Chapter 7

Part 3

“Okay.” he said as he took off his tunic. “First, I’m going to leave my boots on. They won’t be able to see that I have them on unless I stand right at the very edge of the cliff. Second, I’m a pretty good shot, but it would take a miracle to be able to get a hit on them from this far up and this far away.”

“The boots are fine, and just shoot your best, one arrow for each man, and call your targets. And it’s better to shoot a little long than a little short.” she said as she carefully applied more ash and charcoal to his skin, hair, and trousers.

She had a ball of dried grass soaked in berry juice inside a ball of wax she’d made from the jar seals, and she reddened the sword as he placed his bow for a quick grab, then carefully stuck his arrows standing up in the only patch of turf on the cliff top. It was a bit out of the way, but he judged it would still give him quicker shots than picking them up off of the ground.

She handed him the sword. “You’ll have to turn it every few seconds until the syrup dries a bit more, to keep it from running off. Now watch this.”

She laid down on her belly and wiggled forward until she could just see the trap site. “Ready?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, keep watching me.” she said, then cast her spell.

Suddenly his mind became conflicted. His eyes could still see her, but the rest of his mind insisted that she had disappeared. He tried to force himself to keep looking at her, but started to get a disorienting feeling of vertigo and had to look away. Then he couldn’t look at her anymore. He could let his eyes sweep past where she was as long as he wasn’t trying hard to see her, but her presence simply didn’t register.

“Uck. I feel like I’m gonna throw up.”

“This is the Unseen spell.” she giggled. “It’s better than Invisibility, because with Invisibility you might see my footprints as I walk or something. But this way, your mind simply refuses to acknowledge my presence, and if you hadn’t been watching me and concentrating on me when I cast it you would never know I was right here beside you.”

“Wow, that is good!” he marveled, then he heard the sound of a rock being scuffed by a boot and ducked down as he looked to the path below.

“There they are.” he murmured, just as she said;

“Here they come.”

The soldiers were moving up the path at a fairly slow walk; the lead two trackers in gray Taldrian uniforms with no armor, the first of them with his eyes trained on the ground ahead. There followed twenty-four in armor over their uniforms, being steel helmets, segmented bronze breast and back pieces with shoulder caps, steel guards on the forearms to the back of the hand, steel shin plates from knee to ankle, and studded leather skirts. All wore a short sword sheathed on the left of their belt, and half also had a long sword sheathed diagonally at their back and round iron shields notched on the upper right. The other half had medium length bows laminated with sinew and two quivers of arrows.

“Third and fourth are the two from yesterday.” Green Eyes quietly informed him.

“Wow, you have good vision. I can’t see that from here, and I thought my eyes were pretty sharp.”

When the soldiers reached the trap the snares worked exactly as they were intended to. The lead tracker was jerked off his feet, though he must have looked right where the first snare was a third of a second before it got him. The men behind him jumped in startlement at the sudden motion, then he screamed gutturally in agony. The other tracker and three others rushed to his aid, and the snares got two of them and jerked them off their feet as well.

Then there was a lot of confused and frightened yelling, which slowly calmed when nothing else happened. It took the other men almost ten minutes to get the snares off the ankles of the three victims, who had lost a lot of blood by that time, despite the efforts of their comrades to hold tight around their legs above the wounds.

Then it seemed that they were going to carry their wounded back down the trail, and not advance any farther.

“Do something!” Green Eyes hissed.

Soul Dead stood. He didn’t yell insults and he didn’t wave his sword. Instead he let the sword hang by his side with the red syrup dripping off the tip and gave a hideous and unearthly scream, as long and as loud as he could, and made sure he was not looking exactly at the soldiers. Instead he looked about six meters to one side of them, in an effort to appear more sinister.

From the panicked and horrified tone of Smid’s voice, it worked. “That’s him!!!” the man yelled, pointing up at Soul Dead and adding; “That’s the boy that killed Sergeant Lekin!!!”

“Get him!” the man who had been fifth in line yelled, and the rest rushed up the path.

Smid hit the trip wire with his third step, but because they were running up the trail when the small avalanche was released, three of them were above the zone of destruction when the boulders fell and rolled past them. They stopped when they realized they were clear of the danger, and looked back in time to see the last of their comrades being struck or crushed by the thirty centimeter to one-meter-wide rocks as they turned and tried to run back down the trail in a panic.

The exception was the man who had yelled the command. He had been standing beside the snare victims near the top of the destruction zone when the rock fall was released, and the boulders hadn’t yet gained very much speed when they reached him. In an amazing display of composure and athleticism he jumped the first boulder, dodged the second, and dodged the third with the assist of pushing it aside with both hands as it bounced past while he was struggling uphill. Then he was stumbling but above the danger, and joined the three surviving runners in watching the last of his men being killed or wounded.

“Shoot him first!” Green Eyes urgently hissed, and Soul Dead had no trouble with knowing who she was talking about.

He shot four arrows as quickly as he could while still taking careful aim, and quietly called his targets as he shot. “The commander. The highest man. The next highest. The last.”

Out of the corner of his eye he could tell when Green Eyes’ head moved, though he didn’t look at her. She glanced quickly back and forth between the arrows and their targets, up and down, arrows targets arrows targets arrows targets.

He saw the first two arrows hit before he started hearing the thwack of their impacts. The arrows were flying down at over forty-five degrees when they hit. The commander got it just under his ear and the arrow came halfway out the side of his throat. The highest man got it in the upper part of his right arm just above the elbow, and the second highest got it in almost exactly the same place. The man standing beside the commander got it in the base of his neck at the side and the arrow almost disappeared into his body.

The two with the arm wounds had jumped a bit and stared in shocked surprise as their leader was shot, then yelled and clutched their arms as they were hit, then almost screamed in fear as the last man was shot down.

“Do the scream again and hold still!” Green eyes quietly commanded. He did the scream and looked away a bit as before, while she released the Unseen spell from herself and gradually cast in on him as the two men looked up at Soul Dead in shocked terror. The two men blinked hard and shook their heads as he disappeared, then scrambled down the path in an absolute panic.

“Ha! Yes!!” Green Eyes barked a nasty little laugh. “Those were great shots! I hardly had to guide them at all to get them to go where I wanted them! In case you couldn’t see it, the two whose lives I spared with the arm hits are the two who got away yesterday! You can imagine how they’ll make it seem when they report all this to their superiors!”