Nidling was jeering at her. Chingetai stared openmouthed, caught between astonishment and outrage.
“Lady, listen to the earth. The yackcarn stampede is almost on top of us!”
Gran Cyd raised her black brows, but she dropped to a knee and placed a hand on the trembling ground.
“Where are the children?” Jame asked.
“The youngest are in their mothers’ lodges. The elder . . . ” She rose quickly. “Chun, Ardet. Bring in all the younglings and shut the gates. Favorite, go. Do what you can to slow the herd.”
Jame nodded and charged up the benches to more protesting cries.
“Either go down or come up,” came one plaintive wail. “Only stop stepping on us!”
She burst out into the cool night air beyond the steam issuing like smoke from the door of the overheated lodge. A moment to fill her lungs and to clear her head, then she started running down the booming plank road.
What in Perimal’s name d’you think you’re doing? demanded the rational part of her mind.
Buying time to rescue Prid and the others.
How?
I have no idea.
Feet pounded after her. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw the Noyat charging up behind her. Good. She could use the help.
The next moment he had tackled her. She skidded on her hands, picking up splinters. He grabbed her hair and slammed her face into the wood. When he turned her over and lunged to throttle her, she wrapped her legs around his waist and jerked him backward, breaking his nose and grip with a palm strike.
She should kill him for Anise, now that he had broken the rules of hospitality by attacking her first, but that might not be easy and it would take time.
Jame kicked free, scrambled up, and raced for the gate. It was shut. She forced it open a crack and slipped out. The meadow grass clung to her ankles as she ran—forty yards, fifty, sixty—until she could see movement ahead. Dust boiled up toward the gibbous moon like smoke from some mighty conflagration. When she stopped, panting, she could feel the earth tremble through the soles of her boots. The entire end of the valley seemed to be in motion, full of distant, approaching thunder. They appeared to be far away when she first saw them, but then she realized that what she had taken for distance was size.
Four-foot horn spreads, shaggy shoulders twice her height, cloven hooves tearing up the earth with every grunting stride . . .
I’m dead, she thought.
Hooves pounded closer, and there was Death’s-head with streaming mane and tail, white lightning on a darkening plain. He circled her just out of reach, again and again. Oh, for Perimal’s sake . . .
“Stop it!” she shouted at him, and he slowed. She grabbed his mane and, swept off her feet, scrabbled for a stirrup. Here. Up. Into the saddle.
He whirled to face the oncoming stampede, snorting, his ears pricked. Would he stand or flee? Her will counted with him, but how he fulfilled it was entirely his affair.
A racing figure behind caused her to twist in the saddle.
“Prid, run!”
A white face glared back at her. “I will not.”
“Then up.”
The girl hesitated, eyeing the colt as he danced on sharp, impatient hooves. There was no time for her to reach the gate’s shelter.
“You wanted to ride the rathorn. Now or never.”
Prid answered with a half-sob, and leaped. Her foot came down on Jame’s. She swung herself onto the colt’s back behind the saddle, her arms flung around Jame’s waist.
“Hold tight. Tighter.”
Death’s-head had reared back on his hocks. Jame felt his barrel quiver between her legs. From here, he could leap in any direction, fight or flee or stand. The yackcarn roared down on them, towered over them. The rathorn screamed. The scent of terror rolled off of him in a carrion stench, making Prid gasp. As best she could, Jame extended her own immunity to the girl and flung herself forward to grip the colt’s neck.
The yackcarn herd split around them. Horns scythed past. Ropes of slather swung from gaping jaws. Shaggy shoulders and flanks threatened to sweep them off their feet. The colt screamed and slashed with horn and fang, almost knocked off his feet by the sheer weight of the oncoming horde. One beast swerved at the last moment. Its horn plowed into the earth and it cartwheeled. The rathorn jumped back with a shriek, nearly throwing both riders. The creature’s massive body slammed to the ground before them, and others piled into it.
Then they were past. Jame hung, breathless, to the colt’s sweating neck. She could feel Prid’s body tremble as it pressed hard against her back, and the child’s arms clenched around her waist. They were surrounded by dead, dying, or winded yackcarn as if by sheer, shaggy walls of quivering flesh. Somewhere, a calf bleated for its mother.
“Well,” said Jame to Prid, fighting to catch her breath. “Now you can say . . . that you’ve ridden . . . a rathorn.”
The stampede had swept on but, its spearhead broken, had passed on either side of the walled hill village. Less fortunate beasts had crashed through the low roofs of the outer lodges as if into pitfalls and weltered there, bellowing. Merikit lined the edges, spearing downward. All the others, led by Chingetai, pursued the main body of the herd with arrow and lance and gleeful shout.
Men ran past from the north end of the valley to the south, on the heels of the herd, toward the gate. Noyat. A raid. Planned or opportunistic, it didn’t matter: Chingetai had left his womenfolk unguarded.
Or perhaps not quite.
Still, dark figures stood before the gate, rank on rank of them. The dead had indeed come out, watch-weirdlings all on this night.
The attackers faltered. Would they turn? No. The gate creaked open behind the sentries, pushed by a lone man with a scarred lip and a broken, bloody nose. The invaders surged forward, cutting down the dead where they stood.
“Off,” said Jame to Prid.
As the child slipped to the ground, she unsheathed her scythe-arms and donned them, all the while trying to restrain the colt, whose blood was up. Brier had showed her how to shift the short blade up her arm so that its first band gripped her elbow and its second, her armpit, thus giving her some use of her left hand.
Prid was running back to the village. “I have to find my sisters!” she called over her shoulder, and slipped through the gate as she spoke.
Jame plunged after her, cursing the Noyat Nidling. Trinity-triple-dammit, never trust a man who won’t deal with women as equals, much less who sanctions the mutilation of horses.
She tried to guide the colt with her legs, but as usual he read the intent in her mind and interpreted it as he pleased.
Ahead of them, two looters ran out of a lodge clutching armloads of furs. They dropped their booty as the rathorn bore down on them, but too late. Horns, hooves, and blades cut them down as they ran
Shrieks sounded from another lodge. Death’s-head stopped so short at the door that Jame was launched through it. There she rolled over her lethal blades and rose to find Da motionless on the floor in a spreading puddle of blood while Ma fought with a Noyat whose intention was all too clear. He looked back toward Jame. She nailed his leer to his face with a blade through one eye and out the back of his skull. As she freed the steel with a foot braced against his forehead, Da sat up, spitting blood and teeth.
“Go,” she said, not very clearly. “We’re all right. They’re after Gran Cyd. Go.”
Jame plunged back up the steps. There couldn’t be too many raiders—maybe three dozen from what she had seen—but they had the advantage of surprise and confusion. A strike at the Merikits’ heart . . .
The cry of a child distracted her. Ardet had Prid down and was tearing at her clothes. Not all enemies come from outside. Jame kicked him away. The battle maids descended on him in a horde, shrieking and slashing as Jame backed off. God’s claws, she should simply have cut the wretched man’s throat.