CHAPTER NINETEEN.

THEY waited, soldiers and warriors together, in the shelter of the hilltops until Habiba's signal came down the line. Then the battle cries of Thebin and Tashek and mercenary and imperial trooper rose with a terrifying roar as warhorses flew down the hillsides. Infected with the heat of the charge, Llesho's mount took off with the others. Llesho gritted his teeth and held on with his knees while his horse carried him at breakneck speed into the bowl of the Harn encampment.

The raiders had thought themselves protected by the hills at their backs. They'd posted guards who looked back along the road they had come by, but still sent no scouts ahead to warn them of trouble from that direction. Habiba's army took them by surprise, as planned.

That surprise lasted only seconds. Some few of the raiders rested in their tents, and these scattered to their horses like bees smoked from their hives. But many Har-nishmen remained mounted even in rest, and these wheeled and banded into groups, ready on the instant to fight. Habiba had timed his attack perfectly, however. The raiders, from their position below the attack, were forced to stare up at the advancing army which, coming out of the west, fell upon them as shadows against the blinding white light of the falling sun.

When Habiba's forces reached the encampment itself, the sun remained an ally of the magician: sparks flashed off armor and weapons, driving the Harn raiders back in confusion. Raiders on foot ran for their horses and weapons but were cut off on every side. Llesho felt the battle fever surge in his veins, drowning his fear. He knotted his reins over his pommel and fitted an arrow to his bow. Lifting up on his knees for a better angle as her ladyship had taught him, he let his arrow fly. Fitted another before he had fully registered his man down and shot, again, and again. His battle-nerved horse plunged into the fray, using teeth and hooves to drive away any who approached too near.

A squad of raiders regrouped and took the offensive, galloping into the attack with bloodcurdling screams and raised battle axes. Llesho directed Harlol to take his Wastrels to the rear of the fighting, to cut off a Harnish retreat and panic the horses. Bixei stayed close, forming his mercenaries into a circle of swords defending an inner core of Thebin bowmen grouped around Llesho himself. Firing over the heads of their own defenders, they drove the Harn back with bow and arrow.

Llesho fought with the logic of mathematical simplicity foremost in his thoughts: a Harn raider down couldn't kill his brother. A Harn raider dead couldn't stab him in the back as he drove past. He shot and he shot, until he reached into his quiver and found no arrows there. The spear at his back fairly vibrated with its own urgency to bring the fight closer. But his teams, with Bixei and Harlol at their heads, had driven the advance guard of the Harn back, where they fell into the clutches of Habiba's imperial troopers.

And then, with a shock like a door opening when one had given up all hope but the pounding on it, he realized that the battle had ended. Marching toward him, he saw more Thebins on the field than he had come with, and Bor-ka-mar, striding among the tents.

"We have to find Hmishi!" Llesho shouted. "Where is Adar?" Maddened by the dream and goaded by the weapon at his back, he slid from his mount, the short spear coming to his hand as if he been born with his fingers wrapped around its shaft. It wasn't his brother he longed to see, however, or any of his friends once he took up the short spear. He wanted Tsu-tan, wanted to pluck the witch-finder's heart out and return it to his master on a platter. With that bloody thought he broke through Bixei's defensive formation and dove toward the first tent. Nothing. When he came out again, Bixei was leaving the next tent, and his Thebin troops had scattered in the search.

From a tent larger than the others at the center of the camp, Harlol joined them, a bloody rag in his hand. Llesho recognized it as a strip torn from one of the militia uniforms they had worn in their masquerade as caravan guards to a Guynmer merchant.

"The witch-finder is gone." the Wastrel handed him the bloody cloth. "This was all we found."

Hmishi's, Llesho figured, and felt his stomach twist with memories of the prophetic dream. Was he still alive at all, or had they killed him in their rage that he was the wrong Thebin orphan? Harlol was waiting for an answer, so he nodded to show that he'd heard, but didn't trust himself to speak. Didn't know what to say to Bixei, who had come up beside them and was looking at the evidence in the Wastrel's hand with grim foreboding. Wherever Hmishi and his companions were, they could do nothing more for them here.

"Burn them," he said, with a jerk of his chin to indicate the round black tents. "Leave nothing."

Harlol stared at him for long moments, wondering what to do. Bixei, however, shared some of his loss. He had trained and fought with Lling and Hmishi, depended on them as mates in a fighting cadre, and he looked at the bloody cloth with a bleak anger of his own. He said nothing, but grabbed a tent peg and held it to a small cook fire until it burst into flame. Then, he jammed the burning spike end into the felt of the witch-finder's tent and walked away. The tent itself would be fuel to fire others.

The snapping flames fed something dark in Llesho's heart that grew without slaking. With blood in his eyes, he turned to his commanders. "Bring me prisoners," he said. "I will know where the witch-finder has taken my brother."

At that, Bixei eyed him uneasily, and Harlol would not look at him at all.

"Is this one of the times that Habiba expects us to protect you from yourself?" Bixei asked him, uncertainty in his voice.

"It's not me I plan to hurt."

Harlol hadn't sheathed his swords yet, but he rested them with their points to the ground. "You're hurting yourself with every word. If you do what you plan, I don't know if you will ever recover. And if you can massacre your enemy and walk away unmoved by the act, how will Thebin be better off with you in the palace than it is now?"

"You dare-" Llesho turned the cold heat of an inexplicable rage on the Wastrel. He's meant to die for you, He's meant to die for you, whispered in his head. whispered in his head. What matter if you do it, or the Horn? What matter if you do it, or the Horn?

"It's that spear," Bixei reached out and plucked it from his grasp. "I don't know what it is about the thing, but the Lady SienMa did you no favor when she gave it to you."

"Returned it," Llesho corrected, but he stumbled against Harlol with a frown, fighting a sudden dizziness that passed slowly, like clouds parting in front of his eyes.

The sounds of battle were giving way to the moans of the wounded. A horse squealing in pain was suddenly cut off as a rider put him out of his agony, but there were others crying out all around them. There were too many dead, too much blood spilled into the dry ground, though most of it looked to be the enemy's. He might have brought himself to care, if he'd found Adar and his cadre. Llesho shuddered when he remembered what he'd asked Bixei and Harlol to do, however. He was a soldier, but not yet a torturer.

He reached for the spear. When Bixei reluctantly handed it over, he returned it to its sheath at his back. "I'm all right now."

"Llesho." Kaydu, in human form, walked toward them out of the reek and stain of blood and carrion released on the battlefield. She still twitched with lingering bird-ness, but she'd stopped at the baggage train for Little Brother and carried him clinging to her neck. His face solemn and anxious, the monkey watched his mistress as if he expected her to transform into a bird of prey and sweep him off for dinner. Llesho sympathized. He also wondered what task she had completed as a bird, and when she had returned.

"Habiba said to bring you. He's taken the cook tent as his command post. Your brothers are with him."

"Adar?"

"No." She looked away for a moment, afraid to let him see in her eyes what he was already thinking. "But Shokar has come."

He'd known that, and was relieved to hear her say his name that way, to know that his brother had survived the battle. He followed her, picking his way past the living who moved over the ground gathering spent arrows like gleaners after a harvest. Harlol followed at a slight distance, to give them the privacy of their conversation.

"Has Habiba found Shou?" He dreaded to hear that it had all been for nothing. "Is the emperor safe?"

"Shokar found him, yes. Master Den and Carina are with him."

She'd only answered half his question and offered nothing to reassure him. "Alive?"

"Yes." She wouldn't say any more, and he wondered what he would find when he entered the tent. Shou was more than a political ally or even a friend, he realized while he waited to see how much of the man Markko's creeping spy had left them. The emperor was the only model Llesho had for how a king behaved, what he owed his people, and how he kept an empire safe as peaceful Thebin hadn't been. If Tsu-tan had conquered Shou, how did Llesho expect to defeat the witch-finder's master?

He had other greetings first, however. Shokar met him at the tent flap with a bear hug and a roar. "Little brother!"

"Don't call me that, please." He settled his clothes and his dignity, but softened his rebuke with a wry twist of a smile. "It confuses the monkey."

Only slightly chastened, the eldest prince cuffed him gently on the arm. "We thought you might be dead in the fighting."

"I had excellent teachers," he assured his brother. "I'm good at staying alive."

Balar joined them with Lluka, ready to continue his protest begun before the battle. "You have brothers to protect you," he insisted with a sweep of his arm that included Shokar and Lluka, their expressions of relief and disapproval so familiar that it hurt.

Brothers. In case they had not yet heard, Llesho told them. "We didn't find Adar."

Shokar tried to put an arm around his shoulder. "We know, Llesho. It's one of the reasons we're all so worried about you."

Too late for that. Llesho slipped out of reach, unwilling to accept any comfort. "Habiba needs to see me."

"I should think you'd have had enough of magicians leading you into danger," Lluka scolded. "We've talked about it, and we want you to come back to Shan with us, where it's safe." Lluka seemed to think he'd taken the round, but Llesho just looked at him as if he had truly missed the point.

"There is no safe place. I would think that the dead we left behind in Ahkenbad proved that if nothing else did."

Kaydu winced as Little Brother shrieked indignantly in her ear, but added her own support to Llesho's example. "Harnish raiders in the market square at Shan proved it to me."

Llesho gave a superstitious shudder as new scars twitched in his gut. Shokar, too, seemed to be remembering. In defense of his protectiveness, Shokar added, "I would rather not see you hurt again the way you were in that battle."

Llesho agreed heartily, but he wasn't going to say it out loud when any admission would sound like weakness. Instead, he asked, "Why do you, of all people, think that there is any safety to be had in Shan?"

When his brother hung his head, Llesho repeated his earlier question. "Where is Habiba?"

"With Shou," Shokar held aside the flap and pointed to the center of the tent.

Habiba presided from a folding wooden chair over a handful of raiders on their knees in front of him. Shou sat on a simple camp stool in the magician's shadow. Llesho saw a bruise or two, but no obvious wounds. Shou, however, sat with the look of a man pressed beyond his endurance, who has escaped into the land of mazes in the mind. Many, he knew, never returned from that place.

Bor-ka-mar stood at attention at his emperor's back. Only someone who knew him, as Llesho had come to do, would know that his rigidly correct posture hid a personal anguish that he had failed his emperor. He wondered if someone had reassured the soldier that it wasn't his fault, but figured Bor-ka-mar wouldn't believe it no matter who told him so.

Master Den and Carina sipped tea in the corner of the cook tent. Nothing in the way they had distributed themselves gave the raiders any clue to the relative importance of their former prisoners or their rescuers.

"Tell me what happened to them," he asked, meaning the Thebin prisoners. His voice cracked, refusing him the power to say the names. The sound drew Shou's attention.

"I'm sorry," Shou said over the prostrate' forms of the prisoners.

Llesho's heart froze. They're dead, They're dead, he thought, an image of Hmishi lifeless in Lling's arms so sharp in his head that he gasped from the shock of it. Master Den must have seen something of that in his face, because the trickster god rose quickly from his place at tea. he thought, an image of Hmishi lifeless in Lling's arms so sharp in his head that he gasped from the shock of it. Master Den must have seen something of that in his face, because the trickster god rose quickly from his place at tea.

"They're alive, boy. Alive. That miserable witch-finder escaped as your armies entered the camp. He's taken them ahead, into the Harnlands."

"I'm sorry," Shou repeated, and passed a hand across his forehead. "I didn't mean you should think-" he gave a little half laugh, caught on a deep indrawn breath, before his mind seemed to wander again.

"What happened to Hmishi?" Llesho asked the question of Carina, who hadn't moved, but watched them all with quick, anxious eyes. He feared for his brother, but he needed to know if they'd reached them in time to stop the dream.

"This Tsu-tan didn't see your attack coming through the Wastes," she answered him. "His spies reported that Shokar had joined forces with Bor-ka-mar and they were not far behind. The witch-finder ran for the Harnlands, with Hmishi and Lling, and your brother, in his custody.

"He realized they had the wrong boy right away," Carina added. "He knew Hmishi and Lling from Pearl Bay. Master Den he recognized, of course, and threatened his master's tortures for withholding the truth from his raiders. When he learned that I was a healer, he promised that Markko would burn me at the stake. But his prejudices led him to dismiss me as having no consequence, just as he dismissed Den for a laundryman. Lling he preserved for his master's questions, but he handed Hmishi over to his soldiers. They did terrible things to him. I don't know how he lived."

She stopped with a choked cry, and Master Den picked up her sorry tale. "The damage was extensive, but ill-thought. Master Markko raged within the witch-finder's own mind for putting the boy beyond questioning. He left with Hmishi on a stretcher and the healer Adar to tend him."

"And Shou?" They spoke in whispers as the emperor listened to Habiba's questioning of the prisoners, neither letting on who commanded whom, or what force had taken the camp.

Carina opened her hand, as if to let go of some truth. "Tsu-tan could not identify him, but his master made a puppet of his lieutenant's body, and even at a distance saw through the merchant's disguise."

"If Markko saw him through the witch-finder's eyes, he would have known him." Llesho told her what the rescuers had already discussed. "They met after the battle on the outskirts of Shan Province." Shou had worn a different disguise then.

"Tsu-tan called him 'General,'" Carina confirmed Llesho's observation. "Shou insisted that he had lost his post for smuggling. Markko, through his witch-finder, tried for a day and a night to force the truth from him, but Shou resisted both physical and mental attack. At the end, he admitted to spying for the empire, but never gave away his secret."

"Timing worked to our advantage," Master Den added. "The Harnish raiders who tried to force a confession from Hmishi had no reason to suspect that Shou was more than he professed. Tsu-tan believed Hmishi and Lling were simple slaves as they had been on Pearl Island. He knew nothing of Adar or Carina. Markko knew Shou as the emperor's general, but none of the other prisoners. So he accepted Tsu-tan's conclusion, that the provincial general and imperial spy had taken advantage of a chance encounter to use as decoys a pair of traveling healers with a couple of Thebin slaves. It never occurred to either of them, at that point, to question the Thebins about Shou's Shou's identity." identity."

"They never would have given him away." Their companions must know that, of course, but Llesho thought it needed saying anyway.

"They didn't," Master Den assured him softly, "But Tsu-tan made him watch what his soldiers did to Hmishi, and through his witch-finder, the magician attacked Shou's mind."

Habiba had finished with his prisoners, and he called for guards to lead the captives away. When they had gone, Llesho went to the emperor and knelt on one knee. Looking into Shou's eyes for a sign of the man he knew, he whispered, "Have they broken him?"

"No," Shou answered for himself, in a whisper, "but I'm afraid for Tsu-tan's prisoners. Markko will take a long time killing them to get what he wants, and they don't have it to give." Llesho, that was. The Thebin king and whatever else he was to Markko.

"Then we have to get them back first." Llesho kept his voice low, in keeping with the almost secretive mood the emperor had drawn about them with his voice. The power of his will, however, gave force to each word. "And we will. Get them back."

"There is another," Shou nodded, as if listening to inner voices. "His name is Menar."

"Menar?" Llesho asked, unprepared to hear that name.

"A prince of Thebin," Shou said from his waking dream, "A blind poet, who mourns his brothers after many years."

"Menar is alive? Did you see him?" Llesho pushed the hope and the fear down, down. Blind. And Shou was looking at him as if he were some curious artifact he couldn't quite puzzle out. The emperor wasn't the best witness at present.

"I can't see him," Shou answered in the tone one takes with the dull witted. "He's blind. But I hear the wind in the grass, and the heavy cadence of his poems in my head. They weep, weep, for his brothers. Shokar and Lluka, Ghrisz and Adar, and the youngest, Balar and Llesho."

Wind in the grass. Menar was somewhere ahead of them, if Shou truly had some knowledge of the Thebin prince. But Shou knew about his brothers, and his weary brain might have stirred the tale out of its own longing 'for rescue. Llesho had not talked about Ping, however. "Does Menar also mourn his sister?" he asked as a test.

Shou shook his head. "For Ping, anger." His eyes, focused on some unseeable distance, flicked into the now again with a wince at their corners. "My head hurts," he said, with the same expressionless voice that had channeled some vision out of the grasslands.

Carina pressed a finger to her lips, silent warning that the conversation was over.

"I know," Llesho soothed. He rested his head on the emperor's knee for a moment, a gesture that in other circumstances would mark him as the emperor's man and Thebin as a vassal nation. In this hour of torment, however, he wanted only to give and receive the comfort of a son or a brother. "But it will get better. Let the healers help you."

He rose and left the tent, leaving the emperor to the ministrations of Carina, whose drawn face reflected her own worry about the prisoners still in the hands of Markko's minions. She cared about Adar, he knew, and couldn't find it in himself to begrudge his brother that loving concern. It was all getting far too confusing, how he felt and who he felt it for, and he wondered when feelings had become such a responsibility. He didn't have answers, but he took the questions out into the camp with him.

CHAPTER TWENTY.

HABIBA, acting as general of the combined armies, had ordered the remaining Harnish tents torn down and their own camp set up in its place. The dead they had taken a little apart and burned in a pile with the round black tents for fuel. The stench of burning felt and crackling flesh rose to heaven on a pillar of black smoke. Llesho watched until the flames had smoldered down to coals. "This my gift to you, Lady Wife," Llesho whispered bitterly to the rising smoke. So many had died- how many more would he add to his count before Thebin was free and the gates of heaven opened again? During the day, he could believe they did the right thing.

But night had come upon them while Habiba sorted out the prisoners, questioning some, and allotting guards to accompany others back to Shan. Carina had gone off to work with the wounded, both Harnishmen of the Uulgar clans who had followed the witch-finder and the few of their own who had need of her services. For a change, none of his friends had been injured during the fighting. If you didn't count Shou, who'd suffered in the waiting, not the battle.

Llesho had tried to rest as they urged him, but frightful dreams drove him out again into the darkness to hide.

Wandering the encampment, he found a three- legged folding stool plundered from a Harnish tent and settled himself to watch the dying of the coals that used to be his enemies. The dead couldn't tell him where Tsu-tan had taken his Thebin hostages, but he found himself asking them anyway.

"What are you doing alone out here?"

Balar's voice, that was, edged as it hadn't been when they were young and Kungol ruled over a peaceful Thebin. War changes everything, War changes everything, Llesho thought. It made fighters, if not warriors, of musicians. Llesho thought. It made fighters, if not warriors, of musicians.

"Thinking," Llesho answered. He wondered what war made of poets, of their brother Menar left in the hands of the Harn all these years. The very idea of it made him shudder.

"It isn't safe out here."

Safe. Llesho snorted rudely at that. Habiba's scouts spied out the Durnhag Road and looked ahead to Harn. Guards posted throughout the camp and along its perimeter watched for any sneak attack, but Llesho didn't expect one. The raiders had lost too many of their number in the fighting already. They couldn't count on their Harnish countrymen along the Gansau border to help them either. While they might be inclined to look the other way at the strange coming and goings of the raiders, the border clans would resist efforts to draw them into a stranger's conflict. Like not fouling one's own tent, the locals wouldn't pick a fight they'd have to live with long after Master Markko's henchmen were gone.

So Llesho was as safe here by the cooling pyre as anywhere in the camp. That didn't mean a picked team of assassins couldn't reach him any time they wanted, of course. Master Jaks had worn the marks of six such kills on his arm. The magician himself could be watching in the shape of some animal or bird of prey. He'd felt those sharp talons before. It seemed like Master Markko wanted him alive this time, though.

"What's safe?" he asked, shaky enough in his sanity not to care about the answer.

Balar seemed to take his meaning, or part of it at least. He scrounged a low stool from the ruins and dropped down beside his brother. "I'll grant you that. Nowhere is really safe. But you would be safer inside the command tent."

"No. Later, maybe." He ought to be in there with Habiba, making decisions and rewarding his own followers with his praise and encouragement, not out here sulking with his clothes reeking of the dead. While Shou tossed in restless sleep in that tent, though, he just couldn't do it.

As if he heard his name in his sleep, the emperor cried out, a heart-stopping wail that sent a chill through the camp and raised the hairs on the back of Llesho's neck. He wondered if Master Markko, through his witch-finder, had broken something vital and soul-deep in the man. Carina said not. Shou agreed with her, or said he did. But Llesho had never seen eyes as empty as the emperor's had been tonight.

According to Carina, he hadn't cried out like that during all his mental tortures. She didn't know why he did it now. Dreams, he could have told her, while he shivered in a cold sweat remembering Ahkenbad. The magician could kill even in dreams. Was that the plague of Shou's sleep even now?