Reaper's Gate & Toll the Hounds - By Steven Erikson Page 0,378

now he and the captain were riding in daylight, trying to find a way back to Fist Keneb and all the squads that had linked up with his company. Four hundred marines as of two days ago. Beak and the captain had pushed east in an effort to contact those squads that had moved faster and farther than all the others, but they had been driven back – too many Tiste Edur bands in between. He now knew that Faradan Sort feared those squads lost, if not dead already then as good as.

He was also pretty sure that this invasion was not quite going as planned. Something in the look in the captain's dark eyes told him that it wasn't just the two of them who kept stumbling into trouble. They'd found three squads, after all, that had been butchered – oh, they'd charged a high toll for the privilege, as Faradan Sort had said after wandering the glade with its heaps of corpses and studying the blood trails leading off into the woods. Beak could tell just by the silent howl of death roiling in the air, that cold fire that was the breath of every field of battle. A howl frozen like shock into the trees, the trunks, the branches and the leaves. And in the ground underfoot, oozing like sap, and Lily, his sweet bay, didn't want to take a single step into that clearing and Beak knew why.

A high toll, yes, just like she'd said, although of course no real coins were paid. Just lives.

They worked their weary mounts up an embankment all overgrown with bushes, and Beak was forced to concentrate even harder to mute the sounds of scrabbling hoofs and snapping brush, and the candle in his head flared suddenly and he very nearly reeled from his saddle.

The captain's hand reached across and steadied him. 'Beak?'

'It's hot,' he muttered. And now, all at once, he could suddenly see where all this was going, and what he would need to do.

The horses broke the contact between them as they struggled up the last of the ridge.

'Hold,' Faradan Sort murmured.

Yes. Beak sighed. 'Just ahead, Captain. We found them.'

A score of trees had been felled and left to rot directly ahead, and on this side of that barrier was a scum-laden pool on which danced glittering insects. Two marines smeared in mud rose from the near side of the bank, crossbows at the ready.

The captain raised her right hand and made a sequence of gestures, and the crossbows swung away and they were waved forward.

There was a mage crouched in a hollow beneath one of the felled trees, and she gave Beak a nod that seemed a little nervous. He waved back as they reined in ten paces from the pool.

The mage called out from her cover: 'Been expecting you two. Beak, you got a glow so bright it's damned near blinding.'

Then she laughed. 'Don't worry, it's not the kind the Edur can see, not even their warlocks. But I'd dampen it down some, Beak, lest you burn right up.'

The captain turned to him and nodded. 'Rest now, Beak.'

Rest? No, there could be no rest. Not ever again. 'Sir, there are hundreds of Edur coming. From the northwest—'

'We know,' the other mage said, clambering out like a toad at dusk. 'We was just getting ready to pack our travelling trunks and the uniforms are pressed and the standards restitched in gold.'

'Really?'

She sobered and there was a sudden soft look in her eyes, reminding Beak of that one nurse his mother had hired, the one who was then raped by his father and had to go away. 'No, Beak, just havin' fun.'

Too bad, he considered. He would like to have seen that gold thread.

They dismounted and walked their horses round one end of the felled trees, and there, before them, was the Fist's encampment. 'Hood's mercy,' Faradan Sort said, 'there's more.'

'Six hundred and seventy-one, sir,' Beak said. And like the mage had said, there were getting ready to leave, swarming like ants on a kicked mound. There had been wounded – lots of them – but the healers had done their work and all the blood smelled old and the smell of death stayed where it belonged, close to the dozen graves on the far side of the clearing.

'Come along,' said the captain as two soldiers arrived to take charge of the horses, and Beak followed her as she made her way to where stood Fist Keneb and