Good Company

by Dale Lucas

  In short, before Torval had realized just what a monster he now found himself working for, and just what lengths that monster would go to in pursuit of his quarry.

  They’d used the waning light of the day before to get themselves on the west side of the river. Once that was accomplished, they made another camp—small, hasty, easily abandoned if the need arose—and sent Galen and Croften in search of signs of the passage of the Red Raven’s outlaws, anything that might indicate what direction they’d marched in or where their hideout might be located. Croften, fighting a mild fever and the persistent pain of the arrow wound in his shoulder, had managed to find a few shallow footprints and broken twigs, indicating that someone had moved through a given area, but it was Galen who ultimately picked out the trail and followed it. While the rest of them waited by the riverbank, the night gathering around them, no fires lit because they did not care to be seen, Galen and Croften picked their way through the darkening wood, over fallen trees and sometimes round in circles on half-eroded deer paths, until they’d managed to tease out a definite direction of travel. Having located a trail, they returned to camp. Everyone passed the night in the same near darkness, watching as a sliver of moon drifted slowly over them, wheeling from east to west.

  Torval had expected they might ask him for his help following the track after the sun left the sky. He was a dwarf, after all, and his night vision was far more reliable than any of his human companions’ tracking skills. But they had not asked for his aid—not then, anyway. Instead they decided they would set out before dawn with Torval in the lead and follow the Devils’ track back to their camp. As soon as morning came, they’d trek out to the spot where Galen and Croften had abandoned their search and carry on from there. The next day would probably bring a great deal of danger. The closer they got to the Devils’ camp, the greater the likelihood of armed sentries and bloody fighting.

  Unfortunately, by well after sunrise the next morning, Torval almost wished they had encountered a sentry, or some straightforward fighting. Galen and Croften used small, makeshift torches to light their path through the woods to the place where they’d abandoned the trail the night before. Upon reaching that spot, Galen had shown Torval just what to look for—not only obvious signs like footprints, but also the more subtle sorts—trampled leaves, broken or bent boughs, narrow pathways suggested by the gaps between certain shrubs and trees. And then they’d doused the torches and let Torval use his night vision to lead the way. Whenever he reached a point where he could see no sign, he’d call Galen or Croften up to examine that spot more closely, and they would determine which way to continue.

  They lost hours that way, essentially roaming in circles and into numerous dead ends where the tracks they thought they’d discovered ultimately ran out at the base of a big cedar or in the burbling beds of rocky brooks and tumbling streams. By the time they realized just how lost they were, light had already crept into the world, the forest around them gray and mist-shrouded, more visible by the moment, yet still hiding its most cherished secrets in the many shadows that the still-coming sunrise had yet to banish.

  It was just as the sun peeked over the hills to the south and shot its first broken rays through the high forest canopy—almost four hours after they’d first risen and set out—that Galen, scouring the brush desperately for some new indication of the right path, returned and said she thought she’d found something. Since the sun was up now and Torval was no longer needed, she and Croften followed the lead. A short while later, they returned to report that at last they’d located a path worth following. The weary company set out.

  They came upon their first sentry an hour later, Galen suddenly holding up her fist to silently order a hold to their march, then waving to indicate that everyone should hunker down and take cover. Torval sheltered behind a big pine and searched the broad face of the woodland before them, a riot of tree boughs and green leaves and needles and shadowy recesses. When Torval heard something crunch—teeth, biting into an apple—he managed to finally pick out their quarry, about fifty yards on.

  The man perched high in a forest oak, humming placidly to himself and breaking his fast on that small, crunchy apple. At this distance, and with a screen of branches between him and the target, Torval could not tell if the man was actually proving an effective sentry and watching the forest, or if his humming and loud snacking were signs of foolhardy dereliction. A moment later, though, it hadn’t mattered.

  Galen killed the man with a single arrow. He gasped a little—shocked at the steel point that had just burrowed a hole through him—then fell from his perch before his surprise could be given voice. Torval wagered he was dead before he hit the ground twenty feet beneath him.

  They dragged the man’s lifeless body under a copse of ferns, then took cover again and waited. Without any idea how many Devils there might be in total, it was difficult to gauge just how closely their sentries might be spaced. That long, quiet pause in the wake of the guard’s murder allowed them to see if his fall had immediately been noted, or if their way was clear.

  No one cried out. No one came. They carried on, slow and steady. Beyond the sentry post, they found clearer tracks through the underbrush, persistent footprints along the path indicating that it was well trodden and probably a primary route into the camp.

  The sun was well up and the morning mists burned away by the time they found the camp itself. It lay just beyond a little ridgeline, nestled into a sort of ravine in the hillside, jagged, rocky shoulders protecting its north and south sides, the hillside rising at its back, to the west. From their vantage point, secreted in the tree line down the slope, Torval and the others could clearly make out the dark depressions in the hill’s face denoting caves where the Devils made their proper homes while the walled clearing served as a makeshift kitchen and open-air great hall. There were guards on the hillside, perched on rocks and among the crags, staring outward, the morning sun probably blinding them a bit, since it shone right in their faces.

  They conferred in hasty whispers.

  “They’re well entrenched,” the lord marshal noted.

  “I wouldn’t try to take that camp,” Wallenbrand said with a scowl. “Not unless there were three times as many of us.”

  “Head-on’s no good,” Tuvera offered. “Too much open ground between the tree line and the bluffs. They’ll see us coming and pick us off. And some of us can’t cross that ground at speed.”

  She suggested Elvaris. The swordmaiden sat with her back to an ash a stone’s throw away, looking drawn and weary, hastily changing the dressing on her bloody leg wound.

  “There might be a way,” Galen broke in. “We could use the trees for cover and go farther up the hillside, try to hook around from behind.”

  “What good would that do?” Torval asked. “They’re still burrowed into those caves.”

  “Look up the slope,” Galen said. “See that thin column of smoke? And that other, over there?”

  “Chimneys,” Croften said quietly.

  “Precisely,” Galen agreed. “We could plug up the chimneys. Maybe even drop something burning down into them, smoke them out—”

  “We’ll see to it,” the lord marshal suddenly broke in. Clearly something about that plan appealed to him. “Wallenbrand, Croften, and I. The rest of you, stay hidden here until we drive them out.”

  “Wait a minute,” Torval grumbled, “is that it? That’s your plan? The three of you try to creep up and plug those chimneys while we wait for a signal?”

  The lord marshal’s face was still, implacable. “Your time will come, master dwarf. Just do as I say.”

  Off they went, the lord marshal, Croften, and Wallenbrand, disappearing into the woods south of their position, leaving Torval alone with Tuvera, Elvaris, and Galen. The four of them settled in for a long wait.

  “They know what they’re doing, I’ll give them that,” Tuvera said at one point.

  Torval, who’d been wondering idly if he’d ever see Rem, or his home, a
gain, raised his eyes. “What’s that?”

  Tuvera suggested the Devils’ camp. “Safe. Secure. Hard to find. How many hours did we waste trying to track them down?”

  Galen nodded admiringly. “Those Haita hill brigands we rousted out back in Estavar? They couldn’t have done better. No wonder these Devils have made such a name for themselves.”

  Torval took a moment to look out upon the camp then, to really study what he could see from their hiding place beyond the tree line. “There are women and children up there,” he said, almost to himself.

  “Whole families, probably,” Elvaris said. “Families by blood or families made by the exigencies of hard living. Not so unusual, really.”

  Torval thought of the many times he’d arrested pickpocket children who’d ultimately proven to be the brood of grown thieves he’d arrested previously. Yes indeed. Not unusual at all.

  He settled in after that. Little by little, the interminable waiting ate at him like swarming ants. His whole body was tense and weary all at once, eager for action and wholly unsuited to it. What he desperately wanted was to go find a quiet copse of woodland shrubs and curl up for a long nap. If only—

  A loud clap of thunder shook the hillside and sent birds fleeing in terror from their canopy roosts. As Torval and the swordmaidens all turned and stared, they saw the Devils visible in the little camp screaming, waving their arms, running to and fro. A thick pillar of smoke belched from one of the cave mouths above them.

  Without warning there came a second explosion. Yet another cave mouth vomited a cloud of white smoke. Screams sounded out of the hillside into the hitherto-still air of the forest.

  Torval felt a fury rise in him. Instantly he recalled that locked chest full of dwarven blasting spheres: nine compartments containing six spheres, with three compartments yawning emptily.

  Clearly the lord marshal had kept a few on his person for just such an emergency.

  Torval had no idea what kind of chaos was now being wrought, but he could hear the screams, the shouted names, the calls for a bucket brigade, even at this distance.

  “I’d say that’s our signal,” Tuvera said.

  Torval only grunted. The four of them broke cover and charged up the hillside.

  They met little resistance. A few of the Devils—men and women alike—saw the strangers rushing into their midst and took up arms to repel them, but the chaos was too great. Galen laid two men out with well-placed arrows and wounded three more, forcing them to yield. Torval felt vaguely sick as they rushed in, slowly realizing that the people they now attacked had been cleaning up after their breakfast, or preparing a midday meal, just moments before. One woman charged him, sounding a full-throated battle cry as she did, brandishing a woodsman’s ax. Torval sprinted into the arc of her ax-swing, threw his arms around her waist, lifted her and tossed her aside. He had no intention of using maul or blade on a woman if he could help it. When the explosions sounded, many of the women in the clearing below the caves had gathered the children in a recess cut into the rocks, allowing no easy entry save through a pair of camp wives now standing sentry, one wielding a sword, another a battle-ax. Up on the promontories beneath the cave mouths, people stumbled and rushed about, survivors reeling out of the haze with bloodied, soot-covered faces, hacking and doubled over from the thick, sulfurous smoke, while able bodies plunged into the roiling clouds in search of injured survivors. The lord marshal, Croften, and Wallenbrand were sweeping along the broad ledge, herding the excited survivors back toward the path that led down to the ravine and the clearing. One man tried to attack them. Big Croften picked the fellow up and tossed him off the ledge without hesitation. After that there weren’t many eager to fight their attackers.

  * * *

  Now, here they stood. A haze of yellow smoke from the blasting spheres still hung on the promontories while new smoke—thick and black—poured from the cave mouths and curled into the blue morning sky. Something in the caves had been set alight by the explosions, and it burned now, unhindered, unopposed. The survivors of the sneak attack had all been gathered in the rock-walled clearing beside the now-dead cookfires, about thirty of them. As Torval had feared, there were women and children among them—a good many, too. He supposed some were blood relations, while others were part of ad hoc families formed when parents died, or when children taken in road raids were added to the Devils’ numbers to someday join the ranks. There were a number of old men, as well—those bent by time or cut down by bad luck and circumstance, who could no longer function as competent warriors and rangers. These, Torval guessed, probably took on the roles of elder statesmen and artisans, kept the central clan unit attended to while the Red Raven and his bandits went out on long patrols in search of booty.

  At least half of those now gathered bore injuries of some sort: burns, lacerations from flying shrapnel, lungs full of smoke that set them hacking up blood at intervals, or wounds earned in brief conflict with Torval’s band of ambushers. Those untouched busily tended their injured comrades, or kept the few children of the camp safe and settled. Torval had no idea how many of the Devils had died in the caves or fled into the woods, but those remaining had clearly had all the fight knocked out of them.

  Croften had taken a spear-thrust to his lower right side, but the wound looked as though it might not prove fatal. Clearly the big scout simply presented too tempting a target. He sat aside with a scowl on his face as Wallenbrand hastily sewed him up.

  The lord marshal studied the cowed and injured outlaws now gathered before him. He was uneasy, pacing like a caged panther. They’d executed a sneak attack on the most notorious outlaw band in the woods, beaten it, even, and now controlled its secret hideaway . . . but of the young lady they sought, or the Red Raven himself, there was no sign.

  It made Torval angry. These Devils had sins to pay for, no doubt, but they’d just been attacked with explosives, in the very place where they took safe refuge, without any warning or opportunity to parley. Part of Torval understood the bloody logic of the lord marshal’s stratagem—even admired the ruthlessness of it—but there was another part of him, the part that tried to hew to honor and some sort of code of conduct, that could not countenance what they’d just done. Even in the name of recovering Tzimena . . . or Rem.

  Captain Tuvera marched up to the pacing lord marshal and spoke. She made no effort to whisper or keep her words from their prisoners’ hearing.

  “Something’s not right here,” Tuvera insisted. “No sign of the Raven? No sign of the Lady Tzimena?”

  “Spirited away, no doubt,” the lord marshal said.

  “Or burning in those caves,” the captain spat back. “Casualties of your bloody bomb attacks! Why didn’t you tell us what you had planned?”

  “Because he knew you’d object, that’s why,” Wallenbrand said angrily, pausing in his ministrations over Croften’s spear wound. “He certainly knew I’d object. He didn’t bother to warn us, either. Here I thought we’d find those chimneys and smoke them out, slowly. Next thing I know, this yellow-plated bastard is lighting the fuses on those dwarf blasters and tossing them into the caves!”

  “It worked, did it not?” the lord marshal asked.

  Torval saw Tuvera’s eyes suddenly widen in disbelief. “You’re still trying to kill him! You didn’t care if he and Tzimena were in the caves, or if those blasts took her out! As long as the Raven was dead, you’d consider anyone else wounded or killed an acceptable loss!”

  Torval felt his stomach tighten. Yes, that was it, wasn’t it? He waited for the lord marshal to argue, to offer another explanation. He did not. Instead the man simply turned back to the prisoners and nodded toward them.

  “I am inclined to see an interrogation or two as our only options,” the stiff-backed son of a whore said, as though Captain Tuvera had not just accused him of trying to murder her charge. The lord marshal then turned to Torval. “What say you, dwarf? You interrogate prisoners regularly, do you not? Have you any skills to offer in this situation
?”

  “We could ask them,” Torval suggested.

  “Ask?” the lord marshal repeated.

  Torval nodded. “Before we jump to the formal interrogations. Look at them, Lord Marshal. Most of them are women and children. The strong among them are still young—pups, for the most part—and the old ones are all scarred or damaged somehow. These aren’t the cream of the Devils’ crop.”

  “Begging the question of where the cream hied off to,” Tuvera said nervously.

  Torval guessed this group was perfectly capable of charging their captors and overpowering them . . . but something kept them from doing so. The lord marshal’s blasting spheres had proven just how relentless—how merciless—their captor could be. Knowing that he would stop at nothing to get his way, they also knew bravery would profit them little.

  The lord marshal offered a nod and a dismissive wave.

  “You have a little time, then,” the lord marshal said. “Draw some out and question them.”

  “Very well,” Tuvera said, and began marching toward the prisoners.

  Torval shot out ahead of her. “Forgive me, Captain, but let me handle this. This is what I do, after all.”

  He didn’t wait to hear an affirmative from her. As quickly as he could, he presented himself to all gathered there.

  “Listen up!” Torval shouted, his voice echoing between the rock walls of the ravine around them. “My name is Torval, and I’m here to ask some questions! Answer me plain and true, there’ll be no trouble. Lie to me or trouble me, you’ll be sorry. Does anyone disbelieve me?”

  They all stared back, looking neither worried nor convinced. Most of them wore hard faces and frowns, clearly irritated by having been caught off guard but not terribly troubled about it. Those were the faces, Torval knew, of people who were used to losing more often than they won, people who treated losses—however bitter—as little more than temporary setbacks or dues to be paid.