Dustfall, Book Three - The Baying of Wolves Page 5

She moved quickly forward, heading for the side of the two tall trees that gave her the chills, but then stopped. Something was strange about the trees, the clearing, the untrodden ground. If it had been years before, maybe she’d see what the overgrown bushes and weeds hid from her, but something unusual and dangerous was concealed there.

  Yes, there it is, she thought, spotting it. What instinct had told her it was there? She hadn’t known what it was she was looking for. But she had still sensed it, and now she approached, carefully, having no choice but to go on. Time was running out.

  Between the two trees ran a thin line of thread, barely visible, attached at about knee height. It was lightly colored, and only the shadow cast by the overgrown bush at the base of the tree on the right gave her the contrast of light to spot the sheen of wet string against a dark background.

  Some form of trap, she thought. Set long ago, by the looks of it, and by someone who had not been this way for a while. The plants had grown around it, hiding most of its length, but it was still visible in the correct light. Maybe the person who laid it wasn’t even alive anymore. An animal trap of some sort? she wondered, laid to catch prey—or maybe a human—unawares. But a trap that did what? What contraption did the line trigger?

  Aware that the noise was getting louder in the forest behind her, she quickly crouched and traced the line to the bottom of the tree, but couldn't see where it went after that. The ground was too overgrown for her to see if there was a pit concealed there. There was no rope, or net above her. The canopy of the trees had thinned out enough in the autumn and the long cold for her to see that nothing lurked above, waiting to fall. And no log traps or other form of built mechanism. And yet, there it was, the line across the gap between the trees.

  I must get moving, she thought, but then another thought entered her head, a dangerous one, and though she considered it may be foolish, she knew that she couldn’t keep up this constant chase for long. Another day of this and her energy reserves would be exhausted, along with her food and water. She’d had no time to hunt or refill her water skins, even though she had crossed numerous streams and rivers.

  Seren walked toward the thin line, made a scuffle with her feet to make the passage that way more obvious, then carefully stepped over the line onto to the hard earth on the other side. Then she carried on, slowly moving away from the two taller trees and out of the clearing, toward what looked like a larger clearing, maybe fifty yards through the bushes and trees.

  Another weird animal call behind her, even closer, made her speed up. The hunter was maybe only a hundred yards behind her now, and a sense of panic filled her chest, urging her on even though her exhaustion was overpowering and her muscles screamed at her to stop. She pushed onwards, speeding up to a jog, but then stopped dead between two more trees. She felt it before she stepped too far, a slight resistance on her ankle, a pull that was barely there, alerting her to something else that was wrong.

  Her heart thudded in her chest as she glanced down and saw that she had snagged yet another long line of thin wire that ran between the trees, this one also attached to something hidden.

  Seren slowly, carefully, stepped backwards. If she moved too quickly, she thought she would trigger whatever nasty trap was attached to the wire anyway. But she held her breath and pulled her leg away from the wire. She breathed a sigh of relief.

  A shrill, piercing call made her jump, and she glanced back toward the two taller trees, now thirty yards behind her in the woods, and there, heading swiftly toward her, his bow drawn and an arrow already notched, was one of her hunters. He started toward her, speeding up from the slow, casual jog that they had followed her with, gradually beat her energy down with, and rushed through the trees...straight between the two taller trees where the other wire lay. She wanted to back away. He would release the arrow quicker than she could draw her own, and if she did step back she would trigger this second trap.

  The hunter ran between the trees, and Seren watched as he passed through the string, pulling it tight. She thought, just for the slightest of moments, that there was a look of recognition, a knowing moment where the hunter realized all was not good, but then it was over.

  One moment the forest was quiet, the only noise the rush of the hunter as he approached her, and the distant noises of the other hunters as they closed in toward their comrade, breaking the tree line a second or two before the trap went off. The next moment there was the loudest booming noise that Seren had heard in her life. The hunter ran forward between the trees, straight through the hidden wire, and carried on, but then, as the loud noise erupted, sending a shock through the forest, his head and neck vanished completely in a spray of gunk and blood. The body stumbled forward for a few paces and then fell to the ground.

  Seren stood helpless, dumbstruck at what had happened, unable to move as the two hunters slowed their progress and stopped a few steps behind their fallen comrade. She should run, she knew that, but she couldn’t. But she managed to carefully step over the second tripwire and back just a couple of feet away.

  What could possibly do that to a person? Take off their head and neck with a loud bang. Nothing that she knew of. Nothing.

  One of the hunters looked up and pointed at her.

  “You,” he shouted, still pointing. “What did you do? How?” The man was furious, and frightened—as shocked as she, maybe, though he hadn’t seen his friend’s death. The same hunter strode forward through the trees toward her, and Seren stumbled further backwards, nearly tripping over a bush. The other two hunters stood, puzzled, looking down at their headless friend, leaving just the one—maybe their leader?—to pace angrily toward her.

  He walked straight into the second tripwire, the one Seren had barely avoided herself.

  Another loud boom erupted from the bushes, this one much closer, just a few yards to the right of the approaching hunter, and this time it wasn’t his head, but a large chunk of his chest that vanished in a spray of blood. The man staggered forward, dropping both his bow and the notched arrow, reaching for the hole in his chest that was big enough for Seren to see the other two hunters through. The hunters’ leader looked up at her, shocked beyond comprehension, words forming on his lips but no noise coming out, and then fell to the ground.

  Seren stumbled back, stifling a cry, but didn’t fall. She looked up at the other two hunters, waiting for them to rush her. But they had seen their leader fall, the second of their number to go down in such a violent manner within a minute, and looked at the mysterious figure through the trees—Seren, the one who had done this terrible damage to their comrades—before taking off through the trees as fast as their legs would go. It seemed that they only wished to be away from the woman who had torn their fellow hunters apart, killing them without raising a hand.

  Seren watched them go. She felt numb with shock at the events that had unfolded in front of her in the last few moments, without her doing a thing. She took another step back, turning, reaching, hoping for something to lean again, to gather herself and get her breath back, when the ground underneath her gave way to darkness, into which Seren fell, feet first.

  Chapter 12

  “How many fell?” Andmar asked, his breathing strained, as he kept the pace at the front of the warband that jogged down the long slope toward the open plains below them. He could see the great breach in the land more clearly as it cut an open wound across the grassland. He could also see the bridge in the distance and guessed that they were maybe three miles away.

  He had seen the events unfold in the valley.

  “Maybe two dozen,” replied the scout, his breathing also heavy as he tried to keep up with the much larger man.

  Andmar, the leader of the warband, and third to Morlan himself after Carlossa, had been sent to deal with the bridge before Carlossa came to take control of the west, and he was tiring, as were the men that followed him, and he wondered if they would even be fit for battle at such short notice.

  “Fools,” said Andmar. “They should
have pulled back across the bridge and held from this side.” He spat into the dirt and continued his slow jog downhill. The scout chose not to question his judgement, but Andmar did it for him. “They didn’t see them. Had to be that. They moved fast, a good tactic. These are not a stupid enemy.”

  It’d been twenty minutes since Andmar had noticed the approach of the warrior band from the east, along the very same road that they now paced, but on the other side of the breach, across the bridge. He’d known that although he could see their approach, it would be unlikely those guarding the bridge would, and he’d made a mental note to place a lookout, with signals, higher up here on the hill, overlooking the valley beyond, once this stupid business was dealt with.

  If you even manage to keep control of the bridge, he thought. The band approached more rapidly than he had expected, and their first assault had turned into a complete success, a slaughter more rapid than he’d expected. The strangers, probably from the eastern ruins, he thought, had come there with war as their intent. They had come to seize the bridge rather than ask for passage.

  Wise, he thought. For they would have been given none. But what a foolish thing to fall for? Not eyes to see further than the tree line. It had been too easy. He’d thought the Cygoa warriors who had held the other side of the bridge shouldn’t have been on that side in the first place.

  Deaths that were well deserved.

  Now he watched as the strangers swarmed over the barricade, grabbing weapons and shields left on the ground, and formed yet another offense. One he knew he would not be there to meet, even as he quickened his pace.

  They will charge the bridge, he thought, and they will do it rapidly, if their leader has any sense. They can see us from where they are and they know they won’t take the bridge if they wait for us to get there. This is their one chance to take the best defense point before we are even there to offer a threat.

  Andmar raised his hand, gesturing for the warband to stop, then bent over, gasping for breath. He leaned against a tree stump at the side of the road.

  The warriors with him took the halt as a signal to rest, some collapsing on the ground and others standing still, catching their breath.

  “Two minutes,” he called, “and then prepare yourselves.” He looked further down the road and shook his head as the strangers launched their charge across the bridge, barricaded behind shields taken from his own warriors.

  No, he thought. No point rushing in now. Best to let the men rest for a few minutes so that they can take the bridge back. We wouldn’t get there in time anyway. We would not be there to defend this assault.

  The bridge would be lost by the time he arrived. All that remained would be the task of taking it back, and if his men were rested for a few minutes, and ready, angry at seeing their fellow Cygoa slaughtered, then they would have the upper hand, and these newcomers would be already spent after two fights.

  He turned to the scout. “I hope you’re ready to fight,” he said, “because we won’t be defending the bridge. We will be attacking it by the time we get down there, and they will be ready for us.”

  The scout looked to the distance and Andmar could sense his nervousness. Further down the hill, the enemy gathered quickly, preparing to move across the bridge, and on the other side the Cygoa gathered against the makeshift barricade, weapons ready even though they were outnumbered. He wished that there was a way to distract them, to get them to retreat up the hill toward his warband, but they were not looking his way and he did not carry a horn with which to signal.

  “We have no other archers but me,” said the scout.

  Andmar shook his head. “No,” he said. “But if we are lucky, they will have used their arrows by the time we get there.”

  Chapter 13

  Jonah heard boots thudding against the hard surface, and sweat poured down his face. Every muscle in his body screamed with exertion but the fire had been ignited in his veins and he noticed little of the pain. Jonah felt, more than heard, the adrenaline-fueled breaths of those around him as they charged across the bridge. Everything seemed to slow down for him in that moment, just as it had when he’d fought Tikal, the Bluestone leader, in a battle that had happened only a few weeks ago. It seemed like it had been in another time entirely. And this was no mere stand-off between two opponents; he didn’t have just one man to kill but many.

  Just as it had done back then, Jonah’s mind swept him away, and even as he felt a rush of air move near his cheek, an arrow zipping past just inches from his face, he could feel the presence of his dead father, as though the old man had come to witness his son’s initiation first hand. He felt the eyes boring into him even though he could not tell from which direction they came. Judas had been a devil in war, feared by all, and it was not a reputation that Jonah had reached—at least not yet.

  Jonah gritted his teeth, mentally nodded to the man watching him from wherever the dead went, and squinted through the sweat that blurred his vision. This would be a day that would be spoken of for a long time in the histories of the Elk and the other clans of the Wytheville valley, and his name would be the one they spoke. Tales told beside the fire would not reach back further than his life, no longer into the days of the T’yun. The Elk would be the name to eclipse them all.

  Another arrow hit the ground close to his right foot, but he barely noticed it. He wasn’t on the bridge, leading the Elk’s charge toward a heavily guarded barrier behind which a mass of Cygoa warriors waited, equal almost in number to those that followed him. Instead, his mind was miles away, years in the past, hiding in the trees up on the ridge behind the place where he had been raised. Many times, he’d done this when he was little, secretly sneaking away when he thought his father had not known, following the huge warrior as he headed up into the clearing near the reservoir in the hills above the town.

  The boy that Jonah had once been would follow Judas, keeping his distance, hiding behind trees and bushes until he reached a spot that overlooked the clearing next to the water. This would be the same place he would visit years later, to learn to fish and to swim and to build fires, but now this was where he watched, unseen, as his legendary father trained with weapons.

  No one was meant to be watching, and the boy Jonah knew this much. Judas had forbidden it to all, not just his son, but Jonah could not resist and went anyway. His father would train with knives that he would throw against a tall tree stump in the north of the clearing, launching blade after blade, as he slowly moved further and further away, rarely missing. The man would train with a spear, a weapon that few used other than for hunting.

  And he would train with the axe—the ancient steel axe that was their family heirloom and the symbol of Elk clan leadership.

  Sometimes his father would train with a shield, and Jonah would watch, puzzled as the huge man stood before the tree stump swaying side to side, hopping back, leaping forward. The axe would always come to bear, eventually, but it would come last. Sometimes a boot would lash out, and occasionally his father would lead with a push from the shield, slamming it into the ancient bark, following with a down stroke from the axe that would take a chunk off the stump each time. It would never be the same tree stump. Each time his father would utterly decimate the remains of a tree that he had cut down recently, and the next time he visited it would be a new tree.

  Once, on a day that he’d known he probably shouldn’t have risked following his father, because Judas had been angry at something he wasn’t party to, Jonah sat, hidden, in his usual place and watched as Judas not only hit the stump with the axe but also the shield. Both slammed countless times into the wooden stump, and then finally Judas bellowed with rage and finished off with one last maneuver that had stayed in Jonah’s mind all these years. His father faced the wooden stump and...

  The roar of the Elk brought his mind back to the present. The line of Cygoa defense rushed up to meet Jonah as he held the recovered Cygoa shield in front of him. He sensed those either side of him, and behind, rushing forward
, battle raging upon them. Ahead of him was a defensive wall of tires as high as his waist, and behind that two dozen Cygoa warriors with their shields held firm.

  The shield wall was thirty feet away and closing fast.

  Now, rushing up toward him—

  …Judas charged the tree stump and leapt, throwing the shield ahead of him as he went. The shield smashed into the wooden stump and fell away, just as the axe came down...

  —Jonah felt the wind rush past him as the shield flew from his grip. He bellowed as he leapt forward. The shield smashed sideways into the three central Cygoa defenders, and he saw fearful expressions upon their faces as the shield their own kin had used to defend themselves came flying toward them, followed by the screaming warrior.

  And then the Elk hit the shield wall.

  Jonah crashed straight through the first two lines of warriors, knocking them to each side and bowling over those in front of him. The axe came down into the shoulder of a Cygoa warrior three rows back. Screams and yells of fury came from behind him as Jonah continued to charge forward, breaking through the third line of warriors and finding himself upon open grass, behind the enemy line.

  Some of the Cygoa turned, confused, while others fell to the side, pushed, bowled over by the impact, and that was when the rest of the Elk, urged on by the ferocity of their leader’s assault, leapt over the short barricade and rushed into the gap that Jonah had created. It had only taken him a two second head start to hammer a massive hole into the enemy defense, and it was all his men needed to crush them.

  Jonah turned and charged the rear of the shield wall, attacking the left flank, where the Cygoa defenders hadn’t even noticed him coming. He saw Rav, Declan and Gunney fighting furiously in the center, pushing wider the gap that he had made. Three swings of his axe and three Cygoa fell. A fourth broke and ran, tripping over his brothers to escape the demon that raged before him. Then more of the Cygoa were breaking, running in any direction they could to escape the onslaught, and the Elk rolled over the remaining defenders until few stood.