Sister of the Sword

10

By the time the nomads entered Cedarsplit Gap, day was well advanced. Though tired from their all-night ride, not one wanted to stop. Before sunrise they had flushed a party of raiders camped on a ridge overlooking the pass. From them, they’d learned the ogres and raiders were close to capturing the town. Karada united the different segments of her band and set off immediately for the Valley of the Falls.

The Silvanesti, on foot, had fallen behind during the night but caught up at the ridge. Ironically, it was the elves who had the stiffest fight in the mountains.

As Karada had ordered, Balif led his soldiers to the cliff top and immediately ran into a force of five-score raiders. Outnumbered three to one, Balif attacked. The raiders had detected Karada’s large, mounted band moving through the pass and closed ranks in expectation of an assault on horseback. They did not expect thirty metal-armed Silvanesti on foot.

Balif spread his elves out in skirmishing order, taking a small pinnacle above the plateau first. From there, the Silvanesti hurled bronze-tipped javelins down on the tightly packed raiders.

Outflanked, half the raiders bolted there and then. The rest charged the elves with their long stabbing spears leveled. Balif drew his soldiers back on the crag where the raiders’ horses couldn’t reach them. The undisciplined raiders broke into small groups and attacked at will, which allowed Balif to pick them off, equally at will. By midday, the elf lord was master of the plateau.

Sending a messenger on a dead raider’s horse, Balif informed Karada he held the cliff tops. To his surprise, the messenger returned with Karada herself and an entourage of twenty nomads.

She looked over the field of Balif’s small victory. The elf lord, long hair tied back with a leather strap in nomad fashion, was sweating in the heat but as composed as ever.

“Well done,” she said. “How do they fight?”

“They’re fell foes. With better leadership, they’d have driven us off the mountain.”

They went to the edge of the high precipice and looked down on Yala-tene. Smoke drifted over the beleaguered town, and a mass of horsemen was milling about below the wall on the north end of the village. Whatever pangs of memory and loss Karada felt looking at her brother’s home she quickly suppressed.

“Pakito!”

“Aye!” The giant appeared at his chiefs side.

“Take two out of three in the band and hit those yevi-spawn! Go now!”

“Aye, Karada!” Pakito kissed Samtu and started shouting orders. His booming voice carried across the open plateau, putting the heat of battle into everyone’s veins.

“Bahco! Wait here with the third that Pakito doesn’t take,” Karada ordered. The young nomad grimaced with disappointment but did as she said.

Beramun slipped in beside Karada. “Can you see the ogres? How many do you think there are?”

Karada shaded her eyes with her hands. Her vision was proverbially keen, but even she couldn’t distinguish ogres from men at this distance, and she said so.

Hawk eyes still fastened on the scene below, she suddenly exclaimed, “By my ancestors! On the valley floor, there—folk on foot. Do you see?” Beramun and Balif agreed they did. “Do they look green to you?”

Balif frowned. “They do.”

“The Jade Men!” Beramun breathed.

The grim calm of the nomad chieftain gave way to the fury of Amero’s sister. “Bahco!” Karada said, voice cracking with rage. “Take the rest of the band down there and get them!”

“Yes, chief. Do you want prisoners?”

“I want corpses! Those are the snakes who killed my brother! Not one of them is to live, Bahco! Kill them all!”

The dark warrior nodded gravely and departed.

Beramun stared after him, her hand resting on the mark on her chest. Strangely, when she’d escaped Yala-tene to search for Karada, the green brand had saved her life. The Jade Men had captured her but, seeing their master’s sign, had let her go, thinking she was one of them. Their calm assurance had frightened her, but she’d proven she was not Sthenn’s tool, hadn’t she? She was returning with Karada and her nomad warriors.

“I must get to the village as soon as possible,” Beramun said. “May I go with Bahco?”

Karada glanced at Beramun and at Mara, standing behind her and quietly observing everything. “All right,” the chieftain said. “Leave Mara here, and mind what Bahco tells you. He leads in my place.”

Soon only Karada, Mara, Balif, and his elves remained on the cliff. Anyone else might have felt vulnerable being surrounded by armed former enemies, but not Karada. She knew Balif well enough by now to know he would not try any treacherous coup.

They remained overlooking the scene until Pakito’s column hit the raiders from behind. Zannian’s men were crowded in close to the wall, awaiting their chance to come to grips with the weakening villagers, and they never knew what hit them. Pakito, disdaining the use of bows, closed with spear and sword.

“That’s it!” Karada cried, racing along the edge of the cliff, following the fight. One wrong step, and she would have plunged hundreds of paces down the mountain. She was oblivious to the danger. “Drive in! Keep them against the wall, Pakito. No room to maneuver! Give them no room!”

Turning suddenly, Karada sprang onto her horse. “Why am I here? To battle!”

Mara said, “Take me with you!”

Karada gave the girl her hand. “Hold on!” she said as Mara scrambled aboard. “If you fall off on the way down, I’m not stopping to pick you up!”

Mara wrapped both arms around Karada’s narrow waist. The nomad chief waved to Balif, who mustered his elves and started them jogging into Cedarsplit Gap. At a bone-jarring gallop, Karada passed the Silvanesti and hurtled down the slope, drawn by the intoxicating tumult of battle.

The Jade Men formed a circle around Nacris, each facing outward. The youth who’d led the killers after Amero said, “Mother, we await your will.”

“Good boys. Be patient. She will come.”

The din of battle waxed and waned behind them as Zannian tried to bludgeon his way into Yala-tene. More distant was the noise of Ungrah and his ogres resuming their attack, having now demolished the west baffle and part of the outer wall. The sound of ogre war drums could be heard again throughout the Valley of the Falls.

It was high summer, and the Jade Men suffered in the heat, though they wore nothing but green kilts and leggings. They made no complaints and kept formation as the hot sun beat down on them. The ground around them became stained with their dripping sweat.

A strong breeze blew down Cedarsplit Gap, driving eddies of dust before it. The Jade Men on the east side of the circle sniffed the air and immediately stiffened with alarm. They looked to Nacris, reclining in the litter, the javelin still on her lap.

“Mother—”

“Yes, my child. I know. Horses are coming. Are you ready?”

They were.

“Present your arms.”

Each Jade Man knelt on one knee, butting the end of his long spear against his foot. Their circle was now a fence of keen points.

Tiny mounted figures appeared on the cliffs overlooking the valley. Their horses were taller than the ponies the raiders rode, and most were light-colored—tan, gray, white. They stood out boldly against the darker stone of the cliffs.

A heavy cloud of dust rose from the pass, soaring as high as the cliffs around it. The drone of massed hoofbeats gradually overcame the tumult of the battle for Yala-tene, and the first riders emerged from Cedarsplit Gap. Obviously scouts, they took in the scene and reentered the pass. Moments later, a column of riders six abreast burst into view. They thundered down the trail, making for the rear of Zannian’s band and veering away from the Jade Men’s position. Nacris said nothing. The Jade Men held their places.

The moving column of nomads passed within a hundred paces of the Jade Men. The riders saw the strange, green-painted youths on open ground but held their course to hit the engaged raiders hard. A gigantic melee developed, with hundreds of horses churning up the dry earth, filling the air with dust.

A second band of nomads descended the pass in a more leisurely fashion. They halted briefly, then came toward Nacris at a steady walk.

“Steady, children,” she said. “Remember your Master! He will hear of how well you fight today!”

The nomads spread out, plainly seeking to encircle their unmoving enemy. Nacris admired their tall mounts, their buff deerskins, and tanned, healthy faces. She’d been one of them once and remembered how it felt to have sound limbs, a good horse, and the endless plain as your domain.

At a distance of forty paces, the nomads halted. They put aside their spears and swords and took strange devices in their hands—slender staves of wood, their two ends joined by a taut length of cord.

Nacris furrowed her brow. What was this?

Each rider fitted a little spear to the cord. That was enough to warn Nacris these were weapons of some sort. She cried, “Jade Men! At them!”

With a concerted shout the green-skinned youths threw themselves forward. The nomads waited, implacable, drawing back the cords on their odd weapons, stretching the staves into deep arcs. When released, the little spears were thrown with incredible force. The air was filled with the thrum of tight strings and the hiss of flying feathered-tufted missiles.

It should have been over in a few heartbeats—two hundred nomads loosing arrows at less than twenty-five targets. Yet, the fight did not go that way. Slender green bodies twisted and spun, dodging the first volley of arrows sent at them. Screaming in high-pitched, boyish voices, the Jade Men came on. Unnerved, the nomads hesitated before loosing a second hail of arrows.

This time many of the arrows found their marks. Jade Men toppled, chests sprouting with slender wooden shafts. Those not hit dropped to the ground and scrambled forward on all fours, each with a spear clenched in his teeth. Horses reared as the weird youths scampered under them. Some nomads were thrown down and slain by the waiting Jade Men. Others dropped their bows in favor of spears and swords to better combat their strange enemies.

From her litter, Nacris watched and laughed. With a hundred Jade Men, she could have wiped out the nomads before her. With a thousand, she could have ruled the plains. How well they moved and fought! Those mortally stricken lay in the trampled weeds, she noted with a pang, like exotic flowers cut down by a scythe.

The surviving Jade Men swarmed over the confused riders, dragging them off their horses, stabbing, choking, even biting them into submission. A hollow space opened in the midst of the nomad formation as Karada’s warriors drew back from the bizarre green killers. When the dust cleared, the bows went to work again, this time with carefully aimed arrows. Jade Man after Jade Man was hit.

A loud murmur arose from the nomads. Even bristling with arrows, some of the green-skinned youths struggled to rise and carry on the fight. Nacris strained neck and arms trying to lift herself to see what was happening. As the breeze swept the dust aside, she saw a dark-skinned man with a bronze sword in his hand. On foot, he went among the wounded Jade Men, dispatching them with well-placed thrusts.

By the time Nacris hauled herself up to stand with her crutch, it was all over. Tears coursed down her weathered face, though she did not make a sound. Her ploy of waiting in the open had drawn Karada, just as she hoped. Her Jade Men had died well. She was so very proud of her children.

The dark swordsman remounted and rode through the nomad line. Leaning hard on her crutch, Nacris pulled her gaze from the sprawled forms of her young Jade Men and presented the point of her spear to the enemy.

Among the lead riders Nacris noticed a strikingly pretty girl with long black hair and jet eyes to match. Nacris knew that girl. Her name was...

“Beramun,” the girl supplied, seeing the crippled woman struggling to remember.

“You came back. Zannian will be pleased.”

“I don’t think so. I’ve brought friends, many friends.” To the dark man at her side, Beramun added, “Watch her, Bahco. She’s a snake!”

Nacris smiled through her tears. “And Karada? Where is she?”

Beramun turned and pointed to the cliff. “There. She sent us to fetch you.”

Nacris drew back her arm and flung the javelin. Unsteady on one leg, her cast was awkward, and the weapon flew low. It landed in the dirt in front of Bahco’s horse.

“Take her,” he said. Four nomads seized Nacris but found her unresisting. In fact, she broke into wild laughter.

“My design is almost complete!” she chortled. “Obey my will! Take me to Karada!”

Zannian couldn’t believe it. Victory had been his—the Arkuden himself was talking surrender—and now everything was falling apart! What capricious spirits were at work here? How could his glorious destiny have splintered so thoroughly, like a stick of rotten wood?

He abandoned the north baffle, for which so many had died, and got on his horse. The bulk of his once-numerous band was hotly engaged, and every man, every weapon, counted. He rallied his demoralized men and they pushed their new enemies back a bit, gaining room to breathe. The newcomers were not too numerous. Zannian guessed they totaled perhaps four hundred, similar to his on-hand strength, but they were powerfully armed, rode bigger animals, and both horses and riders were fresher than his own troops.

Slowly his men retreated westward, forced away from the village. During the running fight, Zannian rode through the site of another skirmish. The bodies on the ground were green-skinned.

Jade Men. This was his mother’s work. Only she or the Master could have commanded the Jade Men into battle, and Sthenn was certainly nowhere about. Zannian had no chance to look for Nacris’s body among the others before the swirling fight carried him and his men away from where the Jade Men perished.

He spotted Hoten in the fray, trading blows with a sturdy foe on a tall horse. The old raider was having the worst of it, so Zannian charged through the press and speared the nomad on his blind side. Hoten saluted wearily. Zannian started to ask about Nacris, but new enemies appeared, and he and Hoten were driven apart.

A new column of nomads appeared on the raiders’ left. Though smaller than the first group, they still numbered nearly two hundred robust warriors. Outnumbered and outridden, the raiders began to lose heart. Some threw down their weapons and whipped their exhausted mounts westward to the empty camp by the river. Zannian boiled with fury. The cowards would not dare quit the battle if Sthenn were present!

As one trio of deserters cantered away, watching anxiously over their shoulders for pursuit by nomads or Zannian’s loyalists, they failed to see a line of ogres stalking toward them. The biggest ogre raised his chipped stone axe and knocked the lead rider off his horse, cleaving him from shoulder to waist with one blow. The other horses reared, throwing off their startled riders. Two ogres picked up a deserter by his ankles. The terrified raider screamed as he was flung back into the churning battle. He vanished into the mass of fighting humans and stamping horses. The last deserter saw none of this. He ran like a rabbit. Sneering, the ogres let him go.

Ungrah-de hailed Zannian, saying, “We heard the fight coming our way and came to join you.” His brawny arms were stained to the elbows with his enemies’ blood. “Your men are running away.”

“Kill as many as you like, great chief!” Zan snarled. “It will encourage the rest to fight!”

Nearby, the nomads broke through the raiders. Upon seeing the ogres the nomads wavered, but they were many and the ogres few, so they resumed their charge. Ungrah’s warriors did not look as though they could withstand a mounted attack, but they turned the nomads’ spears with their stone-faced bucklers and chopped them down with broad sweeps of their axes. Zannian reorganized his remaining men behind the firm line established by Ungrah-de. The nomads made a few forays against the formidable monsters, but these were bloodily repulsed.

Horns blared, and the nomads drew back several score paces, forming into two blocks. Zannian saw the larger block, on his right, was commanded by a huge man riding an equally tall horse. The nomads on the left seemed to be led by a muscular young man with richly brown skin and short, black, tightly curled hair. There was no sign of a female chief, the Karada of legend.

There was much posturing and spear shaking, but as horses and riders calmed, the two bands drew farther apart. The sun was not long from setting, and the nomads had the blazing light in their eyes. Across from them, many raiders were reeling on their animals, nearly overcome by exhaustion.

Into the open ground between the two forces rode five nomads on four horses. The giant and the dark man were two of them. The third was a slender woman with long black hair. In the midst of the ruin of his dreams of conquest, Zannian felt a surge of fire in his veins when he recognized Beramun.

His elation was tempered by the sight of the fourth horse. It carried two women: one, a red-haired girl Beramun’s age, Zan dismissed immediately; the other, older and browned by years of sun, merited a longer inspection. The older woman wore a fine bronze helmet of elven make. Her jaw and throat were streaked with livid, white scars.

Beside him, Hoten drew in a breath sharply. “Karada!”

“Are you certain?” Zannian demanded.

“In my youth I rode with her band,” was the awed reply. “That’s her.”

Zannian gave a low growl of annoyance. “First the Arkuden and now Karada. Too many dead people are still alive.”

He and Hoten rode out together with Ungrah-de striding along between their horses. They came within six steps of the nomads and stopped.

No one spoke. The only sound was the ogre’s loud breathing and the sound of horses’ tails switching away flies.

Hoten broke the impasse. “Greetings, Karada,” he said, hailing his former chieftain.

She squinted against the flare of the setting sun. “I know your face. You’re... Hoten, son of Nito. You were in my band, many years ago.”

He nodded, thinking it strange that her recognition should please him so.

“Now you ride with these savages?” Pakito growled at him. “Yevi-spawn!”

So much for old memories.

Zannian said, “Speak, Karada. Why have you come here?”

“To save my brother and his people. I may be too late for one but not the other.”

Zannian did not enlighten her that Amero lived. “You don’t belong here. Go back to the east. Battle the Silvanesti, and leave this land to us.”

“You are the invaders!” Beramun spoke up. “Murderers and looters! Go back to the stinking forest you call home and tell your dragon master you have failed!”

The raider chief turned his horse’s head toward her. “I saved you from the Master more than once, girl. Have you no gratitude?”

“Speak to me, raider,” Karada said severely. “I give you this leave: he gone from the Valley of the Falls by sunrise tomorrow, or your corpse will rot where it falls.”

“This one is a warrior,” Ungrah said suddenly. His dark eyes had not left Karada’s face since she’d first spoken.

Hearing the imposing creature speak their language startled the nomads. Ungrah went on. “Even in the high mountains we have heard of the Scarred One. I see now the tales are true.”

“This is not your fight, ogre,” she replied. “Withdraw, and none shall hinder you.”

“My fight is any I choose. Killing the wall-people was just work, but now I think this fight will be good. I will wear your skull with pride, Karada.” He rattled the trophies hanging from his armored chest.

In answer, she drew her long bronze sword. Zannian and Hoten tensed, ready to fight. Ungrah stood his ground, feet planted firmly, both massive hands resting on the head of his axe, unmoving as a mountain.

“To the death then, is it?” said Karada, looking from the ogre to the raider chief.

“It is,” Zannian said.

Ungrah and the raiders turned to go. They’d taken several steps before she spoke again.

“I have Nacris.”

The simple words halted them. Hoten tried to see his mate’s fate in Karada’s expression, but the nomad chiefs face was like the eastern cliffs—hard and unyielding.

“Does my mother live?”

Something flickered across Karada’s face. “Mother?”

“Does she live?” Zannian snapped.

“For now. If I return her to you, will you leave the valley?”

“No.” Hoten’s protest was overridden as Zannian said, “We did not come all this way to fall short now! Karada is my mother’s blood foe. Nacris would rather die at her hands than be spared by her!”

The raider chief kicked his mount into motion, leading his sullen men back to camp.

Before he turned to follow them, Ungrah-de said, “When the sun is next overhead, we will meet here and test our strengths, arm to arm. Until then, savor your blood, Karada. Tomorrow it will stain the soil at my feet.”

Though the other nomads, even giant Pakito, were visibly affected by the threat, Karada turned her back on Ungrah and rode back to her band.

High atop the walls of Yala-tene, Amero and his companions watched the nomads and raiders parley, unable even to discern who the participants were. Yet, Amero was almost certain that one of the nomads was his sister. She was on a wheat-colored horse, and something about the way she sat the animal struck a chord in his mind.

When the two groups rode away from each other, he was filled with joy. Surely the raiders were defeated! What else could they do but abandon the siege and leave the valley?

Amero saw the nomads return to the north baffle and set up camp beneath the walls. A body of men marching in close order down Cedarsplit Gap joined the nomads. It wasn’t until they were much nearer that it became apparent the warriors on foot were elves.

“What does this mean?” asked Hekani, who’d come over from the west baffle once the ogres had retreated. “Silvanesti fighting alongside nomads? Such things don’t happen!”

“What about men allied with a green dragon and with ogres?” replied Lyopi tartly.

“I don’t know what’s possible, and I don’t care! It is a great day!” Amero declared. Worn down to raw courage and sheer nerve, the other villagers could only agree.

Amero hurried to the north baffle, eager to see his sister after so long a time. Beramun would be there, too—brave girl! He longed to see her again and do honor to her courage. Alone of the scouts he’d sent to find Nianki, she had survived and brought the nomads back to save them.

By the time he arrived at the entrance, nomads had already swarmed onto the baffle and were making their way into the village. The people of Yala-tene lined the walls to cheer them. Gratitude poured out of every hoarse throat.

Beyond the wrecked barricade, Amero stopped. He could see them coming. His throat tightened, and his hands trembled. Beramun’s raven hair was painted dark crimson by the setting sun. In front of her, a tawny woman of forty summers clambered over the boulders and rubble. It was Nianki indeed, and how strong she looked!

Where the obstructions ended and the wall began, Karada and her party halted. She looked up and saw the assembled villagers waiting for them. Standing on the wall directly above her was a bearded man in tattered clothes. He was hollow-eyed, battered, and cut about the hands and face. A handsome woman with a thick chestnut braid of hair stood at his side, gripping a much-used spear.

Karada felt her heart beat hard, the pulse pounding in her ears. The setting sun was behind the people on the wall, leaving their faces in shadow. Yet she knew the bearded man. Though her voice, when at last she could speak, sounded questioning and strained, she knew him.

“Amero?”

“Nianki!” the man called joyously, spreading his arms wide.

No one else in all the world called her by her birth name. It was Amero. He was alive.

She didn’t remember climbing the last bit. Next thing she knew she was on the wall, arms around the apparition of her brother. He was solid and real, no spirit, and when he drew back from her, she saw the old gleam of wit in his hazel eyes.

“I can hardly believe it! You saved us!” He was grinning so wide his face seemed ready to split.

“You called me,” she said quietly, moved. “I came.”