“Mother—”
“Yes, my child. I know. Horses are coming. Are you ready?”
They were.
“Present your arms.”
Each Jade Man knelt on one knee, butting the end of his long spear against his foot. Their circle was now a fence of keen points.
Tiny mounted figures appeared on the cliffs overlooking the valley. Their horses were taller than the ponies the raiders rode, and most were light-colored—tan, gray, white. They stood out boldly against the darker stone of the cliffs.
A heavy cloud of dust rose from the pass, soaring as high as the cliffs around it. The drone of massed hoofbeats gradually overcame the tumult of the battle for Yala-tene, and the first riders emerged from Cedarsplit Gap. Obviously scouts, they took in the scene and reentered the pass. Moments later, a column of riders six abreast burst into view. They thundered down the trail, making for the rear of Zannian’s band and veering away from the Jade Men’s position. Nacris said nothing. The Jade Men held their places.
The moving column of nomads passed within a hundred paces of the Jade Men. The riders saw the strange, green-painted youths on open ground but held their course to hit the engaged raiders hard. A gigantic melee developed, with hundreds of horses churning up the dry earth, filling the air with dust.
A second band of nomads descended the pass in a more leisurely fashion. They halted briefly, then came toward Nacris at a steady walk.
“Steady, children,” she said. “Remember your Master! He will hear of how well you fight today!”
The nomads spread out, plainly seeking to encircle their unmoving enemy. Nacris admired their tall mounts, their buff deerskins, and tanned, healthy faces. She’d been one of them once and remembered how it felt to have sound limbs, a good horse, and the endless plain as your domain.
At a distance of forty paces, the nomads halted. They put aside their spears and swords and took strange devices in their hands—slender staves of wood, their two ends joined by a taut length of cord.
Nacris furrowed her brow. What was this?
Each rider fitted a little spear to the cord. That was enough to warn Nacris these were weapons of some sort. She cried, “Jade Men! At them!”
With a concerted shout the green-skinned youths threw themselves forward. The nomads waited, implacable, drawing back the cords on their odd weapons, stretching the staves into deep arcs. When released, the little spears were thrown with incredible force. The air was filled with the thrum of tight strings and the hiss of flying feathered-tufted missiles.
It should have been over in a few heartbeats—two hundred nomads loosing arrows at less than twenty-five targets. Yet, the fight did not go that way. Slender green bodies twisted and spun, dodging the first volley of arrows sent at them. Screaming in high-pitched, boyish voices, the Jade Men came on. Unnerved, the nomads hesitated before loosing a second hail of arrows.
This time many of the arrows found their marks. Jade Men toppled, chests sprouting with slender wooden shafts. Those not hit dropped to the ground and scrambled forward on all fours, each with a spear clenched in his teeth. Horses reared as the weird youths scampered under them. Some nomads were thrown down and slain by the waiting Jade Men. Others dropped their bows in favor of spears and swords to better combat their strange enemies.
From her litter, Nacris watched and laughed. With a hundred Jade Men, she could have wiped out the nomads before her. With a thousand, she could have ruled the plains. How well they moved and fought! Those mortally stricken lay in the trampled weeds, she noted with a pang, like exotic flowers cut down by a scythe.
The surviving Jade Men swarmed over the confused riders, dragging them off their horses, stabbing, choking, even biting them into submission. A hollow space opened in the midst of the nomad formation as Karada’s warriors drew back from the bizarre green killers. When the dust cleared, the bows went to work again, this time with carefully aimed arrows. Jade Man after Jade Man was hit.
A loud murmur arose from the nomads. Even bristling with arrows, some of the green-skinned youths struggled to rise and carry on the fight. Nacris strained neck and arms trying to lift herself to see what was happening. As the breeze swept the dust aside, she saw a dark-skinned man with a bronze sword in his hand. On foot, he went among the wounded Jade Men, dispatching them with well-placed thrusts.
By the time Nacris hauled herself up to stand with her crutch, it was all over. Tears coursed down her weathered face, though she did not make a sound. Her ploy of waiting in the open had drawn Karada, just as she hoped. Her Jade Men had died well. She was so very proud of her children.
The dark swordsman remounted and rode through the nomad line. Leaning hard on her crutch, Nacris pulled her gaze from the sprawled forms of her young Jade Men and presented the point of her spear to the enemy.
Among the lead riders Nacris noticed a strikingly pretty girl with long black hair and jet eyes to match. Nacris knew that girl. Her name was...
“Beramun,” the girl supplied, seeing the crippled woman struggling to remember.
“You came back. Zannian will be pleased.”
“I don’t think so. I’ve brought friends, many friends.” To the dark man at her side, Beramun added, “Watch her, Bahco. She’s a snake!”
Nacris smiled through her tears. “And Karada? Where is she?”
Beramun turned and pointed to the cliff. “There. She sent us to fetch you.”
Nacris drew back her arm and flung the javelin. Unsteady on one leg, her cast was awkward, and the weapon flew low. It landed in the dirt in front of Bahco’s horse.
“Take her,” he said. Four nomads seized Nacris but found her unresisting. In fact, she broke into wild laughter.
“My design is almost complete!” she chortled. “Obey my will! Take me to Karada!”
Zannian couldn’t believe it. Victory had been his—the Arkuden himself was talking surrender—and now everything was falling apart! What capricious spirits were at work here? How could his glorious destiny have splintered so thoroughly, like a stick of rotten wood?
He abandoned the north baffle, for which so many had died, and got on his horse. The bulk of his once-numerous band was hotly engaged, and every man, every weapon, counted. He rallied his demoralized men and they pushed their new enemies back a bit, gaining room to breathe. The newcomers were not too numerous. Zannian guessed they totaled perhaps four hundred, similar to his on-hand strength, but they were powerfully armed, rode bigger animals, and both horses and riders were fresher than his own troops.
Slowly his men retreated westward, forced away from the village. During the running fight, Zannian rode through the site of another skirmish. The bodies on the ground were green-skinned.
Jade Men. This was his mother’s work. Only she or the Master could have commanded the Jade Men into battle, and Sthenn was certainly nowhere about. Zannian had no chance to look for Nacris’s body among the others before the swirling fight carried him and his men away from where the Jade Men perished.
He spotted Hoten in the fray, trading blows with a sturdy foe on a tall horse. The old raider was having the worst of it, so Zannian charged through the press and speared the nomad on his blind side. Hoten saluted wearily. Zannian started to ask about Nacris, but new enemies appeared, and he and Hoten were driven apart.
A new column of nomads appeared on the raiders’ left. Though smaller than the first group, they still numbered nearly two hundred robust warriors. Outnumbered and outridden, the raiders began to lose heart. Some threw down their weapons and whipped their exhausted mounts westward to the empty camp by the river. Zannian boiled with fury. The cowards would not dare quit the battle if Sthenn were present!
As one trio of deserters cantered away, watching anxiously over their shoulders for pursuit by nomads or Zannian’s loyalists, they failed to see a line of ogres stalking toward them. The biggest ogre raised his chipped stone axe and knocked the lead rider off his horse, cleaving him from shoulder to waist with one blow. The other horses reared, throwing off their startled riders. Two ogres picked up a deserter by his ankles. The terrified raider screamed as he was flung back into the churning battle. He vanished into the mass of fighting humans and stamping horses. The last deserter saw none of this. He ran like a rabbit. Sneering, the ogres let him go.