Free Kavin's World by David Mason Page A

behind.”
    “We can try,” I said.
    “I already knew this tale of his,” Thuramon went on, trotting swiftly beside me. “His people are but the unknowing tools of another. There is an evil thing abroad in the world… the enemy I spoke of.”
    “So,” I said. We were climbing to the wall top, near the rubble-filled gate now, amid the stench of death from the piled corpses in the square below. It was not a pleasant odor, but this Kakk Marag must have found it even less so; they were his own, after all.
    “About that enemy…” I said, as we came to the parapet, “I would hear more. But later. Call a trumpeter to me.”
    We put the old man up on the parapet, with a man holding his chain so that he could not jump. The boy, watching, snarled at us like a young dog, which he much resembled. Bowmen nocked their arrows, aiming at the man, if Thuramon should hear him speak anything he should not.
    The trumpeter blew, a long blast, and then another; and on the far ridges, we saw a stirring. Riders came nearer, and word must have gone back swiftly, as to the man’s identity. Other riders came from the ridge, and a group of twenty came toward us, at a trot.
    They were elegantly gotten up, with feathers and horns, and most surely were lesser chiefs. They rode closer, and I flushed with anger when I saw some of them rode Doradan horses; worse, there were scalps, fresh ones, dangling from their lance shafts. Then they drew rein, under the walls, and one bellowed up a question.
    Thuramon cocked his ear, as our prisoner answered; and nodded, satisfied.
    “He tells them we are magicians, that the city is strong and well armed,” Thuramon said. “He says there is loot elsewhere.”
    There were more shouts from below.
    “They cry out against him,” Thuramon said. “They say their folk will not give in. That they will eat us all, and free him. Now, he pleads further. He says that they will soon starve here, too, that winter comes. That there are fat lands and cattle beyond the hills to the west… I wonder how he knew that, by the way. Someone told him… ah, they seem to be weakening, arguing among themselves.”
    We had all of us, to a man, fixed our eyes on the old one who stood up there; even the guard who held the boy’s chain listened and watched, to his ill luck. The boy’s face was scowling blackly as he listened. Then it happened.
    The boy twisted, snatching, and caught the guard’s dagger from his belt. He slashed like a wildcat, deep into the man’s neck. Leaping free, he hacked at another man, and bounded to the parapet. He hung over, shrieking in his harsh language to the men below; then, as we tried to grapple him, he kicked free, and howled a wild phrase. Still howling, he sprang out, and down, into the ditch below, striking with a thump on the muddy earth.
    The old man yowled too, desperately trying to break free, but was yanked back, as arrows spattered against the stone wall from the riders below. He lay kicking like a stranded shark; bowmen sprang to the wall, and our own arrows sang down.
    The clump of riders flew apart, in every direction, some galloping away, and some feathered with arrows, to pitch to the ground.
    Now there was no one below at all; only the crumpled figure of that mad boy, at which I stared, sickened.
    “Wait!” I called out. “Look at that. The brat’s alive.” He had moaned, and scrabbled at the mud beneath him.
    “Drop a rope, there,” I ordered. “Fetch him back.”
    I have no idea why I did it. Perhaps because of some faint hope of future use for the ill-favored brat, or only because I would not let his own tribes have him. I’m sure I felt no pity for either the boy or his elder, who now snapped with his teeth at the guards who held him.
    The guards, who were only men after all, handled the young beast with more gentleness than I might have expected. They laid him out on a blanket, and sent him down to the Temple, where, if he could live at all, he might be healed. I