The Ruby Knight

expensive.’
    ‘Take your bill to Stragen,’ Tel suggested.
    ‘Stragen pays very slowly. I’d rather collect from you and let you argue with him.’
    ‘All right.’ Tel’s tone was slightly sulky.
    ‘Here they come,’ one of the other cut-throats said without any particular excitement.
    The first two brigands to come around the curve probably didn’t even see them. Tel’s laconic archer was at least as good as he had claimed to be. The two men fell from their saddles, one at the side of the road and the other vanishing into the gorge. Their horses ran on a few yards and then pulled up when they saw Tel’s mounted men blocking the road.
    The archer missed one of the next pair that came around the sharp curve. ‘He ducked,’ he said. ‘Let’s see him try to get out of the way of this one.’ He pulled his bow and shot again, and his arrow took the fellow in the forehead. The man tumbled over backwards and lay in the road kicking.
    Then the brigands came around the curve in a cluster. The archer loosed several arrows into their midst. ‘You’d better go now, Tel,’ he said. ‘They’re coming on a little too fast.’
    ‘Let’s ride!’ Tel shouted, settling his pike under his arm in a manner curiously reminiscent of that used by armoured knights. Tel’s men had a peculiar assortment of weapons, but they handled them in a professional manner.
    Because Faran was by far the strongest and fastest horse they had, Sparhawk outdistanced the others in the fifty-pace intervening stretch of road. He crashed into the centre of the startled group of men, swinging his sword to the right and left in broad overhand strokes. The men he was attacking wore no mail to protect them, and so Sparhawk’s blade bit deep into them. A couple of them feebly tried to hold rusty swords up to ward off his ruthless blows, but Sparhawk was a trained swordsman who could alter his point of aim even in mid-swing, and the two fell howling into the road, clutching at the stumps of missing right hands.
    A red-bearded man had been riding at the pack of ambushers. He turned to flee, but Tel plunged past Sparhawk, his blond hair flying, his pike lowered, and the two disappeared around the curve.
    Tel’s men followed along behind Sparhawk, cleaning up with brutal efficiency.
    Sparhawk trotted Faran around the curve. Tel, it appeared, had picked the red-bearded man out of the saddle with his pike, and the fellow lay writhing on the road with the pike protruding from his back. Tel dismounted and squatted beside the mortally wounded man. ‘It didn’t turn out so well, did it, Dorga?’ he said in an almost friendly tone. ‘I told you a long time ago that waylaying travellers was a risky business.’ Then he pulled the pike out of his former chieftain’s back and calmly kicked him off the edge of the cliff. Dorga’s despairing shriek faded down into the gorge.
    ‘Well,’ Tel said to Sparhawk, ‘I guess that takes care of all this. Let’s go on down. It’s still some distance to Heid.’
    Tel’s men were disposing of the bodies of the dead and wounded ambushers by casually throwing them into the gorge.
    ‘It’s safe now,’ Tel told them. ‘Some of you stay here and round up those people’s horses. We ought to be able to get a good price for them. The rest of you, come with us. Coming, Sparhawk?’ and he led the way on down the road.
    The days seemed to drag on as they moved through the unpopulated mountains of central Thalesia. At one point, Sparhawk reined Faran back to ride beside Sephrenia and Flute. ‘To me it seems as if we’ve been out here on this road for five days at least,’ he said to the little girl. ‘How long has it really been?’
    She smiled and raised two fingers.
    ‘You’re playing with time again, aren’t you?’ he accused.
    ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘You didn’t buy me that kitten the way you promised you would, so I have to play with something.’
    He gave up at that point. Nothing in the world is more immutable than the rising and setting of the sun, but Flute seemed able to alter those events at will. Sparhawk had seen Bevier’s consternation when she had patiently explained the inexplicable to him. He decided that he did not wish to experience that himself.
    It seemed to be several days later – though Sparhawk would not have taken an oath to that effect – when at sunset the flaxen-haired Tel pulled his horse in beside Faran. ‘That smoke down there is coming from the chimneys at