Six yards closer, then seven, eight, and Benee stopped, stockstill, fear suddenly drying his mouth, sucking the air from his lungs. The sentry had turned and was looking dead ahead at him! He fought the almost overwhelming urge to get up and run, run, run, back to the safety of the boat, of the swamps of his birth. But that way lay certain death; already could he feel that spear blade in his back.
Then, all was again well. Muttering something incomprehensible under his breath, the man began to pace back and forth, but never more than a few yards in any direction.
At the end of thirty agonizing feet, Benee felt he could be accurate enough for a sure kill. Slowly, he brought up his blowpipe, made certain that the war dart was still in place, then put it to his lips and took exacting aim. A single puff of his powerful, trained lungs … and death flew toward the nameless spearman.
The sentry slapped at his cheek, as if at an insect. But when his fingers felt the dart and his mind registered what it must be, he screamed! Screaming on and on, regularly, like a woman at a birthing, he dropped his spear and ran a few strides toward the distant firelight. All at once, he stopped screaming and fell, his limbs jerking and twitching.
But Benee had not been idle. As soon as the spear was dropped, he ran forward at a crouch and scooped it up; still at a crouching run, he reached the lip of the bank and was over it before the sentry fell. He took time to disassemble his blowpipe and fit the sections back into their cylinder, then slung it and loped down to his boat
Before he pushed off, he gently placed the spear in the boat. Tonight, Benee had become a full man, and this spear was proof of the fact.
So, along the fringes of that narrow land, the swampers and the mountain bands took regular toll of Zastros’ troops, never many at one time. But the constant threat of ambush began to retard an already snail-slow, advance, as the exposed flanks unconsciously drew closer to the center.
So Zastros had two columns of light infantry sent into a particularly troublesome stretch of fenland and no officer or man of them was ever seen again. The harrass1-ment never even slowed. The next unit was a full tahgmah of Zastros’ picked men. Two long weeks later, a bare two hundred of that thousand staggered or crawled out of the fens, and most of those survivors were useless as soldiers, what with strange fevers and festered wounds and addled wits.
And the march route was officially narrowed again, keeping a couple of miles between the eastern flank and the edges of the fens. And Zastros raged and swore at these additional delays. And his young queen, Lilyuhn, whom some named “Witch,” listened to his tirades in heavy-lidded, expressionless silence.
Captain Portos rode back from the High King’s camp in a towering rage. His quite reasonable request that his battered, now understrength, unit be replaced on the hazardous left flank had been coolly denied. As if that were not enough, his personal courage had been questioned for having the temerity to make such a request, and then the High King had refused him his right to meet the questioner at swordpoints.
How quickly, he pondered, did kings forget. When the High King—then Thohooks Zastros, with only a distant claim to the throne—first had raised the banner of rebellion, Komees Portos had enlisted and armed and mounted a squadron of light horses and taken up the rebel cause. Most of that first squadron had been recruited of his own city and lands. Then, oh, then, Zastros had warmly embraced him, spoken to and of him as “brother,” sworn undying gratitude and rich rewards for such aid.
Portos had watched most of that first squadron extirpated at the Battle of Ahrbahkootchee, and he had fled with Zastros across the dread border into the Great Southern Swamp, within which, somewhere, lay the Witch Kingdom. What with fevers and quicksands and horrible, deadly animals, he had had but a bare score left, when Zastros sent word to him and the other living officers. And Portos and his score, all with high prices on their heads, had returned to the ancestral lands and secretly raised and armed and mounted another squadron.