Chapter 206: One Left
The man had Siban’s right wrist trapped under a knee, the knife already coming for his throat while he was still twisted against the wet clay.
He reacted on instinct. Chin down. Hard turn left.
The blade scratched across his jaw from ear toward chin, shallow because the turn denied it any depth. He bridged hard off the ground, driving through his hips, both feet digging into the leaf mat. The man’s knee lifted from his wrist as the man’s balance shifted backward.
Siban rolled free of the weight.
Half a second of distance.
He slashed for the man’s ribs while he was resetting his footing. The man saw it coming and twisted, making the blade score across the outside of his ribs instead of entering between them. Cloth tore, blood followed.
But the man found stable footing on the clay and kept advancing.
From the direction of the fallen trunk, Aydos shouted. The noise cut off abruptly.
Nothing followed.
Siban noticed it and forced his attention back to the man. There was nothing he could do about Aydos if he died here.
The man drove forward in a rush, leaning into the attack.
Siban caught his knife wrist with his left hand and locked down on it. Then his injured forearm failed at the worst possible moment. The wounded muscle released his grip without permission. The man ripped free in one motion.
For two seconds Siban retreated across the leaf mat with no real offense left, using both arms only to survive.
The man cut across his arm through an opening in his defense, a graze through the coat sleeve, then smashed a headbutt into the bridge of Siban’s nose.
Sharp pain hit at once, his vision blurring in both eyes. He lost track of the blade hand for a critical second.
The man tried to capitalize, coming over him to secure position.
Before the man could settle his weight, Siban drove his right elbow into his stomach, enough to interrupt his posture.
The delay bought him half a second, and he used it to recover footing on the slick clay and fight back toward balance.
He heard nothing behind him now.
The forest had gone quiet.
By then, Siban had memorized the man fighting habits. The weight he committed, the forward lean, the direction he attacked.
Siban prepared for the next charge and changed his answer.
When the man pressed again, Siban dropped beneath the attack instead of meeting it.
He slipped under the blade, inside the reach, and drove his knife upward into the outside of the man’s thigh as he went down. The blade punched through muscle and the leg failed under the pressure.
While the man staggered sideways, Siban continued the motion and brought his right elbow across. Bone met bone. He found the guide’s cheekbone as the man’s balance tilted.
The strike landed cleanly.
The man’s head snapped left. His body followed into the wet leaves.
He was knocked out.
Siban stood over him and took one breath.
The man’s chest still moved. The thigh wound bled into the leaf mat but not from the artery.
Siban crouched and looked through the bushes.
Aydos lay beyond them, face up in the leaves. The blade wound through his chest had been delivered after the shoulder arrow had already weakened him.
Dead.
Aydos still held his knife in his right hand. Blood had spread from the wound into the clay around his shoulders.
Yilbars sat against the trunk, both hands locked over the rib wound. He had bled out during the fight while Siban was occupied with the man.
Sorhat had slid down the trunk and now sat at its base. Both wounds remained open, and the blood around him in the leaf mat had gone dark and cold.
Dead.
Tabar lay face-down in the leaves fifty meters back, dead where the first arrow had struck him in the ambush.
Siban remained where he was and glanced at each of them once.
Then he turned back toward the hollow where the man lay bleeding on the ground.
He dragged the guide by the collar with his right hand, keeping his left pressed against his side. He moved as fast as the dead weight allowed.
The man carved a clear blood trail through the leaf mat behind them. Too visible, but speed mattered more than concealment until concealment became available.
The pursuit came from the southeast before he had covered a hundred meters. Footsteps, voices, fast movement through brush.
Siban scanned the ground ahead while moving. There were root masses and clay depressions packed with years of fallen leaves. The kind of terrain the man had used to vanish from Siban’s sight before the tackle.
He found a depression twenty meters to his right behind a cluster of roots where the ground dropped below the surrounding surface.
Good enough. First he got some blood on his hand and kept the trail east.
Then he pulled the man into it, covered them both with loose brush from the near side, and turned his face sideways to keep the airway clear.
Two men passed in the next minute, moving fast. Their sounds carried eastward and faded.
Siban counted to sixty, waiting for more enemies that never came.
Then he pulled the man from the depression and continued northwest.
He reached the camp late in the afternoon with the man’s weight across his shoulders and dried blood in three separate places on his clothes.
Chanat was on watch and spotted him before he reached the camp perimeter.
Siban lowered the prisoner against some roots and faced the four operatives who were currently in the camp.
"We got ambushed, the others are dead."
He put it flatly, but a strain existed beneath his voice. "This man was part of the ambush force."
Siban glanced at the prisoner again.
Chanat crouched beside the man and studied his face for a moment. Brow shape. Cheekbones. Eye set.
He worked through the features before answering.
"That face isn’t Rus," Chanat stated. "He’s Mordvinian."
He looked up at Siban.
"Eastern Erzya, forest clans."
"Get Tirka," Siban ordered.
One of the operatives near the rear of camp moved immediately.
Tirka was a compact man in his thirties whose capability to speak the Erzya language had already made him of use three times during the weeks in these forests.
He arrived without needing an explanation, across from the prisoner, and rested his hands loosely on his knees.
The man was waking.
His eyes shifted beneath closed lids, opened, adjusted to the canopy light overhead, then moved across the gathered faces until they found Siban.
They stopped there.
He was awake. He understood exactly where he was.
Tirka started the interrogation.
