Fortunately the tethered rolghas were still calm enough to let Blade mount one. He gripped the reins in one hand, drew his sword with the other, cut the tether, and whistled to Lorma. She jumped up behind him as she'd been trained to do. Her foreclaws dug into the saddle, while her hind legs, their claws retracted, braced her on the rolgha's rump.
A third hut was now on fire, and Blade remembered how dry and brittle the jungle foliage seemed. There hadn't been rain around here for most of the summer. If the Jaghdi didn't get the fires in the camp under control fairly soon, they might find themselves in the middle of a forest fire.
The light from the fire still hadn't reached the corral. Blade knew he had time to do one more thing to confuse his trail completely. He rode over to the corral gate and his sword came down. The heavy leather thong holding the gate shut dropped to the ground. Then he leaned out of the saddle, dragged the gate open as fast as he could, and clapped spurs to his rolgha.
It jumped forward at a pace that nearly unseated Lorma, who let out an indignant squall. She held on, and in a minute all they could see of the camp was the fires. Before it vanished, however, they saw the first rolghas pushing their way out the open gate and galloping away from the fires. It would be morning before anyone in the camp could mount and ride in pursuit, even if he thought there was something to pursue.
Blade reined his rolgha back to a trot and settled down to guide it through the next few miles of the forest of Binaark.
Queen Tressana looked down from her saddle at Efroin of the Red Band. He looked back up at her, his black eyes as steady as her blue ones.
«So both Blade and Curim are dead?» Her voice was flat, hiding her anger. The disaster to the scouting party hadn't been Efroin's fault. He was showing real courage in bringing the bad news to her. Nothing would be mended by frightening him with a royal rage.
«If they are not, only the gods will be able to find them,» said Efroin bluntly. «We found the amulets and armor of both men in the ashes of the hut. They must have killed each other.»
«I hope Blade was dead before the fire reached him,» said Tressana softly. For a moment she no longer saw Efroin, or anything else. Although Curim had been charming and virile for all his hot temper, after his attempt at murder he deserved exactly the fate that overtook him. Blade was something else. His death was a loss not just to her, but to Jaghd and everything she wanted to see done.
However, there was at least one thing she could do to make up part of the loss. «Efroin, you've served me long and well. The men will trust you, and I think you could even stay on good terms with Jollya. Would you like to be captain of the Men's Guard?»
«I will have to ask you a question before answering, Your Grace.»
Tressana's eyebrows rose. «Are you bargaining with me?»
Efroin smiled. «No. Only scouting out the land, as any good captain should do in war.» He lowered his voice so that only the queen could hear him. «What will my duties be?»
Now she understood. Efroin had a wife and four children, and was said to be unreasonably fond of all of them. He would not particularly care to be her bedmate as well as her champion. A pity, in a way. Efroin was the sort of honest man who often made the best lover, if you were lucky enough to find one. Had she used up her luck in that matter when the gods sent her Richard Blade? Probably. Certainly Efroin would not be good company in bed if his heart wasn't in pleasuring her.
«I need a man for war, Efroin. You can give all your attention to your men.»
«Thank you, Your Grace. Then I will lead the Men's Guard. Jollya will lead the women still?»
«I have no one else.»
He sighed. «The gods send burdens as they will, and men bear them as they must. I will do my best. Do I have your leave to go?»
«Yes.»
He turned, and Tressana spurred her rolgha away. She would need men for her bed as well as for the war. But she did not need them so badly that she would turn a good fighting man into a poor lover. A new party of scouts would have to be sent out to the forest, and that would give her plenty of time to pick and test the men before the army had to march.
She pulled off her hat and let the wind blow her hair out behind her as she spurred the rolgha up to a gallop.
Chapter 15
Blade dismounted as soon as he felt he'd gone too far to be tracked in the morning. He unpacked the supplies in the saddlebags, made a pack of them, then slapped the rolgha on the rump. As it trotted off into the night Blade used his sword to cut a branch for a walking stick. Then he found himself a convenient tree and sat down with his back to it and his sword across his knees to sleep until morning. He knew that the amulets worked, but he'd still rather not trust his life to them for the first time on a particularly dark night. There was also Lorma. Blade suspected Jollya would be able to forgive his joining the Elstani, but never his letting something happen to the cat.
The dawn of a clear day came early. Blade scratched his insect bites, woke up Lorma, picked up his stick, and marched off into the forest of Binaark. Before he'd covered a mile he'd passed straight through the creepers of a small rogue without being attacked. After that happened a few times he found himself whistling as he walked along. It was exhilarating to come back into the forest and thumb his nose at the killer plants.
He was still careful not to let the amulet make him feel he was on a hike on the Yorkshire moors. There were snakes and insects, there was food to be rationed, and there was always Lorma to warn away from even the smaller plants. He also discovered that the amulet didn't let him go through one of the mile-wide groves. They were so thickly grown that even if the creepers didn't attack him it was impossible to get through without hacking his way foot by foot. It was better to walk around, rather than take the edge off his sword when he might need it as a weapon on the other side of the forest. It would take more than the synthetic beetle-gland scent to deal with the groves. They would last until someone in this Dimension invented dynamite or something equally potent.
The amulet also didn't completely suppress the attack reflex in the largest plants, if you waited too long or struggled too hard. The plant would somehow slowly sense that you weren't behaving like a beetle even if you smelled like one. You ought to be investigated, and the only way the plants had of investigating anything was to send out the creepers and the kill-pods.
Such an investigation took place so slowly that an active man with a sharp sword could easily defend himself for hours. It still wasn't pleasant, with the smell from the pods, the acid dripping, and those barbed six-inch fangs. After surviving one investigation only by laying about him with his sword, Blade concluded it was an experience to be avoided. He also knew that it proved that the plants were even farther outside the known limits of science than he'd suspected before. He would have given a lot to be able to take a seedling or even a few seeds back to Home Dimension with him.
In spite of the amulet's limitations, it did speed Blade's progress enormously. He covered in four days the distance it had taken him twelve days to cover the first time. He still didn't travel by night, to avoid blundering into groves or getting Lorma in trouble, but otherwise he was able to tramp along steadily, twelve and fourteen hours a day. The streams were low and the game animals were lean, but with a canteen and a bow he was able to keep both himself and Lorma from going without food.
There was no doubt about it: the Keepers of Jaghd had solved this Dimension's centuries-old problem of the killer plants. The Jaghdi army might have more problems and take longer getting through the forest than they'd expected, but they would get through. It was more important than ever for Blade to get through to Elstan and do whatever he could to defeat Tressana's plan to make herself empress of the world over a pile of Elstani corpses.