Eight men surrounded the body, talking casually as the miner’s life poured away. The largest among them was a monster of a man whose height and bulk rivaled Kaige’s for size. He carried a huge crossbow, which he motioned with toward the center of the creek, where Ilbei noticed that the great boulder the miner had been beating on with his giant sledge was now broken in two. Part of it had splashed down straight across the waterway, partially damming it up on that side, and the other part had fallen onto the gravel closer to the bank. It was a lot of work to break such a thing, and now all of it for naught. At least for the man who’d been at the labor of it for so long.
“Get in there with that shovel and see if he was chasing his tail,” the man with the giant crossbow said. He jerked his chin toward two of the men on the bank closest to where Ilbei and company lay. “You two go through his place and see if he didn’t dig up something we haven’t heard about. Check for false bottoms and loose boards, and any dirt that looks softer than the rest. Feel through the seams of his clothes.”
The two men, one a short, lean fellow and the other a medium-sized brute missing half of his right hand, turned and climbed the bank, moving upstream and around the base of the bluff at the start of its curve. They were bound to see Ilbei and his men where they were.
Ilbei nodded for Meggins to come with him, signing with his hand for Jasper and Kaige to keep watch and call out if trouble came. He mouthed down the hill for Mags not to make a sound. She looked nervous as she nodded, her right hand hooking under and around the mare’s neck protectively while the knuckles on her other hand turned white around the quarterstaff she’d been using as a walking stick.
Ilbei pulled his pickaxe off his back while Meggins drew a long dagger from his boot. They slunk up behind the miner’s small shack and peered inside through a crack. They waited for the two men to go inside. Soon after, they saw shadowy movements between the boards and heard grunts along with the sounds of the dead man’s few belongings being carelessly tossed about.
Ilbei and Meggins went around to the front door, pausing long enough on either side for Ilbei to nod to the left, indicating Meggins to take the smaller man. The younger soldier nodded back, and in they went, two steps each, then wrapped a hand around the face of their respective targets, simultaneously silencing them. Ilbei gripped the haft of his pickaxe right near the head, and with one powerful thrust he shoved a long steel fang right through the back of the half-handed man’s neck. Meggins cut a long line straight across the scraggly week-old beard that stubbled his victim’s neck. They muffled the mouths of their marks until the thrashing stopped. Then together they quietly set the bodies down.
They left the shack as silently as they had come, and in moments they once again lay prone beside Kaige and Jasper in the weeds. Kaige didn’t even look up from watching the men working in the creek, but Jasper’s face was pale as he stared at the blood on Ilbei’s face and on Meggins’ hands. It was as if he had just realized what was happening. He had the sense to keep quiet, though.
After a few moments’ more watching, with most of the group they were observing standing aside while two of the men worked with shovels digging up the gravel beneath where the boulder had been, Meggins made the sign for his bow, his eyebrow rising with the inquiry. Ilbei nodded that he agreed. Meggins crawled back down the embankment until he could get to his feet unseen. He went to the horse and pulled his bow from where he’d tied it to one of the packs, giving Mags a reassuring wink while he did. He made quick work of stringing it, got the quiver down, then returned to the top of the rise.
He raised both eyebrows at Ilbei upon his return, clearly asking when he should begin.
Ilbei mouthed to him, “How many can ya get fast?” To which Meggins held fingers counting three.
Ilbei nodded, adding silently with mouth and gesture, “Get the big one.”
Meggins gave a grin and a sloppy salute, then pulled five arrows from the quiver and laid four of them neatly spaced in front of him. With a glance at Ilbei, who gave him the go-ahead, he raised up on one knee and fired the first shot. The distance wasn’t great, twenty-five paces tops, and the arrow found its mark squarely in the big man’s back, causing him to call out and fall to his knees in the water, his arms angled awkwardly as he tried to grab it and pull it out.
The other men all shouted and looked around, and by the time they spotted Meggins atop the embankment, another man had an arrow through his open mouth. A third took one through the shoulder as he turned and looked for somewhere to run.
They scattered after that. Two of them ran back the way the men originally sent to search the shack had gone, and one drew a longsword and came running straight toward Ilbei and his men, ducking down and using the cut bank to hide from Meggins’ line of sight. They could hear him breathing, right below them, pressed against the overhang.
“Shite,” snapped Meggins as his fourth shot glanced off a studded leather pauldron of a retreating man.
Ilbei, pickaxe still in hand, jumped over the edge, landing in the gravel below with a heavy crunch. The man who had run there was already halfway along the dirt face of the bluff, moving to come around them from behind, where he would have found Mags straight away. Fortunately, he heard Ilbei and spun back before sighting her. He crouched, ready for the fight, his longsword held comfortably in his hand.
“Come on, you rusty army git,” he taunted as he approached Ilbei confidently. He drew a long serpentine dagger from his belt. “The army don’t train a fat bastard like you for what you’re about to get.”
In a rush, he came at Ilbei, his longsword flashing in the morning sun, licking out like lightning bent on opening Ilbei’s admittedly pronounced gut. Ilbei knocked the sword aside with the flat of his pickaxe blades and stepped into the man as he brought the dagger down. Ilbei caught the man’s wrist in his hand and gave it a twist, then kneed him in the groin.
The bandit guffawed, and Ilbei heard the splash of the dagger landing in the water behind him. The groin shot had bent the man at the waist, and Ilbei brought his knee up again, this time into his face, breaking his nose and busting loose a rivulet of blood.
His attacker fell away, staggering as he brought his sword up in defense. Ilbei switched his pickaxe from his right hand to his left as he moved warily around, getting the cut bank at his back and trying to work himself between access to Mags and his assailant. He could see the man blinking and knew the pain from the broken nose was distracting him, so he stepped forward and feinted a blunt strike with the curved head of his pick. The man fell back a step. Ilbei feinted twice more the same way, rapid fire, each time causing the man to shuffle back. Then he stepped in and thrust for real, striking a hammer blow with the end of the pickaxe straight into the poor bastard’s already bloody face.
Blood sprayed like the spokes of a wagon wheel as the man gasped and staggered back. Belatedly, he swung his sword around to parry the blow he’d already received. He then leveled it at Ilbei, shaking his head, trying to clear the spots dancing before his eyes. Ilbei dropped the flat of his pickaxe down on the sword blade, batting the point down toward the water. The man tried to turn the strike away, but Ilbei let the pickaxe shaft spin in his hand, causing the man to jerk his sword up too easily, opening himself up for an instant. He saw it and jumped back, lowering his sword again. Ilbei stepped forward and once again set the flat of his pickaxe blades on the sword. Metal ground against metal as he pushed the pickaxe down the sword a bit. The man glared at him, waiting until the pickaxe slid past halfway, then he quickly raised his weapon up, intent on trapping Ilbei’s pick and tearing it away. Rather than resist, Ilbei stepped into him again, turned sideways, and with a swift and powerful hammering motion, he punched down with his palm on the pickaxe haft. He did it so suddenly the head drove down upon the man’s hands and knocked the sword right out of his grip. His mouth opened in the first portion of a shout as he stared down at the falling sword and then at his empty hand. Though it was all in the space of a second, Ilbei could see the man’s total disbelief as the weapon clattered against the stone.
Fortunately, right after observing that, he also saw the man’s eyes widen, relief forming at something he could see over Ilbei’s left shoulder. Ilbei didn’t wait to find out what it was. Pure instinct set him diving forward, and he flew past the man he’d disarmed just in time to avoid a long crossbow bolt, a bolt easily as long as his arm, as it sailed through the space where his head had been only an instant before. He heard the steel shaft whistle past and saw it vanish nearly to its fletching as it sank into the riverbank.
The bandit dove to retrieve his sword as Ilbei rolled to his feet. Ilbei spun and threw the pickaxe with both hands. The distance wasn’t great, and by the time the bandit had snatched up his blade and spun back to face Ilbei, the long curving tine of that deadly odd weapon bit through his chest and tore open his lung.
He spat blood to match that running from his nose, his face a wet, red mess. He coughed up a full pint of it as he stumbled forward. He looked down at his chest, at Ilbei’s weapon there, and looked up again, as if surprised. He staggered drunkenly across the rocks toward Ilbei, reaching out for him with his sword, as if wanting Ilbei to have it before he died. Ilbei took it as the man fell, plucking it from his dying grip as the bandit pitched forward and landed face first with a gravelly crunch.
Ilbei had no time to linger, however, so with the longsword held high, he ran at the great brute still standing in the creek reloading that enormous crossbow. He swung the sword in a long arc, hoping to cut into the man’s shoulder right where it joined the arm, a severing blow, but the big man was quicker than Ilbei thought, and quite despite the arrow in his back. He spun away and, in a bit of good luck on his part, managed to swipe Ilbei in the eye with the end of Meggins’ arrow as he turned. The sting, and the delicate location, cost Ilbei a moment’s pause.
In the time that bought, the big man finished his spin and used the momentum to launch a whirling swing of the giant crossbow. Ilbei saw it coming, but he was too close to get away. He deflected some of the force with the sword but still took a shot to the ribs hard enough that he dropped the sword. Worse, he found himself hooked in an arc of the crossbow, at which point the big brute began hauling him toward a great punch that was already underway.
Fortunately, it was the same sort of tactic Ilbei often used with his pickaxe, and he was able to move his head enough to avoid having his own nose broken. The blow glanced off the side of his head as he leaned back against the man’s pull, digging his boots into the creek bed and driving with his legs. He blocked another punch aimed at his face, then dropped to his hands and knees. He did it so quickly he slid out from the trap of the crossbow, landing in the water with a splash.
The big man staggered back a step with the release of Ilbei’s weight, but by the time Ilbei could grab the hilt of the longsword again, the burly bandit was standing on the blade. Ilbei threw himself backward, out of the way of another swing of that huge crossbow, and rolled onto his feet again. He ran to fetch his pickaxe from the dead man a few paces downstream. He’d barely got his hand on it when he heard Mags cry out.
“Shite,” Ilbei muttered as he wrenched his pick free of the corpse. He turned back and had exactly enough time to drop to his back as another arm’s-length crossbow bolt whistled past, so close it rustled the bristles of his beard.
“Tidalwrath’s teeth,” he swore, but he leapt right back up and ran along the embankment, following its slope to where he could jump on top of it, into the grass and weeds. As soon as he did, he saw the reason for Mags’ alarm: one of the bandits he’d thought had run off had circled through the brush and come up from behind instead. His presence put Ilbei in fear for what might have become of Meggins and Kaige, neither of whom was in sight. Jasper was there with her, but he lay facedown in the weeds, his hand motionless, fingers still shaped for clutching the thin yellow tube of a scroll he’d apparently been going for prior to being knocked out, clearly struck from behind. Other scrolls lay in the dirt, thrown out of the satchel when he fell.
Mags’ quarterstaff lay near him, and the bandit who’d disarmed her held her captive, her hands already bound and the point of his sword pressed against her side. His whole body tensed as Ilbei approached, one thrust away from puncturing her lungs.
“Come another step and she’s a fountain,” he said.
Ilbei glanced back over his shoulder, down the embankment, and saw the monstrous brigand with the equally monstrous crossbow loading yet another bolt—though it might more accurately have been called a short spear. Ilbei turned back to the man menacing Mags. “Easy there,” he said, sidling away from the edge of the cut bank, hoping to get his head below the big fellow’s line of sight. “No need to let things get to unravelin so fast. And there ain’t no reason ya need to die here today.”
“Won’t be me dying,” he said. “Now you just stop talking and set that pick down before the lady springs a leak.”
“Well, thing is, if’n ya hurt her, you’re dead anyway, which you and me both already know is true. Meanin, ya ain’t gonna do it. So why not just step off and save yerself some trouble here.”
The villain made a show of pushing the sword deeper into Mags’ ribs, causing her to gasp. “That’s right, squeak, little miss, let him know I mean it.”
Mags slammed the side of her head into his ear and batted the blade away with her arm, opening up a long cut in her flesh in doing so. She spun and leapt on him with astonishing speed, wailing at the top of her lungs as if she’d suddenly got the craze. She scratched and clawed at his face, hammering at him with her bound fists and becoming the very manifestation of ferocity.