Inkspell

64. ALL IS LOST

After a few days' rest, Dustfinger's leg was much better, and Farid was just telling the two martens how they'd soon all be stealing into the Castle of Night to rescue Meggie and her parents when bad news came to the Badger's Earth. One of the men who had been watching the road to Ombra brought it. His face was covered with blood and he could hardly keep on his feet.

"They're killing them!" he kept stammering over and over again. "They're killing them all."

"Where?" asked the Prince. "Where exactly?"

"Not two hours from here," the messenger managed to say. "Keep going north."

The Prince left ten men at the Badger's Earth. Roxane tried to persuade Dustfinger to stay, too. "You must spare your leg, or it will never heal," she said. But he would not listen to her, so she, too, came on the fast, silent march through the forest.

They heard the sound of battle long before they could see anything. Screams reached Farid's ears, cries of pain, and the whinnying of horses, shrill with fear, A moment came when the Prince signaled to them to go more slowly. A few more paces, bending low, and the ground in front of them dropped steeply to the road that ended, many miles farther on, at the gates of Ombra. Dustfinger made Farid and Roxane get down on the ground, although no one was looking their way. Hundreds of men were fighting among the trees down below, but there were no robbers among them. Robbers do not wear shirts of chain mail, breastplates, and helmets decked with peacock feathers, they seldom have horses, and never coats of arms embroidered on silken surcoats.

Dustfinger held Roxane close when she began to sob. The sun was sinking behind the hills as the Adderhead's soldiers cut down Cosimo's men one by one. It looked as if the battle had been raging for a long time; the road was covered with dead bodies lying side by side. Only a small troop was still on horseback amid all this death. Cosimo himself was among them, his beautiful face distorted by rage and fear. For a moment it looked almost as if those few mounted men would be able to carve themselves a breach in the enemy ranks, but then Firefox came among them with a company of men gleaming like deadly beetles in their armor. They mowed down Cosimo and his retinue like dry grass as the sun sank right behind the hills, as red as if all the blood that had been shed was reflected in the sky. Firefox himself struck Cosimo from his horse, and Dustfinger buried his face in Roxane's hair, as if he were tired of seeing Death at work. But Farid did not turn his head away. His face unmoving, he looked at the slaughter and thought of Meggie – Meggie, who perhaps still believed that a little ink could cure anything in this world. Would she believe it if her eyes saw what his were seeing now?

Few of Cosimo's men survived their prince. Barely a dozen fled into the trees. No one went to the trouble of pursuing them. The Adderhead's soldiers broke into cries of triumph and began plundering the corpses like a flock of vultures in human form. They did not get Cosimo's body, however. Firefox himself drove his soldiers off and had that beautiful corpse loaded onto a horse and taken away.

"Why are they doing that?" asked Farid.

"Why? Because his corpse is the proof that he really is dead this time," said Dustfinger bitterly.

"Yes, he is indeed," whispered the Black Prince. "I suppose you think yourself immortal if you've come back from the dead once. But he wasn't, any more than his men, and now almost all the people of Lombrica will be widows and orphans."

It was many hours before the Adderhead's soldiers finally moved away, laden with what they could rob from the dead. Darkness was coming on again when silence fell at last among the trees, the silence that is felt only in the presence of Death.

Roxane was the first to find a way down the slope. She was no longer weeping. Her face was fixed and rigid, but whether with anger or pain Farid could not have said. The robbers hesitated before following her, for the first White Women were already standing there among the dead.