“That’s good, nice and slow. Don’t make no noise, just come on back. This don’t have to go bad.” He thought about how, not so long ago, Ergo the Skewer had had much the same advantage on Ilbei, just before Meggins had arrived. Again his gaze darted to the passage leading deeper into the mountainside.
“Kaige, come around here and watch that,” he said, gesturing toward the passage with a movement of his head.
Kaige did as instructed, quickly and quietly. Ilbei took a step toward the man that was backing toward him. “On yer knees.”
The man started to look back, but Ilbei placed the point of his pickaxe against his neck, right between two vertebrae. “You’ll be a pissin doormat if’n ya try it, so don’t do it, son. Ain’t worth it.”
The man looked back into the fire and dropped to his knees. Ilbei looped cord around his wrists and, with a few jerks, knotted it tightly. He quickly bound the captive, wrists to ankles and elbow to elbow behind his back, leaving the man’s spine arced short of painfully, though not so short that it wouldn’t become so if he thrashed about too much.
“Now you,” Ilbei said to the other one, sidling around the wall and stepping past Kaige. “Come on back to me like yer friend there did.” The man, like the first one, chose to comply, and soon he was trussed up as uncomfortably as the first. “Keep still, and don’t do nothin reckless, and you’ll get on out of here just fine come the end of this. Understand?”
The man nodded and remained silent.
Ilbei went to where Jasper was still silently mouthing whatever words were on the scroll, or at least mouthing something while staring at the document steadily. Ilbei slipped past him to where Mags could hear him ask, “Either of these two fellers Gad Pander? I can’t tell.”
Mags came far enough inside to look at them both. She shook her head no.
“Buzzard pus,” Ilbei swore. “Okay, go on back and keep an eye out.” She nodded and went out.
Ilbei went back to the fire and looked down at the rocks where the men had poured out the contents of their long-handled crucibles. Several of the rocks around the outer edge had round indentations, flat on the bottom, much like the impressions in the plates Ilbei had found. Most of them were filled with hardening lead.
He turned back to the nearest captive. “So what’s these disks you’re makin fer?” He already knew, but he wanted them to say it aloud.
“Slugs,” said the man.
“Fer what?”
He nodded toward a stack of boxes near the cave wall, small, sturdy crates roughly three hands square, identical to the one that was sitting between him and his companion when Ilbei first came in. “For trade. Craftsmen in Murdoc Bay pound em out to make crystal ware.”
“They what?”
“They pound em out real flat in molds to make bowls, beat em like a silversmith does.”
“That ain’t how they do it.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No, it ain’t. Don’t lie to me, son, or I’ll melt ya into one of them slots and then pound ya into crystal ware myself.”
“I swear it’s true. Sure to Mercy it is.”
“Don’t drag her name into this here skullduggery. Ya already have the Queen’s wrath to answer fer that. Save somethin fer after Her Majesty’s done with ya, somethin fer yer eternal soul.”
The man looked so frustrated by Ilbei’s threat that Ilbei had to wonder if maybe he was wrong after all. Sometimes a man can be certain of knowing a thing, and yet it turns out he doesn’t know what he thinks he knows half as well as he thought he did. Nonetheless, one thing Ilbei did know for certain was that neither of these two was Gad Pander.
What if Mags had been wrong?
“Ssst,” Kaige hissed. Ilbei barely heard it over the wheezing of the man’s breathing by his side. Kaige pointed down the passage and held up two fingers, then changed it to three, the shrug of his shoulders and retreat of his mouth making it evident he could only guess.
With a jerk of his head, Ilbei moved Meggins around to where he could get a clear shot down the passage with his bow. Meggins pulled three arrows from his quiver as he obeyed, placing one in his teeth and the others point first into the dirt floor of the cave, just deep enough they could stand on their own.
Kaige moved to the other side of the opening, giving himself an angle for surprise. Ilbei came up beside him, his pickaxe held ready in both hands.
Gad Pander was the first to emerge, and he was two steps into the chamber before he saw Meggins kneeling there. “Hey!” he called out. He repeated it right after, much louder, adding, “We’ve got visitors!”
Another man came out right behind him, his hand going for a knife in his belt as he crouched and glared at Meggins, then Jasper, and back.
One blow from the huge round counterbalance on the pommel of Kaige’s sword sent the man to the dirt like a meat avalanche.
More shouts came from down the passage. Several more. Many more than Ilbei would have liked, disproving his three-horse theory entirely. He moved in front of Gad Pander with his pickaxe ready to strike him down. “Listen up, Pander. I never meant ya no trouble, but ya brung this on yerself. Now call them other fellers off; tell em stay where they are fer now. Then ya come on out here and take a knee beside yer boys, so as nobody has to get hurt.”
“You don’t have enough men for this …,” he paused, glancing up and noting the markings on Ilbei’s wide-brimmed metal helm, “… Sergeant. I think you’ve probably got just enough time to run.”
“Well, there won’t be no runnin. I’m takin ya in as a counterfeiter of Her Majesty’s currency. That there is a crime most likely punishable by death, but if’n ya come along peaceful, there’s a chance ya might get out of it with yer life.”
Two men ran around the bend of the dark passage, one with a torch, both with wood axes in hand. Ilbei actually felt sorry for them as they, like the last man through, went down instantly,
bam,
bam
, felled by a pair of rapid blows from the base of Kaige’s big sword.
“Well, I expect this can go all day,” Ilbei said. “How high we gonna pile em up before ya turn around and take a knee there by that feller over there?”
Gad Pander looked back at the three men lying at Kaige’s feet. “Get the ettin,” he shouted. “And there’s one of them right outside the—” The butt of Ilbei’s pickaxe took Pander right between the eyes, and he fell backward onto the growing heap of men behind him.
Kaige looked to Ilbei warily. “You don’t think there’s really an ettin in there, do you?”
“Look at that passage, son. How ya gonna squeeze an ettin in there? He’s tryin to scare us off.”
Kaige tilted his head to the side and looked down the corridor. When he turned back, he looked relieved. “You’re right,” he said. “Least not a big one anyway.”
“Anythin what can fit through there, I reckon ya can handle easy enough,” Ilbei said. “Just watch out they don’t come round with somethin ranged.”
“It won’t go well for them if they do, Sarge,” Meggins reminded him.
“Good, lad,” Ilbei said. He looked to Jasper for similar confidence, but Jasper was exactly as he had been since coming in, chanting beneath his breath, unwaveringly. Ilbei would have said something to him, but he was afraid of interrupting whatever the young mage might have in progress, fearing that an interrupted spell was the only thing that could be more disastrous than the spell itself. He should have told the damn magician exactly what to do. He’d been too vague. That’s why they weren’t supposed to put magicians in infantry units like his. He hadn’t been properly trained for commanding a caster like Jasper in all his army days—he wasn’t sure there was any training for commanding a caster like him.
“There’s more coming,” Kaige said.
“Just add em to the pile.”
“Someone’s coming,” Mags called in from the front of the cave.
“Okay, now that’s a problem.” Ilbei knelt down and scooped Pander up, throwing him over one shoulder like a sack of wheat. “Let’s get outta here.” He paused long enough to apologize to the nearest of the bound men near the fire, and then he whomped him on the head, knocking him out and guiding him toward the wall with a foot to be sure he didn’t fall into the fire. “Kaige, do that one likewise, and let’s go.”
Kaige issued a short hammer blow with his fist to the bound fellow nearest him, collapsing him like a tent with broken poles, and then they made their way to the cave opening.
“Jasper,” Ilbei hissed. “That’s enough.” He didn’t know if the mage would be able to hear him, but shortly after, the wizard was moving back outside, still chanting all the while and seemingly the same phrase over and over again. At least he came. “Meggins, let’s go.”
Meggins picked up his two arrows and backed quickly toward the entrance.
Mags shrieked as a thunderous impact struck the stone above their heads. A spew of gravel and sand blasted down at them, explosive and blinding, tiny bits like shrapnel, sharp enough to bite into their flesh. Bigger rock fragments fell right after, landing heavily onto the ground around their feet, one a glancing bell-strike off of Kaige’s cuirass. Ilbei, like the rest but for Jasper, looked up and dodged as a few more large pieces broke loose and fell. Kaige punched one just before it could strike Jasper atop the head, a quick strike with the flat of his hand that knocked the rock far enough off course to prevent catastrophic injury. It thudded heavily into the dirt, like someone had dropped an anvil there.
Ilbei pushed everyone back inside, glancing left and right along the cliff as he did. Small flames slid down the rock face like burning tears on either side: two, three, then four on the left; three, four, five on the right.
“Shite,” Ilbei pronounced, “where’d they all come from?”
“Should we make for the trees, Sarge?” Meggins asked.
The fires, which Ilbei knew had to be torches, bobbed in the darkness, encircling the area beyond the entrance to the cave, the movement indicative of men running to cut off any chance of escape. “Too late fer that. Back, back! Get inside. We’ll make em earn it if’n we have to.”
They retreated back into the cave, Meggins firing twice at movement rushing toward them as they did. Two men, one with a bow and the other with a sledgehammer, fell dead a few steps short of the entrance.
Gad Pander began to wriggle on Ilbei’s shoulder, stirred from his stupor by being jostled and bounced. Ilbei threw him down and quickly drew out another length of cord, working furiously to get him bound like the others. When he was done, he ran over and did the same for the three men Kaige had knocked out. “Don’t give em a shot at ya through that openin,” he called out as he worked. “Get in behind the wall. We got no advantage on em out there with us in here in the light.”
Mags and Jasper moved together to do as instructed, Mags looking frightened and Jasper, surprisingly, still reading the scroll. Ilbei wondered if he’d somehow gotten magically stuck reading it. He’d heard of such things before.
“Oh sweet mother of Mercy,” Kaige muttered then. “Would you look at that!”
Unable to help himself, Ilbei glanced up from tying up the last man. Through the narrow passage from which the little creek ran came a man of extraordinary size, nearing some twenty-four hands high. A mountain in boots and chainmail. He carried with him a pair of crude spiked clubs, huge lengths of sawed-off oak limbs into which a whole lot of horseshoe nails had been pounded. It was hard to imagine more primitive weaponry, but the man himself fit the weapons perfectly. He was so large he had to come through the passage sideways, sucking in his stomach to squeeze through. The metal point of his iron-cap helmet scraped against the ceiling at its lowest point as he forced himself through, the sound drawing Ilbei’s eye up, as if to remind him just how enormous this fellow was.
Meggins put an arrow in the brute’s shoulder and another in his calf. He’d have gotten a third into him, but the big man hefted one of his oaken cudgels and blocked it rather than being shot in the face. He howled with each arrow’s impact and once more as Ilbei rushed to intercept him before he could get out of the passage. He slammed the massive club back down, intent on hammering Ilbei into the ground like one of those horseshoe nails, but Ilbei raised his pickaxe above his head, the curve of its blade like an iron parasol, to deflect the brutal oaken storm. Ilbei thrust up with all his might to meet the blow as it came down, intent on mitigating the impact, but still it struck so hard it drove the pickaxe haft through his hands as if sliding it into a sheath. Ilbei had to drop to one knee to avoid being brained.
Having blunted most of the force of the blow, Ilbei thought to punch his enemy in the side of the knee, but realized he was too far away. As he came to that conclusion, he saw an enormous foot swinging up at him, ready to kick his head right off his neck. He had to roll backward, out of the way.
Kaige stepped in around him as he tumbled back out of the passage, and the brave soldier lunged at their attacker’s throat, aiming to end the fight right there with the big brute’s corpse as a cork to staunch the flow of any further reinforcements from within. But the oak-wielding warrior was quicker than he looked and knocked Kaige’s sword thrust away.
Then he was out into the open room, no longer stymied by the narrow passage walls.
Ilbei saw by the way the man’s eyes boggled, and by the shape of his jaw, the slanted angle of it as it thrust out to one side, that he’d been born an oddity. There was a wild vacancy in the way he looked at them, and he articulated no words at all. His anger sounded much like his joy likely would have: a garbled, throaty mess of noise.