Swords: 08 - The Fifth Book Of Lost Swords - Coinspinner’s Story (4 page)

      
And now a rain that promised to be heavy had begun. Not that Rostov was entertaining any thought that he might be beaten. That was not his way. Nor were any of the men or women he had chosen for this pursuit resigned to defeat—at least none of them had yet been ready to admit such a thought in Rostov’s hearing.

The General, knowing of a shortcut alternative to a portion of the route that the fleeing Culmians had doubtless taken, had naturally enough led the Tasavaltan force that way. Had it not been for the landslides and other delays, they would have been in time to cut their quarry off. Even as matters stood, he thought that they had gained several hours on the Sword thieves.

      
Rostov had not been able to catch a glimpse of the enemy since leaving Tasavalta. But during the last kilometer or two of the pursuit, fresh animal droppings and other signs indicated that the Culmians were now very close ahead.

      
Karel the wizard had ridden for the most part in grim silence, but certain subtle signs indicated that he was not idle. The few words uttered by the old man suggested that he was having very little luck with any of his spells today; he was not accustomed to failure, but given the overwhelming nature of the magical opposition, anything except failure would have been surprising.

      
Now one of Rostov’s officers halted his mount beside the General’s. “Sir, I wonder if the thieves will be arranging an ambush for us? There’s a place just ahead that’s so ideal I doubt they’ll pass it up.”

      
The General grunted. He had been thinking along the same lines, and in fact that was why he had chosen this spot to halt. So ideal was the terrain ahead for such a tactic that Rostov’s instincts informed him that a Culmian ambush must be there, though there was no way to confirm its presence until the point was reached. A wind had sprung up in the last hour, fierce enough to ground the little flying beasts he would otherwise have used as scouts.

      
Having foresightedly brought Stonecutter with him, the General, after surveying the landscape more thoroughly, now put the Sword of Siege to work to open up a new trail. His intention was to bypass the probable ambush site narrowly, and, if at all possible, take the ambushers from behind.

      
One source of worry was the fact that Stonecutter invariably produced a pounding noise as it worked. But on reflection he thought this was not likely to prove a fatal difficulty. Out here in the open, Stonecutter’s working noise would probably be unheard by people who might be waiting on the other side of a thick wall of rock. And the same howling wind that was keeping the winged scouts out of the air would tend to rush the sound away.

      
The wizard, for whom nothing had worked properly since setting out on this pursuit, was now beginning to adopt a fatalistic attitude. “I fear that if Coinspinner is arrayed against us…” Karel, with a shrug, let his words trail off.

      
But Rostov, as usual when going into action, was ferocious and implacable. “You tell me that the enemy has powerful weapons. I say so do we. And I also say damn their weapons. If we are in the field against them, we must find some way to attack.” Almost as an afterthought, he added: “All of them won’t have stayed to entertain us in an ambush. Part of their force almost certainly is bearing Woundhealer on ahead—and it’s a good bet that those people will have taken Coinspinner too.”

      
Working with Stonecutter in the driving rain, a pair of the General’s men were already hacking an incline into the side of a cliff that would otherwise have been utterly impassable. They were incorporating stair-steps at the steeper parts, and making the whole wide and gentle curved enough for riding-beasts to use. Naturally they had begun their labors at a spot out of sight of the enemy above. One man wielded the Sword of Siege, cutting limestone like so much butter, digging stairs rapidly out of the side of a cliff, while his helper slid the freshly carved blocks away and over the edge.

      
A few shock troops, with Rostov himself and Karel among them, were to climb the newly created stair and take the enemy from the rear, while the bulk of the General’s three squadrons waited, mounted, ready to attack the ambush frontally at the proper moment.

      
And Rostov had one more weapon to bring into action. Calling a well-guarded pack-animal forward, he reached into one of its cargo panniers and pulled forth Sightblinder. The Sword of Stealth looked an exact duplicate of its god-forged brothers, save for the different symbol, in this case the sketch of a human eye, that it bore on its black hilt. At least it looked so to the one who held it; gazing at the reactions in the faces of his people looking at him now, Rostov knew that each of them was seeing something or someone even more awesome than their General.

      
A few moments later, halfway up the newly created path with Sightblinder still in hand, waiting for the stonecutting to be finished, Rostov was beginning to wish that he had brought dogs, to help pick up the scent when other indications of a trail were lacking. Well, it was too late to worry about that now. Beside him, Karel had his eyes closed and was muttering—trying to ward off Coinspinner’s imminent counterblow, perhaps. That stroke was coming, no doubt, in some form, if the Sword of Chance was still in the possession of the ambushers. But there was nothing Rostov could do about it, and so he refused to let it worry him.

      
In a matter of only a few minutes the necessary rough stairs had been completed. The chunks of rock removed, sliced loose as easily as so many bits of melon, had been pushed tumbling into a depth so great that there was no need to worry about the sounds of their falling alerting the foe.

      
And now Rostov, disguised by the Sword of Stealth, and his handful of picked men, moving close past the pair of rock-cutters, wind and rain blasting in all their faces, were at the top of the new pathway.

      
No one in sight, as yet. But there was another little plateau not far above. The General, climbing ponderously and carefully, motioned sharply with his arm, and a young scout, much more agile than Rostov, clambered past him.

      
After peering cautiously through a notch at the top of the cliff, the lithe young soldier turned his head back and whispered: “No one in sight.”

      
That, as Rostov understood, could mean that he had chosen exactly the right spot for his outflanking movement; or of course it could mean that no ambush had been set here after all, and he and his men were only wasting time.

      
Silently he gestured a command, and in silence his small party of picked men moved rapidly forward, until all were solidly established upon level ground. Armed with the Sword of Stealth, he moved ahead of them. The actual location of the supposed ambushers was still above them and in front, but each side was now shielded safely from the other by an intervening wall of rock. From the point where Rostov had now got his men, however, the supposed enemy strong point could be outflanked by an easy climb along a natural formation.

      
At the next level place they reached, one of the men just behind Rostov, a good tracker, paused and murmured: “A lot of hoof prints. They seem to have split up here, General. One of them at least—yes, I think only one-—rode off in that direction, to the west. And what’s this? An arrow, definitely Culmian, broken against a rock. It hasn’t been here long, but it wasn’t shot in our direction. I think it must have been aimed at the man who rode alone. Can it be that luck’s deserted them?”

      
Rostov squinted westward through the shreds of driving mist. “Well, that western trail lies open to us if we want to follow it. But I don’t think we do. Not just yet at least. No ambush there, so it’s not the route they’re fighting to defend.”

      
Karel, puffing with the climb on foot, but so far keeping up, asked him: “Can it be they’re splitting up in an effort to confuse us?”

      
“If so, it seems unlikely they’ll succeed. Let’s move on up the rest of the way, as quietly as we can. Then we’ll be behind their ambush if there is one. We’ll see how many of ’em are ready to stand and fight.”

* * *

      
A few minutes later, the Crown Prince Murat of Culm had seen the failure of the ambush he had so carefully and, as he thought, so cleverly arranged. Howling fiends in blue and green, only slightly outnumbering his own small rear guard, but with the great advantage of surprise, had fallen upon them from the rear. And at the head of the attackers, almost crushing resistance by sheer visual shock, had moved a perfectly lifelike image of the very Queen of Culm herself. At least two of Murat’s men had thrown down their weapons at the sight.

      
As the Crown Prince lay trying to regain his senses, after being felled by a blow to the back of his head, he could not at first understand how he had been overcome. His trap had been bypassed by people who must have somehow made their way up a sheer cliff, where he had thought that even a mountain goat would be helpless. And then, the seeming presence of the Queen—

      
Only when Murat saw a Sword in one of the attackers’ hands, and the thought of Stonecutter occurred to him, followed by that of the Sword of Stealth, did he begin to realize the truth.

      
In their planning for this mission, the Culmian intelligence had failed—they had never guessed that Stonecutter and Sightblinder would still be available to their new enemies.

      
Victorious Rostov, proven right in his tactical predictions, was still in a grim mood. His own men had suffered only minor wounds. Five Culmians were dead, and one, their commander, was taken prisoner. But neither Coinspinner nor Woundhealer was here with the vanquished enemy.

      
The Crown Prince’s head wound proved to be not serious. He was conscious in time to watch Rostov’s cavalry squadrons come pouring relentlessly through the narrow passage he had almost died trying to defend. And presently he had recovered sufficiently to mutter a few words of anguished defiance.

      
Rostov, grim-visaged and surly, made little of the fact of his sole prisoner’s high rank. At the General’s orders, the captive was treated much as any other prisoner would have been, and as soon as he was able to stand again, he was tied into the saddle and stirrups of a captured mount.

      
“Where are the Swords?” Rostov then demanded of him. “I know that two at least were with you.”

      
Murat sighed. “Woundhealer is on its way to my Queen.”

      
“We’ll see about that.”

      
Karel, frowning, signed that he wanted to ask the prisoner a question. “And Coinspinner, Prince? I have good reason to believe that it is no longer with the other Sword.”

      
Rostov frowned in surprise on hearing this.

      
Murat shook his head. There dawned on him a vague hope that these men, whose outrage and fury he could understand, and who came armed with Swords of their own, might possibly be able to avenge the treachery of Kebbi.

      
He drew a deep breath. “The Sword of Chance is now in a traitor’s hands,” he said. Briefly he confessed how he had foolishly handed over Coinspinner, with his own hands, into those of Lieutenant Kebbi, and what his cousin had done thereafter.

      
The fierce winds that Coinspinner had somehow caused to arise were abating now, and it had become possible for the Tasavaltan beast master to get his winged scouts and messengers into the air. One flyer, a magical cross between bird and mammal, was sent home to Sarykam with word for the Princess on the progress made thus far. Others were dispatched to try to locate the fleeing Culmians.

      
Taking several items from his mount’s saddlebags, Karel went to work. Soon he was able to confirm to his own satisfaction that Coinspinner was now somewhere to the west of here, while Woundhealer lay to the south.

      
Wizard and General conferred briefly, and then the scar-faced Rostov turned back to his prisoner. “Well, Crown Prince. Can you ride?”

      
“Bound into this saddle as I am, it would seem that I have no choice.”

      
“That is correct. Prepare to do so.”

      
It was going to be a grim and uncomfortable ride back to Sarykam, Murat thought to himself. Though once there in the Tasavaltan capital, he vaguely supposed, things might not be too bad. Doubtless, once he was there, he would in some way be accorded special treatment because of his rank. Even a room in the Palace could be a possibility.

      
And whatever else happens to me, he thought, I am going to see more of that lovely, lonely Princess. Murat and his own wife had been for some time now on bad terms. Some part of him was curiously pleased that he was soon going to see Kristin again, even though she could hardly greet him with anything but the anger reserved for a treacherous enemy.

* * *

      
After the wizard and the General had taken counsel again, they dispatched most of their force, under Rostov’s military second-in-command, armed with Stonecutter against further ambushes, in pursuit of the Culmians carrying Woundhealer. None of the Tasavaltans had much more to say to Murat for the time being. But he was not slow to realize that he was not being taken back to Sarykam, at least not immediately. Instead the two leaders, armed with Sightblinder, with himself as their prisoner, and no more than half a dozen troopers as escort, were setting out upon the trail of Lieutenant Kebbi and the other stolen Sword.