Tavis dived over the dire wolf the ogres had injured with their first volley, cursed silently as he rolled across jagged rocks, and came up running. He heard bowstrings snap as the fastest of his enemies loosed their arrows. The scout hurled himself over a fallen log into a stand of trees. He did not see where the shafts landed, but none hit him.
Tavis crawled beneath the low-hanging boughs of a spearhead spruce, then stood up behind its bole and nocked another ogre arrow. When he peered around the trunk to take aim, he saw that the three warriors he had wounded earlier were in various stages of collapse, one teetering at the cliff's edge, one holding himself off the ground with his hands and knees, the last lying unconscious with the arrow still lodged in his arm.
The scout fired again, picking, as he had before, a target in the second rank. The arrow gashed two ogres before shattering against the mountainside. This time, Tavis had plenty of time to watch his targets collapse, for those who had not been wounded finally understood the strategy of his glancing shots and were scrambling to open some space between themselves. The poison did not drop the wounded ogres immediately, for they had received only minute doses as the tip grazed them. Still, the toxin was powerful. Their knees began to wobble, then abruptly buckled, and both dropped in the same instant-one knocking the teetering warrior over the cliff.
The five uninjured warriors kneeled at the edge of the precipice, arrows nocked and ready. They seemed content to hold their fire as long as their quarry made no move to escape. The ogres had no reason to press the attack: reinforcements would arrive soon enough.
Tavis fired another arrow. He waited long enough to see his target drop flat and narrowly escape death, then the scout ducked back behind his spruce trunk. Four ogre shafts answered his attack, two of them passing so close they peeled the bark from his cover. The arrows had not even planted themselves in the ground before Tavis was sprinting from his stand of trees.
"This way!" He leaped over the fallen wolf and dodged toward the stream where Morten had taken cover, motioning for Brianna and Avner to follow him.
The ogres' bowstrings snapped, and the scout threw himself headlong into the water. After splashing into the middle of the icy stream, he climbed to Morten's side and peered over the bank. Along with Avner and Earl Dobbin, Brianna was still hiding in a stand of trees with the hill giant.
Tavis nocked an arrow. "I'll cover you!" be yelled. "Hurry! We've got to get out of here!"
Avner stepped from his hiding place to obey Tavis, and the ogres drew their bowstrings back to fire. Then the hill giant's long arm lashed out and snatched the boy up.
"Stupid firbolg!" the giant yelled, glaring at Tavis. He pointed up the canyon, toward the headwaters of the tiny brook. "Gate to Noote's lands upstream!"
Morten started to crawl in the direction the hill giant indicated.
Tavis caught his arm. "Listen to me," he said. "We can't trust Noote."
"We have no other choice." As he spoke, the bodyguard was staring over Tavis's shoulder. "Have you seen what's coming up the valley?"
Tavis twisted around to look. At first, he did not understand what concerned Morten. The valley looked liked any high alpine canyon, with a silvery brook, small patches of tundra meadow, and thick stands of spruce.
Then, on a talus slope about two hundred paces below, something changed. At first, Tavis could not say exactly what. Nothing moved on the hillside, no stones clattered, and the wind came from the wrong direction to carry on its breath any whiff of hidden ogres. But the scout knew better than to doubt the gnawing in his stomach or the hair prickling on his neck. He watched.
At the edge of a spruce stand, a black rock suddenly vanished into the darkness beneath the tree limbs. Tavis blinked, not quite able to believe what he had just seen. The shadows swallowed a second stone, this one while, then a third and a fourth, and the scout realized the whole talus field was disappearing before his eyes. The entire copse of trees was advancing up the gorge, creeping along so slowly that it hardly seemed to be moving at all.
The gnawing in Tavis's stomach changed to queasy dismay. He had seen ogres creep forward behind screens of shrubbery before, but knew better than to think he was seeing that. Ogres could not carry seventy-foot spruces, nor could hundreds of them coordinate their movements well enough to move an entire stand so precisely and imperceptibly. Only Goboka's magic could do that.
Morten was right. Tavis and his companions would have to go with the hill giant now, and hope they could part company later-before he took them to Noote.
The scout nocked an ogre arrow in Bear Driller, then gathered five more-all he could reach-and gave them to Morten. "We'll have to run for it," he said. "Hand those to me as we go."
The bodyguard sneered at being relegated to the position of assistant, but, lacking any missile weapons of his own, took the arrows. "Follow my lead. I'll lake five steps and turn left, then three steps and break right, and do the same thing once more," Morten said. "If we're not dead by then, you're on your own."
The two firbolgs scrambled up the bank. Tavis fired at the top of the cliff. Goboka's warriors stood their ground and counterattacked, determined to keep the pair from reaching the copse where Brianna and the hill giant were hiding. The scout's arrow pierced the throat of one brute, then the other ogres released their own bowstrings. Tavis and Morten made their break, narrowly avoiding injury as ogre shafts clattered to the ground beside them.
Avner's sling whistled from the spruce stand. A stone streaked up and glanced off an ogre's shoulder, then Brianna voiced a spell. One of the shafts in the brute's quiver changed into a snake and buried its fangs into his arm. Morten slapped another arrow into Tavis's palm. The scout fired again, the ogres shot back, Avner's sling whistled, and the battle evolved into a flurry of flying shafts and stones.
By the time the firbolgs made their last break, only one ogre remained. He suddenly retreated from the edge of the cliff, and Morten leaned over to rest his hands on his knees.
"Runt. I've got to admit it," the bodyguard panted. "You're a fine archer."
The scout paid the compliment no attention, and not only because the pounding of his heart in his ears made it difficult to hear. Ogres did not abandon their posts, at least not when their shaman was nearby. If the warrior had retreated, it was because there was no longer any need to hold his quarry at bay.
Tavis looked down the gorge and saw that Goboka's magical copse was no longer gliding up the canyon. Rather, the stand was sweeping toward them with all the speed of a wildfire, the roots of the majestic trees slithering over the rocky ground like tentacles. The spruces themselves were swaying madly, their boughs fluttering and snapping like battle flags, and their boles groaning like bloodthirsty banshees.
"Run for the gate!" Tavis yelled.
Brianna and the other humans were already fleeing up the gorge, but the hill giant was not moving. Instead, he remained at the edge of the copse, staring at his unconscious dire wolf.
"Greta!" he wailed.
Tavis could not tell whether the giant was crying out in remorse or commanding his stricken wolf to rise. The scout thrust his bow into Morten's hands, then turned back for the pet. He had no love for dire wolves-he considered them little more than cowardly bullies-but if rescuing the giant's pet would help their dimwitted guide think more clearly, it was worth the risk.