By the Sword (70 page)

He closed his eyes and dredged the exercise out of deepest memory. It wasn't as hard as he'd thought it was going to be, for in moments he was relaxed. He centered himself in the earth beneath his feet, as Tarma had taught him, and when he felt as if he was truly an extension of it, opened his eyes—

And nearly choked. He'd never, ever seen anything like this before—and if it hadn't been that he felt fine, and had shared the same rations as everyone else this morning, he'd have suspected sickness or drugs. Superimposed over the fighting, the battlefield was divided into fields of glowing, healthy green, and dull, dead, leprous white, with edges of scarlet and vermilion where they met. Outside the area of fighting, the landscape was the same as it had been all the way north—sickly greens, poisoned yellows.

Except for one spot, behind the lines, in the ranks of the mages and commanders—one spot of black, auraed by angry red.

“Get Quenten,” he told his aide. “We've got them.”

Eleven of the twelve mages materialized beside him so quickly he suspected they'd conjured themselves there. “Where is he?” Quenten said—then shook his head as Daren started to open his mouth to explain that he couldn't tell him. “Never mind, I know, I'm being stupid. Hadli, would—”

A dark-haired, plump girl reached up and touched both his temples before he could say or do anything. “Got him, Quenten,” she said in satisfaction. “If you want to feed through me, I'm not much use for anything else right now.”

“What are you going to do?” Daren asked anxiously. “I mean, I don't want you to go blasting at him and hit
our
people.”

“Not a chance. Kero likes things subtle. We figured out last night that we get the same effect by killing or wounding him physically—he‘H still lose his hold on the magic and on the minds he's controlling.”

“So I'm going to give them the way to identify him,” Hadli said. “Quenten will bowl-cast a FarSeeing spell, and Gem and Myrqan will find a weapon to hit him with, while the rest distract him and keep his defenses all facing forward.”

Daren turned; Quenten was already kneeling on the ground with his bowl of water in front of him—but this time there was a picture forming in it that even he could see.

Hadli and two others knelt beside him, and Daren found that he could still see over their heads. What he saw was the backs of several people in robes, with coruscating colors and strange shapes appearing just beyond them. His eyes went to one in a dull blue robe, and he saw, faintly, the same overlay of black and scarlet auras he'd “seen” before.

“That's him,” Hadli said. “The one in the blue, with the copper belt and the serpent-glyph on his sleeve.”

“Daren,” Quenten called, without taking his attention from the bowl, “When we strike him, you'll feel it in the earth. There's going to be a moment of recoil, and then a hesitation. That is when you need to concentrate on what, exactly, you want to happen. There's a lot of power there; think of it as a flash flood about to roll down the river. Once you get it started, you won't be able to get it to stop or even change directions. If you don't know what to
do—don't think of anything.”

Daren refrained from making a sarcastic answer. In the bowl, a light, ornamental dagger was elevating from a table behind the mages. Before he had a chance to ask what that meant, the thing snapped forward as if it had been thrown, and buried itself to the hilt in Blue-robe's back.

Daren had been in an earthquake, once. The feeling was similar. For a moment, the earth seemed to drop out beneath him, and he was left hanging in space, with a sense that something huge and ponderous was poised over him, like a wave, waiting to break.

Belatedly, he recalled Quenten's orders, and realized the impossibility of not thinking anything. Make it simple. Dear gods, it's going to let
go
—
and I don't know what to tell it—

Make it simple.

The wave broke. He swayed, and started to fall, when his aide caught him. And suddenly, there was noise out on the battlefield.

The sound of several thousand enraged, half-mad men, turning on their officers and tearing them to pieces.

Bodies pressed in on all sides of her.
Gods. Blessed Agnira. I got them into this. They trust me to get them out of it. How do I tell them that I can't?
The camp was unusually silent; somewhere on the Valdemar side, Selenay, too, was breaking the bad news to her troops. The regulars, that is; the Heralds already knew about it, of course. Kero wanted to look away from all those eyes staring at her with perfect confidence, to gaze up at the sky or down at the ground—anywhere but back at them.
They depended on me, and I fouled up. Now what do I say? “I'm sorry?”

Instead, she gazed directly back at them all, trying to meet each pair of eyes before she spoke to them. “I haven't got any good news,” she told them, finally. “Ancar's fighters have managed to force us east enough for his southernmost troops to divide and get in west of us. They're doing that now, and we haven't been able to stop them. He's had cavalry to the east in his own lands that has probably moved in north as well. We've been bracketed, and now we're surrounded.”

She waited for a moment for that to sink in, then continued, rubbing the back of her neck. “They outnumber us by a goodly amount. Selenay's troops tried this morning to prevent the southern forces from coming west, but there were too many for them, and the farmers just aren't a match for trained fighters, not in pitched battles. It looks like the big confrontation is coming tomorrow; he has us right where he wants us, and no getting around it.”

She listened to them breathe for a moment. “Where's Lord Daren?” asked a voice from the rear. Kero looked up, above the heads of those nearest her, and attempted to find the questioner.

“We lost track of him about the time he was going to cross over into the Valdemar side of the Comb, somewhere in the mountains. We don't know what happened to him. There's been no word of him coming up through Valdemar like he was supposed to. He could be on the way. He could have been turned back. He could have been defeated by Ancar down in the mountains. We just don't know, so we can't count on him being here.”

Much less being here in time. That's the way ballads end, not real battles.
They'd been in trouble before, but never this badly, and never while under her command. The weight of responsibility made her ache.

“Now, here's what we can do,” she continued. “We're mounted, and we're the best hit-and-hide specialists in the business. We can break out, leave this mess behind, and head back down home. There isn't a soul outside Valdemar that would blame us for doing that. We're not in this for glory, or for patriotism, or because we're fanatics.” She looked around again, and saw heads nodding. “We're in this for the money, purely and simply, and our Guild Charter and our contract allows for this sort of thing. Ancar threw the Guild out; we know he isn't going to accept a Code surrender from us. Probably what he'd do if we tried is kill us out of hand. He might even stick to killing the officers only, and mind-controlling you troops. I don't think I have to go any further into that.”

She noticed one or two nearest her shuddering at the idea, and nodded to herself.

“As I said, the Code and the Charter allow for that. We can break out and go home; this is a no-win, hopeless situation. However—we won't be able to take any wounded with us, and anyone who goes down on the way out stays behind. My guess is we'll lose about half of our troops—the ones that are left—getting out. It's not going to be easy, but staying here means worse odds, so far as I can tell.”

“What are the Heralds doing?” asked one of the Lieutenants. “They're mounted, and they're as good as we are, most of ‘em.”

“Good question,” Kero replied. “They're going to break Selenay out, if they can. It's by no means certain; Ancar wants her hide, and if he finds out they're breaking her loose, he'll bring everything to bear that he has. We can use that as a diversion, of course, which makes our chances better.”

“Then what?” asked the same voice as before.

“Then they're going to turn back and rejoin the fight,” she replied, as neutrally as she could. “All but an escort force to get Selenay to safe ground.”

A murmur of surprise and admiration rose from the troopers. Some of the Heralds—Eldan, for instance—had made themselves very popular; others, like the one Eldan had replaced, were considered nuisances. But the Skybolts could not help but admire anyone with the kind of guts it took to break free of a suicide-situation, then turn and go back into it.

“That has little or nothing to do with us,” Kero reminded them forcefully. “We're mercenaries. They aren't. They have oaths to fulfill, and duties that they won't renege on. We're in this for pay. Now, the Skybolts have never been an ordinary Company, and I've never been an ordinary Captain. That's why I've called you all here. I'm not going to make a decision like this one alone, or even with my officers. Do we try to go, or do we stay? And do I stay your Captain—”

The shouts of disapproval that met that question made her feel terribly self-conscious. “All right,” she bellowed at last, holding up her hands for silence. “All right, if you want me that badly, you've got me. But the other question—break out, or stay and do what we can? You know the drill; dark-colored pebble for ‘go,' light or white for ‘stay.' And no maybe-colored rocks, either—I don't want any maybes on this one. Geyr will collect your votes.”

She turned and sat down, waiting for the results of the vote, keeping her mind tightly sealed against their thoughts. She didn't want to know what they were thinking, and she didn't want to influence it, either.

She tried not to think of anything, really. As Geyr moved out with the basket into the massed fighters someone else called out a question. “What about you?”

“I'll be going with you, since you'll have me,” she said. “And I'll stay with you as far as Bolthaven; I intend to call another vote then, and see if you still want me when this is over. I have my responsibilities as much as these Heralds have, and my oaths have been made to you. I don't intend to break them.”

She heard the murmurs, saw the looks, and knew what they were thinking as well as if she had opened her mind to them. They all knew about Eldan—quite a few of them knew about their first meeting, ten years ago. They knew what she would be sacrificing by leading them if they voted to break out, or at least they thought they did.

She ignored the murmurs, and kept her expression schooled into serenity.
I made my oaths, I have my responsibilities. He knows that. It doesn't hurt any less—but there's no choice. Vows are made to be kept, and he would be the first one to agree.

Finally Geyr brought the basket around to her, and she steeled herself against the inevitable. How could they not vote to save themselves? Only a fool would stay here and die.
So, I'm a fool. But it isn't just Eldan....
True, the odds were only fifty-fifty that any of them would make it out in the clear, and those weren't good odds—but when had a youngster ever thought he couldn't beat the odds?

Then Geyr turned the basket upside-down on the table—

And she felt her mouth dropping open in shock.

A pile—a tiny mountain of white. Pale sandstone pebbles trickled down off the top with a gentle clicking sound. She spread the pebbles out on the table with a shaking hand. No dark pebbles, none at all.

They'd stay, fighting beside the Valdemar folk. No dissenting votes.

She looked up at them, searched each face she could see, and found nothing there but determination. “You're mad,” she said, flatly. “You're all of you mad. We haven't a chance if we stay.”

Shallan stood up, awkwardly, as if she'd been appointed as spokesperson for the entire Company. “We don't think so, beggin' your pardon, Captain. ‘Sides, what's the odds of a mere livin' long enough to collect his pension from the Guild, eh? We all got to talking about this last night. General feeling is, these people here deserve help. Merc's likely to go down any time—but if we got a choice in goin' down, I'd rather do it for somebody that deserves a hand, than in fightin' for some pig-merchant workin' out a fight over territory with some other hog, an' doin' it with my sword an' my life.”

There was a murmur of agreement from the rest, and an “Aye, that!” or two from the veterans old enough in service to remember Ardana and the Seejay debacle.

Kero rose slowly to her feet, and to Shallan's immense surprise, embraced her. She kept one arm around her old friend, as she scanned their faces again, this time with her eyes burning with the effort of holding back tears. “You're all fools, thank the gods,” she said huskily. “Every one of you. As much fools as me—if you'd voted me out, I'd have stayed myself. All right, Skybolts. We stay. And tomorrow, we show Ancar what it means to take on the finest Company in the Guild!”

The cheers could probably have been heard in Haven.

And no one would ever guess,
she thought, with a mixture of pride and sorrow,
that they're cheering their own deaths. Poor, brave fools.