Chapter 8

Part 3

“Yup.” he calmly smiled. “Now I see what you meant about the weak Movement spell. It doesn’t take very much force to nudge an arrow in flight over a bit, but that took a lot of talent to do it with four arrows at once. That was really well done.”

“And you were masterfully terrifying! That scream was a lot better than the insults I told you to use!”

“Thanks. So now what do we do?”

“Well first, I lay here for a bit and recover my power. Those movements and two Unseen spells were some work. I’m a little depleted. It tires you out.”

“Oh. Two Unseen spells?”

“I cast it on you at the end, as those two were looking up at you. That’s why I told you to hold still. It works better that way.”

“Ah. I should’ve guessed that.”

“Damn. It bothers me that you don’t seem to have any feeling of triumph after a great victory!”

He shrugged. “It was interesting. What do we do after you’ve rested?”

“We go down there, kill any wounded survivors, and loot the bodies.”

He nodded, and sat down to wait.

PART 4

After a while he asked her; “You let those two live so they’d tell the rest of the army what happened here, and send some more back here after us?”

“Yup.” she nodded, and slowly sat up, still watching the fallen on the path below. “I don’t know if it’ll work though. The army will be a day’s march into Taldria by the time they stop for the night, and those two wounded idiots won’t catch up to them before then, maybe not until after midnight or later. There won’t be any chance that they’ll send more after us until tomorrow morning, then they won’t get here until tomorrow night. They’ll camp on the flats by your house tomorrow night rather than risk traveling a trapped mountain path in the dark, then start up here the next morning.

“Meanwhile everyone in the army is dispersing and going home to their families. I don’t know if they’ll even bother sending anyone after us.”

Oh, they’ll send someone after us, all right.” he stated with assurance. “They lost twenty-four men plus two wounded today, plus two dead yesterday, plus four the night before, and it happened right here in their own country during peacetime. In the midst of a war in another country they might have been willing to accept that, but not like this, when they have nothing else to do. They’ll probably send horsemen, to get them here faster, and they’ll know that we used magic for sure this time, so they’ll probably send at least one wizard too.

“I’d bet the horsemen will leave as soon as those two make their report, then travel at night along the main road and be down below in two or three hours’ ride, camp the rest of the night down on the flats and come after us sometime tomorrow morning.”

“Hmm. That’s good thinking.” she mused. “ I hope it goes that way. I’d hate to have to just wait around for two days until they get here.

“How much farther up the main path is the next trap?”

“There’s a really big pit trap another fifteen minute hike up from where we slept last night. Father just covered up a natural crevasse, but it’s impossible to see because he planted sods of grass on the lid. Then about another ten minutes’ up there’s a boulder trap with just one big boulder about two-point-seven meters wide that rolls down a three-meter-wide slot that the path goes through. That’s all for this area. About an hour’s hike east there’s another shelter with a bunch of traps around it. There’s another cache halfway there.

“The traps are really a lot of work to make, each one can take days, so they’re all in bunches around the shelters, with a smaller cache between each shelter. You can’t sleep outside at night at all around here unless you keep a fire going and post a guard; there’s giant ferrets and three kinds of wild cats and two kinds of wild dogs that all hunt at night. If you have a fire but no alert guard they still might try to get you if they can approach from upwind and keep you between them and the fire. So when you build a trap you have to be able to make it back to a shelter in an hour or two at most, or you can’t get enough done each day.

“If you have a cave or a sturdy cabin you just have to have a fire before you go to sleep so it smells like smoke, and you’ll be okay. The night predators don’t like being in danger in enclosed spaces. In the day all you really have to worry about is bears; the snakes only try to bite you if you almost step on them. Dragons haven’t hunted here for fifty years.

“So, what are you going to do if they send a wizard?”

“Well. Either we’ll kill a wizard, or we’ll get killed by a wizard.” she told him without looking away from the carnage below. “I’m ready for death if it takes me.”

“Ah. Are you watching for movement among those soldiers down there?”

“Yes.” she answered.

She didn’t elaborate, so he didn’t press her on it.

Eventually she stood up and stretched, so he led her down the mountain.

“Listen,” she told him when they got back to the main path, “Why don’t you give me the pack and go back to the cave and make something hot to eat. I’ll go down and do what’s necessary, then come back for lunch, then you can go down with me and help me carry anything we should take that I can’t bring in one trip.”

He stared at her a moment. “You’re hiding something. Why don’t you want me to go with you?”

She gained an irritated look. “All right, the fact is that they’re human and Taldrian, and so are you. Killing the helpless wounded is a whole different thing from what you’ve done so far. There’s at least seven of them still alive. After I kill the first one the rest will probably yell for help or beg for mercy, and I’ll kill them anyway. You’ve been good about helping me against human Taldrians so far, but even though they killed your family, I don’t think it’s right to ask you to take part in this. And I don’t think it would be wise of me to have you along. I have no idea how you’d react.”

“Yeah, I understand that.” he nodded. “For what it’s worth, I don’t have any loyalty to Taldria anymore. After you told me they killed my family just for looking Bhian, I don’t think I would even if my soul wasn’t dead.”

With that, he handed her the pack, then turned away and hiked uphill.

When he reached the cave he thought he could hear the sound of men’s screams echoing among the rocks, but it was so faint that he might have just imagined it.

When she got back to the cave it was almost an hour later. She let her pack slide off her back with a satisfied groan and it hit the ground with the clink of coins. He could tell it was a different pack than the one she’d left with; slightly smaller and of much better quality. She set two arrows that he’d shot on it.

“Okay.” she said as she crouched and accepted a serving of hot soup in one of the emptied berry jars and a thick slice of dense dark bread with apple preserves on it. “So far we’ve each claimed the booty from the men we’ve killed, and you got the gold from the men your family killed. The traps were your family’s work, so you get the proceeds from twenty-two men, and I get what the two we killed with arrows had, because you would have missed all four men if I hadn’t guided the arrows’ flight. That may seem like you’ll get a lot more than me, but one of the two I killed was the officer, and he had some looted jewelry in his pack that’s worth a lot more than your share, by my reckoning. You get one hundred and thirty-seven of those little gold coins, and about the same value in various rings, brooches, gold chains, and medallions.

“The officer also had much better trail rations than the rest; nuts and dried fruit from the south, and chewy sweets.

“And, he had this.”