Captain's Fury (37 page)

"It can wait," Crassus said. "Apparently we've captured some more balests, and I want to make sure they are properly secured before—"

"With respect," Marcus said, "no, sir, it can't wait. Just because you can't feel the pain doesn't mean you aren't doing more damage to your shoulder. We're going to the healers, sir. Now."

Crassus arched an eyebrow in a gesture nearly identical to the captain's. Marcus supposed that he had learned it from Scipio. Then Crassus glanced down at his shoulder and gave Marcus a rueful smile. "If I was anyone else, I'd be ordering me to go to the healers, wouldn't I?"

Crassus shook his head. "It doesn't. You're always the one willing to go one step farther. You're the first one up in the morning and the last one to sleep at night. You push us all to do better. You keep discipline among the men without resorting to intimidation or humiliation. If you hadn't already won an honor name in the House of the Valiant, your service over the last few years would merit a place in the House of the Faithful."

Marcus fell silent and glanced away from the young man. They had reached the healers' tents. Several wounded men lay on stretchers on the ground, bandaged while they waited their turns in the healing tubs. Several other men lay senseless on bedrolls nearby, fresh pink skin showing where their wounds had been watercrafted closed, exhausting them in the process.

Lady Aquitaine, in her washerwoman guise, was there, serving as an attendant to the wounded, carrying them water and monitoring their injuries. She glanced up at Marcus, smiled very slightly, and returned to her tasks.

"Fidelar Marcus just doesn't roll off the tongue as well though, does it?" Crassus continued. "All the same, I thought you should know that I am aware of all the extra work you do. Thank you."

Marcus tried not to spit out the bitter taste in his mouth. "You're welcome, sir."

Chapter 28

The rain, Amara decided, was a mixed blessing. While the moderate, steady downpour helped to hide their trail and cut down on visibility, reducing their chances of being seen, after three days it had begun to gall. Here at the southernmost reaches of the Realm, rainfall such as this was not unusual this time of year, but Amara had never had to contend with such a relentless downpour.

The nights were uncomfortable, especially because there was no dry wood to be had for a fire. Bernard told Amara that he could have used his crafting to shape the trees into a more effective shelter, or to open a dry hole in a rock shelf, but that he didn't dare risk it, for fear enemy woodsmen might recognize it.

Despite that, Amara's husband was as resourceful as ever about practical matters. He always managed to find some means by which to keep at least some of the water away from them, but none of them were resting very well. If the rain didn't let up soon and allow them something other than a cold meal of traveling biscuits, they were going to run out of them and be forced to eat only whatever Bernard could forage or hunt as they traveled. Amara was not looking forward to raw rabbit.

She glowered up at the sky and wished that she had more practice with crafting the weather instead of flying.

"I know precisely how you feel," Gaius murmured, limping steadily along. "I can't stop thinking about how nice a warm fire and a hot cup of tea would be."

Amara smiled. "Is it that obvious?"

"We're all thinking the same thing," Gaius replied. He squinted up at the clouds. "This is mostly my fault, you know."

Amara glanced aside at him. "Why do you say that?"

"Because it was my mistake. The wind that brought us here was from the far north, cold and dry. I bade it fly south with us, and it met the warm, humid skies over the sea. Rain is the result."

Amara shook her head. "Not a terrible mistake. The rain has probably helped us a great deal."

Gaius smiled, teeth gleaming. "Just between the two of us? I've had all the help I can stand."

Amara laughed, and her eye alighted upon the nearest tree trunk. Perhaps seven feet up, the bark had been roughly gouged and scored to the inner skin with thick, crude furrows.

"A predator," Bernard said. "Maybe some kind of hunting cat. Maybe one of those big lizards." He stopped and held up a hand, his head tilted slightly to one side.

"They're called garim," Gaius supplied quietly. "They make marvelous cloaks when—"

The underbrush ten feet to the First Lord's left erupted in sudden motion, and something massive and leathery and low shot across the forest floor, its head turning sideways, its jaws gaping to snap at Gaius's legs.

It was an enormous lizard—a garim.

The First Lord saw it coming, and he reacted with admirable speed. He managed to turn and thrust his heavy walking staff into the beast's jaws. The garim snapped them shut, neatly clipping off the end of the staff. Then it spat the wood aside and pressed in on Gaius.

Gaius's maneuver, though, had given Amara precious seconds to act. The Cursor called upon Cirrus, borrowing of the wind fury's swiftness, and the world slowed down to a lazy, syrup-thick dance.

Amara's hand dipped to her belt, and her fingers found the hilt of the knife there. She drew, even as she turned toward the menacing garim, shifting her weight with maddening slowness, and flung the knife at what, to her own perceptions, was almost normal speed.

The knife tumbled precisely one and a half times, struck the creature's scaled hide, and sank several inches into the garim's flank, just behind its forward leg.

The garim reacted more slowly than any animal she had ever seen would have, and Amara had taken most of a step before it suddenly wrenched itself to one side, falling into a slow tumble as it snapped its jaws at the knife, tearing it free.

Amara drew her sword and flung herself at the beast, gripping the short weapon in both hands. The extra speed lent her by her fury would allow her to deal out a powerful blow—and she would need it to cut through its hide if the lack of penetration from her knife throw was any indication.

The steps between her and the garim drifted by slowly, and she had time to appreciate another mixed blessing: Though the gift of speed granted by her fury made her swift enough to intervene on the First Lord's behalf, it also left her with entirely too much time to realize the danger in her course of action.

The beast was much larger than she had thought at first. Though it stood very low to the ground, no more than two feet at the highest point of its back, the garim was built broad and flat, with powerful legs that spread out widely from an overly broad body made from gristle and sinew. It probably weighed at least twice what Amara did, and quite possibly more. Its feet were tipped with heavy claws, its head was solid and blocky, distended with the size of the muscles that powered its vicious jaws. It had eyes like beads of black glass, small and vicious and stupid, and its tail, stretching out in length nearly equal to its body, thrashed about with entirely too much power and speed. Its hide was dark grey-green, and rippled with stripes of darker coloration, giving it ideal camouflage in the rain-drenched forest, and the scales looked tough and thick.

If the garim seized her, it would remove her limbs every bit as easily as it had snapped through Gaius's walking staff. She could evade it easily, of course, if she had been on her own—but she wasn't. The creature had deliberately rushed Gaius, and if she did not force it to deal with her, it would only return to its attack on the First Lord. She had to fight, which meant that she had to deal out a decisive, crippling stroke on the first blow or risk being overwhelmed by the beast's power and speed.

She would have aimed for the throat, had this been a thanadent, or a grass lion, or one of the Marat's herdbanes. The garim's neck, though, was covered in great folds of heavily scaled skin, and she doubted her ability to strike through it.

Unlike the garim, which could snap through
her
neck without any particular effort.

Amara was terrified.

The eyes, she decided. A small target, true, but Cirrus's speed would help with that. A true enough strike had the potential to kill the beast—and even if she only wounded it, that might disable the garim badly enough to prevent it from pursuing Gaius. Though if it came to that, she supposed, killing Amara, dragging her body off into the forest, and devouring her might prevent the garim from pursuing Gaius as well.

Looking at it from that perspective, Amara thought, she couldn't lose.

The garim's broad, vicious head swiveled toward her, and its wide mouth opened, revealing what seemed like hundreds of curved, vicious teeth.

Amara screamed and thrust the blade down, putting all the speed and power she could muster into the blow. The tip of her sword struck just above the garim's beady eye, pierced a thin layer of skin, and scraped along the thick bone of its skull. Her forward momentum carried her on, over the low-slung garim, and she realized with a sick sensation of panic that she was about to fall.

Amara tried to turn the fall into a diving roll, so that she would be able to come up on her feet and running—but halfway through, something struck her in the shoulder and sent her into an uncontrolled tumble. She hit the ground hard, first on one knee, then slammed into the ground with one shoulder, and fetched up against a tree with stunning force. She dropped to the ground, the world rolling back into normal motion again, as she lost concentration on maintaining the link with Cirrus.

The wounded garim lashed its heavily muscled tail, with which it had just struck her, and doubled back on itself with sinuous, liquid speed. It rushed her, fangs bared. Amara fumbled dazedly for her sword, knowing, even as she did, that the weapon would be of little use. She thrust out as the garim closed on her, and the sword skittered off the hide of its chest. She screamed.

And then a length of wood came out of nowhere and landed with crushing force on the creature's muzzle, slamming its jaws closed and into the ground. Its head rebounded from the earth, and the wood landed again, and again, the blows precisely timed and savage.

The First Lord of Alera flung himself onto the garim, slipping his damaged staff across the beast's throat, and with a snarl of effort and a wrench of his entire body, twisted away, taking the garim with him, rolling the lizard belly-up.

"His underside!" Gaius cried. "Countess, where the scales are thin!"

Amara seized her sword, lurched to her knees, and struck down, through the garim's exposed throat, just beneath where Gaius's staff still held back the creature's head. To her surprise, the sword swept cleanly through the finer, smoother scales there, and blood rushed out in a scarlet fountain.

The garim thrashed wildly, but the First Lord had the creature pinned. Though it flung him back and forth, it could not escape Gaius's hold. Amara struck again and again, until the garim's thrashing slowed, and the First Lord rolled clear of the dying animal.

One garim hung thrashing fifteen feet above the forest floor in a willow tree, where dozens of the slender branches had seemingly reached down and wrapped around it. Another thrashed and contorted wildly on the forest floor, bounding up as high as five or six feet above the ground. A woodsman's axe protruded from the dying garim's head, where a powerful blow had sunk the weapon to its eye in the lizard's skull.

And the bloodied Count of Calderon himself was locked in combat with a third garim—unarmed. Like the First Lord, he had managed to gain a position on the beast's back, but he had locked his arms around the creature's throat. Amara could see that blood covered one side of his face, his throat, and half of his upper torso, but he was conscious, his face locked into a rictus snarl.

The garim thrashed wildly, rolling over several times, and its tail whipped about with savage energy, hammering Bernard on his legs and lower back. He let out a howl of rage and pain.

Amara cried out and rushed toward her husband, sword in hand.

Bernard's head turned to one side, and he released the garim with one arm, seizing its tail. The beast rolled wildly, twisting free of Bernard's grip, and scrambled at the forest floor with its powerful legs, to rise and sink its teeth into Amara's husband.

Bernard, though, had found his feet first, and hauled at the garim's tail before it could regain its balance. It scrambled toward him as best it could, and Bernard shuffled away from the jaws, still hauling hard on the tail.

At first, Amara thought he was simply trying to buy time—but by the second circle, the garim began to pick up speed. The beast was the largest of any Amara had seen, and must have weighed five hundred pounds if it weighed an ounce, but the Count of Calderon whirled it up off the ground as if it were a child's toy.