Page 110 of The Summer Pass

“What are we⁠—”

“I don’t know yet.” He sounded desperate. “Wait and see what happens.”

Vanu had reached a narrow place on the path, between a group of tall rocks and a stand of trees, when several figures ran crouching out from between the trees toward him. Tirtu and Firuduna both shouted—probably too late to have been useful—and urged their horses forward. Tirtu’s bolted down the trail, but Firuduna’s mount shied and didn’t want to move. Maybe she’d seen the flash of knife blades in the sunset as the attackers ran at Vanu.

Between the pain in his shoulder and the effort of controlling his anxious horse, Firuduna had difficulty following what was unfolding on the path below him. He saw Vanu lunge to meet one of the attackers and slam into him, catching the man by surprise as if he were doing the ambush. A knife flashed as it was thrown, but Firuduna didn’t see where it landed. The prisoners were shouting, as alarmed as Tirtu, waving their hands and calling out words in Zashian that could only have been an offer of surrender. Were the attackers not on their side?

There were three of them—there had been four, but Vanu had already killed one—all tall, light on their feet, and dressed for stealth with scarves concealing the lower halves of their faces. Vanu had been right, they were trying to take him alive. They had surrounded him like hunters trying to take down a beast, but they were armed with swords and knives—like hunters, they should have had spears, and even then, Firuduna recalled what Vanu had done to the Sukiyan mercenary commander’s spear.

They drew closer, tightening their ring around him, as if performing some manoeuvre they’d practiced. Tirtu rode helplessly around the outside, and the Zashian prisoners wrung their hands or something equally pitiful. Firuduna’s horse wanted to go back up the hill, and he decided to let her. He slid out of the saddle and ran down toward the fight, keeping in the shadow of the trees.

There were only two men facing Vanu now. Two on the ground, unmoving. If they’d thought that he’d hesitate to kill them because they weren’t trying to kill him—well, Firuduna had thought that, briefly. But it was as if Vanu had some grudge against them, as if he already hated them for some reason.

He kicked one of the remaining pair and stabbed the other, yanking his sword out of the man’s body before he fell. The kicked man staggered back to his feet and attacked, and Vanu slashed his throat.

There was a moment of stillness. Firuduna froze in the shadow of the trees. The members of the ambush party lay dead on the path around Vanu, blood making dark pools on the ground in the waning light. Vanu wiped sweat out of his eyes and cleaned his sword. He was no longer in armour but in his open vest and warlord jewellery, and he was bleeding in a couple of places that Firuduna could see.

The prisoners were talking to one another in low voices, but Firuduna caught the name of their deity—being thanked, from the sound of it.

“My lord, what—” Tirtu started. Then he swivelled in the saddle to look down toward the Zashian tents.

Someone else was approaching on horseback. No, a group of men—the sounds of the fight and the darkness had disguised their approach, and suddenly they were there.

The man at the head of the party was clearly General Pantaresh, a black-bearded Zashian with a tall hat and gleaming trappings on a sleek, lowland horse. The kind of man Firuduna would have singled out for capture in a raid—or not, once he noticed the big Zashian sabre that hung from his belt.

One of the general’s companions had laid hold of the reins of Tirtu’s horse. Others rode around to encircle Vanu. They ignored the prisoners and the dead men.

Pantaresh said something in Zashian, and a man by his side—Hawakhaba by his looks, but dressed in Zashian clothes—translated:

“You made short work of the Great King’s snakes, I see. Clearly you live up to your reputation as the Lion. But you cannot deal so with the snakes who have infiltrated your fortress.”

Vanu knew Zashian, even if they thought he didn’t, so he must have understood all that before it was translated, but he gave no reaction, just gazed stonily up at the general.

Pantaresh said something else, and then Vanu turned and looked back up the hill.

“If you doubt me, look to the banner flying from your tallest tower,” came the translation.

Firuduna looked too, and there, where Vanu’s lion had been flying when they left, was some different banner, catching the last light of the sunset. It was a bright, ugly yellow, and the device on it was hard to see from this distance, but it might have been a snake.

Vanu turned back to Pantaresh, and there was nothing obviously different about him, but Firuduna thought this must have been how he looked when they cornered him in the Spring Pass three and a half years ago. He looked as if he didn’t even need to hear what Pantaresh said next.

Pantaresh said it anyway, and Vanu nodded, and as the interpreter was needlessly repeating the words in Hawada, he was already unbuckling his sword belt.

“If you surrender to me now, no harm will come to your daughters.”

Vanu dropped his sword, scabbard, belt and all on the path by the hooves of Pantaresh’s sleek Zashian horse.

Epilogue

When Lill left the gathering place, he was chasing a shadow. He knew it was probably nothing: an animal, something harmless. It was just that a movement had caught his eye and reminded him of a stealth-craft exercise. And he was jumpy and tense because Vanu had left him in charge of something.

Look after our family, Vanu had said. Was he doing that? Did he know how to do that?

By habit, he was sliding through the shadows in the direction of the strange movement he had seen, all the while telling himself it was nothing. And then abruptly he saw the person he was following.

He was well hidden in a shaded doorway on the other side of the alley, but not invisible. With his scarf pulled up, he was unrecognizable to Lill, but that didn’t matter. He could have been any of them. And he’d been in the gathering place, spying.

Lill realized why he’d been on his guard, why he’d followed his instincts down this alley. He had been half-expecting to see them again. He had known they were still out there.