Bazil Broketail (44 page)

Lessis pressed her lips together tightly, hoping against hope.

A few moments later the second bat returned, this time with some better news. This bat had negotiated a staircase and reached the uppermost level of the fortress inside the mountain. There it had flashed through upper rooms that were crowded with people.

A reception for Thrembode, of course. The bat had been chased out a window then and had returned to her immediately. She stroked its fierce little head while keeping an eye out for its needle-like teeth. They were hardworking little souls but quite liable to bite. Their eyes met and it squeaked something meaningless to her and lofted away to hunt for its food.

Abruptly she turned, Sergeant Duxe had crept up behind her. She tensed and her hand was about to fly to her dirk when she saw that his sword was sheathed and his demeanor was unthreatening. At the same time his face was fixed in a funereal expression of utmost gloom.

“Is everything ready, Sergeant?” she said.

He came closer, his eyes burned with a strange light.

“You never said anything did you?” he whispered. “To the captain, I mean.”

“No.”

His face did not change but she sensed a wild leap within.

“Why not?”

She smiled; in the near distance she heard a bat cluttering on its way back to her.

“Sergeant Duxe, you have great heart and strength. I believe you were simply led astray by the hotheads from Talion. I expect such things from men like them. You were under strain, that is all.”

“Is that what you will say in your report? If we return.”

“I will not even mention the incident in my report, Sergeant. If I survive to make one.”

“I do not understand.”

“The legions need men like you, Sergeant—it is not my place to destroy your career. The incident is done with. I have forgotten it, can you?”

He stood there shaking his head, the anger still burning in him.

“You bewitched us, all the men, they are in a daze.”

“They are heroes, Sergeant, just like yourself. They will be remembered and sung about for hundreds of years.”

He grimaced. “Ach, but we will all die here. The Talions were right about that much.”

“Not if I can help it. Not if we pull together. Our enemy will relax his guard now. He thinks we are already fleeing south, pursued by the black troopers.”

Duxe plainly wished that he was.

“All that I ask, Sergeant, is that you play your part when the time comes, which will be soon.”

The third bat returned and flew directly into her hair, where it squeaked out its tiny report.

Duxe shuddered at the sight and turned away.

But Lessis stroked the little creature’s forehead and then let it loose to hunt in the sky. Now she knew not only where to find Thrembode but even a way to escape once she had him.

It was time for the final throw of the dice.

After a check of the road which showed it empty, Lessis and Duxe moved up onto it and started forward to the gates. Behind them came ten men, dressed only in tunics and leggings, with their heads shaved like Teetol braves. These men were bound together with Baguti thongs, neck to wrist, like any other slave gang wending its awful way across the steppes to this gateway to hell, except that these thongs were loose.

Behind these men came two soldiers on horseback, stripped to the waist like Baguti, with their sabers sheathed at their sides.

Duxe was also clad like a Bagut, and he carried a whip which he cracked over the heads of the “slaves” while he barked some choice insults at them in crude Baguti.

Lessis ran a careful eye over the assemblage. It was as close to perfect as she could hope to achieve. Duxe did look just like a slave driver; he had that same hardness in the face even though he was too blond and pale for a real nomad of the Gan.

In the horsemen’s saddlebags were a dozen short swords, ready for the right moment.

She was instantly aware of a number of eyes watching their progress as they climbed out of the mist. Everything depended on the sentries being slack enough not to raise an alarm. Parties like this came in frequently enough, even though this one had not been sighted before now.

At a single bugle call dozens of archers could appear on those ramparts and then they would air die swiftly. As they walked along Lessis tried not to imagine the arrows and how they would feel as they sank into her back.

But no bugle blew.

They reached the gate at last, and after Duxe hammered on it with the stock of his whip, a voice bellowed from within.

“Who goes there?”

Lessis replied in the harsh tongue of the Teetol.

“Slaves, good strong slaves for the Doom. Open up.”

There was a shouting match going on inside.

Among the men standing outside the gate the tension was rising to an unbearable level. If they were detected here they would be slaughtered in a matter of moments, or worse by far, captured.

The watch was back. “It’s past the curfew, the gates can only open to a warrant.”

“I have a warrant, you fool, from the magician Thrembode himself.”

“Ah hah, more of the gallant Thrembode’s work, eh? They are making a fuss of him tonight! He came in only a few hours ago, whole place has been in an uproar since.”

Lessis shrugged. “These slaves are his, although he has yet to pay for them.”

The small, inset door in the gate was opening with a squeak of dry hinges.

“Hush yer complaining mouth, woman! None of yer Baguti complaints about the gallant Thrembode now!”

“The gallant Thrembode owes good gold for these men. If he wants to buy on credit again from the slavers of the Gan he’d best pay me.”

“Oh, he’ll pay you alright.” The watchman had emerged. He was a short but massive fellow with the look of an imp about him. His eyes were overlarge and seemed to protrude from his skull while his mouth and teeth were also too great for his jaw.

“Well, let’s see ‘em,” he snarled, unloosing his whip.

The men in the thongs kept their eyes lowered, mute and submissive.

“So what have you got here then?” said the watchman, and he pulled out a young man with a very light shade of skin.

“Renegade from the coast,” said Lessis, who ducked her head inside the gate while the watchman was busy poking the youth.

“Hah, bet he wishes he’d sailed away to somewhere else, eh? Bet he wishes he wasn’t coming in here, eh? They’ll take his manhood off and put him in the bilges here. It kills them in half a year but the Doom don’t mind, he wants to depopulate the coast.”

Lessis had noted the other guards were playing a game of dice in their guardroom, none were paying attention.

The watchman pushed the pale-skinned soldier back into the line and then exchanged a long slow glare with Duxe, who had moved forwards to shove the man away from the “slaves.”

For a moment their eyes burned into each other. The watchman spat loudly, then turned to Lessis.

“Alright, let me see the warrant you have from the excellent Thrembode.”

Lessis was reaching into her cloak, but instead of a scroll she brought out a shining dirk that slashed through the watchman’s throat and reduced his noise to a gurgle. Duxe finished him with a heavy blow to the back of the head that dropped him to the road.

The “slaves” crowded round the horses, there was a clink of weaponry. Cowstrap, the burly smith, bent down and took the watchman’s sword; others were already pressing inside.

A brief fight erupted in the guardroom. The guards were still concentrating on the dice when the men of Marneri burst in on them. The surprise was complete, and fatal, and then the guards were down and their weapons were taken.

Lessis’s force fanned out around the gate area, keeping out of sight. Things were quiet at this hour on this, the lowest level of the mountain fortress. Only the occasional guard keeping to his lonely rounds was to be found.

Lessis was gratified to see that her bats had reported quite accurately concerning the layout of the place. Behind the main gate a wide passage with a curved ceiling drove deeply into the mountain. Along this passage were many doors of wood with steel fittings. Lanterns every fifty feet were the sole illumination.

Lessis sent Lagdalen back outside the gate to signal to the rest of the men and the dragons, waiting below.

They emerged from their hiding place and charged up the pathway to the gate, which swung open to admit them.

At the last moment someone above looked down and saw the dragons; instantly a wail of alarm went up.

Inside the gate Lessis led them to an open passage, which ran to the base of a wide stair. A door opened and an imp emerged, bearing a tray of goblets. From the room behind the imp came the sound of many imps at their feed. The imp stood rock still, eyes bulging in its flattened head, then it dropped the tray with a crash and started to scream.

A bolt from Relkin Dragonboy’s bow took it in the throat a moment later and dropped it to the stone-flagged floor. Lessis gently closed the door on the feeding imps, who never looked up from their plates.

But above them the alarm was definitely raised; they had to keep moving quickly. Softly they sped up the stairs to a landing and then to the second floor.

On this floor there was the sound of many occupants. Doors were opening and closing down the passages, voices murmured. Above them they heard feet thundering on stairs and voices raised.

And then someone below found the dead imp on the floor. There was a bellow of rage and then more noise and then uproar.

“Quickly,” said Lessis, running up the stairs to the third level as fast she could go.

She was tiring. After such a long and exhausting pursuit she was reaching the limits of her strength.

“Gazak! Dragon!” shrieked a voice, and more doors crashed open. A roar of voices was coming from the first floor now.

“Gazaki! Dragons!”

At the third level they were met by a pair of wide-eyed guards who turned and ran at the sight of Lessis surrounded by Kesepton, Weald and Cowstrap, steel glittering in their hands.

A door burst open and another man emerged; he saw Nesessitas coming up behind Cowstrap, and bolted back inside and locked the door from within.

Lessis paused—to make a mistake here would be fatal. She looked both right and left and then chose the right side. At the first turn in the passage, where it split again in two directions, they were met by five imps and a guard, gibbering in fear. The other guard was gone.

Swords flashed, Kesepton cut down the nearest imp, the others fled and the guard fled with them. Following them down the passage came Lessis and everyone else.

Another door opened, and Lessis heard the sound of festivities somewhere beyond it, many human voices raised in excited chatter.

Terrified imps in servant garb ran shrieking ahead of them. A man in the black uniform of Tummuz Orgmeen drew a sword and was slain by Liepol Duxe.

Then they reached a pair of wide double doors. From behind it came the sound of many people. The alarm had not yet reached this room.

Lessis turned to the nearest dragon, it was Bazil of Quosh.

“Sir Bazil, would you be so kind as to break open these doors?”

Bazil’s teeth flashed; he stepped forward and hurled himself shoulder first into the doors. They swayed but held. Bazil uttered an oath, stepped back and hurled himself at the door a second time. This time the doors gave way. Indeed, they exploded open and Bazil’s great body surged in, tripped and crashed to the floor in front of four hundred pairs of horrified eyes.

There was a guard holding a ceremonial pike right over the prone dragon, but the man was so surprised he fell down in a dead faint before anyone could kill him.

Pandemonium broke out. Two hundred wives of the ranking guards in the fortress rose with a collective shriek. Their men either shrieked with them or tried to draw steel and defend themselves.

At the head of the room was a table, and behind it was Thrembode the magician. Thrembode, to his credit, was not surprised for long. Within a second he had realized the peril, understood the incredible risk the witch had taken to catch him, and rose and hurled himself towards the nearest exit, seizing Besita and forcibly lifting her in front of him.

The princess screamed in shock at being torn from a conversation with the wife of the High Warden about the fashions in Kadein and borne away without a word by Thrembode.

Then she glimpsed a dragon and saw a girl with a determined face and a small sword in her hand leap onto a table and jump across Thrembode’s path. The magician cursed and dropped her; Besita fell roughly to the floor.

The girl’s face was faintly familiar to Besita, from Marneri, a high family, serving in the Novitiate. As she lay on the floor trying to get a breath, she watched Thrembode lash out at the girl with his dirk and then attempt to kick her.

The girl ducked the dirk and parried the kick with her own., inside the magician’s poorly aimed blow. He had to dart aside to avoid the next thrust with her sword.

A woman trying to escape tripped and staggered into Thrembode’s side. He seized her and shoved her, spinning, into the girl with the sword. They fell over together.

And then Besita was jerked to her feet and dragged through the serving door at the rear of the chamber.

As the princess disappeared, Lessis was only a few yards behind her, struggling to push a way through a throng of panicked wives. Lessis was on the verge of screaming with frustration. They were so close this time! She pointed to the serving entrance—Kesepton was there, he had seen them.

“Through that door!” she shouted.

Kesepton shoved the ladies of the fortress out of the way, ignoring the ripping of gowns and lace.

Lessis broke free of a clinging fat woman who was screaming frenziedly at the top of her lungs. Others were breaking through to join them. A table went over with a crash, and plates and cutlery flew through the air.

Steel rang on steel all around them as those guards with the presence of mind to remember their weapons drew their swords and engaged the invaders. Dragon swords were out, however, and everything, including the tables, was being cut to kindling in the process.