Then she stared, as if she could not understand why Pirvan was shaking with laughter, and many more than three humans were shouting her name as if it were a war cry.
Tarothin wished he could shout louder than the storm and the battle together. Then this Istaran witling might listen to him!
Instead he turned away, to nearly run into a medium-sized, sharp-faced woman wearing a robe that sun and salt air had faded from black to a dubious gray. The Red Robe almost made a gesture of aversion. Revella Laschaar, the oldest and most powerful Black Robe woman with the fleet, had come to the battlefield.
Karthayan by birth, she now lived in Istar. It was said that she was much in favor with kingpriests over the past twenty years, and Tarothin suspected this was true. She would never have risen so high otherwise.
"Tarothin, friend of the wayward and the unvirtuous!" she called.
"I do not answer to those titles, O servant of Nuitari," he said.
"So be it," Revella replied. "Waste my time, waste your time, waste the lives of those who need our help."
Tarothin bit down on another sharp reply, so hard he thought for a moment he had broken a tooth. Well, there was Sirbones to put it right if so. Meanwhile, no one ignored Revella Laschaar without paying a price.
"Reverend Lady Revella," he hissed, "do you wish to speak, or may I?"
"Answer a question first, then I will listen."
"I will tell all that I know."
"All?" The Black Robe laughed, throwing her head back so far that Tarothin half hoped something would fall into her mouth and choke her. Then she pierced him with an arrow-swift glance.
"We have no time for that much," she continued. "Only tell me this: When you and Rubina fell out with one another-was that feigned or real?"
Tarothin groped for his scattered wits, trying to throw them back across the years to the Black Robe who had been his lover during Waydol's War. As he groped, he looked more closely at Lady Revella. It seemed now that something about her features echoed Rubina's, or perhaps the other way around. Almost certainly a blood tie, somewhere.
But that was a mystery whose answer could wait. An answer to Lady Revella could not.
"It was all an act," Tarothin said. "Well, perhaps not wholly on her part. She did take another lover, until we met again. After that…"
Briefly, Tarothin was glad that it was raining. Otherwise someone might have noticed that his eyes were wet.
"Ha!" Revella spat. "That is the answer I hoped for. Now I can help you."
"Help?"
"You haven't changed your mind about needing some magic worked for more than healing, have you? And stop gaping as if you didn't have a mind to change!" The lady's tongue certainly lived down to rumor.
"We certainly need all the help against Wilthur we can find," he said. "What is your price?"
"Already paid. You made Rubina happy. Darin trusted her. Pirvan honored her with his youngest daughter's name. Gildas Aurhinius would have saved her. Your stand at Belkuthas avenged her."
Tarothin's memories had now caught up with the Black Kobe's babble. It had been the unlamented Captain Zephros who killed Rubina at the end of Waydol's War, and met his own end in the siege of Belkuthas.
"She wished us no ill, and helped us when she could. More than we would have asked," Tarothin said. "Why should we not honor her?"
"Too many people these days give reasons or excuses why not!" Revella snapped. Then, without waiting for permission as wizardly custom required, she touched her staff to Tarothin's.
He neither sprouted wings, fell senseless, nor began to speak in the tongues of the gods. But Rubina's old spell for linking his magic to another's thundered back into his mind, like rampaging minotaurs. He pressed hands to his ears, in a futile effort to fight a noise that was trapped within his skull.
"Hold Rubina's spell, and let me give you one of mine, that we can cast linked," Revella said. "Well, what are you waiting for? Is your brain so soft Rubina's masterpiece has sunk out through the bottom of it?"
Tarothin shook his head and was surprised when it did not fall off his shoulders. "No," he said. "But-I won't ask why you do this. I will ask that if we are not enough by ourselves, will the rest of Istar's magicworkers follow you?"
"They had cursed well better," Revella snapped. "Or have a good explanation. Now, put your staff across mine just there…"
Sir Darin was not the first to notice the break in the storm. The minotaurs had thrown out scouts to the flanks as well as to the front, and in between hacking at maddened vegetation and poisoned monstrosities of animals, they felt the wind and rain ease.
Then they saw breaks in the clouds, and began bellowing the news, loudly enough to be heard over the last of the storm and the battle. They had to outbellow the battle for quite a while.
Darin had never fought side by side with Rynthala in such a deadly fight. He found that it was a curiously intimate experience, in which he could feel as close to her as when they were wrapped in each other's arms.
It did not, fortunately, affect the iron detachment Waydol had taught him to bring to war, and which helped make him almost as formidable as a minotaur. Minotaurs might be stronger, but they fought, too often, in hot fury.
It was in that hot fury that the minotaur column set about clearing a path to their comrades high on the mountain. Some minotaurs fell, past healing; others fell and were carried to momentary safety. The enemy's magical creations gave way before trampling hooves and flying steel. Darin even saw minotaurs using their horns, to hook animated branches away from comrades, or gore sorcerous beasts trying to leap down from above.
Darin and Rynthala had armor, while the minotaurs often relied on their tough hides, so the humans kept well to the forefront. It was just behind the head of the column, indeed, that they saw an obscenity with wings and teeth swooping down on a minotaur.
Rynthala had long since shot off all her arrows, retrieved none, and found no far-striking weapon lying on the battlefield. Minotaurs, of course, were not much for archery, except sometimes at sea-which Darin thought just as well. He did not want to think of the power of an arrow shot from a bow that a minotaur could honorably wield; it would go through plate as if it were cheese.
But a shatang lay near, the head bent but otherwise serviceable. Darin snatched up the fallen weapon, hefted it to judge its balance, then threw it.
The bent head sent the shatang a trifle awry and the winged creature had time to claw at the minotaur's eyes before the shatang transfixed one wing. Darin ran in and chopped off the other wing with his sword, then jerked the shatang loose and pinned the creature to the ground with it.
Meanwhile, Rynthala was trying to wrap an herb-steeped dressing around the minotaur's bleeding, blinded eyes. It was her last one, but Darin judged the risk was fair. The battle must be close to a lull, if not an end, regardless of who would claim victory.
The herbs were supposed to bring calm, ease pain, and stop bleeding. It was a formula handed down from Rynthala's parents, and Darin had seen it save lives before.
It nearly cost him his.
It had not occurred to him that the winged creature might have a mate or at least a companion. He only thought of that in the moment after claws ripped at his exposed cheek and hand, leaving both feeling as if they had been branded and set aflame.
Rynthala cut the creature out of the air with her sword a moment later. It screamed in dying, and Darin wished the scream would go on long enough so that he himself could cry out without being heard. Instead, he bit his lip until blood came, then tried to force out sensible words that would keep Rynthala from lamenting her ill-timed generosity.
"As long as it's not-poison-" he said, feeling as he spoke a chill that gave the lie to his words.