The bakali ambushers below whirled toward the hilltop, their attention drawn by the sudden sounds. Ashtaway stood there in full view, and when he had the attention of the lizardmen, he raised his arms over his head, shook his bow and arrows, and whooped jeeringly.
Many of the brutish reptiles charged the lone warrior, while others vanished into the vallenwood trunks, grunting and barking aggressively. Ashtaway heard screams from the village, but the sounds of clashing metal weapons were also audible and he knew that the Kagonesti had not been taken completely by surprise.
But now he was faced with immediate problems of his own. Ashtaway had a dozen arrows left, and twice that many lizardmen rushed toward him, leaping and springing over the ground with shocking speed. Catlike, racing on all fours, a few of the bakali scampered ahead of their fellows up the steep hillside.
Slowing his breathing to the rhythmic pace of perfect concentration, Ashtaway drew back another arrow and let fly, dropping the leading lizardman with a clean shot to the neck. He shot again and again, each missile claiming another one of the attackers-and by always killing the one closest to him, he gained the time to shoot until his feathered shafts were all expended.
Throwing down his bow-he would return to get it later if he was still alive-Ashtaway pulled the long- hafted axe from his belt and raised the gleaming, steel- headed weapon over his head. Though the shaft had been made by Ash himself, Iydaway had told him that the axe head was a venerable artifact. The Pathfinder claimed that the weapon had been in the tribe for generations-legends held that it was handed down from Father Kagonesti himself. Whatever the weapon's past, Ashtaway suspected that the keen steel blade was no stranger to bakali blood.
A lizardman rushed up the hillside, leaping over the bodies of the chieftain and bodyguards. The creature sprang at the elf, jaws gaping like a crocodile's. With a single downward swing of the axe, the Kagonesti split the monster's skull, using the creature's reckless momentum to amplify the force of the blow. Slain instantly, the beast fell atop the corpses of its comrades.
Ashtaway surprised the next bakali by rushing forward, swinging the axe in a dazzling array of slashes. The first two chops nicked the lizardman's arms, sending it skidding into retreat. With a nimble leap, the Kagonesti swung again, wielding the axe as if he assaulted an ancient vallenwood trunk.
But the pale white skin of a bakali's belly was no equal to that legendary hardwood. Ash's blade slashed halfway through the monster's torso, sending it tumbling backward in a writhing mass of gore. The following lizardmen slowed their pace, suddenly alarmed by this deadly elf.
The Kagonesti did not give the bakali time to consider a revised plan. He rushed first at one, crippling it with a downward slash of the axe, then followed up against another, driving it to the ground and then killing it.
More than a dozen of the lizardmen swarmed to the hilltop. Ash risked a quick glance into the grove-he still couldn't see any of the village, but several ominous wisps of smoke emerged from the upper levels of the leaves. All he could hope was that his desperate warning had given most of the villagers time to escape. He knew that every adult, male or female, who could wield a weapon would be covering the flight of the children and the infirm.
He could do nothing for his people by dying on this hilltop. Instead, he spun and raced along the crest of the twisting ridge, darting through the trees with the grace of a deer, flying like a bird over the far side of the slope, diving toward the denser woods at the bottom. He paused in the shadows of a fallen vallenwood, where a cluster of roots extended overhead like a miniature cave. Far behind, still near the top of the hill, he saw several lizardmen cautiously advancing. The creatures darted back and forth, checking behind every tree trunk. Ashtaway smiled grimly-obviously he had taught them great respect for his fighting prowess.
Moving with caution and utter stealth, he worked his way along the foot of the ridge, steering clear of the bakali who had fanned into a long line to pursue their search. The lizardmen at the downhill end of the rank came within a dozen paces of Ashtaway, never suspecting that the patch of darkness beside the base of a great fir tree was anything other than afternoon shadow.
The searchers safely past, Ash sprinted along the forest floor. The smell of smoke was strong in his nostrils. The picture of the sturdy lodges-leather-bound houses that each sheltered a wild elf family-ravaged by the invading bakali nearly blinded him with fury.
Then he was in the midst of the vallenwoods, the great trees rising like pillars from the soft, brush-free ground. Each trunk was larger around than a chieftain's lodge, the upper branches so dense and so far above that they filtered the bright sunlight into a kind of vague and perpetual twilight. Ashtaway ran like a ghost along pathways that yesterday had chuckled to the tread of children's feet but now festered under the lingering stench of bakali.
Even before he emerged into the encampment, the smoke began to sting his eyes, and when he burst from between the last vallenwoods he could not stifle the wail of despair that rose from his lips. The lodges, the huts, the drying-racks for hides and jerky, everything was in flames. Lizardmen ran to and fro, forked tongues flicking menacingly from their jaws.
Yet, as the creatures piled more and more of the tribe's possessions onto the bonfires, Ashtaway sensed a frustration, a bitter sense of failure in the monsters' demeanor. Heart pounding, the Kagonesti warrior looked around, realizing with a glimmer of hope that there were no bodies! The villagers, most of them at least, must have escaped.
At the moment of his realization, one of the bakali warriors spotted Ash and uttered a shrill warning bark. Immediately several reptilian warriors converged.
But this was the grove where Ashtaway had spent the greater portion of his life. He didn't need to look overhead as he thrust the axe haft through his belt and leapt, strong hands closing around the limb he remembered. Nimbly swinging upward, Ash rose to his feet on the sturdy bough, some ten feet above the ground. One of the lizardmen prodded upward with a spear, and Ashtaway reached down with lightning quickness, snatching the weapon away.
Standing again, he raised the shaft to his shoulder and threw it at its original wielder. The crude flint spearhead gouged a painful wound in the monster's side and sent the other bakali scrambling backward.
With another upward leap, Ashtaway seized a second branch, scampering along this one until he reached the deep shadows near the tree trunk. The lizardmen scrambled toward the bole of the mighty vallenwood, jabbing upward with their spears.
A few of the monsters leapt, grasped the lower branches with their clawed hands, then scrambled up toward the waiting elf. Ashtaway met the first of these with a slashing blow of his axe, chopping off a forepaw that reached too far upward. Another bakali tumbled backward, bleeding, and the rest of the monsters paused.
Ash cawed at them like a taunting crow, dancing rudely back and forth on the limb, just out of reach of the lizard- men's crude weapons. He watched the slitted yellow eyes narrow hatefully, saw the tongues flicking in and out of the scaly jaws as more of the monsters raced to the tree.
When a large crowd of the brutes had gathered, Ashtaway leapt upward again, pulling up to the next limb, then bounding still farther above. Soon dark shadows cloaked him as the branches pressed closer, and he knew he was fully masked from below. At the same time he heard the snapping of branches, and the muttered cursing of his enemies-obviously the mud-dwelling bakali had entered the foreign realm of the treetops in their search for the vexsome Kagonesti.