Erin bashed the man’s head against the ground once, twice, three times, striking his own fingers the last time, numbing and bruising them.
Staggering back to his feet, Erin could hear his pursuers crashing through the brush behind him, only a few seconds away.
He hobbled on. Just a little way to the river now. He could hear it. If he could just keep going! Every step stabbed him with pain, and his lungs were aflame now, even his good leg heavy as lead.
He couldn’t run. Just couldn’t.
Erin the Warrior! He couldn’t quit. He had to live.
Keep your mind on the food, on the campfire. . . .
Don’t think about your legs, your chest, the pounding of your heart. They were so close now—
He wrenched himself from his reverie in time to dig in his heels. Momentum slowed but not stopped, he smashed ipto a gnarled tree growing at the lip of the bluff above Killsister River.
He stared down at her twisting, rushing black depths. The lip of the cliff rose forty feet above the riverbank. Too steep to climb—-with his bad leg.
The voices were right behind him now. There was time only for a desperate gambit.
Carefully, testing each step, he climbed down over the edge of the cliff. The tree roots had actually grown out the bottom, and he climbed down, finding the heaviest and sturdiest roots, clinging to them as he hung there over the lip of the abyss.
The sound of cursing and heavy steps. Finally, voices, “Must find him,” one said, with a heavy, spitting sound. “If we don’t”—another angry expulsion of air and viscous fluid—“trouble.”
“Aye. They discover us, they come after us. Good eating gone.”
The first grunted with disgust. “The easy eating over, for sure. Damn. So easy to goad them, so easy to make each think the other side broke the truce. What’s left after the battle?” They all laughed heartily. “Heh heh. Is meat for us.”
“Let’s try around over to the west.”
Erin hung beneath the tree, shocked, disbelieving.
The Horseclansmen were not their enemies? Had not been their enemies for decades?
And these horrible troll-people, these creatures who lurked like maggots in the shadow of Killsister, watching and waiting and prodding and goading—these things had been fueling the feuds all along?
Finding the bodies, and butchering them like cattle?
Erin lost control of his stomach, tasted acid, felt a sour fist squeeze him until he lost the water and jerky, vomiting over his own chest as he hung there in the tangle of roots. He thought of all the death, all the lives thrown away for nothing, and wanted to die. His brother Tal, dead these five years, whose death had fired him with hatred for the Horseclans. Tal had died to make meat for these monsters. If Erin could not somehow get back to his people the killing would go on, and on, and on, until there was nothing left of either tribe. Then perhaps the ghouls of Killsister would roam, like nomads, until they found more fools eager to kill each other to make meat for the cannibal table.
All thoughts of heroism were gone now. He had to reach his people with the awful truth. Their enemy was not the Horseclans. Their enemy was Death itself.
Erin pulled himself up from beneath the tree, shivering, shaking. He looked out at the distant peaks of the mountain. The mist surrounding them seemed to be countless thousands of souls, torn from their bodies by human teeth and denied rest until someone somewhere lived to tell the truth.
Erin began to move north. If he could reach a notch just ahead, he could get down to the river, and—
Something instinctive made him jerk his head aside. The axe grazed his ear and sailed out over the lip of the cliff and down to the water beyond. Before it disappeared the axeman hurled his own body after it, and Erin was caught around the knees. He brought his joined hands down on the neck, heard a groan, felt new pain as the cannibal bit him with those filed teeth. He screamed. A second man flew at him, hit him around the chest, knife flashing down.
Fighting a growing sensation of hopelessness, he caught the descending wrist and twisted, trying to get hold of the knife. He screamed again as a third man hit him from behind. The cannibals were laughing now.
“Thought you’d get away from us, boy! Ain’t no way out—din’t you know that? Gonna eat you up\"
Erin screamed again as teeth dug into his shoulder and his arm, and the three monsters dragged him down, eyes bright, mouths stained with his blood, giggling now, settling into the business of devouring him alive. .
His head hung over the lip of the cliff. Below him, far below, hissed the waters of Killsister. Life to his people, life to the clans to the south, the last sight in his life . . .
Teeth tore at the tender flesh of his stomach, nuzzling for his vitals . . .
With strength born of rage and panic, born of some primal survival drive so deep that he had never suspected its existence, he convulsed his entire body, pushed with his good leg and with his one free arm, and suddenly all four of them were teetering on the brink of the cliff.
The ghouls howled with despair, and one of them wriggled like a worm on the hook, desperate to escape. Erin’s gory fingers were twined in the monster’s hair, and together the four of them teetered on the edge, tottered there, and they fell, tumbling down the rock face.
Erin felt flesh go, and bone—felt the injured leg shatter as he struck a boulder, bounced out away from the face of the cliff and down into the water, feeling his face go under, the gigantic splash drowning all consciousness and . . .
... at least . . .
. . . clean death . . .
A flash of sky, and the momentary, sliding grasp of desperate, drowning fingers, a moonlight glimpse of a white face, panicked eyes rolling and head sinking in the churning waters of Killsister . . .
And then nothing.
Dead. I must be .. .
His head throbbed terribly, his entire body seethed with pain. He couldn’t move.
Somehow he managed to pry his eyes open. He tried to move: his hands were tied behind him, his body bound to the trunk of a tree. His leg was shattered, twisted at an ugly angle. Bone projected through the flesh. The pain was a dull throb, a pulse that beat more steadily every moment.
It was day, and from where he sat, he could see the waters of Killsister. Rippling calmly here, its rage spent. There was green to either side of it, a vast field, and beyond this a gentle rise of hills.
Behind him he heard horses, and the smell of stew and fresh-baked bread was in the air. Leather-shod feet slapped against hard earth.
A bearded figure leaned into his field of vision suddenly, grinned without humor. “Hezros! Rat is awake!” The bearded man squatted, picked at his brown teeth with a long fingernail. “You may wish you’d drowned, Rat.”
Erin tried to remember something. Anything.
Tumbling, into the river. Something striking him—a log? A tree trunk? And he had clasped it.
And something else had, as welclass="underline" one of the cannibals. He vaguely remembered a savage struggle, in a place beyond pain or exhaustion. Only the knowledge of the message that he carried, had to carry, kept him conscious and fighting.
And then the knife was gone, and his enemy was gone, swirling away, ruined face pumping black in the moonlight.
Erin had hitched himself up over the wood and passed out.
He had a faint memory of hands hauling him from the water, but nothing more until this moment.
He heard but could not see a general commotion. Four people approached from behind him, three tall men, and a clean-limbed dark-skinned woman who stood level with the tallest of them. She had a cold, brilliant smile, and her hair was cut close to her scalp.
The largest man caught his attention.
Erin would recognize Hezros anywhere, even without the leather armor. His jaw was immense, and carried a heavy dark beard. Half of his lower lip had been cut away, and three teeth were missing from the lower jaw. He was bare-chested, three varied wounds already dressed and swathed.