by Dragonlance
As she drew near, Eldako shouted something, pointing up past her. A bull-man had appeared in the window. He had a crossbow and was aiming it at them through the rain. Eldako grabbed and strung his bow, reached for his arrows, and nocked. The minotaur loosed. Shedara twisted in midair, and a bolt struck one of her packs and stuck there. She turned deathly pale, and a cold feeling passed over her. Another inch to the left, and the quarrel would have taken her in the heart.
Eldako pulled, aimed, let fly. The minotaur wasn’t expecting the falling elves to shoot back, and didn’t see the arrow coming. It hit him square in the left eye, and he stood erect for a moment, stunned, then collapsed, hanging halfway out the window. The crossbow dropped from his hands and smashed against the rocks. Eldako readied another arrow, but no more bull-men appeared. Shedara dived again, caught up with him, grabbed his arm so they fell together.
“We have to get them back!” she yelled in his ear, above the rain.
He nodded, then looked below, at the mass of broken rocks and churning foam. He slung his bow over his shoulder again.
“Later,” he said.
The wind swirled and gusted, tugging them this way and that. They were helpless against it: the magic buoyed them but didn’t let them steer their flight. The best they could do was angle their bodies to shift direction a little, but even that didn’t help much. They fell past the jagged, rocky cliff, dotted with scrub and bird dung, rainwater coursing in runnels down its side. Nothing to grab there, no way to arrest their fall. They had to find some place safe to land.
Shedara scanned the rocks, looking for one that was large and flat and level and not very far out to sea. The tide was still somewhat low in the daytime, as the silver and red moons were nearly full at night. That meant there were places that were sheltered from the worst of the battering surf—but not many, and most were jumbles of scree that would slide out from underneath them when they landed.
“There!” Eldako shouted, a finger stabbing down and to the right. “That one!”
Shedara looked and saw a slab of water-darkened rock, maybe twenty feet long and eight feet wide, not quite flat but sloping down slightly, toward the water. She made a face. It wasn’t ideal, but it was better than anything she’d spotted—and they were running out of time. They were still falling, leaf-slow. She met his eyes—pale and strange, the color of glaciers—and nodded once, firmly.
They dived for it.
The wind fought them, tugging and shoving this way and that. One moment, it threatened to blow them out to sea, then it shifted and nearly smashed them against the rock. Then it got under them, and it seemed they might sail forever through the air, never coming down. But the spell would only last so long. Shedara could feel its power fading, its edges starting to fray.
Eldako must have felt it too, for he angled himself down even more sharply, dragging her with him. They plummeted, descending like arrows toward the stone, which loomed closer and closer. Shedara had the sick premonition of it smeared with her blood. She tried to pull up, but Eldako shook his head. The merkitsa was fearless. He shouted something she couldn’t hear.
Then the wind caught her, and jerked her away from him. She flailed, tried to grab him again, but he was already too far away. A wave broke nearby, drenching Shedara in spray.
She looked down, and the rock loomed, and she couldn’t worry about Eldako anymore. She spread her arms like wings to slow her descent. It worked, to a point: when she struck the stone, there was a lot of pain, but no snapping bones, no hot lances through any of her joints to herald a sprain. She rolled, then stopped herself at the edge of the rock, battered and breathing hard.
Eldako landed a moment later, hitting the stone even harder than she had, his arrows scattering from his quiver. The landing drove the wind from him with a loud grunt, stunning him. He began to slide, down toward the dark water. Shedara heaved herself up and, shoulders and elbows burning, hurled herself at him, catching his wrist with her uninjured hand. She slid a few inches with him, then managed to get one foot wedged into a crack, stopping them both.
The waves boomed, driving away all thought as they pounded the nearby rocks. Sea-spray and rain fell upon them. Coldhope Keep was above them somewhere, but all Shedara could see was the shoulder of the cliff, blocking out all else. She dragged Eldako closer to the bluff, into a hollow beneath the rock, carved out by surf. The minotaurs, looking down, would never see them here. With luck, they would assume the two elves had fallen to their deaths. Finally safe within the shallow cave, she collapsed and let the world slip away for a while.
Eldako shook her awake. “Get up. The tide is coming in.”
She opened her eyes, sat up, felt her head spin. She hurt all over, but it was just scrapes and bruises. A large, green crab was studying her foot; she nudged it away, then looked out of the cave.
The rain had stopped; the sky had cleared a little. It was late afternoon, the clouds glowing gold on their western fringes. The wind had died down too, and the vicious surf with it, thank Astar. The water had risen quite a bit; the slab they’d landed on was half submerged, and the edge of the Run was nearly to the cave’s mouth. At high tide, the spot where they lay would be well under water.
“Are you hurt?” Shedara asked.
“Yes,” Eldako replied with a serious look. “All over. You?”
She laughed at that. “No worse than you are. Nothing that needs healing. Even my wrist’s feeling better, though that slop you put on it got washed away.”
She raised the hand the shadows had injured, earlier that day—gods, was it still the same day? It felt like years, not hours, had passed. Her fingers opened and closed slowly. There was a white scar where the awful black wound had been. The wild elf’s herb-magic had worked well.
Eldako was inspecting his quiver. He’d lost most of his arrows in the fall, and had only three left. He shook his head, annoyed.
“My bow is intact, and that’s what matters,” he said, his expression still impassive “I can make new arrows without much trouble, but a proper merkitsa strongbow takes months to craft.”
Grimacing at the aches that ran through his body, he got the rest of the way to his feet.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” he said. “Back up the cliff, away from the water.”
“We need to get Hult and Forlo back,” Shedara said.
“I agree,” he answered. “Let us see what is possible. Come.”
He strode out of the cave, clambering up on a barnacle-crusted stone to stare up the cliff face. It was nearly vertical, even bowed outward in places, with no clear paths to the top. There was a harbor village a few miles from here—Shedara had seen it on her way to Coldhope—but there was no way they could walk there across the rocks before the tide made the going impossible. Their options were few.
“We have to go up that way,” Shedara said, shading her eyes. She looked up, leaning back. “I have a climbing spell to help, but just one. And I can make us invisible too. But that’s all I’ve got left for today.”
“You use the spell,” he said. “I have climbed without magic all my life … and I wouldn’t trust that arm to hold your weight yet.”
She nodded, flexing her stiff fingers again. She scrutinized the cliff a while longer. Then she spoke a few words, making passes with her hands as she drew in the moons’ power. The air seemed to shimmer, just for the blinking of an eye, then she blew out a long breath.
“Ready,” she said.
They walked to the cliff’s edge, to a place where the stone hung low over the water. He boosted her up—she was still remarkably light, the falling spell still clinging to her—and she pressed her hands flat against the rock. They stuck there, and she pulled herself up the rest of the way, clinging to the stone like a spider. She scrambled a few feet higher, then glanced back, waiting for him.
He studied the rock a moment, looking for outcrops and cracks. With a quick jump, he caught hold of a narrow lip of stone and hung from it, swinging slightly. He looked
up at Shedara. She grinned down at him, already impressed. She was a climber, too—during the Godless Night, when the moons and magic were gone from the world, she’d had to do it without the spider spell—and she could tell he knew what he was doing. She went up a bit farther, feeling Eldako’s eyes on her, then turned to watch him pull himself up after her. He found another handhold then another, and soon his feet found purchase on the stone as well.
Shedara decided she liked the merkitsa. She climbed onward, the rising tide receding beneath her.
It took more than an hour, but finally she reached the top: a wooded promontory nearly a mile east of the keep. The wind had blown them farther than she’d thought while they were falling. Eldako came up a while later, and she caught his hand and pulled him up onto level ground again. He lay there a moment, on the carpet of pine needles, while he gathered his strength.
“The minotaurs are still there,” Shedara reported. “All around Coldhope. Looks like at least five hundred of them.”
Eldako groaned. Shedara sat beside him and gazed up at the boughs, swaying in the breeze, and listened to the creak of the trees. It was cool, autumn coming. Sunset soon.
“Do you still have the strength to make us invisible?” he asked.
“Barely … but yes.”
He drew a deep breath, held it, then let it out and rose slowly to his feet. “We’ll go scouting at dusk,” he said. “They’ll be changing their guards and concentrating on their supper. It would be foolhardy for us to attack, but we can move among them and use our eyes.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said, smiling. “I have the feeling they took Forlo alive and he may still be here, but Hult—”
“Don’t speak it,” Eldako interrupted. “Bad luck.”
He stretched, working the aches out of his muscles. Shedara did the same. She could feel the weariness, deep within her. It had been a hard day; she would sleep well tonight.
“I am ready,” he said. “Cast the spell.”
She stood before him, chanting her incantation. The air rippled. Her fingers danced, her left hand no longer hindered at all. Her wound had healed. Then the air around her surged again, tingling like the moments before a storm, and the world became, for an instant, as clear as crystal. She could see through Eldako, through the trees, through the ground beneath him. The wild elf caught his breath, surprised—and then everything snapped back to the way it had been before, solid and opaque.
“You will be able to see me,” she said, in answer to his unspoken question. “And I can see you too … but no one else. Just remember—stay quiet. The magic doesn’t make us silent. And don’t attack anyone, or you’ll break the spell.”
“I understand,” he whispered.
They looked to the west. There was a gap between cloud and horizon, the red sun peeking through, touching the distant hills. Eldako took a moment to secure his gear, making sure his remaining arrows didn’t rattle. Shedara did the same, securing her sword in its scabbard. When she looked up, she caught him watching her intently.
“You are like a merkitsa woman,” he said. “They fight alongside the men. The Uigan do not. It is good to be with a woman again.”
That caught her off guard. She felt her face flush. “Forthright, aren’t you?” she asked, looking away. “Come on. Let’s see what we can see.”
The forest ended half a mile from Coldhope, giving way to rocky grassland with a few fields nearby—fields whose serfs had fled with the barley still unreaped, fearing that the Uigan horde would soon overrun the area. The grain gave them cover, but they had to move carefully, or the bull-men would see the movement and investigate. No one came for them, though, and soon they were outside the keep’s walls again, crouching in a ditch and peering over the edge. The minotaurs had lit fires all around Coldhope but had put up no tents. They were bivouacking, not camping, and would be moving out in the morning.
Shedara’s estimate seemed about right, up close. Half a thousand of the bull-men, with some humans thrown in as well. Banners of black and gold, emblazoned with various regimental emblems, fluttered in the breeze. The minotaurs were doing what all soldiers did when not fighting or marching: they were eating, sparring, gambling, singing, and drinking copiously. A few stood guard with crossbows and spears, but even they were busy guzzling from wineskins. Clearly, they didn’t expect any trouble.
“Give me twenty of my people,” Eldako murmured. “Twenty strong bows and hands to pull them. I could leave this lot in tatters.”
“I could say the same of the Silvanaes,” Shedara whispered back. “But they’re not here, either. What can we do with just the two of us?”
They kept studying the camp. “I think I see where they’re keeping the prisoners,” Eldako said after a while, pointing toward a thicker knot in the crowd.
Fifty or so bull-men were gathered together, watching something the elves couldn’t see. They shouted in the minotaur tongue, and every now and then broke out in bursts of laughter. Swords and fists lashed the air.
“It must be Forlo and Hult,” Shedara whispered with a scowl. “The bastards are making sport of them. Come on.”
They stole forward together, making no sound at all. The last two hundred yards to the bivouac were wide open—without the invisibility spells, even a drunk watchman would have spied them. As it was, though, they crossed the distance and slipped past the sentries without any trouble. From there, it was easy going: the noise of the bull-men was enough that they didn’t even have to move very quietly, and the sentries were so widely spread out that the two elves got past all of them with ease. Only once, when a minotaur suddenly rose from where he sat and stumbled directly into their path, did they almost give themselves away. Eldako nearly slammed into the bull-man, but pulled up quickly, gliding around him like smoke.
The knot of shouting, laughing minotaurs was harder to negotiate. There was no way to get through the pack to see what was in its midst. Fortunately, there was a tree nearby: an old, gnarled ash with overhanging branches. Eldako climbed it with ease, barely shaking its branches as he rose. The bull-men noticed nothing. Shedara came up behind him, the spider spell still lingering, and they clung to its upper limbs, looking down.
Hult was in the midst of the pack. A leather thong tied his ankle to a stake, which was hammered into the ground. He had a dagger in his hand—a minotaur blade, not his Uigan knife—and was facing two snarling black dogs. A third lay in the dust, a pool of blood spreading from its pierced throat. One of the hounds darted forward, its powerful jaws snapping; Hult slashed and missed, but a kick sent the dog yelping back to its mate. The minotaurs cheered; silver changed hands.
“And they call my people barbarians,” Eldako sneered.
“They’re not all like this,” said Shedara. “Forlo’s friend Grath—”
Just then the other dog came on, and this time Hult couldn’t fend it off. The beast’s jaws clamped down on his calf, and he yelled in pain. The bull-men laughed as he pounded on the animal’s head and shoulders. Finally he stabbed the dagger down into the base of its skull, and the animal went limp with a whimper, bringing a new round of whoops from the minotaurs. Hult rose, bleeding, and turned to face the last dog.
“Stop this! Stop this at once!”
Everyone—the minotaurs, Shedara and Eldako, even Hult—turned toward the voice. A black-furred bull-man in plate armor strode forward, hefting a massive morning star. He wore an officer’s badge, and the others parted to let him through.
“What is this?” the officer thundered. “Tormenting a prisoner? Are you lot citizens of the League, or savages like him? Call off that beast at once!”
The final dog was just tensing to leap when a blond bull-man with a scarred face whistled. The animal looked back at him, and he spoke a sharp word. Head lowered, the dog slunk to his side.
“Now,” said the officer, “whose idea was this?”
The minotaurs glanced at one another, then moved away from the dog’s owner. Glowering death at the others,
he took a step toward the officer. “Beg pardon, Captain,” he declared. “We gave you the traitor Forlo. We didn’t think you cared about this one.”
The black minotaur was silent a moment, then lunged forward and struck the blond warrior with a mailed fist. The minotaur went down hard. The others fell silent.
“Use some sense, Marn!” said the captain. “This one’s valuable. Think of the price they’ll pay at the Arena for a real, live Uigan warrior to fight on the sands!”
The minotaurs muttered. A few jeered. Hult looked confused, holding his dagger ready. The blond minotaur, Marn, got up from where he’d fallen, blood trickling from his snout. “Sorry, Captain,” he said. “Reckon I wasn’t thinking clear.”
“You can lay silver on that,” said the captain. “Now take that blade away from the barbarian and put some irons on him. Then get some rest, the lot of you! We march at dawn to meet up again with Marshal Omat and the main force. After that it’s back to the capital—and anyone who slacks because they’re tired is in for a flogging! Understand?”
The bull-men muttered agreement and withdrew. Two brought forward long poles with metal prongs on the end and used them to pin Hult to the ground. A third got the dagger away from him. The minotaurs clapped heavy shackles to his ankles and wrists, then led him away. Shedara watched them go, feeling murderous.
She looked over at Eldako. His face was cold.
“Come on,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do for them. Not now, anyway. At least we know they’re still alive, and where the cattle are taking them.”
She glared at the minotaurs a while longer before sighing. “All right. Let’s go.”
Away from the bivouac again, back in the woods, Shedara let the invisibility spell lapse. She fell to her knees, exhausted, then leaned back against the trunk of a pine tree. Eldako crouched beside her, looking back toward the fire-glow from Coldhope. For a long time, neither of them spoke.
