Entangled (66 page)

She was wriggling on her stomach through tussocky marsh grass, soaking her belly and her leggings in cold water. Grondin and Bont were to her right, Driff and Oplimar to her left, each commanding eight of the Merell fighters, and all of them slithered forward silent as ghosts.

Everyone knew exactly where the sentries were and everyone knew exactly what they had to do.

Despite the darkness, Leoni’s out-of-body senses showed her more of what happened next than she really wanted to see.

The fifteen sentries had positioned themselves in five groups of three behind the boulders – some twice the height of a man, some tumbled on top of one another – that formed a natural obstacle course in this part of the valley floor. From time to time a two-man patrol armed with long stabbing spears made its way from group to group, exchanging muttered words and occasional guffaws of laughter.

The plan was to hit the entire guard detail at the same moment, giving no opportunity for any to flee into the darkness and raise the alarm. For this reason, after Leoni had put thought-images into her mind showing her the disposition of the sentries, Ria divided her force into five groups of nine. She herself led one group. In charge of the other four groups she placed two of the men and two of the Neanderthal males who Leoni had seen close to her on previous occasions.

The men, Ria told her, were Driff, a lean, intense, black-haired Illimani who had come over to her side, and the shaggy giant Bont, a member of her own Clan. The Neanderthals, who she called the Uglies, and Leoni could see why, were Grondin – Bont’s size, built like a prizefighter – and bushy-bearded, pot-bellied Oplimar. All of them were telepaths – Ria called it thought-talk – and so the attacks of all five groups would be coordinated in total silence.

Leoni admired the stealth with which the attackers squirmed through the wet grass and amongst the smaller rocks, worming ever closer to the positions of the sentries. She had not been able to reach the others with telepathy; but even if their minds had been open to her she suspected they did not have the Blue Angel’s ‘gift of languages’. Floating above the whole scene she pulsed directions to Ria as first Bont’s group, next Oplimar’s, then Grondin’s and last of all Driff’s arrived within twenty
feet of their targets. Ria in turn must have signalled them because they all came to a halt, awaiting the order to attack.

Now two of the Illimani set off on patrol again, slowly crossing the narrow floor of the valley. They made their first stop and there were the sounds of muffled voices. At the second stop they paused for several minutes and Leoni flew over them to discover that the three sentries at their post had an animal skin, perhaps filled with liquor, which they were sharing with the other two. A few more minutes passed and though it was not yet dawn Leoni thought she could detect the faintest blush at the edge of the sky as the patrol at last moved on.

They were almost halfway to the next guard post when Ria’s entire force rose to their feet and charged in grim silence.

The two patrolmen didn’t see Bont coming and had no time to level their spears or cry a warning as his huge axe scythed out of the darkness. One fell grunting as the blade buried itself in his belly. With a jerk Bont withdrew it, unleashing a geyser of blood, and back-handed the weapon into the second man’s face.

Darting forward, Leoni found Ria behind a boulder. She was stooped over a naked Illimani who lay face down, unconscious, on the ground. There was madness in her eyes and a stifled cry of wild joy burst from her lips as she pulled back a fistful of his hair and slit his throat with a long flint knife. The cut went so deep that his head came almost clean away from his shoulders.

Leoni saw Oplimar and Driff both kill men. Grondin picked one of the sentries up and smashed his spine across his knee. All along the line of guard posts it was the same story – the small number of defenders, surprised and utterly overwhelmed by the sudden unannounced attack, quickly fell and died under the brightening sky.

But one of the sentries, left for dead, leapt to his feet despite a jagged wound in his side and ran zigzag like a hare towards the camp. He was very fast and though Driff pursued him he had a good lead.

Leoni couldn’t understand why Ria also took off after the escaping Illimani because he was at least a hundred feet ahead of her, just a faint white blur in the pre-dawn shadows, and she’d never catch him. But then she snatched at a pouch hanging by her side, drew back her arm and threw a stone at him. Leoni lost sight of the little missile as it flew through the air. It must have whizzed right past Driff’s ear before – CLUNK! – it
bounced off the back of the fleeing man’s skull and dropped him to the ground in a heap.

Driff reached him first, hatchet raised, but Ria wasn’t having it. She barged her friend aside, jerked back the Illimani’s head and cut his throat.

With the sentries disposed of and more light seeping into the sky, Leoni scouted the way forward while Ria brought up her whole force at the double as far as the boulders. From there it was about a mile to the camp but because the valley ahead took a sharp curve to the left the place wouldn’t be visible to the Illimani, even in daylight, and provided good shelter to muster for the final attack. Not until they had rounded the curve would Ria’s fighters come into view. Even so they would still have to cover at least quarter of a mile in the open before reaching the camp and a small nagging voice at the back of Leoni’s mind told her this would not be good.

She explored both sides of the valley for alternatives, but the slopes were too steep to be climbed by a large force without attracting attention. What she did find was a narrow path, angling up to the left, that a small group walking in single file might scale. Better still, the path led to the ridge directly overlooking the sector of the camp where the Illimani had kept their prisoners. Leoni remembered many of Ria’s fighters carried bows. She’d never got closer to a battle than
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but something told her this would be a good spot to put some archers.

She glanced to the sky. It was still more night than dawn but in half an hour – an hour at most – the sun would be above the horizon and all the advantages of darkness would be lost.

She darted down to get a closer look at the camp.

Behind it ran a fast-flowing mountain river channelled in a rocky gorge that intersected the main valley from the right. It had been a large camp, consisting of hundreds of tall conical shelters of skins stretched over wooden frames, like Native American tepees, ranged across the valley floor almost to the river’s edge. But the Illimani had burnt everything to the ground. What stood out now were the three thorn-bush stockades they’d set up amongst the ashes to hold their prisoners.

For a few moments Leoni was dizzied by the nightmare horror of it all.

The stockade at the extreme left of the group was empty, but a little beyond it was a large cleared area in which the Illimani had burnt at the stake, crucified and tortured to death several hundred men – probably the entire adult male population of the camp.

A second stockade at the extreme right of the group was crammed with young children. All were alive but milling in terror and crying out.

In the third stockade, between the other two, the bodies and body parts of a great many women lay strewn in the dust as casually as animal carcasses in an abbatoir. About a hundred still lived but Leoni saw a small group of bloodstained and filthy Illimani on the rampage amongst them – ten brutal naked men finishing off the orgy of violence that had obviously continued throughout the night. It was a horrific scene, made worse by the pitiful screams of the victims.

But something even more disturbing was happening. When Leoni had first flown over the camp, perhaps an hour before, many of the Illimani who weren’t raping and butchering women had been sprawled out, dead drunk. Now most of them were on their feet, some rubbing their heads but obviously alert and responding to an order to form up. Hundreds had already assembled in the cleared area and more were joining them every moment.

Leoni saw the warrior she thought of as Bull swaggering around, kicking and beating men who were still sleeping. His twin, Bear-Skull, had assembled a mob of twenty and now led them, knives unsheathed, to join the other murderers already at work in the women’s enclosure.

If Ria was going to attack she must do so at once, while the shadows were still deep in the last exposed quarter-mile of the valley, and before the Illimani finished their killing and marched out of the camp.

As she hurried back to Ria’s side, Leoni was conscious once again of the numbing weakness spreading like poison through her aerial body, and when she looked down at herself she saw … almost nothing.

Arrayed on the stony valley floor beyond the line of huge boulders where the Illimani sentries had been killed, Ria’s entire force of more than five hundred waited for her command, while she herself stood alone, fifty paces to the fore, peering into the darkness ahead.

Though there was no thin cloud of light to announce the other girl’s presence, as there had been earlier, Ria knew that Leoni had returned to her side. She also sensed – she felt it in her own breath and heartbeat – that Leoni was in terrible danger. ‘Sister,’ she pulsed – it was the only word that did justice to the strength of the bond she felt – ‘what has happened to you?’

Leoni’s thought-voice was weak, barely audible, seeming to emanate from somewhere very far away: ‘No time to explain,’ she said. ‘I won’t be able to stay with you long. I’m going to be taken back.’ Then Ria felt a flood of words and thought-images wash over her as Leoni shared everything she’d observed during her reconnaissance – the Illimani forces mustering on the meeting ground of the Naveen camp, the pitiful condition of the surviving captives, the disposition of the stockades and the trail leading to a promising ridge that overlooked them.

As she took all this in Ria’s mood darkened. The prospect that had lured her to this place was of drunken and disorganised enemies who could be surrounded in the dark by archers and shot like fish in a pool. Instead it was close to sunrise and the five hundred Illimani she confronted were alert and would soon be on the march. These were men who had dedicated their lives to violence and fought side by side in many battles. Her men were hunters first, fighters second, and the women might be hard as flint around hearth and home but none of them knew war.

Ria thought of retreat but rejected the idea. The Illimani would pursue them and catch them before they could make good their escape, probably even before they reached their waiting non-combatants, and
certainly when they did. Better by far to force the fight now while they still had surprise on their side.

All at once, so bright and obvious it dazzled her, a plan began to take shape in her mind: ‘Can I get two hundred of my archers into place to the side of the meeting ground?’ she asked Leoni. ‘Is there a chance they could approach without being seen? Is there enough cover there to hide them?’

There was no reply and Ria almost choked with frustration. She needed a clearer picture! ‘Leoni! Please! Help me.’

Again she was met by silence – and, worse, her sense of the presence of the invisible girl, so strong moments before, had now evaporated. She shifted to out-loud speech. ‘Sister, are you there?’ she asked. ‘Are you with me?’

When no answer came, Ria understood her ally had truly gone. Perhaps she had simply been snatched back into her body the way she herself had been snatched back at the end of her two journeys with the Little Teachers? But she couldn’t rid herself of the intuition that some greater danger was involved.