The Hickory Staff e-1

by Rob Scott

  Suddenly angry, Brynne prepared herself for a fight. ‘Come right in,’ she cried as Steven’s firelight gleamed along the carefully honed edge of her knife. ‘I haven’t disembowelled anyone in a couple of Twinmoons and I am ready for you!’ She felt the heat of battle rage through her body as she quickly discarded the thick woollen tunic she wore over her cotton undergarment: she needed to be agile and quick, not weighed down by heavy clothing. The number of intruders approaching their camp sounded formidable.

  Then Mark was by her side, his battle-axe poised to strike. He didn’t look comfortable. ‘What’s happening?’ he shouted unnecessarily.

  ‘We’re about to come under attack.’ She shot him a sexy grin and reminded, ‘Remember, don’t try to hack off any limbs – especially not your own.’

  Mark gurgled an incoherent reply, regained his senses and yelled to Steven, ‘Hey, how about some light?’

  Calmly, Steven nodded, closed his eyes and held one hand out, palm-down. He made a sweeping gesture from shoreline to shoreline: this would get their attention! All at once, scores of enemy torches that had been extinguished to ensure a stealthy approach burst into flame and illuminated the cavern around their camp. The four friends gaped at the force coming towards them. Ten longboats, each loaded with twenty or more armed warriors were approaching over the lake while another crowd of assailants were creeping over the rocky shore to surround their camp: a classic pincer movement.

  Mark guessed the screams were meant to intimidate and demoralise, but as all their torches sprang to light simultaneously, their shouting died out in an instant. There was an unexpected hissing as a number of the attackers, stunned by the sudden fire in their hands, dropped their torches into the water. One was so startled that his flaming branch fell into the longboat and cries of warning and anger were replaced by screams of pain and surprise as several men struggled to stamp out the strangely resilient flame dancing about inside their vessel. What had begun as a highly organised silent ambush had evolved into a confused and broken attack, all strategy forgotten, thanks to Steven’s magic.

  Cries of ‘Evil magic! Demon fire!’ and ‘Retreat!’ replaced the previous intimidating threats. Steven set his jaw in determination, hoping he had turned the tide before the battle began.

  One voice rose above the others. ‘Stand fast!’ it commanded urgently, ‘it’s just a trick. Stand fast!’

  Garec had an arrow nocked and ready to fire; two additional quivers were standing ready by his hand. He took in as many details of the enemy as possible. They did not appear to be Malakasian, or if they were, they did not wear Prince Malagon’s colours. On closer examination, he wasn’t even sure they were soldiers: they were a ragtag band of men and women of all ages, and in all states of dress. Even though the light was not that bright, he could see a number of bare feet. Some of the people looked fit and tough; others sported hefty paunches. They were armed with everything from bows to broadswords. Many brandished daggers and even kitchen knives; there were quite a few sturdy wooden cudgels as well. This was no organised fighting force; this was a band of thieves or pirates.

  Garec thought they might stand a chance if he and Steven could kill a pile of them before they reached shore, but he had no idea how they would handle the attackers approaching along the beach, then Steven gave him the answer.

  ‘Stay where you are!’ Steven shouted above the confused din.

  ‘Steady now,’ the commanding voice called back. ‘On my mark.’ The voice came from a longboat off to Steven’s left.

  Shaking his head, Steven pointed the staff at the closest boat and watched as flames crept up its gunwales and licked along the handrail to ignite the oars. Twenty would-be assailants screamed at once and summarily leaped, fell or were pushed over the side. He repeated his directive. ‘Stay where you are!’

  One man, about Garec’s age, had been warily creeping along. Now, hidden in the shadows with his back to the stone wall, he waited. When all eyes were on the burning longboat, he took advantage of their inattention and charged towards Mark and Brynne, weapons drawn and bellowing a battle cry. Brynne, who both felt and heard him approach, took several steps towards him, then dropped to her knees and used the young man’s weight against him. Unable to slow in time, he stumbled, tripped over her and tumbled to a stop near the waterline.

  Mark stared in disbelief – it had happened so quickly he hadn’t even realised Brynne had moved; her skill with that blade was stunning, terrifying! The foolish man’s stomach had been sliced open; Mark watched silently as the dying pirate struggled to replace several loose coils of intestine that had escaped unchecked as he rolled across the shore.

  Mark shook himself and climbed over to check that Brynne was okay. She bent down to clean the knife-blade on the man’s tunic, then drew herself up and glared at the group of men and women who were watching her. Although she said nothing, her expression was taunting, almost daring them to come forward and face her.

  The injured man thrashed about, splashing water up as he kicked his legs and flailed his arms. He screamed for his mother, and to someone else – not a name Mark could recognise – and then, thankfully, fell silent. The ruffians on the beach moved forward slowly, waiting for the order to engage the enemy.

  ‘This is not good,’ Mark said as he shuffled nervously back and forth, his feet ankle-deep in the pebbles.

  ‘Do not come against us,’ Steven yelled towards the longboats, then, with a note of sincerity in his voice, ‘I have no wish to kill you.’

  ‘You are outnumbered, fifty to one,’ their commander called back with a laugh. ‘Yield now.’

  ‘You don’t understand.’ As Steven raised the staff, the closest assailants cringed visibly before him. ‘We will not yield. You will lay down your arms, or you will die.’

  Garec searched the gloom, an arrow drawn full, hoping to pinpoint the leader’s voice. He sighted down its shaft waiting for an opportunity to silence the man for ever, but he was beaten to it: off to his right, from somewhere out on the water, he heard the telltale snap of a bowstring.

  There was no time to cry out a warning; he drew a quick breath and held it, waiting for the arrow to pierce him through. But he was not the target: he watched in almost stupefied amazement as Steven, with positively inhuman speed, snatched the shaft from the air and snapped it in two with one hand. Recovering quickly, the Ronan bowman found the enemy marksman crouched in the bow of a longboat and sent his own shaft hurtling across the water. With a muted thud, the arrow embedded itself in the man’s neck. Several startled cries nearly drowned out the pirate’s incoherent last words and Garec felt his hands shake for a moment as the dead man fell forward into the water with an insignificant splash.

  The voice cried out again, this time in anger, ‘Beach party, attack! Longboats forward! Take them now!’

  Brynne dropped to a crouch and Mark fought the urge to run as thirty armed ruffians charged with an unholy bellow that sounded as if it would reverberate through the cavern for an eon. Behind him he heard similar cries as the group flanking them advanced as well. Oars squeaked in rusty oarlocks, groaning as the longboats made for shore.

  Garec’s hands were steady again. Calm and controlled, he began firing into the boats, aiming for the oarsmen, not just to slow down their approach, but to force more of the enemy to expose themselves as targets while they struggled to clear the benches of their dead. He’d made three shots for three clean kills when he caught sight of the force bearing down on Mark and Brynne. Grimacing, he changed target, but though he killed or wounded a soldier with every shaft, there were simply too many: the horde was about to overrun his friends.

  Steven wished Garec would stop firing for a moment so he could try to bring a peaceful end to the confrontation. He was sorry Gilmour wasn’t there; somehow the old man would have negotiated a truce by now and they’d all be sitting around the fire together, smoking pipes, chucking back the local liquor and swapping stories.

  He sighed, and glanced to his right
, where Brynne and Mark were about to engage a force large enough to take Denver in an afternoon. So much for peace to all humankind! Maybe he could have this deeply meaningful philosophical discussion with himself once he’d saved his friends from being chopped into the evening’s main course. Steven closed his eyes and focused his thoughts.

  The shoreline came to life as thousands of small, smooth, rounded stones and pebbles sprang into the air and careened through the marauding horde as if fired from an invisible catapult. With a gesture, Steven repeated the attack on the group advancing from the adjacent shore. Eyeballs were ruptured, noses broken, ribs cracked and teeth dislodged; deep welts and bruises coloured exposed flesh as the stones ripped mercilessly through the enemy ranks, denting helmets and even shattering sword blades. The raiders screamed in terror, diving into the lake or running headlong back along the beach in an effort to escape the punishing hailstorm of pebbles. A small cloud of stone projectiles pursued every one of them, punctuating the message that the small company was not about to surrender.

  In spite of the blood and broken bones, no one had died in Steven’s counter-attack. He wondered if they appreciated that yet.

  Steven turned his attention to the longboats. His initial reaction was to sink them all, but it occurred to him that a boat or two might be useful for them, so instead, he drove the staff into the shallows at his feet and, replicating the wave he had created in Meyers’ Vale, sent a wall of water forward to capsize the boats and leave their passengers adrift. ‘Kill as many as you like, Garec!’ he shouted loudly enough to be heard above the cries of the injured, ‘but try not to hit the boats. We’ll need at least one of those intact.’

  Garec looked over at him, and Steven shook his head slightly. He set off to examine the pirate Brynne had so deftly gutted. For a moment he hoped the man might be saved, but he shuddered as he looked down. The massive wave had washed away the blood and if he didn’t look any further than his face, the dead raider looked as though he had simply fallen asleep with his feet in the water. Steven avoided looking anywhere else; he knew that seeing entrails would make him vomit. On the beach before him lay five or six more of Garec’s casualties, each with an arrow jutting awkwardly from someplace soft and vital.

  He turned to Brynne. ‘Did you have to-’ His voice trailed off. Of course she did. The man had attacked her. He had come screaming out of the shadows, and if Brynne had not dispatched him so efficiently, she or Mark would be lying here instead.

  Steven couldn’t take his eyes off the corpse. He had seen the man clumsily trying to push his own organs back in, as if the act of forcing them back inside his abdomen might save his life. It was a reflex; anyone would have done the same, grasping feverishly at the slippery, blood-soaked intestines and shoving them back inside, not caring even if they were returned to their correct position. Were his hands clean? He hoped so, because forcing clumps of dirt in between the tubes might cause an infection. Looking down into the dead man’s face, Steven saw that although open, his eyes were askew in their sockets, pointing in different directions. Were his hands clean? If not, it hadn’t mattered for long. The body sprawled, arms and legs akimbo, somehow taking up too much space. The warden of this subterranean boneyard would not be pleased. As Steven folded the man’s arms across his chest, a bemused chuckle escaped his lips. He drew back, momentarily shocked at the sound of his own voice.

  ‘Don’t get jaded, Steven,’ he told himself, and ran a hand over his eyes. He wiped his hand contemplatively on his tunic. ‘Don’t get used to this,’ he repeated.

  Two large groups had formed on the beach, one behind him and one before. People were still emerging from the water, many dragging their injured with them. At a quick estimate there were nearly three hundred of the soldiers, pirates, ruffians or whatever they were still standing, but regardless of their numbers, their attitude had changed. They hovered between embarrassment and fright – embarrassed at how handily they had been put down, and frightened, because they did not expect to leave the cavern alive. Nine longboats lay capsized about fifty yards from shore. One still burned, smoke billowing up in great clouds beneath the bone-decorated stone ceiling.

  Steven looked at the person emerging from the lake to address them; he assumed it was their leader, the one who’d ordered the foolish attack. He waited expectantly, silently.

  Even Brynne gave a little start when the raider clasped a handful of matted hair and pulled it behind one ear. It was a woman. Steven cleared his throat, adjusted his grip on the staff, and waited.

  ‘I have come to surrender, and to beg your mercy for my warriors.’ The second surprise of the moment was the woman’s voice, soft and gentle, far divorced from the commanding voice with which she had ordered the abortive attack. ‘You have a power, that is obvious, and I cannot risk more of my soldiers’ lives against you.’

  Steven beamed. ‘Well, I’m glad you came to your senses before-’ Brynne pushed in front of him, her knife drawn and ready.

  ‘Brynne, what are you doing?’

  A tense murmur rippled through the ruffians assembled along the shore as they watched the interchange. Garec retreated several steps and drew his bow, ready to fire in an instant.

  Brynne placed her knife at the woman’s throat and with her free hand reached behind the pirate’s back to withdraw an evil-looking dagger with a curved blade and a short wooden handle. ‘Steven, I appreciate what you did with the rocks, and that tremendous wave, but you still have a lot to learn.’ She tossed the dagger to Mark. ‘One doesn’t get to be the leader of a band like this by surrendering at the first sign of trouble.’

  Steven paled.

  ‘She was going to kill you, so they-’ she nodded towards the pirate ranks inching slowly along the beach, ‘-could kill the rest of us.’

  Angry and embarrassed with himself, Steven cursed aloud in English, a string of epithets that left Mark shaking his head in admiration at his friend’s grasp of the vernacular. Recovering, Steven summed it all up with a rousing, ‘Son of an open-sored Atlantic City whore!’ and stepped forward as if to punch the woman hard across the face.

  She raised her own fists, but rather than backing away, she taunted him, ‘Go ahead, sorcerer, kill me. The way you pined over Rezak back there, I’m surprised you didn’t kiss him goodbye.’ She stared up at him, her eyes fierce. ‘What’s the matter, sorcerer, don’t like confrontation? Afraid to kill me?’

  Rezak. Steven would remember that. He looked down at the unsavoury character glaring at him. ‘I’m not a sorcerer,’ he said.

  ‘Look at that,’ the woman said. Steven fell back several paces as she shoved him hard and laughed, ‘You are afraid to kill me.’ Around them, members of her pirate band laughed and hooted uproariously. The woman spat at Steven’s feet and, reeking confidence, stepped towards him.

  In an instant Brynne was between them again, the hunting knife drawn. Steven barely had time to blink before Brynne had flicked her wrist twice and taken off both the woman’s earlobes. She sounded deadly serious when she told the pirate leader, ‘I, however, am not afraid to kill you.’

  The woman recognised Brynne’s unemotional savagery and lowered her fists. She drew a wet kerchief from around her neck and dabbed at the blood that dripped steadily from her ears. ‘I am wondering how you managed to get in here,’ she said offhandedly, not sounding in the least bit threatened. ‘You could not have come from the river with such a vessel-’ she indicated the Capina Fair, ‘-and I know you didn’t enter this cavern through-’ She hesitated, as if discarding certain words, ‘through other places. So unless you used magic to get inside, I have to assume you have lived your entire lives down here and I have simply never seen you before. It is possible. This is a large lake, and an even larger cavern. And yet, I find that unlikely, because I have met the other permanent inhabitants of this cave on several occasions, and they tend to be a good deal hairier, blinder, and-’ she smiled at Steven for the first time ‘-less attractive than the lot of you.’ She squeezed blood
out of the kerchief, then bent down to rinse it in the lake before reapplying it to her ears – although they were still bleeding freely, she didn’t appear to be terribly upset about it.

  ‘So, sorcerer, how did you get down here?’

  For the first time, Steven noticed she was using just one hand, her right hand: her left had either been hanging limply at her side or slightly behind her back since she had joined them on the beach. Looking down at it now, he noticed she was curling and straightening different fingers in a repeating pattern. Behind her, the pirates were standing perfectly still. He thought they looked to be somewhat closer than they had been when he first stood up from the dead man’s body, but perhaps that was a trick of the light. He couldn’t see the raiders assembled behind the first row or two, but there was some movement, as if they were shuffling nervously from side to side, or trying to move without being detected.

  Then, from the corner of his eye, he saw it. A big man, older but tough-looking, with a shaved head and a long scar running across the outside of his neck, was watching the woman’s fingers intently. He was bleeding from several lacerations on his face and arms, but like the woman with the now neatly clipped earlobes, he did not seem to notice his wounds. Instead he stared between Brynne and Mark, watching the curling and straightening of the woman’s fingers.

  She was sending messages to him. It was a code. Steven couldn’t work out what the patterns meant, but there was no question the woman before him, still carrying on about him being a sorcerer, was sending orders to the ranks behind her. Steven was almost dazed: he was watching the scene unfold as if he were just a bystander. Now the big pirate began sending a message to someone flanking Steven and the others. The man’s hand rested quietly on his thigh, then, slowly, his index and then ring fingers curled up beneath his palm. It was the tiniest of gestures, almost impossible to catch if you weren’t looking for it. Steven assumed they had been ordered to gather their weapons and prepare an assault. The scarred man curled and waggled his fingers over and over again; Steven guessed he was communicating with the group back along the beach, behind Mark and Brynne.