——— 2 ———

⁠—⁠—⁠— II ⁠—⁠—⁠—

Rapidly the two dust clouds closed in on the four companions, like dread jaws shutting on hapless prey.

“Guin. We’re finished,” said Rinda in a small voice. Her eyes were brimming with tears. “We’ll be taken back, and there will be no escaping this time. I can only hope that those devils of Torus will have the sense of honor to give us a dignified death. Neither Remus nor I will ever forget, Guin, how you chose to sacrifice yourself for us, how you fought for our lost kingdom! Not until our last breath. And, Istavan…” Rinda turned to the mercenary. Her violet gaze met Istavan’s eyes of obsidian, which were now opened wide in astonishment. “Thank you. Thank you for rescuing us from the encampment. I am sad that we won’t be paying you for your troubles. You… You would have looked dashing in the fur-rimmed cloak of the Holy Knights! Tell them what you have to, do what you have to! You, at least you, must survive! You alone stand a chance!”

Istavan blinked. He had not expected such a heartfelt outburst. He was mumbling something about not having done half of what he should have done when Guin interrupted with a commanding growl.

“Don’t give up hope! Children of Parros, I have told you before: you must fight until the very end. Even if you do not lift a sword, you must fight!”

“B-But⁠—” Remus said.

“Wait!” Istavan cut him off. The mercenary’s voice was filled with a strange tension. “Wait, something’s strange about that other dust cloud!”

“What…?” This was Rinda.

“They… it’s…”

What happened next convinced the twins that the mercenary from Valachia, driven to the depths of despair, had lost his mind. For the slumped Crimson Mercenary suddenly sat straight up and began to laugh so hard that they feared he would break in half.

“Istavan!” yelled Rinda. Guin’s eyes narrowed.

“Ah, ah-hah-hah! I see it now! What timing!” shouted the mercenary breathlessly, pounding the saddle with his fists and howling with a delight made all the more sweet for having emerged from the blackest pits of despair.

“Ho!” Guin let out suddenly, with as much mad energy as Istavan.

“Guin, what⁠—” began Rinda.

“Suni!” Guin hollered with ferocious joy. “Ride, Istavan! Ride east, and keep your bodies low to the horse. Make haste, or we’ll get in the range of the knights’ pellet-crossbows. Make haste!”

“Hiyup!” shouted Istavan, kicking the sides of his poor horse again. “Hang on, kids!”

“What about Suni? What’s going on?” exclaimed Rinda, still not seeing.

Istavan had turned their horse around once again. They rode towards the oncoming cloud of dust in the east. “Suni’s brought the Sem to save us!” he shouted to the twins. “The little monkey’s come to our rescue, and none too soon! We were in the bigeater’s mouth, we were!”

“Suni!” Rinda cried, and then she could say no more, for her voice was choked with sobs.

The wildling warriors approaching across the desert plain were now clearly visible to Rinda as she peered forward over the horse’s neck, and to Remus as he bent in the saddle behind Istavan. The Sem force had seemed farther away than it actually was; they were only half as high as their Gohran counterparts and ran on foot. Istavan urged the stumbling horse on toward them, knowing that it galloped on the very edge of exhaustion.

The approaching Sem war party consisted of diminutive but ferocious soldiers. Red war paint brightened their faces, and on their backs they bore leather quivers and short bows strung with vines. Their quivers bristled with poison arrows, and their bodies were adorned with strange animal skins and the feathers of exotic birds.

And there, at the front of the pack, a small, familiar shape ran with bounding steps, so fast she was almost tumbling towards them.

“Suni!” Rinda called out, jumping off the horse as they drew near the Sem. She landed awkwardly, falling to her knees, but was quickly up and running. She paid no heed to the sand that dragged at her ankles and the jagged rocks over which she stumbled.

“Riiinda!” Suni answered Rinda’s call. Her little simian face bore a look of utter devotion, and tears of joy streamed from her eyes.

“Suni!” Neither of the two girls even noticed the bow shots from the Mongauli soldiers peppering the sand around them as they embraced. Both of them were sobbing convulsively and calling each other’s names so often that they could scarcely spare the breath to say anything else. They were of different races and different upbringings, and neither knew a word of the other’s tongue. But they discovered, there on the Nospherus sands, how deep their friendship was, two girls who looked as unlike each other as one could imagine two girls looking.

“Suni! My dear little Suni! You were a true friend!” Tears streaming down her face, the princess thanked the Sem.

“Alura, alufeh, emiiru, allu, elaatu!” chattered Suni excitedly, hopping with pride as she pointed at the small army behind her. Istavan sprang from the saddle and came running toward them with Remus at his side. Their horse, meanwhile, collapsed upon the sand, foam flecking its lips as it strained to breathe.

“One, two, three… I’d say there’s about three hundred of them, plus me and Guin, against two hundred Mongauli knights. I’d say our chances are bloody good now,” beamed Istavan, as though the Sem had arrived through some effort of his own.

“Noble lady!”

Rinda stood up, startled, to see who had called out to her.

Suni stepped away from Rinda and smiled, pointing at one of her fellow Sem. It was clear at a glance that this Sem was of high rank, a leader among his kind. He spoke Rinda’s language falteringly but with only a trace of an accent.

“As thanks for saving a daughter of our tribe, we offer our humble assistance in your fight, and we request that you join us in our village.”

“I⁠—I don’t know what to say…”

“I am Loto, chieftain of the Raku tribe. I see you are weary. Please, take refuge behind our ranks.”

Rinda wondered where the little chieftain had learned to speak the language of the Middle Country so politely. She found herself naturally falling to one knee in the greeting of the high court in Parros, taking his furry hand in her own. “I am a prophet of Parros, the princess Rinda. This is my brother, Remus, the sole legitimate heir to the throne. Istavan of Valachia is our friend.”

“This is no time to be playing palace with monkeys!” yelled Istavan, unable to contain himself. “Look! By the double-edged sword of Cirenos, leopard-head is taking on all two hundred of those Mongauli knights by himself!”

Rinda remembered where she was and spun around. Behind them, a furious battle was underway. Rinda had been too preoccupied with her reunion with Suni to notice that Guin had not accompanied them on their flight into the safety of the Sem ranks. While she had been weeping with joy, Guin had surged toward the enemy, howling an animal challenge, sword held high in his hand⁠—a cavalry attack of one warrior against two hundred knights.

A shout of surprise went up from the knights as the battle was joined.

“Hold⁠—you’ll hit our own men!”

The Mongauli host was uncertain of how to deal with the terrible lone rider who plunged into their midst like an awl into corkwood. Fearing his fiery spirit, they gave way before him. At last the handsome Captain Astrias waved his red commander’s flag and drew the knights back into formation, barring Guin’s path and closing in to counterattack.

Guin’s longsword hewed through the foes who surrounded him, cutting down horses and spilling shocked riders onto the unyielding ground.

“Do not use your crossbows! I want him taken alive!” yelled Astrias. He spurred his horse and headed towards where Guin was so skillfully overthrowing the red knights. It irritated the captain that he could not fight to the death against this opponent; the archduke’s daughter had issued strict orders to bring back the leopard-man alive. If Saim and Feldrik, the white knights sent to oversee his mission, had not been there, he would have simply ordered the leopard-man killed and made up some tale later to please the general.

“Fight! Fight! He is only one!” Astrias shouted, urging his wary knights onward. But while it was true that Guin battled alone, he fought with the strength of ten. Red blood flowed down red armor and a great war cry went up from the leopard jaws. It was as though the legendary beast-god Cirenos was among them, singing his song of screams and dancing his blood dance, engulfing their very souls. Horses fell, their legs chopped out from underneath them, and even the bravest of the red knights hesitated, none wanting to be the next to challenge this fearsome champion.

The obvious reluctance of his men infuriated Astrias all the more. “You! How dare you retreat? We are knights, and he is one against us all! Surround him and bring him down!”

But before he was finished yelling, another foe appeared, on foot. Though his faceplate was lowered, this one in jet black armor was clearly a man.

“I’ll watch your back!” the new arrival yelled to Guin. Then he pulled one of the red knights off his horse and jabbed him with a quick, lethal thrust of his shortsword. Fast as a panther, he snatched up the fallen knight’s sword, jumped astride the horse, and fought his way towards the leopard-headed warrior.

“Guin! Are you all right?” the man asked above the fray.

“I was wondering where you were!”

The two warriors weaved their horses expertly through what had seemed a solid wall of knights, slashing and cutting until their mounts stood rump to rump.

“Guin! First time we fight together!”

“Aye!”

Although they were hopelessly outnumbered, the two friends had managed to break up the formation of the knights around them. Now the riders were regrouping to face them, approaching, then withdrawing, like a living wave hesitant to die upon the rocky shore. Then, like a storm-surge, the Sem poured over the nearest rise and charged into battle with their eerie cries.

“Aii, aii, aii!”

“Sem!”

“A Sem raiding party!”

Another tremor of fear went through the Mongauli ranks. Astrias saw his knights scatter, and lost all patience. He could hold back no longer. “For Mongaul!” he shouted at the top of his lungs, and giving his tawny steed a sharp crack of the whip he charged straight into battle. So swiftly did he go that Saim and Feldrik, waiting beside him, could not react quickly enough to call out to him to stop.

The two forces clashed with the might of two giant sand-worms defending their territory to the death. But once they clashed, the Sem scattered amongst the knights so that the struggle resembled more that of a giant red sandworm that blunders into a nest of desert ants and is quickly buried under the swarm.

The Sem warriors ran between the horses, firing poison-tipped arrows with precision into the chinks in the Mongauli’s armor⁠—at their throats and armpits and through the eye slits in their faceplates. Stricken knights, clawing at their wounds, yelped and fell from their horses. As soon as they crashed onto the ground, Sem swarmed on top of them and finished them off with knife and ax.

The carnage was not one-sided, however; the blades of Astrias and his knights sent many a Sem head flying. The horsemen delivered sweeping cuts from above, sometimes slashing through two Sem at once. But the ape-men were cunning, and they had developed tactics for dealing with men on horseback. One of the tribesmen would run close to a mounted warrior and plant his feet, while another sprang atop the first one’s shoulders. Then a third and a fourth ran up the pole created by the first two and leapt down upon a knight. Laden with their heavy plate armor, the knights were helpless against tiny Sem warriors who slipped past their swords and shields to cling to their breastplates. The knights’ cumbersome gauntlets made it difficult for them to fight at close range as the wildings, like implacable fleas, went to work with their knives, stabbing furiously at the chinks between armor plates until they drew blood.

Seen from Ruah’s bright chariot, now high in the sky, the battle must have looked like an undulating stain of rusty red >blood on the white and tan of the Nospherus desert. The battle cries of the knights and the eerie shrieks of the Sem mingled and echoed through the desolate field of boulders.

“Allu, alurah! Alphetto!”

“Yii yii yii!”

“For Mongaul! For Mongaul!”

“Slaughter them!”

The Sem surged against the ranks of red knights, and the red knights pushed back. Meanwhile, the two white knights had slipped towards the back of the Mongauli lines and were engaged in a whispered conversation.

“Feldrik, it seems our forces are outmatched!”

“Yes, both in number and⁠—with those two captains of theirs⁠—in skill.”

“Have you seen the leopard-man fight?!”

“How could I not? And that one in black⁠—if I’m not mistaken, his armor is Gohran, though he bears no crest.”

“A deserter, then? Or a traitor? This is grave indeed.”

Feldrik’s answer was cut short by a band of Sem who broke through the battle lines in front of them. The white knight yelled as he flailed with his whip, knocking down wildlings on either side. “Traitor or no, all this proves that Amnelis was right! The wildlings are allied with the orphans of Parros!”

“This could be a threat to Mongaul.”

“Indeed!” Feldrik struck down another leaping Sem warrior. “We should ride back with speed to report this to the lady.”

“What of Astrias?”

“The fate of Mongaul may depend on us! We cannot tarry!”

Feldrik and Saim locked eyes. Then both nodded and, wheeling their horses around, they galloped from the fray, directing their mounts back along the way they had come.

“Hyaah!”

A horsewhip cracked. In the midst of the blades and the blood, the only one who had noticed the flight of the two white knights was the leopard-headed warrior Guin. He roared. Several red knights moved to block his path, but he forced his way between them and rode hard to intercept the two fleeing knights.

“Mercenary! Don’t let them go! They’ll bring reinforcements!”

Istavan shouted his agreement and spurred his horse to follow after Guin. But the red knights fell into formation in front of him, blocking his way. Judging swiftly that he’d never make it in time, he stood in his saddle, and, in the Gohran manner, grasped the pommel of his sword in his palm and threw the weapon like a spear.

His aim was true. The broadsword caught Saim’s white horse in the flank and sank in deep. The horse reared and Saim was thrown, crashing down headfirst on a rocky outcropping. Weaving past a few astonished knights, Istavan leapt from his horse and with his short sword dealt the finishing blow to the fallen white captain.

Guin was less successful in his pursuit. Other red knights had rushed to cross his path, and when he realized that he would never catch the fleeing rider, he grimly returned his attention to the battle at hand.

Feldrik galloped on, not even glancing back to see his comrade’s end. Beating his horse with his whip stock to drive it ever faster, he quickly disappeared in a cloud of dust, heading towards the River Kes and the safety of Alvon Keep.

“You there!” a voice called out to Istavan just as he had spun around to remount. “You will face me now!”

Judging from his voice and bearing, the knight challenging Istavan was about the same age. In fact, the black hair and sparkling onyx eyes that could be seen despite the red helmet were not unlike Istavan’s own. This other spurred his horse and rode up between the Crimson Mercenary and the fleeing Feldrik.

“Out of my way, dung-chucker!” spat Istavan, quickly remounting.

“I am Astrias, captain of these men! Speak your name, you who wear our armor but fight beside the Sem! For your sake I hope you are merely a murderer, and not a traitor to Gohra!”

Astrias? The Red Lion of Gohra? Istavan frowned and stared at his opponent from under his lowered faceplate. Except for the color of the man’s armor, it was almost like looking at his own reflection in a mirror. Astrias’s hair and eyes were uncannily similar to Istavan’s. If they wore the same armor and had their faceplates lowered, perhaps it would be impossible to tell them apart.

Yet there was something about his opponent⁠—a noble dignity, blazing with the fire of a single-minded devotion to his country⁠—that Istavan lacked. The mercenary watched his foe with a wry smile on his face, missing nothing. He decided that he did not like the Red Lion one bit.

“Astrias! Offer up your head!” Istavan shouted, forgetting entirely about the fleeing Feldrik. He made sure of his grip on his sword and charged across the sand towards his noble foe.

The young captain smiled grimly, raised his sword, and charged. They met halfway, their blades clashing in the air between them and sending blue sparks flying. Galloping past each other, they wheeled around and charged a second time, then a third.

By the third pass, the color began to drain from Istavan’s face. He had taught himself how to survive on the battlefield; the trick was precisely to avoid direct confrontations with talented opponents like this one. He did not know how long he could hold out against a fighter like this who had no doubt been trained by the best palace instructors in the art of swordplay since he was a child. Even though the two were similar in strength, and seemed to be evenly matched in skill as well, the mercenary knew that in the end, formal training had a way of outclassing the rough and dirty fighting styles that were his own stock and trade.

Moreover, the former pirate’s latest adventures were beginning to take their inevitable toll. He was tired. His hand was sweaty, causing his sword to slip, and every blow he countered from Astrias’s blade sent pain shooting up his arm into his shoulder.

“You’ll need to do better than that to claim the head of the Lion of Alvon, knave!” Astrias shouted confidently. He had begun to sense that he had the upper hand in this match. He would not have been so confident had he bothered to look at the battle around him; the Sem had completely surrounded the red knights and were pushing in hard on those remnants too. But for all his successes on the battlefield, Astrias was only twenty, a young man more interested in sparring than in leading. In war, such youth was a disadvantage.

“State your name!” Astrias demanded of the mercenary. “My sword was not crafted for cutting down nameless foot soldiers who dream of knighthood, coward!”

If Istavan had learned anything in his years of freelance soldiering, it was that honor and dignity meant about as much as a sword with no blade. If you wanted to survive, you had to be realistic. So he called for help as loudly as he could: “GUIN! GUIN!”

The leopard-headed warrior had found himself in the midst of a wary circle of reluctant challengers. The number of knights who dared to come close enough to cross swords with him was dwindling rapidly. Hearing the call, he charged suddenly through a gap in the ring and quickly reached the mercenary, who gladly moved to put Guin between himself and the troop captain.

“Coward! That was supposed to be a duel!” Astrias roared, advancing nonetheless to meet the new challenger. This time, however, the tables were turned. Guin’s strength, his skill with the blade, and his endurance were all far above those of the young captain. The second time they crossed swords, Astrias’s blade went flying from his hand and he tumbled to the ground. In a flash, Guin was standing over him, the point of his broadsword tickling Astrias’s unprotected neck.

“Kill me!” Astrias hissed through clenched teeth. His face was flushed with shame. “Kill me, now!” Guin held his blade steady and stared down into the captain’s youthful eyes.

“Demon breed! Bringer of hell to Gohra! Kill me now!” cried Astrias in frustration.

Behind him, Istavan was yelling for Guin to give the Lion of Gohra his wish. But Guin heeded neither of them.

“I am Guin,” he said to his defeated opponent. His voice was harsh and heavy from within the leopard mask. “I have a message for your lady general who fights and commands like a man. Leave the wildlings and the creatures of Nospherus alone, or I will stand against Mongaul for all eternity.”

Then he withdrew his sword and bent to help Astrias to his feet. Stunned, the youth stared uncomprehendingly at the leopard-headed warrior. He could not believe, in the first place, that he had been so wholly defeated, and now he was being given his life and freedom. All through it he had suffered no more than a scratch, but, his eyes stinging with defeat, he rubbed his throat with his hand and stumbled towards his horse on unsteady legs.

At long last Astrias shouted the order to retreat, his voice hoarse and uncertain. The straggling knights heard his call and regrouped away from the wildlings. Of the two hundred knights that had joined the battle, only fifty remained.