Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [102]
“Hold!” the fox warrior called out. “Or I’ll kill this child.”
He came strolling out of the pavilion carrying the page, trussed and sobbing, slung upside down over one mailed shoulder, the boy’s head dangerously close to the sharp wedge of bronze knife that the warrior held in one gauntlet. Dallandra let her arms drop.
“What do you want of me?”
“Hah! I knew it would work.” He was looking round at his men, if such you could call them. “She’s weak, this woman. She pities things.”
They howled and pressed close round her. She could smell bear and wolf, too, grease and blood and musk, mingling with an all too human sweat. Fur poked through their mail in tufts.
“You come with me,” the leader said. “And you work no magic, or I’ll fray and tear every weaving of this lad’s body, and his spirit will spill and die.”
The page wept the louder.
“Hush, child, I won’t let them hurt you.”
“Hah! She takes our bargain?’ The fox warrior pulled back dark lips in a fanged grin.
“What do you want of me?”
“Of you, naught. Of Evandar, everything. He’s weak, too, giving me the whistle when he didn’t have to. Losing a woman brings pain, he said, and so I got my idea. Ransom you are and ransom you’ll be, until he saves my dying country.”
Dallandra spat on the ground.
“You have the soul of a maggot, not a fox.”
“She sees things, this woman! Maybe I’ll trick Evandar and keep her forever!”
His soldiers growled and roared. A clawed hand cuffed her cheek and left her dizzy.
“Scoop her up, bind her, carry her off! Well slip out the way we came in.”
Ropes as rough and abrasive as straw circled her round, yet at the same time she felt as if she were falling, fainting, swooping nearer and nearer the ground yet never hitting against it. As her head cleared she saw round her huge flies and beetles, all shiny black bodies and green wings, with mandibles and mirrored red eyes—and realized that this insect horde was a normal size, but that she herself had shrunk to match them. Two massive black wasplike creatures with golden wings held her sling of ropes in their mandibles. With a buzz and drone of wings they flew, a horrible grating sound that combined with the pain in her head to drive her half-mad. She thrashed and kicked, but nothing she could do freed her from the web that dragged her along after them through the air.
On and on they flew over a huge green confusion, a swelling of trees that filled the world and reached up brown claws as if to grab them as they sped past. By twisting round and straining her back to look up she could just see the white clothes of the page, who dangled ahead of her like a crumb of bread in the grasp of an enormous and glittering blue-black fly, but a crumb that kicked and fought on occasion. At least Evandar’s brother had had the sense to keep his hostage’s hostage alive. All at once the green below started to rush up to meet them, or so it seemed to her, rushed and swelled and spun round and round. She would have screamed but it seemed that her tongue and mouth had fused together, that her throat swelled, that her body bloated and puffed up till pain seemed to burst out through her skin.
The ground smacked her hard. Light spun round her. The last sound she heard was the screaming of the page.
For a long time it seemed to her that she lay dead. Al-though she could not move nor hear nor see, her mind did exist, a floating point of consciousness on a black sea — She waited calmly for the light to rise and float her onward while she thought over the fall. It must have disrupted her etheric double, she supposed, and killed her that way, being as she had no body at the time; She felt profoundly sorry for Evandar, much more than she was worried about herself. In