Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3)

We took them by surprise. I swung left and right, crippled two men, and took off running again. I saw enough to know we had more than a dozen still chasing us, rough irregulars by the look of them. Road-brothers if you like, just not my brothers and not my roads.

I caught up with Lesha soon enough. They would too. Her only chance had been to get to her horse but there wasn’t time.

‘Where to?’ I shouted.

‘Don’t know.’ She panted it out. A useless but reasonable answer.

We let the valley guide us between the hills. Even as we ran the light grew, or rather the greys paled revealing hints at the world. Sunny waited for us where the valley divided, sword in hand, breathing hard. The cries of pursuit rang out behind. Hollers and wolf-howls, as if it were a game to them. It sounded like a lot more than a dozen on our trail.

It occurred to me that we were being herded. I had a couple of seconds to consider the realization before the ground gave way under Sunny. He vanished into a dark hole and I avoided following him by the narrowest of margins. Lesha hit me from behind as I teetered, arms wheeling, on the crumbling edge of the pit, and we went in together.

‘Shit.’

We landed next to Sunny, our fall broken by a pile of sticks and dry grass. Looking up earned me an eyeful of loose earth sifting down and a glimpse of the paling sky, lighter still now viewed from the depths of a pit. To escape would require a climb of twelve maybe fifteen feet. We’d fallen into some kind of natural sinkhole covered to make a trap.

‘Who are they?’ I asked.

‘Bandits.’ Lesha’s voice came soft with terror. ‘Perros Viciosos, Bad Dogs in the old tongue. I didn’t think they came this close to the Iberico.’

‘Let them know who you are, Jorg. They’ll ransom us.’ Sunny tried to climb but slipped back in a shower of dry earth.

‘You don’t believe it half the time, Sunny. You think I’ll convince this lot they’ve caught a king?’

The whooping drew closer, louder. Laughter now. ‘We’ve got them!’

‘Viciosos? That means “bad”?’ It didn’t sound quite right.

‘Vicious,’ Lesha said, stuttering out her words. ‘For what they do to captives.’

The pit smelled of char.

‘Give me a knife,’ I said.

‘Left mine in a Bad Dog.’ Sunny patted his side.

‘It’s all on Garros,’ Lesha said. She’d left her weapons on her horse. Who sleeps like that?

I drew my sword and made a slow arc to check the space. We had room to swing a cat if its tail wasn’t too long. The laughter and mutter of voices increased above. The Bad Dogs were gathering.

I caught Lesha’s shoulder and felt the unheard sobs shudder through her. No swift death waited for any of us. ‘Stand there.’ I pushed her into clear space, stumbling over the broken branches. She turned to me, just the glimmer of her eyes to mark her in the dark.

Light from above. A torch and a man to hold it. He could have passed for Rike’s smaller uglier brother. ‘See what running got you?’

I swung and severed Lesha’s neck in a single clean cut, letting the sword bury its blade in the wall. Before she could fall I had her head in both hands, scarred and heavy, no realization in those eyes yet, and threw it as hard as I could. It struck the bandit square in the face, not on the forehead as I would have liked, but on the nose, mouth, and chin. He staggered one step backward, two steps forward, and fell with a wordless curse. He landed on Lesha’s body. I caught the torch.

‘What the hell?’ Sunny stared in horror and amazement. Mostly amazement.

‘Look at the walls,’ I said. They were black. I stabbed the torch in where the sandy soil would hold it.

The bandit proved as heavy as he looked. I hauled him off Lesha and wrenched my sword clear to hold at his throat. ‘Get up, Bad Dog.’ The sharp edge helped him find his feet. ‘Sunny, get her blood spread around.’

‘What?’

I kicked the brush around my ankles and set my left hand to the pit wall. ‘This wasn’t put here to break our fall.’ My fingers came away sooty. ‘They burn people here.’

More noise from above, an angry debate.

‘You better lower a rope if you want this idiot alive,’ I shouted.

A shrill laugh, more heated words exchanged.

‘Ah, who am I kidding?’ I sliced his throat on the blade of my sword and wrestled him around so the spray of his blood wouldn’t be wasted. ‘Who looks over the edge? It’s not as if he knew we didn’t have a knife to throw.’

Five torches arced in together before the idiot’s neck had stopped pulsing. With the brush damped down and our wits about us we managed to get the torches secured and stamp out any burning patches. The smoke covered the stench of blood and soiled corpses. When we were done Sunny met my gaze.

‘You killed her so you had something to throw?’

‘That would have been enough of a reason – you saw how she moved, she wouldn’t help in a fight. But no.’

‘For the blood?’

‘So I didn’t have to watch them take as long as they could to kill her. If you knew how these sorts of men work, you’d be asking for me to take your head too.’

‘But I get a choice?’