Retrieving Clonogh, Graywing headed down the trail, the hooded courier following close behind him, his ivory stick now thrust through his waistband at Graywing’s command. The stick’s faint tapping could alert enemies a hundred yards away.
Graywing glanced back at his charge as the trail bent around the top of a forested ledge. What do you have in that pouch, Clonogh? he wondered absently. What do you carry, that is worth risking your life and mine to deliver?
At the high end of the rock spur, Graywing gestured and veered off the trail, Clonogh following close behind. The slope here was heavily wooded, and they ghosted from tree to tree, angling downward. Then Graywing froze, and halted Clonogh with a hard hand. Immediately to his left, the leaves of a ground-spreader rustled faintly and rhythmically, a tiny, repetitious movement like a man breathing.
They were there, lying in wait above the trail, and their “specialist” was truly expert at his craft. Senses even a hair less honed than Graywing’s would never have found them.
Nothing moving but his eyes and his twitching nostrils, Graywing counted four of them waiting there. The count bothered him. Something told him there should be five, but he could find only the four. The Gelnians were facing the other way, watching the trail beyond the spur, and they were much too close! The nearest hidden assassin, so camouflaged that only his breathing betrayed his presence, was no more than two long strides from where Graywing crouched.
Soundlessly, he edged in front of the cowering Clonogh and eased his sword from its buckler. At that instant Clonogh’s foot slipped. He danced for balance, stones rattled and all fury broke loose.
Like the cat whose name he bore, Dartimien blended effortlessly with his surroundings. Crouched at the toe of the rock spur, he seemed no more than part of the rock beside him. Still as a leaf in a calm, he watched the trail directly above and counted his heartbeats. The smugglers should have stepped into sight by now, should be at the mercy of the Gelnian assassins by now, but moments passed and no one appeared.
He was going to give them a minute more, but sudden intuition-like an extra sense that he had always possessed-raised the hackles on the back of his neck. The prey had somehow outsmarted the predator. The smugglers were not there! His eyes narrowing, he turned and saw them yards away, behind him. With a growl he spun around, daggers appearing in both hands as he stood. And at his movement, the ambushers turned, too.
The first move was so quick that even Dartimien barely saw it. The foremost smuggler-a tall, blond-bearded man with a feathered ornament braided into his hair at one side-leapt forward, his sword flashing downward in a deadly arc, and one of the Gelnians collapsed, spewing gore from a severed neck. Before the others could react, a second fell, gutted by a backswing. The other two scrambled back, got their feet under them and drew bright blades as the buck-skinned warrior whirled full around, darted between them and struck again. One of the Gelnians fell. The remaining one scuttled back, stumbled over his own feet, then turned and ran.
Dartimien shifted one of his daggers and raised it to throw, then stopped himself. “This isn’t my fight,” he muttered, and faded into cover.
Graywing saw the third ambusher fall, and turned to aim a cut at the fourth. But terror seemed to have given wings to the man’s feet. He scrambled backward, dodged the flashing sword, then spun around and fairly flew over the rock spur, onto the open trail and toward the brush beyond. In a moment he would be gone, spreading the alarm, and moments after that they would be up to their necks in enemies.
Graywing spun around, saw Clonogh still trying to get his balance, and ripped the ivory walking stick from the man’s waistband. He heard Clonogh’s gasp and the beginning of his shout, but by then he had acted. The ivory stick was stout, and had good weight. Barely pausing to aim, Graywing hurled it. It whistled through the air, flashed once in open sunlight, and thudded satisfyingly against the skull of the fleeing ambusher. The man fell like a rock, face down, and the stick caromed away into the heavy undergrowth beyond.
“Don’t!” Clonogh shrieked.
“Got him,” Graywing muttered. Then without formality he slung his sword, picked up his employer as one would lift a sack of grain, and sprinted down the trail. There was still a fifth man back there somewhere, and Graywing had no wish to be around when he saw what had become of his companions. That one, his intuition told him, was their “expert,” and an entirely different sort than his fallen henchmen. Dealing with them had been easy. Dealing with him might take time that could not be spared.
Through flickering sunlight and shadow Graywing raced, letting the slope work for him. Within a few steps he was covering twenty feet at a stride, and the wind sang in his ears. Clonogh’s strident wail trailed behind him, lost in the wake of their passage.
For a quarter of a mile he ran, and then another quarter, and the slope beneath him eased toward level ground. He burst from a tree line, through stinging brush and into a tilled field, and kept going until they were out of arrow range before he slowed his stride.
Finally, when he was sure they were in the clear, he stopped and set Clonogh on his own unsteady feet. The man’s cloak had been whipped back, disclosing a totally bald head and a wrinkled, beardless face distorted now by rage.
“You fool!” Clonogh screamed at him. “You bloody, stupid barbarian! You’ve ruined me!”
Graywing stared at him, speechless for a moment, then his eyes narrowed to threatening slits. “What I did was save your life!” he snapped. “And your treasure!” He gestured contemptuously at the leather pouch still slung securely across the robed one’s breast. “I’ve-”
“Idiot!” Clonogh shrieked. “You’ve ruined everything! I was to deliver the Fang of Orm to Lord Vulpin. Now it’s gone!”
“You still have it,” Graywing pointed at the sealed leather pouch, wondering if the man had gone insane. “It’s safe in your pouch.”
“Barbarian!” Clonogh howled at him, dancing about in his rage. “This pouch? This pouch is nothing! It was a ruse! The Fang of Orm is back there! You … you threw it away!”
“I threw it … you mean your walking stick?”
“Walking stick!” Clonogh was almost gibbering now. “That was no walking stick! That was the Fang of Orm, one of the most powerful relics in this pitiful world!”
In the blue of evening, Graywing crept alone up the slope, into the blockaded hills that ringed the Vale of Sunder. Moving like a shadow, he retraced his earlier racing route, looking for the scene of the failed ambush. Ahead he saw the rock spur where the assassins had waited, but there was no sign now that anything had occurred there. The bodies were gone, the trail apparently untouched.
Every sense alert, he moved from cover to cover, his eyes searching. Then a few yards ahead, where there had been no one a moment before, a slim, dark-garbed figure leaned casually against a tree. As Graywing tensed, his hand on his sword hilt, the man straightened and stepped forward. “Don’t bother looking,” a pleasant, musical voice said. “I already searched. It’s gone.”
Graywing squinted, feeling for an instant as though he were looking at a ghost. “Dartimien?” he breathed.
“Of course I’m Dartimien,” the man grinned. “I always was. It’s been a long time, Graywing, though I see you’ve lost none of your deft touch with the big blade. That was quite a mess you left here. Blood all over everything. Took me an hour to cover all the traces.”
“Dartimien,” Graywing repeated. “I thought you were dead, at Neraka.”
“So did those goblins,” Dartimien grinned. “They marched right over me. It was the last mistake they ever made.”