Priest (Ratcatchers Book 1) (25 page)

“Ah!” she cried. “Stop it! They are gone, I am here. We are here, now!”

He shook his head. He had passed the test, and all that remained was trying to get her not to hate herself for it.

He stood up and started putting his armor back on. She made a sound like a defeated gasp.

Even facing away from her, he couldn’t get the memory of how she looked, and how she wanted him, out of his mind.
I’m going to have trouble sleeping for
, he thought a moment,
a year
.

“You’re going to be a knight,” he said. “The urq can’t stop it. Even the other knights can’t stop it. Forget them,” he said.
Forget me
. “Hang on to that. You worked for it your entire life, and you are going to be a knight.”

He could hear her stand up. She was staring at him. He didn’t want to turn around and see her expression.

“Go put your armor on before I change my mind.”

She didn’t move.

There was a sound like a saw biting wood.

“Ragh! Ragh! Ragh!” It was urq laughter.

Heden turned and saw a dozen, more, hairless blue-black figures emerging from the woods, each wearing light armor, carrying various weapons. Larger than a man. Each covered in blood-like red powder. He recognized them. Bloodrunners. Elite scouts.

The urmen had found them.

Of course
, Heden thought. The urmen would have scouts too. Heden and Aderyn had tarried here too long.

The urq were each larger than a man, but hunched over. At night, their deep, dark-blue skin looked black as pitch, but here in the sunlight it seemed like blue ink. Their long, massively muscled forearms stretched from their shoulders all the way to the ground. They used these more than their tiny legs to move and run. They could run upright like a man for short periods, but preferred to lope along on all fours with much greater speed. Their build gave them the use of heavy weapons and bows no man could lift or fire.

They were covered in a thick layer of hard fat that acted like natural armor, and so some wore no armor at all. Most left their pot-bellies unarmored, it was a sign of masculinity among them. They had small, piggish yellow eyes and huge mouths full of wide, flat teeth. Two white tusks, each needle-thin and perfectly straight, jutted up out of the lower jaw and rose up to their temples, acting as natural protection from injury to the face or eyes.

They each had a dull red powder caked onto them, some on their shoulders, some along their forearms, some all over their bodies. It was meant to look like blood, but Heden knew it was rust. It was a ceremony the Bloodwalkers went through that involved destroying iron. But they liked giving the impression of being covered in blood.

Heden could not count how many of them there were. They leered from behind every rock and tree. Dozens. Heden was apprehensive. His rational mind understood that they were just urq, no real threat to him even ten years ago. But seeing them here, being outnumbered was unsettling. The Bloodwalkers were fierce and intelligent and knew how to effectively use cover and squad tactics, but Heden could call upon the incarnate power of a god, should it prove necessary. And it would not. He had many other tricks up his sleeve. The only problem was Aderyn.

The urmen had probably been watching them for a while. Both Heden and Aderyn had been concentrating on other things. They had seen Heden put his armor back on, but interrupted once it looked like Aderyn might go do the same. Naked, she was vulnerable enough, even a squire of the Green. But, Heden thought, they’d lost the initiative. Their chance had already gone, and they missed it. Maybe they weren’t expecting to find Heden and Aderyn, and certainly not in that particular situation.

Aderyn was looking around frantically, calculating the paths that led her back to her armor. She was trying not to panic. Heden sensed this, and spoke her name.

“Squire Aderyn,” he said, and she turned to look at him. Her eyes wide. She was about to speak, but Heden interrupted her. He put his left hand on his breastplate out of habit, over the point on his chest where the talisman of Saint Lynwen hung, held up his right hand, and prayed to his saint.

Aderyn, naked, gasped and shivered as though she’d just been dunked in ice-cold water. Her sun-browned skin flashed with goose bumps, and then a flash of light. When Heden’s eyes recovered from the glare, she stood before him in a full set of golden, ornamental plate armor. She had no weapon, and her head was exposed, but the articulated plate armor covered the rest of her body like no real armor could. She was a warrior goddess. The plate had winged filigree. She looked like she’d stepped out of a stained glass window.

It was a gift. From Heden’s saint to Aderyn. A reward. For what, Aderyn could not know. But Heden knew. Aderyn could not have worn that armor if she and Heden had succumbed to temptation.

“How long will it last?” she asked him, marveling at her hands and arms covered in flexible, impenetrable golden metal. The only sound was the urq marshaling. He could hear them. The battle was about to start. They had only moments before the bloodshed.

Seeing her outfitted thus, she was no longer an object of desire. More than anything, he wanted her to succeed. To become a knight. To become the kind of knight she believed in. He had no idea if this was even possible now.

“Nothing lasts forever,” he said cryptically. Her eyes shot up to him, reacting to an answer to no question she had asked.

The sun sparkled on the river behind them, and the moment was over. He turned, hand reaching to the pommel of his sword to draw it from its sheath, and saw the full might arrayed against them.

He reeled. There were hundreds of urmen, all Bloodwalkers. They’d been pouring out of the forest while he prayed. Heden wouldn’t have guessed there were this many Bloodwalkers in all the tribes in all the thousands of miles of the Iron Forest.

One of them held aloft a great torch, a great red guttering flame. It was their battle standard. It was a sorcerous thing, and fed on the blood of their enemies. Heden had seen one before, and he suddenly couldn’t see anything else. His eyes fixed on it, and he stopped breathing.

It was like unmooring a boat. His eyes were no longer seeing what was in front of him. His mind was drifting to another episode like this.

Aderyn smiled a wolfish, feral grin, and crouched, ready for battle. Glad for the challenge. Ready to prove herself, test the mettle of the Green against the might of the Bloodwalkers. And she looked forward to battle next to Heden. But he was already lost. She turned and saw there was a problem.

Aderyn saw Heden freezing up. Though unarmed, she was not afraid. They were, after all, just urq. The fact that each of them weighed four times her hundred and twenty pounds meant nothing.

The urmen knew her by deed and reputation. They didn’t bother sending one down to test her as they would any other enemy. A dozen of them loped out of the forest, ready to tear her apart.

“Heden!” she shouted.

She ran forward to meet the urmen, engage them as far from Heden as possible. Protect him from whatever was happening to him. She didn’t understand it. She could not reconcile what she knew of him with someone who would be gripped by terror at a few dozen urmen.

What armor the urq had was makeshift. They could pound and shape metal, and some could smelt it, but not this tribe. They, like most urmen, relied on slave races to mine and smelt metal. And they traded and stole for what they could not make. Their weapons were axes taken from men, and huge two-handed swords that no man could wield.

She identified one urq using a shield, small for him, perfect for her, and launched herself at him, speaking a prayer as she did so.

Her right heel connected with the urq’s head, and hit it like a battering ram. The attack had to be precisely aimed to avoid the urman’s tusks, as they would deflect and absorb any such attempt. For one blow, her limbs were like stone mauls, and the blow threw the urq back, his shield flew up in the air. She grabbed it before he hit the ground and whirled on another urq closing in on her.

She swung the metal shield, given an improvised serrated edge by the urq who stole it, and slashed first at his eyes, then kicked him in the chest avoiding his axe swing, and sliced again through the thick layer of muscle and fat that had until this point protected his pink intestines. He went down instantly.

Now she had an axe.

And still Heden did not move. She was effectively keeping the urmen off him, but there were too many. Eventually they would swarm her and have him.

“Heden!!”

This was a bad one. He was with the Sunbringers going out into the forest to preempt the sack of Hoddenhill. In the real battle, his company was victorious but he was badly wounded, his ribs crushed. Heden grasped his chest with the memory of it.

He was seizing up, his arms and legs locking in a whole body clench. He wasn’t even aware of it, only the vision of explosions as huge trees snapped like twigs and men screamed as an army of urq, their blood red flame empowering them lay waste to all. Heden was impotent to do anything. There were screams and the blood-soaked smiles of urq stamping in the blood of the townsfolk.

“Heden!!” a voice cried. It was Stewart Antilles, the Hospitaller. A troll had swung his terrible mace and crushed Heden’s breastplate. Stewart was running in full plated mail across the field to save him. He wouldn’t arrive in time. Heden was dying.

“Heden, it’s me! It’s Aderyn!”

It was the nightmare logic of the dream, events happening out of order, repeating. He felt the slam of the troll’s great maul hit his chest and bear him through the air.

But this time, instead of hitting the ground, he splashed into water. He gasped and swallowed water. He was drowning, his clothes heavy and soaked with water, his breastplate bearing him down, and several thick arms grappling him down and under the surface.

He looked down through the murk, grabbed the arms and felt them. They were urmen. Urq had attacked him. He was drowning.

He was drowning in the river, and the urq were attacking him. He started to panic and thrash about. He wasn’t sure what was happening or how he could stop it, but he was drowning.

Aderyn watched as Heden, under the water, suddenly burst into action. He might have been able to save himself but she wasn’t taking any chances. Five urmen had slammed into the Arrogate and born him into the river. She hacked at the neck of an urq that stood in her way and in spite of its great strength and the thickness of its skin and density of its bones, more than a match for any normal man, it was no match for the power of the Green. The urman’s skin split from its collarbone down to its beating heart, and it fell while Aderyn leapt into the water.

She dove into the air dropping her axe and shield, they would only hinder her, and breathed deeply before hitting the water.

The current was strong, but clear and not especially deep here, only about twelve feet. Her divine armor hindered her not at all. The urq could hold their breath for up to ten minutes, all they had to do was outwait Heden and their opposition would be halved.

Though the Arrogate struggled, he had no air and could not speak a prayer or reach any weapon. Add to this his disorientation, the heavy pack on his back adding to his weight, and he was almost dead.

Aderyn expelled some air in a prayer and the five urq holding Heden down stopped worrying about him, and grabbed at their throats. Each started to kick its tiny legs and swim up to the surface, but Aderyn knew that air would do them no good. She ignored them and swam down to Heden, whose struggle had lessened. He was drowning.

The river water started to cloud. Great billowing gouts of black ink erupted from the mouths of the urq. They were bleeding out gallons of their black ichorous blood into the river. Twisting and writhing in the clouds were the thorny vines summoned by Aderyn’s prayer. The vines erupted from the urmen’s throats, ripping their way out of their mouths, tearing out their tongues and breaking their jaws with the strength of growing trees.

In moments, the urq were dead, their bodies floating to the surface. Aderyn swam under the cloud of blood and found the limp form of Heden. Grabbing him by the edge of his breastplate, she pulled him up and began to swim to the other side of the lake.

She heard a distinct sound, unmistakable. It sounded like dragonflies zipping past her ears. The urq were firing their heavy black arrows into the water, trying to stop her getting away. The arrows lost all their power and momentum as soon as they hit the water, she knew she was in no danger. The urq probably did as well, but wanted to make sure she knew they were there and she wasn’t getting away.

She stayed underwater as long as she could, and swam as far as she could. Eventually she had to come up for air. She wasn’t sure if Heden was alive or not, he’d been underwater some time without moving, but she couldn’t leave him behind. She had to make the attempt.

As she kicked with her legs and strove through the water with one free hand, she felt the sudden flood of water against her skin, and realized Heden’s divine armor had faded abruptly. She was naked again. But maybe far enough away now.

She needed air, and surfaced. The urq still loosed their arrows. She looked to the far shore. There were roughly four dozen urq archers. Four units firing black arrows at the water. Their massive bows could easily clear the river, wide though it was. But at the moment, only Aderyn’s head was above the surface. A small enough target to keep the odds in her favor.

As she swam, she pulled Heden’s head above water. She didn’t know if it would help, but she knew keeping it underwater was no good. The pack on his back made pulling him through the water difficult, but there was no easy way to remove it.

She reached the far shore, and dragged Heden’s waterlogged body out of the river and onto the wet ground, laying him down on a bed of moss and decomposing leaves.

She knew what the urq would do. They didn’t like water, but didn’t fear it. They wouldn’t cross it if they didn’t have to. If they couldn’t hit with an arrow, probably several, enough to slow her down, they wouldn’t bother coming after her. And they saw she was naked. They weren’t going to stop trying.

Arrows thudded into the ground near her. She didn’t have long. An arrow or two she could deal with, but each one would slow her and make more arrows likely until eventually the urmen decided to ford the river.

She stopped, looking at Heden’s breastplate, and suddenly didn’t know what to do. An arrow struck less than a foot from his head, its black, raven-feathered shaft buried six inches in the ground.

She couldn’t tell if his heart was still beating without listening for it, and she wouldn’t be able to hear it through the breastplate. But she was completely naked. His breastplate was the only armor between them. And he needed armor more than she did.