Off Armageddon Reef Read online

  "After he got done administering the thrashing of your life," Falkhan growled.

  "Probably." Cayleb chuckled. "I'm getting a bit old for that sort of thing, but if you were to tell him about the way I threw dust into your eyes, he'd probably be just a little upset with me. Still, I think he'd agree that now that I'm here, I shouldn't be turning around with my tail between my legs."

  "He wouldn't be any too pleased with me for letting you throw dust into my eyes, either," Falkhan observed glumly. Then he sighed.

  "Very well, Your Highness. We're here, you fooled me, and I'm not going to drag you home kicking and screaming. But from this point on, you're under my orders. I'm not going to lose you to a slash lizard, of all damned things, so if I tell you to get the hell out of the way, you get the hell out of the way." He shook his head as the prince started to open his mouth. "I'm not going to tell you you can't hunt the thing, or how to go about doing it. But you're not taking any foolish chances—like walking into any thickets after a wounded lizard, for example. Clear?"

  "Clear," Cayleb agreed, after a moment.

  "Good." Falkhan shook his head. "And, just for the record, Your Highness, from now on I want to know what you're hunting, not just where and when."

  "Oh, of course!" Cayleb promised piously.

  * * *

  However Cayleb might have misled him in order to get here in the first place, Falkhan had to admit that the crown prince was in his element as they moved cautiously across the mountain slope. Cayleb's tutors had their hands full getting him to pay attention to his books even now. When he'd been younger, that task had been all but impossible, but the royal huntsmen and arms masters couldn't have asked for a more attentive student. And however much Falkhan would have preferred to see someone else—anyone else, actually—hunting this particular slash lizard, the prince was showing at least a modicum of good sense.

  Slash lizards were one of Safehold's more fearsome land-going predators. A fully mature mountain slash lizard could run to as much as fourteen feet in length, of which no more than four feet would be tail. Their long snouts were amply provided with sharp, triangular teeth—two complete rows of them, top and bottom—which could punch through even the most tightly woven mail, and their long-toed feet boasted talons as much as five inches long. They were fast, nasty-tempered, territorial, and fearless. Fortunately, the "fearless" part was at least partly the result of the fact that they were pretty close to brainless, as well. A slash lizard would take on anything that moved, short of one of the great dragons, but no slash lizard had ever heard of anything remotely like caution.

  Cayleb knew all of that at least as well as Falkhan did, and he was making little effort to stalk his quarry. After all, why go to the trouble of looking for the slash lizard when he could count on it to come looking for him? Falkhan didn't much care for the logic inherent in that approach, but he understood it. And, to be honest, he also accepted that Prince Cayleb was much handier with the lizard spears they all carried than any of his bodyguards were. The lieutenant didn't much care for that, either, but he knew it was true.

  The crown prince was actually whistling—loudly, tunelessly, and off-key—as they wandered as obviously as possible through the heart of the slash lizard's apparent range. They were on foot, and Falkhan supposed he should at least be grateful Cayleb wasn't singing. King Haarahld had an excellent singing voice—a deep, resonant bass, well suited to the traditional Charisian sea chanties—but Cayleb couldn't have carried a tune in a purse seine. Which did not, unfortunately, prevent him from trying to on all too many occasions.

  None of the bodyguards was trying to be particularly quiet, either. All of them, and the prince, were, however, staying as far away from any undergrowth as they could manage. Fortunately, the shade under the tall, straight-trunked pines creeping down from the higher slopes had choked out most of the tangled wire vine and choke tree which formed all but impenetrable thickets lower down in the foothills. That gave them—and the slash lizard—fairly long, relatively unobstructed sight lines. And assuming the local farmers' reports about the slash lizard's recent habits were accurate, then they ought to be—

  A sudden bloodcurdling scream came out of the woods on the slopes above them.

  No one who'd once heard an enraged slash lizard could ever mistake its war cry for anything else. The high-pitched, wailing whistle somehow still managed to sound like the tearing canvas of a sail splitting in a sudden gale. It was the voice of pure, distilled rage, raised in furious challenge, and the entire hunting party wheeled towards the sound as the broad, low-slung creature who'd made it erupted from the woods behind it.

  It wasn't a fully mature slash lizard after all, a corner of Falkhan's mind noted as he muscled his eight-foot lizard spear around. This one was barely eleven feet from snout tip to tail tip, but all six legs churned furiously as it charged, gaping maw spread wide to show all four rows of wetly shining fangs.

  The lieutenant was still wrestling his spear into position when Prince Cayleb shouted back at the charging lizard. The prince's shout was as obscene as it was loud, accusing the creature's mother of certain physically impossible actions, but content was less important than volume. Although it shouldn't have been possible for the slash lizard to hear anything through the sheer racket of its own bellow, it obviously heard Cayleb just fine. And, with the single-minded, territorial fury of its kind, it recognized the raised voice of a puny counterchallenge.

  Falkhan swore even more obscenely than Cayleb as the hurtling predator's trajectory altered slightly. It thundered directly towards Cayleb, as fast as or faster than any charging horse, and not one of the prince's bodyguards was in position to intercept it.

  Which, of course, was precisely what the crown prince had intended.

  Cayleb turned his body almost at right angles to the slash lizard's charge. His lizard spear's long, broad, leaf-shaped head came down with the precision of a Siddarmark pikeman, his right foot extended slightly towards the lizard, and his left foot slid back and came down on the butt of his spear shaft to brace it. It all happened almost instantaneously, with the muscle-memory instinct of a swordsman and a polished perfection of form any of the prince's hunting mentors would have been proud to see. Then the lizard was upon him.

  The creature's thick, squat neck stretched forward, the white lining of its opened mouth and gaping gullet shocking against the dark gray-green of its winter pelt as its jaws reached for the foolhardy foe who'd dared to invade its territory. And then the wailing thunder of its challenge turned into a high-pitched squall of anguish as the prince's razor-edged spearhead punched unerringly into the base of its throat.

  The twenty-inch spearhead drove into the center of its chest, and its own hurtling weight hammered the knife-edged point home with a power no human arm could have achieved. The stout eighteen-inch crossbar a foot below the base of the spearhead prevented that same weight from driving it straight down the spear shaft to reach Cayleb. The shock of impact still nearly bowled the prince over, despite his impeccable form and braced position, but it didn't, and the slash lizard's squall turned into a choking scream as the spearhead punched straight into its heart.

  The lizard slammed to a halt, writhing and thrashing in pinned agony, blood fountaining from opened mouth and nostrils. Its death throes almost accomplished what the force of its charge had failed to, shaking the crown prince like one of the port's mastiffs shaking a spider rat. It could still have killed Cayleb with a single blow from one of its massively clawed forefeet, but the prince clung to his spear shaft, using it to fend off the half-ton of mortally wounded fury.

  To Lieutenant Falkhan, it seemed to take a brief eternity, but it couldn't actually have been anywhere near that long. The lizard's screams turned into bubbling moans, its frantic thrashing slowed, and then, with a last, almost pathetic groan, it folded in upon itself and went down in a twitching heap.

  * * *

  "Shan-wei take it!" the shortest of the men lying belly-down on the ridgelin
e snarled in disgust. "Why couldn't that accursed lizard have done its job?"

  "Never really much chance of that, Sir," his second-in-command observed dryly. "That was as pretty a piece of work as I've ever seen."

  "Of course there wasn't," the leader acknowledged sourly. "Still, I could hope, couldn't I?"

  His subordinate simply nodded.

  "Well," the leader sighed after a moment, "I suppose it just means we'll have to do it the hard way after all."

  * * *

  "Well," Ahrnahld Falkhan said, looking at his crown prince across the slash lizard's still shuddering carcass, "that was certainly exciting, wasn't it?"

  Cayleb's answering laugh was exuberant, despite his chief bodyguard's less than fully approving tone. Then the prince braced one foot on the lizard's shoulder, gripped the spear shaft in both hands, bent his back, and grunted with effort as he pulled the long, lethal head free.

  "Actually, it was," he agreed as he began scrubbing blood off the spear by wiping it through the low-growing near-heather.

  "I'm glad you enjoyed it," Falkhan said repressively, and Cayleb grinned at him. The lieutenant tried to glower back, but despite his best efforts, his own grin leaked through. He started to say something else, then shook his head and looked at one of his subordinates instead.

  "Payter."

  "Yes, Sir?" Sergeant Payter Faircaster replied crisply, although he couldn't quite suppress a smile of his own. The prince's bodyguards might all deplore the way their charge's insistence on doing things like this complicated their own duties, but there was no denying that it was more satisfying to protect someone who wasn't afraid of his own shadow.

  "Take someone back with you for the horses. And send someone else back to take a message to Rothar. Tell the Mayor to send out a cart to haul this—" he poked the lizard with the toe of one boot "—back with us. I'm sure," he gave the prince a sweet smile, "that His Majesty is going to be fascinated to see what sort of small game the Prince was out hunting this morning."

  "Oh, that's a low blow, Ahrnahld!" Cayleb acknowledged, raising one hand in the gesture a judge used to indicate a touch in a training match.

  "I know, Your Highness," Falkhan agreed, while the rest of the prince's bodyguards chuckled with the privilege of trusted retainers.

  "Luhys," Faircaster said, pointing to one of the other troopers. "You and Sygmahn."

  "Aye, Sergeant." Luhys Fahrmahn's broad mountain accent was more pronounced than usual, and he was still grinning as he touched left shoulder with right hand in salute and jerked his head at Sygmahn Oarmaster. "We'll do that thing."

  He and Oarmaster handed their spears to Fronz Dymytree; then the two of them trotted off with Faircaster, leaving Dymytree and Corporal Zhak Dragoner with Falkhan and the prince.

  * * *

  "Now isn't that handy," the short man on the ridgeline murmured in much more satisfied tones.

  "It suits me right down to the ground, Sir," his second-in-command agreed feelingly. Charisian Marines had a well-earned reputation, and they didn't get assigned as royal bodyguards for their sweet dispositions and retiring ways.

  "Well," the leader said after a moment, "I suppose we'd best get to it. And at least we've got ground we can work with."

  He and his men had been shadowing the prince's party ever since it left Rothar, and while he would have preferred for the lizard to do their job for them, the opportunities the present terrain offered were obvious to his experienced eye.

  "Let's go. And remember—" He glared at the rest of his men. "—I'll personally cut the throat of anyone who makes a sound until the crossbows are into position."

  Heads nodded, and eleven more men, all dressed in the same gray-brown and green garments, two of them armed with crossbows, climbed to their feet behind him and his sergeant.

  * * *

  "Just as a matter of curiosity, Your Highness," Lieutenant Falkhan asked as he paced the length of the slash lizard's outstretched body, "how did you come to hear about this?"

  "Hear about it?" Cayleb repeated, eyebrows raised, and Falkhan shrugged.

  "As a general rule, palace gossip spreads faster than a crown fire in a pinewood," he said. "In this case, though, I hadn't heard a whisper about this fellow." He jerked a thumb at the dead lizard. "That's why you were able to get this little expedition past me. I'm just curious about how you managed to hear about it before anyone else?"

  "I don't really remember," Cayleb admitted, after considering it for a few seconds. He scratched one eyebrow, frowning thoughtfully. "I think it may have been from Tymahn, but I'm not really sure about that."

  "Tymahn would've known about it if anyone did," Falkhan acknowledged. Tymahn Greenhill, one of King Haarahld's senior huntsmen for over eighteen years, had been Cayleb's chief hunting mentor, since the king's crippled leg had prevented him from filling that role himself.

  "He does have a way of hearing about things like this," Cayleb agreed. "And he—"

  "Get down, Your Highness!"

  Ahrnahld Falkhan's head snapped up as a voice he'd never heard before in his life shouted the four-word warning.

  * * *

  The short man whirled in shock as the deep, powerful voice shouted from behind him.

  He and his men had gotten to within fifty yards of their intended prey. The thick carpet of pine needles had muffled any sound their feet might have made, and the steep-sided gully of a dry, seasonal streambed's twisting course had provided cover for their approach. His two crossbowmen had just settled into firing position, bracing their weapons on the raised lip of the streambed and waiting patiently for the moving Marine lieutenant to clear their line of fire to their target. Not surprisingly, every scrap of the leader's attention at that moment was concentrated on the Charisian crown prince and his three remaining bodyguards.

  Which was why he was totally unprepared to see the man charging across that same carpet of pine needles towards him with a drawn sword in his hands.

  * * *

  Lieutenant Falkhan reacted out of instinct and training, not conscious thought. His right hand swept towards the hilt of his sword, but his left reached out simultaneously. It caught Crown Prince Cayleb by the front of his tunic and yanked brutally.

  The sudden heave took Cayleb completely by surprise. He unbalanced and went down in an ungainly sprawl . . . just as a crossbow bolt hissed through the space he'd occupied an instant before.

  The same bolt could not have missed Falkhan by more than six inches, and a second bolt slammed into Zhak Dragoner's chest. The corporal crumpled backward without even a scream, and the lieutenant's blade hissed out of its sheath.

  Fronz Dymytree tossed aside the lizard spears he'd been holding and snatched out his own cutlass almost as quickly as Falkhan's sword cleared the scabbard. The two surviving Marines, still reacting before conscious thought could catch up with them, moved to place themselves between the prince and the apparent source of the attack.

  * * *

  The assassins' leader just had time to draw his own sword before the interfering madman came bounding down into the dry watercourse towards him.

  "Finish the job!" the leader shouted to his second-in-command. "I'll deal with this bastard!"

  His subordinate didn't even hesitate. The leader's reputation as a master swordsman was well deserved. It was also one of the reasons he'd been chosen for this mission in the first place, and the second-in-command heaved himself up out of the streambed on the side closest to the Charisians.

  "Come on!" he barked.

  * * *

  Falkhan swore viciously as at least ten men seemed to appear out of the very ground. Two of them carried crossbows, but all the rest had drawn swords, and the crossbowmen dropped their ungainly, slow-firing weapons and reached for their own swords.

  "Run, Highness!" the lieutenant shouted as he sensed Cayleb bouncing back to his feet behind him.

  "Fuck that!" the crown prince spat back, and steel scraped as he drew his own blade.

  "God
damn it, Cayleb, run!" Falkhan bellowed, and then the attackers were upon them.

  * * *

  The assassin leader was confident in his own skill, but a faint warning bell rang somewhere inside him as his unexpected opponent's peculiar stance registered. The mysterious newcomer held the hilt of his weapon in both hands, just above eye level, with one foot advanced and his entire body turned at a slight angle.

  It was unlike any stance the assassin had ever seen, but he had no time to analyze it. Not before the hovering weapon hissed forward like a steel lightning bolt.

  The sheer, blazing speed of the stroke took the assassin by surprise, but he was just as good as his reputation claimed. He managed to interpose his own broadsword, despite his opponent's speed and even though he'd never encountered an attack quite like this one.