The Dragon's Doom - Ed Greenwood [17]
That carter seemed to look up and notice them for the first time as he drew level with Blackgult. His jaw wavered as if he was having trouble forming words he wanted to utter-and then he sprang from his saddle with a wild roar, clawing at the baron's leg and stirrup as he came down and snatching out a long, curved knife.
The Golden Griffon punched him hard in the face with a fist that had the hilt of a reversed dagger protruding from its midst, and the man's head jerked back like that of a child's doll.
He fell under their hooves without a sound-though he might as well have been blowing trumpet calls for all that he could have been heard in the sudden roar of a dozen throats. Men clambered up onto carts, drew swords and daggers with wild shrieks and shouts, and leaped at the passing riders.
" 'Tis because we're overdukes, that's what does it!" Craer explained to the unheeding world at large, as he drew a dagger and threw it in one smooth, flashing motion, while drawing another. "Like deer we wander up and down the Vale luring every passing man with a dagger to do us violence, helpfully baring our breasts and behinds to them with loud cries of 'Here I be! Strike at me! Strike now! I'm the best grauling eager targ-' "
Craer swallowed his words in a desperate ducking movement as a muddy boot swept toward his head. It belonged to a leaping carter who'd plucked Tshamarra from her saddle with the sheer force of his arrival-as her horse reared and kicked, and her desperate spell blew the man's head into spatters.
The blast spooked her horse into leaping forward into a cart with a mighty crash, and the world was suddenly a wild place of flying reins, lashing hooves, and raw-screaming men.
Craer sprang from his saddle to rescue Tshamarra, who was rolling and kicking in trail-dust amid plunging hooves and the bouncing, headless corpse of the man she'd slain. A carter sprang after him, howling.
The procurer struck aside a hoof with his shoulder, trying to get himself into a protective stance above the Lady Talasorn, but another crashing hoof nearly crushed her and sent him sprawling.
He came up right under a vicious stabbing downswing from the pursuing carter, and drove his own dagger hilt-deep into the man-only to have it snatched out of his grasp by the carter's shrieking spasm of pain. As he grabbed for the receding hilt, a lashing hoof nearly took his face off.
He threw himself against that horse, leaping as high as he could, and managed to get its head turned in another direction, so that its bucking took its deadly hooves away from him and his lady.
Another carter was coming at him, barking like a hoarse, angry dog. Craer ducked away from the first thrust of the man's rusty and much-notched old warsword, sprawled headlong to avoid being gutted by the second, and then managed to kick the man into a fall before his warsword could reach Tshamarra-who was grimly shoving a headless, gory body away so she could roll out from under it.
Craer plucked his knife out of the groaning, twisting body he'd left it in, cut that man's throat, and sprang away in time to meet the carter with the warsword head-on. They crashed together like two rutting bulls, blade to blade-and the procurer suddenly went to his knees, the man plunged helplessly over him, and Craer put a dagger into a passing crotch and clambered up to open another throat before the screaming became too shrill.
Tshamarra staggered to her feet-and promptly fell on her face again as a loose rein lashed her across the chest and throat with a crack that made Blackgult, sword-wrestling with two carters, three wagons, and many plunging horses away, wince and stare.
"Teeth of the Three!" Hawkril swore. "What's got into these mad-heads?"
Someone hacked at him, and he turned aside the blow with his own blade. The attacking carter snarled and hacked again, not even trying to protect himself, more like an enraged drunkard than any sort of warrior.
Steel clashed on steel anew, and the man staggered. Rather than slash the carter's