The Towers of the Sunset - L. E. Modesitt [43]
“Hate being this late.” Hylin’s hand reaches up and touches his sword hilt.
Creslin merely shifts his weight and throws his senses out upon the light breeze that seems to have sprung up from the west, from behind the trader’s mules, and toward the dark shapes of unlit buildings before them.
“Anyone live here?” he asks as they pass another deserted hovel.
“Supposed to have an honest inn.”
Creslin sees a single bright light perhaps half a kay ahead.
Clink . . . whufff . . .
Creslin stiffens at the sounds and the feelings of mounted men gathering behind an abandoned barn beyond and to his right, then reaches and flips the sword from his back sheath.
At the same time, he can feel the bow being drawn, and in desperation, twists the winds and the moisture in the air and flings them into the face of the bowman.
“Bandits!” rumbles Derrild unnecessarily, snatching at least twice for a heavy nail-studded club.
Dropping flat against his bony mount, Creslin spurs the gelding toward the half-dozen riders, blade ready.
“HYYYYYY!”
“Bastard!”
His blade flashes once, then again, as he ducks and lets his body follow the patterns drilled into him.
“Devil! Where is he?”
Creslin gathers the now-wailing winds and flings them once more, even as his mount starts to crumple. He leaps, using his momentum to drive the sword through the throat of the heavy bandit, who has tried to back away.
“Go! There’re more! They got Frosee!”
“Hell . . .” he mutters as he tries to unseat the dead man.
Hylin reins up beside him.
“Who’s coming?” Creslin asks.
“No one. Just me.” Hylin’s face is pale, even in the dim light.
“Where’s Derrild?” Creslin succeeds in toppling the dead man.
“On his way to the inn, as fast as he can drag the mules.”
“What?”
“We’re paid for this, Remember?”
“Oh . . . yeah.” Creslin looks around. Besides the heavy man lying facedown in the mud, two other bodies sprawl on the ground . . . and the gelding that had carried him for so many kays.
“You got one more, but he’s dead in the saddle.” Hylin’s voice is flat.
Creslin shakes his head, as much to stop the quaking of his hands and body as to deny what Hylin has said. “Couldn’t be. I rode through just twice.” He sees one bowman lying on his back, his face covered with ice. How can there be ice? How can there possibly be ice? The evening is cool, but not that cold. Creslin swallows, not wishing to think about how he has called the winds from the Roof of the World.
The other man, smaller, and in dark tunic and trousers, lies with his face in a puddle.
“I don’t know what you are, Creslin, and I don’t want to find out.”
Creslin shakes his head again. “I’m nothing . . . nothing at all.” He wipes his sword on a fragment of cloth dangling from the saddle, then automatically replaces it in the sheath.
“So is death, friend.” Hylin drops off his mount, bends over the bandit chief, and slashes. He comes up with a heavy leather purse and tosses it at Creslin. “Put that away.”
Creslin slides it into his pack, numbly, as the other man remounts.
“Shift your bags, and let’s get on with it. We need the locals to clean up the mess. They can at least do that.”
Creslin hands the reins of the well-muscled black horse to Hylin, wondering how it happened so quickly. One moment the archer was about to spit him with an arrow, and the next, four men, if he can believe Hylin, are dead. “I couldn’t have done that . . .” He shakes his head again, then wades through the ankle-deep mud to the gelding. Dark blotches streak the dead horse’s muzzle. Whether they are mud or blood, Creslin knows not, nor does he care as he retrieves the mud-smeared bags. He ties the saddlebags and his pack in place quickly, behind a far better saddle than Derrild had provided.
He touches the black, trying to reassure it, and the horse steadies as he swings up into the saddle in close to a fluid motion, as close to fluid as his tired legs permit.
From somewhere, thunder rolls, and unseen clouds begin to mass.
“Hard to believe you’re not one of those devil