Thinblade (52 page)

He couldn’t help but feel good at the news, and her smile always lifted his spirits. Everyone was in much better shape after a full night’s sleep and a good meal. They would make good time even with the steady rain that showed no signs of letting up. Alexander pulled the hood of his cloak up before stepping out into the weather.

For the next two days they made steady progress heading east. Isabel led the way through seemingly endless tracts of fir trees, winding through the brush to make their trail difficult to follow. She kept Slyder near the Reishi and looked in on them often. They were losing ground and struggling to stay on the trail. In two days, they’d fallen about five miles behind.

The rain had been falling steadily and the forest was wet. Alexander and his companions were soggy and cold. In the back of his mind, he worried about the night wisps. Now that the forest was thoroughly soaked, they couldn’t build a decent fire if they wanted to, even with the little bit of oil that Lucky had left. Without fire, the night wisps could easily be the end of them. He reminded himself to stop wasting energy on problems that hadn’t happened yet. He had more than enough real problems to worry about without fretting over potential dangers.

The next morning the rain broke and the sky showed signs of clearing. The monotone, flat-grey cloud cover gave way to big grey puffball clouds that scudded across the sky like they were marching toward a distant enemy. The sun peeked through here and there, casting bright rays of light down to the ground through the thick, moist air. The day was warmer than the past few, but the wind had picked up so it felt colder in the shade of the forest.

Isabel turned them north about midday. She said they should reach the northern edge of the forest by evening of the next day. The Reishi were still a good distance behind and steadily losing ground. The rain was making it even harder for them to follow Isabel’s circuitous trail. She led them in a straight line until the terrain presented an opportunity to confuse the Reishi, then she led them in unpredictable and almost bizarre patterns, sometimes turning abruptly for no apparent reason and other times walking in large circles so their tracks would intersect and create a confusing maze of trails to follow. Where they found flowing water or stone, she used it to conceal their path. Other times she stopped and brushed out their footprints with fir boughs to make it look as if they had simply vanished.

She knew an experienced tracker would find the trail eventually, but it would take much more time to find it than it took her to obscure it. Every tactic she employed was designed more to delay their enemy than to lose them outright, and her efforts worked. She frequently looked at the enemy’s progress through Slyder’s eyes and saw them walking in circles looking for some sign or mark on the ground. She kept Slyder high in the trees and was careful to ensure that he was never seen. She knew all too well that the value of a spy diminished greatly if the enemy knew they were being watched.

True to her word, Isabel led them to the northern edge of the forest in the late afternoon of the next day. Alexander could see the city off in the distance. It was bigger than he had expected. He’d only seen Southport, Highlands Reach, and Glen Morillian in his whole life. Each was a fair-sized city but none was close to the size of New Ruatha. Even at this distance, he could see the sprawl of the houses and buildings stretching out onto the plains all around, but the thing that caught his eye and captured his imagination was the multi-tiered plateau in the center of the city. It was still two hours until dusk and he could already see the seemingly endless lights glittering over every part of it.

Chapter 43

Jack smiled at the sight. “It’s been a long time since I’ve looked on the Glittering City. It’s good to be home.” He sighed somewhat wistfully and then said more sardonically, “I only hope my guild is still in order. Bards can be an unruly bunch when left unsupervised for so long.”

Alexander grinned at the mixture of joy and mischief that danced across Jack’s face.

“I’ve missed New Ruatha, too,” Lucky said with fondness. “It’s been many years since I studied at the Wizards Guild. I hope Mage Gamaliel is well. It will be good to see him.”

They stood well back into the wood line and looked out across the high grass of the plains. It looked like they could make the edge of the city by dark, but Alexander wasn’t sure he was judging the distance correctly. “How far away is it?” he asked.

“It’s more than half a day’s walk,” Jack smiled knowingly. “Looks closer, doesn’t it?”

Alexander nodded thoughtfully, “Where do we enter the passages you spoke of?”

Jack pointed to the eastern edge of the city. “There, where the river flows in. We can enter the underground passages and make our way right into the central plateau without ever setting foot on the streets.”

Alexander looked at the sky and the position of the setting sun. “We still have a couple of hours of light left. Let’s make the best of it and move farther east so we have as little ground to cover as possible out in the open.”

They started moving through the forest only a hundred feet or so inside the tree line. Alexander knew there were probably Reishi patrolling the grasslands between the forest and the city, and he wanted to avoid them if at all possible. Isabel said the majority of the Reishi had gone north along the road on horseback. They would have easily made it to New Ruatha a few days ago and were probably looking for them at this very moment. Even as that thought entered his mind, Alexander felt a strange sensation well up in his head almost like pressure building behind his forehead.

He stopped and focused on the sensation. The moment he did he was swept up into the firmament. His awareness was no longer confined to his body but spanned the whole of existence. It was a jarring sensation that flooded his consciousness with more information than he could possibly process. It was all a jumble of tangled and disjointed events cascading through his mind.

Then, abruptly, he was floating beneath the present moment, beneath the firmament itself. He no longer saw the impossibly vast cacophony of events in the world but instead looked up at the wave of time from beneath, where it was calm and quiet. He could see where it crested into the world of reality and created the moment of existence that every living thing shared. It was a whole new sensation, like being within the ocean of the firmament rather than spread across the place where it crested into the moment of creation.

And then it sped up.

It was so beyond anything that Alexander had even imagined that he couldn’t quite grasp what was happening. The point in time where the firmament touched reality moved forward just a minute or so. Not long, but Alexander knew with awed certainty that he was seeing into the future, or at least one possible future. His awareness narrowed down to the place inside the tree line where he and his friends were. He saw himself and his friends moving through the forest. Then he saw Truss leading more than a dozen mounted Reishi mercenaries around a thicket on the edge of the forest. Next he saw a hail of crossbow bolts crash into his friends. Isabel was hit. Lucky was hit. Jack was hit. Truss laughed.

Alexander slammed back into his mind and the present moment with such force that he nearly lost his balance. Scarcely a heartbeat had passed and yet his vision felt like it took several minutes. He looked up and saw the thicket that Truss would be charging around not fifty feet ahead.

“Take cover!” he commanded quietly as he whipped his bow off his shoulder and nocked an arrow.

Everyone except Anatoly hesitated for just a moment. Anatoly quickly and fluidly slipped behind a big tree while unslinging his war axe. A moment later everyone else scrambled to get behind a tree, when a dozen horses came around the thicket. The enemy saw them in the thin woods of the forest’s edge and wheeled toward them.

A dozen crossbow bolts zipped past them, peppering the trees they were hiding behind, but none hit home. Alexander’s mind reeled at the implications. He’d seen the future and yet he hadn’t because the future he’d seen didn’t happen. He couldn’t quite make sense of it and he clearly didn’t have time to try. The enemy was fifty feet away and coming fast.

Alexander counted fifteen soldiers. They were mounted, well armed, and wearing light armor. He tried to touch the firmament again to see if he could use his magic to help in the fight but felt nothing, so he fell back on old reliable skills. He rolled around the tree, bringing his bow up and the string back, took quick but careful aim and let his arrow go. The first kill of the fight was his. The mercenary toppled off the back of his charging horse with an arrow buried through his breastplate and into his chest.

A moment later, Isabel and Abigail imitated him and dropped a soldier each. Still the enemy charged. The next volley of arrows from Alexander, Isabel, and Abigail leapt from their bows only feet before the enemy reached their position. Three more fell, but the remaining nine enemy soldiers crashed past the trees and spun quickly. Truss was shouting commands from a distance of thirty feet or so behind his force of mercenaries.

Alexander felt time slow down. He surveyed the scene quickly but calmly. Abigail scrambled onto a large fallen log that was too big for a horse to leap and drew another arrow.

From his hiding place behind a giant cedar, Jack swung a broken tree branch at the legs of a horse rushing past, sending it crashing face first into the dirt. Anatoly employed a similar tactic, except his axe took the horse’s legs off at the knees and sent the animal into the ground, squealing in pain. Both soldiers tumbled off their mounts and landed hard. Lucky was sitting with his back to a large tree, rummaging around in his bag. Isabel dropped her bow and drew her sword.

The enemy was all around them, pulling their horses to a halt so they could converge on Alexander and his companions. They were armed with spears and long swords. Each had a crossbow but they’d all been fired. Alexander leaned his bow against the tree with one hand while drawing his sword with the other.

He felt a sense of calm focus settle on him. He was in a fight and he had a blade in his hand. The timeless experience imparted on him by the skillbook gave him a feeling of familiarity and certainty.

He stood away from the tree in a clear challenge to the first soldier who brought his horse around for an attack. When the horse rushed, Alexander calmly took a couple of steps in front of its headlong charge. His quick move put the enemy’s spear on the other side of the animal’s neck, protecting Alexander from its sharp tip. At the same time, he brought the tip of his blade around and caught the enemy soldier on the outside of his thigh just above the knee. The momentum of the horse did the rest. The blade drove through muscle from front to back, then sliced out the side. The man screamed in agony and slipped off the side of his still-charging horse.

Isabel dodged a charging horseman by circling around the trunk of a fir tree only to run into the attack of another. With her back to a tree, she traded sword thrusts with the mounted man. Abigail killed another with her bow. She stood, feet planted squarely, on top of the old log and calmly drew another arrow. Anatoly ducked under the slashing attack of a horseman and swept the legs out from under the horse with the blade of his axe, unhorsing yet another enemy soldier. Jack carefully moved from one downed soldier to the next with his now bloody knife.

Two mercenaries came at Alexander just after he met the first charge. He easily parried the sword of the first but it put him in position for the second’s attack. He deflected the spear enough to prevent being run through and instead escaped with a gash on top of his left shoulder. As the spear rode over his shoulder, he thrust the point of his blade up into the abdomen of the horseman, lifting him off the horse, over his head, and bringing him crashing down onto the forest floor.

Isabel cried out when the soldier she was fighting slashed her across the chest only inches below her throat. From where Alexander was, it didn’t look deep, but it was bleeding freely. A second later, the man who had cut Isabel stiffened when an arrow from Abigail’s bow sprouted from his chest.

The soldier who’d missed a moment before wheeled to face Alexander again, slashing with his sword. Alexander calmly used his sword to stop and trap the enemy’s blade against the horse’s neck, while drawing his long knife and burying it into the rider’s hip. The enemy screamed in pain before toppling off his horse.

The battle lasted only a few seconds. Just as the last man fell with Alexander’s long knife buried in his hip, Lucky stood up with a strange-looking little bone whistle. When he realized that he’d missed the fight, he looked almost disappointed and kind of sheepish.

Seeing his men all fall very quickly, Truss wheeled his horse and spurred it into a gallop toward the plains. Lucky broke into a broad grin and blew the whistle. At the silent sound, all the horses immediately started bucking in sudden, startled pain. Truss lost control and toppled off his horse but got tangled up in the stirrup. Alexander watched the petty little noble get dragged off into the distance by his panicked horse.

Lucky chuckled, “Handy little whistle.” He held up the old carved-bone whistle that looked like a tiny wild stallion. “I’m sure Truss agrees,” he added with a grin. He slipped it into his pocket and picked up his bag. “Now, let’s have a look at those wounds.”