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Jo Clayton: Moongather

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Jo Clayton Moongather

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Tayyan shook her head, her short blonde hair shifting about her long face. “Don’t think so.” She brushed the pale shag out of her eyes. “How close do you think?”

“Couple turns behind us, but closing.” Serroi felt the injured ankle, ignoring Tayyan’s gasp of pain. “I don’t think anything’s broken. Can you walk?”

Tayyan lifted her head, squinted as lightning cracked the darkness again, grimaced as a hoarse yell sounded to be swallowed almost immediately by a thunder crash. “I’d better, hadn’t I.” Her short laugh was harsh, strained. She pushed away from the wall and limped a few steps, sweat beading her forehead, teeth clamped on her lower lip.

“Lean on me.” Serroi slid her arm around her shieldmate’s waist. “All right?”

Tayyan chuckled, an easier, more natural sound this time. “Fine, little one.” She ruffled Serroi’s tangled curls, then pressed her hand down on her shoulder, resting enough of her weight on the small woman to enable her to swing along at a fast walk.

Every glare that shattered the stifling blackness of the stormy night showed storehouses sharing sidewalls on each side of the winding street, blank stone faces two stories high locking them into the way that was looking more and more like a trap. A vinat run to the slaughter, Serroi thought. Maiden grant we find a sideway soon. Or we have to fight.

The street twisted again, an abrupt, almost right-angled bend. The two women staggered around the bend and stopped, dismayed, as the lightning showed them a solid stone wall blocking the passage-a warehouse, its massive ironbound doors the only break into two stories of rough-cut stone. Serroi looked up at Tayyan, touched the coil of rope on her weaponbelt. “You’re the climber. What’s the best way?”

Tayyan urged her forward, hobbling with her halfway to the end. Then she halted, gave Serroi’s shoulder a little push. “The warehouse. You climb, I’ll keep them off your neck.” She limped to one side of the street; her eyes fixed on the corner they’d just turned.

“But… Tayyan!”

The taller woman glanced back, grimaced. “Get a move on, will you? You’re going to have to haul me up as it is.”

Serroi stared down at shaking hands until they steadied, then she ran over the cobbles until she stood before the double doors. She unclipped the line from her weaponbelt, snapped on the small folding grapnel, began swinging the weighted rope in widening circles. She let it go. The rope went streaming upward, butted playfully at an overhanging beam, then fell back to clatter on the cobbles. Serroi’s breath whined in her throat as she pulled in the grapnel and swung it again, around and around until it hissed through the heavy air. When she let it go this time, she heard the grapnel clunk solidly home and saw the rope jerking like a thing alive in front of her. She drew her hand across her sweaty forehead, straightened her shoulders and turned.

Tayyan was standing in the middle of the street now, her hand on the hilt of her sword, her body balanced and alert in spite of her injured leg. Serroi breathed a prayer of thanks, then shouted, “Tayyan! Get your skinny self up this rope.” She reached for the bow clipped to the wide leather strap that passed diagonally across her back. “I can hold them off better with this.”

Tayyan snorted as she limped a few steps closer. “You first, love; you’ll have a better angle of fire from the roof.”

“Tayyan!”

“Don’t you argue or I’ll spank you black and blue when we get home, little windrunner.” She grinned. “Get!”

“Bully.”

Scrap.” Still chuckling, Tayyan turned to face the corner again. Lightning burned the images of four men out of the darkness. Her voice cutting through their shouts of triumph, she cried, “Go!”

Serroi ran at the rope and began hitching her way up it. A quarrel from a guard’s crossbow thudded against the stone and skittered off. Curses and the clank of sword on sword sounding behind her drove her faster and faster, up the rope; her arms burning with the intensity of her effort. Finally she swung herself over the parapet and collapsed onto the flat roof. A quarrel hummed past. She shifted position hastily and risked a glance over the edge.

Tayyan was down, a quarrel through the thigh of her injured leg. As Serroi watched, she struggled onto her knees, then onto her feet, using her sword as a brace until she was up. She lifted the sword and waited for the guards to attack.

They advanced cautiously; a Biserica trained meie, even one handicapped by a wound in the leg, was to be respected. Her back against the wall of the storehouse, she waited for them, calm, resolute and deadly.

Serroi unsnapped her bow and strung it. The man with the crossbow slapped a quarrel in place and clawed back the bowstring. She nocked an arrow and let it fly, taking him in the throat. Then she methodically dropped the other three as they scrambled for the bend in the street. Bow in hand she leaned over the parapet to call to Tayyan.

Tayyan took one step, slipped in her own blood and crashed onto the cobbles. The quarrel in her leg must have nicked an artery, for the blood was pumping out of her, gushing whenever she tried to move. She managed to drag herself a few feet. Her hands slipped and she went down; she raised her head, called hoarsely, “Serroi, help me.”

Serroi dropped her bow and started to swing back over the parapet. Three more guards plunged around the corner. She leaped back to the bow, pulled and loosed with the calm sureness trained into her by her years at the Biserica. As the last man toppled, the Norid stepped around the bend. His hands were raised. There was a sharp agony of light flashing between them, a small fireball. Serroi froze. He threw the fireball. It came at her, growing, growing.

Bow clutched forgotten in one hand, whimpering in terror, forgetting everything but her need to get away, Serroi fled over the roofs, sliding, leaping, blind and deaf. Lightning and thunder cracked around her. The wind rose, battered at her. Great drops of rain spatted down. She fled over the rooftops, eyes blind, mind numb, body only animal competent, leaving her shieldmate lying in her own blood, forgetting the oath she swore on sword and bow, caught in an agony of terror touched off by the dark figure of the sorcerer.

She fled until the roofs ended at the city wall, scrambled desperately onto the broad walkway and into an arrow slit then threw herself toward the uneasy water far below, not caring whether she lived or died.

She hit the water feet down, body vertical, slicing into it, going deep then fighting up, mind blank, body struggling to live. With the storm breaking over her, lightning almost continuous, the wind snatching at the water, turning the harbor into treacherous cross-chop, she swam blindly until she slammed into the side of a moored boat. Without hesitation she swung herself over the rail and lay gasping on the deck. As soon as she’d caught her breath, she fought the sail free of its cover and got it raised, slashed the mooring lines, and sent the boat into the heart of the storm, her tears mixing with the sea spray and the rain.

The wind drove the boat far out to sea before the storm dissipated and left her bobbing like a cork between great swells of water with no land in sight and little idea of what direction she was moving in. She unclamped cramped fingers from the tiller, uncleated the sheet and let the sail crumple down, then dropped her head on her knees, trying to summon the remnants of her strength. After a time she sat up, touched her forefinger gently to the soft warm green spot that sat like a third eye in the center of her forehead. With the spot quivering under her touch she desired land, then closed her eyes and moved her head in a slow half circle, trying to feel the pull that would tell her where she had to go.

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