Loss: Prequel to the Bornlord Saga Read online

the late afternoon sunlight in the dirt of the man's clothes and his unkempt beard and hair. Instantly one of the male armsors left the water and came to stand next to Banjee.

  "Ho! Fellow Aldarans!" came the smooth voice of the stranger. A wide flashy smile split the burnt tan of his lean face.

  Banjee could only stare in shock, his lined eyes wide. No one else answered the stranger's hail either, and with a tightening of his lips that noted their silence, the man spoke again.

  "I'm sorry ta surprise you. I guess you don't see many folks out here."

  That was a gross understatement, particularly from someone who claimed to be an Aldaran. For reasons going back to their country's settlement, precious few people in Tibernia even knew of Aldar's existence. And it would be a warm day in Winter for an Aldaran to venture this far into the barren plains.

  As the man continued his unhurried approach, his mouth returned to its cheerful smile. Next to Banjee, the armsor shifted, beginning a circumspect surveillance of their surroundings for the man's compatriots. The stranger seemed to know what the armsor was doing, just as he seemed to realize that Banjee, the most venerable figure, was head of the group.

  "It's only me. My name's Rawl. I been gone thirty years from Aldar, but I've a hankerin' ta go home again. I knew you'd be comin' through this way about now, and I planned on meetin' you. Good thing I started out from Tibernia so early. My horse broke a leg a way's back and I been on foot since. Ran out 'o food some time ago and I'm hopin' you can help me out with 'at too." His voice was an odd mix of fluid Aldaran lingo and hard Tibernian drawl.

  Banjee eyed him as he stopped a half dozen feet away. The stranger, of middle years, with lank, wavy, brown hair and gray eyes that probed from above a narrow drooping nose, carried a thin leather saddle pack slung over his shoulder. He dropped the bag with a muffled grunt and extended his hand to Banjee, all the while showing his even yellowed teeth.

  Banjee was too much an Aldaran not to reply with civility. "I'm Banjee, leader of the expedition," he answered simply, taking the other's dirty, dry, heavily veined hand.

  Banjee's rook took far more exception to the newcomer. Screaming, Angel jumped from Banjee's shoulder at the outsider, veering enough so that only the tip of his left wing slapped the startled man's forehead. The huge black bird screamed again and spiraled upward, away and off above the scabrous gravel and the withered forest.

  The caravan leader's mouth opened and closed again as the stranger ducked and cried out. "Angel!" Banjee managed to blurt. He'd never seen his companion act quite like that.

  "I come in friendship!" the man said in outraged hurt, staring after the circling bird before bringing accusing eyes back to Banjee.

  "Sorry." Banjee found himself suddenly put in the wrong. "I don't know what got into him." He paused and continued, committing himself. "We're settin' up camp as soon as we can cut a trace to get the carts through the trees. We can get you something to eat." Turning, Banjee's quick blue eyes picked out one of the merchants. "Pete, see if you can get Rawl a bit of the crackers and jerky."

  It's not much. Rawl," he continued, turning to meet the stranger's suddenly hooded eyes, "but it'll be better than nothing." Nodding his thanks, the stranger picked up his pack. "And I'll be talking with you later,” Banjee said clearly as the man turned to follow Pete.

  Banjee cornered the stranger some time after dark. The entire party had worked to set up pits for boiling the water, and the first round of clean liquid had been a welcome change from the musty rations they'd shared the past week. And although the task required the collection of a lot of wood, the newest member of their party had been noticeably absent during the process.

  Three of the handlers sat off in the dark with Rawl on logs pulled away from the cook fire's light. Banjee located them by the sound; apparently the stranger was entertaining with some story that had set them to laughing.

  "An then the freezin' bornlord says to me, 'So yaw think they'd like it better if I asked 'em instead o' tellin' 'em?’”

  The laughs cut off as Banjee reached the group and glowered at Rawl. The stranger's smile slipped. "Sa Banjee, come sit with us. I been tellin' some o' yur folk about Tibernia.”

  Banjee ignored him. "Sa Rawl, listen up. if you decide to come with us, then you'll do your share of the work. There aren't any slackers here."

  The lean outsider quickly rose to his feet, his expression completely sobered. "O' course, sa, o' course. I would o' gladly helped with camp chores, but unfortunately, I have a malady in which the barest whisper o' sun on my skin causes it ta break into horrible, itching, red welts. I've been forced ta cower in the woods for days now as I waited on you. Believe me, it causes me the greatest distress."

  Banjee looked at the man with ill-disguised contempt. "Do you think I was hatched yesterday?" he growled. "You're as tan as I am."

  The stranger's mouth dropped open almost theatrically. "I've had to endure it," he said, jutting his chin in stoic affront. "I'd stay in the sun an' show you, but the itching drives me ta tear my skin 'til it bleeds. Jus' look at my legs here where I was out without leggings." He quickly pulled up his left pants leg high enough so that the distant firelight exposed a wicked web of scabbed patches on his knee and lower thigh.

  Even Banjee was taken back. "Still, you've got to contribute to the expedition," he managed to sputter.

  "I was plannin' on collecting fire wood here in a bit," Rawl replied reassuringly as he shook his pants leg down over his boot.

  "Rawl's from Sunhold," one of the handlers spoke up. It was young Rory, excellent with the deer, but not long on common sense. "He's been tellin' us that the bathing pool at the palace in Tibernia is not nearly so fine as Sunhold's swimming holes."

  Banjee caught his bottom lip between his teeth. So the stranger had indeed once hailed from Aldar. "So what took you to Tibernia?” he demanded. Rawl had resumed his seat on the log.

  The stranger shrugged and shook his head. "I always had a cravin' ta travel. I tried being an armsor for a while, but that didn't work. Didn't have enough smarts ta be an observer, an' I didn't want ta go inta the mountains with the explorers, like you. So I managed ta get a spot on a coralin expedition. Under Carmelo." Rawl's eyes flicked to the standing man's with this mention of one of the leaders who had preceded Banjee. "When we got ta Tibernia, I jus' decided ta stay there."

  Banjee couldn't help a frown. It was plausible, though highly unusual. "So now you're wantin' to go home again," he stated.

  "O' course! A man can only take so much o' the bornlords!" Rawl's comment was intended for the others, and Rory and another man laughed.

  Banjee was too tired to push it any further that night. "Just so we're clear about taking fair turns with the chores. If you can't be in the sun, I'll expect you to work at night."

  "No problem, sa. I'll get busy right away." Still, Rawl remained seated as Banjee made his way to check with the armsor on first guard shift.

  There stood only one more water source, another nine days away, between Lake Hope and Aldar. To get there by the shortest route, the caravan struck a path into the plains from the northwestern corner of the shrunken water body where they'd camped for three days. The next water body, Lake Desperation, was even smaller than Lake Hope, and as they headed out, with Banjee's sun-blasted eyes picking out the markers in a landscape that had none, he forced himself to drop any thoughts of what they might find there.

  "See that, Malila?" Banjee drove, and he transferred the reins to his knotted left hand as he pointed to a slight swell in the yellow distance. "Once you round the lake and pick up the northwest bearing, study the horizon for that rise. We're going to hold that at eleven o'clock for the rest of the day."

  She nodded silent agreement and then looked down at her lap to check the reading on the compass. By this time Malila could probably do this by herself. Maybe she would too, next year. Banjee could feel in his bones that he was tired of it.


  One of the wagon's wheels hit a hole, causing a bone-jarring jerk that the two humans suffered stoically. Talons clamped into the shoulder pad, Angel swayed forward and then straightened with an indignant ruffle of his glossy feathers. The motion caught Malila's attention.

  "Angel doesn't like that Rawl fellow," Malila ventured.

  "Can't say I do either," Banjee answered slowly. He'd have never been able to stay leader so long if he didn't listen to his intuition, and for reasons unknown to him, his intuition was telling him there was more to Rawl than the man was telling them. "Couldn't exactly leave him out in the grasslands to die," he finished.

  "No," Malila agreed. She hesitated a few seconds and continued. "That's interesting, what Patchy said. That she thinks Rawl might be the one kicked out of the armsor class ahead of hers."

  In reply, Banjee gave a, “Humph." The veteran leader of their small armsor force had approached him with her information only the day before. Rawl had already admitted he'd had armsor training, and Patchy, in her taciturn remembrance, had only been able to add to the stranger's story that she thought his dismissal was somehow related to a counseling issue. Somehow Rawl hadn't fit into the way armsors needed to be. That was no crime in and of itself.

  "And what do you think of his sun poisoning?" Malila continued.

  Guiding the deer around a tangle of deadened brush, Banjee's dour frown deepened. "Humph. You'd think he's hiding, the way he acts, but he's been talkative enough." That was true. To anyone who would listen, the lean man talked. His Tibernian stories were fantastically engaging entertainment to an audience that really knew nothing about the homeland of the ancestors who had spawned them. Their once-a-year coralin expeditions were secretive, staying at different locations in the outlands each year and with only the businesspeople and a few armsors going to the city, Tregon, to meet with the Traders who then brought the coralin to them. The issues with Tibernia were old, however, and sometimes Banjee wondered if the charade was even needed any more...

  Malila's voice pulled him from his wool gathering. "There's another," she said. Looking up, Banjee saw it, the tiny robed form off to the east. The Traders were still about, searching for whatever they'd lost. "Void. Just wish I knew what they wanted," she said. Banjee did too.

  The caravan kept to its placid pace, stopping so they could shade the deer for the worst hours of heat. Tacking almost due north in the afternoon and with Malila at the reins, they moved into a slightly hillier region where the caravan leaders were forced to find their markers each time they crested a ridge. Finally getting down to aid the deer as they struggled up an unusually steep mound, Banjee was surprised when his co-leader reined in the deer sharply. Pushing his way through the yucca to reach the front of the wagon, Banjee was brought up short by the five robed men who sat astride their fleet horses not twenty feet ahead.

  "Bonay!" Banjee called a startled hello in one of the few Trader words he knew, while Angel took that moment to throw out his wings and jump from his shoulder. The Traders said nothing, though the rook may have startled them somewhat too. Several of the warriors watched spellbound as the huge bird climbed the air.

  The five riders wore the red and black striped sashes of the tribe that roamed the grasslands northeast of Tibernia. They were far out of their territory now, in the no man land of the lakes. "Bonay!" Banjee called again, unease mixing with a strong determination to find what ailed the Traders. He wished he knew more of their tongue, but he'd had no reason to learn it before.

  "Let me get someone who can talk with you," he said, pointing at his mouth and shaking his head and then gesturing backward at the trailing wagons, trying to indicate he would get someone else who could understand.

  "No talk," the grizzled Trader at the head of the group said in rough Aldaran. "You go." It was clear the horseman was telling Banjee to get in the wagon and leave. Shaking his head at Patchy, who held her bow and peered with concern from under the curved awning over the wagon behind his, Banjee climbed up next to Malila, who snapped the reins and put the deer into motion again. As Patchy blew a whistle signal telling the armsors in the train to hold, their wagons lumbered slowly past the Traders, who spread out and stared at the barrels and bags of each vehicle as it passed.

  "What do they want?" Malila ground again between gritted teeth as the last wagon passed the Traders.

  Turned on the hard seat, Banjee shook his head in reply as he watched. Behind the train, the Traders drew close together on the crest of the swale. Suddenly one threw out a closed fist before jerking his horse away toward his fellows. Apprehension bloomed in the caravan leader's gut and then the Traders whirled on their horses and were instantly gone.

  "They're gone now," Banjee reported, though his disturbance still clung. "Pull it a bit to the right, Malila. You've veered off track with the visitors."

  In the twelfth wagon behind them, Rawl shoved back the stifling oil skins he'd dove under for covering. The driver, his friend Rory, seemed to think nothing of Rawl's aversion to, "those stinking grasslanders." After all, Rawl had lived with them a long time, trying to bring them civilization, that is, until a chief, jealous of Rawl's popularity, decided to chase him away.

  Rawl clambered to his seat on a barrel behind Rory, smirking grimly to himself at his success in evading the Nomers once again. Then his eye caught sight of his sheathed sword with its carved hilt lying on the bags just next to the awning. Damn. Well, the Nomers hadn't stopped them so they must not have seen it. He was plain lucky, that was all.

  The next day felt particularly hot, the sun broiling with an intensity that left the drivers light-headed. Banjee, after allowing use of their rationed water in the morning to dampen rags draped over the deer’s heads, extended the mid-day rest so that deer and humans alike could stay in the shade of the covered wagons.

  The expedition set out again in the fourth afternoon hour, the members sagging into their seats and the deer moving in a mindless shamble. Angel flew off, seeking dinner and cooler air aloft. Sometime later, as they crawled through the heat, Banjee heard raised voices from behind, from the wagon that followed. Tomer, the male armsor who had come to his side when Rawl first appeared at Lake Hope, was talking loudly with Patchy as he gestured to the south. The man's tunic was sweat-streaked, and he walked to keep up with the wagon.

  The caravan leader called a halt, allowing the two armsors to join him and Malila. With them, he stared behind at the horizon and soon made out, miles away, across the flatness of the baking plains, what seemed to be a band of horse riders throwing up a small cloud of dust.

  "What the…,” Malila began, finally seeing what the others pointed out.

  Banjee's comment was a sigh. "Well, maybe this time we'll find out what's ailin' them. Looks like they're coming right for us. Give the deer a ration of water," he told Malila. "We'll wait here for 'em."

  His co-leader jumped from the wagon and made her way down the train issuing orders. Soon those party members not responsible for the deer were milling, stretching their legs as they speculated on the visitors. Only Patchy seemed to view the riders with approbation, and she carefully spread out her people where their arrows would be most effective. Banjee realized what she was doing, and after a minute's thought, issued the order for anyone else who had arms to secure them as well. The order surprised many, but most Aldarans had at least a modicum of training, and most of the merchants and drivers strapped on swords and gathered bows.

  It was a curiously tense party that watched the dust cloud grow. Forms of perhaps thirty riders materialized, and rather than slowing as they neared, the ground-eating lope of their horses suddenly broke into a punishing gallop about half a mile away. Along with that came a rising wail that stood the hair on the Aldarans' necks.

  "For demon's sake, don't stand there! They're attackin’, you fools!" It was Rawl, clutching a borrowed bow and with a poorly stocked satchel of arrows over his shoulder. He stood in the
harsh sunlight, screaming at Banjee and the people around him.

  Banjee wanted nothing more than to talk to the Traders, and he had gathered the businesspeople to translate. He frowned in muddled shock at Rawl. "We need to talk to them…,” Banjee began.

  "Talk! They aren't goin' ta talk!" Rawl screamed. "Once they've started wailin' they won't stop 'til they've won or been driven off!" The stranger was close to panic. Rawl turned and sprinted to the nearest wagon, sinking to his knees behind its cover.

  The war cries had escalated to a pulsing scream that vibrated like a screeching whirlwind in the oppressive heat. The Traders flew at them, but still Banjee hesitated, expecting them to pull up. Suddenly an arrow flew past their heads.

  "They're attacking!" Expedition members dove for cover as the riders poured at them. Suddenly, just in front of the line of carts, one of the robed horsemen wavered and fell. Another fell, then another, as the arrows of the armsors' landed. Two horsemen surged between two of the wagons, only to be struck down almost immediately. Every Aldaran archer was busy then, as the line of mounted riders spread out and pulled back.

  The Traders circled and charged from the west, but this time it was clear that the expedition's bows had far better range than those of the grasslanders. None of the Traders' arrows fell within striking distance no matter how they circled or tried. The damage had been done, however. One handler had been killed, and one of the merchants writhed from the arrow in his right chest.

  For more than two hours the Traders played with them, circling and coming in at them, their wails rising to a crescendo, and then just as rapidly pulling away again as the Aldaran arrows grazed their flanks. Just as suddenly, the remaining riders finally gathered in a swirl and then turned, loping off in the direction from which they had come.

  Spurred by his shock, Banjee dealt with his expedition members gruffly, forcing the stunned handlers into consoling the deer and the merchants to check for damage. Only the armsors seemed capable of clearly acting on their own, and with guards posted, Patchy assisted their armsor medic in preparing to work on the wounded merchant.

  Banjee didn't catch up with Rawl until later, when the bandaged merchant slept fitfully next to the fire used to boil the medical instruments. In Aldar, the man's punctured lung would likely heal, but out here, in the dirt and heat? Banjee’s first words to the stranger were sharp. "What do you know about this attack?"

  Rawl scrunched into a corner of Rory's wagon, his skinny legs dangling over the open backboard. "I know I warned you,