GOLBFISH STOOD AT KOLGAN'S SIDE ON THE BATTLEMENTS, STARING down at the river. He felt ashamed of himself. The flow was half what it had been when he first came to Lemod, and he had never noticed the change. Beaches of shingle fringed both banks; ledges and boulders dispersed the channel; tree trunks and ice flows bridged some of the narrower gaps. An agile man could certainly work his way to the middle. Beyond that, the widest, fastest stretch . . . well, that was what friends were for.
The sides of the gorge were vertical in places, and not much less than vertical everywhere else. He wondered who stood in the woods on the far side, watching the city.
He spoke for the first time since leaving Wagonmaker's. "By the five gods, he's right again! It is a way out, and the only way! He saw it and we did not."
Kolgan growled. "I wish I knew how he does that."
Golbfish had asked the Liberator that question once, but the answer had been something about a temple of learning somewhere, and he had not understood. "Where will you try?"
"Down there looks good," the Joalian said, "but how could we get to it?"
They paced the parapet for an hour, until each had chosen a point of attack. The Nagians would try downstream, the Joalians upstream. The leaders would have to guide their men across by memory.
"Think we can do it?" Golbfish asked glumly.
"Cross? Some of us, yes." The tall man glared across at the far cliffs and tugged at his red beard. "But to invade Thargvale with no cavalry, with very little surprise, with a larger army already in the field and able to cut our line of retreat . . . You know this is madness?"
The alternative was worse.
"Have you ever been to Thargland?"
Kolgan shrugged. "Once. As a youth, I accompanied an uncle of mine on an embassy to Tharg. I was not impressed."
"You are a Joalian. You would not be impressed by a Thargian shitting gold bars."
"I would certainly have them appraised by a competent minter."
Golbfish chuckled, but it was a social chuckle, and false. "Tonight the river. Tomorrow the guerrillas, the forest, and the pass. We must take life one day at a time now and be grateful for it."
"Aye!" Kolgan said sourly. "And even if we fight our way home, Your Majesty, our troubles will not be over. Your brother will be well established on your throne now, with an army of his own, and my foes in the Clique will have drawn up detailed plans for my funeral."
This would not do. Leaders must maintain their own morale if they were to maintain their troops'. Golbfish squared his shoulders—as much as his shoulders would ever square.
"Look on the bright side. However it began, this is no longer a squalid territorial squabble. We are caught up in the affairs of gods. Many things are prophesied of the Liberator, some clear and some obscure. Many things are likewise prophesied for a man named D'ward, and now we know that D'ward and the Liberator are the same. The most famous of the prophesies is that the Liberator will bring death to Death. If you wanted to find Death, Kolgan Coadjutant, where would you go looking?"
Kolgan raised his eyes to the southern peaks, his red brows bunched in a fearsome scowl. "Are you suggesting he is going to lead us to the city itself?"
"What use is a prophecy that is never fulfilled? Tharg would not take us very far out of our road, as I recall."
"It would be a shorter road, because we should never return."
True! Golbfish admitted to himself that he held no great hopes now of ever seeing Nag again. "When you were in Tharg, did you visit the double temple?"
"I saw it, although it was not then complete. Not all the pillars were erected, K'simbr Sculptor was still working on the image of the Man as Creator. But I have looked upon the face of Death." He spat contemptuously. "No one but the Thargians would raise such an abomination!"
After a moment he added, "And their cooking takes the skin off your tongue."
Before Golbfish could comment, D'ward came stalking along the parapet. He seemed to have recovered his strength, although his face was still drawn.
"Possible?" he demanded.
"We'll take casualties," Kolgan growled. "But it won't be a massacre."
The Liberator nodded and leaned on the battlements. "Get as many men working on supplies as you can. Ropes, planks . . . food for the march, of course. Wineskins and barrels for floats. Have to lower the barrels down the cliffs in nets, but keep all preparations out of sight until dark, of course. A swimmer won't last two minutes in that cold. Oh . . . I didn't say so, but Ysian comes with us. She knows the terrain."
Golbfish caught Kolgan's eye. When the Lemodians returned, they would be hard on traitors.
Kolgan was disapproving. "Sir, this will not be an easy march, even for battle-hardened warriors. For a girl . . . " He let the suggestion die aborning.
D'ward was staring down at the river. "Do you know the narrowest escape I have had in this campaign so far, Coadjutant?"
"Your entry into the city, I assume, sir."
"No." He looked up with a grin. "The next morning, when I first met Ysian. She came at me like a whirlwind. She very nearly skewered me with a butcher knife."
The men laughed as men do when their leader makes a joke. "You tamed her, sir!"
"Or she tamed me. Now, anything else?"
"What of Dosh Envoy?" asked Golbfish. "I thought you trusted him?"
D'ward smiled thinly. "In some things. He has a higher loyalty that you'd be happier not knowing about. He'll come. Don't worry about him once we're across."
He looked up at the drizzling clouds. "Pray for rain," he said. "Pray for lots and lots of rain."
Just before the light failed completely, Golbfish buckled on a sword. He sent a squad down the cliff face to rope out a path and string ladders. He followed with the next contingent, descending into black madness. Men kept coming steadily after that, with ropes, with timber, with anything that might float.
An hour or so later, bruised, battered, and freezing, he stood on the south shore.
He had been one of the lucky ones. Everyone went roped, with two companions feeding out the line behind him, but anyone who slipped landed in ice-cold water and was usually smashed into the rocks before he could be hauled back. Planks worked loose from their moorings, barrels sank, ropes failed, ice floes rushed out of the night like monsters. Men vanished in mid-sentence and were gone forever. Darkness and the roar of the river made communication almost impossible. The current brought down Joalian bodies.
As soon as he had a score or so of men with him, Golbfish secured ropes to guide the rest. Then he told a squad to follow him and set off up the cliff. When the Lemodians learned what was happening, they would start rolling boulders down on the invaders.
The slope was steep—rock and mud, dribbling water. He knew he was at the top when he banged his head on a tree root. He hauled himself over the lip and rose shakily to his feet. The darkness was absolute, but something alerted him. He ducked. A blade whistled overhead. He dragged out his sword and slashed at the night. He felt a sickening, squishy impact, heard a cry, and knew that he had just drawn his first blood. He moved quickly to the other side of the tree and peered around helplessly, listening. His victim was sobbing and muttering prayers, somewhere on the ground.
Again an unnamed sense warned Golbfish of movement, and he flailed his sword at the empty air. He was a warrior now, a killer. Behind and below him, he could hear his own men coming.
"Watch out!" he shouted, parrying blindly. His blade struck another with a loud clang. He dropped to a crouch and swung again, knee high. A man screamed and fell into crackling undergrowth.
The only way to tell friend from foe was by speech—challenge, and if he did not reply in the right accent, try to kill him. If he just tried to kill you, don't wait for the reply. But the resistance was surprisingly light and soon faded away completely.
Having secured a beachhead in the woods, Golbfish detailed a squad to accompany him and set off to establish contact with Kolgan.
The Joalians were having a worse time of it. There was another blind skirmish in the undergrowth, and again the defenders withdrew. Soon Nagians were hauling Joalians over the cliff edge and securing ropes for those coming after. There was no sign of Kolgan himself.
Golbfish returned to his own column and was dismayed to discover less than a hundred men in position. He waited for a while to see if the Lemodians would launch a counterattack. Nothing happened; the woods were silent. He scrambled back down to the river. The army was crossing, but at this rate it seemed likely to take days. He fought his way back across the river—an even more hair-raising procedure than the first trip, for he frequently had to work his way around other men clinging to the same rope or boulder.
He harangued the crowd milling on the beach. He assured them that their comrades were crossing safely and had not just gone to a watery grave. He ordered more lines set up, more avenues mapped through the maze.
He climbed back up the north cliff in a shower of gravel, mud, and descending warriors, and somehow even forced his way up one of the rope ladders dangling on the walls. More haste! he commanded. Faster!
He reeled off in search of D'ward and found him overseeing the defense at the gates, for the Lemodians had guessed what was happening. Even there, though, the assault was strangely halfhearted.
Golbfish reported. D'ward listened, thanked him, and ordered him back to the south bank. He set off to cross the river a third time. He saw with relief that the exodus was gathering speed.
There were no moons. By midnight the rain had become a downpour, making the darkness absolute. Undoubtedly many men died at the hands of their friends as gangplank or rope failed and too many struggled to occupy the same perch. Hundreds drowned or froze or were smashed on the rocks.
At dawn Golbfish found himself in command of the army in the orchards of the south bank. Kolgan had fallen while climbing the cliff, breaking his shoulder. He was huddled in a daze of agony and shock on the shingle. The river was littered with bodies and the shore with wounded.
Rain still fell in torrents. The river was visibly rising. Lemod was back in the hands of its rightful owners, blazing in several places from fires set to slow down their return. There was no sign of pursuit. Praise the gods!
Dosh Envoy appeared in the first gray light, accompanied by a boy whom a second glance showed to be Ysian in male clothing. The sight of her blue lips persuaded Golbfish to let fires to be lit. The two camps had been amalgamated and he had posted a cordon around the perimeter, almost a solid fence of men. The Lemodians were still not attacking, not even reverting to their old guerrilla tactics. Why not?
Everyone was coated in mud. Half the survivors seemed to be limping or staggering blindly in deep shock. One skinny youngster arrived hobbling, with his arms around two friends. He pulled loose from them and steadied himself on one leg, hanging on to a branch.
"How many?" he barked, and Golbfish realized that the kid's eyes were blue.
"Casualties? Four or five hundred, I think."
The muddy scarecrow winced. "No opposition?"
"Very little. How many did you leave behind?"
"Damned few," D'ward said. "How many can't walk?"
Golbfish shrugged. "There are at least fifty still down on the beach. Up here . . . I don't know. Another fifty?"
The Liberator groaned and wiped an arm across his face. It remained just as filthy as before. "You all right?"
"A trifle fatigued, perhaps. You, sir?"
Chuckle. Another groan. "Twisted an ankle, that's all." The Liberator laid his injured foot on the ground and showed his teeth in a grimace. "My first battle," he muttered.
Golbfish saw how his eyes were glistening, and felt a curious twinge of sympathy. Like him, D'ward was not a genuine soldier, was not hardened to being responsible for the lives of followers. Most leaders would have been cheering madly at this point, exulting in a brilliantly executed withdrawal. Twice now, D'ward had pulled off stunning reversals; twice he had made brilliant generalship look like child's play, and all he was concerned with was the cost.
"The river has taken its toll, but it was not the massacre the Thargians would have inflicted."
"We must see they don't get their chance yet." D'ward eased himself to the ground. "Summon the troopleaders." Ysian came and knelt beside him. She tried to wipe his face with a rag, and he waved her away irritably.
Soon the troopleaders gathered around, a bedraggled, shaken retinue, barely half the number who should have been there. D'ward appointed temporary substitutes and sent for them—there was no time for proper elections, he said. He seemed to know the names and abilities of every man, Joalians as well as Nagians.
Still sitting in the mud, leaning against a tree, he outlined what everyone already knew and did not want to think of. They had escaped from one trap, but only into a greater. The Thargians might recross the river and try to intercept their quarry before it could reach Moggpass. If not, they would head east to Tholford and block the road back to Nagvale. There would undoubtedly be many more armed men in Thargland itself. The reckoning had only been postponed.
"Now we must march," he said. "Anyone who can't must stay. Form up."
The men were exhausted, but the alternative was death or slavery. The troopleaders exchanged glances, but no one objected.
D'ward hauled himself to his feet. Half a dozen men rushed forward to help, but he refused them. In obvious pain, he began to hobble forward. In a moment someone offered him a staff, freshly cut, and he accepted that. He was setting an example, but that was all he was capable of.
Kolgan had arrived, but he was still too shocked by pain and exposure to be any use at all. Marveling at the strange fate the fickle gods had thrust upon him—and cynically amused by it also—Golbfish took effective command and issued the necessary orders.
One woman and less than five thousand men set off on a journey of conquest and deliverance. The steady, chilling rain was both a physical torment and a promise of hope.
Behind them, the abandoned wounded screamed and pleaded until their voices faded into the distance.