The powrie stood tall on the eastern wall, but then kept moving forward, curiously, falling headlong over the structure and landing in the dirt, very still.
A long arrow protruded from its back, an arrow with fletchings familiar to the woman.
"There is my plan," she replied confidently.
A moment later came the thunder of hoofbeats to the east, many hoofbeats accompanied by the screams of those unfortunate goblins caught in front of the wild horse stampede.
"Avelyn!" Pony yelled.
"Ho, ho, what!" the monk replied, loosing yet another lightning bolt, this time into the ground at the feet of a horde of goblins that were charging straight for him. The jolt sent the entire group of monsters two feet off the ground.
Pony grabbed a pitchfork from one of the men nearby and ran to the eastern gate, bravely throwing it open.
There stood a pair of goblins, stunned that the gate had opened before them. Pony took one in the throat with the pitchfork. The other turned to flee, but was cut down almost immediately, an arrow striking it right between the eyes. Pony looked back and spotted Elbryan sitting on a low branch of a tree on the northern side of the ravine. Below the ranger, Bradwarden ran back and forth, trampling goblins and powries or bashing them down with his heavy cudgel.
The centaur tapped one powrie on the head, then scooped up the dazed dwarf and dropped it into a sack.
Pony didn't have time to consider the move, for the thunder approached, led by powerful Symphony. Goblins and powries scattered or were crushed beneath the charge, a hundred wild horses stampeding along the ravine.
"Avelyn!" Pony cried, and the monk rushed past her; she noted that he was glowing slightly, that same bluish hue as the eastern gate.
Pony held the townsfolk back as Avelyn ran out among the goblins. Most were too confused and frightened to attack, but some did charge.
Avelyn held forth his hand — Pony caught sight of a red sparkle from within his grasp.
A huge ball of fire encircled the monk and consumed all the nearby monsters. A hot wind brushed Pony's face and blew into the stunned villagers standing beside her.
When the flames dissipated an instant later, Avelyn stood alone and the way was open.
Almost open; a powrie came rushing out from behind a stone, its hair burned away, its face blackened, its club no more than a withered arid charred stick. But the dwarf was very much alive, and very angry. It howled and whooped and charged Avelyn, ready to throttle the monk with its bare hands.
In his other hand, Avelyn clutched a third stone, brown and striped with black-tiger's paw, it was called. Now the monk fell into this stone's magic, letting go the fire shield of the serpentine. A moment later, Avelyn was screaming in agony, not from the powrie — that enemy hadn't caught up to him yet — but from the work of his own transforming magic that was bending and breaking the bones in Avelyn's left arm. Fingers crunched and shortened, fingernails narrowed and slipped back under the knuckles, and then came a great itching as orange and black fur erupted all along the length of the arm.
The powrie got to the monk, but Avelyn had recovered now. He was whole again — except that his left arm was no longer the arm of Brother Avelyn but that of a powerful tiger.
With a mere thought, Avelyn extended his claws and raked them across, taking the face off of the stunned powrie.
Now the way was clear.
From further down the valley, Symphony charged in, followed by his equine minions. The stampede came to a skidding halt, the wild horses accepting riders, villagers. Pony climbed atop Symphony, and Avelyn, standing with Elbryan as the ranger ran in, waited behind to cover the retreat.
Both Pony and Elbryan sucked in their breath at the sight of Avelyn's arm, but neither spoke of it at that desperate moment.
Then away thundered Symphony and the hundred horses, fifty of Weedy Meadow's eighty inhabitants holding fast to manes, terrified, and scores of goblins and powries scrambling to the hills, trying to get out of the way.
Down those hills came the powries, outraged by the apparent escape, but Paulson, Cric, and Chipmunk had done their work well. Deadfalls, pit traps, and jaw traps stopped many; in one place a dropping pile of logs triggered a small avalanche of loose snow and rock.
Those monsters that did make it down found Bradwarden and his cudgel waiting for them, the centaur kicking and smashing with abandon. Avelyn's graphite shot out again, back toward Weedy Meadow's eastern gate, scattering those goblins coming in close pursuit and opening the way for Elbryan, who insisted that he go back for any stragglers.
The ranger found a giant coming hard his way, stomping across the village, outraged and already hurt by one of the monk's lightning blasts.
Hawkwing's bowstring hummed repeatedly, an arrow thudding into the giant's chest, followed by one to its belly, another to its chest, and then a third nicking off huge ribs, and then a second in the belly.
Each hit slowed the behemoth a bit more, allowed Elbryan yet another devastating shot. Finally, the stubborn monster slumped down.
Several frightened men ran right over its back as it tumbled, a horde of shrieking goblins close on their heels.
Elbryan knelt by the gate, taking careful aim and picking off the closest monsters one by one.
"Avelyn, I need you!" the ranger cried. The situation was even more desperate than Elbryan initially believed, as he discovered when he looked up to see a goblin standing atop the wall, some five feet to the side of the gate, ready to pounce upon him.
But Avelyn couldn't immediately help, the monk preoccupied with a group of powries coming hard down the south hill, having dodged the trappers' pitfalls.
Elbryan turned to meet the pounce, but even as the goblin came on, silver flickers caught the ranger's eye. The monster landed right beside the ranger, but it was dead before it hit the ground, three daggers sticking from the side of its neck and chest. Elbryan glanced back to a smiling Chipmunk, the man running off to engage another confused powrie.
"Avelyn!" Elbryan called again, more insistently. The ranger put up his bow and cut down one more goblin as the group of men ran out the gate and scrambled past him.
Elbryan fell back in a roll; goblins filled the gate and poured out.
Avelyn's lightning blast laid them low.
Then they were off and running, all of them, Elbryan and the three trappers, Bradwarden and Avelyn, and all the latest refugees of Weedy Meadow, following the tentative trail opened to them by the horse stampede.
They ran all the morning, fighting often, but only quick skirmishes. They followed the obvious trail and were guided along even more cunning ways by Elbryan, the ranger following Symphony's call.
One stubborn group of thirty powries stayed with them all the way, hooting and hollering, throwing daggers and axes whenever they got close enough, and only crying out with more fervor whenever Elbryan or Bradwarden paused and let fly an arrow, inevitably taking one of the dwarves down.
Avelyn, huffing and puffing; and too weary to attempt another stone use, moaned and complained that the others should leave his fat body behind. Elbryan would hear none of that, of course, and neither would Bradwarden. The powerful centaur was still carrying the sack with the kicking powrie, and somehow managing to put his great bow to use every so often, but he still had enough strength to allow the fat monk up on his back.
The horse trail continued to the east, but Elbryan called for a turn to the south, leading his group, more sliding than running, down a thickly wooded hillside that ended in a half-frozen stream and a field covered with snow beyond that. They splashed across and ran on, the powries coming in furious pursuit now that their prey was in the open.
"Why'd we go this way?" one villager crud out in desperation, seeing the stubborn, untiring dwarves gaining steadily.
The man got his answer as grim-faced Pony, sitting tall atop Symphony, came out of the trees across the way, flanked on each side by a score of angry villagers and their spirited mounts.
El
bryan's group ran on; the powries skidded to an abrupt halt and tried to turn.
Pony led the thunderous charge and not a dwarf got off that field alive —
except for the unfortunate one kicking futilely in Bradwarden's sack.
The encampment that night, closer to Dundalis than to Weedy Meadow, was filled with a bittersweet atmosphere. More than sixty of the village's eighty folk had escaped, but that meant that nearly a score had died, and all their homes were lost.
"You sent him away?" Pony asked Elbryan as the ranger approached the campfire she and Avelyn shared.
"I could not tolerate that in the camp," Elbryan explained.
"How could you tolerate it at all?" Avelyn asked.
"How could I stop it?" Elbryan was quick to reply.
"Good point," the monk conceded. "Ho, ho, what!"
Elbryan looked at Pony, and each shuddered, thinking of brutal Bradwarden and his planned meal. Elbryan had interrogated the captured powrie, getting no information of any value, and then the centaur had claimed the dwarf as his catch — and as his dinner.
He had promised Elbryan that he would kill the wretched creature quickly, at least.
The ranger had to be satisfied with that; he and the refugees were in no position to take on a prisoner, especially one as fierce and stupidly bold as that powrie.
"We did well," Avelyn remarked, handing a bowl to Elbryan and motioning to a cauldron not so far away.
The ranger held up his hand, having little appetite this night.
Avelyn only shrugged and went back to his meal.
"You did well," Elbryan remarked to the man. "Your fireball opened the way for Symphony — and even the help of the horses would not have been possible without the magic of the turquoise. And your lightning bolts saved many lives, my own included."
"And mine," Pony added, rubbing the fat monk's back.
Avelyn looked at her, then at Elbryan, his expression truly content. He even forgot his food for a moment, just sat back and considered the events and the role he and his God-given stones had played.
"For years I have wondered if I chose correctly in taking the stones,"
Avelyn explained a moment later. "Always have I been followed by doubts, by fears that my actions were not truly in the spirit of God but only in my own misguided interpretation of that spirit."
"Today proves you right, then," Elbryan said quietly.
Avelyn nodded, feeling truly vindicated. A moment later, he caught the look that passed between Elbryan and Pony, and politely excused himself. There were many wounded in the encampment that night, including some who might need further help from Avelyn and his hematite.
"I could not save Weedy Meadow," Elbryan said to the woman when they were alone.
Pony looked all around, leading Elbryan's gaze to the men and women, to the children who would have surely died this day had not the ranger and his friends ushered them away.
"I am satisfied," Elbryan admitted. "The town could not be saved, but so different this is from the day of our own tragedy."
"We did not have a ranger to look over us," Pony replied with a grin.
That smile could not hold, though, lost in the bittersweet blend of tragedy present and tragedy past. The two moved closer together, huddled in each other's arms before the fire, and said not another word, each lost in their memories of their own loss but with the satisfaction that this day, they had been the difference.
CHAPTER 40
Nightbird the Leader
"They are not burning the town," Elbryan remarked as he, Pony, Bradwarden, and Avelyn looked toward Dundalis.
"Why would they?" the centaur asked. "The place was empty before they ever got there."
"True enough," Elbryan replied, for the folk of Dundalis, with sixty-three witnesses from Weedy Meadow and a score from End-o'-the-World telling tales of utter disaster, had not been hard to convince. All of Dundalis' folk had followed Elbryan into the woods to the camps the ranger and his friends had constructed, hidden deep and far from the trails.
"But neither did they burn Weedy Meadow," Pony observed, "nor End-o'-the-World before that."
Elbryan looked grimly at Bradwarden.
"Supply towns," the centaur said, his tone grave.
"That means they are continuing south," Avelyn remarked, his voice cracking on the words. "How far?"
"Few villages south of here," Bradwarden said. "Nothing much all the way to the great river."
"Palmaris," Avelyn muttered helplessly.
A long, silent moment passed as the gravity of the situation settled more deeply over the four friends.
"We can do little to stop such an army," Elbryan declared. "But our duty is threefold: to hurt the monsters in any way that we can, to send word ahead so that the villages and even the great city are not caught unaware, and to care for those who have fallen under our protection."
"A hundred and sixty," Bradwarden said. "And I haven't yet' counted them all. Worse, no more than a third o' them're able to fight against the likes of a single goblin."
"We must work with them, then," Elbryan declared, "usher those who cannot fight to safety and use those who can and will do battle to our best advantage."
"A huge task, ranger," Bradwarden remarked.
Elbryan stared at him long and hard.
"I'm with ye," the centaur grumbled a moment later, "though not for the taste o' powrie, I tell ye. Tough little bugs!"
"Ho, ho, what!" Avelyn howled.
They went to the task that very day, sorting the refugees into those who would stay and fight with Elbryan, and those who would be sent to safer havens, into caves that Bradwarden knew of some distance to the east of Dundalis or even into the more human-controlled southlands, if a route could be found. When they finished the initial round, Elbryan found that he had more than seven score who would need to be relocated, leaving him just over twenty able-bodied warriors.
And they were indeed a ragtag band; the best among them, other than Pony, Bradwarden, and Avelyn, was probably unreliable Paulson or the always irritating, disagreeable Tol Yuganick.
Pony pointed out that very fact to Elbryan when they sat together that evening. "You should send him south with the refugees," she noted, indicating the grumbling Tol, who was walking about the encampment, bullying any who crossed his path.
"He is strong and good with a spear," Elbryan countered.
"And he'll fight you all the way," Pony said. "Tol will demand control, and his continuing rage will certainly put him, and any who follow him, into a position from which there will be no escape."
Elbryan couldn't really disagree. At least with Paulson, the ranger had some idea that the man was willing to follow directions; Paulson and his two companions, after all, had laid traps on the hillsides east of Weedy Meadow exactly as Elbryan had bade them.
"Send him off with the unfit," Pony said again, more forcefully. "Let Belster O'Comely deal with the brute, else I fear that you and Tol will cross swords, and it would not do for you to be killing one of our own in front of the others."
Elbryan thought she was perhaps being a bit overdramatic, but he had to admit that he and Tol had come close to blows several times over the previous few months — and then in situations not nearly as tense as the one that surely lay before them.
"When will you send the band south?" Pony asked, wisely giving Elbryan some breathing room before he was forced into such a difficult decision.
"Paulson, Cric, and Chipmunk are off scouting the area even now," the ranger replied, "swinging west to confirm the occupation of Weedy Meadow and End-o'-the-World and then south to see what roads lie open. When they return in a few days, we might decide what to do with the refugees."
Pony nodded, considering the plan. "If they will soon return, then they will not go far to the south, not to the next villages in line, Caer Tinella and Landsdown, and certainly not to Palmaris," she reasoned. "You must send an emissary soon if the southland is to be properly warned."
&nbs
p; Elbryan sighed deeply, agreeing fully with her observation. He knew the proper course before him, knew the perfect choice, a person possessed of both tact and skills, battle and horsemanship, but it was a decree the ranger did not wish to utter.
Pony did it for him. "Symphony will bear me?" she asked, drawing the ranger's gaze to her own.
Elbryan paused and looked long and hard at the woman, at his love. They had been reunited for so short a time, how could he bear to part with her again?
Despite that turmoil, Elbryan found himself nodding. Symphony would indeed carry Pony; the great stallion had already indicated as much to Elbryan.
"Then I will be away before the dawn," Pony said firmly.
Elbryan sighed again, and Pony took his face in her hands, turned him to her, and pulled him close, kissing him gently.
"I will go all the way to Palmaris, if I must," she promised, "and then I will return to your side. Symphony will see me there and back again. No goblin, no powrie, no giant will catch me."
Elbryan, who had felt the wind, the rush of Symphony's run, didn't doubt that for a minute. "And you must return to me," he whispered, "to fight beside me and to lie beside me in the quiet night, when all the troubles of the day must be put to peace."
Pony kissed him again, longer and harder this time. All around them, the camp was settling down, save the occasional grumble from ugly Tol, and the pair slipped away sometime later into the forest to a private place.
True to her word, Pony was riding hard to the south as the sun crested the eastern horizon. She had not gone without two meetings, though, one a very private discussion with Elbryan and the other, unexpectedly, with Brother Avelyn, who was waiting for her when she walked out of the camp.
"Symphony is not far," the monk explained. "I saw him on that ridge just a few minutes ago. Waiting for you, I should guess."
Pony gave a crooked smile, her wonderment at the continuing intelligence shown by the animal — now seeming to be so much more than an ordinary horse — clearly displayed on her features.
DemonWars Saga Volume 1 Page 50
