If the Istaran healers honored their vows to those not of Istar. Sirbones had heard too many tales of the kingpriest demanding that healers and others violate their vows, to have full trust in those who lived where the kingpriest held sway. He also had too much work at hand keeping his own vows to spend much time worrying about those who would break theirs. Indeed, Sirbones had so much work that he did not see the new attack before he had become its first victim.
Twenty paces ahead of the vanguard, consisting of two of Torvik's fighters and an Istaran, all apparently at peace with one another as they fought the common enemy, a stout tree branch bowed upward. It went on bowing upward until it snapped, to dangle by strips of bark and a few fibers of wood that seemed to glow in the storm-murk.
Then the lower portion of the branch, closest to the trunk, reared back. It hurled the broken portion forward like a plains rider's throwing spear. In midair, the broken portion spun end over end, until the jagged end was foremost.
It was this jagged end that drove spearlike into Sirbones's chest. It struck with enough force to knock him off his feet, but as it had pierced his heart as well as driving shattered ribs into his lungs, he felt no pain from the fall.
Indeed, he had only time to feel surprised, before he lost the power to feel at all.
Fulvura was not quite up with the vanguard of the human column. She did not entirely trust her back to this many humans in a battle so confused, deadly, and dark. It would be far too easy for someone to slip close in the rain, the wind, and the rest of the battle-din, and hamstring or even kill her.
She wished to avoid this, although not out of fear, being of a line that had never flinched from battle, raid, or arena, and produced at least one emperor they were willing to acknowledge. She was instead loyal to her brother's plans, which hung on some measure of peace with the humans, at least until they could all quit Suivinari Island with their work done.
Those plans would go sadly awry if Zeskuk had to avenge her death or wounding. Of course, he would also be without her help if she were killed or wounded in an ordinary battle, or merely fell overboard and drowned. But he would have no blood-duty of vengeance.
It was as Fulvura considered these matters that Sirbones died. Indeed, his body landed almost at her feet. Two long writhing tree roots snaked across the rich soil, gouging the leaf mold, reaching for the human healer's body and for the living man he had been trying to heal.
Fulvura stepped over Sirbones's body and chopped down with her battle-axe. The wounded man screamed, convinced that the axe blow was for him. He was still screaming when the descending blade hacked through the first root.
The minotaur jerked the man to his feet with her left hand and sent him stumbling toward the rear. Then she stamped hard on the other root, as it groped for either Sirbones or his staff. She could not be sure which was its intended prey.
The root stung her exposed foot, as if its sap were an acid. She smelled even in the storm the reek of scorching hoof. She was bending over to snatch Sirbones clear of immediate danger when the root brushed against the dead healer's staff.
There were legends of how the priests of Mishakal bound into their healing staves secret spells that kept anyone else from using their magic. Whether the legend was true, or whether the collision of healing magic and killing magic was simply too violent for matter to endure, Fulvura had the sense of standing on the lip of an erupting geyser.
Wood of every kind and in every form from whole trees down to splinters, mixed with sand, mud, hot water, steam, dead creatures and bits of creatures that the minotaur neither could nor wished to name-a mighty column of all these and more towered an arm's length from her. It soared into the treetops, then started to collapse.
Before a ship-long and minotaur-thick tree trunk fell where she had been standing, Fulvura had leaped backward, with agility more like a leopard's than a minotaur's. She had Sirbones's body firmly clutched under one arm and the battle-axe was still in the other.
"Hope I won't have to do that again, to prove anything to anybody," she muttered. She did not dare look about her for humans who might relieve her of her burden, but she hoped they would not be long in coming.
She would not leave the healer's body prey to twisted magic, but this was no battle for even a minotaur to fight burdened and one-handed!
Pirvan saw Zeskuk's sister standing with Sirbones's body under one arm about the same time as he noticed three other things.
One was Hawkbrother and Young Eskaia hurrying to catch up with him and Haimya.
The second thing was a quivering in the ground, not far from Fulvura.
The third was a misshapen form crashing through the undergrowth, ready to burst out of the trees. What it had been before magic transformed it, Pirvan did not know. He was only sure that it was no friend to anyone in the column.
Lightning flared again. This time it flung no snakes or anything else. It nearly dazzled Pirvan, but the remnants of his vision let him tell what was coming at him.
Once it had been a wild boar, or at least a wild pig. Now its snout was a razor-sharp spur of bone, its tusks were barbed, its teeth were pointed like a shark's, and its hooves left red smoke curling up where they touched. Pirvan rather hoped that its hide had not been turned to armor as well.
" 'Ware!" he shouted. Fulvura turned, and so did Hawkbrother, who had a throwing spear in one hand, which gave him the readiest weapon. The spear flew. It struck the once-boar in the left eye and stuck in the socket. The boar outbellowed a minotaur and charged the nearest enemy, who happened to be Fulvura.
The quivering ground flew apart in a shower of dirt and things too long dead to be looked at, let alone smelled, without revulsion. Fulvura reeled backward, nearly losing her balance. The monster boar turned aside and caught sight of Pirvan.
As the glaring yellow eye steadied on him, Pirvan wondered if Wilthur the Brown's magical creations were falling afoul of one another. This would not save him from the boar without some further exertion on his part, however, so he leaped, slashed, fell, rolled, and sprang to his feet again in a single flow of movement, knowing as he did that he had been as fast as he had ever been. He had also hamstrung the boar, but it seemed to be quite as fit to charge on three legs as it had been on four. Pirvan, on the other hand, doubted that he could death-dance with the boar for as much as another minute.
He did not have to. Before Fulvura could fall, Eskaia and her mother caught the minotaur and steadied her. She rumbled something that did not seem to convey gratitude, but then being rude to lesser races was sometimes a point of honor with minotaurs.
Meanwhile, Fulvura flung the axe down, all but threw Sirbones's body at Hawkbrother, unslung the shatangs from her back, and snapped the finger-thick leather thongs binding them as if they were pack thread. Then she put one shatang between the boar's ribs. As it staggered around to face her, she put the second into its throat. It fell too quickly to need the third.
Fulvura and Pirvan met, facing each other over the boar's body. They fell somewhere between shaking hands and glaring at each other, until at last Fulvura jerked her head. Pirvan saw, and wondered how he had escaped noticing it before, that one of her horns was painted in spirals of red and gold, and the other in purple and green.
"Well struck," she said, looking back at the trio grouped around Sirbones's body. "Stop gaping and either get out of the fight or find someone else to oil and wrap him. I'm done with scavenging this thrice-cursed battlefield!"