In Legend Born (22 page)

He saw the iron keys to the heavy gate and the prison cells hanging on the wall, just as the priest had said they would be. He decided that with all the noise overhead, no one would hear what happened way down here.

Josarian walked towards the guards. At the very moment that they realized there was something strange about him and grew alert, he pulled a
yahr
out of each voluminous sleeve of the robe and attacked. He struck the nearest guard across the face, momentarily disabling him. He used the moment to break the other Outlooker's wrist while the man was drawing his sword. He turned and killed the first one with two skull-shattering blows, then tripped the second one as he attempted to run away. Josarian picked up the Valdan's fallen sword and, handling it awkwardly, slit his throat.

Swords.
Tansen had told him—had fiercely
insisted
—that since he couldn't smuggle twenty
yahr
into the fortress, he and the hostages would have to fight with any weapons they could take away from the Outlookers.

Swords.
He looked down at the Valdani blade in his bloodstained hand. It felt heavy, strange, and clumsy, but... by Dar, he had never known how easy it was to kill a man with a
sword!
Silerians were only permitted to own bladed tools such as skinning knives, axes, and sickles. Neither Josarian nor any Silerian he knew—except Tansen—had ever even touched a sword, let alone wielded one to kill someone. No wonder the Valdani had disarmed Sileria after conquering it! They could never have so thoroughly subdued a people armed with such weapons.

Heart pounding, he picked up the other dead man's sword, grabbed the heavy key ring on the wall, and chose the key most likely to fit the elaborate lock on the gate. He unlocked it, hung back for a moment in case there were more guards on the other side, then rushed into the dank corridor lined by prison cells. It was illuminated only by two heavily smoking lanterns, one at each end of the corridor.

His brother-in-law Emelen was the first man to peer through a tiny iron grid in one of the doors to see who had entered their domain. "
Josarian!
"

"Josarian?" said a muffled voice behind Emelen.

"Where?" came a voice through the grid on the door facing Emelen's.

"Josarian!" someone cried further down the corridor.

"Quiet," he ordered as more familiar faces pressed up against the tiny grid of each of the dungeon's six heavy prison doors. Horror engulfed him at the thought of his friends and relatives enduring the past few days in this sunless, airless, fetid hole. He started pushing keys into the first lock, desperate to get the men out of here, even if only to die in the open air as they attempted to escape the fortress. "I don't want the Valdani to hear us. We haven't much ti— Ah!"

The lock turned, the door opened, and Emelen and two other men poured out of the cell. Josarian handed Emelen one of the swords, picked it up when his bewildered brother-in-law dropped it, and ordered him to use it. Then he gave his two
yahr
to the two other men and started unlocking the next door.

"Keep an eye out!" he ordered. "If any Outlookers come down those stairs, let them come all the way down, then take them by surprise. Kill them and take their weapons.
Take
their swords."

Attempting to swing the sword like a
yahr
, Emelen nodded and led the other two armed men down the dark passageway. Three more prisoners burst free from a cell as Josarian unlocked the door. They spread his instructions from cell to cell as Josarian attacked the next lock with his keys.

"Lann," he said, upon freeing a boyhood friend, "make sure everyone knows the plan. We kill everyone upstairs first, get as many weapons as we can before we go outside. That's important:
Get their weapons and use them.
Do you understand me? And the archers are still up on the ramparts and will fire when they realize we've escaped, so watch out for them!"

"Right, Josarian!"

Another door opened. Josarian moved on to the next one. "Set the supply building on fire. Set everything that can burn on fire—give them plenty to worry about besides us."

He opened another door. More men poured into the corridor. Josarian finished in a rush, "As you leave the fortress, go off in all directions, no more than two or three men at a time. Make them split up to chase us. Don't go home, it's the first place they'll look. We'll all meet tomorrow night at the Dalishar Caves." It was an ancient holy site, famous among Silerians; even hunted men who'd never been there before should be able to reach it by this time tomorrow.

He unlocked the final cell and was shocked by what he found there.

"Zim!" His cousin's pretty face was bruised and battered, his tunic was torn and covered in dried blood, and he held his left arm at an awkward angle. "Zimran..."

One of Zimran's eyes was swollen shut, but the other sparkled with excitement. "What took you so long, cousin? I was supposed to meet a lady two days ago."

Tansen had never liked relying on horses when his life was at stake, but this one was holding up well. If he lived, maybe he'd even keep it. He led the Outlookers through a series of winding passes, some of them quite steep with sheer drops on one side. As sunset turned to night, he slowed his pace accordingly so that he wouldn't lose the Valdani who followed him.

A scream in the distance made him suppose that some Outlooker's horse had misstepped and sent him hurtling to his death. That made one less whom Tansen had to kill.

He wondered if Josarian had succeeded in freeing the hostages—and if he were even still alive. Their plan lacked precision. They were too uncertain of what lay beyond the high, forbidding walls of the Valdani fortress. A better plan would have been for Josarian, who knew these mountains so intimately, to lead the Valdani on this chase while Tansen, who was more likely to survive close combat with so many Outlookers, infiltrated the fortress, but the circumstances made such a plan impossible. Now he could only carry out his part of the scheme and hope that his bloodbrother—his
friend
, he realized with surprise—survived. He wouldn't know until he reached the Dalishar Caves.

He continued following the path Josarian had guided him over last night, keeping an eye out for the landmarks his friend had pointed out for him to memorize. Numerous trails and paths intersected, criss-crossed, and paralleled each other along this route; choosing the wrong one at any moment would mean he'd miss the abandoned Kintish quarry and fail to execute the plan. If the Outlookers following him caught him or else gave up and turned back, then they would be free to pursue the escaped hostages upon returning to the fortress and learning what had happened there. The fewer Outlookers who were searching for them, the better chance the
shallaheen
had of disappearing and reaching safety.

If Tansen made a mistake and missed the quarry, he could still elude a pack of clumsy Valdani in the mountains after dark, but he would let down Josarian and the hostages.

These thoughts weighed heavily on his mind as he reached a three-way fork in the path that he was sure hadn't been there the night before.

Which way? he wondered, hearing the Outlookers behind him.

Stay calm. Think it through.
A
shatai
was cool in combat, clear-headed in danger, free of emotions that shackled lesser men to failure and death.

The path looked wholly unfamiliar. Had he taken a wrong turn earlier? Surely Josarian wouldn't have failed to point out this three-way junction to him. Surely he himself wouldn't have overlooked it last night. What was wrong? Why didn't he know which way to go?

Which way, damn it?

He heard the jingling of bridles as the Outlookers came over the rise at his back. He dismounted and examined his choices on foot, hoping this more familiar perspective would help him recognize or remember something. The sound of men and horses grew louder as his pursuers drew near, and even in the dark, he knew he had only seconds before they spotted him.

Which way, Josarian? Which way?

Myrell was outside, issuing orders to another search party when he heard angry shouting from inside the command building. More annoyed than alarmed, he ordered two Outlookers to go inside and stop whatever brawl had erupted among his men when there were far more important matters for them to attend to.

It was only after he had issued the order that some vague alarm stirred inside him: nothing even as strong as suspicion, merely an uneasy feeling that something wasn't quite right. He finished instructing the search party, then turned to follow his men into the command building and put his mind at ease about the situation there. Faced with the excitement of pursuing Josarian, everyone had momentarily forgotten about the prisoners, who had been the focus of—

He stopped in his tracks, horrified beyond thought, as twenty
shallaheen
poured out of the big, elaborately carved door of the command building and raced down the broad stone steps, their shaggy black hair absorbing the light cast by the newly lit lanterns. Myrell barely had time to realize they had escaped before a new and even more appalling fact struck him:
They were armed.
Swords flashed in some of their hands, striking out at the first two Outlookers the mob encountered at the bottom of the steps.

Swords!
Where, by the mercy of the Three, had the prisoners gotten
swords
? And how had they escaped? Josarian was somewhere out there in the mountains, with over half of Myrell's men chasing him. Who had freed the prisoners?

He drew his sword as the swarm of barbarians split up to attack, shouting in their thick-tongued native language, baring their teeth in savagery as they launched themselves at their astonished captors. An unarmed man flew into him, striking his sword aside with... No,
not
unarmed! Myrell had seen a weapon like this once before, a couple of sticks joined by a piece of rope. He struck at it with his sword as it swung toward his head, then made a thrust at his opponent. He missed, but then managed to slash the man's face.

The man jumped back and stared at Myrell with fierce dark eyes, circling him and swinging his childish weapon wildly between them in a series of loops. Myrell had removed such toys from a number of detainees over the past couple of years, including some of the prisoners he now faced in combat. It had amused him to learn the
shallaheen
placed great value upon their pathetic bundled sticks and seriously believed they could defend themselves, and even kill a man, with such a device.

It didn't seem nearly as amusing now, when the thing came flying at his face. If he hadn't ducked, it might have broken his nose! How had the prisoners gotten out of their cells? What had happened to the guards? He realized with a chill of shock that the prisoners must have killed everyone inside the command building. How else could they have gotten their hands on the swords that many of them carried? How else could they have seized the wooden weapons which had been confiscated and left carelessly lying around?

Only a few of Myrell's archers remained up on the ramparts. There was little they could do up there after sunset except act as sentries. Besides, in the confusion that had followed Josarian's escape, Myrell had ordered most of them to fill other posts left vacant by the men he had sent out after the outlaw. The archers who were still up there would be trying to pick off the prisoners, but they'd be reluctant to fire into the fray; the
shallaheen
and the Valdani were too closely intermingled for a safe shot. Even worse, the peculiar fighting style Myrell observed in his opponent made him a difficult target for an archer, even at this close range, for he kept circling and circling Myrell; if an archer got off an arrow, he'd risk missing the ever-moving target and perhaps even hitting one of his own men. If all the
shallaheen
were as slippery as this one, the archers wouldn't be of much help where they were. Myrell had to kill this man quickly so he could order the archers down into the combat area to fight.