Legacy (tsk-2) by Lois McMaster Bujold

Author:Lois McMaster Bujold [Bujold, Lois]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf_fantasy
ISBN: 978-0-06-144851-5
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2007-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

11

A nother night attack—without the aid of groundsense this time. Gods, I’m as blind in the dark as any farmer. Dag had feared the flare of their grounds would alert the malice’s outlying pickets to his patrol, but blundering bodily into sentries in the murk now seemed as likely a risk. A misshapen moon was well up. When they cleared these trees, he might get a better look at what lay ahead. He glanced right and left at the shadows that were his flankers, Mari and Dirla, and Codo and Hann, and was reassured; if his dark-adapted eyes could scarcely make them out, neither could an enemy’s.

He dared another deerlike step forward, and another, trying not to think, Blight it, we’ve done this once today already. His patrol had come up on signs of the malice’s massed forces soon after midnight, and again left their horses in favor of this stealthy approach. Through terrain for which, unlike Bonemarsh, they had no maps or plan or prior knowledge. If his own exhaustion was a measure of everyone else’s, Dag distrusted his decision to strike at once, without allowing a breather; but it was impossible to rest here, and every delay risked discovery. They had come into a level country, with little farms carved out of the woods becoming more and more common, not unlike the region above West Blue. Little abandoned farms. Dag hoped all the people hereabouts had been warned by the refugees from Bonemarsh and fled to Farmer’s Flats.

The open fields allowed a glimpse ahead but equally denied cover. As they reached the scrubby edge of what had been a broad stand of wheat, now flattened and dying, Dirla stole over to him. “See that?” she breathed, pointing.

“Aye.”

On the field’s other side, wooded land rose—as much as any land rose in these parts—angling up to a low ridge. The red glimmer of a few bobbing torches shone through the trees, then vanished again. Silvered by the sickly moon, a narrow triangular structure crowned the crest. A crude timber tower perhaps twenty feet high, built of logs hastily felled and notched to lock across one another, was briefly silhouetted against a distant milky cloud. Whatever shapes crouched on the plank platform at its top were too far away for Dag to make out with his eyes; but despite his tight closure, the threat of the malice beat in his belly with his every pulse.

“Lookout post?” Dirla whispered.

Dag shook his head. “Worse.” Absent gods help us. This malice was advanced enough to start building towers. Even the Wolf Ridge malice had not developed enough for that compulsion. “Can you see how many on the platform…?” Dirla’s younger eyes might be sharper than his own.

“Just one, I think.”

“It’s up there, then. That’s where we’re headed. Pass the word.”

She nodded and silently withdrew.

Now they had to get next to that tower without being spotted. So near—across a trampled field and up a wooded hillside—so far. Dag guessed that the bulk of the malice’s mud-men and mind-slaves were camped on the ridge’s far side, probably along a stream.

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