Owlflight

But now he had new worries. He froze; suddenly they were no longer alone.

He heard the guards before he saw signs of them; heard their voices echoing toward him down the hollow wooden tube. He froze in place, afraid that they had already caught the sounds of hands and knees shuffling through the water above their heads. In another moment, he saw little flickering bits of light reflected in the water, coming through cracks and crevices in the aqueduct cover. They’re going to hear us. They have some magic, or another Yip Dog, that will sense the Hawkbrothers. They have a real dog that will smell us up here! It was all he could do to keep from shouting in panic as the lights drew nearer, as he felt the walls pressing in on him. He began to shiver even harder, and clenched his teeth tightly to keep them from chattering.

Then, miraculously, the lights and voices passed right on by.

He hardly believed it at first, and only a sharp prod from behind got him going again. Twice more, lights and voices approached and passed, and twice more they all froze in place, waiting, shivering in the cold water.

At long last, his hand encountered the end of the aqueduct. They were in the cistern house, where the aqueduct spilled into a storage cistern which in turn led to the horse trough outside the cistern house. He hung onto the end of the trough, and lowered himself down into the cistern, being careful not to make more of a splash than the water pouring into the cistern already made.

One by one, the rest of the Hawkbrothers followed, first into the cistern, then, shivering and chilled, onto the floor of the cistern house beside him.

“I want you to stay here,” Snowfire said in his ear. “Keep out of sight. You’ve done all you need to.”

He nodded, his teeth clenched to keep them from chattering. He couldn’t have replied if he’d wanted to, for he was shivering too hard, and not just with cold.

“He shouldn’t stay here,” hissed someone else. “There’s no place to hide and only one way in or out, and if anyone comes in here after water, they’re going to find him!”

Snowfire growled, but reluctantly agreed. “Let me have Hweel check the stable.”

Silence then, except for the sound of falling water and occasional voices outside the cistern house. Darian was in a constant state of terror lest some drunkard stumble to douse his head and find them all there. At long last, Snowfire spoke again.

“Dar’ian, go to the stable,” he ordered. “Hweel says that there are no humans quartered in there, nothing but horses. You should be safe enough at this time of night, and it’s halfway between the threshing barn and here. We can get you on our way out of the village.”

Darian just nodded, and waited while the others slipped out, two and three at a time, his gut clenched tight all the while.

How am I going to get out of here? he asked himself, once the last of them were gone. I can’t move and hide like they can! Somebody is going to see me for sure!

As if to underscore that fear, he heard precisely what he had feared most to hear - the sound of three or four drunken men approaching the cistern house, talking loudly in some foreign babble.

Were they coming here? Where could he hide? Could he get inside the cistern? Would they see him if he did? As he felt blindly about for the edge of the cistern, his hand encountered a bucket that had been left behind, and suddenly a plan burst in on his mind in a blaze of illumination. Quickly, he grabbed the bucket, filled it at the cistern, and just as the men reached the door, he opened it, trudging openly out into the square with his heavy, sloshing bucket.

Exactly as he had hoped, the men ignored him. He was just another slave, and a child at that, insignificant and unworthy of a moment’s thought. They shoved past him, and as he trudged away, he heard them splashing and choking in the water, trying to sober themselves up.

Ugh. It’s a good thing that from there, the water goes to the horse trough. But if I was a horse, I wouldn‘t want to drink it after they’d had their dirty heads in it.

He continued to trudge toward the stable, carrying the bucket-handle in both hands, hoping that no one would notice his long knife at his side, the only weapon he had with him. Snowfire wouldn’t let him have anything else, and at the time he had thought it a pitiful excuse for a weapon, but he rather doubted that these people allowed their slaves to have anything as dangerous as a knife.

At last he reached the shelter of the stable. He put down the bucket, opened the door, picked the bucket back up and slipped inside. Just in case Hweel had been mistaken, he wanted an excuse to be here, and a bucket of water was a perfectly good excuse.

But it was black in there, without even a night-lamp. That meant that there was nothing, and no one waiting, except for horses.

He waited for his eyes to adjust to the dark, listening to them stamping and blowing, breathing in the scent of horse sweat and hay. Once he could see a little, he walked up to the nearest stall. Each of the stalls had an