Rikus grabbed his Belt of Rank and buckled it on. “Wait, Neeva. If you break a leg, it’ll slow down the entire army.”
Her only answer was a curse.
The mul picked up his sword and started to follow, but abruptly halted. Instead of his hiss of scales and the beat of lizard wings that he heard earlier, the field was ominously silent-save for the hushed chorus of contrived chirps and whistles. The noises were so soft that, had he not held the Scourge of Rkard in his hand, Rikus would never have heard them.
“Neeva, stop!” he hissed, clattering over a jumble of rocks as he rushed to catch up.
“Why?” she demanded.
“There’s something out there!” the mul answered.
Neeva stopped immediately, hefting her axe into a guarding position. “This had better not be a ploy, Rikus.”
“It’s not,” the mul assured her, stepping to her side.
He searched the ground ahead, looking for the slightest indication of movement. All he saw was an endless field of motionless rocks, flecked here and there with equally motionless boulders. Unfortunately, he could not use his dwarven vision to pick out whatever was making the sound, either. The sun, all but sunken behind the Ringing Mountains, was bathing the field with just enough fiery light to wash out all traces of ambient heat.
Rikus took Neeva’s arm. “They’re between us and camp,” he whispered.
“What are they?” she asked, dropping the cape from her shoulders.
“I don’t know,” he said. “With the Scourge, I can hear them whistling and chirping-but I can’t see them any more then you can.”
The mysterious watchers fell silent.
Rikus cursed under his breath and brought his sword into a defensive position. “Be ready,” he said, no longer bothering to whisper.
They slowly backed away, stopping when they reached the stony bed that Neeva had prepared for them. Still, the watchers did not move or attack.
“Maybe its a pack of wild thri-kreen,” Neeva said.
Unlike K’kriq, most thri-kreen were not civilized. They roamed the desert day and night, hunting for prey to sate their ravenous appetites. Sometimes, if they were desperate, they would resort to eating sentient creatures.
Rikus peered all around them, searching the dusky terrain for some sign of an insect-man. The dying rays of the sun only made it more difficult to see, for they lit the tops of the rocks in muted red light. It was impossible to distinguish colors, and even shapes were soft and fuzzy, but he did not see anything large and angular enough to be a thri-keen.
Rikus shook his head. “There’s nothing big enough.”
The mul had no sooner spoken than a soft churp sounded at their backs. A small foot brushed against the rocky ground and padded toward them. Rikus spun around and glimpsed the three-foot silhouette of a bushy-haired man dropping behind a small boulder.
His stomach knotted in cold fear. “Halflings!” Rikus hissed, pressing his back against Neeva’s.
“I wish you’d said thri-kreen,” Neeva replied. She remained quiet for a moment, then added, “If I fall, don’t let them eat me-at least not alive.”
“Then don’t fall,” the mul answered. “If you do, I doubt I’ll be in any position to stop them.”
Rikus and Neeva had faced halflings before, when they had ventured into the halfling forest to recover the spear and the wand that they had used to kill Kalak. The small hunters had felled them both easily, and Agis had barely been able to talk the tribe’s chieftain out of eating the entire party.
They waited, back to back, for the halflings to move again. After what seemed an eternity, Rikus suggested, “Maybe they’ve decided against attacking us.”
“You can’t believe that,” Neeva countered. “This isn’t just any halfling hunting party. They’re Urikite assassins.”
As much as he didn’t want to, the mul had to agree with his fighting partner. Halflings left their forest too rarely for this to be a chance encounter.
From beside them, Rikus heard the soft scrape of a foot on stone, followed quickly by the high-pitched twang of a tiny bowstring. “Down!” the mul screamed. He pushed Neeva to the ground and dropped at her side.
An instant later, a tiny arrow clattered against a rock near Rikus’s side. Though the missile was hardly longer than his hand, the mul knew from his previous experiences that it would be tipped with an effective poison that knocked its victim unconscious within a few seconds. Likely as not, the unlucky victim would never wake, and if he did it would be to the sight of several halflings preparing to eat his liver.
“How are we going to get out of this?” Neeva asked. Her voice was muffled because her mouth was pressed to the ground.
Rikus lifted his head enough so that he could look around. A dozen yards to his right, he could hear a pair of halflings chittering and whistling to each other, but they remained hidden from sight. The mul could not hear or see any other man-eaters.
The gladiator dropped his head back to the ground. “Crawl,” he whispered.
Neeva reluctantly left her bulky steel axe behind and they started forward. They pulled themselves along inches at a time, silently grimacing as the jagged stones scraped long gashes into their torsos. Within a few yards, warm blood coated from their collarbones to their knees, and grating sand filled the dozens of cuts lacing their chests and stomachs.
Although Rikus was careful to keep his sword from banging against a rock, the pair could not help making more noise than halflings. They drew heavier breaths and created soft rasps as they drew their larger bodies across the ground. Every now and then, there was a muffled clack when one of them accidentally dislodged a stone and it bumped into another. Rikus had no doubt that the halflings could track them by the sounds they were making, but he did know what option they had except to crawl.
A pair of twangs sounded from their left, then two more darts clattered into the rocks ahead of them. Rikus cursed and used the tip of his sword to flick the arrows away. He suspected that even a scrape along the poisoned tips would be enough to knock either him or Neeva unconscious.
“Why don’t they show themselves?” Neeva whispered, looking around for the source of the arrows. When Rikus did not answer, she asked another question, “How many do you think there are?”
“Two or a dozen,” the mul answered. “It’s impossible to tell. Just keep crawling.”
“Why?” There was an edge of fear in Neeva’s question that Rikus had never heard in her voice before.
“They may be able to hear us move, but as long as we stay down they can’t see us any better than we can see them. One of us should be able to reach the rest of the legion and warn it.”
“The halflings are after us, not the rest of the legion,” Neeva whispered. “Even I can tell that there aren’t enough of them to attack two thousand men, but they don’t need many warriors to assassinate a commander.”
Seeing the wisdom of Neeva’s words, Rikus silently cursed the Kes’trekels, suspecting the slave tribe had advised Maetan to set up this ambush.
“You’re right, but let’s keep moving anyway,” the mul whispered. “We won’t help ourselves by waiting until they come to us.”
As the two gladiators crawled forward, the halflings mirrored their progress, chittering and whistling to keep track of each other and their prey. Occasionally, one or two of them would fire a dart, and twice the little arrows struck within a foot of the mul’s head. By the time they had crossed fifty yards of rocky ground, both gladiators were breathing hard-though Rikus suspected their weariness had more to do with nerves than muscle fatigue.
“Maybe I should yell for help,” the mul whispered.
“Are you out of your mind?” Neeva hissed. “No one but the halflings will hear you!”
“It was just an idea,” Rikus answered defensively.
He crawled forward again, stopping to listen every two or three yards. Most of the time, the halflings were silent, but every now and then, a chitter or a chirp let him know the assassins were closing in.