A Time of Omens - Katharine Kerr [170]
“Ill-omened places, fords,” Yraen remarked.
“So they are.” Rhodry rose in the stirrups and stared as if he were counting every distant tree. “Think there’s someone waiting on the other side?”
“The dogs think there is,” Otho put in. “I say we ride upstream.”
“Upstream?” Yraen said. “What’s upstream?”
“Naught, I suppose. So they won’t expect us to go that way.”
Rhodry laughed, a little mutter under his breath like a ferret’s chortle. Carra went ice-cold. She was going to die. She realized it all at once with a calm clarity: what waited for them across that river was death, and there was no escaping it. They couldn’t go back, they couldn’t go forward, they might as well cross over to the Otherlands and be done with it. Although she tried to tell the rest of them, when she opened her mouth she simply couldn’t speak. Not so much as a gasp came out.
“Well spoken, Otho my old friend,” Rhodry said at last. “Let’s give it a try. See those boulders up there a ways? Shelter of a sort. But we’d best dismount, I think.”
Since the trees thinned out toward the clearing’s edge they could lead their horses, single file, without leaving this imperfect shelter, but they couldn’t do it without cracking branches and snapping twigs and setting the underbrush rustling. After some twenty yards the dogs began growling and snarling, anyway, no matter how Nedd tried to hush them.
“They know we’re here,” Rhodry said to him finally. “Don’t trouble yourself about it. But there can’t be a lot of them or they’d have rushed us already.” He pointed across the river. “Look.”
In among the trees at the far side of the clearing on the opposite bank someone or something was moving to follow them, some three or maybe four shapes, roughly man-shaped, that slipped along when they moved and stopped again when they halted.
“Otho,” Rhodry said. “You and Nedd take Carra into the trees. We won’t fool them, but maybe—”
Carra never learned what he intended. Pressed beyond canine endurance, Thunder suddenly began to bark, then bounded away and raced straight for the river before Nedd could grab him. Just as he burst free of the trees something flashed and hissed in the air: an arrow. Carra flung herself on Lightning to hold him back and screamed as the arrow struck Thunder in the side. Another followed, another, catching him, throwing him to the ground—pinning him to the ground, but still alive he writhed and howled in agony. The horses began to dance and toss their heads in terror. Dead-silent as always Nedd ran.
“Don’t!” Rhodry and Yraen screamed it together.
Too late. Nedd reached the dog, flung himself down beside the dying Thunder just as another flight came hissing down, bright death catching the fading sunlight. He never screamed, merely jerked this way and that while the long shafts struck until at last he and Thunder both lay still, the dog cradled in his arms, in the middle of a spreading pool of blood. Carra felt herself sobbing and choking, but in an oddly distant way, as if she stood beside herself and watched this girl named Carra howl and retch until she could barely breathe. Just as distantly she was aware of horses neighing and men cursing and shouting, then the sound of some large animal crashing through the under-brush. All at once Otho grabbed her by the shoulder with one hand and Lightning’s collar by the other.
“Move!” he howled. “Run, lass!”
For such a small man he was terrifyingly strong. Half dragged, half stumbling, Carra got herself and the dog into the hollow among the rocks and fell, half spraddled across the whining, growling Lightning. Otho threw himself down beside her. He was cursing a steady stream in some language she’d never heard before.
“Rhodry, Yraen?” she gasped out.
“Right here.” Rhodry