Videssos Cycle, Volume 2 (93 page)

“No doubt you’re right,” the Greek sighed. It saddened him to think that to the locals he was only another invader.

“Yezda!” The peasant was short, stooped, and naked, with great staring eyes. He pointed to an artificial mound on the southern horizon, larger and better-preserved than the one Rakio had noticed a couple of days before. He rapidly opened and closed his hands several times to show that they were numerous.

Arigh frowned. “Our scouts saw nothing there this morning.” He glanced at the native, who repeated his gestures. “I wish you spoke a language some one of us could follow.” But the farmer had only the guttural
tongue of the Hundred Cities, reduced to a patois by centuries of subjection to Makuran and the Yezda.

He smiled ingratiatingly at the Arshaum chief, pantomiming riders going up to tether their horses in the ruins. He pointed to the sun, waved it through the sky backwards. “This was yesterday?” Arigh asked. The local shrugged, not understanding. “Worth another look,” Arigh decided. He ordered a halt and sent a squad of riders out to examine the hillock.

It was nearly twilight when they came back. “Nothing around there,” their leader told Arigh angrily. “No tracks, no horseturds, no signs of fire, nothing.”

The peasant read the scout’s voice and fell to his knees in the dirt in front of Arigh. He was shaking with fear, but kept stubbornly pointing south. “What’s he sniveling about?” Gorgidas asked, walking up after seeing to his pony.

“He claims there are soldiers up on that hillock there, but he lies,” the Arshaum answered. “He’s cost us hours with his nonsense; I ought to cut off his ears for him for that.” He gestured so the native would understand. The local cringed and went flat on his belly, wailing out something in his own language.

Gorgidas scratched his head. “Why would he put himself in danger to lie to you? He has no reason to love the Yezda; see how well he lives under them.” Every rib of the farmer’s body was plainly visible beneath his dirty skin. “Maybe he’s just trying to do you a favor.” The Greek wanted to believe that; he did not like being put on the same level as the Yezda.

“Where are the warriors, then?” Arigh demanded, putting his hands on his hips. “If you tell me my scouts are going blind, you might as well cut your own throat now.”

“Blind? Hardly—we’d be dead ten times over if they were. But still …” He eyed the peasant, who had given up moaning and was gazing at him in mute appeal. The physician’s trained glance caught the faint cloudiness of an early cataract in the man’s left eye. His mind made a sudden leap. “Not blind—but blinded? Magic could hide soldiers better than rubble or brush.”

“That is a thought,” Arigh admitted. “If I’d taken this lout—” He stirred the peasant with his foot; the fellow groaned and covered his face, expecting to die the next instant. “—more seriously, I’d have sent a shaman to smell the place out.” He became the brisk commander once more. “All right, you’ve made your point. Get Tolui and round up a company of men, then go find out what’s going on.”

“Me?” the Greek said in dismay.

“You. This is your idea. Ride it or fall off. Otherwise I have no choice but to think Manure-foot here a spy, don’t I?”

Arigh, Gorgidas thought, was getting uncomfortably good at making people do what he wanted. “A concealment spell?” Tolui said when the doctor found the shaman eating curded mares’ milk. “You could well be right. That’s not battle magic; whoever cast it could not mind if it fell apart as soon as his men burst from ambush.”

He drew his tunic over his head and undid the drawstring of his trousers with a sigh. “In this weather the mask is a torment, and the robe is of thick suede. Ah, well, better by night than by day.”

“Round up a company,” Arigh had said, but Gorgidas had no authority over the nomads, who did not fancy taking orders from an outsider. Tolui’s presence finally helped the Greek persuade a captain of a hundred to lead out his command. “A hunt for a ghost stag, is it?” the officer said sourly. He was a broken-nosed man named Karaton, whose high voice ruined the air of sullen ferocity he tried to assume.

His men grumbled as they wolfed down their food and resaddled their horses. Karaton worked off his annoyance by swearing at Gorgidas when the physician was the last one ready. Still, it was not quite dark when they rode for the mound that had once been a city.

Rakio caught up with them halfway there. He gave Gorgidas a reproachful look as he trotted up beside him. “If you go to fight, why not me tell?”

“Sorry,” the physician muttered. In fact he had not thought of it; he always had to remind himself that his comrades did not share his distaste for combat. Rakio was as eager as Viridovix once had been.

The hillock was ghostly by moonlight. Atop it Gorgidas could see stretches of wall still untumbled; his mind’s eye summoned up a time
when all the brickwork was whole and the streets swarming with perfumed men dressed in long tunics and carrying walking sticks, with veiled women, their figures robed against strangers’ glances. The place would have echoed with jangling music and loud, happy talk. It was silent now. Not even night birds sang.

Like a good soldier, Karaton automatically sent his men to surround the base of the hill, but his heart was not in it. He waved sarcastically. “Ten thousand hiding up there, at least.”

“Oh, stop squeaking at me,” Gorgidas snapped, wishing he had never set eyes on the peasant in the first place. He hated looking the fool. In his self-annoyance he did not notice Karaton stiffen with outrage and half draw his saber.

“Stop, both of you,” Tolui said. “I must have harmony around me if the spirits are to answer my summons.” There was not a word of truth in that, but it gave both men a decent excuse not to quarrel.

Karaton subsided with a growl. “Why call the spirits, shaman? A child of four could tell you this place is dead as a sheepskin coat.”

“Then fetch a child of four next time and leave me in peace,” Tolui said. Echoing from behind the devil-mask he wore, his voice carried an otherworldly authority. Karaton touched a finger to his forehead in apology.

Tolui drew from his saddlebag a flat, murkily transparent slab of some waxy stone, which was transfixed by a thick needle of a different stone. “Chalcedony and emery,” he explained to Gorgidas. “The hardness of the emery lets a man peering through the clear chalcedony pierce most illusions.”

“Give it to me,” Karaton said impatiently. He squinted up to the top of the mound. “Nothing,” he said—but was there doubt in his voice? Tolui took the seeing-stone back and handed it to Gorgidas. Things at the crown of the hillock seemed to jump when he put it to his eye, but steadied quickly.

“I don’t know,” he said at last. “There was a flicker, but …” He offered the stone to Tolui. “See for yourself. The toy is yours, after all; you should be able to use it best.”

The shaman lifted the mask from his head and set it on his knee. He
raised the stone and gazed through it for more than a minute. Gorgidas felt the backwash of his concentration as he channeled his vision to penetrate semblance and see truth.

The physician had never thought much about Tolui’s power as a sorcerer. If anything, he assumed the shaman was of no great strength, as he had been second to Onogun until Bogoraz poisoned Arghun’s old wizard because he favored Videssos. Since then Tolui’s magic had always been adequate, but the Greek, not seeing him truly tested, went on reckoning him no more than a hedge-wizard mainly interested in herbs, roots, and petty divinations.

He abruptly realized he had misjudged the shaman. When Tolui cried, “Wind spirits, come to my aid! Blow away the cobwebs of enchantment before me!” the night seemed to hold its breath.

A howling rose above the hillock, as of a storm, but no wind buffeted Gorgidas’ face. Then Karaton shouted in amazement while his men drew bows and bared swords. Like a curtain whisked away from in front of a puppet-theater’s stage, the illusion of emptiness at the crest of the hill was swept aside. Half a dozen campfires blazed among the ruins, with warriors sprawled around them at their ease.

The first arrows were in the air before Karaton could give the order to shoot. A Yezda pitched forward into one of the fires; another screamed as he was hit. A different scream went up, too, this one of fury, as the pair of wizards with the enemy felt their covering glamour snatched away.

“Up and take them!” Karaton yelled. “Quick, before they get their wits about them and go for weapons and armor!”

Shouting to demoralize the Yezda further, his men drove their ponies up the steep sides of the hill, then dismounted and scrambled toward the top on foot. Gorgidas and Rakio were with them, grabbing at shrubs or chunks of brick for handholds. Looking up toward the crest, the Greek saw the campfires and running figures of the Yezda shimmer and start to fade as their sorcerers tried to bring down the veil once more. But Tolui was still working against them, and the fear and excitement of their own men and the Arshaum ate at their magic as well. The fires brightened again.

A pony thundered downhill past Gorgidas. A daredevil Yezda, seeing his only road to safety, took that mad plunge in the dark and lived
to tell of it. His horse reached level ground and streaked away. “That is a rider!” Rakio exclaimed. A crash and a pair of shrieks, one human, the other from a mortally injured pony, told of a horseman who tried the plummet and failed.

Several more mounted Yezda broke out down the path they would have taken to attack the Arshaum army. Most, though, stunned by the unexpected night assault, were still throwing saddles on their beasts or groping for sabers when Karaton’s men reached them.

As he gained the top of the mound, Gorgidas stumbled over an upthrust tile. An arrow splintered against masonry not far from his head. Rakio hauled him to his feet. “You crazy are?” he shouted in the Greek’s ear. “Get out your sword.”

“Huh? Oh, yes, of course,” Gorgidas said mildly, as if being reminded of some small blunder in a classroom. Then a Yezda was in front of him, shamshir whistling at his head. He had no room for fine footwork. He parried the stroke, then another that would have gutted him. The Yezda feinted low, slashed high. Gorgidas did not feel the sting of the blade, but warm stickiness ran down the side of his neck, and he realized his ear had been cut.

He thrust at the Yezda, who blocked and fell back awkwardly, confused by the unfamiliar stroke. Gorgidas lunged. At full extension he had a much longer reach than the nomad thought possible. His
gladius
pierced the Yezda’s belly. The man groaned and folded up on himself.

Most of the enemy, outnumbered two to one, drew back for a stand at a small courtyard whose ruined walls were still breast high. The Arshaum hacked at them over the bulwark and sent arrows and stones into their crowded ranks. Unable to stand that punishment for long, the Yezda surged out again and with the strength of desperation broke through their foes’ lines. Karaton squalled in outrage as Yezda hurled themselves down the hillside with no thought for broken bones or anything but escape.

Only a few got that far; the Arshaum cut down the greater part of them as they fled. One of the Yezda wizards, a shaman in robes hardly less fringed than Tolui’s, fell in that mad chase, a sword in his hand in place of the magic that had failed him.

The other sorcerer was made of different, and harsher, stuff. Gorgidas
thought he saw motion down a narrow alleyway and called out in the Arshaum tongue, “Friend?” He got no answer.
Gladius
at the ready, he stepped into the rubble-choked lane.

A campfire flared behind him. The sudden brightness showed him that the alley was blind—and that it trapped no ordinary Yezda. For a moment the red robe and jagged tonsure meant nothing to the physician. Then ice walked up his spine as he recognized Skotos’ emblems.

The wizard’s face, Gorgidas thought, would have revealed his nature even in the absence of other signs. A man who knows both good and evil and with deliberate purpose chooses the latter will bear its mark. The eyes of the dark god’s votary gave back the fire like a wolf’s. The skin was drawn taut on his cheeks and at the corners of his mouth, pulling his lips back in a snarl of hate. But it was not directed at the Greek; he was sure the wizard wore it awake and asleep.

The physician edged forward. He saw the other had only a short dagger at his belt. “Yield,” he called in Videssian and the Khamorth tongue. “I would not slay you out of hand.”

As it focused on Gorgidas, the wizard’s sneer tightened. His hands darted out, his lips twisted in soundless invocation. Mortal fear lent his spell force enough to strike despite the chaos of battle. Gorgidas staggered, as if clubbed from behind. His sight swam; his arms and legs would not answer; the sword fell from his hand. The air rasped harshly in his throat as he struggled to breathe. He slipped to one knee, shaking his head over and over to try to clear it.

The spell had been meant to kill; perhaps only the discipline of the healer’s art gave the Greek strength of will enough to withstand it even in part. He was groping for his blade as the sorcerer came up to him. The dagger gleamed in the wizard’s hand, long enough to reach a man’s heart.

The wizard knelt for the killing stab, a vulpine smile stretched over his lean features. Gorgidas heard a dull thud. He thought it was the sound of the knife entering his body. But the Yezda sorcerer reeled away with a muffled grunt of pain. The power of the spell vanished as his concentration snapped.

Gorgidas sprang for the wizard, but someone hurtled by him. A sword bit with a meaty thunk. The Yezda thrashed and lay still; Gorgidas smelled his bowels let go in death.

“You crazy are,” Rakio said, wiping his blade on his sleeve. It was statement this time, not question. He seized the Greek by the shoulders. “Are you too stupid not to go wandering away from help and get caught alone?”

“So it would seem. I’m new to this business of war and don’t do the right thing without thinking,” Gorgidas said. He drew Rakio into a brief embrace and touched his cheek. “I’m glad you were close by, to keep me from paying the price of my mistake.”

“I would want you for me to do the same,” the Yrmido said, “but would you be able?”