The three soldiers in front of us were almost as surprised as I was, but they recovered rather quicker. As I clung to Mithos’s waist, barely daring to look around him to see what was happening, they formed a tight line across the street. Mithos raised his sword and dug his heels into the mare’s flanks. She leaped on, but she was distracted and scared. I doubted she’d try to break through all that muscle and steel. Not that I could really blame her.
The impact, when it came, was more of a thud than a crash. The soldier in the middle panicked and dropped his spear as the horse’s great breastbone barreled into him and sent him sprawling. The man on his right held his position but abandoned his lunge to defend himself from Mithos’s fearsome sword strokes. The other stabbed at us from my left with his spear. Crying out in terrified desperation, I kicked wildly at him.
He dodged my boot, like someone avoiding a wasp, and stepped back. This was no retreat, however, but a way of better picking his striking spot. His spear was poised in his right hand, pulled back and ready to plunge into me with full force as I sat there with no weapon or armor to protect me.
With a cry of aggression, the product of a dubious marriage between horror and bravado, I flung myself on him, falling from the saddle and sending him sprawling backward. The spear clattered to the ground. Rather than trying to recover so unwieldy a weapon, he dragged his shortsword from its sheath. I was virtually straddling him, my right hand holding his left from my face, my left fumbling for his sword hand. I grabbed it, but his arm was strong. A dark smile spread across his face. He hissed through his teeth and his blue eyes lit with triumph. The weapon was almost completely under his control, and I felt its blade pressing below my rib cage. He pushed upward, and I struggled to hold it down. His strength was too much for me. His hands came on, one reaching for my eyes, the other pushing the shortsword into my thorax.
With a sudden shift of my lower body I put a knee to his stomach, and, as he gasped for air, rolled off and seized the fallen spear. By the time I had turned on him again, he was up and ready, the sword extended and his body hunched over and balanced, feet apart. He was a big man. I, by contrast, was not as athletic as an eighteen-year-old probably should be, wiry of limbs and a touch overfed about the middle. Still, I gripped the spear with both hands as Orgos had shown me, and, nervously, held my ground. At my back, the other troopers were hurrying toward us and the soldier who had fallen in front of our horse was getting to his feet.
My adversary cut at me, testingly, and I parried neatly, turning my left shoulder toward him and throwing my weight onto my right leg as I’d been taught. A flicker of a smile crossed his angular features, as if the fact that I was less incompetent than I had looked would actually make his inevitable victory more entertaining. He launched a feint attack, pulling back and actually chuckling as my block and lunge whistled through empty air. The footsteps behind us were getting closer. This was not the time to play for a draw.
I stabbed at him, extending my left leg, keeping my right planted and then, as he parried and cut, pulled back to my original position. Textbook. He grinned. I lunged short and, as I recovered, set my body weight squarely over my front foot, throwing my balance off in ways I could only hold for a couple of seconds. He had parried my attack easily and was looking smug, overconfident. I sprang forward, landing on my right foot and lunging as far as I could reach.
The speed and aggression of the flèche attack caught him off guard, and by the time he saw it, it was too late. The spear tip punched through the starched white linen of his cuirass just below the shoulder and a spot of crimson blossomed and spread. His eyes rolled back and he sank to the cobbled road, holding his wound.
“Will!” called Mithos, from the saddle. I turned and found the others were almost upon us. Though Mithos had dealt one of the original troopers a cut across the shoulder blade, which had been enough to take him out of the struggle, the other was now trading blows with him, clearly reluctant to get too close till his fellows from the other end of the street were on hand. This was our chance.
Once again, I took Mithos’s powerful hand and was hoisted into the saddle. As I warded off the remaining soldier with the spear, our steed shuddered into motion. Behind us, the remaining soldiers, realizing they could not hope to catch us on foot, threw their spears in an erratic volley. One whistled over my head and clattered on the road ahead, another sparked against the stone wall to my right and fell to earth.
Three more turns, seven or eight blocks traveled, and no sign of the enemy. Our mount, however, was struggling. One of the flung spears had caught her hindquarters and the weapon’s point had torn a hole in the tissue of one thigh. It was a minor wound, but it was bleeding heavily and giving the animal a lot of pain. She wouldn’t run much further. Two more blocks and her canter became erratic as she tried to favor her other legs. Then, even this became too much for her and she stuttered to a halt.
Mithos glanced at the wound, slid to his feet without a word, and began to run. I followed, amazed we’d held off death this long, but still fully expecting to begin our Kingdom of the Damned tour within the next ten minutes or so. Unless they caught us and took us back for Lengthy Torture and Languid Execution, in which case the tour might start later.
What we saw on rounding the next corner suggested that ten minutes had been optimistic. This road marked the northernmost reaches of the city and, while the town lacked the fortifications of Cresdon or Ironwall, there were sentries at every exit. Stavis, you’ll recall, is an isolated bit of Empire territory connected to its lands in the West by little more than a road across the Hrof wastes. But except for that ribbon of paving across the desert, everything around the city was neutral territory. What that all added up to was that we were about twenty yards from never seeing another Empire soldier again, but from what I could see it may as well have been fifty miles.
There were soldiers everywhere. Lisha and the others may have been long gone, but we had lost several minutes in our earlier wanderings and news of the events at the Waterman had reached the city guards. A great throng of people had spilled out of the adjoining houses and inns to watch the inevitable capture of the notorious rebels as they attempted to leave. If this wasn’t bad enough, the remainder of the guards who had pursued us would be here in moments, complete with even fuller descriptions of the escapees, their probable locations, and some colorful suggestions for what to do with them. Down the street was a stone tower, four stories high and topped with a white flag with a diamond motif: inside it would be soldiers. For once, Mithos’s instinct matched my own. He found the first open tavern door-an inn called the Fisherman’s Arms-and made for the bar.
The place was buzzing with anticipation and, since everyone was clustering around the door and windows, we had no trouble getting served.
“Two pints of bitter, please, mate,” I said to a barman as he looked over my shoulder to see what was going on outside. “And close the door, will ya? It’s spoiling the fire.”
“What the hell are you doing?” Mithos growled with a disbelieving stare.
“I’m ordering a couple of. . you know. I thought you wanted. .”
“We came in here to get out of the street and to think, that’s all.”
“Well, since I’ve ordered them, we’ll just drink up and be on our way, eh?” I ventured.
Mithos sighed and closed his eyes tightly, his brow creasing with intense concentration. I turned to see a face I recognized entering by the same door we had. He was a tall man in his late fifties, clad in a suit of black, his hair and beard an even silver, carefully trimmed. His eyes met mine blankly and he stepped on toward the bar.