She was about to thank Grandmother for the advice when she heard muffled cries outside. “Something’s going on out there,” Corlan said, springing up from his corner and rushing to the window. Rieve joined him there, gripping flaking, rusted iron bars and straining to hear. There were more shouts, then what sounded like fighting, the clang of steel against steel.
“Probably just a bunch of drunken raiders brawling,” Father said.
“I don’t know,” Corlan said. “I don’t hear any laughter, and very few curses. Mostly it sounds like serious combat.”
Rieve kept listening, hoping for any clue.
And then she heard her name.
“It’s Aric!” she said. “He’s come for us!”
“How did he know where we were?” Father asked.
“I gave him a pebble that Grandmother gave me,” Rieve said. “It was meant to be for Corlan, but … well, you know.” She didn’t want to torment Corlan further about his first reaction to the news of their leaving, and why. He was sorry, he had ultimately made the right decision, and she was content to leave it at that. “It showed him where we are.”
“And we doubtless left a clear trail,” Mother added. “So many raiders, in addition to us, could hardly have done otherwise.”
“We’ve got to let them know we’re in here,” Rieve said.
“We need to do more than that,” Corlan said. “If we heard the fight, the raiders have heard it too. Aric and his friends will be overwhelmed.”
“Then we need to help them,” Grandfather said. “They came to help us, so we can do no less. Sheridia?”
Grandmother glanced at the thick wooden door, barred from the outside, that held them in the small, dirt-floored room. “There might be something I can do,” she said.
“Whatever you can,” Grandfather said. “And now would be a good time.”
“I can help too,” Corlan said. “When they captured us, they took all my belongings, but they all came to the fort with us. Which means that somewhere out there is my psionocus.”
“You have a psionocus?” Father asked. “With you?”
“Well, close by someplace. I shouldn’t have to be able to see it to activate it. I only have to be able to concentrate.”
“Can it really help us?” Rieve asked.
“It might. Just let me focus on it. And I have to deserve it. That’s what Tenavry said. ‘Deserve every gift.’ ”
He sat in the corner again, closing his eyes and clenching his fists. Rieve supposed he was conjuring up an image of the little beast he had told her about when he sculpted it.
“Focus fast,” Grandmother said softly. She had turned to face the door, and she spoke words in a language Rieve didn’t know, moving her hands in a strange pattern at the same time. After a few moments, she whispered, “Bang on the door.”
Mother was nearest the door, so she thumped on it with her fists.
“Quiet in there!” a guard shouted. “Don’t think that—”
Grandmother made a yanking motion with her hands, and there was a louder thump on the outside of the door. The first guard released a wail of terror, and a second one’s voice yelled, “What have you done to him? Let him go!”
“We’ve done nothing!” Grandmother called. “Any problem he has is of his own making!”
“What’s going on out there?” Father asked.
“I believe he’s stuck to the door,” Grandmother said. Her voice had never sounded sweeter.
Someone on the outside pounded on the door, writhing against it and screaming, “Get me off! Get me off!”
Then the bar fell from the door. Before it could be replaced, Rieve and her father rushed the door and it swung out. They bowled over one guard, and the other was still pressed flat against the wood, crying for help.
The guard on the ground tried to scramble to his feet. Grandmother spoke some more words and made another gesture, and a cloud of dust from the dirt road blew up into his face, filling his eyes and mouth. He started coughing and spitting, and, blinded by the dust, he fell back again. “Come on,” Grandfather said. “We’ve got to find Aric and the others!”
“Wait!” Rieve ran back into the room that had been their prison. Corlan was still there, sitting in the corner, eyes squeezed shut, hands undulating slightly as if floating on some wafting breeze. “Corlan, let’s go!” she shouted. “Corlan!”
Corlan didn’t move.
The more he fought, the more Aric’s sword fed him. At first he thought he was imagining it. But the longer he did battle, the better he felt. Stronger. Whenever his blade made impact with other steel, he felt a shock up to his shoulder, as he expected. After a while, he realized that those shocks were different from the ones he experienced when the blade struck wood or bone or stone. Those hurt, tiring him. But steel on steel—those gave him more energy, not less. They eased the ache the other ones caused.
Not only that, but regardless of what his sword touched, just the very act of holding it, of moving it through the air, seemed to strengthen and energize him. The steel was him, and he was the steel, and this was what he was made for.
Aric broke through the first raider’s defense and ran him through, the sword slicing clean and not stopping until the cross guard slammed into the man’s belly. Putting his left hand flat against the man’s chest, Aric withdrew the sword. Thanks to the fuller groove he had cut in the blade, it came away easily, without the suction that sometimes occurred. The raider fell away, and Aric swung the blood-slicked blade up to block an axe blow.
From that point, things grew ever more chaotic. Aric caught the obsidian axe head on his hand guard, twisted and flicked his wrist, and wrenched it from the wielder’s hand. He snapped the blade right to left and the razor-edge point sliced the raider’s throat so neatly that the man didn’t know he was hurt for several moments, until blood dribbled down his chest. Then he screeched and put his hands to his neck, and the wound opened up. Another raider sliced at Aric with wrist razors, three-bladed weapons attached to his arms. Aric held him off for a bit, finally slicing up into his right arm, severing it below the elbow. The raider cried out, tried to nestle his damaged arm, and stabbed himself in the biceps. Aric ended the man’s misery with a swift thrust to the heart.
More raiders filled the space between alley and building. Aric lost himself in battle. Bleeding from a score of cuts, he fought like a whirlwind, his new sword flashing this way and that, blocking an attack and slicing flesh in the same motion. He battled dwarf and dray, mul and goliath, elf and man. Somewhere along the way he ceased having to think about what he was doing and simply acted, as if possessed of a wild nature born to the blade.
When he stopped to catch his breath, more than a dozen corpses surrounded him, bodies piled upon bodies.
Ruhm, Mazzax and Amoni had been busy too, but between them the count of their dead didn’t equal Aric’s. All were wounded, but none fatally, Aric was glad to see.
“Aric, you were incredible,” Amoni said. She was winded, with red patches on her cheeks and forehead. “A trained gladiator and I only killed six.”
“Four for me,” Mazzax put in.
“Five,” Ruhm said, a little sourly. “The dwarf got one of mine.”
“She wasn’t dead yet when she came to me,” Mazzax countered.
“I weakened her.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Aric said. “We need to find Rieve and her family, before more raiders get here.”