“Offspring of a k’nith!” wailed Ro-Vijar. “Your mother mated with a root! I will follow you all the way to Poyolavomaar and thence travel on to Arsudun, where I will mount a fleet to raze your unspeakable city! You will die a death more horrible than you can imagine!”
Rakossa made a gesture of disgust. “There is no death we cannot imagine.” He turned to the squire standing next to him. “We would not inflict this vexsome babble upon the creatures of the ocean.” He put a paw on the squire’s lance. “Best to kill him now and spare the roamers of the ice.” He tugged. The squire did not let go of the lance.
Rakossa regarded the wounded soldier with a stare of disbelief. “We will gift you with another spear, sub-officer, unless you wish to kill the thing on the ice yourself.” When the squire did not reply, Rakossa tugged again, harder. Still the Tran didn’t let loose of his weapon.
“You wish to join him?” Rakossa’s voice was touched with incredulity. “Give us your lance, squire, or we will—”
“You will do nothing,” a tight voice said. Rakossa spun, confronting the speaker of the unbelievable words. Surely he recognized the young officer. It was one who had not cheered as loudly as others when Rakossa had first announced their intention to pursue the escaped offworlders from Poyolavomaar. And had he not seen this one in council since that time…?
“I hight T’hosjer, son of T’hos of Four Winds, of a line who have served Poyolavomaar many generations.” The moonlight gave his youthful features a sinister cast, shone on the slim sword the officer held to the Landgrave’s chest.
“Be that so, T’hosjer, you are an officer no longer.” His voice rose. “You are not even a squire; you are nothing!” He reached up a paw to shove the point of the sword aside. T’hosjer leaned forward, penetrating the other’s chest just above the sternum. Rakossa froze.
Looking around the circle he saw the fixed expressions on the faces of sailors and officers, wounded and spared. No one spoke.
“What is this? Have you all gone mad?”
“No, Rakossa of Poyolavomaar. We have gone sane.” T’hosjer gestured with his free paw toward the slight, silhouetted figure of Ro-Vijar down on the ice. “You blame all that has happened on that one. ’Tis not his fault. We of Poyolavomaar always prided ourselves on making trade or war on our own, without the help or interference of others.
“You have sought the aid of those who are not even Tran, have taken the advice of one not of the Seven Peaks. Because of that my brother T’sunjer and many friends of my cubhood lie dead on the step of a strange city that meant us no harm, their hearts pierced by arrow or sword, their bodies broken by rocks.”
“You fought as fiercely as any other,” said Rokassa accusingly.
“I fought for the city of the Seven Peaks, for Poyolavomaar my home and for my friends and companions. I fought because the alternative was to run. An officer of Poyolavomaar does not run and leave his friends to fight and die without him. There will linger on us no disgrace from this defeat, for we fought blind.” A mutter of agreement came from the surrounding soldiers.
“We were blinded by your words and the position you inherited. We partook of your madness. This, and not the defeat in battle, is the shame we will carry with us to our own passing. It has been long said that you were mad, Rakossa of Poyolavomaar. Those who disagreed or argued too strongly with you disappeared too often these years past.”
“We are your Landgrave,” said Rakossa angrily. “We stand before you as rightful ruler and liege!”
“You are no longer ruler or liege. From this point,” and he mimicked Rakossa’s own words of a moment ago, “you are nothing.”
Rakossa studied the circle of glowering soldiers, male and female. “A thousand metal pled to the soldier who kills this traitor!” No one moved. “Two thousand!” Then, “I will mate and make my coruler the woman who kills this one!”
That produced the first sounds from the group—mewling laughs from several of the female soldiers. One said, “To live the life of horror you visited upon your concubine Teeliam Hoh? I believed not the rumors that came of what you did to her. Now I think they mayhap were understated.”
Rakossa still could not comprehend what was happening. “Officers, prepare to set sail. Soldier-sailors, to your posts.”
“Over the side.” T’hosjer jabbed a little harder with his sword. Blood trickled faster through gray fur. “Join your ally and friend.”
Dazed, Rakossa crawled over the railing. “We will follow. We will see all of you spitted over hot fires in the kitchens. We will have your mates and cubs disemboweled before you!”
T’hosjer leaned over the side of the raft, made certain the no-longer Landgrave of Poyolavomaar dropped to the ice. Then he turned, exhausted, to the mate who had become captain of the raft and spoke a single word.
“Home.”
As members of the circle moved to their posts and signals were exchanged with the four remaining rafts, T’hosjer slid his sword back into the scabbard tied to his right leg.
“What of Moulokin?” asked one of the sailors. “Will they not come seeking revenge?”
“When we have regained some of our pride, we will come back to the canyon of the shipbuilders and make peace with them, as should have been done long ago. There will be changes in the way Poyolavomaar relates to its neighbors.”
As the pitiful remnant of the once grand fleet began to gather wind and move northeastward. T’hosjer moved to the stern. Two figures were receding behind them, dark blots against the ice.
“What see you, T’hosjer captain?” It was the one of the female fighters who’d laughed at Rakossa’s bizarre, desperation proposal.
“I expect they started the moment we prepared to leave,” he told her. He squinted into the moonlit distance. “I believe Ro-Vijar of Arsudun is on top, but it is becoming hard to tell.” He grunted, turned away as the two flailing figures became merely another blur on the blue-white ocean.
In the canyon of Moulokin several shapes moved against the wind and cold. Scattered among the boulders and the dead, they gathered the personal effects of the soldiers of Moulokin and the weapons and armor of the enemy not already scavenged by the victorious soldiery.
One figure did not move. She sat on a wooden beam splintered from some shattered raft and stared out toward where black cliffs gave way to shining ice sea. Since the sun had dropped behind the west rim of the canyon she had been singing in a high, keening wail that was part growl, part rhyme, part something no human could put a definition to.
A voice sounding tired and a touch irritated called to her from among a cluster of stones which had been torn loose from the outer wall by the offworlder energy weapon.
“With all due respect, my lady Elfa, I implore you to have mercy on a wounded soldier and cease that awful caterwauling.”
Her head came around sharply, eyes strove to pierce the night.
“Who… who calls the Landgrave’s daughter?”
“And give us some help,” the voice added, ignoring her request. Two figures limped out from behind an enormous boulder. One promptly slumped to a sitting position. The other figure fell atop the first, rolled off to one side and lay panting on the ice.
“I have a broken leg and torn dan, and this soldier of Moulokin is sorely hurt. I sewed up his belly as best I could, but I am no seamstress or physician.”
“Hunnar? Hunnar Redbeard?” She slid off the section of ruined mainmast, chivaned recklessly toward the two shapes.
Tonx Ghin Rakossa did not die easily. The same forces that powered the demons within him refused to let him perish.
He snugged the too-small cloak more tightly around his torso, leaned against the howling wind. Curse the leperworm Ro-Vijar for the damage he’d done before he died! Rakossa’s dan were too badly torn to give the wind purchase, and his left arm dangled uselessly from the shoulder.