The bald templar chuckled, and again flashed that cruel grin.He reached for Fellstar’s reins.
A crack like a whip sounded.An arrow—its shaft long as a ballista bolt, its head broad as her hand—flew from the trees and struck the bowman ahead of her.He crumpled like a paper doll.Silence held for a moment, the bald templar reaching for Fellstar’s reins, Fola stunned by the sudden violence.
A second arrow took the other archer through the face.Frog squawked and leapt into the sky in a flurry of wings, and chaos erupted.
Fola drove her heels into Fellstar.The horse screamed and lurched forward, knocking the bald templar off his feet.The third man ahead, to her right, drove the point of his sword at Fellstar’s breast.Fola freed her staff from its holster and swatted the thrust aside.Through the sackcloth, her hand found the familiar key in the staff’s silver filigree and depressed it as she swung for her assailant’s shoulder.The staff met mail and pulsed in her hand—a single burst of magical energy.Instantly, the man she had struck went pale and collapsed to his knees.As she rode past he doubled over and retched.
That should have been the end of it.Two dead, one badly bruised, another nauseated for a day and a night.No other violence by her hand.She might have ridden on to Parwys alone.Except, as Fellstar surged forward, she caught a glimpse through the trees of her rescuer—his hulking frame and his four arms.
Colm emerged from the forest.In her hazy memories of the night before he had been large, but to see him out of doors, standing, she realised that she had underestimated.He stood two heads taller than the bald templar—seven feet, at the very least.His chest was broad around as a young stallion’s.He wore no armour, only deerskin trousers and a loose-fitting, low-necked vest that revealed the complex geography of his chest, its muscles shaped and arranged to support four limbs rather than two.The upper pair of arms were thick as an ordinary man’s legs and ended in hands that might have crushed a human skull.Instead, for the moment, they held a massive bow.The lower pair were smaller, still well muscled, but seeming lithe and almost delicate on Colm’s frame.With them he drew a pair of long, broad knives.
‘Does your offer stand, Lady Fola?’he called to her, his voice a rumbling, heavy bass.
The as yet uninjured templar threw himself behind a fallen log on the far side of the road from Colm.The other two who still lived lay in the road—one in a puddle of vomit, the other muttering and groaning against the blow Fellstar had dealt him.Fola hoped his ribs were badly cracked, at the very least.
‘It stands,’ Fola called back to Colm.Her heart was beating very fast.Part of that, she knew, was the fear, the adrenaline.‘I need an escort to Parwys, and eventually to the City of Thaumedony.’
She said this, although it was by no means a certainty that Colm actually believed in the existence of the City.In many lands the common folk had heard of it only in legends carried by merchants and itinerant troubadours.In places further from the heart of the world those stories thinned, and the well educated were likely to dismiss tales of a wondrous paradise in a distant land as fanciful rumour.
A shame.The wider world might not be so often cruel if people were more willing to believe in the City.Then again, that cruelty was the very thing that hardened their hearts against belief.
The Mortal Church believed, of course, but only in a twisted phantom of their own imagining.
‘Your need is clear enough,’ Colm said.‘What will you pay?’
‘Whatever pay you require,’ Fola said, with a sour taste in her mouth.She should not fault him for demanding payment.Currency and the need for it drove the wider world.Yet she could little control her reflexive disappointment.‘And, when we reach the City, riches so vast they will become meaningless to you.’
He smiled wryly at her.‘I accept.’
He loosed an arrow.Rotting wood, indeed, proved little defence against it.The cowering templar screamed in pain and pawed at the broad head where it protruded, bloody, from his thigh, and pinned him to the log.Colm crossed the road, knives glinting in the sunlight.
‘This isn’t necessary,’ Fola said, suddenly nauseous herself.Violence, like currency, was foreign to the City.‘They won’t be able to pursue us.We should be on our way.’
‘Their kind scuttle about these lands like ants on an old corpse,’ Colm said as he reached for another arrow.‘In days they’ll have rejoined their battalion.Word of you will spread faster than you can outrun it, and they heard as well as I did where you plan to ride.’
There was sense in that.Tarebach had its share of darkly complexioned women, but the further north she travelled the more she would stand out.If she was to learn anything from these wraiths in Parwys, she would need to gather information before her association with the fabled and notorious City of the Wise muddied the waters.Or worse, drew more unwanted attention.
And yet… though these people had wanted to do her great harm, they were no longer in any position to hurt her.Beyond the City and its Citizens—for whom dying was painful, and frightening, and inconvenient, but could be overcome—death was too permanent and total a punishment to balance out any but the most heinous of crimes.There had been enough of it that day, in that place.
Fola’s frustration boiled into her voice.‘You’re the one who got me drunk and talking.They wouldn’t even know who I was, otherwise.’
Colm paused and turned to answer her, visibly annoyed.
That moment of pause saved Colm’s life.Without it, he would have been facing the log and the wounded, screaming templar, instead of the balding man with cracked ribs who lurched suddenly to his feet, sword in hand.
A groaning mumble became a sharp cry, the second half of an invocation.‘… light of Peregrin, Agion of Perseverance, the Steadfast, he who held the line at Odegaard!’
A corona of silver flames swirled around the templar’s head.He lunged, his sword flashing.Colm caught the templar’s sword with the leathery back of his upper forearm.The blade bit deep.Colm’s upper hand spasmed, dropping the arrow it held as he lashed out with his lower arms and their bright, broad-bladed knives.
The templar danced to the side, his movements almost too fast for the eye.Tremors seized the templar’s limbs, then faded, though he still quivered like a spring wound to the point of snapping.
Librarians who returned to the City from the wider world had written volumes—some genuine reports, but an equal measure of speculation—about the magic of the Mortal Church and the invocation of the Agion, their heroes turned gods.Fola had never seen it for herself.Paralysed by fascination, she watched the templar, his body vibrating with energy.
‘Abominations!’the templar roared, his horn of light flaring.‘One born of demon magic, the other wielding it!By the light of the Agion, I will cut you down!’
Colm flexed his wounded arm.Ropes of blood splashed at his feet.He brought the other three up, knives held defensively.
The templar sprang forward.Colm caught the first blow with a knife and replied with a fist to the templar’s shoulder.He screamed, but rolled with the force of the blow, channelling it into a thrust that buried the tip of his sword in Colm’s gut.
