It was strong, and frightened beyond fear. It bit and trampled, and Stark cut a path through the barbarians with the long sword, and presently above the din he shouted, “Ciaran!”
The black mask turned toward him. “Stark.”
He spurred the beast again. “I claim my sword-right, bastard!”
The remembered voice spoke from behind the barred slot. “Claim it, then!” The black axe swept a circle, warning friend and foe alike that this was a single combat. And all at once they two were alone in a little space at the heart of the battle.
Their mounts shocked together. The axe came down in a whistling curve, and the red swordblade flashed to meet it. There was a ringing clash of metal, and the blade was shattered and the axe fallen to the ground.
There was a strange sound from the tribesmen. Stark ignored it. He spurred his mount ruthlessly, pressing in.
Ciaran reached for his sword, but his hand was numbed by the force of the blow and lacked its usual split-second cunning. The hilt of Stark’s weapon, still clutched in his own numb grip and swung viciously by the full weight of his arm, fetched Ciaran a stunning blow on the helm so that the metal rang like a flawed bell. He reeled back in the saddle, only for a moment, but long enough. Stark grasped the war-mask and ripped it off, and got his hands around the naked throat.
He did not break that neck, as he had planned to do. And the clansmen all around the circle stopped and stared and did not move.
Stark knew now why the Lord Ciaran had never shown his face.
The throat he held was white and strong, and his hands around it were buried in a mane of black hair that fell down over the shirt of mail. A red mouth passionate with fury, wonderful curving bone under sculptured flesh, eyes fierce and proud and tameless as the eyes of a young eagle. A splendid face, but never on any of the nine worlds of the sun could it have been the face of a man.
In that moment of amazement, she was quicker than he.
There was nothing to warn him, no least flicker of expression. Her two fists came up together between his outstretched arms and caught him under the jaw with a force that nearly snapped his neck. He fell backward out of the saddle and lay sprawled on the bloody stones, and for a moment the sun went out.
The woman wheeled her mount. Bending low, she caught up the axe from where it had fallen and faced her chieftains and her warriors, who were as dazed as Stark.
“I have led you well,” she said. “I have taken you Kushat. Will any man dispute me?”
They knew the axe, if they did not know her. They looked from side to side uneasily, completely at a loss. Stark, lying on the ground, saw her through a wavering haze. She seemed to tower against the sky in her black mail, with her dark hair blowing. And he felt a strange pang deep within him, a kind of chill foreknowledge, and the smell of blood rose thick and strong from the stones.
The nobles of Kushat chose that moment to charge. This strange unmasking of the Mekhish lord had given them time to rally their remnants together, and now they thought that the gods had wrought a miracle at last to help them. They found hope, where they had lost everything but courage.
“A woman!” they cried. “A strumpet. A drab of the camps. A woman!”
They howled it like an epithet, and tore into the barbarians.
She who had been the Lord Ciaran drove the spurs in deep, so that the beast leaped forward screaming. She went, and did not look once to see if any had followed, in among the men of Kushat. The great axe rose and fell.
She killed three and left two others bleeding on the stones. And still she did not look back.
The clansmen found their tongues.
“Ciaran! Ciaran! Ciaran!”
The crashing shout drowned out the sound of battle. As one man they turned and followed her. These tall wild children that she led could see only two choices, to slay her out of hand or to worship her, and they had chosen to worship. From here on they would follow her anywhere she led, with a kind of devotion different from and more powerful than any they could have given to a man—so long as she did nothing to tarnish the image they had of her, as a goddess.
Stark almost laughed. Instead of killing Ciaran, he had succeeded in giving her power and freedom she had never had before. Now nothing short of death could stop her.
Very well, he thought, in some dark corner of his mind. Very well, if that is the way the thread is woven.
Feet trampled him, kicked him, stumbled over him. Men were fighting above him, and the padded hoofs of beasts came stamping toward him. His head cleared with a panic rush. He got his knees under him and started to rise, and the movement attracted the attention of a warrior who must have thought he was dead, judging from the expression of surprise. He yelled and started the lunge that was meant to run Stark through, and then suddenly he dropped down flat as an old sack, with the back of his neck shorn through, and somebody was telling Stark bitterly, “Pick up his sword, damn it, pick up his sword, I can’t hold them all off alone.”
It was Lugh, filthy, battered, bleeding, and a hundred years older than he had been the last time Stark saw him. Stark bent quickly and caught up the sword. He stood beside Lugh and they fought together, moving with the flow of the fight, which was becoming a rout so swiftly that before they knew it they had been carried out of the square. Here in the narrow, crooked streets, the press of refugees was simply too great. Clots of men formed like corks, bottling up the ways, and the barbarians cut them down happily at leisure. Stark grunted. “There’s no profit in this. Can we get clear?”
“What matter?” said Lugh. “We might as well die here as anywhere.”
Stark said, “There is a second line of battle, if you’d rather fight than die.”
Lugh looked at him out of haggard eyes, a man’s eyes where only a few hours ago they had been the eyes of a petulant boy. “Where, Stark? Where? The city is lost.”
“But another thing has been found.” The barbarians held all the streets under the Wall now. There was no way back to the places Balin had shown him. He took Lugh sharply by the shoulder. “If you can point me the way to the Quarter of the Blessed, I’ll show you.”
Lugh looked at him for a moment more. They were hemmed in by the press of people, jammed against the cold stone of the buildings. Lugh shook his head. “I can point the way, but we must still go over or through this mob.”
Stark nodded. The walls were solid, and in any case one street would be no better than another. The roofs were a blind alley, and the houses traps. “We’ll go through, then. Stick close.”
He began to forge his way by main strength through the press, being perfectly ruthless about it, as he thought that very quickly now Ciaran of Mekh would be looking for him. She—it still came very strangely to think of Ciaran as “she"—would have killed him when he challenged her because no leader could violate the customs of single combat, but he knew that she would vastly prefer to have him alive. There was still that matter of the talisman. Only the shock of the unmasking and the subsequent necessities of battle had saved him in the square. He moved faster and harder the more he thought about it. Men cursed and struck at him, but he was bigger and stronger than most of them, and a little more coherently desperate, and with Lugh to back him up he found himself before too long at the other side of the jam, where the press began to thin out into streams of people blindly running.
Stark ran too, but not blindly, with Lugh coming at a sort of loose-jointed weary gallop beside him. They passed through the gate of the Thieves’ Quarter, where they had passed before on their way to the King City. The streets of the artisans had in them only the first stirrings of chaos. Mostly the shops were shuttered, the houses quiet. The folk had left them to watch the fighting, and now the buildings stood in the winter sunlight as peacefully as on a holiday afternoon.