She took down two men with it, one of them dead, and remembered too late that a two-handed weapon is not ideal in a melee against enemies who can get inside its swing. But Gerik seemed to have learned more swordsmanship in the last year than in all his previous years combined, and Pirvan was as quick as an eel and as welcoming as a poisonous serpent. Each of them took a man, and Haimya began to hope.
Hope ended when the door was suddenly filled with more men. The battle must have attracted them, and these newcomers were hideous beyond belief, earless, silent, scarred, and frenzied. Even if they’d had ears, Haimya could not conceive of their listening.
She and Pirvan paired off and kept the newcomers at a distance. They were both fighting with strange weapons, she was sick, and he was wounded, but one mind seemed to move both their limbs and take knowledge from both their senses.
The newcomers seemed reluctant to attack Gerik, and Haimya wondered if this was because of his service to Fustiar, who had to be their master. The pirates seemed to have no reluctance to attack anyone, but they divided their forces so that no one was overmatched.
How long the fight might have gone on, only the gods could say. Its end came in one frightful moment, as Haimya relied on Pirvan’s protecting her front to launch a full overhead swing at a pirate wearing a helmet.
The Frostreaver flashed down, it smote the helmet and pierced iron and bone to the man’s nose-then it shattered like a glass globe flung on a stone floor. Except that the shattering did not strew mere fragments of glass far and wide.
Instead, pieces of mage-wrought ice flew in all directions, sharper than razors, as heavy as stones, and as deadly as the claws of a dragon. Haimya saw blood on her leg, saw two men go down, and saw the mutes drag one of their number out the door with his belly laid open as they fled from something that overmatched their mindless courage-
And she saw Gerik Ginfrayson collapse, holding a hand already red over an ice-torn wound in his thigh, over his death wound, until his strength left him and his hand fell, leaving the wound to finish its work.
Haimya knelt beside him until the light went out of his eyes. She remembered kissing his lips before they were cold, then again afterward. She remembered muttering that she had been faithful to him, until this last betrayal, and other things that it was probably as well he could no longer hear. The gods’ hearing them would be enough.
She did not remember if he said anything. Probably he was silent, and even the smile on his face was almost certainly her imagination. But she held the picture of that smile in her mind, even when she felt Pirvan’s hand on her shoulder and allowed him to pull her to her feet.
“We have to move.”
“Where?”
“Up or down. It doesn’t matter. We have to be outside the tower where Hipparan can find us-before Fustiar awakes or the black dragon returns.”
“I–I took the piece-Gerik should have had it, and I his.”
He looked down at her leg. “You can’t climb?”
“Perhaps. I-” She forced the words out, even as she uttered them knowing that he would ignore them, that if he had to find a way of carrying her out under one arm, he would do so.
“Leave me here.”
“Haimya, this is the first and probably the last time I will ever give you a command. Come, freely or against your will, but come.”
A lingering remnant of dignity forced her to put one foot in front of another. Surprisingly, the wounded leg could take some weight, even as she felt the bleeding worsen.
Kicking the useless handle of the Frostreaver out of the way, they stepped over the bodies and ice fragments to the door.
Chapter 21
Hipparan toas not one of those dragons with the inborn gift of sensing magic worked in a cave deep under a mountain halfway across the world. Nor had he, in his few decades in the world before entering dragonsleep, found time to learn that art-if it could be learned, as some elder dragons doubted.
But the magic he sensed now blazed like fires in dry grass. Or at least one source did-neutral he thought, but with an aura about it of danger. Evil flickered, like a campfire in yesterday’s downpour, close to the neutral source.
And far away but drawing closer was the black dragon, a familiar sensation and at any other time not an unwelcome one. He had never heard of a dragon turning from evil to good, or even neutral, but it seemed likely that the black would not do anything evil unless Fustiar compelled him.
As he took wing, Hipparan hoped Fustiar had no spells to compel any dragon except the aged black. But a mage who could break dragonsleep, even with the aid of the Dark Queen, was too potent for the comfort of anyone except his sinister mistress.
Hipparan was of one mind with Pirvan and Haimya. He would not sorrow if Fustiar fell into a wine barrel and drowned. For now, he could only hope that at least the mage’s ability to work spells was drowned in the wine he’d drunk, and would stay that way until Pirvan and Haimya were safely out of his reach.
Hipparan slanted down to just about the treetops, gaining speed as he did so. The wind of his passage blew birds’ nests out of the trees, and nesting mothers squalled protest as their fledglings toppled into space.
Hipparan felt the mothers’ sorrow but could do nothing about it. He owed them nothing; he owed Haimya and Pirvan (and all their friends, might Paladine protect them) a great deal.
His wings quickened their beat until he was flying faster than he ever had, even in the high skies.
* * * * *
Pirvan’s arm was throbbing as if it had been held over a fire, by the time he and Haimya reached the roof of the tower. They met no one on the stairs, either friendly or hostile, though the crumbling steps, cobwebs, and reek of mold and still more unwholesome life were menaces enough to the two battered questers. Several times Haimya had to stop-for breath, she said-but Pirvan saw blood soaking through her breeches and even the rough dressing she’d torn from the clothing of a dead pirate.
When they reached the roof, they were still alone, and Pirvan quickly saw why. The roof was more holes than either stone or timber. A misstep could send them plummeting to death in the shadows.
At least it would be a quicker death than the pirates now surrounding the tower would mete out to them. Pirvan hoped he and his companion could at least force the pirates to kill them, but with his arm and her leg and fever, he was making no large wagers. The last strength she’d gained from the healing potion had gone into wielding the Frostreaver with a skill that an ice barbarian warrior would have envied-and what had it brought her?
Gerik Ginfrayson’s death, and that had taken from her something that she might never gain back, not if she survived tonight and another fifty years as well. He had thrown away his oath to Synsaga to save her, and she had repaid him with death.
Pirvan could see in Haimya’s eyes that in her mind she would look upon Gerik’s dying face a thousand times over, until either her mind could endure it no more or she could make her peace with what was not her fault and in any case past all altering.
He had firmly put the thought out of his mind that she was now free. She would welcome no man’s approach for years, if ever. Now all he could do for her was be silent and if it came to that, keep her from dying alone.
More torches were coming across the courtyard toward the foot of the tower. Pirvan looked down, and an arrow whistled up toward him, striking the stone a good ten feet below him. Chips of stone and large chunks of mortar showered from where it had struck, however. This whole tower had to be on the verge of coming down of its own weight; how it had survived Fustiar’s residence, let alone his magic, was something to marvel at.