"We've got to get back to the cave and wake Foryth and Emilo if they're still sleeping," Dan urged. "It's time to get out of here!"
Moving as quickly as they dared while still preserving some semblance of silence, the two backtracked to the ravine. They leapt down to land on a patch of smooth moss and then broke into a full sprint, following the gully toward its terminus near their makeshift shelter.
"This is where we climbed in," Danyal said, pointing to the shelf of rock that rose as the left wall of the ravine. "It didn't seem so high when we jumped down."
"We can climb it," Mirabeth assured him. "There's plenty of handholds."
Danyal agreed.
"Don't start coming up until I'm all the way to the top. You shouldn't be beneath me, in case I slip!" the kender-maid called over her shoulder.
She kicked her foot into a crack in the stone wall and reached upward to find a pair of handholds. Pulling herself off the ground, she ascended smoothly and soon neared the top of the rocky face.
Watching nervously, Danyal saw her foot slip momentarily from its perch. He tensed, ready to catch her, trying to anticipate how she would fall, but the nimble maid maintained her balance easily. In another moment she disappeared over the rim of the top.
A split second later Mirabeth's scream of shrill terror split the woods, sending birds cawing into the air and filling Danyal with unspeakable panic.
"What is it?" Frantically the lad threw himself at the rock wall, scrambling up a short distance and then, slipping in his haste, tumbling back to sprawl on the ravine floor. He looked up and felt the hope drain from his body.
Kelryn Darewind stood there, and in his arms, he held the squirming figure of Mirabeth. His hand was clasped over her mouth as she stared, wide-eyed with terror, at Danyal Thwait.
"Well, there you are, my young friend." The bandit lord was cool, even dispassionate, and that aloofness brought Dan's hatred burning through every other emotion. But he could only stare in impotent fury as Kelryn continued. "It seems you must have wandered off in the night. It's really quite a relief to find you again."
Trembling, Danyal stared bitterly upward, knowing that even if he clawed his way up the cliff, it would be a simple matter for the bandit lord to kick him loose when he neared the top.
"I think I'll take this little prize with me to Loreloch!" taunted Kelryn Darewind.
Only then did another figure saunter into view, as Zack joined his captain. The knifeman fixed Danyal with a cackling glare, his one eye flashing wickedly.
"Run!" screamed Mirabeth, suddenly twisting her mouth free from Kelryn's hand. "He's going to kill you!"
Danyal couldn't make his feet move. He cried aloud as the false priest clapped a rough hand over the kender-maid's mouth. Only when Kelryn nodded forcefully at Zack did the youth perceive the imminent threat and break into flight.
He heard the clump of something heavy landing on the ground behind him and didn't need to look back to know that Zack had leapt into the ravine. The bandit's thudding footsteps were loud and clumsy as he pounded after Dan, and the boy couldn't suppress a sob of terror as he felt that menacing presence closing in. He sprinted as fast as he could, dashing around corners in the winding ravine, desperately seeking some place that might let him scramble upward to safety.
And knowing that he left Mirabeth in Kelryn Dare-wind's merciless hands somewhere far behind him.
Zack uttered a bark of cruel laughter, and Dan knew from the sound that the man was only a few steps behind. Eyes blurring, the lad thought of Mirabeth, horrified at the prospect of her captivity among the merciless bandits. Strangely, that fear seemed much more real and more terrifying than the prospect of his own imminent death. He fought back another sob, his grief rising from the fact that he was so utterly unable to come to Mirabeth's aid.
When he attempted to leap over a rock that blocked the ravine bottom, Danyal's strength and agility came up a fraction of an inch short. His foot caught at the top of the boulder, and he tumbled headlong, landing heavily on a patch of sand. He rolled hard into the steep wall of the gully and looked up to see Zack's villainous face leering down at him.
"Well, laddie-looks like I get to wet my blade again after all!"
Danyal clawed to either side, trying to find a rock or a stick, anything he could use as a weapon. But his hands couldn't do more than scratch at the smooth, hard-packed sand.
Zack threw back his head and laughed-the last sound he ever made. A heavy piece of granite, jagged with a multitude of sharp edges, plummeted from above, striking the knife-wielding bandit in the middle of the forehead. Zack's head snapped back like a cracking whip, and he toppled like a stone statue. Danyal vaguely heard the thump as the man's head smashed onto the rocky ground.
Only then did he look up, squinting against the sky to see Foryth Teel leaning over the lip of the ravine. The historian dusted off his hands and shook his head in agitation, clearly distressed.
"Did you throw that?" Danyal asked, looking once more at the piece of granite that had smashed Zack's skull.
"I'm afraid-tsk, that is, yes, I did," Foryth admitted sadly. He sighed, as if he had just committed a grave act of injustice. "I just don't seem to be able to keep from getting myself involved. Er, is he dead?"
Danyal stepped over to Zack's still form, hesitantly taking a moment to look closely at the expressionless face, the blank and sightless eyes. Finally he nudged the bandit's knee with his toe, drawing no response.
"Yes, he is." He was about to turn away when he saw the big knife, the keen edge shining like quicksilver in the sunlight. The weapon lay in the stones where Zack had dropped it, and Danyal impulsively reached down and picked it up. The hilt was smooth and comfortable in his hand, and the blade was well balanced and clearly lethal.
At the thought of killing, an urgent thought grabbed him. "What about Mirabeth?" he shouted. "We've got to help her!"
"I'll meet you up ahead!" Foryth called back.
Danyal was already racing back along the ravine floor. When he reached the spot where the kendermaid had ascended, he stuffed the knife into his belt and climbed as quickly as he could, drawing himself onto the rim of the precipice as Foryth came huffing up to him.
"They went that way," the historian said, pointing into the woods.
Danyal was about to start along the trail when he caught sight of something unnatural on the forest floor.
It was a wedge of tan wax, and when he picked it up he clearly saw the resemblance.
"It's the tip of a false ear-a pointed ear!" he exclaimed, his mind churning.
"Do you think-that is, could Mirabeth have lost it?" Foryth asked.
"Yes!" Picturing the kendermaid with the twin to knots, the pointed ears, and the webbing of age lines around her mouth and eyes, Danyal's mind whirled with questions. "Why would she wear something like this-a fake tip for her ear?"
The answer was obvious in his own mind, but just in case any doubt remained, Emilo Haversack came into view, trotting from the direction of their cave. He saw the ear, looked into the questioning faces of Foryth and Danyal, and nodded in understanding.
"I remember now," the kender confirmed. "Mirabeth is really a human."
CHAPTER 31
Pursuing the Pursuers
First Bakukal, Reapember
374 AC
"She is a human girl!" Danyal gasped, remembering his impressions of Mirabeth's bouncing walk, the shyness of her smile, and the musical sweetness of her voice.
"Yes-or, rather, a young lady, actually." Emilo's brow was furrowed, and the lad wondered if his companion was trying to recollect other details. But then he realized that the kender's expression was related to his news.
"Her story's like yours, in a way," Emilo told Dan. "She's the only survivor of a catastrophe, a murderous attack that killed everyone in her family, including their servants and guests. Mirabeth was lucky to escape with her life, and she only did so by donning a disguise."
"As a kender? But why?"
"Ahem." Foryth Teel cleared his throat with dignity. "I'm never one to ignore the details of a story, but I wonder if perhaps our discussion should wait for another time. If our attentions now might not be better directed toward pursuit?"
"You're right." Danyal was nearly overwhelmed by a feeling of helplessness, but the tautness in his limbs and the palpitating of his heart were caused by another emotion as well: He felt a burning fury, a rage that he knew could drive him to savagery and violence. When he thought of the way Kelryn Darewind went about calmly, arrogantly, destroying the lives of so many people, he wanted only to kill.
His hatred for the bandit lord roared into an angry flame. The man seemed to represent everything frightening, terrible, and unfair in the world. He was a deadly foe, but unlike the dragon Flayze, he was not invulnerable.
And he had Mirabeth.
"Which way did he take her?" Foryth asked. "I saw him here at the edge of the ravine with Zack, but then I chased after you, Dan. I'm afraid I lost sight of him."
"We saw his men down by the stream. I'm sure he'll take her there." Danyal started along the most direct route to the clearing, plunging between the trees, holding his arms before his face to brush the branches aside. He heard Foryth and Emilo charging behind him and, in a surprisingly short time, saw the open sunlight of the meadow expanding before them.
Instinctively the lad halted and crouched. Joined by his two companions, he squirmed forward to get a look without revealing himself to view.
A shout sounded from the far side of the clearing, and they saw Kelryn Darewind holing the still-squirming figure of Mirabeth in one hand. With the other, he waved, and one by one his men came into view, scrambling up the bank of the low streambed to rejoin their captain at the edge of the woods.
"I count seven of them," Foryth Teel remarked softly. "Plus the young lady, of course."
And then they were gone, vanishing into the woods at a jogging trot that, Danyal knew, he and his companions would be hard pressed to match for any length of time.
But they had to try. He rose to his feet, ready to dash across the meadow and chase the kidnappers through the woods, when he felt a restraining hand on his arm- one on each arm, actually.
"Wait!" Emilo hissed.
"Indeed. Wouldn't you think they've set someone to watch their trail?" Foryth asked, with what seemed like maddeningly casual curiosity to Danyal.
"Why?" snapped the lad. "He's got what he wants. He'll just-"
"Precisely my question," the historian continued. "What does he want? If we knew that, we'd know what he plans to do about us, among other things."
"Such as whether or not he wants to lure us into an ambush," Emilo added.
Danyal was infuriated at the thought of some cowardly bandit lurking at the forest's edge, but a cool, quiet part of his mind suggested-in a very soft voice-that his companions were right. He looked across the clearing at the opposite grove, estimating that a hundred paces or more of open ground separated that clump of trees from the wedge of forest where the three of them currently held their council of war.
"We could charge across the clearing together," suggested Danyal impulsively, remembering the big knife he wore at his waist.
"Tsk… a nice idea, and appealing to my own sense of bold adventure. But what if there are two, or even three of them?" Foryth demurred.
"Or an archer. It seems to me at least two of the bandits had short bows," Emilo chimed in.
Danyal's frustration welled anew, but again he saw the need for caution. He cast his eyes left, seeing only the sloping and fully exposed incline of the grassy ridge that formed the side of this stream valley; then he looked right, toward the stream that was currently invisible, running within its deep banks.
"The streambed!" he whispered. "Let's stay in the woods until we meet the stream. Then we can follow the channel, hiding below the bank until we get to the other side of the clearing!"
"Splendid idea!" Foryth exclaimed in an enthusiastic whisper.
Emilo was already moving back from the clearing. In moments the three were on their feet, concealed a short distance within the woods as they once more plunged between the trees with all possible haste. Soon they heard the trilling of water before them, and then the stream was there, spilling across its gravel bed some five or six feet below the level of the forest floor. To the left, they could see the waterway cutting its deep channel into the ground in the meadow beyond.
Without hesitation, Danyal led the way down the smooth, muddy bank. Emilo and Foryth came behind him, though the historian stumbled at the base of the bank and splashed to his hands and knees into the stream. Still, he rose to his feet with aplomb and hastened to follow.
Kicking through the shallows at the edge of the flow-age, Danyal had a strong feeling that he was in a tunnel. The lofty trees closed in above the narrow stream so that no more than a small strip of sky was visible. Compared to the dappled shadows of the waters here, the bright, sunlit expanse of the meadow glowed brighter and brighter before them.
And then they were out of the woods, still following the streambed in its course through the meadow. Though the bank was already higher than his head, Dan leaned forward and down with instinctive caution. The shorter Emilo didn't have to worry, while Foryth, the tallest of the trio, ducked with exaggerated care as he splashed along behind.
Heart pounding, Danyal wondered if the bandits would have thought to watch the stream as well as the clearing-or even if he and his companions were correct in their suspicion that one or more of the men had stayed behind. The lad couldn't help worrying that they were wrong, that perhaps all the precautions were a waste of time, allowing Mirabeth to be spirited away while the trio of would-be rescuers tried to sneak up on an empty patch of woods.
The branches of the next grove arced before them, and soon they felt the cool shade of the trees around them again. Danyal still led the way, trembling with a tingling awareness of the need for stealth and of the existence of potentially deadly danger.
The human youth found a niche where the stream-bank had yielded to the pressure of a gnarled root and dropped into a deep notch. With two steps, he was up, slipping through the forest with the wicked knife in his hand. He stayed low, trying to be stealthy, using all the techniques of rabbit-stalking that he had learned over his life. Gliding from one tree to another, he kept the meadow to his left and advanced on the place where the bandits had disappeared into the woods.
He was startled by a sudden waft of odor, an acrid stink of sweat and campfire smoke, and he knew beyond any doubt that an enemy was near. With a gut-wrenching jolt of energy, all his doubts disappeared and he was ready, even eager, for danger. Emilo, also moving soundlessly, joined him behind the trunk of a massive pine while Foryth held back a few paces.
The kender wrinkled his nose, also sensing their enemy ahead. With a finger to his lips, Emilo pointed to himself, and to the right; then he indicated Danyal, and pointed left. The lad nodded, watching his companion draw a dagger almost as long as the weapon Dan had claimed from Zack.
Foryth, meanwhile, had armed himself with a stout stick that was nearly as tall as he was, a club that bulged with a solid knot at one end. He indicated silently that he would come after the two, moving straight ahead.
As Emilo disappeared behind intervening trees, Danyal was startled to realize that his fingers, clenched around the hilt of the knife, were stiff with cramps. He changed hands on the weapon and painfully flexed his reluctant digits. At the same time, he moved forward with extreme care, keeping the blade outthrust and ready.
After a moment, he caught sight of a man-or a man's boots, to be entirely accurate-extending from beneath a tree. Judging by his feet, the bandit was lying on his belly, no doubt looking out over the clearing that extended just beyond his vantage. There was no visible reaction from the lookout, who remained apparently unaware of the stealthy trio.
Dan had no more started to congratulate himself on his luck when he considered, for the
first time, the realistic prospect of sticking the sharpened piece of steel that he held in his hand into another person's flesh. Practically speaking, the task should be easy. He was still unobserved; he should be able to fling himself forward and fall on the man's back. One quick stab and the fellow would be killed, wouldn't he?
All at once Danyal felt himself weakening, his guts once again churning with a feeling of despair as he wondered if he could, in fact, just murder this man in cold blood. But if he didn't, how were they ever going to rescue Mirabeth? "Ssst!"
A harsh, clearly audible whisper split the woods, and Danyal all but groaned, certain that one of his companions had given them away. Still, he shrank back into his own concealment, surprised to see that the man under the tree was wriggling backward with no indication of extreme alarm. Finally the bandit rose to his haunches, turning his face away from Danyal as he replied with similar furtiveness. "Yeah? What is it?"
Only then did Dan see the second bandit, a mustachioed bowmen called Kal. The fellow crept up to his compatriot and gestured into the field. "Any sign of 'em?"
"Nah." The reply was curt and disgusted.
"Me neither. They haven't tried to come along the ridge, or I woulda seen 'em for sure."
"D'you think we should head back to Loreloch, or at least meet Red at the bridge?"
The archer barked a dry laugh. "Boss said to wait until tonight. I'm not thinkin' I'd like to cross him."
"Yeah. Well-"
The snap of a dry twig was like a crack of thunder in Danyal's ears, a sound that overwhelmed everything else. It had come from behind him, near where the lad had last seen Foryth.
"What was that?" The bowman instantly had an arrow nocked, his weapon drawn as he peered into the thick woods. "Go check it out!"
"Me?" The squatting man was at first indignant. Then he looked at the other's weapon as he drew his own short sword, apparently reaching the obvious conclusion: His companion could cover him with an arrow, while his blade would only be useful at close quarters.
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