With his feet numb below the ankles he had no way to land
but ugly. He slammed back-first into the ground, knocking the wind out of
him—but he was alive. As he gasped for air, he managed to push himself up on
top of his dead feet. With trembling, barely sensate fingers, he pulled his
sword and felt for the cliff wall so he could put his back to it. Then he
waited for the swordsmen to descend on him.
But no one came.
He listened: there was no sound of rushing feet, of steel
sliding from scabbard. Even the sound of the party carrying the corpse had died
away utterly. Finally the Ultor breathed easy. He’d made it into the village
safely. Now he just had to make back it out alive.
He pulled his boots and gloves back on, massaging his numb
limbs to try to restore circulation. If he didn’t get his feet warm soon he
might lose some toes, which, he reflected with a grimace, would play hell with
his footwork. Shouldering his pack, he crept as stealthily as he could around
the first house and checked for signs of life. Nothing and no one stirred
within. He lifted the latch and let himself in.
He left an amount of silver that would rate as generous back
in the capital, and presumably as a life-making fortune here in this tiny
village on the side of a god-forsaken mountain, and took as much food as he
could fit in his pack. Unfortunately it seemed that the whole village preferred
the fermented goat’s milk to water or wine, though not even starvation had made
it palatable to him. Still he took it. He couldn’t risk searching a second
house for his own pleasure; he was the Ultor.
He did need a mount, though. He crept down to the town
circle and eyed the wood house and its complement of wooly ponies. They looked
barely large enough to carry a grown man, much less man and pack. But if he
could drink piss milk, he could ride a midget horse. Whatever it took to get
off this godforsaken mountain.
Two swordsmen still remained at the village gate, and
another at the door of the wood house, looking over his shoulder now and then
at his brethren within. A few words of the conversation inside the house
drifted out to the Ultor here and there, but whatever language it was, it
resembled none the Ultor knew. The pony pen stood behind the house, under no
particular guard. Yet.
The Ultor made his way around the village circle, keeping
the stone huts between himself and the wood house guard as much as possible. The
ponies shied away from him when he reached them—little wonder, he must smell
like death—but he got his hands on a sturdy mare and, running his hand over her
and whispering soothing nonsense in her ear, managed to calm her enough to get
his pack tied on her back. He kept to a crouch the whole time, waiting for the
guard to check the whinnying ponies, but he never came. The conversation in the
house went on just as it had. Exactly who were these swordsmen, who found a man
dead and set no patrol to watch the village by night? And who was their leader,
the master of the wood house, and of all
the gold in the mountain? The Ultor was curious, but not curious enough to
linger. He found the store of bridles and saddles and slipped one of each onto
his mare. Then he led her oh-so-quietly to the gate and out of the pen.
He listened a moment to the rumble of the men in the wood
house. Stealth had brought him this far, but now he had to abandon it. The
little mare whickered and stamped, impatient to be off if she was going. The
Ultor grabbed a hank of her mane and hauled himself up onto her back. His feet barely
cleared the ground by a foot, but she showed no distress at the size of him, so
he decided not to worry about the size of her.
Now was the moment. He had to make a run for it. He dare not
speak to her, close as they were to the wood house guard, but he hoped his hand
on her neck conveyed his urgency. He said a quick prayer and took a deep breath—and
kicked.
The mare sprang forward like a jackrabbit. She passed the town
fountain before the wood house guard cried out, and barreled toward the gate.
The Ultor actually let out a laugh of joy to feel her nimble run beneath him. Then
he drew his sword.
The two men at the gate were slow to react; they were
watching for intruders, not escapees. The Ultor spurred the mare on to her top
speed. The stone gate was three men wide, the walls to either side of it too high
for a pony to jump—even one that seemed to be part hare. The guards scrambled
to block the gate with their bodies, but the Ultor kept the horse barreling straight
for them, and sent up the high, ululating cry of the savages of Zowadim. He’d
seen the Zowadis frighten better soldiers than these with their unnatural
screams, and sure enough, in the face of madness and a few hundred pounds of
flying horseflesh, the guardsmen faltered. They slipped out of the way.
The one on the right stumbled and fell, but the one on the left
swung his sword as they passed. The Ultor parried the blow easily—but in the
moment, the thrill of the run and steel against steel, he forgot his present
weakness. In reaching across his body and swinging his great blade, he threw
his weight too far to the side for his withered thighs to counter, and even as
the little mare cleared the gates to freedom, he fell, smacking into the ground
and rolling to a stop. The little mare never even slowed down.
The Ultor scrambled to his feet, and barely had he gained
them before he had to swing his sword again, and again, fending off both the
gate guards at once. He felt his remaining strength drain with every blow. The
guardsmen were yokels, badly trained and ill-practiced, and more than all the
other indignities of this day and night, the Ultor despised falling back before
such idiot swordsmen. But fall back he did. By the time their dozen other
comrades had arrived to reinforce them, the Ultor was on his knees. The men
surrounded him, and the Ultor threw his blade down in disgust. They threw him
to the ground and kicked him a few times for good measure.
“I am the Ultor!” he yelled from the dirt, then again in
Ugasic, “I am the Ultor!”
Some discussion in their guttural tongue, and then one spoke
Ugasic. “What are you saying?”
“I am the Ultor,” he repeated, getting to his knees, his
hands held high. “I demand safe passage.”
“The hell is an Ultor?”
“Do not profane the name! I am a sacred avenger. I may not
rest or delay until my task is done. All who—”
Someone kicked him back down in the dirt. They all laughed.
“Those who impede the Ultor risk God’s wrath—and mine.”
They spoke their own language again, though their triumph
and derision was plain. The Ultor seethed. Finally, after some yelling that he
assumed was about whether he returned to the village alive or not, someone
produced a rope and tied his hands behind his back. Then they yanked him to his
feet and prodded him back toward the gate.
“Where are you taking me?” he asked.
A man with a scar over his left eye, the one who had
questioned him before, answered as they passed beneath the great stone gate: “You’re
going to see the Boss.”
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