The brush along the rocky riverbank was much thicker than under the heavy shade of the great trees; they had more cover to hide in, but there were more branches to snap, leaves to rustle, and rocks to trip over. Wintersky found a game trail that wound in and out of the bushes, often requiring that they go on all fours to keep their heads below the covering undergrowth; Darian discovered that he had his hands full just following in his wake without making too terrible a noise. The river here did not make enough sound to mask their passage; though swift and deep, there were no rocks or deep bends to cause even a ripple along its tranquil surface. A chilling, damp breeze rose from its surface, penetrating Darian’s clothing.
It seemed to Darian that they had been moving so long that it must surely be dawn, and yet by the stars it could not possibly have been much later than midnight when he felt Snowfire stop and crouch under the shadow of a bush. He stopped as well, then felt Snowfire’s hand reach back and tug at his shoulder. Obedient to the signal, he crept forward to peer out at whatever it was that Snowfire was looking at.
“Is this the place?” the scout breathed into his ear. He squinted, and peered out into the darkness, straining his ears as well as his eyes when the dark bulk ahead of him failed to resolve into anything he recognized.
It was his ears that told him they had reached their goal; a rhythmic splashing, the creaking of wet wood, the steady trickle of water. They had reached the aqueduct, and the water wheel that fed it.
He put his mouth to Snowfire’s ear. “This is the place,” he whispered.
Snowfire nodded, and motioned to him to be silent. He froze where he was, and tried to ignore the three or four insects that decided to negotiate the new piece of territory - his legs - that had suddenly appeared in front of them. He was just glad that Snowfire had given him a handful of aromatic herbs to rub all over himself before they left, for most of the insects had left him alone tonight.
Finally, after what seemed far too long a time, Snowfire motioned him forward, and slipped out into the open himself.
Now, for the first time in days, Darian found himself on totally familiar ground. The wooden aqueduct hung above their heads, dripping fairly steadily; he followed the sounds of dripping until his outstretched hands encountered the ladder that led to the first clean-out door up above.
He took a chance that one word wouldn’t betray them.
“Here!” he whispered harshly, and was suddenly surrounded by seventeen Hawkbrothers.
He scrambled up the ladder and felt for the catch that released the door. The aqueduct wouldn’t have worked for a week if it hadn’t been covered to keep leaves and trash out; nevertheless, things did manage to get in, and moss and algae grew in the trough. Hatches had to be made to permit occasional cleaners - usually older, more responsible children - to scrub the troughs. To avoid accidents with overcurious or adventurous younger children, the catches were reasonably tricky. Darian had already served one stint as a cleaner; that was how he knew where the catches were and how to open them.
He had a moment of panic when the mechanism jammed and refused to open, but after some desperate prying and jiggling, it broke loose and let him lift the hatch up. With a sigh of relief, he lifted the heavy hatch off to the side. Darian listened for a moment to the cold water running inside, and permitting himself a shiver, climbed in.
He was immediately soaked to mid-calf in very cold water, but he knew that before they reached the village, he’d be soaked clear through. He dropped to his hands and knees and crawled into the tunnel formed by the trough of the aqueduct and the arch of the roof above it. As he crawled forward into the darkness, he felt someone immediately behind him.
Now they were all relying on him to pick the right branching. The right one would bring them out in the village, to the village cistern house right beside the horse trough. The wrong one would send them out into the fields somewhere.
None of the left-hand branchings, he reminded himself. Those all go out to the fields. As he crawled, he tried not to think about his surroundings. It was so dark in here that he couldn’t see even a glimmer of light. It was cold, there was water up to his chest and the roof of the aqueduct pressing into the back of his head. And someone hadn’t done his job, because the floor was slimy with algae. He tried to remind himself that it could have been worse things, but as he started to shiver, that thought wasn’t at all comforting.
It’s the second right-hand branching. I’m sure of it. But the longer he crawled, the less sure he became. Was it the second? He’d been crawling an awfully long time, and he’d only come to one place where the aqueduct opened up to the right. What if he’d missed it? What if he’d gone too far? What if they were already crawling off over the fields of barley and turnips?
Then, just as he was beginning to panic and thinking about trying to get everyone to crawl backward so he could recheck where they’d been, his hand encountered emptiness and water where the wooden wall had been. He stopped, and reached back with his foot to signal that they’d come to the turning.
He felt a hand grab his foot and squeeze; he moved into the right branch, and continued the crawl forward.
Here, at least, the cleaners had done their job. Slime gave way to clean wood under his palms, and he sighed with relief. This must be the correct branch; it was the only one that got scoured religiously, for it not only fed the horse trough but was the main water supply for the whole village.
But now he had new worries. He froze; suddenly they were no longer alone.
He heard the guards before he saw signs of them; heard their voices echoing toward him down the hollow wooden tube. He froze in place, afraid that they had already caught the sounds of hands and knees shuffling through the water above their heads. In another moment, he saw little flickering bits of light reflected in the water, coming through cracks and crevices in the aqueduct cover. They’re going to hear us. They have some magic, or another Yip Dog, that will sense the Hawkbrothers. They have a real dog that will smell us up here! It was all he could do to keep from shouting in panic as the lights drew nearer, as he felt the walls pressing in on him. He began to shiver even harder, and clenched his teeth tightly to keep them from chattering.
Then, miraculously, the lights and voices passed right on by.
He hardly believed it at first, and only a sharp prod from behind got him going again. Twice more, lights and voices approached and passed, and twice more they all froze in place, waiting, shivering in the cold water.
At long last, his hand encountered the end of the aqueduct. They were in the cistern house, where the aqueduct spilled into a storage cistern which in turn led to the horse trough outside the cistern house. He hung onto the end of the trough, and lowered himself down into the cistern, being careful not to make more of a splash than the water pouring into the cistern already made.
One by one, the rest of the Hawkbrothers followed, first into the cistern, then, shivering and chilled, onto the floor of the cistern house beside him.
“I want you to stay here,” Snowfire said in his ear. “Keep out of sight. You’ve done all you need to.”
He nodded, his teeth clenched to keep them from chattering. He couldn’t have replied if he’d wanted to, for he was shivering too hard, and not just with cold.
“He shouldn’t stay here,” hissed someone else. “There’s no place to hide and only one way in or out, and if anyone comes in here after water, they’re going to find him!”
Snowfire growled, but reluctantly agreed. “Let me have Hweel check the stable.”
Silence then, except for the sound of falling water and occasional voices outside the cistern house. Darian was in a constant state of terror lest some drunkard stumble to douse his head and find them all there. At long last, Snowfire spoke again.
“Dar’ian, go to the stable,” he ordered. “Hweel says that there are no humans quartered in there, nothing but horses. You should be safe enough at this time of night, and it’s halfway between the threshing barn and he
re. We can get you on our way out of the village.”
Darian just nodded, and waited while the others slipped out, two and three at a time, his gut clenched tight all the while.
How am I going to get out of here? he asked himself, once the last of them were gone. I can’t move and hide like they can! Somebody is going to see me for sure!
As if to underscore that fear, he heard precisely what he had feared most to hear - the sound of three or four drunken men approaching the cistern house, talking loudly in some foreign babble.
Were they coming here? Where could he hide? Could he get inside the cistern? Would they see him if he did? As he felt blindly about for the edge of the cistern, his hand encountered a bucket that had been left behind, and suddenly a plan burst in on his mind in a blaze of illumination. Quickly, he grabbed the bucket, filled it at the cistern, and just as the men reached the door, he opened it, trudging openly out into the square with his heavy, sloshing bucket.
Exactly as he had hoped, the men ignored him. He was just another slave, and a child at that, insignificant and unworthy of a moment’s thought. They shoved past him, and as he trudged away, he heard them splashing and choking in the water, trying to sober themselves up.
Ugh. It’s a good thing that from there, the water goes to the horse trough. But if I was a horse, I wouldn‘t want to drink it after they’d had their dirty heads in it.
He continued to trudge toward the stable, carrying the bucket-handle in both hands, hoping that no one would notice his long knife at his side, the only weapon he had with him. Snowfire wouldn’t let him have anything else, and at the time he had thought it a pitiful excuse for a weapon, but he rather doubted that these people allowed their slaves to have anything as dangerous as a knife.
At last he reached the shelter of the stable. He put down the bucket, opened the door, picked the bucket back up and slipped inside. Just in case Hweel had been mistaken, he wanted an excuse to be here, and a bucket of water was a perfectly good excuse.
But it was black in there, without even a night-lamp. That meant that there was nothing, and no one waiting, except for horses.
He waited for his eyes to adjust to the dark, listening to them stamping and blowing, breathing in the scent of horse sweat and hay. Once he could see a little, he walked up to the nearest stall. Each of the stalls had an outside half-door, so that the upper half could be left open for ventilation, and in this weather the upper doors were left open all night so the horses got air. The beast on the other side of the stall door seemed far too large for the stall he’d been put in. Darian stared at him in awe; he was huge, bigger than any horse he’d ever seen before, and a true war-horse. Every stall in the small stable was full, and it was quite clear why the barbarians had put their beasts here instead of using the place to quarter more fighters. These horses must easily have been worth a small fortune apiece. They were certainly worth more than a simple foot soldier, or even a squad of them.
Darian put his bucket down and closed the door, then felt for the ladder built into the wall beside him and climbed up into the loft where the hay was stored, moving carefully and feeling for each rung to keep from making any noise. He would have a good vantage point and a comfortable place to wait as well.
Both loft doors were open to the night air, and he,: got down on his stomach and wormed his way over to the one that pointed in the direction of the threshing barn. Loose hay covered the floor to the depth of his knees in the middle, and his neck on either side. Mice skittered about in the hay; in the silence he heard two of them fighting, voicing their anger in tiny squeaks.
He settled in with his nose barely poking up above the sill of the door, and strained eyes and ears, trying to penetrate the night. The plan called for the Hawkbrothers to get to the threshing barn, remove any guards that were there, and free the villagers. Wintersky and Raindance would lead them through the village, across the bridge to the road on the other side of the river, and upriver to Kelmskeep; Snowfire and the others would form a rear guard to deal with pursuit.
Nothing in the plan called for actually attacking the barbarians, except in the person of the guards watching the captives. At the time, Darian had been disappointed, but now he was relieved. Trapped inside the cistern house, he had suddenly become aware that he was one young boy surrounded by many, many, strange, hostile men who would not think twice about killing him. Once again, he felt his insides go to water, felt the fear he had experienced when the barbarian army attacked. This was not the time or place for a confrontation, and now he was glad that Snowfire had already made up his mind about that.
I just wish someone could have told the enemy so we‘d be sure that they would leave us alone -
Suddenly, the peaceful night was split by flashes of red, orange, and green light and a roar as deafening as the worst thunderstorm he’d ever lived through. Darian stifled a yelp and winced away from the door, but immediately reversed himself and peeked back over the top of the sill. Something awful must have happened out there -
It was all coming from the direction of the threshing barn, and he knew with a thrill of dread that the enemy had not gone along with the plan of avoiding confrontation.
More brilliant flashes of light lit the village below, followed by more tfiundering noises, and men boiled out of the nearby houses like so many angry hornets streaming from a disturbed hive.
His heart pounded, and there was a metallic taste in the back of his mouth. He began to sweat, and had to clench his hands on the sill to keep from jumping up and running out there. What do I do? Where do I go? Nothing in the plan told him what to do now -
Don’t panic. Think of something! He didn’t dare move from where he was, and yet there must be something he could do! If I can stop some of these men, delay them - if only I had a sling, or a rope to trip them with! What had he learned? How to raise things - how to heat water and call fire - how to sense magic and -
Wait a minute; if I can raise things, can I keep them down? Too late to guess, he just had to try; spurred by fear and excitement, he reached out with his tiny spark of magic toward one of the barbarians running below him, and momentarily glued his toe to the ground.
The man tripped and fell heavily, taken too much by surprise to fall properly, and Darian heard something break with a dry crack - though whether it was a bone or a weapon, he couldn’t tell. The man staggered to his feet, dazed, and stumbled off; he was clearly not in a condition to fight now, and might not be for a while.
Encouraged, Darian did it again, and once again, it worked, sending the man crashing headlong into the ground and driving all the breath from his body. This one was stunned, and only moved feebly rather than trying to get up. It took him a long time to get to his feet and lurch away.
Darian tried the trick again, and yet again, with equal or better success. It was working! He was doing something!
If only he knew what was going on out there -
There was more light, real fire this time, rising above the roofs of the nearest buildings, the harsh smell of smoke, and the sounds of shouts and screams in the distance where the barn stood. He could not tell what was going on, except that the quiet raid had become a full-scale confrontation, and that was not good.
There were no more barbarians where Darian could see them, and he realized belatedly just how exposed his position was. He wormed his way back into the loose hay, pulling it up over himself until there was hay all around him to the depth of a pitchfork’s tines; he could still see out the loft door, but now he was peeking out from under the hay like a mouse in a burrow.
He got under cover just in time; someone with a mage-light following him ran toward the stable, and by the long robes the man was wearing, he was not one of the Hawkbrothers, nor one of the barbarian fighters.
The stable door slammed open as Darian lost sight of the man, then slammed shut again. He heard a thud, the creak of wood and a voice uttering what sounded like curses, and heavy steps on the ladder. He was shudderingly grateful
for the cover of the hay, as the mage-light popped over the side of the loft, and the entire loft lit up as brightly as day.
More heavy steps, a shadow passed over Dalian’s hiding place, and the man stepped into Darian’s line-of-sight. He blocked about half of Darian’s view, but Darian had a very good view of him. Tall, a bit less muscular than the barbarian fighters, but just as shaggy and bearded, he wore an outlandish reddish-brown robe, with a design pieced into it in dark brown leather. It appeared to be the stylized head and forequarters of some beast, but what, Darian couldn’t tell. There was a pendant around his neck that swung into view as he turned; a sun-disk, with the rays in metal but the disk in black. An eclipse?
All his attention was centered outside, which was a very good thing, as Darian was in plain sight from where he stood if he chose to look in that direction.
Is this the mage? It must be. What’s that pendant mean?
Is it magic? Darian tentatively stretched his new “magic-sense” toward the man.
And he was all but “blinded.” He shielded himself again, as he’d been taught, and lay there, dazed. I think this is the mage, all right.
And the man was doing something; he had his hands cupped in front of him, and he was muttering. And from a point just below them, Darian heard an ominous, deep sound of growling, and the noise of very heavy feet shuffling away.
He’s - he’s got monsters! He’s turning monsters loose! The Hawkbrothers had no warning of this - bad enough that they were facing half an army, but no one had thought about facing monsters, too!
He had to do something. He had to! He couldn’t let Snowfire down, the way he’d failed Justyn! The man was still muttering, probably calling up another monster. Darian couldn’t wait any longer.
With a yell, he leaped out of the hay, pulling his knife at the same time.
The man turned, quick as a thought, but only in time to keep from getting knocked out of the loft door. Darian hit him with a shock, his right shoulder nearly wrenched out of its socket as the man deflected it. They both went down in the hay, with Darian on top; he tried to bring up his knife to finish things, but the man seized his wrist, and rolled to the right. Now Darian was underneath; the man tried to get the knife away from him, bashing his hand down uselessly into the soft hay, his knees digging into Darian’s stomach. Darian squirmed, trying to break his hold and get away, and the man held off Darian’s knife hand with his right and got his left around Darian’s throat and began to squeeze.
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