Shancy emerged from the blockhouse to fetch a pail of water. When she saw the stricken Ergothians, she gasped, covering her mouth with the hem of her apron.
“The Red Wrack!” she cried, retreating.
Tol felt the pit of his stomach fall away. His men had the plague! Since they’d not encountered any contagion directly, he realized it must be spread by the fog. Neither he nor Egrin could believe the bakali clever enough in sorcery to manufacture the mist themselves, which meant a wizard must be involved.
Five bakali lay lifeless in the clearing, the final wisps of fog clinging to their bodies. The city guardsmen looked over the slain lizard-men and regarded their commander with new respect. Tol brushed aside their admiration.
Shancy and the other woodcutter women were terrified by the sight of the dead lizard-men. They wondered if their men had met the same fate the bakali had obviously intended for Tol’s troop. Tol promised them he would look out for their missing loggers as his troop made its way north.
The soldiers’ coughing was growing worse, and many complained of severe headaches. Although they were obviously suffering, Tol ordered them to prepare to move on. They had to find the missing scouts.
They headed deeper into the wood. Although they called periodically to their missing comrades, their cries attracted no answers. Stealth was out of the question anyway, what with half the men or more coughing ceaselessly. The tiny red splotches were growing, covering the men’s faces with a crimson stain. The Red Wrack was upon them, and Tol didn’t know what to do. Lord Urakan’s army was served by an entire train of healers, yet they were said to have barely held out against the disease.
He contrived to touch both Narren and Egrin with the Irda nullstone, thinking its power might transfer, but their symptoms did not abate.
Tarthan and the thirty men under his command had been farther from the clearing than the rest and seemed less affected by the plague mist. Tol sent them ahead as a vanguard. Before midday Tarthan sent back word they’d found a recent trail.
When the main body caught up with Tarthan, Tol found the warrior standing in a dry creekbed that wound through the woods. A grim expression on his dark face, Tarthan pointed to several bare footprints, surrounded by three-toed bakali prints.
Tol knew those long, narrow footprints. One of the Dom-shu sisters had been abducted by the lizard-men.
Taking the lead himself, he drove his men relentlessly onward. The tracks continued, following the old stream bed.
Near dusk, they found Sanksa and Kiya hiding in a tree. With happy shouts, the two swung down, and for the first time in their “marriage,” Kiya threw her arms around Tol and embraced him with real ardor.
“I knew you would come!” she said. “Hurry! They have Miya!”
As they moved out, Kiya explained that she, her sister, and the two men had risen well before dawn and gone out to reconnoiter as planned. When the mist first formed, they climbed trees to see over the fog. Then the bakali appeared. Communicating by hand signals, the scouts decided Valvorn and Miya would warn Tol, while Kiya and Sanksa stayed aloft to keep an eye on the lizard-men. Once Miya and Valvorn were in the fog, they lost consciousness, however, and the bakali fell on them. Valvorn was slain immediately and Miya taken captive. Sanksa and Kiya had been following the lizard-men all day. Tol had caught up with them as they rested briefly in the treetops.
“Miya is in their camp, two hills away,” explained Sanksa. The plainsman’s copper-colored face was grim. “I counted twenty-eight lizard-men.”
Tol drew his saber. “Let’s rush them!”
“Wait,” Egrin said, struggling to draw breath. “Why not work around the camp and take them one by one?”
“There’s no time. Besides, the way everyone’s coughing, the bakali will surely hear us coming.”
Tol sent Tarthan’s healthy men straight on, while four companies under Narren, Wellax, Allacath, and Lestan followed as closely as they could. Egrin’s band would swing wide on the right, while Frez’s men took the left. The remainder, under steady Darpo, would wait in reserve, moving up where and when the situation warranted.
Tol followed Tarthan’s men through the widely spaced trees. Light was failing fast, and he didn’t want the bakali to elude them in the coming darkness.
From the top of the hill, they plunged down the slope, slipping and falling in the loose leaves. Deaf oldsters could have heard them coming, and as they advanced up the facing slope arrows flickered through the trees. A few men were hit, and the first wave of Ergothians faltered.
Rallying his men, Tol hacked through a wall of briars and kept going. Arrows thudded into trees and turf around him. Gasping and coughing, but still slogging forward, Narren’s company topped the hill and started down behind Tarthan’s. Tol heard crashing in the underbrush, punctuated by hacking and wheezing, and knew Egrin’s men were on their way as well. He saw the dark silhouettes of several bakali as they stepped out from behind trees to loose their missiles. More of his men toppled, arrows in their chests.
“Long live the emperor!” shouted Tarthan, raising his sword high.
The soldiers answered in ragged fashion and charged uphill the last twenty paces. Confidently, the small group of bakali waited, thinking the line of sharpened stakes around their camp would halt the humans, who could then be punished by a rain of arrows. Tol reached the stakes first, and wormed between them without much trouble. The lizard-men had bungled. They had spaced their stakes to stop enemies as bulky as themselves, not such slender humans.
The bakali were poorly equipped with plundered weapons. Although they fought tenaciously, by the time Egrin’s men closed in from the opposite side, the lizard-men were all dead. Tol searched the camp for Miya, finding her under a flimsy lean-to of willow leaves and moss. She was staked out on the ground, hands and feet bound with thick rawhide straps. Tol was shocked to see her at first because she’d been stripped of her clothing and her skin was covered with bloody red streaks.
“Husband!” she shouted. “Glad to see you. Get me loose, will you?”
Egrin and Narren arrived at the lean-to, and Miya managed a surprising yelp of modesty. Startled, the two men withdrew.
Tol sawed at her bonds with his dagger. “What happened? Did they hurt you?”
“Nay, I’m not harmed.” She stared in the direction where Narren and Egrin had come and gone, making sure they did not return.
“What are all these marks?” He rubbed a finger down her arm. The red streaks smeared at his touch.
She explained the bakali had been in the process of marking her for butchering when Tol and his men arrived.
“These lizards eat humans!” she said. “Lucky for me, they like certain cuts better than others. They took too long, arguing over who would get what part of me.”
The image she conjured up was horrible, but Tol found himself grinning with her.
“What part did they consider the choicest?” he asked, thinking thigh or calf, but Miya pinched the ball of her left thumb.
“Two of the lizards were going to fight to the death over who got this part of my hands,” she said with a shrug.
Miya recovered her discarded clothing, using a scrap of hide to scrub away the bakali’s butcher marks.
Tol said, “I’m glad you’re well. Kiya would never forgive me if anything happened to you.”