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There was plenty of speed in him still, and the Eshkiri horses like to run.
I stung him with my belt to make him go. It seemed a rough and thankless parting to offer a good mount, but there was no help for it. He shot forward, the grass spraying from his hooves, and shortly vanished over the green ridges under the blowing black and white sky.
The ground was hard enough here, I hoped, to bequeath no track of my own. I turned due south, carrying the bit and bridle perforce, so as to leave no clue, and broke into the rhythmic, mile-eating man-trot the boys learn in the krarl. If your legs and your lungs are whole, you can keep this up for quite a while and make excellent time.
Then all my planning want for nothing.
The wind cracked the sky open. A white lightning flash, and rain slanted on the gale like a gray sheet. Three flashes more and I was engulfed in a curtain of water.
What would happen now was this. The rain would wash out the beguiling traces of the decoy horse; it would additionally form mud which, if the deluge ceased as abruptly as it had commenced, would dry the perfect imprint of my own footfalls. Meanwhile, blundering blindly through the wet. I would distribute as many obliging tokens of my passage as there were unseen bushes to trample through and branches to snap. There was also one other pleasing thing. Some horses will not turn in a storm. Maybe my Eshkorian steed would balk, freeze, or bolt back the way I had sent him, empty saddled, into my pursuers’ midst.
I stood in the lightning-splintered rain, cursing myself to further thought. It seemed to me I should proceed no farther than to the nearest hiding place, and thereby create as few tracking signals as I could. The horse, if it continued going despite my doubts, would mark indications of its flight the guide might yet discover. And, whatever happened, they would not imagine me crouched at the wayside. They would believe I had pressed on.
Accordingly I made up the adjacent slope to the little natural tower of limestone at its summit, Here, between two porous spurs, in the black glue of the mud, I resigned myself to waiting out the storm.
It was to be a long, long wait.
The storm battered on the hills, sometimes stampeding off
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a way, then returning. The rain and wind did not abate. Four hours must have passed, and with grim humor I began to keep a look out for the hunt. I had by then started belaboring myself; I should have foretold the foul weather, the warnings of it had been there to see, I should have retained the horse, I should have run on south, trusting the rain to hold and confuse my track. In short, I should have done everything I had not.
Presently five riders dashed across the slope below, heading southeast.
Obviously the party had split, no longer sure of my direction.
They were all Kortis’ men. Even through the rain, I had made out their black, their silver skull-faces with black glass eyes. Only the captains of Kortis Phoenix Javhovor wore the uniform of my father’s guard. Still set on retribution?
I Wondered how far they would get before they came up with my horse, or else turned back for cover. I wondered, too, where the other four or five had taken themselves and if any of Erran’s soldiery were with them. Though my usefulness for Erran was over and he had no particular interest in vengeance, there were still his scientific philospher’s experiments with my flesh. Maybe he had offered some reward for me, and Kortis’ impoverished captains were riding for it. Nemarl might have sent men, too. Yet there were only ten I had noted. Not many for the pelt of the Black Wolf, son of the Black Wolf of Ezlann. Perhaps there were other parties abroad I had not yet seen.
This conjecture made me sullen, at myself, my situation, my lack of advantage.
Suddenly three more riders came through the rain, this time moving slowly. As they drew level with my concealment, the first dismounted, kneeled in the mud, and cast about. The horse of this, the guide, was smaller and stockier, and he was unmasked. A Dark Slave. The two captains, hooded against the weather, showed me their black silver skull-heads; then one reached idly to brush the rain away from a clump of grasses growing in the hillside. It was a fatuous womanish gesture, his wrist slender in its gauntlet, and so I knew him; Demizdor’s kinsman, Orek.
“Well,” the other called to the slave, “what do you make of it?”
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The slave mumbled something in a stilted version of the city tongue.
The captain said, “We have lost him, Orek, unless our luck turns.”
Orek flung around in his saddle furiously.
“No, by my soul, We shall find him. Ah! Why did Lord Kortis give us no bronzes?”
“He thought it wasted effort. He would not set soldiery to catching Brian’s wolfhound.”
Orek struck his thigh with his fist, that mannerism especial to girls and girlish men hoping to ape virility.
“Erran shall not get him back when we have him, no, by the golden whore.” Then his voice broke like a boy’s, as if he wept. That surprised me. I thought, Does even Orek weep because he is angry? Before, I could reason it out, he slashed his horse viciously with the silver-headed crop, and it floundered forward and away into the rain, after the rest.
Next moment the Absurd took a hand.
The remaining silver captain dismounted and began to lead his horse up the slope toward my limestone shelter, calling to the slave over his shoulder, “I’ve had enough bathing, fellow. I am for waiting here till the storm’s done. Ride and tell Zrenn where I am. Tell him they’ll be riding blind till midnight. We’ll find no tracks till this downpour’s spent.”
The guide got back on his horse, and rode off northward to where, presumably, the remaining group of men were searching. The captain continued walking up the hill toward me.
I had had plenty of roosting in the wet, and plenty of being hunted, too.
I quickly unsheathed the bronze-mask’s sword I had stolen, waited till the silver man came around the first spur, then stood up and cut him clean through, breast to back.
His glazing stare of surprise was evident, even through mask and smoked glass eye-pieces. I pulled off the mask and the rain danced on his eyeballs.
The horse, used to storm and ungentle behavior, stood patiently, observing me with indifference. I looked at the wet black clothes of the dead man, his mask, his horse, and I thought, Why not?
One quarter of an hour later, a silver captain rode down the slope, masked, gloved, hooded, leaving a half-dressed corpse wedged in the chalky mud of the hilltop.
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The captain had not gone far when two others rode up from the north, hailing him with cries and news.
“Zrenn has made south, with Nemarl’s seven and the slave. He thinks Vazkor has gone that way, and Zrenn means to circle around and trap him between two bands.”
“Does he?” said the silver captain.
The two riders trotted over to him and cowered in the rain. If they had known how near dry dust they were, they would have savored every drop. The silver captain leaned to the nearest and knifed him between the ribs. As this one toppled, his neighbor, with an oath, snatched at his sword. Not quickly enough. The captain’s own sword, already bloody, went through his neck, ending oath, intention, and life.
This silver captain, clearly a renegade and madman, thereafter turned his horse and galloped southeast, letting the rain clean his weapons as he went.
We see what we have always seen. It if seems, it is.
The renegade mad captain-I-soon came on three more silvers. The storm was slackening at last, in sinking buffets. The rain eased and left a sky purpling with dusk, with one brass hammerhead standing where the sun should have gone down. Beneath a rocky overhang, three men wrung out their cloaks and reviled nature, and spoke of Zrenn and Nemarl’s seven captains and the lack of bronze soldiery, and, noticing me, hailed me, and soon lay in the grass, one without his head.
From being quarry, I had turned hunter, and it pleased me.
These men who had jeered as they watched me writhe in Eshkorek now ended their quest on my blades. I should not, had they caught me, have ended so daintily. I did not mind leaving the clues of their corpses for guide and pack. Coming on their dead, the living must have imagined witchcraft was afoot in those southeastern hills.
I was learning, too, from their snippets of dialogue before I killed them, the strength of their forces and their method of campaign.