The Ruby Knight

unfriendly.’
    ‘How many?’
    ‘It’s very hard to tell, Sparhawk. At least a dozen, but probably fewer than a score.’
    ‘Take the children and ride back to the edge of the water.’ He looked at his companions. ‘Let’s see if we can flush them out,’ he said. ‘I don’t want them following us.’
    The knights advanced across the muddy field at a walk, their lances lowered. Berit and Kurik flanked them on either side.
    The Zemochs were hiding in a shallow trench less than a hundred yards from the beach. When they saw the seven Elenes resolutely bearing down on them, they rose with their weapons in their hands. There were perhaps fifteen of them, but the fact that they were on foot put them at a distinct disadvantage. They made no sound, uttered no war cries, and their eyes were empty.
    ‘The Seeker sent them,’ Sparhawk barked. ‘Be careful.’
    As the knights approached, the Zemochs shambled forward, and several even blindly hurled themselves on the lance points. ‘Drop the lances!’ Sparhawk commanded. ‘They’re too close!’ He cast aside his lance and drew his sword. Again the men controlled by the Seeker charged in eerie silence, and paid no attention to their fallen comrades. Although they had the advantage of numbers, they were really no match for the mounted knights, and their doom was sealed when Kurik and Berit outflanked them and came at them from the rear.
    The fight lasted for perhaps ten minutes, and then it was over.
    ‘Is anybody hurt?’ Sparhawk asked, looking around quickly.
    ‘Several, I’d say,’ Kalten replied, looking at the bodies lying in the mud. ‘This is getting to be a little too easy, Sparhawk. They charge in almost asking to be killed.’
    ‘I’m always glad to oblige,’ Tynian said, wiping his sword with a Zemoch smock.
    ‘Let’s drag them back to that trench they were hiding in,’ Sparhawk said. ‘Kurik, go back and get your spade. We’ll cover them over.’
    ‘Hide the evidence, eh?’ Kalten said gaily.
    ‘There may be others around,’ Sparhawk said. ‘Let’s not announce that we’ve been here.’
    ‘Right, but I want to make sure of them before we start dragging. I’d rather not have one wake up when my hands are occupied with his ankles.’
    Kalten dismounted and went through the grim business of ‘making sure of them’. Then they all fell to work. The slippery mud made dragging the inert bodies easier. Kurik stood at the edge of the trench scooping mud over the corpses with his spade.
    ‘Bevier,’ Tynian said, ‘are you really so attached to that lochaber?’
    ‘It’s my weapon of choice,’ Bevier replied. ‘Why do you ask?’
    ‘It’s a little inconvenient when the time comes to tidy up. When you lop off their heads like that, it means we have to make two trips with each one.’ Tynian bent over and picked up two severed heads by the hair as if to emphasize his point.
    ‘How droll,’ Bevier said drily.
    After they had dropped all the bits and pieces of the Zemoch bodies and their weapons in the trench and Kurik had covered them with mud, they rode back to the beach, where Sephrenia sat on her horse, carefully keeping Flute’s face covered with the hem of her cloak and trying to keep her own eyes turned away. ‘Have you finished?’ she asked, as Sparhawk and the others approached.
    ‘It’s all over,’ he assured her. ‘You can look now.’ He frowned. ‘Kalten just raised a point. He said that this was getting to be almost too easy. These people just charge in without thinking. It’s as if they want to be killed.’
    ‘That’s not really it, Sparhawk,’ she replied. ‘The Seeker has men to spare. It will throw away hundreds just to kill one of us – and hundreds more to kill the next one.’
    ‘That’s depressing. If it has so many, why is it sending them out in such small groups?’
    ‘They’re scouting parties. Ants and bees do exactly the same thing. They send out small groups to find what the colony is looking for. The Seeker is still an insect, after all, and in spite of Azash, it still thinks like one.’
    ‘At least they’re not reporting back,’ Kalten said, ‘- none of the ones we’ve met so far, anyway.’
    ‘They already have,’ she disagreed. ‘The Seeker knows when its forces have been diminished. It may not know precisely where we are, but it knows that we’ve been killing its soldiers. I think we’d better leave here. If there was one group out there, there are probably others as