Janny Wurts - The Curse of the Mistwraith

At this, even Gnudsog reconsidered. ‘You could be right.’ Supporting evidence lay with the arrangements for the escape of the knacker’s brats. Arithon’s bribes had been lavish enough that hard measures had been needed to pry loose the names of which parties had treated with him. Etarra’s field captain scraped an itch underneath his right bracer. ‘Let’s prove Pesquil a sissy.’

Forty riders were dispatched to track the children. From the rear of the column, Pesquil watched them go, his narrow lips clamped in disdain. ‘Those lordly fops Gnudsog has to nursemaid didn’t listen. We’ll keep our distance, then.’

The mounted lieutenant at his elbow stopped fingering the scalplocks that fringed his saddle, and widened seamed eyes at his commander. ‘They’re going in with the army, you think? And you’d send our league riding after?’

‘Any trap laid by Deshans is bound to be placed deep in Strakewood.’ Head cocked in consideration, Pesquil picked his teeth with a fingernail. ‘We’ll go in, yes.’ He clipped out a breathy laugh. ‘With two whole divisions of garrison troops ahead, and another pair blundering on each flank, whatever surprise the barbarians fixed’ll be sprung before we try the trail. Even Steiven’s dirty tactics can’t murder ten thousand troops without exposure. We’ll win our bounties in the mop up.’

‘I hope your score’s well squared with Daelion Fatemaster.’ The lieutenant adjusted studded reins in laconic resignation. ‘They say we fight a sorcerer who weaves darkness. For myself, Sithaer, I’d always planned I’d die rich.’

As Etarra’s two score light riders crested the rise above the ford, six young boys snatched up javelins and bolted like hares for the forest. Whether they had defied their parents to play in the open, or whether they had been posted in plain view for bait became moot as the riders spurred their mounts and charged after them. They were quarry, and fear for their lives drove their flight. Flat out across dew-tracked greensward, enemies with drawn blades swept down at their heels. The boys made straight course for shelter, vaulting the switched back curves of marshy streamlets on the butts of their toy wooden weapons.

They were small and light, and shod in deerhide that made little mark on the hummocks, while the steel-rimmed hooves of the horses bit deep through the soft turf and sank. The riders were forced to take a zigzagging course over firm ground, or tear their mounts’ tendons in the bog. They shouted and whipped on their horses and brandished sabres in a show of blood-thirsty frustration, their orders plain. The clan boys were to be routed, not killed. Pursuit must hound them into Strakewood until they tired, then slacken off and appear to give up. Trackers would take over from there. The youngsters would be followed in stealth back to their parents’ encampment; a sensible plan, which pleased the garrison’s light horsemen, carefully chosen as fathers who might condone the slayings of headhunters, but who had little inclination themselves for the horror of skewering youngsters.

Hardbitten to bitterness by the atrocities of his profession, Gnudsog was not given to foolish chances.

His forty light riders crashed into the hazels and saplings that edged the forest just seconds behind the last straggler. Thickly tangled summer scrub swiftly isolated children from hunters. Crows startled up from feeding on blackberries flapped away with raucous calls of warning. Squirrels scattered chattering in alarm. Raked by briars and low branches, the horsemen determinedly pressed onward. Their mud-flecked mounts gouged through dead sticks and moss, the odd hoof-fall a dissonant chink of steel against buried scarps of granite.

Ahead, all but invisible in their deer hides, the barbarian children raced in fierce silence, the one towhead among them picked out in the gloom by the chance-caught flicker of filtered sunlight.

Intent on keeping him in sight, the lead rider never saw the wooden javelin left braced at an angle in the path. His mount gathered stride and cleared a rotten log, then crashed, shoulder down, impaled. Its scream of mortal agony harrowed the dawn-damp wood, while the rider, thrown headlong, struck a bough at an angle and broke his neck.

First casualty of the Deshir barbarians, he died with his eyes still open and the taste of blood on his tongue.

Attracted to the site by the thrashing convulsions of dying horseflesh, the survivors gathered and pulled up. With spur and rein they stayed their mounts’ panic, while the first man in called the verdict.

‘He’s stopped breathing.’

A still, stunned moment progressed to passionate contention over whether to stop now and call the army, or to ride down verminous whelps whose parents had trained them for murder.

‘Dharkaron’s Spear!’ raged one rider. ‘I’d say there’s no clever trap waiting! Or the Sithaer-begotten brats would just draw us on, and not bother stopping to kill!’

That outcry was silenced, and grimly, by an officer given his authority through Etarra’s pedigreed elite. ‘We stick with orders and track. One man will go back as spokesman. Lord Diegan’s no coin-grubbing headhunter. He may roust up the garrison. Else risk finding himself a laughingstock, as craven.’

Which recast the affair as rank insult, for a boy’s prank with a wooden spear to have killed a man before the armed might of Etarra.

Shouts of agreement endorsed this plan, while the dismounted volunteer asked for help. Willing hands lifted the slain man and tied him over the saddle for transport back to the main troop.

Fled in swift silence up the marshy course of Tal Quorin, the children were long since lost to sight. But in the beds of green moss, under the sills of the sedge clumps, water pooled in a flurried progression of footprints. These the iron-clad hooves of the destriers milled under, as the main strength of Etarra’s garrison ploughed past. The ground was left harrowed to brown mud that sucked and spattered, causing the horses to stumble, and the riders to curse as their tassels and trappings became begrimed. Lances hooked in the greenbriar, and the foot troops slogged silent to the rear.

The supply wagons perforce had stayed behind. If Gnudsog had opposed the decision to turn the main army up the riverbed, he knew better than to belabour the mistake. His mouth a grim slash in his hardened leather face, he brought his lancers forward with professional determination.

Noon passed. No ambush seemed in evidence. The fall of the floodplain sloped more steeply and the ground firmed, though the soil beneath its canopy of deep wood still reeked strongly of bog. Swarming gnats remained in force. The heavier shade at least curbed the growth of brambles, and as the footing improved so did spirits and eagerness. Aware for some time that the hemming effect of the hillsides was crowding his troops along the bank, Gnudsog consulted with Lord Diegan and received permission to regroup.

‘I mislike the feel of this entirely,’ he grumbled, his eyes on his men as their ranks wheeled and reformed to order despite the unsuitable terrain. The garrison split and regrouped, two companies to divide and cross the ridges on either side. These would advance up adjacent valleys and flank the main force along the river. Gnudsog kept ruminating in monologue. ‘Too easy.’

At his side, stripped of his helm to adjust a crest plume disarranged by low branches, Diegan raised his eyebrows. ‘Does everything have to be difficult?’

‘Here? Against Steiven’s clans?’ Gnudsog curled his lip and spat. ‘Yes.’

‘But the clan chief might not be in command,’ Lysaer pointed out, his regard, chilly blue, on the veteran captain, and his hands, lightly crossed, on his sword.

‘Well.’ Gnudsog cleared his throat. ‘Yon thieving little stoat of a sorcerer’s clever enough, if your cant to our council held truth.’ Unfazed before lordly affront, he grinned through his yellow, broken teeth. ‘You and my Lord Commander will ride behind with the second division. And if we go back proving you hazed the city ministers like the ninnies they are, so much the better. I like my killing quick, with the advantage of superior numbers. Should things fail to get grim, you can always strip me of rank. It’s my pension I’m risking, not your necks.’