She left him to his task. Mathi intended to return to her shelter-she shared the largest tent with Treskan and the elves’ baggage-but first she followed the edge of the hill around, looking down at the water sparkling in the darkness below. She hadn’t gone halfway around when she spotted movement in the heavy shadows along the west bank of the river. Unsure what she was seeing, she slowed, then stopped. More movement, in another place. Someone was down there. More than one someone.
“Lofotan!” she hissed. “Lofotan, come here!”
The elfjogged up carrying his bow. Without a word Mathi pointed to the spot she thought she’d seen figures moving. She held up two, then three fingers. Lofotan nocked an arrow.
“Are the centaurs all back?” Mathi whispered. They weren’t. Lofotan said something about them not coming back from the west.
“Balif?”
“Deer, maybe.” Lofotan waited, bow held loosely waist high. His eyesight was several times better than Mathi’s. He saw something she couldn’t. The bow mounted swiftly to his cheek and the arrow flew. Like most elves, Lofotan used a pinch draw, rather than the three-finger draw favored by humans. The pinch draw was not as powerful, but it had the advantage of nearly silent release. The arrow flashed into the night with only the softest thrum of the bowstring behind it.
There was a thud below, a loud snapping of greenery, followed by a splash. Mathi strained hard to see what had happened. Moments later the answer came floating down river. A body, face down in the water, with Lofotan’s arrow through its neck.
“Watch out,” the warrior said calmly. He leaned aside. Mathi stepped back more slowly and a brace of arrows cut the air where he had been.
“We’re silhouetted against the sky,” Lofotan said. “Stay back.”
He went down on one knee, bow resting on his thigh. Mathi fidgeted.
“Wait,” the elf whispered.
He heard a sound with his keen ears, popped up, aimed, and dispatched an arrow. He was rewarded with a screech of pain. Lofotan dropped down again. An arrow whistled past, high over his head.
“He has the range but not the angle,” was his professional assessment of the enemy archer. “A smart soldier would beat a retreat now.” Another missile thudded into the clay of the bluff. Mathi muttered, “That one’s not smart, he’s angry.”
Lofotan found a loose stone. He pressed it on Mathi and told her to go eight or ten feet away and toss it over.
“He won’t fall for that old trick!”
“Do as I say!”
He had a second rock himself. Mathi crept on her hands and knees to where a small cedar tree was barely clinging to the crumbling cliff. She hurled the stone, then dropped on her belly as fast as she could.
From his position Lofotan pushed his stone off the edge with his foot. Clods of dirt went with it, making a miniature avalanche. A white-fletched arrow sang through the air where the stone fell. If Lofotan had been sitting there it would have hit him in the face.
Straightening his back, the elf took aim and let fly. Without waiting any time to see if he hit the mark he got up, tapped Mathi on the back and said, “Get your spear and follow.”
They descended to the water’s edge. The first victim had floated down thirty yards but was snagged on a low-hanging tree branch. Target number two, the one who had yelled, was dead on his back on the sandy bank. Number three was in a tree, his arms and legs hanging lifelessly over the slow moving stream.
The last nomad fascinated Mathi. She walked under the tree and saw Lofotan’s arrow had gone through four inches of trunk before piercing the man’s skull. He had never seen such marksmanship, especially in the dark and from a height.
“It’s nothing,” Lofotan replied to his amazement. “I have always been counted a mediocre archer. Artyrith could have gotten all three in half the time.”
They hid the bodies in a gully, covering them with vines. The night was too quiet for safety. All the normal sounds of the woods had stilled.
“Too many people around,” was Lofotan’s assessment. They returned to camp.
Zakki and the centaurs were there, waiting. Only nine had come back from their patrol. Two centaurs had fallen trying to escape swarming nomad scouting parties.
“How far from here?” asked the elf.
“An hour’s walk.” For a centaur, that meant eight to ten miles. Even with the thick foliage slowing them down, that meant the nomads could be upon them at any time. Now, in fact.
Mathi looked to the stars. Four hours till dawn. Suddenly she felt very naked. Why did she linger with these doomed fools? Her mission was a failure; part of her was glad of that. Now Balif and his companions faced utter destruction. Why remain? Two reasons occurred to her. One, the woods were alive with vigilant nomads. Her odds of escaping were not high. Even more compelling, she remembered her vow to Balif.
Lofotan broke the spell when he swept his arm in a wide arc from one side of the bluff to the other. “I want a line of sharpened stakes across here, every one six feet long or better.” A line of stakes would halt any mounted charge, but it wouldn’t delay a determined assault on foot.
“Who’s going to make the line of stakes?” Mathi wondered.
“We are, all of us.”
With axes, swords, and jury-rigged mallets the elf, the scribe, Mathi, and the surviving centaurs set to work. Mathi and four centaurs went to where the trees began and started to cut down saplings. Two centaurs dragged these to Treskan where the trees were stripped of branches and had one end sharpened. The elf, Zakki, and two sturdy centaurs drove these at an angle into the clay, then chipped the protruding end to a point. Lofotan spaced them about a foot apart. It would take more than a hundred to cover the ground he indicated.
Chopping down trees was noisy work. The silent forest echoed with the sound of blades biting green wood. Nomad scouts could not fail to hear the commotion.
Mathi chopped and hacked until her hands were blistered. Then she chopped some more. She dulled an axe and switched to a thick-bladed falchion loaned to her by one of the centaurs. The horse-men were unflagging workers. They’d been dashing around all night, but they kept at the work until the sun’s first rays put the stars to sleep.
Mathi raised the falchion high to finish cutting down her forty-third sapling. An eerie baying filled the woods below, and she stayed her hand. She listened, and the sound grew more distinct. Hounds. They had the scent of their prey.
Something crashed through the undergrowth. It was hurtling toward her. She put an elm tree to her back and raised the battered falchion. The dogs were chorusing loudly now in a wide half circle, all the way from the extreme left to the far right. As on the night she was caught outside Bulnac’s camp, the baying dogs raised the hair on her neck and made her heart hammer. Their calls spoke to her blood far more frighteningly than anything the humans did.
She saw a sudden blur of muddy brown. For a moment Mathi thought it was a bear. It drove past her beyond arm’s reach but close enough for the wind to stir her clothing. The eyes of the beast met hers in passing, then Balif was gone. He ran up the hill through the field, disappearing over the rise into camp.
Balif had been out nosing around when the dogs had picked up his trail. Even he could do little against a veteran pack of hunting hounds.
The centaurs arrived at a gallop. Warchief Loff-as they called Lofotan-was calling everyone back. From the summit he could see movement in the trees. Lots of movement. Mathi ran. The centaurs thundered past her and kept going.
Lofotan’s fence was only three-quarters complete. A small pile of poles lay scattered on the ground where the stakes ended. There was no time to finish.
Balif had run to the first shelter he could reach, which happened to be the supply tent where Mathi and Treskan slept. The tethered horses, brought with great labor across the river, were terrified by his presence. They milled around snorting and stomping. Mathi watched the centaurs join their fellows behind the stakes. Treskan had a spear. Lofotan was there too, but he did not see the Longwalker. She guessed the kender had abandoned them to their fate at last.
