Hand of the King's Evil - Outremer 04 (73 page)

She was letting her own unhappiness colour everything in grey, against the world
’
s truth. Bright sunshine, a gaudy green in the grass, only that taint of smoke to speak of shadow: sworn enemies might meet on such a day and not fight, or agree to fight together. It could happen. Would the djinni have helped work to make it happen, if all would fall apart in any case?

She had no answers, to questions that couldn't be asked. What she had was fear; and actually it wasn't what she thought or what she knew that made her fearful. She thought she knew her man, and Sieur Anton and his ilk. If only Hasan could avoid Marshal Fulke, his good sense might carry the hour. What she truly feared was a fool, on either side: a man who could not see beyond his weapon's edge, some unthinking hero who would kill - from a distance, most likely with an arrow - and look for praise where he had bought disaster with a casually taken life.

She watched for it to happen, any or all of it as her mind had played it out. She watched the men ride the wall and saw that she was wrong, she'd been too
subtle
and too grand. No meeting of proud captains, each of whom could honour the other; that was a girl's fancy, a nursery tale, no part of war.

Instead there was simply a boiling, a sudden rush of shadow through a gateway in the wall. Men on foot, and no more than half a dozen of them against twice that many mounted: they might have the advantage of surprise, but even so it should have been a slaughter.

It was not; or not as it should have been. Men on foot should not, could not stand against horsemen; she knew that from her earliest schooling, from before she knew that she was being schooled. And yet these few in their black robes swirled around the riders and their beasts, and one by one the horses fell. Then it was black against black, Patric against Sharai, but they were too far away and their dress was too similar to tell apart from this distance. Except that she did know, she was sure that when six men were left standing, they were not a surviving half of the Ransomers. It ought not to have been possible, but—

'Sand Dancers,' Elisande said beside her.

'How can you tell? From here? Are you counting their fingers for them?' Elisande was right, and they both knew it; but she hated the knowledge and did not want it in her head, nor any of the memories that two commonplace words could carry with them.

'They killed the horses. Men of the tribes would have spared them, tried to capture them. But men of the tribes would have had better sense than to attack twice their number on horseback. Besides, those robes are black. But why are they here, and what are they fighting for?'

'Sweet, I don't know. I never have known. Theirs is another war altogether, it seems to me.'

'No, only another arm of the same, that we cannot track from here. Well, there are few of them; and here come the Ransomers for vengeance.'

Indeed, a squad of horsemen was cantering along the wall, two dozen or more with a cloaked knight prominent among them. She said, 'The Ransomers won't care about the niceties, black robes or blue. They have seen Sharai slaughter their brothers; there will be no truce.'

'Likely not. I never had much faith in it. But they can kill Dancers, and welcome so.'

'If they can kill Dancers.'

'Why not? We did. Those riders were surprised, and led by a fool. It's been how long, six hundred years that the Dancers have lived alone in the Sands? I'm sure they killed the odd braggart for reputation's sake, but reputation is all it is, Julianne. Reputation and good training, but the Ransomers also have both, and the Ransomers have been fighting for forty years. The Dancers haven't faced a real enemy in ten times that long. None of these living have risked their lives till now. They will not stand. Besides, they are Sharai; they are not stupid. Strike, and run
...'

And so they did, back through the opening in the wall, where the horsemen could only have followed them slowly and one by one. Their leader had better sense.

'Perhaps they'll lose themselves, and starve,' Julianne muttered vindictively.

'Not they. Dancers think round corners; they'll know the secrets of those walls. Or they'll climb straight over them, as your 'ifrit did. Not your foolish boy
...'

She meant Imber, of course, not Roald - but Julianne still felt a pang, though she hoped her face had not shown it. Roald was dead, and laid with honour with his Princip's son; let him lie. She stared into the distant haze, eyes wide enough to smart with the smoke on the wind, looking for Hasan and desperate not to see him at this most inopportune of times.

'Look
,' Elisande said suddenly, startl
ed. 'There, the Ransomers
...'

The horsemen were milling chaotically around that narrow opening. Not trying to go in, but what, then? For a moment she thought that they were somehow knocking down the wall, to allow them safe entrance and their just revenge, if they could only flatten walls faster than the Dancers could run. But then she saw a great section topple and fall - and it fell outwards, towards the Ransomers. Whose horses were backing, wheeling, kicking and rearing, caught in a crush and close to panic, she thought, though she could not read them well from here.

It was impossible to see clearly through the massed bodies and their constant motion that took them nowhere, neither through the gap and into the field nor back and away from the wall; it was hard to see anything at all, but there was black against the green, dark and sinuous shapes gleaming in the sunlight as they came through the field's trampled crop and over the rubble of the fallen wall to vanish into the disorder of the mounted men.

Some of those were mounted no more. There were riderless horses breaking free and running fast, their discipline as broken as their harness. Others were down; she watched one fall, seeming to subside into the heaving mass like meat sucked down into a boiling pot of stew.

There were men on foot amid that desperate madness, then. If any could find space enough to stand, and keep their feet against the buffeting bodies, the raging maelstrom of noise and terror; if any could survive so long as this, survive at all against marauding 'ifrit with strength enough simply to push a strong wall over, where it lay between themselves and their prey.

'Elisande, your eyes are sharper than mine,' desert-trained, though Jemel's were better yet, the best she knew now that Marron's were his own again. 'Can you see how it goes there? They are killing each other, look

'I daresay they are,' Elisande replied in a voice so strange, so distracted that she might as well have spelled it out in syllables,
I do not care what is happening, and I am not going to look.

Julianne turned in bewilderment; and saw what she was seeing and so understood at once, although it seemed almost an impossible thing.

Marron stood there, on their island, where he had not been a few bare moments earlier. Marron was meant to be still in the Princip's palace, far behind them; Esren had said so.

Nor was he alone. He held Jemel in his arms, but not the Jemel that Julianne could have wished for, grim-eyed and fearsome and fierce. This was Jemel hurt, atrociously hurt, unconscious; his robe was darker even than i
t should have been, clinging wetl
y to his blood-streaked body where it was not hanging in rips and shreds.

Marron lifted his eyes to gaze at both the girls. Deep crimson red they were, as though Jemel's blood had dyed them so, or else as though he wore them as a badge of war.

'Oh, Marron
...'

Was it Elisande’
s voice, that despairing sigh, or was it her own? She couldn't tell.

He didn't seem to care, either way. She never had been sure how much of him was Marron and how much the Daughter, when they shared one flesh like this. He was not entirely remote, he couldn't be, or there would have been nothing but distance written on his face when he'd looked at Jemel; and yet there was little enough written there now when he looked at Elisande.

'Jemel needs your healing,' he said, as though she could not have seen that for herself.

Was it only Julianne who thought
again,
Perhaps it was. Elisande's authoritative hands guided him to lay down the insensible Sharai; they pulled away the tattered remnants of his robe; they moved rapidly, assessingly from one torn wound to another, while her voice was weak, almost whispering, chasing after what was lost already. 'How did you find him? Or us?'

'It knows,' he said, 'I could feel where he should be. I had to take him from some Patric men, but they gave me room enough, and only threw curses at me. Then I felt where you should be, and I came. Can you heal him?'

'Easier than last time,' Elisande said. 'He's not so very dead. There'll be more scars, but you won't mind that,'
you carry scars enough yourself
her voice implied,
and not all on that tender skin of yours.
'And I can't do it all at once; we will need those herbs, Julianne,' though her face was saying
this cannot be the reason we are here, there would be no sense in it.
'But, Marron, I don't understand what you've done, how it helps. The djinni would have taken you to Jemel, brought you here, you didn't need
...'

'I am not finished yet,' he said. 'Your father wanted me to fight, Julianne, he forced me to it; now I can, if I have to. If I must break one more oath, it may as well be broken beyond repair.'

'That may not be all that is broken. Grandfer might not draw it out of you again, he might not be able to
...'

'I have not said that I would ask him to. I did not ask before; how can it matter now? See to Jemel, Elisande.' And he pulled a dagger from his belt, pricked his arm, let the Daughter flow.

Swiftly then, while his eyes were his own brown, Elisande chased him with one more question. 'Where are you going now?'

'To find Sieur Anton,' and there was none of that chill, despairing certainty
in
his voice, nor in his look; only a determination so strong that yes, he would sacrifice anything, more even than he had given already if he had indeed anything more to give. 'Look after Jemel,' and this time it was a plea, or as near as he could come to it in the moment before he opened a blood-red gate and stepped through it into a golden light that folded itself around him and was gone.

Distance was not and could not be an object; he was barely aware of it as a reality. He ran not to cover ground, not to save time, but only because running was there to be done, it was here for the doing, it was his and he belonged to it as it to him. He could have run for ever; he might yet run for ever, if his running fetched him no reason to stop.

He was aware of but did not feel the heat of the world that surrounded him. He had fire in his veins that flowed to match his running, and he had a cool stillness in his mind that matched the static precision of his thoughts.

He ran over dust and rock within a wide and open bowl, under an opal sky. He was alone, if not unobserved; there was a glitter in the air about him that was more than the eternal gold, an occasional line of darkness in a shadowless land.

There was a river behind him, he remembered that, it steamed and hissed in its course, hot water on hot rocks. He had jumped from a rock in midstream and not thought twice about it, although it was a long and a perilous leap for a mortal body to attempt. His jump to the rock from the other bank had been made with a body in his arms, and he hadn't worried about that one either.

Worry seemed not to be a part of him any more, to have been cauterised or cut out, cast aside. He ran quite untroubled by his awareness of trouble
in
the other world, and quite aware too of that unconcern. This time around, possession had been invited and had driven deeper, with a sharper edge; he carried twin divisions within this single body, himself and another that was not him, not male, not human. In this world, it was ascendant as if by right; in the other, only by his gift.

So he, they stayed in this world for their running, until it understood and he from it understood that they had run enough in this world. Then the prick in his arm came without his ever thinking to make that happen, he didn't need to, it did the thing itself; and then it left him - but not entirely, not now, some vestige still remained, the coolness of the shadow cast — and pain flooded in to fill the vacancy, more pain than ever such a little cut deserved, and far more blood.

And it made a doorway for him, he didn't need to think about that either; and he stepped through and swiftly took it back. He had done that before, after the transition from golden rock to green island, from steam to clear air, from solitude to girls; not only the pain found relief in his being whole again, wholly filled, entirely separated. He could lose himself in what possessed him, and find a terrible comfort in the red cast of its sight, the ice and hammer of its thinking. Why be what he had been before, when he could be this strong, this safe, this simple?

This time there was a
battle
at a
little
distance, as it had known there would be. This was what he had wanted to see, or else what it had wanted him to see; despite that ruthless division in his head, he would have found it hard to say which was true, or more true. He did not try; it did not seem to matter.