The balisong was in her hand again. She reared up on one elbow and sliced at the back of the young man's knee. The finger-length blade was honed to a wire edge; it slid through denim and flesh and with only a little tick of extra effort when it cut the tendon. George howled, a sound of bestial frustration rather than pain, and lurched before his other leg could adjust to carry his weight. Hordle was turning even as he did, and the blade spun-horizontally this time, from left to right across the other man's shoulders. The head came free, and fell beside her.
BD looked into the dead man's eyes. And they looked back at her; his mouth was still grinning as she saw consciousness flow back into them, a single instant of utter horror before the blackness.
I'm going to faint dead away, for the first time in my life, she thought with a curious detachment, and did.
"No," Sethaz said. "Do not waste more men down that tunnel. Send them to scour the land outside the walls instead. We'll have a battle to fight tomorrow anyway."
Thurston of Boise gave him an odd look, a single nod, and then turned to stride away, issuing orders to the men around him even as he did.
Estrellita Peters stood before him, flanked by guardsmen and with her hand resting on the shoulder of her eldest son. Behind them servants were clearing away the ruins of the Bossman's feast. She swallowed and met the Prophet's gaze for a moment before she shifted her eyes to look over his head. Her voice was still calm as she spoke:
"The thanks of my family and Pendleton to you, my lord Prophet. My husband has been abducted by these vicious bandits, but at least you saved me and my sons from captivity. In the future, you and yours may carry weapons here as you please."
Sethaz smiled, a wryly charming expression. "For the present, Dona Peters, we'll be wielding our weapons outside the walls, against your enemies."
She nodded. Her son spoke, eagerness on his seventeen-year-old face.
"Your man was so brave, and so quick and strong! He defeated the head of the Rangers, and knocked down John Hordle! The truth you teach must have much in it, if you can inspire men so!"
The Bossman's wife gave her son a warning squeeze, and he cleared his throat and extended his hand. Sethaz took it in both of his, a firm shake:
"Thank you for rescuing me and my mother."
"Your mother did a good deal to rescue herself," Sethaz said, looking into the dark young eyes. "We will speak more of such matters later, Mr. Peters."
And a whisper, felt along the edges of his mind: I-see-you.
TheScourgeofGod
CHAPTER TEN
As fire forges steel
So pain brings wisdom forth;
Not lightly won, but with blood
All the God suffers is known
By His chosen ones From: The Song of Bear and Raven
Attributed to Fiorbhinn Mackenzie, 1st century CY
I bind your eyes, your nose, your ears, brother deer, Ritva Havel thought, turning her will into a dart. By the Hunter and the Huntress, come to meet your fate!
Then she withdrew her mind, becoming one with the musty scent of damp decaying leaves and wet earth and pine sap from the twigs that studded the loops set on her war cloak, the feel of water soaking through the knee of her pants from the damp earth where she knelt, with the gray light through the misty rain. The mule deer was a second-year buck, his rack of antlers still a modest affair. He was plump with autumn though, his ruddy-brown coat glossy, working his way down from the heights where the snow season had already started.
Here it was just cold, the drizzle slanting down through open forest of tall slender lodgepole pine and short squat limbers, knocking more of the faded old-gold foliage of the quaking aspens and narrow-leaf cottonwoods to flutter down and make the earth beneath slippery with wet duff. The brush ahead of her and to either side was viburnum, scarlet in this season; the withered red berries were still dense on the spindly stems, and the deer was working its way along the edge of the tongue of woodland, nibbling at the fruit while its tall ears swiveled like a jackrabbit's and the black-tipped white tail quivered over the snowy patch on its rump. Mountain bluebirds called as they flitted from branch to branch, feeding on the same bounty.
Closer, and she could hear the slight mushy tock as the deer's hooves cleared the ground. Her own breath scarcely moved the gauze mask, but her stomach abruptly cramped-they'd been hungry, and Rudi needed better food if he was to heal. Fifty yards, forty, thirty… you looked at the spot where you wanted the arrow to go… twenty. ..
I am the bow and the arrow, the hunter and the prey…
The bow came up as she drew to the ear in a single smooth motion, and the cloak fell away from her arms. A slight creaking came from it as her arms and shoulders and gut levered against the force of the recurve's stave, stretching the sinew on the back, compressing the laminated horn on the belly and bending the slice of yew between them. The string lifted from the final curve at the tips, the bow bent into a deep C, and the arrow slid back through the cutout in the riser. The deer began its stiff-legged leap even as the string rolled off her fingertips.
Snap. The string lashed the hard leather bracer on her forearm, and there was a quarter second's blurring streak through the air. Thunk.
That was the distinctive wet sound of a broadhead striking flesh. The quick-release toggle of the war cloak snapped under her fist and she cleared the viburnum in a single raking stride, ready to chase or shoot again. Starlings rose in a chittering flock from the trees around her as she moved, hundreds wheeling in perfect unison and coasting downward to new perches. She reached for a new arrow; an injured animal had to be run down and given the mercy stroke or a hunter would lose all luck, and you couldn't always count on a quick kill. This time the deer took three staggering steps and collapsed, its limbs kicking for a moment; then it stretched out its neck and went limp.
"Good!" Ritva said, wiping off her bow and sliding it into the case against the wet.
She stopped and gathered up her cloak, slid her sword through the buckled frog on her belt and slipped her buckler onto the spring-loaded clip on the sheath. The deer's eyes were blank by the time she arrived, beaded with drops of the rain that pooled like tears. Her arrow had sunk to the fletching behind the ribs on the left side, angling sharply forward and either striking the heart or severing the big veins next to it as the razor-sharp triangular head punched in. The death had been very quick; a single moment of surprise and pain, and then the dark.
"I'm sorry, brother," she murmured, glad of that.
She bent and passed a hand over the deer's eyes, and then her own; touched a finger to the blood and then to her forehead.
"Thank you for your gift of life. Speak well of me to the Guardians. Go now and play beneath the forever trees on the mountainsides of the Undying Land, where no evil comes, until you are reborn."
To the forest: "Thank you, Horned Lord, Master of the Beasts! Bring this my brother's spirit home to Her who is Mother-of-All. Witness that I take from Your bounty in need, not wantonness, knowing that for me also the Hour of the Hunter shall come, soon or late. Earth must be fed."
Then she bent and caught the deer above the hocks, heaving backwards and pumping her legs to keep it moving, and wheezing a little too; the carcass weighed as much as she did, and she wasn't a small woman. You needed a tree to gralloch a deer properly. Hanging it up by the hind legs made it drain thoroughly and it also made it easier to gut and quarter.