Heirs of the Blade_ Shadows of the Apt_ Book Seven - Adiran Tchaikovsky [192]
She found Alain in his own tent, and he turned as she entered, still bloodied from the battlefield and with her sword at her hip. The tales that had already reached him would not have been silent about her own particular exploits: she had led the assault, she had taken the bandit leader. My gift to you.
She almost threw herself at him. In her mind she was duelling, and had beaten down his last parry, exposing him to her blade. It was now that balancing moment when one protagonist was utterly at the mercy of the other.
He caught her, as she reached him, and their lips met. The shock of it made her heart stutter, as that long-familiar face, that maddening smile, all of a sudden they were hers.
He drew her down on to his sleeping mat. ‘Salma,’ she whispered, when she finally could.
And, of course, he replied, ‘Yes.’
Part Four
Broken Threads
Thirty-Three
Surveying the field from the forest’s edge made for a grim sight. The battle had not been large, compared with some that Che or the others had seen, but this aftermath had a particularly abandoned air. The bodies of, they assumed, the losers were strewn haphazardly all about, as a score or so individuals picked their way through them, hauling corpses aside into an untidy line. Others were digging a great pit, the final resting place that the dead here would all lie in together.
The winners had already departed, leaving these menials to assign the losers to the worms and the burying beetles. These undertakers moved without speed, hunched up against a chill wind that coursed unchecked across the open ground.
After pausing long enough in the trees, the four travellers set out again, plotting a path that would skirt the field of combat. Che saw Maure steel herself before moving on, and wondered what additional horrors a necromancer might witness in such a place.
‘We need news,’ Thalric decided. ‘I’d not expected to find this sort of slaughter in the Commonweal. A good few hundred fighters a side, surely.’
Some of the gravediggers glanced up at them, but looked away just as quickly, obviously wanting these wayfarers to be none of their problems. They spotted one man standing apart, though, leaning on his narrow-headed spade. He was a greying Grasshopper, the same kinden as most of the workers, but he regarded the travellers steadily as they approached him. As they drew near they saw that there was a dead man lying by his feet, another Grasshopper, with the arrow that had done for him standing up like a tiny standard.
If the old man had any fear that the newcomers might attack him, he did not show it. Perhaps he felt that even the Wasp-kinden could not make his current surroundings much worse.
‘Good day to you,’ Che called out, and then she grimaced, deciding that her words were poorly chosen. ‘Well . . . anyway,’ she continued vaguely. Closer to, she had ample opportunity to study the strewn corpses. They seemed a poor sort of soldier, badly armoured and clothed like the peasants seen on their travels, not like men and women for whom fate had chosen this violent end. ‘What happened here?’
The old man cast his eyes over the carnage, and then back at her, as if to say, Is it not obvious?
She nodded, waving his unspoken words away. ‘Who fought here? Who won?’
‘Was the Salmae fighting bandits, so they say. Salmae won.’ He shrugged. ‘Or we won, perhaps. They said it was for us, when they made us fight. Protect us against the raiders, they said.’
It took Che a moment to deconstruct ‘the Salmae’, and to understand that the man must mean Salma’s family. ‘Where did the winners go from here?’ she asked quickly.
‘North. Leose. They’ll have some great celebration there, no doubt.’ The gravedigger, looked underwhelmed by the thought.
‘Tell me, if you were fighting here, was there a Spider-kinden woman . . .?’ Che’s words tailed off as she noted a telltale