Serpent's Silver (15 page)

*

They were almost to the Barrens when Jac felt his head fully clear. Turning to Heeto riding beside him, he addressed the matter he had not quite understood. “That white light—what was it, and how did it happen?”

Heeto yanked his horse’s reins so hard he almost tumbled from the saddle. His face was stricken, as was his voice. “Oh, Master, I forgot it! It worked, Master. I’m sure it worked! Only I’m not sure what it did or why! I pointed it, I pressed the trigger, and… and then there was the light.”

“Lord!” Jac said. He tried to digest this. “The Mouvar weapon—where is it now?”

“Where we were, Master. At the cliffs. Inside the tunnel.”

“Lord!” Jac repeated. He shook his head. “It had to have been that! Because after that flash, the serpent changed. Maybe that weapon didn’t work on a bearver, but the serpents are different; they carry captive spirits.” He shook his head, hardly believing what he was saying. Was he raving? “We’re going to have to get it. It could be the answer to everything. If it works, we may have the answer to flopears and Rowforth!”

“We can’t go back now, Master. The sun is up.”

“Yes, it is, isn’t it.” He let the fact infiltrate his consciousness. Day made things so much clearer—usually. But the revelations he was experiencing, assuming they made any sense at all… “If we go back now, they’ll get us. So we won’t do it now. We’ll do it as soon as we safely can.” Which meant evening or night.

They rode on toward the camp, following their faint trail through the Barrens. That was as familiar to both as though marked with signs, but anyone else would not find it at all.

When they arrived, there was confirmation: Kian and Lonny in front of his tent, standing hand in hand, without question alive.

There went perhaps his last hope to win Lonny. But somehow the pain was less now. He was glad to have her alive—and a new horizon was opening on his activity.

Even as Jac hailed them he was already making plans for the recovery of the weapon that had worked so strangely to rescue them.

Chapter 15

Ambush

JAC DREW LINES IN the sand with a stick and motioned everyone around. It was battle plan time, and all his men—all fifty-six, including Heeto and of course the newcomers, Kian and Lonny—were grouped outside his tent.

“We’ll have to do it this way.” His finger pointed out the spot on his crude map. “Right here on the main road where you lost your way, Kian. We’ll hide behind the trees and wait. Smith,” he said to the man behind him, “you’re the best crossbowman, so we’ll station you in a tree where you can take out the leader. Take the leader out as soon as they offer resistance, and we may have a chance. If the flopears don’t get to us first.”

Kian felt constrained to speak. He had been mentally counting their numbers since they came outside and guessing at the number of troops he had seen and the number of flopears nearby. “I can’t be certain this is the route they will take. I only know what I heard in the palace. By the way, that was my last dragonberry. If we don’t win and you haven’t got dragonberries growing here, that’s the end of astraling.”

“Yes, you’re right, it’s our only chance,” Jac agreed. “Then, when the fighting is heaviest—and there’ll be fighting, make up your mind to it!—maybe Heeto and I can get back to that tunnel and get back your Mouvar weapon.”

“Are you sure it will do any good if we have it?” Kian found it hard to believe it would. Even though he and Lonny had been rescued by its use, he didn’t know what it had done. Whether it could be effective against the flopears themselves, let alone the armed soldiery of Rowforth’s—that seemed too good to be true.

“We’ll see,” Jac said. “And, Lonny—”

“Yes?” She looked up at the leader with her blue eyes.

“We’ll station you on high ground overlooking the valley. If you spot any flopears, you’ll warn us.”

“Will my voice carry that far?”

“No, you’ll have to run back. If you shout from the high rock on this spot above the road, we’ll hear.”

She nodded. “I won’t have a horse?”

“Can’t spare one. It all depends on your legs. It’s a distance of about twice around this camp.”

“My legs are good,” she said with unconscious understatement. “I’ll look out for flopears.”

“It’s too bad there’s not another good spot for an ambush. But then maybe the soldiers won’t think to ride for flopear help, and maybe the flopears wouldn’t help. There’s a chance.”

Kian considered how different Lonny was from Jon back home. Jon would have been protesting that she should have a horse and her sling and a supply of rocks. Jon would want in on the fighting, and Lonny would be conscious that she was female and that fighting was only for males. As for Lenore, whom Lonny so resembled in appearance, he really didn’t know. All he could remember of Lenore was looking away with embarrassment whenever she was near. Yet her appearance was almost identical to Lonny’s. How blind had he been?

Matt Biscuit moved through the men until he was beside Jac. “You’d better use him,” he said, jerking his thumb at Kian. “Him and his gauntlets.”

“Right. Kian, you’ll be in the forefront of the charge. Assuming there is a charge, and there’s sure to be one. Rowforth’s men won’t give up your father without a fight. So you and I and Biscuit here will be at the head of any charge. Biscuit’s good with a sword, I’m good, and from what you say, your gauntlets will make you better.”

“I, uh, really haven’t had the practice,” Kian confessed. Now that he was facing battle, he felt quite ill. Kelvin, the hero, would never feel like this!

“You want
me
to wear your gauntlets?” Biscuit demanded.

“No! I’ll wear them, and I’m good. I wore them in one battle back in my home frame, and there was only one other warrior my equal.”

“Your brother, Kelvin,” Jac supplied.

“Yes, Kelvin.” He did not add that Kelvin had worn the left gauntlet, he the right. Nor that they had fought each other to a draw. Some things these local patriot bandits could know, and some he didn’t want to reveal even under torture.

“Then it’s settled. We know from your last reconnaissance that they’ll be coming at dawn. On their way home we’ll stop them and take away your father. If we do, we have your word he’ll help us against Rowforth and the flopears. That right, Knight?”

“You know it is.” Jac seemed just a bit belligerent, but then they all did. It was probably battle nerves and the fact that so far he had been more of a source of problems than a solution to any.

*

When he got a look at the soldiers through his physical eyes, Kian marveled at how little he had noticed with his astral vision. They were ordinary men by Jac’s reckoning, but they were obviously top fighting men. Sturdy, strong, well disciplined, and their quality showed. His mother’s troops had looked nothing like these. They would not release his father without a fight, and studying them from concealment, Kian wondered if Jac’s ragtag crew could possibly prevail. Then he remembered the gauntlets he wore, and he knew that they did have a chance. Assuming he could stay astride his horse and get into the fray where it would help.

He sighed. He knew he would soon be taking men’s lives and he hated it. But the alternative was to leave his father, and possibly, though he had not seen her, his mother. He willed himself strong for the coming fight.

The few crossbow bolts struck the road directly in front of the marching men as Jac rode out of the trees and raised his hand. “We want your prisoner! Resistance or a refusal to turn him over means death!”

“By the Gods, we’ll have none of it!” The ruddy-faced captain turned to his troops and commanded: “Shields ready! Prepare!”

A lucky crossbow bolt from Smith found its target. The captain clutched at the feathered barb piercing his throat above the mail. Gurgling horribly, he pitched over the head of his war-horse, spraying blood on his way to meet the ground.

“Charge!” Jac ordered his bandit army, and Kian hardly had time for it to register before he was charging the foremost men. In a moment more he was crossing swords, cutting down, stabbing and chopping expertly. His gauntlets knew, and did what was necessary. He saw his father through the dust that now covered everything, and after he had dispatched his fifth man, he felt fully that he was effecting a rescue.

“Flopears! Flopears!” It was Lonny calling from the rock. If it weren’t for the dust he could have bent back, looked up, and seen her. The battle had hardly started, but she was there, calling down to them.

Obviously the flopears had not been far away. Had they known what would happen, through their magic? Had one of them been astral-spying here? Or was it simply that the valley and its flopear population were far too close to the bandit camp? Whatever the case, it was doubtful that a rider had gotten back to them to beg their assistance.

Flopears, it seemed, were now fully allied to Rowforth and did not necessarily wait to be asked. In the past, Jac had confided, things had been far different, and dealings with mortals had been restricted to the once-a-year sacrifice.

Faster than he would have believed possible, the fighting tide turned. Kian found his gauntlets taking complete control of his hands and arms and almost his mind. Blocking, stabbing, slashing—his sword was busy while his shield hid the faces of dying men. But their horrible screams cut through to his ears. Who had ever fancied that combat was glorious? He could not think now, even to marvel at the speed of his blade and the intricate motions of his arm. He was simply a killing machine.

Then his horse screamed, and he was flying from the saddle over its neck. Somehow the gauntlets flung sword and shield and forced his body into an acrobatic roll. He bounced to his feet, twisted out of the way of a sword slash, saw Biscuit run the man through, and retrieved his weapons almost under the horse’s hooves. These gloves played it entirely too close for comfort.

“We have to retreat! Quick, before the flopears arrive!” It was Jac’s voice in the dust. Biscuit reached down a hand to Kian, but the gauntlet with the sword in it motioned him away.

Thinking only that he must get Lonny, Kian scrambled up the hillside, out of the lake of dust. How nice to catch a breath of fresh air! Once a sword cut at him, but his shield deflected the blow without even jerking hard. Then he was above the horses and on his way to the high rock and to Lonny. It was much too steep going, but the gauntlets knew no defeat. Without giving him a chance to do more than fight for breath, they grabbed saplings and brush and pulled his errant feet constantly upward on a path that seemed impossible for a mountain goeep. How nice it would be to have enchanted boots that governed his feet the way the magic gauntlets governed his hands.

Now he was at the crest of the hill, coming up by the rock. Lonny was on the rock, her eyes fixed glassily on a flopear advancing on her with raised club. In a moment the flopear would bash in her head and send her lifeless body tumbling down to the battlefield below. No wonder the gauntlets had hauled him up here so rapidly; had he realized the reason for their urgency, he would have strained yet more to make it sooner. As it was—

He could not make it in time; the remaining distance was too great. But even as he realized this, his right glove whipped his sword down, slicing at the ground broadside. The point caught a stone and drove it out and up in what his father called a golf drive. The little stone sailed across and flew at the flopear’s face. Then, as if its job were done, the gauntlet sheathed the sword.

The flopear, no slouch, saw the missile coming and ducked, and the stone missed. But this distracted him from the girl. He looked across and saw the new enemy cresting the hill. The flopear reoriented, bracing himself and taking a defensive posture with the club. Then, satisfied that he faced only one new enemy, he lifted the club for a smash. There was no point in bashing the helpless girl if he got his own head lopped off immediately after.

Kian’s gauntlets got him to the top and on his feet and his shield up in front of his face before the flopear could fully turn and redirect his blow. But he no longer held his sword. He had foolishly sheathed it, and had no time to draw. Kian lurched on his feet as the club smashed against the shield. Despite the gauntlets, he almost fell. This flopear was a true warrior, balanced and ready despite his surprise, while Kian was a bumbling fool.

Then his right glove jumped forward to catch at the flopear’s left knee, and his left glove shoved the shield back hard against the club and the attacker’s face. The flopear tried to step back but could not, because of the caught knee. He had been caught by surprise by an unworthy foe. He cried out and flung away his club, trying to recover his balance, but he could not. He fell, and now the gauntlet let go of the knee with a shove, and the flopear stumbled back too violently. He lost his footing at the edge of the steeper slope and fell down, rolling over on the slope, tumbling head over boots. Thump, thump, thump, bash. Then, mercifully, a speck of silence.

Other flopears would be here momentarily. Kian had dealt with one, thanks again to the genius of the gauntlets, but there was no reason to think he could handle three or four. That one had been too apt, too quick and sure; only the surprise hold and push when Kian had seemed to be falling (seemed?) had caught him. Once a flopear eyed him, he would be done for, and the same for Lonny. He grabbed her hand and yanked. “Come!” He ran, hauling her along, his gauntlets helping him decide the route. But Lonny tried to hang back. “Kian, we’re going the wrong way! The serpents—” With shock he realized that his hands were urging them past a pole holding a serpentskin chime. Turning his head, he could just barely see short-legged flopears toiling up the hillside. That way would be suicide or capture. Ahead—ahead was the bigger of the two valleys: the one Lonny’s people called Serpent Valley.

Unhesitatingly the powerful gauntlets pulled them on, down the steep hillside where silver serpents lay basking lazily in the morning sun.

*

John Knight could hardly believe that they had arrived, but they had, and they looked just like the troops back home that Rufurt had maintained. Only here it was Rowforth, and if he didn’t misinterpret Gerta’s expression when she talked of him, he was not the ideal monarch for this familiar yet strange fairy-tale land.

“I’m sorry you go, John,” Gerta said as she led him from her cottage. “You good man. Not like most mortals.”

Blinking in the sunlight, John considered the good manly uprightness of the troops, the neatness of their green uniforms, and the shine of their highly polished mail. With troops like these, could Rowforth be bad? Possibly he had a wife such as Rufurt had had—Queen Zoanna, sinister mistress of men, certainly mistress of John Knight. Evil women, he was beginning to think, existed everywhere.

“Good-bye, Gerta,” he said, directing a grateful look at her. The flopear girl had been kind to him. She was strange in the way she had talked to that chime as though it contained something living, but he had come to know her as a person rather than as a thing.

“Up on your horse, you!” a captain commanded.

He mounted. The saddle was a bit tight. Riding horses had been but an occasional recreation in his Earthly life. Flying with a jetpack or legging it over mountains was more in his experience. Of course, he had ridden bicycles as a boy and later driven cars and trucks.

The procession rode out. Turning, looking back, John marveled anew at the cottages and the round holes that had been turned into dwellings and buildings in the surrounding cliff. The roundness of the holes made him think of worm-holes. Had he imagined the great size of the serpent he encountered? Gerta hadn’t said, but he remembered vividly her holding out the pink and blue blossoms to that great, flat head.

He breathed in, savoring the delightful green smells of spring. It was spring here, he’d bet. You could mistake a lot of things, but you couldn’t mistake the feel of seasons. Not when you were outside and a part of the natural scene.

They were leaving the valley now by a road he didn’t recall but must once have traveled. He could see that it was a valley and that there was another valley connecting it. The hills, the mountains, were much like those in Rud. In a way it was like some areas of the Americas, if they had not been ground down by glaciers. But if there had been no glaciers here, should there be such valleys? Pondering this, he mentally shook his head. He was no geologist, so his conjectures were hardly definitive. Whatever made the valleys in these mountains, they ran big, and whatever made the mountains, they ran rough. Now, as in other things, he wished he were more the expert on the subject.