Sunrise Lands

Maybe I could have eaten enough crow to stay home, he thought. His spine stiffened, and he remembered Pierre Walks Quiet's voice around a campfire one night: A man lives as long as he lives, and not a day more.

He glanced over his shoulder at the walls of the village double-bowshot away across the flat yellow blond field. He'd run all night and into the dawn. Almost made the village wall, almost made the hills beyond. So close…

And I'm going to die thirsty and hungry and tired. Shit.

"The last time was a good ways east of here," he said. "It wasn't as good a day as you thought, or as bad as I did at first."

"Indeed we have met so," High Seeker Kuttner said. "Glad to see you again like this, Vogeler. Oh, so very glad to see you."

"Not seeing as much of me as you did the last time when you had two eyes, you pissant little Cyclops," Ingolf taunted, forcing a sand-dry mouth to speak and to smile.

He gave a silent sigh of disappointment as the ges ture that had almost ordered the horse archers to shoot stopped unmade.

The commander of the score of Corwinite cavalry looked around anxiously. Every third man of his troop was wounded, some with bandages still leaking blood, and foam streaked the shoulders and necks of their horses. Only two unsaddled horses followed on leading reins. He licked his lips and spoke: "High Seeker, there are enemy patrols all around us."

"They may not be looking very enthusiastically," Kuttner said, with a secret smile.

"High Seeker, we must break eastward now if we're to get through before the Boise cavalry get their screen tight. What shall we do?"

Kuttner smiled more broadly. Even ready for death and raising his shete for the final rush, Ingolf found his stomach twisting a little at the cruelty in the expression. Killing this one would be a service to humankind in gen eral. His eyes flicked around; a dozen bows, but he might just live long enough to cross the ten yards and strike "What shall we do? What there wasn't time to do when this apostate escaped from Corwin," Kuttner said.

Then he spoke three words and moved his hand in a sign. Ingolf dropped his shete to his side. Incredulously, he looked down at it and told it to move. Instead the thick muscular fingers opened, and the weapon fell point-first to go shink in the gritty volcanic soil beneath the wheat; the golden heads waved around the leather-wrapped hilt.

Kuttner rode close, and slapped him casually across the face. Sweat broke out on Ingolf's skin as he strove to move.

"You have much to learn," he said. "Much to experience, Ingolf apostate. The Ascended Masters have called your name. It echoes through the Valley of Paradise and whispers in the Eternal Flame. The Prophet is dying, and in His passing He will require servants. And there is a drum you desecrated that needs a new hide to cover it. Come with me."

"Lacho Calad! Drego Morn!" Ritva shouted in unison with her sister.

There were four men in the Cutter patrol that came over the rise, pushing hard to catch the pair they'd been chasing for hours. Two died as the sisters shot, the ar rows cracking into their breastplates and sinking halfway to the feathers; it was only thirty yards, and they'd carefully picked the ones with bows in hand and arrows on the string. The Cutters had all been in the battle yesterday, and the quivers of the other two were empty.

They charged without hesitation anyway, one leveling a lance and the other holding his shete up. Acrid dust shot up from the hooves of their horses, heavy with pebbles in this stretch where the flat plain met the northern foothills.

"Where did you two get that ambling crowbait?" Ritva shouted, as she legged her horse into a gallop towards them.

Which was unfair; Duelroch and Mary's Rochael had been standing idle all yesterday, and the Arabs had unca

The two Dunedain and the pair of Cutters closed with the shocking abruptness a combined gallop produced, but the Cutters' horses were laboring. She could see snarls of effort on the men's faces, and the marks of exhaustion. Then only a pair of pale eyes over the shield rim as the enemy braced themselves for impact, ducking down behind their shields against arrows…

… and the twins pivoted left and right, splitting to either side like water from a wedge and throwing themselves away and down in the saddle as well. Ritva took her weight on her bent left leg and pressed her face into Duelroch's flying mane for an instant. The lance head went through the space she'd been in; then she was back in the saddle as her leg uncoiled like a spring, bringing the mare up on her haunches to shed her hurtling forward momentum.

Or most of it; still on her hind legs, Duelroch had to crow-hop twice to keep from tumbling, with dust shooting forward from under her hooves. Then she landed and whirled, superbly responsive to Ritva's shift of balance. The Ranger's hand went back over her shoulder and she had the arrow drawn to the ear before the horse had fully settled again. It stood stock-still to the signal of knees and legs as she aimed for half a second, with the kiss-ring on the string touching the chapped skin of her upper lip and the narrow pile shaped arrowhead resting on the arrow ledge over her gloved knuckle.

The Cutters were frantically trying to rein their own horses in and around, but they'd only begun when the snap snap of bowstrings on steel cut sharply through the whistle of the wind and the hammer of hooves.

Crack.

At less than twenty feet even the best armor wouldn't stop a bodkin point from a powerful bow. The leather plates over the Corwinite horse soldier's upper spine hardly even slowed it as it punched through and into bone. The man dropped limp as an empty sack, striking the ground and rolling twice, snapping the shaft of the arrow off.

Crack.

Mary's arrow missed the spine, smashing through just beside it and out the man's chest, transfixing the lungs but not the heart. He screamed and fell and dragged, one boot twisted in the stirrup; the horse stopped and looked back at him in puzzled alarm. Mary swung down out of the saddle and did the needful thing with her sword, putting the point behind one ear and giving a single sharp push; the man didn't resist, either too nearly unconscious or glad of the release from pain.

Then they freed the horses, stripping off saddle and bridle and slapping their rumps to set them off; they'd find water, and probably somebody would round them up eventually.

Mary grimaced as she came up, wiping and sheathing her sword.

"I hate doing that," she said, taking a drink from her canteen after they had both tasted earth and murmured the prayer.

"Me too, sis," Ritva said, thankful her kill had been clean.

Her hands fought to shake; suddenly she was conscious of sweat and itches and the heat of the noonday sun. Hot dry wind was cool on her sodden hair as she slung her helmet to her saddlebow.

"I think Rudi got cut off a little south of here," she said worriedly.

"Mer," Mary said, agreeing. "But he might get ahead of them and circle north. Let's get to the rendezvous and see who made it."

They worked their way northward, towards a butte shaped like a camel's head and hump. Ritva's head came up as she caught the ringing stamp of a shod hoof on rock, and then she relaxed again and lowered her bow as Father Ignatius stepped out from behind a curve of stone. Edain came next, and then young Frederick Thurston. He looked like a man who'd been hit behind the ear with a sock full of wet sand, but not quite hard enough to knock him out.