by T Nisbet
Chp. 32
The relief I felt was short lived. I didn’t like that I wouldn’t be able to help protect Ivy, even if Guldan was this world’s most famous swordsman. I didn’t trust him at all, and his desire to leave Brianna to some horrible fate insured my dislike.
I retrieved my bow from where I’d attached it to the horse’s saddle and bent it to string. I was putting the quiver of arrows over my shoulder when Toby ran up holding a large wooden crossbow Bronn had given him. He grinned at me and patted the weapon.
“Me likey,” he said.
“Just don’t shoot me in the back while we’re running buddy,” I said and headed after Gill.
We ran around the boulder and over to the road. A strange birdcall sounded out from a rock ledge twenty paces to our right. I looked up at the peculiar whistle and saw Gill motioning to us from atop the tree-lined shelf.
“Up there!” I whispered to Toby.
“Right behind you,” he replied.
It took us a few minutes to get to his position.
Gill pointed out over the clearing.
“This ledge is perfect for a bowman, elevated, trees to provide us good cover, a good fifty-yard killing zone in front before they pass below us heading south, and it’s a difficult position to assault without any covering fire. We’re hidden from any riders coming in behind us from the south as well. It would be the perfect location for an ambush if it weren’t for the vale. If more than one rider comes through, they might be able to scatter and an obvious place to avoid being hit by an arrow is exactly where we’ve hidden our wagon,” Gill said, pointing over at the huge boulders to our right. “Can’t go further up the road because we wouldn’t be able to alert anyone here should they make a retreat to this position. All in all, it’s better than I could have hoped for under the circumstances.”
Gill eyed Toby and the large crossbow grinning.
“This is a poor spot for a weapon such as that. The bolts are heavy, made to pierce heavy armor or stop a horse. You’ll need to find a position down there,” he said, pointing to some trees near the boulders our wagon was hidden behind. “Aim low and take down the horse. Anywhere in the chest or side should do it. Wait until you see two arrows fired, before you pull that trigger okay?”
“Really?” Toby asked. “Shoot the horse?”
“Unless you want them riding down one of our friends, yes,” Gill smiled patting his shoulder. “Might want to let them know of our plan then while you’re at it. Just in case someone tries to take cover behind the boulders.”
“Thought you hated horses, Tob?” I asked, needling him.
“I do,” Toby said grinning. “It’s just that I’ve decided I hate walking more.”
As Toby made his way back across the road and over behind the boulders, Gill told me how he wanted the fight to go should it come to that. If a solo rider appeared, he would shoot first and then me. If I missed as well, Toby would take out the horse. More than one rider, and we’d fire in unison and keep firing until everything was down. The main goal was to keep them from passing below us, and then to keep them away from where the wagon was hidden.
As it turned out, we didn’t have too long to wait. Toby had just gotten into position after alerting Bronn and Carla, when I heard the sound of a horse being ridden hard coming up the rise before the vale. Gill heard as well and nodded to me. We each notched an arrow and drew back.
I settled into a locked position. The arrow’s fletching tickled my cheek as I sighted down its length. The sound of the approaching rider grew louder.
“Just one,” Gill breathed. “Going to let him get close, be ready.”
The black-clad rider appeared over the rise urging every ounce of speed from his heavily breathing horse. Brutally whipping the horse, the blood elf raced across the flat vale towards us.
As I followed the rider, ready to loose my arrow, I heard Gill breath out. His bowstring twanged beside me as he let his arrow fly. The dark elf reeled in the saddle as Gill’s arrow punched through his chest just below the collarbone.
“Loose,” Gill whispered.
I released my arrow and watched it close the distance, almost instantly spilling the rider from the saddle. The horse slowed to a trot almost immediately, then stopped on the road down below us.
“Pull the body off the road and hide it, then take the horse over with ours by the wagon,” Gill said. “I’ll cover the vale until you return.”
I climbed down and went over to the body, my heart hammering in my chest. The blood elf lay on his side. Gill’s arrow had killed the dark elf, the three-foot shaft punching all the way through his rib cage in the back. I took a shuttering breath and turned the body over carefully. The blood elf’s dark eyes were half closed in death. I saw the orange feathers of my arrow sticking out of his sternum and nearly threw up.
I shook my head and tried my best to be business-like. Neither one of the arrows appeared to be usable, so I didn’t bother pulling them out. I grabbed the top of his tunic near his pale throat with one hand, his belt in the other and lifted the dark elf off the ground, carrying him off the stone road into the trees near Toby.
“Nice shootin, Tex,” Toby said, helping me set the elf’s body down behind a fallen log.
I ran back to the road and gathering the horse’s reins, mounted it. It reared when it felt my weight settle onto its back and almost threw me from the saddle. I managed to stay on, and get the horse under control, but it was a near thing. I patted its sweaty neck and whispered soothing words to it. It wasn’t long before I was able to get it to walk behind the boulder.
“Rider dead?” Bronn asked, taking the horses reins from me as I dismounted.
I nodded.
“Search the body, there might be some intelligence we could use.”
I nodded again and took off back around the boulder.
I stopped next to Toby and quietly told him about Bronn’s instructions. I’ll admit I was extremely relieved when Toby volunteered to search the body for me. I’d killed, and seen more death in the last couple of days than I had ever wanted to, rummaging through a corpse’s clothes was one step too far for me at that moment. I smiled in appreciation and left Toby, making my way back up to where Gill watched the road.
Just past noon, another rider rode into the vale and met a similar fate as the first. I was able to salvage both arrows and brought them back up to the ledge, after dealing with the body and horse.
“There should be a cloth at the bottom of your quiver Jake. Use it to clean your arrow,” Gill said, reaching down into his own quiver and retrieving a slightly stained, brown cloth. As he began to meticulously clean his arrow, I reached down into my quiver and found a similar cloth.
“Does it ever get easy Gill?” I asked, attempting to clean the drying blood off my arrow.
“Killing?” Gill snickered. “Yes and no, though killing in a just cause takes some of the edge off. It’s all about your mind set really. Everyone has his or her own way of dealing with it. I try to see killing as an unavoidable necessity to the survival of my family and friends in Lockewood.”
He ruffled my hair.
“It’s not like you’re killing innocent, fuzzy, little bunnies, Jake. Let me tell you what I know about these dark elves, maybe that will help you put it into perspective a bit.
“They worship demons. You know that, but what you maybe don’t know is: they sacrifice their own first-born child on an altar, and spread its blood over their bodies as a testament of their faith. Can you imagine? How could anyone pray that way? I don’t pretend to understand it, I just know it as evil, Jake.”
Gill pointed vaguely at his scarred face.
“I have them to thanks for this. A group of them attacked the mage, my mentor and I were guarding, on the trip to Alissia I told you about. I was only sixteen at the time, in the last stage of training. They killed my mentor, but we saved our mage. That sword on the wall in my room is the sword that gave me this beauty mark.
“And there’s some
thing else you should know. They sacrifice everyone they capture in battle. Their priests and priestesses give the prisoners a foul draught of some sort that keeps their victims alive and aware while they are dismembered and fed to the minor demons and imps they keep as pets. The victim’s revulsion and horror feed their evil sacrifices to the demon we are going to kill.”
I felt nauseous thinking about it. It had to be stopped. I said a quick prayer to God to give me strength.
“Don’t let them capture me, Gill,” I said, meeting his eyes.
He smiled and nodded.
“I was about to tell you the same thing. Battles with Blood Elves are always to the death.”
As I finished cleaning the arrow, I became aware of the steady sound of horses echoing from behind us. After seconds it was joined with the pounding of hooves coming towards us.
“Concentrate your aim on those coming towards us only. Take the right side, I’ve got the left.”
I nodded and settled into a stance pulling the notched arrow I had just cleaned back until the fletching rested gently against my cheek.
“Wait,” Gill whispered as the half a dozen riders crested the rise and rode recklessly into the vale. “Wait.”
Four other black-clad riders appeared below us and seeing the other dark elves racing towards them moved their mounts to the side of the road opposite us.
“Closer, closer…” Gill breathed.
I sighted the lead rider on the right and released my breath slowly.
“Now,” Gill whispered.
Together we let fly. I notched a second arrow, pulled, and released as my first arrow struck the dark elf I’d aimed at in the face sending his lifeless body tumbling unceremoniously off the back end of his horse.
Notching another arrow and pulling back, I heard cries of alarm from the road below and did my best to ignore them. My second arrow slammed into the chest of the rider whose horse had just trampled my first target, as he fell I scanned for my next target. I was about to release my third arrow when my target’s mount screamed out in agony, its front legs buckling. It crashed down, tumbling forward, spilling its rider into the road and tripping the two horses behind it even as an arrow from Gill slammed into one of the falling rider’s chest. The whole group crashed to the road in a wailing pile of dead and dying.
An elf leaped out of the tangled mass. I adjusted my aim and let fly, grabbing another arrow and putting it to string.
I heard one of the dark elves below me cry out, and I saw his mount rear over backwards out of my peripheral vision. The arrow I just released hit the dark elf squarely in the center of his stomach. He staggered sideways and fell to the road, pulling weakly at the arrow that had pierced through his stomach and lodged in his spine.
I watched as one of Gill’s arrows pinned another of the fallen elves to the road. All of the elves that had been heading towards us were down, so I spun and fired my arrow at an elf that was riding towards where Toby stood trying to reload his crossbow. The arrow sunk into the dark elf’s upper back, and he fell sideways from his horse.
“Duck!” Gill shouted.
I dropped to my stomach without thinking.
Gill’s sword connected with a dark elves’ blade above me. I spun on my side and kicked the attacker’s feet out from under him. As he started to fall, Gill’s sword buried itself in his side.
Another attacker gained the ledge. Gill jumped over me and beat him back. Both swords were a blur, but the elf obviously hadn’t been expecting to be attacked so quickly after gaining the ledge, and Gill’s attack backed him to the edge of the shale cliff.
Cursing, his eyes burning with hatred, the dark elf turned and jumped. I scrambled to my feet, notched the arrow I already had out, pulled and fired where I thought he would land.
I was rewarded with a sickening grunt.
“Quickly!” Gill said, scrambling down the side of the ledge towards the road. “We need to clean this up before any more come.”
Putting the bow over my shoulder I climbed down after him as fast as I could. When I reached the bottom of the ledge I heard hissed cursing coming from beneath a dead horse. Gill was standing on the other side of the horse looking down. I quickly ran over to join him. Pinned beneath the dead horse was a young female blood elf. Only one arm and the upper part of her chest were free.
She looked up at us with hatred in her eyes, wheezing out foul curses in their garbled language. I could only assume they were curses of course, but from the look she was giving us, I was pretty sure whatever she was saying was particularly foul.
Despite her condition, I was surprised at her beauty. Her face was nearly perfect, high cheek bones, full lips, and eyes the color of a golden field of wheat. Her deep auburn hair spilled out around her mixing with the pine leaves and dirt.
She must have seen the way I looked at her because she smiled up at me with a seductive, evil half grin.
“Beware this one, Jake. She’ll steal your seed and then feed you to her pets. Though the first part might be fun,” Gill laughed.
Bronn appeared at our side. One look at the dwarf and the female dark elf began to thrash, trying desperately to free herself.
“Whoa!” Bronn laughed. “Caught yourself a minx, eh?”
“What do we do with her?” Gill asked.
“Well, I’d say bind her and let Guldan decide what to do with her, but she probably won’t survive long once we get the horse off of her,” Bronn grunted shaking his head.
“Why?” I asked.
“Internal injuries,” Gill offered. “I’ve seen a few crushing injuries before. Once the weight is removed, the blood flows into the injured organs and the person bleeds to death.”
“Oh.”
“Well, let’s be at it then. Make sure you grab her arms,” Bronn said.
I watched in amazement as he grabbed the dead horse’s neck above Toby’s crossbow bolt and pulled, rolling the animal off of the trapped elf. The sheer strength needed to move the horse was nothing less than superhuman.
She passed out, as Gill pulled her out from under the dead animal. Bronn released the horse’s neck and it rolled back.
“No time to gawk lad! Get a couple of horses and some rope from the wagon.” Bronn said patting me on the shoulder. “The guard and I will take care of this one.”
Using a couple of the dark elves’ horses and a thick rope, we dragged the two dead animals out of the vale and into the trees far enough away from the road where they wouldn’t be noticed right away, then removed the dead elves. Carla didn’t say anything, but I could see the pain in her eyes as she looked at the dead horses. It took quite awhile to make the area look right, but no other riders came along while we cleaned up. Gill sprinkled pine needles and dirt over the blood soaked sections of the road.
When we were finished we went back to our spots and waited. From where Gill and I sat on the ledge, I couldn’t see any visible signs of what had happened. Bronn had cautioned us that dark elves had keen senses and might smell the blood that had been spilled. With that in mind we prepared to shoot anyone coming from the south that stopped or seemed suspicious as they crossed the vale.
Gill handed me some dried meat as we sat there guarding the roadway.
“That is some gift Thallium gave you, Jake. You handle a bow like a crazed forest elf.”
“It’s some curse, you mean.”
“Curse?” Gill asked surprised. “How so?”
“What’s it good for, Gill,” I asked. “Killing things, people, elves, whatever?”
“Are we back to this? You have to get past it, Jake. I trained for most of my life to know the way of the sword and bow. I didn’t do it because I dreamed of glory. I didn’t volunteer for this because I want my name carved into some piece of stone by a fountain. I want my life to matter. Don’t you?”
I considered what Gill said. He did have a point. Fame was a nuisance, a ball and chain I didn’t want any part of.
“I guess so.”
“
My Papi always said, ‘All you can do is your best.’ Pretty good advice if you ask me,” Gill said.
I couldn’t help but laugh.
“My dad says the same thing.”
“So we do our best and pray our best is good enough,” Gill said, smiling.
I nodded.
