Dead Dzhool’s crippled mount was still screaming. Geros, too, began to scream, so terrified that he could form no words, but wail and point the boarspear up at the brushy slope. There a rank of riders, at least a dozen of them, armed and armored, was coming from the trees which had concealed them.
“BACK!” roared Klairunhz. “There’s too many to fight here! Back to the bridge!” Setting words to actions, he reined his mount about and set off in the wake of Shahrl, Geros, and Ahndee.
Bili stayed only long enough to split the skull of the suffering horse. Then he set off toward the bridge, just as the line of mounted ambushers came tilting down the rise. This granted Bili a closer look; his experienced eyes informed him that though numerous-nearer a score than a dozen-the charging horsemen were not nearly so well armed as they had at first seemed.
All had swords of one kind or another, and a few even bore them as if they understood them, but the uniformity ended there. A big man in the lead had a full panoply of threequarter armor and it looked to be decent-quality plate. The remainder might have been outfitted from a hundred years of battlefield pickings. Their helms were of every description. One man wore nought save a dented breastplate, another had squeezed into a shirt of rusty scalemail. Two or three went in loricated jerkins, one in a cuirass of boiled leather, another in an old, threadbare brigandine. Bili thought that the ruffianly crew looked the part of the brigands they probably were.
Mahvros’s powerful body responded to Bill’s urgings and big steelshod hooves struck sparks from the pebbly roadbed. The black stallion splashed through the little rill, and then they were descending the road’s first curve. Suddenly, twenty yards ahead, riders emerged from among the treetrunks to block the way. A shaft of moonlight silvered their bared blades.
At a walk or a trot, Geros Lahvoheetos’s big mule was a good mount, but the animal’s ragged gallop was a jarring, toothloosening ordeal. Despite this, Geros was spur-raking the roan barrel and screaming for greater speed.
The bridge now lay behind them and the road traversed was the well kept one, flanked by Komees Hari’s fences. From back there, came the sudden commencement of a blacksmith symphony of steel on steel, the metallic clangs punctuated by the shouts and shrieks of man and horse. Geros’s own screams then froze in his throat and he could only sob out his terror, while great tears furrowed his dusty cheeks.
His employer had bidden him ride hard for Horse Hall. He was to inform Komees Djeen that the party was under attack from at least half a score of armored and mounted bravos, and they were withdrawing to make their stand at the bridge. He was to add that one mercenary was slain; and that Thoheek’s son Bili had lingered at the original ambush site to dispatch a wounded horse and was now missing.
Had his overwhelming fear not occupied every nook and cranny of his mind, Geros would have been thanking every god he had never heard of that he had been chosen messenger and sent away from the scene of battle. For though he had quickly come to love his gentle, patient, softspoken young employer, he knew himself sufficiently to realize that in an actual fight, he would probably have deserted him.
He would have consoled himself, of course, by rationalizing that he had not been retained on account of his weapons skill, of which he had none, but simply as a bodyservant and occasional musician, at both of which trades he excelled. But he could have continued neither with an arm lopped off or a foot of sharp steel rammed into his body. And this last thought would have brought up his gorge and he would have silently damned himself for a despicable craven. He had always secretly feared that he was a coward, never having been in a position to prove himself one way or another.
He heard approaching hoofbeats ahead, and as he crested the second hillock from the hall, he saw the source a galloping horse and three armed men, one astride and the other two grasping the stirrup leathers and running alongside. Before he could think of what to say or do, even rein his mule, the mounted man shouted.