Ildas scampering before her, Tuli ran from tree to tree, meaning to get as close to the Highroad as she could, a task made easier because the Nor had swept a wide swath of land free of snow. The army was camped on the grassy slopes of the Earth’s Teeth at the Well of the Blasted Narlim, but the Warwagons were sitting on the Highroad, sticking up there like wanja nuts on a harvest cake, a tempting target Tuli wasn’t prepared to pass up. Coperic had made a half-hearted protest, then got down to planning her attack and his. He and his people were on the far side of the army, ready to hit the majilarni when she provided a diversion to take the attention of the norits off the army.
She only came across two sentries prowling through the grove, though there were quite a few traxim roosting in the upper branches. Ildas and nightsight were enough to keep her away from either. She fled through the grove like a ghost and crawled into the space beneath the desiccated air-roots of a dead spikul. While she looked over the ground ahead, Ildas trotted busily about the roots, spinning fine lines of light out of his substance, weaving them into a web of protection about her. When he was finished, he nosed against her, wriggled with pleasure when she rubbed her fingers behind his ears, then he trotted off. She settled to watch.
The bare ground between her and the last of the Warwagons was thick with norits. Some sat in close groups talking quietly, some were rolled into blankets, asleep, some had gone slightly apart and into themselves, meditating or searching about with their longsight, Tuli didn’t know which but suspected the second and was very glad of Ildas’s web. There were a few traxim still aloft but most were roosting in the trees or perched on the Warwagons; they didn’t seem to like night flying much. Tuli suspected from what she’d seen of them that their eyes weren’t all that good in daytime, let alone night.
Ildas trotted toward the last of the huge wagons, circling unseen about sleeping forms, norits or the mercenaries that rode the wagon, about meditators and talkers, coming close to them, almost brushing against them, his leisurely progress a teasing, mocking dance. Then Tuli was part of that dance and it was a small piece of the Great Dance she’d wheeled in when Ildas came to her. She knew she was lying in dark and dirt, but she was also locked into the Dance; she laughed to herself; Ildas laughed with her, their joined laughter was the music of the Great Cycle of death and birth and death, the endings that were also and always beginnings.
Then Ildas was leaping onto the warwagon, fastidiously avoiding the hunched forms of the sleeping traxim. He pottered about, pushing his nose into the load, searching out a place that suited him. The traxim stirred uneasily as if they felt a wind sneaking through their fur, but they didn’t wake. Somewhere near the center of the wagon, Ildas lifted his leg and urinated a stream of fire into the load.
There is an oil distilled from the flesh of the vuurvis, a deep-sea fish the size of a small whale; the secret of preparing it belongs to the mercenaries of Ogogehia, it is their most fearsome weapon, used in clay melons that shatter and splatter fire. The burning oil clings to flesh, it can’t be wiped away, water won’t put it out, it can’t be smothered. It keeps eating into the flesh until the last trace of the oil is consumed. Ildas had sniffed out barrels of that oil and used it as his target.
Flames exploded into the air five times a man’s height and splashed outward much the same distance, landing on norit and mercenary alike; the sleepers writhed and rolled about on the ground, living torches that filled the night with screams of an agony beyond comprehension: those on their feet howled and ran until their hearts quit and they crashed to the ground, some of them into snow that did nothing to put out the fire. Burning traxim leaped shrieking into the air, came spiraling down to crash among the trees or into the army, spreading the chaos. The few that escaped were those near the ends of the wagon that had time to flip from this world into that place the Nor had fetched them from. Most of the sleepers were dead or dying. More than half the nearby norits had escaped though they spent some minutes in frantic efforts to shield themselves from the flying oil. Tuli gaped at the damage Ildas had done with one well-placed squirt.
He came prancing back, wriggled round her, bumped against her, rolled onto his back so she could scratch his belly. “You’re a one soredak army, Didi,” she whispered to him. She continued to stroke him as she watched the surviving norits go from body to body, cutting throats of any who still lived. The noise diminished here by the Highroad, but she heard screams and shouts and curses drifting from the army, the protesting hoots of macain and the high angry squeals of rambuts. Coperic, she thought. No, can’t be. He and his folk must have been in and out already; they wouldn’t make that much noise. Should be getting out myself before they start hunting. She began inching backward out of the shelter of the roots. Ildas walked beside her, snapping the web of light back into himself. When she was clear of the roots but still deep in shadow, she sat on her heels, looking about. The traxim in the trees had whipped into the air with the explosion of the Warwagon and hadn’t yet settled back to their roosts; any sentries close at hand had rushed into the open, looking vainly for some way to help the dying, or joining other men to roll the next Warwagon farther from the fire and save that one from burning also. Soon someone out there would start thinking instead of reacting and send searchers into the trees to sniff out whoever had set the fire. But not yet. She got to her feet and fled through the trees, leaving the seething turmoil behind, heading for the rendezvous with Coperic. He was probably there already, waiting with the others for her to show up. She slowed and began to relax.
A norit stepped from behind a tree, hands raised and filled with fire, eyes glaring, mouth opening in a long ululating scream that tore from his throat and assaulted her ears. He flung the fire at her.
Tuli swerved so sharply she had to scramble to keep on her feet; arms waving, kicking herself in the ankle, she plunged for the shelter of the nearest tree, a spindly brellim, knowing she couldn’t reach it in time, suspecting its shelter was no shelter at all from the magic fire.
He screamed again, outrage in every hoarse syllable of those unintelligible words.
She looked back, saw Ildas leap between her and the fireballs, bat them down, the norit not seeing him but seeing his fire fail; she sucked in a breath to laugh her triumph-and crashed into the tree.
She was stunned for an instant, then got shakily to her feet. From the corner of her eye she saw Ildas play with the fireballs, jump on them and eat them. The norit stared, open-mouthed, as his fire vanished, bite by bite. For the moment he’d forgotten her.
Tuli whipped around the still shivering tree and fled into the dark, her head clearing as she moved, her first panic settling into a mix of terror and rage. She ran furiously twisting and turning through the trees. And Ildas kept the fireballs as well as the rest of the norit’s magic away from her. But she couldn’t outrun him and he was an adult male, so much stronger than her, he didn’t need magic to deal with her; it was only his rigid mind-set that kept him stopping to use that magic. Not that she thought all that out; fragments of it came to her while she ran, coalescing into a sense of what was happening, adding pinches of hope and contempt to the mixture seething within her. She forced herself to slow a little and use her nightsight to plot her route, diving beneath low-hanging limbs, bounding over root tangles that were traps for unwary feet. Several times she heard him flounder and curse, felt a fleeting satisfaction that vanished into the chill realization that she couldn’t get away from him no matter how hard she ran. Twice more he stopped and tried his magic on her, twice more Ildas slapped fireballs down, ate them and set himself between her and other manifestations of the norit’s magic that made her hair and skin tingle but had no other effect on her.