"Shut up!" he yelled at Azdra'ik, and dodged Bogdan's attack.
"They're coming at Ela, man! We can't hold them forever—"
This as he trod on someone's foot trying to back up, and Bogdan's sword grated and sliced along his shoulder.
"Get out of my way," he panted. "Bogdan, stop it! You're wrong, for the god's sake, Bogdan—" He gave up trying to coddle Bogdan's sense of righteousness. "Papa would say—"
"What? That we're all wizard bastards?" A downstroke beat his blade down. But Bogdan was tiring, too. Bogdan could not take advantage on the recovery: Tamas shoved him back with his shoulder and tried bashing him with the hilt.
The barked quillon drew blood across Bogdan's hand. "Damn you!" Bogdan yelled, looking at it, and launched a crazed attack, blow after blow.
"The edge!" Azdra'ik yelled. "Watch your feet, man!"
He had no more room. A goblin's shove at his back flung him within Bogdan's guard and he used the hilt and the side of the blade, to batter himself free. Sweat was running in his eyes. The goblins were all shouting, both sides at once. He made a second desperate try to trap Bogdan's guard, and trapped himself, the swords bound together, the tines piercing Bogdan's hand—he had him, if he did not let go, he could keep from killing Bogdan or being killed, if he did not let Bogdan get free, but Bogdan was grabbing at his throat and forcing him backward in a frenzy of pain and outrage, step by resisting step—he knew the edge was behind him.
"You'll take us over!" he yelled at Bogdan. "You'll take us over the edge, dammit, don't!"
His foot hit nothingness. He felt himself going, he felt the drop beginning and he let go the sword—he had made up his mind to that—rather than kill them both.
But a hand snagged him by one arm as he let go the sword. Bogdan spun past him with all his weight and both swords— into empty space past his reaching hand. The pull on his left sleeve was hauling him back to solid ground breathless and cold and shaking from head to foot—
"Bogdan!" he shouted into that gulf, in hope that if it was a magical place he might yet find him.
"He's gone!" Azdra'ik shouted into his ear, with his arms around him. "You're here, man. Do you hear me? They won't stop us. Man!" Azdra'ik shook at him. "Listen to me! You've got the power to do something—do it! Use the mirror! Break through the wall!"
One thing touches everything, he thought, for no reason. And: for less reason and with a sudden unreasoning hope: Master Karoly!
Nikolai tried not to think about the stars above the tangle of woods, but he was sure that it was at least rightfully noon, that something magical was in progress, and that if their two ghostly guides were at all reliable they should have found the boy long since.
"They're not getting us anywhere!" he protested to Karoly.
"We're not where we were," Karoly snapped. "And it's not that easy, master huntsman, it's not a deer we're tracking."
"What does that mean?"
"That it's not a deer!"
That was what one got for arguing with a man who thought in circles and heard things when he set his ear against the earth. But from the beginning Ysabel and Pavel had seemed on the track of something the hound was interested in following: Karoly's murdered sister and her soldier lover drifted effortlessly in the lead as they slogged through thicket and up and down hills, Nikolai leading the old man on the pony— with the hound out in front of all of them, running with his nose to the ground, immune to the dark that impeded a human hunter and probably tracking better than both ghosts together, in Nikolai's estimation.
Then of a sudden Nikolai smelled apples, when no apple tree should be in fruit—and that made him think, oddly enough, of the courtyard in Maggiar, an overset basket by the kitchen door, and Michal's horse.
The dog barked, letting every goblin in ten leagues about know where they were.
"Quiet!" Nikolai hissed. "Dog, hush!"
In the same instant he felt a tweak at his hair, which might have been a twig raking him. A slight breeze had started up, a whispering in the brush.
Good lad, someone said. He was sure it was not master Karoly—Karoly did not call him good and no one called him lad these days. It sounded like a woman's voice. He could not be certain.
Loyal to Stani, indeed, the voice said next his ear—no one could fault you that.
"Urzula?" Karoly asked of a sudden. "Urzula, is that you?"
"Just the wind," Nikolai said, wanting to believe in anything but the lady gran next his ear.
But in the self-same moment, on a trick of the wind, he heard a sound he had not heard since his wandering youth: the clash of swords and the sounds of warfare echoing through the woods. Gracja brought her head up, pulled at the reins he was holding, and Nikolai scrambled aside as a shadow of a rider passed right through the brush without disturbing any of it, and passed right through Gracja and Karoly to boot.
A second rider passed, and a third, all shadows, and Nikolai began to shiver in a way nothing had made him do since he was a boy hiding from the soldiers.
But he had the impression he knew who they were without clear sight of any of them: Michal, and Filip, and Jerzy and all his dead comrades, all riding toward the sounds of combat. Zadny barked at them and set up a sudden howl.
That was the only thing that brought him to his senses, because for a moment he felt so light-headed, so slightly connected to his body, that it would have been so much easier to let go and run after them.
He reached out for Karoly's knee, fearing for the old man's life. But: "Follow them," Karoly said urgently. "God, give me up the reins. The boy's in deep trouble!"
The dog crashed off into the woods ahead of them. He handed Karoly up the reins, Karoly flailed at Gracja with his heels and the pony started moving, stolidly, relentlessly forward, while the ghosts went before them with a sighing in the branches, and ghosts of every sort poured in from left and from right of them, drifting shadows in the starlight, afoot, ahorse, some on creatures an honest man did not want to see—those might be goblin dead.
There was a brilliance ahead, some sort of light cast up from the valley below on the thinning screen of trees, and came a howl from ahead of them that Nikolai had heard only once before in his life, at Krukczy Straz when the arrows had begun to fly—goblins leapt up ahead from ambush, with shrieks and waving of swords that glittered in the eerie light.
But that howling changed abruptly when the shadows in their lead poured into their midst. Goblins broke from cover and turned in flight; Nikolai ran, gasping for breath, to add whatever solid force he could to the ghosts, shielded his eyes with his arm and broke through a screen of brush onto a barren hillside, beneath which something shone like a star brought to earth. Shadows flowed down that hill like a river of darkness behind the fleeing goblins, a river on which the light still picked out detail like a helmet or an arm or a mailed shoulder—shadows flowed over the goblins and left them still—except a few that scattered shrieking and gibbering to the four winds, and a handful of stragglers from the ambush that tried to regroup in Nikolai's path.
Nikolai did not stop to think: he laid with blind desperation into what resistance he found, clearing a path, because an old fool on a pony was coming behind him, and there was the light down there, the only relief from the night around them. That was where they had to go and he did not even question the idea, he was only aware as he sliced his way through that Karoly and the pony had flanked him, headed downward past him.
Somewhere he found the wind to take out running after the old man, with a stitch in his side and the light blurring and blinding him. Wizardry for certain, he thought, a white glare unlike sun or fire—centering somewhere about a girl on a motionless horse.