eyes. There was no outcry. If the sentry had made one it had been covered by the thunder. I lay very still until my eyes adjusted. It took me a long, breathless second to find Tempi. He was up the bank some fifteen feet, kneeling over a dark shape. The sentry.
I approached him, scrabbling through the wet fern and muddy leaves. Lightning flickered again above us, more gently this time, and I saw the shaft of one of Marten’s arrows protruding at an angle from the sentry’s chest. The fletching had come loose and it fluttered in the wind like a tiny, sodden flag.
“Dead,” Tempi said when Marten and I were close enough to hear.
I doubted it. Even a deep chest wound won’t kill a man as quickly as that. But as I moved closer I saw the angle of the arrow. It was a heart shot. I looked at Marten with amazement. “That’s a shot to sing a song about,” I said quietly.
“Luck.” He dismissed it and turned his attention to the top of the ridge a few feet above us. “Let’s hope I have some left,” he said as he began to crawl.
As I crawled after him I caught a glimpse of Tempi still kneeling over the fallen man. He leaned close, as if whispering to the body.
Then I saw the camp, and all vague curiosity about the Adem’s peculiarity was pushed from my mind.
CHAPTER NINETY-ONE
Flame, Thunder, Broken Tree
The ridge we crouched on made a wide half-circle, holding the bandits’ camp in the center of a protective crescent. The result was that the camp sat at the bottom of a large, shallow bowl. From our position I could see the open portion of the bowl was bordered by a stream that curved in and away.
The trunk of a towering oak tree rose like a pillar in the center of the bowl, sheltering the camp with its huge branches. Two fires burned sullenly on either side of the great oak. Both would have been big as bonfires if not for the weather. As it was, they merely shed enough light to reveal the camp.
Camp is a misleading term, “encampment” would be better. There were six field tents, short and sloping, mostly intended for sleeping and storing equipment. The seventh tent was almost a small pavilion, rectangular and large enough for several men to stand upright.
Six men sat huddled close to the fires on makeshift benches. They were bundled up against the rain, all of them with the hard-eyed, long-suffering look of experienced soldiers.
I ducked back below the ridgeline and was surprised to feel no fear at all. I turned to Marten, and saw his eyes were a little wild. “How many do you think there are?” I asked.
His eyes flickered thoughtfully. “At least two to a tent. If their leader keeps to the big tent that makes thirteen, and we’ve killed three. So ten. Ten at the very least.” He licked his lips nervously. “But they could be sleeping as many as four to a tent, and the big tent could sleep five more in addition to the leader. That makes thirty, less three.”
“So at best we’re outnumbered two to one,” I said. “Do you like those odds?”
His eyes moved to the ridgeline, then back to me. “I’d take two to one. We’ve got surprise, we’re right up close.” He paused and coughed into his sleeve. He spat. “But there’s twenty of them down there. I can feel it in my balls.”
“Can you convince Dedan?”
He nodded. “He’ll believe me. He’s not half the ass he seems most of the time.”
“Good.” I considered briefly. Things had been happening more quickly than I can tell them aloud. So despite everything that had happened, Dedan and Hespe were still five or six minutes behind us. “Go turn the two of them around,” I told Marten. “Then come back for Tempi and me.”
He looked uncertain. “You sure you don’t want to come now? We don’t know when their guard might change.”
“I’ll have Tempi with me. Besides, it should only take you a couple minutes. I want to see if I can get a better count of how many there are.”
Marten hurried off, and Tempi and I edged our way back up to the top of the ridge. After a moment he edged closer until the left side of his body was pressed up against my right.
I noticed something I’d missed earlier. There were wooden poles the size of tall fenceposts scattered throughout the camp.
“Posts?” I asked Tempi, driving my finger into the ground to illustrate what I mean.
He nodded to show he understood, then shrugged.
I guessed they might be tethers for horses, or drying poles for sodden clothes. I pushed it from my mind in favor of more pressing matters. “What do you think we should do?”
Tempi was silent for a long moment. “Kill some. Leave. Wait. Others come. We . . .” He gave the characteristic pause that meant he was lacking the word he wanted to use. “Jump behind trees?”
“Surprise.”
He nodded. “We surprise. Wait. Hunt rest. Tell Maer.”
I nodded. Not the quick resolution we had hoped for, but the only sane option against this number of men. When Marten came back the three of us would take our first sting at them. I guessed with surprise on our side, Marten could mark as many as three or four with his bow before we were forced to flee. Odds were he wouldn’t kill all of them, but any man arrowshot would be less of a threat to us in the days to come. “Any other way?”
A long pause. “No way that is of the Lethani,” he said.
Having seen enough, I carefully slid down several feet until I was out of sight. I shivered as the rain continued to pelt down. It felt colder than it had a couple minutes ago, and I began to worry that I’d caught Marten’s cold. That was the last thing I needed right now.
I caught sight of Marten approaching and was about to explain our plan when I saw his panicked expression.
“I can’t find them!” he hissed frantically. “I trailed back to where they should have been. But they weren’t there. So either they already turned back, which they wouldn’t do, or they were too close behind us and ended up following the wrong set of tracks in this bad light.”
I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the constant rain. “Can’t you track them down?”
“If I could, I would have. But all the prints look the same in the dark. What are we going to do?” He clutched at my arm, I could tell by his eyes that he was on the verge of panic. “They won’t be careful. They’ll think we’ve scouted everything ahead of them. What should we do?”
I reached into the pocket that held Dedan’s simulacra. “I can find them.”
But before I could do anything, there was an outcry from the eastern edge of the camp. It was followed a second later by a furious shout and a string of cursing.
“Is that Dedan?” I asked.
Marten nodded. From over the ridge came the sound of frantic movement. The three of us moved as quickly as we dared, peering over the top.
Men were swarming from the low tents like hornets from a nest. There were at least a dozen of them now, and I saw four with strung bows. Long sections of planking appeared from nowhere and were leaned against the posts, making crude walls about four feet high. Within seconds the vulnerable, wide-open camp became a veritable fortress. I counted at least sixteen men, but now whole sections of the camp were cut off from view. The light was worse as well, as the makeshift walls blocked the fires and cast deep shadows against the night.
Marten was swearing a steady stream, understandably, as his bow wasn’t nearly as useful now. He nocked an arrow quick as winking and might have fired it just as fast if I hadn’t laid a hand on his arm. “Wait.”
He frowned, then nodded, knowing they would have half a dozen arrows for every one of his. Tempi was suddenly useless as well. He would be riddled with arrows long before he came close to the camp.
The only bright facet was that their attention wasn’t directed toward us. They were focused off to the east where we had heard the sentry’s cry and Dedan’s cursing. The three of us might escape before we were discovered, but that would mean leaving Dedan and Hespe behind.
This was the time when a skilled arcanist should be able to tip the scales, if not to give us an advantage,
