At least they're speaking English instead of Elvish, Rudi thought with resignation. When they insist on Sindarin… there's no better language for being insufferable in, and the Lord and Lady know Mary and Ritva are experts at insufferability anyway.
The twins came in, shaggy in their war cloaks of mottled dark green canvas covered in loops stuck with bits of grass and sagebrush. Rudi had to admit they were invisible until they wanted to be seen. He was a very good scout himself; the twins were very very good, able to crawl to within touching distance of alert, war-wise men. If they had time enough, and sometimes it could take days.
They were also identicals, tall young women lithe as cats, their yellow hair caught up in tight fighting braids under knitted caps of dark gray wool. The faces below the hoods of the war cloaks were oval and high-cheeked and their slightly tilted eyes cornflower blue, capable of a most convincing imitation of guileless innocence.
In truth his half sisters reminded him of cats in more ways than one, including an occasional disconcerting capacity for cool wickedness. They'd also, in his opinion, spent far too much time in Aunt Astrid's little kingdom in the woods, listening to her bards recite from those books she insisted on calling the histories, and talking in a language invented by a long-dead Englishman. Not that they weren't great stories, but the way the Dunedain carried on, you'd think they were as true as Tain Bo Cuailnge.
Everyone worked their way backwards until they were well below the crest of the low ridge, and then Ritva went down on one knee and smoothed a patch of dirt. There was enough starlight and moonlight to make out the diagram she drew.
"Their horses are rested now; there's good water there, if you don't mind hauling it up on a long rope, probably four or five saddle lariats linked together. It looks like they're going to have a quick cold dinner, give the horses the last of their feed pellets and then ride east in the darkness, to get past the Boise pickets."
Rudi nodded. The Church Universal and Triumphant had pushed an army into the territory claimed by the United States-the one head-quartered at Boise-and gotten beaten rather comprehensively. But President-General Thurston had been killed in the fight-by his own eldest son, Martin, who'd been conspiring with the CUT. He hadn't liked his father's plan to finally call elections, and to keep his own children from running for the office. Now he was lord of Boise… and Rudi and his friends were the only ones who knew the real story.
And in the meantime, we have a problem that isn't politics, Rudi thought. Namely, how to get Ingolf and Matti and Odard free.
Or it wasn't entirely politics. If you had the right-or wrong-parents, the way he and Matti had, everything you did was politics. And whoever did it, fighting was always about politics, whether it was this or an Assembly of the Clan shouting and waving their arms or two rams butting heads in a meadow; he'd grown up the Chief's son and absorbed that through his pores.
"Sentries?" he asked.
"Mounted," Mary said.
And I know it's you, Mary, he thought; they did that verbal back-and-forth thing to confuse people, but he could tell their voices apart. And your faces. Well, usually.
"So much for a bit of quiet Sentry Removal as a solution to that little problem we're havin'," Edain added. "Getting our friends out, that is."
The twins nodded soberly, not rising to the slight edge in his voice; it was too obviously true. A mounted man wasn't as good a sentry as someone on foot and hiding-much harder to miss and easier to avoid. Unfortunately they were also a lot harder to take out so quietly that nobody noticed. Killing a man silently was hard enough; doing the same to an animal as big and well constructed as a horse was much more so. Doing both together…
When problems that involved fighting came up, the Rangers were extremely good at sneaky, underhanded, elegant solutions. Astrid-the Hiril Dunedain, the Lady of the Rangers-considered straight-ahead bashing crude. Sentry Removal was one of the Dunedain specialties. Sometimes elegance bought you no lard to fry your spuds, though.
"Where, what pattern, and how many all up?" he asked briskly.
"They've got pairs riding in a figure-eight pattern; eight on the move at any one time. There's thirty more of them altogether, with that party that came in this afternoon, the ones who had Mathilda and Odard and his man Alex."
"About half of them are wounded," Ritva said, taking up the tale; then she grimaced slightly. "And we're not counting the six who were too badly wounded to ride fast or fight."
"Their officers killed them?" Rudi asked. The Cutters certainly seem ruthless enough for that.
"No, they killed the badly injured horses. The men killed themselves," Mary said flatly. "No argument about it, either. They were singing until the knives went in. Something about bright lifestreams. "
"And sure, Ingolf said that the Sword of the Prophet were… serious men," Rudi said. "Everything I've seen bears it out. And our folk?"
"Mathilda and Odard here," Ritva said, tapping her finger at the sand-map. "They're lightly bound, wrist and ankle, except when they let them up to go to the slit trench. Doesn't look like they're hurt at all, beyond some bruises; they haven't even taken their hauberks off. Odard's man Alex isn't confined at all. But Ingolf…" She hesitated.
"Bad?" Rudi asked, frowning.
He'd grown to like the big Easterner; he'd been a good comrade on the trail, a notable fighting man even by Rudi's exacting standards, and with a breadth of experience in many lands that the Mackenzie secretly envied. Also he'd been a captive of the Church Universal and Triumphant before, and escaped.
"They've got him in a tight triple yoke, and chains on his ankles."
Rudi hissed slightly. A triple yoke was a beam of wood with steel circles set in it for neck and wrists; they could be arranged so that it needed continuous effort to keep the collar from choking you and you were never able to take a full breath. Pendleton slavers and other people of low morals and no scruples used them to break the spirit of captives. They were excruciatingly uncomfortable to start with, quickly grew into outright agony, and they made it impossible to really sleep, while the victim could still walk… if you beat them with a whip. Still, Ingolf was a strong man in heart and body both, and he'd been in it for less than two full days. Their plan required all the captives to be fully mobile if it was going to work.
"Chief?" Edain said.
Rudi looked over at the younger man. Edain went on:
"I can see why this Prophet scabhteara made war on Boise and Deseret. I can see why he conspired with Martin Thurston. What I can't see is why he's so very sodding eager to catch us "-by which they both knew he meant Rudi-"that he's willing to endanger all his plots and plans hereabouts to do it."
"He knows," Rudi said.
As he spoke he lifted the scabbard of his sword out of the sling at his belt and ran it through a set of loops on the quiver at his back, so that the long hilt ran up behind his right ear. That made drawing it just a hair more awkward, but it cut down on the chance of a betraying rattle; their plan also depended on going undetected as long as possible.
"He knows what?" Edain said, puzzlement plain on his square young face even in the dimness.
He's a smart one, Rudi thought.
They put on their helmets; before Rudi did he pulled on his coif, a tight hood and collar of mail on padded leather. Most Mackenzies didn't bother with one, thinking their brigandines of little steel plates riveted together between layers of leather or canvas were enough. But while Rudi was an excellent archer, the sword was his favored weapon, and that meant coming within hand-stroke distance.