“If it must be …”
“I do not know what must be, but what must not be is you dying out here alone.”
“Yes, my lord Pirvan.”
Waydol staggered when he rose, and had to put some of his weight on Pirvan, but the knight had carried packs loaded with stones that weighed more, in his training days. He had not owed the stones any debts of honor, either!
* * * * *
Pirvan had no trouble finding bearers after he and Waydol staggered into the stronghold. Enough men ran forward to crew a fair-sized ship. Four of them carried a stout plank door fitted with handles, and on this they laid the Minotaur. The four men and as many others as could get a grip on the door lifted it, and the procession down to the water began.
Pirvan could do nothing more for Waydol, so he went in search of Birak Epron and Haimya. He found them standing in front of Waydol’s hut, swords drawn, facing a dozen angry men. From their ragged appearance, most of them were either new recruits or refugees.
“What goes on here?” Pirvan snapped.
“These men wanted entry to Waydol’s hut,” Birak Epron said. “They could show no right. They said they wanted to bring his goods down to the shore. I think they’re after loot.”
“Perhaps,” Pirvan said, fixing the men with a gaze that made them step back several paces. “Or perhaps they are thinking how much the kingpriest will pay for the secrets of a minotaur who has lived among humans for twenty years.”
“Well, by all good gods, why not?” one man said. “Waydol’s going home without-”
Birak Epron suddenly had one hand on the man’s collar and the point of his dagger at the man’s throat. “Who told you that?”
The man gobbled something that might have been a name. Birak Epron threw the man down like a rotten leg of mutton. “The same one who told the archer who killed Pedoon, or so I’ve been led to believe. Trying to make trouble to the last, I suppose, but at least this time he hasn’t got anyone killed.”
“Or at least he won’t, if we don’t see any of you bastards around here again. The boats are waiting. Be in them before I come down to the beach, or start swimming.”
The men ran off.
“I shall have to find the troublemaker and kill him before we turn these folk loose on Solamnia,” Birak Epron said. “I know you and your lady are too honorable to do that, but I assure you that it must be done.”
Pirvan at this point would have listened to an assurance that they must go questing for the Graystone of Gargath. This quest had stretched his notions of what could and could not be far beyond previous limits-and he did not feel he had led a particularly sheltered life.
Haimya looked at the hut. “I hate to leave it for Istarian looters. They may take everything to the kingpriest even faster than those bandits.”
“Time enough to think about that when we’ve saved the men-” Epron began.
Drums from the ships interrupted him. Then shouts, then a scream from below.
Pirvan studied the stronghold, then the cliffs. There! Small figures scuttled atop the cliff at the east end of the cove, moving like archers. Archers, standing where they could reach some of the ships and part of the houses.
And where they would be as hard to come at as if they’d been shooting from the Abyss itself with Takhisis’s permission!
The companions ran down the hill even faster than the would-be looters.
* * * * *
Waydol was in a boat on his way to Windsword by the time the three companions reached the beach. Archers were running toward the east, looking for places where they could at least distract the enemy.
From what Pirvan heard, the enemy looked like Istarians-rangers, perhaps, or fleet archers. Neither cared whether the bow was an elven weapon, and were among the most formidable archers outside the elven nations. They also had the advantage of height, and altogether they promised to be a problem that Pirvan had not anticipated and really did not need!
“Can more follow where these went?” he asked, of nobody in particular. Twenty archers up there were doing enough damage. A hundred-
“No.” It was Stalker. “Only very good climbers could be up there. I wager one man fell for every one up there.”
That was some consolation. So was the stronghold’s plainly beginning to fight back. Friendly archers were shooting, not accurately thanks to having to shoot upward. But they had numbers and plenty of arrows; luck might do the rest.
Also, several of the ships in Jemar’s fleet were replying. Two had full-sized siege engines mounted on deck, and two more had huge fortress crossbows that could send a bolt the length of a man through a foot of oak. It was one of those crossbows that took down the first archer, snatching him out of sight in a single breath.
This slowed his comrades’ fire briefly, long enough for Pirvan to lead his companions up to the blue-doored hut of Mishakal. Several wounded lay on blankets outside it, but Sirbones was nowhere in sight.
“I-I am Delia,” said the thin, pale woman holding her staff over a man with an arrow-gouged thigh. “I was-midwife, healer, to Lady Eskaia. She is safe aboard Windsword, but Sirbones needs help.”
“I’m sure he does,” Haimya said. “But Waydol needs help direly. Can you tell us where Sirbones-?”
“Delia!” a voice shouted from up the hill. “Did I not tell you to-?”
“Sirbones, there were so many of them. Leaving them be was worse than healing. Leave be, or I shall have to spend strength healing you that-”
Sirbones appeared on a path just uphill. Before Pirvan could ask him to make sense of this conversation, the archers atop the cliff let fly with their farthest-reaching arrows yet.
Pirvan and his companions knew where three of them went. One glanced off Birak Epron’s helmet. A second stuck in the thatch of Delia’s hut.
A third struck Delia in the stomach. She gave a faint cry, put a hand on the arrow shaft, then sat down, clamping her mouth shut against the pain.
“Don’t touch it,” Haimya said. “There it’s not likely to kill, with a good healer readily at hand-”
“Ah, but no healer is close enough now,” Delia said. Her eyes rolled up in her head, and she fell backward, atop the man whose leg she’d been healing.
“Lady?” he said. “Lady?” he repeated, this time in a wail.
“Delia?” Sirbones asked, hurrying up. He knelt beside her, holding his staff lengthwise along her body. “Delia?” he said again.
Then he rose slowly to his feet, his face working. “I warned her. She-when she healed Lady Eskaia and the babe-she put so much of herself into those spells. There was nothing left for her. Then she went and healed others, giving more and more that was not really there, until a mouse bite could have killed her!”
Blindly, Sirbones groped for support. Haimya let him put his head on her armored shoulder and held him while he wept.
He sobered quickly, but flies had already begun to gather around Delia before he spoke again. “Is it true that Waydol-?”
A thunderclap left that question unfinished. Pirvan looked up to see a dozen small fireballs scouring the top of the cliff where the archers stood. Had stood, rather-these fireballs were not mostly illusion.
Pirvan’s gaze followed the blazing corpse of one archer all the way down from the top of the cliff until he hissed into oblivion in the water of the cove. Several more fell after him, and then some rocks, heated until they also threw up steam when they struck the water.
“Waydol is-” Pirvan began, then cursed under his breath as Rubina appeared, seemingly out of thin air.
“I thought I deserved better than that, Sir Pirvan,” Rubina said. She was almost as pale as Delia had been, and Pirvan had the notion that her staff was now doing duty as a walking stick. But her beauty was undiminished, and she had donned her black robes for the first time since landing-what seemed months ago.