Sir Remmik’s lean face paled and he looked truly pained. “And the Wadi?”
The Akkad-Ur laughed a rough, patronizing sound of derision. “Why do you think only the Solamnic Knights were captured and everyone else was slain?”
The Knight Commander obviously reached his own conclusion, for he stepped back, storm clouds building behind his gray eyes. He forced a slight bow and turned on his heel. The guards hurried to catch up with him.
The Akkad-Ur watched him go, satisfied with the interview. His informant thought the Knight would certainly lead their trackers to this woman and possibly bring her back as a hostage to save the other Knights. But after looking into Sir Remmik’s eyes and seeing the red rage within, he felt sure the Knight would not hesitate to impose his own Solamnic justice. He had better warn the warriors sent to trail the Knights to be on the alert.
18
Dreams and Arrows
Linsha. A voice whispered her name over the rustle of the flowing river. She did not hear the voice as much as feel it caress her mind.
Startled, she sat up straighter, for the voice sounded familiar. Her eyes scanned the riverbank to her left and right, but she saw no one in the heavy gloom. This was a night of a dark moon, a night of dense shadows and velvet darkness. The only light came from overhead where the stars glittered in brilliant clusters, freed from the moon that often stole their fragile light. Around her insects hummed in the grass and on the river, a mist was rising from the water, pale and ethereal, reflecting the distant starlight.
Linsha. Wake up, my lovely.
Linsha’s heart skipped a beat and tripped forward in a rapid pulse. Her breath caught in her throat.
A pale figure stood in the middle of the river perhaps ten feet away. It had no solid form. It looked to her like an outline of a person drawn with silver ink. The mist swirled about its feet and rolled upward, defining its limbs and filling out its shape with a spectral glow as pale as starlight. The last to appear was his face, as handsome as she remembered. She fancied she caught the faintest hint of blue in his eyes.
Linsha pitched a rock at him. “For the gods’ sake, am I dreaming you again?”
He watched the rock sail through the area of his chest and shook his head. Is that any way to treat an old friend?
“What do you want now, Ian?” she demanded. “You’re supposed to be dead. Why do you keep coming back? What enigmatic warning are you going to give me this time?”
He laughed, that same roguish rumble of good humor she remembered from Sanction. It seemed another lifetime ago she had loved him—or thought she had.
He held out his arms to her. Come kiss me, Green Eyes.
“Drop dead, Ian.”
Thanks to you, my lovely, I already have.
“Right. So what do you want now? Still want to warn me about some nameless rogue?”
You are in a bad mood. Even in your sleep. Anything to do with that dragon of yours?
Linsha leaned forward, another rock in her hand. “He’s not my dragon,” she snapped.
So you say. He grinned again. I don’t have to tell you to be wary. You already know. Listen to your heart. No, I just came to tell you to wake up. Wake up, Green Eyes. There is trouble coming.
“Wake up!” A real voice, a human voice spoke in her ear. “Linsha, wake up.”
Linsha nearly leaped vertically off the rock she was sitting on. She turned huge eyes to the speaker, snatched his padded jacket, and yanked him closer. “Don’t you ever sneak up on me like that again!”
Sir Hugh calmly put a hand on her wrist and pushed her away. He moved quietly and sat down beside her on the rock.
“Sorry. You were mumbling something. I thought you were dreaming.”
She turned back to look at the river, but the spectral form was no longer there, only the mist that flowed in currents above the water. Had she been dreaming? She didn’t think she’d been asleep. She knew how to sleep sitting up or even standing up when necessary—every active Knight learned that trick, but she’d never fallen asleep on guard duty before. Of course she was still bone-weary from days of work and worry and travel. Perhaps Ian had been only a dream. Yet… she had felt his presence so intensely, just as she had in Sanction those years ago.
“Did you see something on the river when you came?” she asked softly.
He looked at the mist and the shadows and said, “Like what?”
“Nothing. I suppose I was dreaming.” She was not about to explain Ian Durne to Sir Hugh. The young Knight still believed in her. She was not going to shatter that illusion by telling him about her love affair with an assassin from the Knights of Neraka.
But if she had been asleep then, she was very awake now. Awake and vividly aware of the night. She sat up straighter, her senses reaching out around her. Something did not feel right. What had Ian said? Trouble is coming.
Brush rustled somewhere to her left. Gravel crunched softly under a heavy foot. Linsha reacted instinctively. She lunged against Sir Hugh, shoving him off the rock onto the ground. She landed heavily beside him just as a crossbow bolt cracked into the rock where they had been sitting.
Both Knights shouted a warning to the sleeping camp.
The effect was immediate. Another sentry blew a horn. The sleepers in the camp, trained by months of danger, slept fully clothed with their weapons close at hand. The shouts brought them instantly awake and on their feet just as a mob of dark figures charged the camp. Voices rang out in war cries and challenges. Swords clashed in the dark.
More crossbow bolts slammed into the rocks around Linsha and Hugh, then three dark forms barged out of the brush and dashed toward them, swords and bucklers raised for an attack.
“Damn! They’re carrying scimitars!” said Sir Hugh, who only had a light long sword and a padded jacket.
Linsha, who had managed to scrounge a heavy rapier and a brass-hilted poniard before she left Sinking Wells, wasn’t any happier. “Damn,” she muttered. “They’re draconians.”
They leaped to their feet and stood back to back. There was no time to retreat up to the camp or make an offensive move. The draconians were on them in a blink of an eye, screeching and smashing in for a quick kill.
In the dark Linsha could not easily identify what type of draconian they were. They were not skilled fighters. That much was clear, for they got in each other’s way and used their curved scimitars to hack and beat down their opponents. They’d probably stolen the blades and their armor, too. Thankfully two of them were short for draconians, which meant they were probably baaz, the warped, evil perversions of brass dragon eggs. The other was taller and heavier. A bozak perhaps.
“If you kill one, pull your weapon out fast!” she cried to Sir Hugh.
He managed a grunt in reply and fended off another wild swing at his head from the bozak.
The draconians jeered at them and pressed harder. Their scimitars slammed into Linsha’s blades until both her arms ached and quivered from the force of the blows. Her left arm, wounded in the melee with the Tarmaks, flared with pain every time she used the poniard to stop a swing.
Fortunately her rapier was a well-built weapon, strong enough to survive the blow of a scimitar, balanced for speed and slashing cuts, and not too heavy for good point work. Linsha often preferred a good rapier and had trained with one for years. Using all of her skill she forced one opponent to back away and, ducking under another wild blow, she slipped by his arm and rammed the point of her blade into the draconian’s chain mail vest. The sharp point burst through the chain links, slid between his ribs, and pierced the heart.