The Warslayer(62)

"Can the wizard ride?" he asked, letting the packsaddle slip to the ground and worrying its waterproof covering loose.

"Like a sack of turnips," Glory said succinctly.

"Let Fimlas take him, then. You ride Felba, and I shall have Heddvi here." He tore through the contents of the pack with ruthless efficiency, winnowing its contents into three bags small enough for them to carry. She heard things break.

"Do you mind if I ask what's going on?" Dylan demanded, coming over to look. The first sack was full, and Glory thrust it at him, pointing back over his shoulder.

"That is an invading army. We are running away from it as fast as we can."

"On what?" Dylan asked, in tones that rather suggested he knew.

Glory looked at him.

"No," he said, backing away, still clutching the canvas sack. "No, no, no. I don't do horses. You remember—when that damned Adrian of yours stepped on my foot I was lame for a month!"

Adrian the Wonder Horse had been a joy to all who knew him, but trick-horses weren't so thick upon the ground that Full Earth could afford to pick and choose, and Adrian, ham and prima-donna though he'd been, was a great big gorgeous beast, far less easy to replace or do without than any of the human cast. And he'd known it, too, more the pity.

"Then stay here and die," Glory snapped, losing what passed for her patience. If the errant gods of whimsy wanted to supply her with missing cast members, why couldn't they have sent her Adrian? He'd have been a bit more use at the moment. "I don't have time to argue with you, and I'm not going to carry you. But I reckon you ought to know that that lot coming are probably cannibals."

Dylan looked back toward the army. "I'll fall off," he whined, as if that made any difference to the facts.

"Try not to," Glory advised. "And don't drop the bag. It's got your dinner in it." She hoped.

Taking pity on him, she took one of the spare cinch straps out of the wreckage of their pack and buckled it around Fimlas, apologizing to him as she did. It would give Dylan something to hold on to, at least. The pony regarded her with wise sardonic eyes and shook its head energetically.

She got Dylan aboard Fimlas and mounted Felba, and Ivradan handed her tote-bag up to her and passed her one of the bags of supplies and a blanket, then mounted Heddvi, not bothering to rig what passed for a bridle here. Glory dug her heels in, and the pony headed back down the path toward Great Drathil. As she'd hoped, Fimlas followed of his own accord, and the sense of urgency was enough to keep even Dylan momentarily quiet.

The ridge cut them off from the sight of the enemy army almost immediately, though it was closer now, and Glory could hear scraps of sound carried toward them by the freakish acoustics of the ruins. A cry; something that might be part of a marching song. The most disturbing thing of all was that everything about the advancing horde wasn't alien. Although she didn't know for sure that they weren't human, they certainly weren't Allimir. And if the marauders were human, she had an even better idea of what would happen if the villains caught up with them, though it hardly mattered how dead they got, or what happened to their bodies afterward, if they were killed. Dead was dead.

She headed Felba toward the ruined gates and the path that lay up the mountainside. On their way here this morning, Ivradan had described Great Drathil as a walled town surrounded by a ring-road and a moat used primarily for drainage and sewage purposes. Glory had reason to be grateful for that now: the moat had probably been full the night the city burned, and its presence had kept the destruction from spreading across the road, with the result that their headlong flight was reasonably unimpeded now. Glory led, urging the pony to a ground-eating trot, and Ivradan brought up the rear, making sure that Fimlas and Dylan stayed essentially together.

She'd lost sight of the gate when they reached the ring-road, though she could see the higher bits of the path up the mountain now; a set of switchbacks leading all the way to the top. The army would be able to see it too, and probably the three of them on it, but there was literally nowhere else for them to go. They couldn't hide in what was left of the city—even retreating back into the forest wasn't a real option: if her eyes hadn't been fooling her, and those blue gleams she'd spotted were real, the magic the enemy was carrying would be enough to track the three of them down—or call them and their mounts to it, the way the monster had called Kurfan and the ponies out of the Oracle-cave.

Glory shuddered. Maybe they wouldn't look up and see them on the mountain path. Maybe they had other marching orders. Maybe the magic of the Sword of Cinnas was more powerful than their little talismans and would shield the three of them somehow. Maybe the bad guys were afraid of Elboroth-Haden, too.