by a fastmoving strike force of cho-ja. Less sure than the insects, the humans fanned out in a wide ring to cut off the desert men, while the cho-ja under their Strike Leader slipped past them and cut in an arc across the path of the riders' descent.
'Defer to Lord Chipino's officers,' Lujan commanded the Acoma. Then, as the Lord of the Xacatecas called something to Mara from his litter, the Lady touched her officer's sleeve.
'The Lord would have no live prisoners,' she instructed.
Lujan relayed the order.
Kevin watched, wide-eyed, as the cho-ja overtook the raiders. Seeing the shining black insectoids race upslope to take them, with their helmets sitting square on faces that were nothing close to human, and upraised forelimbs lifted like razors to kill, the diminutive mountain men skidded to a stop. They drove the querdidra forward with slaps and curses, trying to disrupt the cho-ja ranks. But Lax'l's warriors were fast, almost black blurs in the sunlight as they swerved around the fear-maddened beasts. And uncannily, they made no sound, beyond the click of hooked feet on broken rock. The cho-ja flowed past the disturbance and came on, while the desert men spun and tried frantically to run.
The slaughter was swift. Kevin, who had never seen cho-ja in war, felt gooseflesh rise beneath his sleeves. He had seen men die, but never disembowelled from behind, with a single stroke of those black, chitin-bladed forelimbs. The cho-ja were deadly swift, and they slew with a machinelike thoroughness.
'Your cho-ja make short work of the nomads,' Lord Chipino observed, his grim tone revealing he derived no enjoyment from the deaths. 'Perhaps they will think twice about harassing our supply trains into llama henceforth.'
Mara lifted a fan from her cushions and tapped it open, thoughtfully. She cooled herself, more from nerves than heat. Though blood sports did not appeal to her, she did not show squeamishness at the sight of battle and death. 'Why attack so heavily guarded a caravan? By Lashima, can't they see we have your honour guard as well as three companies of warriors?'
Downslope, the Acoma Strike Leader's men were ineffectively trying to round up the frightened querdidra. Lord Chipino dispatched some of his own drovers to help, since their knowledge of the beasts' handling was a necessity if the caravan was to be moving again before sundown. 'Who can say what motivates the barbarians,' he concluded, regarding Mara across the space between palanquin and litter. 'If I did not know better, I would say we were fighting fanatics of the Red God.'
But the Dustari nomads did not believe in Turakamu, or so said the texts at Lashima's temple where Mara had studied during her youth. The increase in border unrest made no sense, and the descriptions of engagements Lord Chipino had offered in the hostel over maps added up to nothing but a profligate waste of lives. ~
Mara flicked her fan closed. More than ever, she feared for Ayaki, left at home on her estates. She had expected to cross the ocean to provide support and swift solution for the troublesome attacks on the border. Longing for a quick return home, she sensed that the problem was worse than she'd initially thought. She might not be back for the fall planting, and that turned her heart icy with foreboding. Yet she did not speak aloud of her worries. When the caravan regrouped and started forward, she asked to be shown the mountain landmarks. Kevin walked beside her litter, listening to Chipino's best scout name the peaks, the valleys, and the rock tables that sometimes spanned the trail in windcarved archways of stone.
They need not have been in a hurry to orient themselves to this new, strange land. Time weighed heavily during the months between engagements, and after the novelty of the early weeks the stark, barren valleys sawed at the spirit and the vast desert horizons scoured the soul to insignificance. As often as he could, Kevin retired to Mara's command tent, which, though constructed of layers of sewn needra hide, oiled to keep it pliable against the weather, was nonetheless opulent inside.
'Who passes?' called the guard at the door flap.
Kevin lowered the cloth he held pressed against his face and sucked in a dust-laden breath. 'It is 1.'
The armoured guard waved him past with his spear butt.
Kevin stooped, ducked through an inner door of fringes that filtered out most of the dirt, and blinked at the abrupt change in lighting. The main chamber