A Life for Kregen

Chapter Nine

Jilian kept singing snatches of a silly little song as we jogged along in the suns shine the next day. We had all the world to ourselves, it seemed. The sky stretched emptily and the unending grassland was studded only with small trees and bushes, a wide heath that was, in truth, deceptive, for it extended merely between towns here in eastern Thadelm. The song concerned the comical efforts of a little Och maiden and a strapping young Tlochu youth to sort out the twelve limbs they possessed between them. I found Jilian’s song silly but enchanting. It is called The Conundrum of the Hyrshiv. The eventual solution the Och girl and the Tlochu boy worked out for themselves is ironical and funny; it is touching and true, though, for it illustrates that despite difficulties love, what is sometimes ludicrously called “True Love,” will find a way around problems of this physical kind.

She broke off singing and with that graceful turn of her head looked across at me and said, “You could, at least, Jak the Drang, Jikai, have found us zorcas.”

Her use of Jikai here was entirely sarcastic.

We rode hirvels. Now the hirvel is a perfectly good saddle animal. He is a stubby, four-legged beast looking not unlike a nightmare version of a llama with his tall round neck, cup-shaped ears and shaggy body and twitching snout. But he will carry you along if not as fleetly as a zorca or as powerfully as a nikvove in some comfort and despatch.

I said, “There has been enough killing for one night.”

“Deaths don’t frighten me.”

“I saw that. Can you tell me where you were trained?”

By my phraseology she understood that I was circumspect about the sororities. She laughed.

“There is no secret about where, Jak. That was at Lancival. Oh, a wonderful place, all red roofs and ivied walls and the gentle cooing of doves and the sliding gleam from the water well, that is a long time ago now.” She sighed and her laughter died. I judged that to a man with a thousand years of life, as I had awaiting me, her memory of a long time ago might seem as yesterday. Or not, given the terrors and the pains of the intervening period. She flashed her eyes at me. “But as to how, that you may ask and never get an answer.”

“I do not think I would choose to ask.”

“And you?”

“Here and there about the world-”

“Oh, really, Jak! If we are to be friends, as I sincerely hope, you must do better than that.”

“You would wish to be friends with me?”

Her regard on me wavered and she looked away. She shivered. “Better a friend than an enemy.”

“Well,” I said, trying not to be offended. “And I think if we are to be friends you must do better than that.”

“Mayhap I do not wish to be — friends.”

“As to that, we must let Opaz guide us.”

“Yes.”

“So how was it you were slave with the Pandaheem?”

Her face flushed up again in remembered terror and anguish, and, too, recollected anger.

“I served the Sisters well. At least, I think I did. I have some skill. But when the Troubles fell on Vallia, flutsmen came and I was taken. They dropped from the air like stones. We fought but were overborne. They are not — not nice, flutsmen.”

“Most, not all,” I agreed, equably. “And this Kov Colun?”

“I will say nothing of him save that I shall sink my talons into him, and rip him, and may then, if it pleases me, kill him.”

I nodded and the conversation died for a space.

After a time as we rode along and the motion of the hirvels jolted our livers, we regained a more pleasant atmosphere and she told me she was one of six children born to a shopkeeper in Frelensmot. He had been a happy, jolly man, and just rich enough to buy three slaves for the shop, which was, she said with a funny little toss of the head, a Banje store, a place where you could buy candy and sweets and toffee-apples and miscils and all manner of toothsome, mouthwatering trifles. But the shop fell on evil days and her father spilled a vat of boiling treacle on his foot and it never healed and that broke him. She herself was sent at first to the Little Sisters of Opaz, where she learned a great deal of how to be demure and polite and sew a fine stitch. Later she went — and here she hauled herself up in her tale, and regarded me with those eyes of hers slanting on me with the telltale surprise for herself that she had said so much.

“When I went to Lancival I learned what to do with a length of steel somewhat longer than a sewing needle.”

She laughed. “And I learned other things, also, and one day Kov Colun will find out how I can rip him up in a twinkling.”

Her hand reached back and stroked down the polished balass of the box. A sensuousness in the gesture reminded me of the way a great cat will turn her head and rub a paw down past her ear. Then Jilian laughed again, her head thrown back and the long line of her throat bared and free to the breeze.

“And you are just Jilian?”

“For you, Jak, just Jilian.”

“I see.” Well, it was no business of mine. Although she wouldn’t understand, I did not think we would go up the hill to fetch a pail of water together.

We would have to avoid habitations until we reached Vond, and any other riders we encountered would without doubt be hostile. The rendezvous with Barty and the others lay some way ahead and although I was in a fever of impatience to reach Vondium and attempt to discover where the main threat to the city would come, I had to tread cautiously. So we covered the dwaburs, talking and laughing, and keeping our weapons loose in their scabbards.

A scatter of black-winged warvols rose ahead of us. The scavenging birds would rip a body up, dead or half-dead; but they were a part of nature fulfilling a function and so must be treated on their own merits. We rode up to the mess hunkered by a grassy hillock.

The three zorcas were almost stripped down to the bone. The three jutmen because of their armor were not in so detailed a state of dissolution, although their faces were gone, and only three yellow skulls jutted above the corselet rims. Their weapons were gone, and although two of the arrows had been withdrawn, the third, broken in half, still shafted from the gaping eye socket of a skull. One always, in these circumstances, inspects the fletchings.

There was no sense in grieving over the three zorcamen. By their uniforms and insignia they were of the Second, Jiktar Wando Varon’s regiment. Stragglers, they must have been attempting to catch up with the main body, as we were, heading for the rendezvous.

The arrows were fletched with natural gray and brown feathers, and were of the length to be shot from a standard compound bow. “Hamalese?” said Jilian.

“Very likely, or their mercenary allies. We have a ways to go before we reach Vond. The river will set a barrier of some sort between us. Keep your eyes skinned.”

And that was an unnecessary injunction, to be sure.

The mercenaries turned out to be masichieri, very cheap and nasty examples of men earning a living hiring out as killers and pretending to be soldiers, and they found us as the twin suns were sinking into banks of bruised clouds and streaming a choked, opaline, smoky light over the grass.

“I make ten of them, Jak.”

“Yes.”

“Will that be five each, d’you think?”

They were infantry, armored in an assortment of harnesses, bearing a variety of weapons, and their bristly ferocious faces exhibited their joy at thus finding two lonely strangers at this time of the evening. They rose from the bushes and four of them bent bows upon us. They were joking among themselves.

“Best step down nice and easy, horter and hortera,” one shouted, very jocose, calling us gentleman and lady.

“Had I a bow-” began Jilian.

I said: “Put your head down, girl!”

I clapped in my heels, the Krozair longsword flamed a single brand of livid light against the sky and I leaped forward.

Three of the arrows were caught and deflected as the masichieri, startled, loosed. The third whistled past out of reach to my rear. Then I was in among them. The Krozair longsword — well, that brand of destruction is indeed a marvel, and this was a true Krozair brand, brought from Valka, the blade and hilt so cunningly wrought that the steel sings of itself as it thrusts and cuts. Four, five and then six were down before they even had time to consider what manner of retribution they had brought on themselves. I kneed the hirvel to the side and the Krozair blade hissed. Back the other way and a thraxter that came down at me abruptly checked, snapped across, and its owner went smashing backwards without a face. The remaining two were to my rear and I hauled the hirvel up squealing on his haunches and swung him about. His hooves clawed at the sunset. We were down and I was belting back, and saw a sight, by Krun!

One of the masichieri staggered away, his hands to his face, and between his clenching fingers spurted a crimson flood.

The other screamed as the whip coiled around his neck. He was dragged bodily up to Jilian’s hirvel. I saw her face. It was drawn and intent. I saw her left hand.

She did not wield a rapier.

As the shrieking wight was dragged in, struggling futilely against the coils of the lash, a steel taloned left hand raked out, glinting in the dying light, slashed all down his face. That cruel, steel curved claw ripped his face off as a mummer takes off a mask. Blood spouted. Jilian reined back and flicked her whip and allowed the body to drop.

She laughed.

Her left hand, gloved with taloned steel, a razor claw of destruction, glimmered darkly as she lifted it to me in triumph.