Ildas gave a wild despairing cry and left Tuli, but before she would react to that, he was a great quivering sail of fire, gossamer thin, reaching from the ground to the treetops, interposed between Coperic’s band and the demon beast. She could see the black sicamar through the veil, saw him lose his alertness, saw him turn his head from side to side a last time, saw him shrug his shoulders, saw him go trotting off. The veil shifted with him, keeping itself between the demon and the band. Tuli felt the fireborn’s terror and revulsion, dug her fingers into the bark, somehow sucked strength up through the tree and fed it into him until he hummed with it, his confidence burning brighter and brighter as the demon sicamar trotted off. A moment more and he snapped back into himself. He sat on the branch beside her, preening his sides and oozing satisfaction.
After that, Coperic, Tuli and the others kept following the army, unwilling to give up the hope of inflicting more damage on it, no matter how minor, but they stayed well away from it when the demons were loose. They could only follow and wait for the battle to engage the attention of the norits and their beasts so they could again fight for the life they’d known and wanted back again.
Cold knots in her stomach, Tuli watched the Followers swarm at a section of the Wall, watched them falling from the arrows and crossbow bolts raining on them, watched them press on, those behind climbing over the dead, taking up the crude ladders the dead had carried and pressing on the wall, falling themselves under the scald of the boiling burning fat. Then, over the screams of the dying, the shouts of the attackers, she heard a rapid crackling that kept up for some minutes, a strange sound that resembled nothing she’d heard before unless it was the popping of posser belly meat frying in its own fat. The norits began falling; they were far beyond the reach of bow or crossbow, even beyond range of the catapults, but they fell; in seconds half of them were down, some screaming and flinging themselves about, some crumpled and silent. For several more seconds the norits milled about in utter confusion, more of them falling, dying, then they were running, diving into the reserves, diving behind rocks or clumps of brush, anything to get out of sight of the wall. She dug her fingers into the earth, hardly able to breathe, hope more painful than the despair that had haunted her the past days.
The crackling went on and on and the attack of the tie-conscripts faltered as the mysterious death scythed through them. A few moments later they too were retreating in disorder, flinging themselves in a panic after the panicking norits. Then all along the mountain slopes, as if that were the one key that unloosed them, Stenda and outcasts, tie-folk and tar-men, all those left after the slaughter on the Plain, they flung themselves on the backside of the army, fighting with scythes and pruning hooks, knives and staves and ancient pikes, anything they’d found that could inflict a wound.
For some minutes the confusion continued and the ill-armed, leaderless attackers gnawed deeper into the army, killing majilarni and tie-conscripts, Plaz guards and a few of the mercenaries, though these trained fighters quickly organized themselves into defensive knots and took out most of those that came at them. Sleykyn assassins slaughtered any who dared attack them. Then Nekaz Kole got busy, sending bands of mounted mercenaries rushing in both directions from the road, squads of three peeling off at each center of disturbance and fighting with a methodical deadliness that steadied whatever section of the army fought there, and turned the attack to rout. The near-noris Four horned their beasts into order and sent them against the attackers; though their numbers were few, not more than fifteen, their deadliness and the terror they breathed out sent everyone within a dozen body-lengths into desperate flight, flight that was seldom escape; they were too fast, those demon beasts, leaping along the mountainside fast as thought, with no sign of fatigue.
The attackers began to melt away, leaving a large percentage of their number dead on the slopes, pursued by the demon beasts that reveled in their slaughter, filling the mountains with chopped-off shrieks.
Tuli clung to her hiding place, hoping silence and stillness and ultimately Ildas would protect her better than flight. Now and then over the screams and rattles of the fleeing, she heard softer and far less shaped sounds, the others in Coperic’s band slipping away; she sent her blessings after them but stayed where she was, watching what was happening below.
The commotion began to settle. Nekaz Kole rode back and forth along the line, his guard flying behind him, quelling confusion and reorganizing the shattered army, sending a delegation under a white flag to arrange for the collection of the dead and wounded, got the cooks working, preparing meals back in the hills under guard of the norits; the raiders still alive were almost cleared away; the demon beasts were trotting back to their masters, most of them, one or two still nosing out knots of attackers gone to ground when they saw the result of the flight of the rest.
Tuli froze. Two shadows were moving through the brush below her. She saw a clawed hand reaching, twisted and brown like ancient tree roots, clumps of yellow-white hair escaping from under a dark kerchief tied about the man’s head, dark worn shirt baggy about a narrow body, slightly bowed legs in leather trousers, strong square feet in soft shapeless boots. A gnarled, tough old man moving with taut silence across the small cleared area, making no sound at all on the treacherous scree and bits of dead brush.
And behind him, one she knew almost as well as she knew herself, who for a while had been another self. Teras. Hars and Teras, both still alive. She wanted to call to them. She wanted desperately to call to them, but she didn’t. They were getting away clear, would soon enough be beyond the reach of the demon beasts, reined in as they were by the Four below. She watched Teras as long as she could see any bit of him, weak with the joy of finding him still alive, not one of the corpses abandoned by the side of the Highroad. She wanted to whoop and dance her joy but could not. It seemed intolerable that she had to lay still as the stone around her or betray both of them, but she managed it. All too soon, slow as he was moving, he was out of sight, creeping on up the mountain toward some rendezvous she knew nothing of, perhaps with more of the outcasts from Haven. She lay in an agony of stillness, her forehead on her crossed arms, breathing in the dry red dust of the mountain, grinning like a fool, weak as a new-hatched oadat.
Ildas nudged at her, nipped gently at her rib when he couldn’t get her attention; as she started to move, he yipped a warning. Slowly and carefully she raised her head, trying not to gasp in dismay. A demon chini stood in the clear space below, sniffing at the scree where Hars and Teras had passed. As if he sensed her watching, he lifted his head and stared toward her. Helplessly she lay where she was, watching him take two steps on the spoor of Hars and Teras, then lift his head again and look toward her as if he weighed whether to take her first or continue after the raiders. Ildas trembled, and wailed his terror, silent cries that tore along her spine and bounced about her head. The demon chini shook his black head as if his floppy ears hurt, then started up the slope toward her.