Ilbei Spadebreaker and the Harpy's Wild (33 page)

“But I ain’t tired, Sarge.”

“Right, and I aim to keep it that way. Ya can take a couple of hours while Jasper works, and then the rest of us will if’n Jasper ain’t done yet. I expect he’ll need to rest after, likely more than the rest of us, so get to it, boy.”

Not long after, Meggins was off, hidden in the darkness downstream, and Kaige was snoring at the edge of the flickering shadows of their single torch, whose illumination was augmented some by the bit of phosphorescent fungus Jasper had.

Propping the torch near the wall, where its golden light reflected dully off the smooth stone, Jasper set himself to work. He pulled out the healing scroll, unfurled it partially and weighted the top portion down upon Mags’ ribs with two rocks so that it wouldn’t roll back up on itself. They’d had to prop her on her side with her pack still on to accommodate the length of arrow that ran in through it, through her and out through her chest. Jasper was patient enough to watch the stones for a moment to make sure they wouldn’t roll off with the movements of Mags’ breathing.

Satisfied, he scanned the document carefully, unfurling the spell the rest of the way and discovering the scroll was nearly as long as his tinder-thin arm. Ilbei, watching over his shoulder, not only marveled at its length, he once again marveled how anyone could possibly write so small—much less read such minuscule script in the near dark with only the light of a flickering torch and a scrap of fungus.

Jasper looked up at him and ran a finger across a portion of the scroll about a quarter way down its length. “It says here that an embedded object—that will be the arrow there—will begin to glow. And here, it reads specifically, ‘Your assistant must take hold of the object and draw it out before the glow abates.’ That, of course, will be for you to do.”

“All right,” Ilbei said. “But do ya mean the very moment it starts to glow, or is there some kind of sign that it’s done glowed bright enough?”

Jasper’s mouth opened, a reflexive inclination to talk down to him, no doubt, but he appeared to realize that Ilbei’s question was a fair one. He turned back and reread the passage. “No, it just said it will begin to glow. So, if we assume that whoever wrote this scroll employed careful language, then the choice of the word ‘begin’ was purposeful.”

“Well, you’re the expert, so assumin is exactly what I’ll be doin. When it glows, the first second of it, I’ll pull it out.” He glanced at the arrow protruding from Mags’ chest, then leaned over and studied the feathered back end. “I’ll break that off now to make it easier.” He reached down and gripped the shaft in his powerful hands and made to snap the last half-hand’s length off before Jasper could say anything, but his efforts were to no avail. He’d have had as much success trying to snap an oak tree in two. “I guess we need Meggins back here with that quiver to make it normal like.”

“We don’t need him. It will come out anyway,” Jasper said, clearly annoyed as he held the two rocks in place. “Can you please just do as I ask, and leave the rest to me?”

Ilbei fixed Jasper with a crooked look, digging deep into the wizard’s unflinching eyes. The wizard seemed confident, at least in this. “Fine,” he said. “Go on, then. I’ll wait till that there lights up.”

“Good. Be patient. This is going to take a while.”

“I heard ya the first time ya said it.”

Jasper shrugged. Then, after one more scan down the spell, he began to read, his voice low and level, steady as a song.

Two hours passed before the arrow began to glow, and Ilbei was fighting to keep his eyes open when he realized the light had come. It startled him to full consciousness, and with guilty fear that he’d be too late, he gripped the glowing arrow in one hand, braced the other just below her ribs and drew it out. The effort he thought he’d need was not needed at all, and such was the force of his initial draw that he nearly snapped his arm back and elbowed Jasper in the nose. He caught himself, however, then caught one of the rocks before it could roll off of Mags and set the scroll curling up on itself. But yank he did, and out the arrow came, straight through her body as if it were a thing made of light.

He half expected it to solidify again and drop like a twenty-ton brick, but it didn’t. Instead, it hissed and crackled like dried pine needles in a fire, then vanished in a puff of smoke. Ilbei would have praised the young magician on a fine bit of magic, but Jasper was still reading aloud. Which he continued to do for the next four hours.

By the time the spell was cast and Mags was breathing easily, Kaige was up and had relieved Meggins on watch down the tunnel. Ilbei, Jasper and Meggins took a few bites from their stores to refresh themselves, then fell in beside her and took some sorely needed rest.

When he woke, Ilbei guessed it was late morning or early afternoon of the day following their entrance into the cave. They’d been in longer than he’d expected, but at least everyone was healthy and alive. He woke the rest of them, and shortly after, all were on their feet, refreshed to greater or lesser degrees. Mags complained that her chest hurt and that she had a backache. Jasper complained that his back surely hurt worse than hers did, as he hadn’t been healed after having to sleep on solid rock, which he continued to moan about for the next few hours as they made their way downstream. He only stopped complaining because, finally, they could see the entrance to the cave, the bright daylight beyond shining like a beacon of all things warm and dry.

“I’ll never complain about the heat again,” Jasper promised, which of course set Meggins and Kaige to speculating on how long those odds would be. In truth, the sight of the sunlight raised everyone’s spirits more than a notch.

Unfortunately, however, upon drawing near the exit, and upon Ilbei’s having sent Meggins to check outside in case Verity had stationed any of his crew out there, they had their spirits put right back down where they had been. Lower, really. Sent there by the metallic clatter of a pace-long crossbow bolt that came clattering off the stone, the vicious tip of it only missing Meggins’ forehead by the length of an eyelash standing on its end.

He jerked sideways to avoid it, as if by spasm, and he had to fight his way against the current to get back out of the line of fire. He was sputtering and swearing all the while as he scrambled and splashed away from the opening, and as he did, another of the long steel bolts ricocheted off the edge of it and glanced off the hard leather of his armor. It flew up the tunnel and skittered to a stop ten spans beyond the rest of the company. Kaige went and got it as it began rolling down toward the water. He brought it back to Ilbei, who took it from him and shook his head.

“The gods-be-damned Skewer. I knew that bastard was gonna be out there. I knew it like a burnin rash.”

Chapter 26

“S
o what’s the Skewer doing out there?” Kaige asked. “Didn’t the major say he run off?” The man’s brawn and the strong line of his jaw sometimes belied his youth and farm-grown naivety.

“Aye, lad, he did. So either the Skewer come round this way on account of our bad luck, or the major is as low and slimy as a snail’s arse.”

“I think it might be the second one,” Meggins said.

“As do I.” Ilbei stroked his beard, and bits of sand and gravel fell out, bouncing off the bulbous projection of his belly, the larger pieces ticking first off his chainmail and again when they fell to the ground. “Ya happen to get a count of em out there?”

“I didn’t,” Meggins confessed. “I only just saw the movement when the Skewer raised his crossbow. It was all I could do to duck back in time. I think I saw someone else with him, but I got nothing like a count of who all might be out there. Could be no one, could be fifty of them.”

“He only had two men with him when we run him off, Sarge,” Kaige offered helpfully.

“Right, he did. But no tellin how many he’s got now. Major surely gave him reinforcements when he sent him down here with Verity.”

“What?” That came from both Kaige and Jasper.

Ilbei shared a look with Meggins, who simply shrugged. Meggins had at least twenty years on the other two, and likely a lot more living in those decades than Jasper or Kaige would have by the same count.

A third long, silvery shaft careened off the edge of the tunnel entrance and cut through the air. It whipped between Ilbei and Meggins and actually puffed Mags’ hair, slicing off a few strands just below her ear. They heard it land several spans beyond, followed by the metallic hiss of it sliding deeper into the darkness.

“Back upstream, let’s go, let’s go,” Ilbei said. He put one hand on Meggins’ back and the other on Mags’, shepherding them both along. When they were out of range, Ilbei shook his head. “By the gods, we’re pinned down again. Never seen two archers so mean.”

“But they’ve got damn fine weapons, you have to admit,” Meggins said, holding his newly acquired bow out and twisting it in the torchlight. The flames reflected dully off its black surface. It had a thin green line running through one of its composite layers, but Meggins, for all his experience with bows, could not muster a guess at what it might be. It matched the fletching on the arrows though, suggesting the feathers might be treated with something, or not be feathers at all.

“Yes, they do,” Ilbei said. “Too fine. Strikes me squirrely to find two weapons what can shoot the moon right outta the sky, and both of em here in a backwoods like Three Tents.”

Meggins nodded.

“Perhaps it really is because of the harpies,” Jasper said. “As you suggested before.”

Ilbei started to scold him for going on about harpies again, but stopped. “What makes ya say that?”

“Well, what else would require such weapons? I’ve never actually killed one, but I can’t imagine you need a thing like that to hunt deer. I’ve known lots of hunters, and none of them used anything like either of those.”

Ilbei scratched his beard again, dislodging more bits of stone in the doing. “You’re right, son. He wouldn’t. And a man who has resigned hisself to makin his livin off a handful of dirt-poor miners hasn’t got no reason to have such a weapon neither. He’d make a fine bit more with that thing workin fer Her Majesty, or fer any of the nobility, whether huntin or mercenary work.”

“Well, I did see him leaving the barracks back when I shipped in,” Meggins reminded him. “So he was military for a time.”

“Right,” said Ilbei. “And now he’s out here spearin grouse and peahens for copper coins. And right friendly with the major too.”

“Maybe they sent him out here to help flush out the counterfeit coins,” Mags said. “He’s been up at Fall Pools often enough over the last year or so.”

“Did he come down to Camp Chaparral much?”

“On occasion. There weren’t enough of us to feed, so he didn’t come by often. But I saw him a few times. We bought a boar from him for Candalin’s last birthday. She turned one hundred and sixty-five.”

“Not bad fer a commoner and a blank,” Ilbei said. “Especially livin out here with no casters healin folks.”

“Too bad it turned out to be her last,” Mags observed.

“Aye.” Ilbei looked down for a moment. He regarded the panniers sitting next to Jasper’s trunk, all of which they’d retrieved before their attempt to exit the cave. He jerked his head right back up. “Speakin of that, and just so as it matters to ya all, and in the event I get one of them steel spits between my eyes, them other coin molds ain’t gone to Hast like I told the major back there. I put em in with poor old Candalin. The dirt was fresh dug, so I buried em down a half span.”

“You mean you lied to Major?” Kaige said. He looked disappointed and surprised.

“Aye, Kaige, that I did. But only as he’s been lyin to us since day one. And I figured if’n things worked out right, we’d make what I told him true enough in time.”

Kaige thought about that for a while and seemed mollified. Mainly. It was obvious to all who observed that his particular notion of reality was being shifted sideways considerably.

The metallic scrape of another crossbow bolt sliding across the stone sounded a few paces downstream.

“Well, we can’t stand here all day. We need to figure a way out of here.” He nodded to the trunk filled with Jasper’s scrolls. “Jasper, ya got all yer spells back now, what do ya have that can get us out of here? Can ya teleport me, Meggins and Kaige behind them fellers out there so as we can sneak up on em and clear a path?”

“Not without getting much closer to the entrance,” Jasper said.

“Well, I’ll stand in front of ya while ya cast. I can use that trunk of yers to shield us some.”

“I still only have fifty spans, you know. And we are twenty spans up the wall. How far away was the Skewer from there?” Jasper looked at Meggins as he spoke.

“Maybe twenty or so down from where the creek turns down the hill,” Meggins replied.

“Well, if he doesn’t have any more men down there, I think it might work.”

“Can’t ya look first? Don’t ya have them seein spells?”

“I do!” Jasper went to the trunk and started looking through it, using his bit of fungus to light the inside. He muttered what served him as epithets, cursing Kaige for shuffling them all around, but eventually he pulled a proper seeing spell out. “All right, let’s go have a look.” He actually seemed giddy about casting it.

They waited in silence as Jasper read the spell, his eyes seeming to stare at the words and at nothing simultaneously. After several long minutes of this, he stopped chanting and blinked. “Well, they certainly spare
every
expense with these things. I’m beginning to think the only spells of any value in that whole box are the ones I wrote myself.”