his steel and apt to bind the blade if he struck it edge-on—and attack whenever he could.
He tried to grab himself a shield after taking his first attacker down with a bone-deep slash to the man’s thigh, but the mercenaries had anchored their shields around their necks with leather thongs. Pavek only had time for a single-syllable curse before a man and a woman bearing the weapons of Nibenay surged toward him.
He beat aside both clubs, then fell back a quick half-step to survey the battle. He had room to fight only because the Quraiters around him were down and dying. The circle still held, but there were far more bodies on the inside of the rampart than on the outside.
They’d been outnumbered almost two to one from the start, and with Escrissar’s foreign fighters, it was more like ten to one.
But the female mercenary—a human: all the Nibenay mercenaries seemed to be human—left him no time to consider options. Following his retreat, she swung her club, a two-handed whirling blow that, had it landed, would have taken him out. But Pavek pushed forward into her unguarded attack, and over-balancing her, got a clean, backhand cut at her neck as she went down, insuring that she’d stay down. The other mercenary, undoubtedly her partner, came at him in blind rage.
At that same moment, a cry went up from the other end—Yohan’s end—of the battle. The cries weren’t cheers, and he could only hope the dwarf hadn’t been wounded, or worse, gone down completely, but a numbing blow to his off-weapon arm jolted his attention back to more immediate concerns.
He got lucky, catching the mercenary’s weapon hand above the wrist. The man dropped his club and ran screaming toward the trees. There was a five-heartbeat pause in the battling: long enough for him to reach down and pick up a club since he’d given up all hope of getting a shield.
“Yohan’s dead!”
The tidings he’d dreaded, delivered by the voice he wanted least to hear.
“Hold the line!” he shouted, not daring to turn around as a Urikite templar—an instigator whose face he recognized—came forward to join battle with him.
“We can’t! Not without Yohan. What do we do? Everyone’s hurt. Pavek!”
He parried quickly, using the edge against an obsidian weapon that chipped against the harder steel.
“Help us, Pavek! We’re losing!”
Fear touched Pavek’s heart then, a cold, shivery tracing—and he would have died himself if Ruari hadn’t thrust his staff between them and spun the thrust aside, exposing the instigator’s flank long enough for Pavek to pierce it with the sword. As the templar fell, his medallion slipped from beneath his shirt.
Medallion. And Ruari had his.
“Give it to me!” Pavek dropped the club and reached across the body toward Ruari.
“Give what?”
“My medallion. Give it to me!”
“What?”
“You said it, scum: We’ve lost. That medallion is all we’ve got left.”
The flow of combat had swung away from them, toward the place where Yohan no longer offered solid resistance. Pavek scrambled down the rampart, heedless of what lay beneath his feet. Ruari kept pace with him, his staff-wielding more effective than any shield. They disabled three Nibenay mercenaries in quick succession, but the tide of the battle didn’t change.
Escrissar’s force would be over the rampart at any moment.
“Now!” Pavek shouted above the din of weapons striking and men screaming.
True to form, the half-wit scum threw the medallion without warning.
Pavek caught the thong on a fingertip, and didn’t allow himself to think about what might have been. He spun the inix leather around his left hand and closed his fist around the familiar ceramic lump, shouted Guard me! and raised his wrapped fist high above his head:
“Hamanu! Hear me, your servant, O Great and Mighty One!”
Everyone in Escrissar’s force heard Pavek’s cry and surged toward him. Ruari would have gone down in a pair of heartbeats once they closed, but the remaining Quraiters, though they couldn’t have understood what he was trying to do, saw Ruari defending him and rushed to their aid.
The fighting was fierce and desperate around him. Pavek felt a sharp pain in his leg; then it went completely numb: the telltale sign of a serious wound. But the leg held, and he prayed as he’d never prayed before to see a pair of sulphurous eyes in the lurid sunset sky.
Shimmering ovals glowed faintly overheard: the distance between Urik and Quraite was considerable, even for a sorcerer-king.
Who knew what Hamanu saw when a templar invoked his name and power? Another sorcerer-king would know; certainly not