Fellion laughed. “Fill ’em up again, boys!” he shouted, and he waved an imaginary mug. “Hugh! Dammit, where’s that ale?”
There was a long silence, then, “Sir Hugh? Is that you?” the strange voice called.
This time, Hugh thought he recognized the speaker. Her voice was lower than normal and husky, affected no doubt by shock, caution, or grief.
“Mariana?” he called and stepped out into the moonlight again.
Five forms clambered out of the rocks and surrounded the three survivors. Hugh heard familiar voices talking and questioning. The newcomers touched him as if to reassure themselves and him that he was all right. Others took Fellion and gave him water from a skin.
A tall, lean figure came to Hugh. She pulled off her helmet, revealing a head of pale silvery hair cut short. The long braids she had worn before the war were gone, hacked off in a gesture of defiance and grief.
He grinned a weak semblance of a smile. “Captain, glad I am to see you.”
The half-elf nodded once, and Hugh thought he saw moonlight glitter on a rivulet of tears on her cheeks. She helped him sit and pressed a waterskin into his hands. Using the lure of water, she encouraged Amania to let go of his neck and sit beside him.
The militia captain studied them both in the dim light and shook her pale head. “I have seen this camp. How did you three survive?”
Hugh could only shrug. He tried to explain. “I still don’t know. I was sitting up with Fellion when I heard Sir Remmik yell something. I thought he was shouting at a guard or a dog or something. A few moments passed, then all chaos broke loose. It was dark in the cave.” He shuddered, remembering the shrieks and the panic in the darkness. “Amania came to me. She couldn’t stop screaming. Fellion tried to help me. A Tarmak attacked us. He drove us back… his sword slashed me… Fellion and I killed…Amania pulled us back into a passage. We fled…” His voice faltered and failed to silence. He could feel tears running down his cheeks and could do nothing to stop them. He buried his face in his hands.
Mariana sat and watched wordlessly to allow him time to regain his composure.
Fiercely he wiped his eyes on his sleeve and took another long swallow of water. “Thanks,” he said with a thick voice. “How did you know we were here?”
“We didn’t. Varia found us and told us about the massacre. We came to see for ourselves. Some of my men—” she gestured to the militia men helping Fellion— “have friends and family here.”
“Is anyone else still alive?”
“None but you so far. We found General Dockett by the Post.” Her voice remained cool and contained—too much so, Hugh thought—as she said, “We found his head jammed on a stake. Vultures have been at it.”
“What about Knight Commander Remmik? Or Falaius?”
She repeated everything Varia had told her about the Solamnic prisoners and the absence of the Legion commander. Thus far her patrol had not found Falaius either.
“That’s odd,” Sir Hugh murmured.
Mariana left him by the well with Amania, Sir Fellion, and one of her men with strict orders not to touch the water from the well. The Tarmaks, in their efforts to destroy everything useable to the defenders, had poisoned both wells. While the men tended Fellion and treated Sir Hugh’s slash wound, the rest of the patrol finished their search of the caves and the canyon.
They came back tightlipped and silent. No one else was with them “We will have to come back and bury them,” one soldier said in a voice wracked with pain. He clutched a light-colored hair scarf often worn by women.
Sir Hugh shook his head. “Seal them in the caves,” he suggested. “There aren’t enough of us left to bury them all.”
“We were lucky to get in here tonight,” snapped the captain. “The Tarmaks may decide to post a watch to catch a burial detail. We’ll have to leave them for now.”
A misty hint of light edged the eastern horizon, and the late moon dropped toward its rest. Mariana eyed the sky and ordered her charges to move. The militia, what was left of it, was gathering at Sinking Wells miles to the east. She wanted her patrol out of the canyon and out of sight of any Tarmak hunters.
Reluctantly they gathered what little they could of anything salvageable and constructed a litter for Fellion. They left the Wadi at the mouth’s entrance. As soon as they were gone, the wild dogs and the old lion slunk out of their hiding places and resumed their feeding.
9
The Brute Prison
Linsha came awake abruptly. From only a few feet away a bony face stared down its aristocratic nose at her. Shadows cast from the torchlight outside their prison lay in sharp relief along the edges of its features. The steely gray eyes stared at a point somewhere beyond her left cheek as if their owner could not bear to look her in the eye.
“Your friend is back,” Sir Remmik said in a curt tone. “You may want to take a look at him.”
Having done what he felt was necessary, Remmik withdrew, leaving her lying in confusion.
Her mind, still drugged with sleep, did not grasp his meaning right away. Her friend? Which friend? She opened her mouth and tasted the acrid aftertaste of the general’s magic. Gods, how did he do that? Even worse she felt a stinging sensation on her neck where the gold chain had cut into her skin. Her hand flew unbidden to her throat. She touched the empty space where the scales had hung and felt the bloody weal on the back of her neck. The scales were gone.
She felt as though the Tarmak had ripped away the only connection she had left with both dragons. What was left felt like a gaping raw hole in her heart. She would have curled back into a ball and tried to escape back into sleep again, except Sir Remmik’s words resurfaced in her groggy memory. Her friend was back. What friend? Then another bit of memory returned, and she sat up and looked around.
Lanther lay close to the barred doors where the guards had dumped him, sprawled on his back and still as death. No one else moved to help him because most were sleeping the sleep of the mentally and physically exhausted, and apparently Sir Remmik did not want to be bothered any further.
Careful of her aching head, Linsha rolled to her hands and knees and crawled to the Legionnaire’s side. He didn’t move when she checked his pulse, but she felt his heartbeat slow and steady under his jaw. The man had a constitution of steel. She fetched water from a bucket the Tarmaks had left and bathed his face until he regained consciousness enough to drink some water.
For the next hour or so, she gave him water a little at a time and fed him crumbs of the dry bread their captors had given them as supper. Eventually he fell asleep with his head in her lap. She didn’t mind. The night was quite chilly, and her body needed what little warmth he could share.
She sat with her back against the old wall and listened to him breathe. At least he was still alive and here with her, not lying in the blood-drenched caves or out in the garden with arrows in his back. That was something.
For a while she watched him sleep. When sleep did not return to her, she watched the Tarmak guards pass by the doors of the prison on their rounds. She timed them as they walked by the doors, and she paid close attention when they changed the guards sometime around midnight. But soon that palled, too, and it wasn’t long after the guards resumed their stations that her mind began to wander. Although she wanted to shy away from it, she finally let her thoughts pick through the tales the Knights had told her of the massacre in Scorpion Wadi. Sir Remmik had said nothing of the catastrophe, hut several of the younger ones, Sir Johand and Sir Pieter, had talked with the horror still fresh on their faces.
She asked about Sir Hugh, General Dockett, Falaius and others, but the only death they knew for certain was the general’s, for they had seen his head on the stake staring down on them as they marched past.
The entire camp.