Blade, ignoring Mok, vaulted up the stairs, calling out as he went. «Ooma? Ooma — Ooma?»
Echoes mocked him. No voice answered. He peered into the room where he had left her sleeping. Empty. He ran down the corridor and glanced into the only other room. Both the aunts lay in their beds. One look at their yellowed faces was enough. Dead of plague. But where was Ooma? She had sent a message and surely she would wait here for him.
He ran down the stairs and approached Mok. The man still lived, though for the moment he had stopped that terrible laughing. Blade knelt beside him. «Mok! Mok — do you know me? It is Blade.»
The little eyes, lost in folds of jaundiced fat, slowly opened and Blade could discern a last intelligence in them. The mouth opened and words tried to slip past the swollen black tongue and were blocked. Blade bent closer, trying to understand, to make sense of the jumble and slur, of the agonized attempt to speak. Nothing.
He glanced at the table. There was a clay vessel of the powerful fermented melon juice. Blade seized it and dashed half the contents into Mok's face, then he pried open the mouth and poured the rest down the fat throat. It was a faint hope, but the stuff might jolt Mok into a few last moments of lucidity.
The fat man choked and retched and spat. Blade knelt and put his ear close to the frothing mouth. «Mok — Mok! It is Blade. Ooma sent for me. Where is she, Mok? Where is Ooma?»
The fiery liquor did its work. Mok's eyes cleared for a moment and he looked up at Blade with comprehension. His first words nearly tore Blade's heart from his chest.
«Api,» burbled Mok. «Api came. They — they took Ooma and used her, all the Api soldiers, and then bound her and threw her alive into the charnel pit. She would— would not tell them of you, Blade. They would have spared her, the Api, but she would not tell them of you. A-alive — in the pit—»
Mok closed his eyes and let out a deep groan. Blade struck him hard across the face while his guts twisted with horror and remorse. Api? They were immune to plague. And who controlled the Api? Who but Nizra. The Wise One. Blade struck Mok again and damned himself bitterly for being the fool of all time.
Mok was speaking again. «Trap, Blade. T-trap. Ooma did not send for you. She was content to wait until you came. B-but Api came first. Took her. G-gave us all plague with knife. You see—»
j
It was his last moment of lucidity before death. He raised a fat arm and Blade saw the cruel knife gash. They had inoculated Mok and the aunts with plague. Simple enough. Let a dagger fester in a corpse for a time, then plunge it into living flesh and plague would follow almost instantly. But this time it had not struck fast enough. Mok had lived long enough to talk.
There came a scream from the copse where he had left his bodyguard. Then a clash of arms and more screams and cries and the curses of men locked in battle. It was a trap. The Api had been waiting.
Mok's arm dropped to the floor. The fingers curled, stiffened, then relaxed. Mok was dead.
Blade drew his sword and ran to the door and peered out. Three of his men were already down and the remaining three were retreating up the path toward the cottage and giving a good account of themselves. They were being hard pressed by half a dozen Api warriors, as hairy and long-snouted as Blade remembered them.
Blade stepped outside the door and raised his sword and bellowed, «To me, guardsmen. To me! Break off and form around me here.»
His stentorian roar for a moment broke off the hot little battle. The Api paused in their attack and stared at Blade, their pale eyes feral beneath the horned helmets, the pointed baboon muzzles dripping with sweat and slobber. The goons rested for a moment, leaning on their long wooden swords edged with flint; and Blade's remaining three men broke off and ran to join him.
One of the soldiers was bleeding badly from a shoulder wound. Blade ripped away part of his tunic and bound it up as the man gasped out his story.
«They were concealed in the melon trees, Sire. We were betrayed by Sesi, who led us here. And now we die, for there are many of them all around the house.»
It was true. Blade could hear the high-pitched, effeminate calls of still more Api as they emerged from the trees at the foot of the hill behind the cottage and began to ascend. But he patted the wounded man on his unhurt shoulder and smiled at them all. «We are not dead yet, guardsmen. Only obey me — obey me absolutely and keep your courage and we may come out alive yet. They are only Api after all and we will out-think them.»
Yet as he gazed down the hill to where the Api leaders and the traitor Sesi were conferring, Blade did not feel so confident. It was going to be a near thing. Yet such was his rage and despair at the moment that he welcomed it. Let them come on. They would find a Blade as cruel and brutish as themselves. His eyes narrowed as he sought out the young sublieutenant Sesi. How skillfully, how carefully, the cornet had carried out his master's orders. Blade cursed himself again and again. He had made what might be a fatal mistake — he had underestimated the Wise One. What was worse, Blade had ignored the clear indications that this might happen. Nizra had told him of signals from the Api, and Nizra had carefully avoided mentioning the girl Ooma. Blade, busy and full of his own conceit, had let it pass unnoticed. How Nizra must have chuckled, how that ghastly head must have lolled. For by torturing Ooma he could learn the truth about Blade, at least to a point, and thus seek to discredit him as the avatar. Fool, Blade called himself. Fool — fool — fool!
At the foot of the hill the conference broke up. Sesi turned away and sat down beneath a melon tree. Blade smiled grimly. The cornet had done his part and would not fight.
The Api leader, a goon not so large as the slain Porrex, but who looked to be shrewder, began to squeal out his orders. Blade followed suit.
«Into the house,» he ordered. «There are four windows and the door to guard. I will take this door and the near window — each of you will take one of the remaining windows. They are large and clumsy, these Api, and not made for climbing through narrow windows. Now — keep your spirits up and fight for your lives.»
One of the men gazed at the yellow mark on the door and cringed away, crying out, «But there is plague in this house, Sire. We will—»
J
Blade gave him a brutal shove in through the door. «There is a greater plague out here, fool. In! Must I think for all of you?»
The Api were slow in approaching and Blade understood why. He reckoned some two score of the goons, against four. Impossible odds. Once inside the cottage he cast about for some manner of evening them a bit. He stared at the corpse of Mok and had an idea. There was still time, for the overconfident goons were shouting and jesting among themselves as they moved in to slay the four men.
Blade pointed to the vast body of Mok. «Wedge him into one of the windows. Quickly. All that blubber will barricade it as well as an iron shutter.»
And so poor Mok, and his bloated body, did some service as he was thrust head first through a rear window and wedged tightly there by men who groaned and sweated as they lifted the great bulk.
Blade glanced through the remaining rear windows and saw a line of Api coming up the back slope. They were fifty yards distant, some twenty of them, and squealing with battle glee as they swung their long, pointed swords over their heads.
Only two of his men had lances. The remaining guard, he who had been wounded, had only his short iron sword, as had Blade. Blade posted the men with lances at two of the remaining three windows, one facing to the rear, the other forward, and he himself took the door and the window nearest it. He posted the wounded man in the center of the room as a reserve and indicated the body of Mok where it served as a stopper.