Having a girl within reach must be driving them mad. If one of them tries something, makes a move for her, that's sure to start a fight. Either the man holding her will react, or one of the others—either way, once a fight starts, it's bound to spread. If that happens, maybe I can get in there and get her out while the fighting's going on.

But the bandits ignored the robed man; ignored Dierna, which was even odder. Even if this strange man—

—even if this strange mage had given orders about leaving Dierna alone, scum like this would
not
have been able to ignore her. They'd have been watching her, hoping for the mage's back to be turned, hoping for a chance at her. But she might as well not have been there. They weren't ignoring her—they acted as if they didn't even see her.

Kero turned her startled attention back to the mage. That flat rock—he had some kind of paraphernalia laid out on it, as if it were an altar. He set the lock of hair on a brazier in the middle of the rock, picked up something Kero couldn't make out, and began making passes over the burning hair.

A moment later the hair on the back of her neck was rising, as a circular boundary around the rock began to glow, as if he had piled up a circle of dark red embers. The strange light pulsed at first, then settled down to a steady, sullen glow. There was one small gap in the circle, and the mage put his instrument down as soon as the glow of the boundary settled, and strode through it.

He returned to his boulder, his steps hurried and betraying a certain impatience; he shot out his hand, and pulled Dierna to her feet by her bound wrists. She yelped, a sound that carried above the rest of the noise in the camp—and not one of the bandits looked up.

The mage dragged the young girl stumbling along behind him, then pushed her through the gap in the boundary. He cleared the flat rock of encumbrances with a single sweep of his free hand, then kicked her feet out from under her and forced her down beside it. He waved his hand again, and the gap in the boundary closed as fire burned from each end of the arc and met in the middle. Then he pulled a knife from the sleeve of his robe, seized Dierna's head by the hair, and before Kero could take a breath, slashed Dierna's cheek from eye to chin.

For one moment, Kero was paralyzed, with herself and the sword warring to take over her body and act. And in that moment of indecision, someone—or some
thing—
else acted.

Outside the circle of firelight, a wild clamor went up. It was a heartbeat later that Kero recognized the sounds for the voices of half a dozen horses screaming with fear. The thunder of hooves was all the warning the bandits got before an entire herd of them, blind with panic, stampeded through the camp. Then the campfire went up in a shower of colored ball-lightning and huge sparks and explosions just as they hammered past, and they panicked further, scattering in all directions.

And as if that wasn't chaos enough, one of the revelers fell into the fire with a bubbling shriek of pain, clutching his throat.

And the bandits panicked as badly as the horses.

That's an arrow!
Kero realized, in the heartbeat before her attention was caught again by Dierna and the mage that held her.
There's someone else out there-someone with a grievance and a bow.

But she had no chance to think about it, because the mage caught her attention again. Something—a cloud of smoke, or blood-colored mist—rose up out of the stone. It was the height of a man, and as broad as two men, and it was lit fitfully from within, like the clouds on a summer night flickering with heat lightning. The mage stepped back, releasing the girl; it gathered itself, coiling and rearing up exactly like a snake about to strike. Then it lunged forward and fastened itself on the blood-dripping cut on Dierna's cheek.