An Empire Unacquainted With Defeat by Glen Cook

Author:Glen Cook
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 1597801410
Publisher: Night Shade
Published: 2009-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

XII

Outside ambushed us.

The sun had set. No moon had risen. The stars didn't cast much light. Bellweather had lighted no fires. We were suddenly there, beside Lord Hammer's stallion.

The last dozen yards we had to step over and around the dead and wounded. There were a lot of them. I kept whispering Chenyth's name. The only man I could find was Brandy. The griper had been dead for hours.

"They've killed or captured most of the animals," Bellweather reported. Lord Hammer grunted noncommittally. "We've killed hundreds of them, but they keep coming. They'll finish us in the morning. This is serious business to them."

"Chenyth!" I called.

"Will? Will! Over here."

I hurried over. He was doing sentry duty. His post was an open-topped bunker built of the corpses of savages.

"You all right?" I demanded.

"So far. Brandy and Russ and Aral are dead, Will. I'm sorry I came. I'm tired. So tired, Will."

"Yeah. I know."

"What happened down there?"

"It was bad." I told him the story.

"The other Harish. Will they? . . . "

"I'm sure their daggers are consecrated to the same name."

"Then they'll try again?"

"They made it? Then we'd better warn . . . ."

A shriek ripped the air.

I hurled myself back toward Lord Hammer. I arrived at the same time as the Harish. Blades flashed. Men screamed. Lord Hammer slew one. I took the other. Bellweather and the others watched in dull-eyed disbelief.

Before Jamal died he cursed me. "You have given the Hammer his life," he croaked. "May that haunt you all the ages of earth. May his return be quickened, and fall upon you heavily. I speak it in the Name of the Disciple."

"What did he mean, Will?" Chenyth asked.

"I don't know." I was too tired to think. "They knew him. They knew his mission. They came to abort it. And to capture the dragon's blood for El Murid." I glanced at Lord Hammer. He had begun a sorcery. His voice sounded terribly weak. He seemed the least superhuman of us all. My awe of him had evaporated completely.

He was but a man.

"Maybe they were right," Chenyth suggested. "Maybe the world would be better without him. Without his kind."

"I don't know. His kind are like the dragon. And we have taken the gold, Chenyth. It doesn't matter who or what he is."

Sleep soon ambushed me. The last thing I saw was a ball of blue light drifting into the rocks where the savages lurked. I think there were screams, but they might have come in my dreams.

They took me back to the wars. To the screams of entire kingdoms crushed beneath the boots of legions led by men of Lord Hammer's profession. Those had been brutal, bitter days, and the saddest part of it was that we hadn't won, we had merely stopped it for a while.

My subconscious mind added the clues my conscious mind had overlooked.

I awakened understanding the Harish.

"His name is a joke," Fetch had said.

It wasn't a funny one. It was pure arrogance.

One of the arch-villains of the Great Eastern Wars had been a sorcerer named Ko Feng.

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