The Mark of Ran (29 page)

Again—a tiny scrape on the stairs, like someone’s foot shifting. Rol rose to his feet with all the stealth he could muster from the rags of Psellos’s training, and padded noiselessly to the top of the stairway. It was pitch-black now, though if he looked out of the tall surviving window of the place he could see the paleness of the earth below and, raising his eyes, the hard glitter of the stars. A lighter patch on the world’s rim spoke of the rise of the moon to come; it would be a mere sliver, a new moon. There was no breath of air to stir the dust in his throat and when he swallowed it felt as though he had sand coating his tongue.

He looked down the stairway, his night vision soaking up the blackness and making sense of it. There was someone standing at the foot of the stairs. Even his preternatural sight could make out only that it was a man or manlike, short in the legs and long in the arms, the limbs very fine. A shapeless lump of a torso, and a head oddly sunk into the shoulders, almost domelike. No neck to speak of, or any feature where the face should be. But he knew it was watching him. He was not afraid; in fact, he felt the strangest sense of pity.

“Who are you?” he asked.

The thing disappeared so quickly he almost lost track of it. He drew Fleam, the moment of calm broken, and pelted down the stairs. Out of the ruined gateway he ran until the vast bright arch of the night sky was all above him, the welkin ablaze with more light than he had thought stars could make, mare’s tails and filigrees of diamond in the black. The Gorthor Flats ran out all around him in a featureless blank, and closer to, the broken fragments of the tower lay in skewed lines and mounds. There was no sign of the visitor and the night air was icy and still.

Gallico appeared at his shoulder, fast and quiet despite his size. “What was it?”

“I don’t know. An Ur-man perhaps. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

The halftroll sniffed the air and it came out of his gaping nostrils again in two gray spumes. “Yes, they have been here. Time to go. They may be a while gathering yet.”

“Gallico, it was not threatening. And it ran from me.”

“To fetch its pack-brothers, you may be sure. They never hunt alone. Come—let’s get the others on their feet. The tower is no longer safe.”

The party set off across the Flats, cursing the brevity of their interrupted rest and shivering in the cold of the desert night. All but Rol and Gallico found themselves tripping and stubbing toes on the deep cracks of the Flats as they set a fearsome pace northward. It was bitterly cold, and hunger had begun to bite into their strength despite a hurried meal of dried fish, wolfed down on the move. They had a mouthful each of water, gulped down as they half jogged in Gallico’s wake.

“What’s the rush?” Bartolomew complained. “Is this some kind of race?”

“Yes,” Gallico said shortly. “Keep your wits awake and your weapons to hand.”

“Who’s to attack us out here?” Rusaf complained. “Lizards? Beetles?”

“There,” Rol said, pointing. Gallico followed his arm. The flicker of movement was so brief as to be dismissed as a trick of the eye, but he nodded.

“They’re coming up to larboard.”

“I’d rather stand and await them than have a running fight,” Rol said.

“That’s what they want, with a small group such as this. Stop for only a few minutes, and they’ll use that time to gather in their hundreds. No, they are like wolves. A stalled prey only emboldens them.”

“What in the world are you two talking about?” Rusaf hissed.

“The locals,” Rol told him with a thin smile. “They’re about to pay us a visit.”

Ten yards in front of them the cracked planes of dirt reared up like trapdoors in the ground, and out of them swarmed a mass of shadows, noiseless, swift as snakes. Rol had a split moment to take in their features before he had drawn Fleam and she was leaping forward in his grasp with the distinctive whistle that sounded like the laugh of a woman.

They had heads like moles, eyeless, with delicate snouts and snuffling nostrils set at the very tip. Below the heads were wet holes that might have been mouths. Aside from that they were featureless. Their thin arms ended in four digits, all tipped with long claws. Their bodies were gray, lighter on the belly and darker on the back. The backs and shoulders were covered with fine fur, like the stubble of an unshaven man’s chin.

They came in from all sides, thirty or forty strong. The Cormorants drew their cutlasses, faces white as bone in the darkness.

“Stand fast,” Gallico said. “Make a ring, and do not let them inside it.”

The Ur-men circled, uttering a high-pitched ululating warble that hurt the ears. More of their fellows were running and lurching and limping across the Flats now, dozens and scores.

“Should have stayed in the tower,” Gallico spat. “This is new to me, these numbers. I have never seen—”

The black ring closed in on them.

The party fought silently, murderously, beating away questing talons, stabbing out with the bright points of their blades. A nick here, a shallow stab there, the sharp, horrified intake of breath as Rusaf saw his forearm laid open from wrist to elbow. Rol edged his way left to close the circle. It was like fighting a gale-flapped thornbush. The Ur-men would move in, dart back, bob and duck and leap up and chance a swing with their claws, then scurry out of the ring to let another in. Rol stabbed out in growing desperation, to meet nothing but empty air. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Gallico’s towering frame, fists barreling through the air. The water cask was sliced from his back and fell to the ground behind him. He turned for one moment and the creatures leaped on his back, howling. Others scampered through his legs and pummeled the cask itself, breaking in the timbers with a splash and a splinter. Creed impaled one on the ground, his cutlass bending in the thing’s spine.

Fleam sliced off one questing, clawed hand that had come seeking Rol’s face, and its owner shrieked, high and awful. It lifted its snout and spat out a gob of liquid, which spattered against Rol’s shoulder. He beheaded the creature with one long sweep of Fleam’s curved edge, fluid gouting up in two steaming jets from the thing’s severed shoulders. The acrid smell of burning made him pause. There was smoke writhing from the shoulder of his tunic. Even as he stared at it, astonished, the pain hit him as the ichor burned through his clothes and seared his skin. He cried out loud. It was as though a hot coal had been dropped inside his shirt.

The creatures were thick as a hedge all about them now, and the party was fighting desperately back to back, cutlasses flickering. Gallico was outside the ring with one of them still clinging to his back, stabbing its claws into his corded muscles again and again so that his blood ran down, and then putting its wet mouth to the wounds and sucking ecstatically. The halftroll twisted, agonized, smashing Ur-men to mangled wreckage right and left. Up and down his huge chest little crackling streams of smoke were writhing and he was bellowing with pain and rage as he fought.

Rol ducked below the swipe of another Ur-man’s claws and stabbed Fleam upward through the delicate snout. The steel emerged glistening from the thing’s head and he let it slide off the scimitar, booting it aside. The agony in his shoulder was overmastering him; it felt as though his flesh were being burned deeper and deeper, some fire there seeking his heart. He reversed Fleam in desperation and grasped the blade in his scarred hand, then dug the point into his own body, digging deep, seeking the hot mote that was tunneling there. Then he flicked the blade outward, tearing free a gobbet of smoking flesh. The pain was bearable again, that of a normal wound.

He lunged forward out of the ring of mariners, and flailed into the crowded enemy about Gallico. The scimitar sang joyously in his hand and seemed lighter than ever before. He hacked and sliced and slashed with his own blood soaking him from shoulder to thigh, and cried out as he saw Gallico fall to his knees, the halftroll tearing at his own flesh in his agony, ripping away ragged collops of burning meat from his body.

The ring of men fell apart. Rol saw Mihal yanked from his feet to disappear into a scrum of the enemy, legs kicking uselessly. Creed and Mochran were fighting grimly in a little war of their own, and Bartolomew was standing over Rusaf’s body with a bloody cutlass in each hand. Gallico was buried under a squirming mass of Ur-men, the ground puddled with his blood.

A light began to shine in the depths of Fleam’s blade and in Rol’s eyes. They flared white and seemed to smoke without heat. The black desert night was transformed into a capering chiaroscuro of leaping shadows as the radiance grew. Rol cried out, but the sound was strange, too deep for a human chest to hold. His eyes were two holes through which the sun of another world speared its unbearable brightness. The Ur-men hesitated, backed away. Rol’s cry grew until there was no vestige of humanity left within it. There was a terrible stink of burnt flesh. Fleam was a spike of pulsing argent that stood vertical one moment, flickering so that it no longer seemed bladelike at all but had the silhouette of something else that shrieked with the fevered laugh of a woman. It came down again in Rol’s fist and began to scythe through the Ur-men as though harvesting corn.

To Elias Creed and the others watching, cutlasses momentarily forgotten in their limp hands, it seemed as though Rol grew in stature and his very face changed. In his grip the scimitar steadied and coalesced again until it was a molten bar five feet long which he wielded two-handed, and he towered above them as it snicked and clicked through bone and meat and sinew, scattering body parts and black gore far and wide, dispersing his attackers. They saw a terrible, mirthless rictus on Rol’s face, and the light spilled out of his body until it seemed they were watching some towering creature with luminous wings that arced and beat with thunderous concussions high in the air above their heads. All but Creed cowered on the ground, hiding their eyes. The Ur-men gave a collective shriek, and those who could began running as fast as their wiry legs would take them, but the winged furious light followed them and slaughtered them left and right, hovering above the ground and hunting them down by the light of its terrible eyes.

Eighteen

THE GORTHOR FLATS

CREED FOUND HIM HALF A MILE FROM THE FIGHT,
having followed the trail of gore and body parts, a dark road of slaughter. It was coming on to dawn and there was a light behind the horizon in the east. Soon the sun would spring up to begin its daily battery of the parched earth.

Rol lay on his face with his sword beneath him. When Creed turned him over he could see the burnt hole in the shoulder of his tunic, but there was no other mark on him. He pulled the charred material to one side, to find nothing greater than a small rose-pink scar on Rol’s flesh. He was soaked with black blood that was crackling and dry now, but not another mark was on him. He seemed to be asleep.

Creed rubbed his filthy hands over his face, and then trickled a few drops of water from the skin he carried onto Rol’s eyes. They opened, blinking at once, and Fleam came up defensively, halting a handspan from the convict’s nose. “Welcome back to the world,” he said quietly.

Rol sat up and seized the waterskin, squeezed a stream out of its nozzle into his mouth. He shut his eyes again and said, “Tell me what happened.”

“Mihal is gone—dead, I suppose. Rusaf is hurt, but will live if his wound does not go bad. Gallico …” He hesitated. “I do not think he will make it through the day.”

The eyes opened again. As they did, the first dawn light sprang swift as an arrow’s flight above the flat pan of the horizon, and kindled in them a luminosity, a brightness that had nothing human about it at all. Then the swift-rising sun rode up farther, and they were Rol Cortishane’s eyes again, striking, but those of a weary man, no more. Creed took back the skin, corked it, straightened with his own small hurts shouting for attention all about his arms and shoulders.

“We cut the spittle that burned out of Gallico, and bound up what we could, but they have carved his back to bloody rags. He lost more blood than I ever saw any creature lose and live, and they sucked it out of him too.”

“Take me to him,” Rol said, and he stood up, sheathing the marvelous scimitar. He set a hand on Creed’s shoulder and Elias had to make an effort not to cringe from that touch.

“You remember what you did last night?”

“Partly. It happened once before, or something like it.” Then he grinned weakly at the expression on Creed’s face. “I am not a ghost, Elias, nor a demon either. You need not fear me.”

“Well, you saved our lives, at any rate. They’d have slaughtered us all if you—if that hadn’t happened.”

They walked back to the dark knot of men huddled on the white blazing blankness of the Flats.

“Bartolomew and Rusaf want to turn back for the coast and make for Ordos. They say this place is cursed.”

“They are right,” Rol said mildly. “But no one will turn back.”

Creed studied him as discreetly as he could. It was the same Cortishane he had come to know and esteem in the past few weeks, but there was something different, all the same. Something in the
Cormorant
’s first mate had hardened. Whatever had occurred in the night could happen again—would happen again. Would the white winged light always know friend from foe when it came burning out of this man’s eyes?