Get Her Back (Demontech) Read Free Page B

him, Balta.” He turned his mare and headed toward the end of the column.
          “Look what we found trying to follow us, Sir Haft,” one of the Bloody Axes, Farkas by name, said when Haft reached the small knot of riders.
          What Haft saw was a funny-looking little man. His face was deeply lined and his skin was a bronzed tan. A colorful scarf was wrapped around his head. He wore a colorfully-patterned cloth that wrapped around his waist and hung almost to his ankles. Rope sandals were on his feet. He rode sidesaddle on a donkey, and led a pack mule laden with chests and bolts of cloth. He looked indignant until he looked at Haft, at which point his expression became belligerent.
          “Lord Haft,” the man said, “do you not recognize me?”
          Haft looked from the odd man to his pack mule and what it carried and back to him. “I don’t know your name,” he said. “But it looks like you’re a mage from the Kondive Islands.”
          The man gave a shallow bow while tapping his forehead, his lips and his chest. “I have the honor of being Tabib, Mage Second Class—from the Kondive Islands, exactly as Lord Haft has said. When the Lord Spinner realized that you had left without a mage, he assigned to me the honor of accompanying you.”
          “I see,” Haft said. “I sincerely hope we won’t need your talents or magics, but you’re welcome, Tabib.” Then to Farkas, “Put him in the middle of the column.” Back to Tabib, “That way you’ll be able to  respond quickly wherever you might be needed. But I still hope you won’t be needed.
          “And cover your body before this infernal wind flays your skin to the bone!”
          Tabib smiled a secret smile, gave another shallow bow and  ignored what Haft said about the wind flaying him. “It is better to have a mage and not need him than to need a mage and not have one,” he quoted sagely—or a bit self-importantly, as Haft thought.
          Haft turned and trotted his mare back to where Balta and  Jurnieks waited for him. He told them about the Kondive Islander mage as they began leading the column south, and concluded with a sour, “Like all mages, he has no lack of a sense of self-worth.”
          While Haft was seeing to Tabib, Balta had sent three riders ahead as scouts. They were clearly visible more than half a mile ahead, bent over from a wind that was striking them from the north.
     
     

 
     
    CHAPTER FOUR
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
          It was late afternoon when the three-man point team stopped to wait for Haft and the rest of the small column to close the half mile gap between them. They had found the place where the Golden Girl and her Zobran Royal Lancers had reached the top of the High Desert’s plateau. By now, the runaway and her escort had a nearly two-day lead. Haft and Lieutenant Balta agreed it was unlikely that they’d catch up with Alyline before she reached the Desert Nomads’ camp. They also thought that the less time she spent there before they arrived, the easier it would be to extract her and any surviving Royal Lancers. The fearsome reputation of the nomads left them with no illusions about Alyline receiving a friendly welcome on her arrival at their camp.
          They turned inland, following the clear track Alyline’s party had left on the barren ground. In addition to the lead scouts they now put out flankers, two riders to each side, a quarter of a mile out from the short column, to watch for possible danger coming from the sides.
          Haft had hoped that the constant wind would die down, but  it didn’t. All it did was change from gusts to a steady northerly  wind. The wind didn’t, however, cover over the tracks they were  following—the ground was too hard for the wind to quickly shift its surface, as such wind would cover tracks made in sand or snow.
          “What are you saying?” Haft asked Jurnieks. The