“Well, we’re comin out. And we got a few fools behind meanin us no good. Like as not, there’s others on the way from up the hill, so get all yer gear packed. We need to get movin quick.” Hams waved in a way that confirmed he’d get right to it, and Ilbei went back to share the good news.
Once they’d gotten everyone out of the cave, they decided not to waste any more time than it took for Jasper to read healing spells for himself and Kaige. Mags insisted she was fine, and Ilbei did likewise, regaining strength mainly from a long draught off of Hams’ wineskin.
Ilbei decided to cut a straight line for Hast, determined to keep clear of the trees and use the open country for speed. “They’ll expect us to head fer the Desertborn,” he said. “So let’s just hightail it direct along the desert’s edge like we planned.”
It was agreed upon, and they loaded up as much water as they could carry—and no help to be had from the packhorse, which had wandered off beyond any range they cared to pursue. Soon enough, they were on their way to Hast, moving with all due haste. Ilbei wanted to gain the remainder of the day on those who were in pursuit.
By the time the cruel sun was slipping down behind the far end of the world, Ilbei and his company were exhausted. Grateful for the pleasant evening temperatures, they were able to sleep under the stars and spared the effort of pitching tents. Hams and his people volunteered to take all the night’s watches, and for the first time in what felt like an eternity, they slept. Ilbei snored so loud the crickets wouldn’t chirp for a quarter measure round.
When he woke the next morning and discovered that no one had come near in the night, he dared to think they might be on the brink of a genuine getaway, though he knew the day ahead would be a tough one. Cutting across the bottom fringes of the Sandsea would be rough. The heat would be terrible, if yesterday’s temperatures were any indication, but after, they’d have an easy way of it and could make Hast two evenings hence if they wasted no time.
After a quick meal of snake-belly bacon, as Hams called it, and boiled apples, they were underway again, the party’s spirits high—and kept that way for Cavendis’ having been gagged again. He trundled along behind the group, tied to the other two prisoners like mules in a pack train. The nobleman looked absurd in one of the makeshift hats Hams had made for him and the other two. It was a wide, floppy thing, woven from deer grass, and Cavendis had sneered at it when Hams approached him with it. But the seasoned old cook had patted it down on his head anyway. “You can knock it off if you’d like,” Hams had said. “But I won’t pick it up again. If you die of heatstroke out here, I got no reason to mourn you.” He glanced briefly about and added, “Doesn’t seem like any of these others do either.”
“I know I don’t,” Meggins said. “For all I care, he can lie out here until the vultures come pick his eyes out.”
“Or the harpies do,” Jasper said, feeling much better now that his wrist was healed and they were on their way back to something approaching civilization. “They eat carrion as well, and they are, as you are aware, known to frequent the area.” He made his odd breathy laugh and looked to Meggins for approval at his having entered the taunting fray.
Meggins rewarded him with a grin, saying, “Not much on delivery, Jasper, but the material was good.” Jasper was more than satisfied with the assessment, and unfortunately for the rest, in its aftermath he felt suddenly quite companionable. This amicability resulted in a half-day monologue on the health and social benefits of humor, in particular in a hospital setting, which was, of course, derived from an extensive study he’d read only a few months ago in the Healers Guild publication
The Crown City
Journal on Health
.
During the first part of Jasper’s dissertation, the travelers were too eager to get home to interrupt, and by the time the morning was growing short and the sun had scaled the summit of the sky, they were too hot to expend any energy in cutting him off. And so he rambled on and on, the rest ignoring him and conserving their energy and water as they went along.
And then a long, silvery shaft of metal streaked by Meggins’ head and plunged into the sand not far from Auria, who was walking alongside him being regaled by his stories and manifest charms. She stopped when she heard the
tick
of it sliding into the sand, then stooped and pulled it free. She studied it, twisting it so the light glinted down its length, her brows down low, having never seen such a thing. “What in the Queen’s name is this?”
“Ain’t the Queen, missy, that there is the Skewer.” Ilbei had already spun round, scanning the shimmering sands behind them, his hand an extension of his helmet brim. “Can’t see a damned thing,” he said. “Glare is terrible. We need to get movin.”
“There!” Mags called out. “East.”
Ilbei turned and squinted that way. Sure enough, he could see riders coming through the blur of the heat rising off the sand. He counted eighteen.
“Tidalwrath’s teeth! That’s damn near a score of them bastards, and mounted.”
“I didn’t think there were that many horses up there,” Meggins said. “Where were they hiding them?”
“Who knows? But we’re in fer it now.”
Another steel crossbow bolt flew in. It landed only inches from the corporal’s feet. The corporal pulled his bow off his back. Meggins and Decia readied theirs right after. Auria pulled a boomerang from her belt, at which Ilbei shook his head. But it didn’t much matter what they used; those bows, that boomerang, none of them had the range to compete with the Skewer’s mighty crossbow but one. Only Meggins’ could, and Ilbei saw straight away he only had six of the enchanted black arrows left.
“Make yer shots count, people.”
Hams moved up to stand beside Ilbei, carrying a javelin in each hand. “You want one?” he asked.
Ilbei shook his head. “I’m worse with them things than I am at tavern darts.”
“I’m not,” Kaige said. Hams tossed him one. Kaige hefted it in a way that assured Ilbei the man had thrown a lot of them, and that gave him cause to hope. Maybe they could get clear of this fight too. He couldn’t say he hadn’t expected something like this, but he had allowed himself hope that they would have a bit longer stretch of luck. He should have known better, what with them having a teleporter on hand.
The sun hit the incoming shaft on the way in, and Meggins stepped out of its way just in time. It would have cut straight through his heart. “Why’s he picking on me?” he said. “What did I ever do?”
“I expect it’s that bow of yers,” Ilbei said. “Though I’m surprised he can even make out which one of us ya are from there. Never seen anythin shoot that far.”
“Well, he’s still out of my range,” Meggins said. “But not for long.”
Soon after, the exchange began. They did have the advantage of the sunlight lighting up streaks of the Skewer’s bolts for a time, at least so long as he was relying on the arc. But it wasn’t long before he was able to level the weapon and fire straight on.
Meggins sent an arrow at him when he was just outside of a hundred spans. The Skewer dodged sideways, leaning in his saddle, and the arrow blasted the rider behind him off his horse. Meggins cheered. “I’ll take luck over skill any day! Seventeen to go.” Then he swore and staggered back, one of the long crossbow bolts through his side, in through the left side of his stomach and protruding three full hands out the back.
“Meggins!” Kaige cried, and both he and Mags rushed to the man.
“Jasper, can ya get us another one of them fog spells?” Ilbei asked. No reply followed, and Ilbei spun left, then right, afraid that he would find Jasper lying dead with one of those wicked steel shafts in him. But Jasper merely gaped into the distance, his pale flesh whiter than usual, transfixed by fear, seemingly unwilling to believe they were in combat again. “By the gods, man! Jasper, snap to.”
Jasper turned, blinking as if just awakened from a dream.
“Fog, son. Can ya do the fog trick again?”
Jasper looked as if he were trying to recall something from the most distant past, but slowly began to shake his head. One of the Skewer’s arrows whistled past, right over his shoulder, and buried itself a half-span deep in the sand less than a pace away. Fortunately, the addled wizard didn’t realize what it was. “I can, but the heat will burn it off too fast.” He turned numbly toward the oncoming charge. “I don’t think I can get it read in time.”
“Well, we’re in the jaws of it, then. Here they come.”
Another steel shaft shot straight through Jasper’s satchel as he fumbled in it, looking for anything he might use. The force of the impact drove through the thrown-back flap, the front cover, the interior divider, and the back cover, all of them. And despite the layers of leather shielding, it managed to pierce the skin of the slender wizard’s hip, though hardly deeper than the first joint of his little finger. Still, one might have thought he’d been decapitated and thrown in burning oil for how he screamed, falling to the sand and writhing about in agony.
The horsemen were within forty spans, and that was close enough for Ilbei. He drew his pickaxe and charged. “Ain’t waitin fer another one,” he said, and ran through the sand as fast as his bowlegged strides would carry him, angling side to side as randomly as he could, intent on making himself at least marginally hard to shoot. He saw the shadow pass just as he prepared to heave his pickaxe at the Skewer, and there came across the line of riders a streak of black and gray. Miasma!
The harpy swooped across the riders, unleashing an awful shriek. She tore the Skewer out of his saddle and dashed him against the man riding at his side. Then she loosed a wet spray of urine and foul excrement as she passed over, a yellow, spewing mist with flecks of black and gray. Ilbei could smell it immediately, and he was still twenty spans away. It was so foul it gagged him and stopped him in his tracks. His eyes burned with its acridity, and he staggered, choking, to his knees. He thought he might stop the gagging by force of will, but he couldn’t, and for a moment he simply knelt there, his hands driven wrist deep into the hot sand, precariously balanced in the place between vomiting and not.
The horses were screaming, the terrified neigh such creatures normally save for pain, though none of them had been physically hurt. They reared and jumped and kicked out their hind legs, leaping and spinning, their eyes as wide as hens’ eggs, bucking and snorting as they scattered every which way. Their riders, had they been able to even think about trying to stay in their saddles, were not up to it, and they fell to the sand and rolled about, palming at their eyes and gagging as if befouled by some choking gas. They arced and writhed and vomited, a terrible sound.
Kaige, Hams, Corporal Trapfast and the sisters all ran up toward Ilbei, but they staggered to a halt a few steps short of him, as if they’d run into a wall. They may as well have, for how unbearable it was. Ilbei could hear them choking, just as he still was.
Kaige bore through it anyway and, holding his breath, ran forward three more steps and launched the javelin Hams had given him. The long, iron-tipped spear flew in a graceful arc, a black streak on the clear blue sky, then plummeted down again, pinning one man to the sand and ending his choking misery. Decia backed off a few steps from where she’d stopped and took a knee. She too went to work on their enemy with her bow, taking careful aim and striking down two of them in her first three shots.
The harpy, that foul and wonderful Miasma, swung back and let the thrashing horsemen have another blast of … of that indescribable spew. She loosed the foul contents of her body on them as she loosed a cry of the most frightful sound. Ilbei looked up, his stomach in his throat, and watched her soar up after and begin to fly away. He thought she might have looked back at him, but soon she was lost to sight, climbing her way up toward the sun, driving for altitude with long, graceful strokes of her wings.
Around the tumor of bile that grew in his throat, he called out for his companions to finish the enemy quick. Once that fetid cloud was gone, the advantage would be lost. Kaige called for Hams’ other javelin, as the old man was still trying to force himself deeper into the edge of that invisible, noxious cloud. Hams could not match Kaige for range, not by forty spans at least. Arrows flew from Decia and the corporal’s bows, and Kaige’s second shot was true.
The men that remained were crawling away. Crawling like broken, impotent scorpions across the scalding sand, painting stripes of vomit like wakes behind.
Ilbei got to his feet and tried to move up to where Kaige was, but his eyes burned as if he’d stuffed his face into a forge. “All nine hells!” he muttered, and, coughing, he fell back again.
He saw the Skewer stagger to his feet and lumber drunkenly away, his monstrous crossbow gripped uselessly by one steel arc, its butt dragging in the sand. Ilbei wanted desperately to give chase, but he didn’t want to overplay his hand. The harpy queen had given them the victory: best to take the pot they’d won.
So he did. He turned and saw that Mags had gotten Jasper to quiet down. She was just beginning to get him to his feet. Meggins was worse off by far. Ilbei grimaced, seeing that. He had to get his weary people back to Hast. And he had to get Cavendis to the justice he was due. All of this was his fault, a lying lord, a nobleman slaver and a cheat. He would pay for all of this. And if Ilbei’s testimony amounted to anything, Cavendis would pay for it with his life.
Chapter 36