Son of the Hero (23 page)

As soon as I saw weapons—not drawn, just there—I knew that we wouldn’t get through the encampment without violence. Annick shot two arrows as soon as she saw a raised sword—a good fifty yards off. After that, all I could hope for was to get in and out as quickly as possible, before the locals could organize any real defense.

We headed directly for the center of the camp. Lesh cut picket lines and tethers and chased off horses. Harkane did some fancy stunt riding, leaning way over to grab several hunks of burning wood from a bonfire in the middle of the camp—hardly slowing down at all. Then he circled around to use the brands to fire all of the tents and open pavilions. The silk, or whatever it was, burned fast.

A few of the Fairy folk stood ready to meet us—apparently not at all discomfited by the change to their schedule. The four of us were well separated by then, so everything happened as a series of individual duels. Annick went into her berserker mode again, chasing down locals, forcing them to fight. Lesh and Harkane paid more attention to my instructions. They concentrated on causing confusion and damage, only fighting when they had to defend themselves. Me, I had my hands full for a few minutes.

An axe-wielding dwarf jumped out in front of me and tried to chop my horse out from between us. I jerked hard on the reins and the animal reared and came down hard toward the dwarf, forcing him to back off. By the time he stepped forward again, I had my horse turned so I could meet the dwarf with Dragon’s Death. The claymore quickly shortened the dwarf by a head. I noticed that I was whistling again, the same eerie melody I had whistled while we were fighting the mountain trolls. Although the elvish sword didn’t glow as it had in the night, I had no trouble handling it, even one-handed. There was no nonsense of the sword doing its own fighting regardless of me, or dragging me along with it. I was always in control, but that sword proved to be as easy to use as a reed wand.

Just after I cut down the dwarf, something hard hit me in the back. The impact pitched me forward. If I hadn’t managed to get my left arm hooked around the neck of my horse, I would have been thrown over his head. The pain in my back was like being hit by a pitch—a hard fastball. My vision blurred for a moment. I fought to push myself upright in the saddle again and puffed, trying to get my breathing in order. I hadn’t seen what hit me, but I assumed that someone had thrown a spear—with one hell of a lot a force behind it. The lance wasn’t sticking out of me, so I knew that my chain mail had turned the shaft aside. The spot where it hit was—well, “sore” doesn’t begin to approach an adequate description of how it felt, but I couldn’t stop to check the extent of the damage. The thrower—one of those tall, pale types that I assumed had elven blood—ran at me, drawing his sword. He was on foot and his blade was just a normal broadsword, but he didn’t see at all intimidated by my longer weapon.

We didn’t play games. My back hurt so badly that I had to grit my teeth against the pain. My only thought was to end this duel as quickly as possible. I parried his swing, then my sword whirled around full-circle, whistling through the air, and took off his sword arm above the elbow. I kicked out to knock him back. The shock went all the way up my leg to the pain in my back. But the guy did go down and he didn’t bother to get back up.

I left him lying there and backed my horse through a circle, looking for the next threat. The Fairy camp was a shambles. Every tent was burning, and so were two of the wagons. Quite a number of revelers were down, dead or wounded. Their horses had all run off, except for one with a broken leg. That horse rolled on the ground and neighed in panic and pain. We had done everything we could hope to do.

“Let’s go!” I shouted. I waved my sword above my head until that aggravated the pain in my back too much to continue, then led the way out of camp, due south. The others closed up quickly behind me. Even Annick broke off right away. Maybe she thought I would leave her there if she didn’t. Maybe I would have. None of the arrows that followed us came close, and there was no immediate pursuit, not without horses. But we rode as if the posse were right on our tails. The horses might return, or someone at the picnic might have the magic to contact others to hunt us.

I could feel my eyes tearing up from the pain in my back, but I couldn’t take much notice of that yet, not until we had some space between us and the people we had just attacked. When we were not quite out of sight of the burning tents, we cut right sharply. I hoped to leave the impression that we were going northwest, that we had simply made a tiny little error, turning just a couple of minutes too soon. Then, when I was absolutely certain that none of the elvish folk could still see us, we turned south again and drifted back to our original course. It was another hour before I dared to stop and dismount so we could rest our horses and check out my back.

Getting my chain mail off brought new agony. I lay down on my stomach—almost fainted and fell—and Annick and Lesh both checked out my wound.

“There’s a puncture, not too deep,” Annick said. “A very dark bruise around it, bigger than both my fists together.”

“There may be a broken rib or two, lord,” Lesh said.

Annick poured water and did what she could to clean the wound. Her touch was surprisingly light, but that didn’t stop every new touch from adding to the pain. “There’s not much else we can do here,” she said when she finished.

“Look in my pack,” I said. “I think there’s a roll of gauze and some tape. If I’ve got a busted rib, it needs to be bandaged as tight as possible.” I didn’t remember seeing anything like aspirin. Mother wasn’t likely to think of something like that.

The process of bandaging hurt so much that I almost passed out again, but when it was finished, I did feel a little better. The pain wasn’t nearly so acute. The tight gauze girdle exerted pressure all around my middle. I got my shirt back on, but not the chain mail. I didn’t even want to think about putting all that weight back on, even though the armor had undoubtedly saved my life.

I sat on the ground for a few minutes after the tape was secure, then got to my feet gingerly. I could feel sweat beading up on my face, but we had to press on.

“We’d better get moving again,” I said, my voice low as I tried to get by without breathing very deeply.

“We head for home now?” Lesh asked. I nodded. “Back to Arrowroot?”

“That’s where Parthet is due to meet us.” I recalled the feeling of danger there, but I had to go to Arrowroot. “We’ll stay on this side of the isthmus as long as we can, try to get south of the swamp before we turn west.” The elflord might be confused further by that—assuming that we had confused him at all. Dorthin, Varay, and Xayber all met at the southeastern corner of the isthmus. If we couldn’t convince the elflord that we were an enemy out of Fairy, maybe he would think that the Etevar were feeling him out. Setting Xayber against Dorthin couldn’t hurt Varay.

We had been stopped long enough getting me taped up that the horses had cooled down and Harkane had watered them. Harkane helped me back into the saddle. The pain was still there, but I thought that I would be able to deal with it. I had to. We rode slowly for a time. The pain didn’t go away, but it abated a little—or I simply became used to it. I could breathe a little more easily.

Trusting my danger sense a little more—and worried about what riding the rough terrain of the countryside would do to my back and ribs—I didn’t try to keep us concealed. We rode the main road south, bold as could be. I shoved my Cubs cap in a hip pocket. Annick unbraided her hair and let it blow free. At first glance we might appear to be a young lord and lady of Fairy out with servants.

Shortly after we started riding again, I felt the questioning presence again, but more lightly than before. The elflord hadn’t yet identified us as his irritant. I forced my mind as blank as possible, like before, and the presence passed.

A little later, Harkane moved his horse up next to mine. “You’ve made it past the dangerous stage,” he whispered softly. “You have the magic of the Hero working to mend your wound. By the time we get home, it should be only a memory.”

“I hope you’re right,” I said. “And I hope we don’t come up against anything serious before then.” We had a lot of Fairy to cross before we could reach Varay and even temporary safety.

Near sunset, we left the road and moved into the hills to find a campsite that would shelter us but not bottle us in. I settled on a flat ledge halfway up a gentle slope, with trees on three sides. There was running water below. We refilled our drinking bags and let the horses get their fill before we moved them up to the campsite. We didn’t unsaddle the animals, though, and we unloaded only what we absolutely needed for the night. It was too likely that we would be on the run before morning.

Despite the way I was hurting, I might have felt less nervous riding by night and hiding by day if not for the warning that darkness couldn’t hide us from elves and the corroborating evidence that even a half-elf like Annick could see almost perfectly in the dark. Giving ourselves the inconvenience without the advantage was pointless.

Annick was full of vigor when we made camp. Her eyes and face had an excited look that might have seemed feverish in other circumstances. She looked younger, fresher. I wondered if she got some tangible physiological benefit from killing, if the addiction was physical as well as psychological. I had intended to complain about the way she had acted during the fray, but I held back. It’s not just that I didn’t feel up to an argument. I guess I had given up. She gave no indication that she was looking for reformation, so the aggravation would have been pointless.

“What will you do when this fight is over?” she asked me. Harkane and Lesh were already settling down to sleep. I was sitting propped up against a tree trunk, as comfortable as I was likely to get. The pain did seem to be fading somewhat. Maybe Harkane had been right. In any case, I wasn’t feeling quite as bad as before.

“Which fight? We haven’t started the real battle yet,” I said. Dusk hadn’t quite fled into darkness.

“After you beat the Etevar.”

“I haven’t started to think past that. I know what everyone expects, that I’ll stick around and play prince and occasional Hero. Become King of Varay someday.” That was a gloomy thought. I wasn’t stodgy enough to play Prince Charles or loose enough to be randy Andy. But I couldn’t see going home to play with computers at the moment either. It was difficult to think of computers as real just then. “I don’t know what I’ll do. Maybe go back to my world and do some traveling.”

Annick stared at me. I was uncomfortable about it, especially knowing that she could see me better than I could see her in the growing night.

“What will
you
do when you’ve killed all the people you’ve spent your life hating?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I’ll find something if that time ever comes.”

“You think it’ll be that easy?”

Annick didn’t answer.

The attack came while I was still awake, still on sentry, but that didn’t help. For once, my danger sense didn’t scream soon enough. The Elflord of Xayber had finally located us, and the gap between my danger warning and his assault weren’t enough to let me do any more than whip the claymore off my shoulder and get it out in front of me. It was pure luck that I was already on my feet. I had decided that I had better get up and move around a little to keep from getting stiff. Then it came.

There was no direct physical attack.

My mind was suddenly in the grip of an incredible power—a psychic bearhug. There was intense pain at the start, worse than the pain in my back had been at its worst, and then a feeling of utter helplessness. I struggled against the force and the void behind it. I fought to open my eyes, scarcely aware that I had closed them in the first onslaught. I blinked and found myself standing on a featureless plain that was unbroken to the horizon in every direction. It was a gray nothingness. There wasn’t even real ground beneath my feet, just an unidentifiable, almost undetectable surface. I was standing alone with just the elf sword. I turned slowly, sword at the ready. My back didn’t hurt—I noticed
that
right away—but my danger sense was running up and down my spine. The general message was something like:
Holy shit, are you in for it now!
As if I needed a prompter to tell me that.

“Okay, Xayber, come on out and let’s get this over with. Time for all good rats to come out of their holes.” Bravado. Also a poor choice of words. Huge rats started rising right out of the ground—something like Claymation. The rodents were the size of the goat I had killed, and nearly transparent, their innards right there for me to see. They came at me as if I were the pie-eyed piper. All I could do was hack at them with the elf sword and hope that I ran out of rats before I ran out of strength. My back didn’t hurt, but I didn’t feel particularly chipper either.

“Okay, what’s the next act?” I asked when the stream of rats finally dried up.

A giant face appeared in the distance, in what passed for a sky in that gray void. It was an oblong face with pale complexion, black hair, thin mustache, and short goatee, haughty-looking beyond words. I don’t suppose the resemblance was really all that close, but it made me think of that three-view portrait of Cardinal Richelieu that seems to be in all of the history textbooks. The face stared at me. When the mouth moved, I heard the words as if they were spoken right in front of me.

“You’re
the one who dares challenge me? What a disappointment. I had hoped for something more diverting.”

“Divert your head up your ass where it belongs,” I said. And, for a moment, that’s exactly what I saw. When that image faded, it was replaced by a more complete version of the face atop a normal-looking body—as normal as any eight-footer
can
look. The elflord was only ten feet away from me, and armed much as I was. His claymore fit him better than mine fit me.

“Okay, you got that trick down pat,” I said. “Now try this one. Drop dead.”

He didn’t oblige this time, though. It was too much to hope for. I moved my sword back and forth in front of me and started whistling that strange melody again as I advanced toward the elflord. There was no place to run, so I decided that I might as well act as if I weren’t unduly worried about the elflord. The music seemed to give him an instant’s pause before he brought his sword up and came to meet me. The battle tune he whistled was different from mine, but it was just as eerie.