The Khamorth threw up his hands, screamed, and crumpled to the snow, dead before he touched it. The other barbarians stared. So did Rhavas. That he could bring forth such power, wherever it came from, still astonished him.
Howling what had to be curses of their own, the other two Khamorth swung up their swords and rushed toward him. "Curse you!" he shouted at them. His blood was up now, not for his own sake but for Ingegerd's. Their faces twisted in pain. They staggered, groaned, and collapsed. They thrashed in the snow for a little while, then lay as motionless as the first plainsman.
"Very holy sir?" Ingegerd's voice behind Rhavas almost made him scream. He whirled in something not far from panic. "They are dead, very holy sir," Ingegerd said. "They are dead, but others will live yet. We have not escaped. Hurry away, before more Khamorth find the trail."
Her calm good sense restored order to a world that had seemed to be coming apart at the edges. "I come," Rhavas said, and he did.
A couple of minutes later, women's screams rang out from elsewhere among the trees. Some of the barbarians had caught the other two, then. "Can you curse them, as you did the three you slew?" Ingegerd asked.
Rhavas felt of himself, as he might have if he tried to decide whether he had the strength to lift some heavy load. He found that strength wanting, and shook his head.
She sent him a curious look. "How did you do it just now, then?"
"How? Because one of them threatened you," Rhavas said simply.
Ingegerd said nothing to that for some little while. Then, in a voice most carefully neutral, she asked, "And the other two?"
"Aftershocks." In the earthquake-scarred north country, the word came naturally to his lips.
She said something in her sonorous birthspeech. Rhavas made an inquiring sound. She started to answer, then checked herself. "It does not translate well into Videssian. And I think we are making a mistake in fleeing deeper among the trees now."
"What would you rather do?" Rhavas asked.
"Go back for our horses," she said, "and for those the Khamorth will have left behind. We can travel quicker with them, and keep the foe from coming after us."
"If they have not left a guard," Rhavas said.
"If they have, belike you can dispose of him. He will threaten both of us, after all." Ingegerd thought for another moment, then nodded to herself. "It is the best plan we have, anyhow." Rhavas did not contradict her. She went on, "If it works, we win much. Let us try it."
They hurried back toward the edge of the trees. The screams in the little wood went on and on. Rhavas wondered how Phos' might could be consistent with such evil, and with the good god's inevitable triumph. Maybe Skotos was stronger than Videssian theologians imagined. He shook his head. He could not, would not, believe that.
He and Ingegerd came around the bole of a tree as thick as he was tall. Behind it lay the body of one of the Videssians with whom they'd been traveling. Of itself, Rhavas' hand shaped the sun-sign. The man's blood stained the clean white snow. Half his face had been hacked away. He must have been one of the archers who'd shot at the plainsmen, for they'd pulled down his drawers and thrust an arrow up his . . . Rhavas dared hope he was already dead when they did that.
Ingegerd said, "May he safely cross the Bridge of the Separator. Those who did this to him will surely suffer forever in Skotos' ice."
"Yes," Rhavas said, wondering how she, who'd been born outside the Empire's beliefs, had more faith than he did. He made himself add, "We had better go on." She nodded, her mouth a thin, pale slash that both admitted and defied what she had seen.
They passed other bodies and more scarlet splashes and streams on the snow. The barbarians hadn't just slain; they seemed to have cut and slashed for the sport of it. One dead Videssian was gutted like a boar brought down in the hunt, his entrails not only spilled out onto the snow but then chopped to bits. Rhavas' stomach lurched. The man couldn't have lived long while that was going on . . . could he?
And this was surely not the only such slaughter the Khamorth had worked. Wherever they caught Videssians, they must have amused themselves this way. If nothing else, the practiced skill of the atrocity proved as much. They must also have been working such evils on one another out on the Pardrayan steppe for centuries uncounted.
How? Rhavas wondered. How could the lord with the great and good mind have tolerated wickedness, viciousness, on such a scale for so long? The prelate wondered whether any Videssian theologian had ever seriously addressed the question—and, if so, what answer he had found. With the sour taste of nausea in the back of his mouth, Rhavas saw one ominous and obvious possibility: that Skotos really was stronger than the theologians living comfortably in Videssos the city, the richest and grandest city in the world—or even in Skopentzana—had imagined or could imagine.
If priests who speculated learnedly on Phos' sacred scriptures saw how things could be in the real world—well, then what? Would the real world matter to men consumed with the spirit and the world to come?
It mattered desperately to Rhavas right now, if he wanted to go on living in it. "We're getting close," he said in a low voice.
"I know," Ingegerd answered, even more quietly. "Can you see? Have the savages left a sentry behind?"
"I don't know. . . . Wait." Had that been movement behind a tree? It had—no doubt about it. "Yes. There is one."
"Curse him, very holy sir. If you have Phos' holy power in you, curse him."
Rhavas had no true notion of what sort of power lay within him, or from whom it sprang. Before, when he'd tried to bring it out without great stress, he'd always failed. Could he turn it into a weapon as reliable as bow or spear? He pointed toward the plainsman. "Curse you," he said, wondering what would happen next.
The Khamorth fell in the snow, face first.
Ingegerd seized Rhavas' arm and squealed like an excited little girl. "You did it, very holy sir! By the good god, you did it!"
"So I did," Rhavas said, still more surprised than not. He was not sure—he was far from sure—he'd done it through Phos' power, but at the moment he wasn't inclined to be fussy, either. He'd cursed the plainsman, and the plainsman was dead. What else mattered? Nothing he could see. Roughly, he went on, "Let's get the horses, and let's get out of here."
"That is good advice," Ingegerd agreed, still looking at him as if she thought he was the most wonderful thing in the world. Seeing that awe on her face made Rhavas feel twice as tall, twice as wide, and eight times as strong as he really was.
They quickly hitched the horses together, then mounted the ones they had been riding. All the Khamorth ponies followed without any trouble; they were used to being led in long strings. Rhavas said, "I hope the rest of the nomads are properly surprised when they come back and find their mounts gone."
"I think they will be," Ingegerd said warmly, and then, "Maybe you ought to curse the whole wood."
He thought about it. He aimed his arm as he might have aimed an arrow. Then he shook his head. "Whatever may be in me, that is not."
"Too bad," Ingegerd said. "The Khamorth within deserve whatever may befall them."
"I can only do what I can do," Rhavas said. "I did not know I could fell that one man until I tried."
"I do not blame you," Ingegerd said quickly. "I would never blame you. That you can do what you can do is a wonder past compare. But, having seen so much, am I to be blamed for wishing I might see more?"
The prelate shook his head. "Not by me. I would never blame you."
Now she eyed him with something besides almost adoring admiration. "Back among the trees, you said you cursed the one barbarian because he was going after me," she said slowly.