“Am I the only one running?” Tilda called from outside the fort. Block looked down at Dugan.
“Truce.”
“Get the hell off of me!”
A stone bounced by, narrowly missing Block’s head. The dwarf growled and stood to run, pushing off with a foot on Dugan’s sternum. The man likewise growled and scrambled to his feet.
A narrow but deep chasm Block had seen from the top of the palisade surrounded the place for the long-ago landslide here had cracked open the ground. When the Dauls had constructed their fort much later they had made the gate as a drawbridge, raised and lowered with rope winches Block had also seen above, all ruined now. The gate door was however left in its down position as a bridge. Tilda was already across it, pointing her long gun back at the mountainside where the bugbears descended back out of range.
“Careful,” she said. “The bridge wobbles.”
In fact it did more than wobble as Block ran onto it, with Dugan directly behind him. When the bugbears had bashed the winches and cut the ropes, the bridge had fallen hard, breaking the spikes that were meant to secure the far end. It had also knocked the round beam around which the bottom end rotated out of its metal braces. When Tilda had run lightly across it, the bridge had shuddered. When Block planted one foot on it at a huffing sprint, the near end of the unsecured wooden platform slid under the bulky dwarf’s weight, and he stumbled sideways. When Dugan hit it a step behind him the whole surface shifted sharply forward.
It was a near thing. The man fell forward and landed spread-eagle in the center of the short span. The dwarf, with a lower center of gravity, kept his feet. That made him stumble two steps forward, and just a bit sideways. One foot hit the very edge of the bridge, half-on and half not.
*
The Corner Stone of the House that Tilda Lanai served wheeled, spun his arms, and for a frozen moment she thought surely Block would catch himself, right the ship, and run across the bridge to stand beside her. But it was not to be.
Seeing Block’s predicament, Dugan scrambled sideways and threw out an arm, straining for the edge of the dwarf’s Guild cloak or even the end of his braid. Block tottered for a long moment. Then he fell. Dugan’s hand closed on nothing and his chin banged against the bridge. Just that fast, Captain Block was gone.
Dugan scrambled to the edge on hands and knees and looked down into the darkness untouched by the sun high above in the clear sky. He looked up at Tilda but she did not meet his eyes, only stared at the last place Block had stood. Dugan scuttled the rest of the way across on all fours, and stood up beside her.
“Tilda,” he said.
“What?” she asked numbly. He had no answer.
Inside the palisade one nimble bugbear had already reached the ground. It loped across the yard straight at the open gateway with its fellows whooping high above it, dark shadows cavorting against the yellow stone of the mountainside. Tilda looked across at it coming for a few moments, and when it was nearing the gate she raised her gun. The thick hair and hide of a full-grown bugbear might have been proof against a lead ball, but Tilda shot it in its gaping, fang-rimmed mouth. It fell in a heap.
“Tilda,” Dugan said again.
“Yes,” she said. She put a heel against the near edge of the fateful bridge and threw her weight at it, but it moved only slightly. Without a word Dugan crouched and put his hands on the edge, and shoved hard in time with her next lunge. The bridge did not move far, but in its present state it did not have to. A corner of the far end slipped off the rocky edge and the whole thing turned before plunging down, crashing and splintering for long, long moments.
High above on the mountainside, the shadows of the bugbears were still as they stood silently watching. The rest that had started to climb were nearly down into the yard. Tilda looked across at them. She set her gun down on its stock and dug a ball out of a pocket. She started to reload.
“Tilda,” Dugan said for the third time.
“I know,” Tilda said, though she was not sure what she meant. When her gun was reloaded, she turned and walked away into the woods.
Chapter Twelve
It had been so long since Zebulon Baj Nif had slept in a bed that when he awoke he had no more idea of what he was lying on than of where he was.
Something lumpy but soft, yielding in some places but firm in others. Zeb hoped faintly for a woman before realizing it was only a mattress, irregularly filled.
He opened his eyes one at a time, and blinked in the faintest light. There was a curving wooden wall on one side and a coiled hammock hanging above him, though he was on a bunk. Zeb became aware that his whole world was gently rocking. Hospital wagon, he thought. But no. The constant sound in his ears was not the creak of wooden wheels or the whine of an axel needing grease. It was the slap of waves on a hull. The roll of the sea.
“ Fatch ipi thrajipi,” Zeb muttered in Minauan, a phrase it would not do to translate. His voice cracked and rasped dryly.
Wood scraped wood, and Zeb craned his neck sideways. On the other side of the narrow room beneath a high porthole, a figure stood but remained indistinct in the meager light. Two steps brought it bunk-side and Zeb narrowed his eyes as it, she, knelt.
“Drink,” a vaguely familiar voice said, female and accented. A tin cup touched Zeb’s lips and he pushed himself up to his elbows to gulp the metallic-tasting water. When the swallow of water was gone, the figure withdrew and rummaged around somewhere. Sparks were struck, a candle flickered to life, and the Far Western woman with the long, black, unkempt hair stood on her tippy-toes in the center of the room to pass the flame to a lantern swinging from the ceiling.
Memory trickled back to Zeb more than it flooded. He raised his right arm and stared at the inside of his right elbow. Not a scratch. When he moved it though he saw the scarring to either side of the joint, faint white spider webs on his tan skin. The movement was painless.
“It is well?” the woman asked in Codian, returning to kneel beside the bunk and grasping Zeb’s wrist without asking. She manipulated the arm some more, bending the joint and moving it side to side. Zeb could not have stopped her had he wanted to, as he presently felt about as powerful as a sickly kitten. The woman peered at his elbow as would a carpenter who had just blown the sawdust off a fresh piece of work.
“Who are you?” Zeb asked, mouth no longer dry but his voice still rough. The woman blinked at him.
“You do not remember?”
“I do,” Zeb said. “But I never got a name.”
The woman let his wrist go, and Zeb’s arm flopped limply back to the mattress. She stood, wearing her trousers with the patched knees and a long shirt with a rough, thigh-length hem, likewise beige and equally shapeless. She bowed from the waist.
“I am called as Amatesu.”
“And you still say you’re not a priestess?” Zeb croaked.
Amatesu straightened and looked thoughtful, giving her small mouth a pretty purse.
“I am not a cleric in the way of Noroth,” she said. “Not dedicated to a single god of your Ennead. I am shukenja. I am…a talker. With the spirit world.”
Zeb had no idea what that meant, though if the arm which he had thought was sure to be an amputation job was healed, he was fine with whatever Amatesu wanted to call herself.
“But you did fix my wing here, right?”
Amatesu blinked. “Wing?”
“Arm, I mean. It is just a…manner of speaking.”
“You do not have wings.”
“No, I know that…” Zeb sighed and with a grunt he managed to sit up slowly and turn sideways on the bunk, shaking bare feet out from under a coarse blanket and placing them on the deck flooring. He extended his right hand.
“I am just trying to say thank you, is all.”