“I think they might try something tonight,” Tad said, far too casually. “I know I was being watched all the time, and I just had that feeling, as if there was something out there that was frustrated and losing patience.”
“I got the same feeling,” Blade confessed. She hadn’t enjoyed taking her shields down and making a tentative try at assessing what lay beyond the river, but it had felt necessary. In part, she had been hoping to sense a rescue party, but the cold and very alien wave of frustrated anger that met her tentative probe had made her shut herself up behind her shields and sit there shivering for a moment. “I—tried using that Empathic sense, and I got the same impression you did. They would like very much to get a chance at us.”
She hoped that Tad wouldn’t make too big a fuss about that confession; he’d been at her often enough to use everything she had. Now she’d finally given in to his urgings, she was not in the mood for an “I told you that was a good idea.” She wasn’t certain that it was a good idea; what if those things out there had been able to sense her just as she sensed them?
Then again, what would they learn? That she was hurt, and scared spitless of them? They already knew that.
Fortunately for him, Tad just nodded. “It’s good to know that it’s not just my own worry talking to me,” he said, and sighed. “Now I don’t feel so badly about setting all those traps.”
“What—” she began. At that moment, one of her fishing lines went tight, and she turned her attention to it long enough to haul in her catch. But after rebaiting the hook and setting the line again, she returned to the subject.
“What other traps do you think would work?” she asked. “On our side of the river, that is. Where could we set more?”
Thus far, they hadn’t had any luck with deadfalls like the one that had marked one of the shadows before. It was as if, having seen that particular sort of trap, the hunters now knew how to avoid it. Large snares hadn’t worked either, but she hadn’t really expected them to, since there was no way to conceal them. But perhaps now, with water over the trail, trip-wires could be hidden under the water.
“I tended to that during my ‘walk’ earlier. There’s only one good place, really,” he told her. “The river’s gotten so deep and fast that there’s only one place where I think they might try to cross—that’s downstream, past where we crossed it when we first got here. I didn’t set a trap right there, though—what I did was rig something that’s harmless but looks just like the rockfall I rigged later on.” He gryph-grinned at his own cleverness, and she could hardly blame him.
“So they’ll see the harmless decoy, and then walk right into the rockfall?”
He nodded, looking very proud of himself. “It’s a good big one, too. If they actually try coming after us, at least one of them is going to be seriously hurt or killed, unless they’ve got lightning reflexes and more luck than any one creature deserves to have.”
“Just as long as you don’t hurt someone coming to rescue us!” she warned. Yesterday she might have argued with him about the merits of setting something meant to kill rather than discourage—but that was before she had opened herself to the creatures across the river. She still might not know what they looked like, but now she knew what they were. Killers, plainly and simply, with a kind of cold intelligence about them that made her wish for one good bow, two good arms, and three dozen arrows. She would debate the merits of permitting such creatures the free run of their own territory some other time; and if they gave up and left her alone, she would be perfectly happy to leave them alone. But if they came after her or Tad, she would strike as efficiently and with the same deadly force as they would.
There was still the question of whether or not these creatures were the “hunting pack” of someone or something else; she did not have the ability to read thoughts, even if these creatures had anything like a thought. But she hadn’t sensed anything else out there with them; all of the creatures had been of the same type, with a definite feeling of pack about them.
Which could simply mean that their master was off, lounging about at his ease somewhere, watching all of this in a scrying-mirror. That would certainly fit the profile of a sadistic Adept; she couldn’t picture Ma’ar, for instance, subjecting himself to mud and pouring rain.
If that was so, if there was an Adept behind all this, and she ever got her hands on him. . . .
“That wasn’t the only trap I built,” Tad continued proudly, oblivious to her dark thoughts. “I have trip-tangles under the water that will throw them into the stream, I balanced boulders to roll at a touch and trap feet and legs, and I put up some more snares. Between all that and the rock barricade we have across the front of the cave, I think we can feel a little safer.”
“Just as long as we can continue fishing from in here,” she corrected. “And as long as you can stand to live on fish.”
“All I have to do is think about eating any more of that dried meat, and fish takes on a whole new spectrum of delight,” he countered. “I’m learning to tell the difference between one fish and another, raw. Some are sweeter, one has more fat—”
And they all taste the same to me. “Fine, I believe you!” she interrupted hastily. “Listen, I wonder if we could rig some kind of a net or something to haul in driftwood as it comes down over the falls. There’s a lot of stuff getting by us that we could really use.”
There was nothing that Tad liked better than trying to invent a new way to do something, and the idea of a driftwood-net kept him happily occupied for some time. And more importantly, it kept him restfully occupied; no matter how cheerful and energetic he seemed—or tried to appear—he was tired, and so was she. The ever-present roar of the falls would cover the sounds of anything approaching them, and most especially would cover the sounds of anything bold enough to try swimming across the river at this point. They both knew that, and she suspected that he was staying half-awake even through her watch, as she was staying through his. Not especially bright of either of them, but neither of them were able to help themselves. Their imaginations supplied the creatures out there with every kind of supernatural attribute, especially in the dark of the night. It was easier to dismiss such fears by daylight, except that she kept reminding herself that just because their hunters hadn’t done something yet, that didn’t mean they weren’t capable of a particular action. It was hard to strike a balance between seeing threats that didn’t exist and not being wary enough, especially when you didn’t know everything the enemy could do.
“Not long until dark,” Tad observed, after a long discussion of nets and draglines and other ways of catching runaway driftwood. He pointed his beak toward the river. She nodded; although it was difficult to keep track of time without the sun being visible, the light did seem to be fading. Another one of her lines went taut; this fish was a fighter, which probably meant that it was one of the kinds Tad liked best. Any fish seemed pretty tasteless to her, wrapped in wet clay to bake and without any herbs to season it with. She’d thought about using some of the peppery leaves just to give her food some spice, then thought better of the idea. Although they had not had any deleterious effect rubbed on the skin, there was no telling if they were poisonous if eaten. You could rub your skin all day with shadow-berries and not get anything worse than a purple stain, but eat a few and you would find yourself retching up your toenails. . . .