Danica pointed out a slight depression in the ground, barely visible, then indicated the pattern that made her believe that brush had been scraped over the ground.
Ivan snorted in disbelief. “That all ye got to go on?” he asked loudly, no longer afraid of the volume of his voice.
Danica didn’t even try to hush him. She remained confident of her guess, and could hope only that some ranger, or one of Elbereth’s kin, perhaps, was in the area. If not a ranger or an elf then Danica felt certain the tracks had been made by someone intent on concealing himself.
In the wilds of the mountains, that rarely boded well for travelers.
A few hundred yards down the trail, Danica found further signs of passage. Even Ivan couldn’t discount the obvious boot print in the soft trail, though half of it had been just as obviously brushed away.
The dwarf put his hands on his hips and looked around, focusing on the crook of a low branch hanging over the trail.
“I seen some rocks aside the trail a dozen yards back …” the dwarf began.
“Uh-oh,” muttered Pikel, suspecting what his brother was getting at.
“Got some big enough trees hanging over the trail,” Ivan continued, not hearing Pikel’s flustered sigh. He looked at Danica, who seemed not to understand.
“Could set us a trap,” Ivan spouted. “Could haul a rock up one of them trees and—”
Pikel slapped him across the back of the head.
“You’ve tried that before,” Danica reasoned from the sour look on Pikel’s face.
Pikel groaned and Ivan glared at him, but the yellow-bearded dwarf took no retribution against his brother. They had indeed tried that trap before. Though Ivan, stubbornly, if with little real conviction, insisted that it had been a success—they had clobbered an orc after all—Pikel just as stubbornly insisted that the meager kill had hardly been worth the terrific effort of putting the rock in the tree in the first place.
Knowing that this time there would be another witness, Ivan would have conceded the point and gone along without further mention of the trap and Pikel’s assault—it was only a slap, after all—but then, without explanation, Pikel whipped his club up in front of Ivan’s face. To Danica, standing to the side, it seemed clear that Pikel tried to halt the weapon’s momentum short of Ivan, but the club still connected with Ivan’s great nose. It knocked him back several steps and sent a stream of warm blood flowing over the dwarf’s hairy lip.
“What’d ye …” Ivan stammered, hardly believing the attack. He took up his double-bladed axe, snarled, and stepped toward his frantically squeaking brother.
Pikel couldn’t explain the action to either Ivan or Danica, but he did manage to turn his fat club around in time, revealing a heavy dart buried halfway into the hard wood.
Now came Ivan’s turn to do his brother a good deed. Looking to the thick bushes past Pikel, to where his warrior instincts told him the dart had come from, he saw a crossbow leveled Pikel’s way.
A tall form fell from a branch to land softly behind Danica.
Ivan’s pointing finger made Pikel turn about.
“Uh-oh,” the green-bearded dwarf squeaked, knowing he had no time to get out of harm’s way.
Ivan hit him just before the quarrel, though, taking him down in a perfect tackle as the bolt flew harmlessly past.
Ivan didn’t relent. As he rolled, he heaved Pikel right over him, and Pikel understood the tactic, likewise heaving Ivan back over him. Like a rolling boulder, the brothers barreled into the brush forcefully enough to tangle the two men concealed there.
The intruder behind Danica, his sword bared and held high, had no reason to believe that the woman, intent on the spectacle of the dwarves, even knew that she was about to die. His surprise was complete when Danica snapped into a bend at her waist, her leg shooting out behind her, high enough to connect with the man’s chest.
He flew back several feet, slamming into a tree trunk, but managed to regain his dropped sword. More wary, he began backing away, step for step with the dangerous woman’s approach.
Danica broke into a run and came in hard and fast, but skidded to her knees and dipped her head as another form appeared from behind the trunk and launched a shoulder-high swipe at her with a short, slender staff. The weapon banged hard against the tree, spitting flakes of bark.
Danica slipped one foot back under her and kicked out with the other, thinking to break the second enemy’s knee. He got his staff down in time to deflect the attack, though, then countered with several sharp thrusts.
The young monk knew she was in trouble. They were no ordinary highwaymen, though their dress seemed mundane enough. She managed to fall out of the way as the other’s sword flashed at her skull, but took a hit on the hip from the fast-flying staff.
Then she was up in a crouch a few feet away from the two men, taking careful measure of their tempered approach, looking for an opening where there seemed to be none.
Ivan bit down hard, and continued to bite, until he realized from the steady stream of “Ooooo’s” that it was Pikel’s calf, not an enemy’s, in his mouth.
The dwarf scrambled to gain his footing in the tight quarters, branches and brambles grabbing at him with every move, and the nearest man landing no less than three punches on his already wounded nose.
Then Ivan was up, as was Pikel, with weapons ready. Ivan launched a vicious swipe with his axe, but his arm slipped through another thin but tough branch, shortening his reach so that he never got close to hitting the man.
Pikel yelped in terror and dived aside as his brother followed through, the wild flying axe nearly connecting. Again, albeit unintentionally, Ivan had saved his brother’s life, for as Pikel leaped aside another crossbow bolt soared in, cutting the air between the dwarves with a sizzling sound and thudding heavily into the shoulder of the man facing Ivan.
Both brothers paused long enough to look behind them to the crossbowman, who was frantically re-cocking the weapon. Pikel went back at his attacker, who had finally extricated himself from the brush tangle, and Ivan turned to where his closest enemy had been standing.
The man was not to be seen, and Ivan suspected from the still-shaking bushes that he had been laid out flat. Not one to argue with good fortune, the dwarf howled and bolted back the other way, crunching out of the brambles to find a clear path leading to the crossbowman.
The swordsman was wounded; that was something at least. Danica’s kick apparently had done some damage, for he winced with every circling step he took. Danica had already come to the conclusion that the staff-wielder was the more formidable of the two, though. His salt-and-pepper hair showed experience, and the perfect balance of his measured strides made her realize that he’d spent his lifetime training in the martial arts. His staff seemed puny compared to the other’s sword, but in his hands it was a deadly weapon indeed.
A sword cut sent the woman low, and the staff clipped her shoulder. She had to dive over backward, rolling back to her feet just in time to prevent a killing follow-up attack.
Danica had used the roll to her advantage. Crouched in a ball on the way over, the monk had slipped one of her crystal-bladed daggers from her boot sheath.
The swordsman came on again, seeming more confident.
Danica planted her right foot out in front of her and pivoted on it, launching her left foot high and wide behind her as she twirled. She knew that her circle-kick attack would have no more effect than to force the swordsman’s blade out wide, and knew, too, that she had left herself vulnerable to the other attacker. She threw her supporting leg out from under her and completed her circuit as she crashed down to the ground, hearing the whiz of the staff as it flew inches above her head.
Danica broke her fall with one arm and kept her torso high enough from the ground for her to snap her other arm underneath her, releasing the dagger. Its short flight ended in the swordsman’s belly, and he fell back, eyes wide in disbelief and mouth wide in a silent scream.
The staff-w
ielder laughed, congratulated Danica for the cunning move, then came on relentlessly.
Pikel’s attacker, too, wielded a club, but he faced two serious disadvantages. First, Pikel’s club was much larger than his, and second, he couldn’t possibly hit the thick-skinned and thicker-headed dwarf hard enough with a blunt weapon to do any serious damage. Lightning fast, he smacked Pikel twice on the shoulder and once on the pot helmet, which rang loudly.
Pikel hardly cared, accepting the three hits for the one he returned. His tree-trunk club caught the man’s exposed side and sent him flying from the brush to roll hard against the base of a tree.
The man’s face could not have reflected greater terror if he had been tied to a stake in the path of a horse stampede when Pikel came rushing out in pursuit, his pot all the way down over his face but his club leveled perfectly to squash the man between the tree and its thick end.
The man rolled aside and Pikel slammed in, snapping the young tree down and going headlong over its broken trunk.
“Oo,” the dwarf grunted as he skidded to a stop along the felled tree’s rough bark. Then came that loud ring again as his stubborn attacker rushed back in and planted a two-hander on the top of his helmet.
Ivan realized he would not get to the crossbowman before the man had the weapon readied, so he hoisted his axe above his head in both hands and roared, “Time to die, ye thieving dog!” as he let the weapon fly.
The man dived over backward, thrusting his crossbow up in front of him as a makeshift shield. The axe took it solidly, tearing it from the man’s hands and carrying it along on its flight until the whole connected with a tree, the crossbow falling in two pieces and the axe burying several inches into the trunk.
Ivan slowed his charge as the man came back up to his feet, drawing a long, thin sword, and not at all unnerved by the fine throw. In fact, the killer smiled widely at the unarmed dwarf’s approach.
“I could be wrong,” Ivan admitted quietly, his ferocious charge withering to a halt.
Danica punched and punched again, both attacks deflected harmlessly wide by the small staff. Her attacker countered with a straight thrust and Danica threw her forearm up at the last moment to push it out of line with her face. She countered with a snapping kick, but her attacker had his staff back in place quickly enough to slow the strike so that it did no real damage.
A groan drew Danica’s attention to the side. There stood the swordsman, his trembling hand at last closed around Danica’s bloodied dagger. The man’s face contorted in agony, but also in rage, and Danica suspected that he would soon be back in the fray. No matter how ineffective he might prove, she feared she wouldn’t be able to handle both men at once.
Her temporary distraction cost her. The staff connected on her side. Danica rolled sidelong with the blow, diminishing its painful sting, and grabbed at her other boot as she went over and came back up into a crouch.
The staff-wielder leaped and spun in a flurry of defensive movements, anticipating another dagger throw. Danica pumped her arm several times, delicately shifting her angle with each forward movement. Each time, her intended victim placed himself in a position to block the throw or dodge aside.
The man was good.
Danica carefully aligned herself, pumped her arm once more, and threw. The staff-wielder easily slipped to the side, his expression revealing confusion that the skilled woman would have missed him so cleanly. He understood a moment later, when his companion groaned again, loudly.
The swordsman’s trembling hand slipped free of the golden tiger hilt of the dagger in his belly and inched upward to the silver dragon protruding from his chest. Helplessly, he fell back against a tree and slid down to the ground.
“You and I,” said the staff-wielder, and he accentuated his point with a furious rush and a blinding, dizzying series of thrusts and swipes.
Pikel looked mournfully at the tree he had felled, his pause for sorrowful contemplations costing him yet another ringing slam on his pot helmet.
The druidic-minded dwarf felt nothing but a most profound rage welling inside of him. Pikel had always been regarded by those who knew him as among the most even-minded of people, the slowest of the slow to anger. But he had killed a tree.
He had killed a tree!
“Ooooooo!”
The groan issued out of his trembling lips, between gnashing, gritted teeth.
“Ooooooo!”
He turned around to face his attacker, who backed off a step at the sheer strength of the dwarf’s bared fury.
“Ooooooo!”
Pikel tripped over the tree stump as he charged, diving headlong. His attacker turned to flee, but the sprawling dwarf caught him by the ankle. The man’s club came down repeatedly on Pikel’s grasping fingers, but the enraged dwarf felt no pain.
Pikel dragged the man in, grabbed him in both hands, and hoisted him into the air. Gaining his feet, the powerful dwarf held the man above his head and looked around as though wondering what to do next.
The club rang again on Pikel’s cooking pot helmet.
Pikel decided he had had enough. He impaled the man on the jagged edge of the broken tree stump.
Ivan whipped off his backpack, fumbling with the straps as his enemy rushed in. The dwarf blocked a sword thrust with the pack, tangling the sword in its straps long enough for Ivan to get out a package, six inches square and carefully wrapped.
The swordsman yanked away and tore the pack from his blade then looked back at the dwarf.
Ivan had ripped open the box and removed its contents: a toy he had been making for Cadderly ever since the young priest’s heroics against the Talonite Barjin.
The black adamantine border of the spindle-disks contrasted with the semiprecious crystal center. The swordsman paused, wondering what purpose the twin disks, joined in their center by a small rod, might possibly serve.
Ivan fumbled to get his fat finger through the loop in the string wrapping that small rod. He had seen Cadderly use the toy a thousand times, had marveled at how the young priest so easily let the disks roll down to the end of their cord then, with a flip of his wrist, sent them spinning back to his waiting hand.
“Ye ever seen one of these?” Ivan asked the curious swordsman.
The man charged, and Ivan flung the disks out at him. The man got his sword in the way to block, then eyed his weapon in disbelief, regarding the ample nick the harder adamantine had caused.
Ivan had no time to gloat over the integrity of the craftsmanship, though. His throw had been strong, but unlike Cadderly, he had no idea how to recall the spinning disks. They hung near the end of the string, spinning sidelong.
“Ooooooo!”
Pikel’s rush from the side turned the swordsman around. He sidestepped the raging dwarf and regained his balance as Pikel swung around, scraping one foot on the ground for leverage to begin yet another furious charge.
The green-bearded dwarf stopped short of passing the man, instead launching a series of furious blows with his heavy club. The swordsman worked hard, but managed to keep out of harm’s way.
Ivan shoulder-blocked Pikel aside.
“This one’s mine!” the gruff dwarf explained.
The swordsman smiled at the dwarf’s apparent stupidity—together the brothers could have easily finished him.
His smile went away—literally—when Ivan hurled the spindle-disks again. But surprisingly, the small weapon was not attached to the dwarf’s finger, and had no encumbrance at all as it zipped past the swordsman’s futile attempt to block.
The man’s head snapped backward and his face seemed to melt away when the adamantine disks connected, removing every visible tooth, smashing apart his nose and both cheekbones, and neatly tucking his chin up under his upper jaw.
“Didn’t think a dwarf could throw like that, did ye?” Ivan bellowed.
The man stood staring in disbelief. His sword fell to the ground.
“Oo,” Pikel muttered as the man’s head lolled freely to one side, for
only then did either of the brothers realize that Ivan’s powerful throw had snapped the man’s neck.
Ivan reiterated Pikel’s grim thought. “Oo.”
Kick and swipe, punch and spearing thrust.
Danica and the staff-wielder moved in vicious harmony, attacking and parrying with incredible speed. For heartbeats that stretched into moments, neither scored a hit at all.
But in the heightened competition, the adrenaline pumping fiercely, neither seemed to tire in the least.
“You are good, Lady …” the staff-wielder remarked, his voice trailing off as though he meant to say more. “As I expected you would be.”
Danica could hardly reply. Had the man just teased her, almost uttering her name? How could he know? A hundred thoughts raced through Danica’s mind with the sudden suspicion that it had not been just some random ambush. Was Cadderly safe? she wondered. And what of Avery and Rufo, who had come down that same path just a couple of days before?
Thinking her distracted, her assailant came in viciously.
Danica dropped straight to the ground and kicked out, connecting with the man’s knee hard enough to halt his rush.
Danica stepped ahead, coming up right in the man’s face. She took a painful hit on the shoulder for her efforts, but got in one of her own, a snapping chop to the man’s throat. In the single instant the man was forced to pause and gulp for breath, Danica got one hand planted on his chin and the other around the back of his head to grab a clump of hair.
The man dropped his staff and clamped his hands onto Danica’s wrists, preventing her from twisting his head around. They held the pose for several moments, with Danica simply not strong enough to continue the intended maneuver.
The man, sensing his superiority, smiled wickedly.
Never releasing her grip, Danica leaped and rolled right over his shoulder, letting her weight do what her strength could not. They twisted and squirmed, Danica bending her knees to keep her full weight on the hold. The man wisely dropped to the ground, but Danica rolled again, under and to the side, with her forearm locked tightly under the man’s chin.