Twelfth day after Sun's Height, 30016 DC
Emlyn dozed fitfully on the hard ground, half-waking to roll over before dropping off to sleep again. Tynan had decided that it was not necessary to set a watch in the civilized countryside, and whenever he woke up he could see the humped and shrouded forms of his friends, firmly asleep in the not-quite-dark of the summer night.
It annoyed Emlyn to discover that, of everyone, he was the least able to sleep on the ground. Even Ali had dropped off without any difficulty. Emlyn wriggled further down inside his bedroll, dragging his blanket tighter round his shoulders, and then lay still, determined not to shift around and wake himself up any further. Soon he began to drift away again.
By the time the sky overhead began to brighten into a pre-dawn pale grey, Emlyn was familiar with every lump and hollow of the ground where he had chosen to lie. He hadn't camped out since he was a boy playing at being an adventurer, and he didn't remember it being quite so uncomfortable. He was surprised at how awake he felt when the morning eventually came; he must have slept for longer than he'd realised.
Campcraft under Tynan's supervision was practical and efficient. As the sun rose over the lip of the sheltered hollow where they'd camped and began to dry the dew on the grass and the surface of their bedrolls, Emlyn chewed on a strip of dried meat and began to feel more cheerful. Ali was buoyant too; although the young acrobat stayed wrapped in her blankets until Tynan forcibly tipped her out, she bounced straight to her feet and began to eat perfectly happily. As Emlyn watched, Ali finished her breakfast, wiped her hands down her trousers, and strolled over to a clear patch of ground, where she began a series of stretches, contorting her body in ways that seemed fantastic to the young fighter.
'Ali, what are you doing?' he demanded, amused.
Ali – who had been sitting on the ground and resting her forehead on one outstretched leg while she held her foot in her hands – lifted her head, propping her elbows on the grass in between her outspread legs, and said, 'Practising, of course.'
'Oh, right,' said Emlyn, feeling rather at a loss. Ali had talked about the need for stringent practice in her profession, but he hadn't seen any sign of discipline in her before and had been inclined to think that it was just talk. He looked over at Ensa, wondering if she felt the same way, but the wizard hadn't even noticed the little exchange. The half-orc was sitting cross-legged on the ground, poring over the open spellbook in her lap. Emlyn could see Star's whiskers quivering as the rat, perched on one of Ensa's knees, divided her attention between the spellbook and her surroundings.
Emlyn hadn't travelled with the wizard for three days without learning that it was useless to try and talk to Ensa while she was intent on memorising and preparing spells – in fact the rigid set of her shoulders and back bore witness to the half-orc's effort and concentration on the task – so Emlyn glanced at his cousin, wondering if Tynan also had a morning routine to complete.
It didn't take any intelligence to spot that Tynan was plainly worried. Having finished eating, the ranger was too agitated to sit down and he was on his feet, glancing from the sun – now having reached a respectable height above the horizon – to the edge of the hollow which was towards the road and the city.
The ranger met Emlyn's eyes and smiled briefly. 'I'm just going to climb up and have a look across the road. When Ensa's finished, the three of you should come up. We want to be in position, even if we don't actually… well, it never hurts to be ready.'
'Right,' said Emlyn again. There was no point in asking what his cousin was avoiding saying. The young fighter had tried to guess how long it would take Shadow to travel to and from the city, and had come to the conclusion that if the elf had been successful then he should have been back long ago.
Ensa lay flat on top of the boulder, trying not to feel vulnerable. She knew that they were invisible from the road, from anywhere except the top of the hill behind them, but she felt as though they were terribly exposed.
Her neck was aching from craning round look down the road, so she stopped trying to peer towards where the caravan would appear. 'Watch the road for me, Star?' she breathed. She laid her cheek on the rough stone, looking towards the seemingly empty hillside where she knew that Tynan and Emlyn would appear, and began running over in her head the spells she had prepared, focusing on the phrases and movement that would draw the power to her and let her shape it.
'Ssh!' Ali hissed, beside her. The girl was clutching her ready-strung bow in her left hand, and with her right fingering through the arrows she had laid out in front of her, checking that they were placed for her to grasp easily even as she watched the road.
Ensa felt Ali's sudden tenseness in almost the same instant that Star squeaked a warning. A second later she heard what had disturbed them; a faint rumble of wheels coming down the road.
It seemed to take an age for the noises to creep closer. Gradually Ensa began to distinguish slow, deliberate hoofbeats among the heavy rumble, and then a shouting voice that seemed so surprisingly close that she almost jumped. Beside her, Ali shifted, and Ensa winced. 'Don't move,' she whispered. 'Nothing unless Tynan attacks first, remember?' She hadn't seen Shadow, so in all probability they were going to have to stay hidden and silent until the heavy cavalcade was past them and away into the foothills. For all she knew it might not even be the right caravan – even law-abiding merchants liked to travel before the day got too hot.
Still, Tynan had said, Prepare for the ambush, and there was always the possibility that Shadow had managed to sneak around behind the hill and drop into Tynan and Emlyn's hiding place without Ensa seeing him. Ensa closed her eyes, making swift, precise gestures of her hands, and felt her spine prickle with the heat of magic.
She was too preoccupied to react when Ali, feeling the great stone begin to reverberate with the thunder of the passing wagons, rolled fluidly to her knees and in the same movement aimed and released an arrow that punched through the chest of the final cart's driver.
Emlyn was crouched beside Tynan, his armour dragging at his shoulders. He was more aware of the weight than he'd been for days, now that the thin layer of interlocking metal plates might be all that stood between him and an early death. He laid a hand on the hilt of his father's sword, loosening it in its sheathe, then dropped his hand away, trying to relax. Calm down, he told himself. Shadow hasn't shown up. Nothing is going to happen.
Tynan heard the caravan's approach first, peering cautiously over the top of the matural earthy ridge that they were crouched behind. 'Looks like Varturan,' he breathed. 'Ready, Emlyn?'
'Wait, Tynan, we aren't going to attack?' Emlyn was confused. 'We don't know if Shadow got the amulet.'
'He will have done,' Tynan said, firmly. Perhaps a little too firmly. Emlyn frowned faintly, wondering what was going on.
Below them, the noise of the caravan was growing closer and clearer, but Emlyn could see nothing apart from the short, spiky grass and the hard earth of the ridge. Tynan had the only vantage point. 'How do we know?' he asked, puzzled by his cousin's apparent departure from logic. 'Tynan, we can't just attack and hope!'
'Shadow will be here, Emlyn,' Tynan said, earnestly.
'We don't know that!' Emlyn was beginning to get frustrated. 'We were going to hold back unless we saw him!'
'He'll be here. Trust him!'
'How can I?' Emlyn only just restrained the urge to shout. He could hear the voices of the cart drivers calling quietly to their teams as they took the sharp corner in the road. He knew that meant they must be passing Ensa and Ali's position. 'I don't know a single damn thing about him! He won't let me!'
Tynan looked at Emlyn, started to say something, and bit his lip. 'I'm sorry. You're right. You don't have any reason to trust him.' He looked away, back towards the road. 'But I do.'
Entirely unable to sort out his confused emotions, Emlyn watched his cousin tense up and begin to rise to his feet – slowly, as though he were still debating with himself. Emlyn clenched his fists and wondered if he'd follow, if Tynan did race down towards the caravan. And it looked as though Tynan would…
But before the ranger's head could clear their shelter, they heard a sudden shout and the regular rhythm of the hoofbeats and cart wheels. Startled, Tynan dropped back into cover, meeting his cousin's eyes. 'What under heaven – oh no. Ali. Come on!'
The dying driver groaned as he collapsed limply backwards into the body of his cart, clutching desperately at his chest, but the guard behind him leapt to his feet. 'We're under attack!' he bellowed, setting up a clamour of indecisive exclamations among the other drivers. The guard, ignoring them, cocked a crossbow and slotted a quarrel into place, levelling it up at the boulder.
Ensa, who had risked lifting her head for a glance down at the road as soon as she had realised that Ali had shot, ducked hastily back into cover. She'd been seen – a crossbow bolt shattered against the rock somewhere just below them. Ali, her eyes dancing, took advantage of the guard's need to reload to push herself back onto one knee for another shot, but her arrow flew wide as the young acrobat threw herself down again, a bolt flying past her head from the other direction. The second guard had pulled himself together to react to their threat.
Ali turned to look at Ensa, a wild grin on her face, but the wizard was struggling to hold onto her readied spell and didn't have the concentration to speak. She had no attention spare to remonstrate with the girl; her brain was working wildly. She'd seen the caravan now – as predicted, it consisted of three carts pulled by teams of two oxen. The oxen had been essential to their original plan – they were far more placid than horses, less likely to bolt, but now it might be a disadvantage. Originally, they'd wanted the caravan stopped; now, if they could, they wanted it to keep moving, leaving them behind. Two guards! The High Priest had predicted four. Varturan certainly wasn't nervous and handicapped by the loss of her greatest asset. She had to get the caravan moving, give them time to slip away. How could she –?
A flicker of movement caught Ensa's eye, and she tilted her head to see Tynan and Emlyn charging out of cover, dashing towards the road and out of her field of vision, and she grimaced. That changed all her plans. Now they were all committed to the attack. Tynan and Emlyn would reach the road ahead of the caravan; if the oxen stampeded the two men would be trampled and lucky to survive. On the other hand, if the two guards began shooting at them as they crossed the open ground then that was a greater danger. She had to distract them, and fast.
Grunting with the effort of the magic flowing through her, Ensa hauled herself up on one knee and fired a magic missile at that final cart.
She didn't have time to move as she heard the faint whistling of another crossbow bolt racing towards her.
Tynan was the faster of the two men, and Emlyn was far enough behind to watch the ranger as he slipped in between the lead oxen, drawing his shortsword in both hands. Someone – Ensa, of course – had caused a splintering explosion at the rear of the caravan, and no one was looking in their direction as Tynan slashed accurately through the traces that harnessed the oxen to the cart. Startled by the noise and the frightened lowing of oxen in pain at the rear of the cavalcade, the oxen lumbered into a slow trot and disappeared past Emlyn down the road. Now the halted front cart would impede any movement of the others.
Emlyn thought that he heard Star squealing, away up on top of the boulder, but he didn't have time worry about it. The driver of the lead wagon had felt his reins go slack and turned round, startled, shouting, and the guard who was standing on the back of the cart, shooting up at Ensa and Ali on the boulder, had spun to face the two men, his loaded crossbow twanging as he knocked the release lever.
Emlyn dived one way and Tynan the other, and the quarrel embedded itself into the packed earth of the road. Tynan was up already as Emlyn struggled to his feet, and the ranger had drawn his longsword and was parrying the attacks of the guard up on the cart, who had drawn a blade of his own and was using the height the cart gave him to press the ranger hard. Emlyn dragged his own sword out of its sheathe and moved to help.
It was then that he heard the strange growling noise from away to his right; from the middle cart, the one that no one had bothered much about because it had no guard aboard.
Emlyn turned in time to see a huge, powerful orange and black blur flow over the side of that cart and lauch itself forwards before it cannoned into his chest.
The young fighter flew backwards and thumped down a second time onto the hard surface of the road, winded and seeing stars for a second. He could feel a heavy weight pressing down on his chest until he thought his ribs must crack under the strain, and hot breath carrying the stench of rotting meat was panting into his face.
As Emlyn's vision cleared, he looked up into a snarling cat's face. The dire tiger's mouth was larger than his head, and as he looked up into it the huge animal yawned, puffing its rancid breath over Emlyn again, and displaying immense stained ivory teeth.
Emlyn shut his eyes.
Tynan didn't see his cousin go down. He had problems of his own. The second dire tiger was standing not two feet away, snarling ferociously at him.
The immense animal's head was almost on a level with his. Tynan locked eyes with it, wondering what was going on in the tiger's head. Why did it just stand there? He would have expected it to either attack him or to run away. Unless it was under orders of some kind…
Moving slowly, so as not to disturb the animal, Tynan slid both his swords back into their sheathes. There was a bitter taste in his mouth. He'd chosen wrongly, then. Shadow hadn't come through for him, and he'd staked Emlyn, Ali and Ensa's lives on it as well as his own. He'd let them all down.
'Smart move,' said a voice. It was loud and commanding, but with a hard, brassy edge to it that said to Tynan that its owner hadn't been born nobility. Tynan slowly turned his head to look in the direction that the tigers had come from.
He met the eyes of Mingun Varturan.
AN: Sorry to cut off there, but this chapter was getting really long, so I decided to split it into two halfs. The other half of the fight is written and will be up in a couple of days, as soon as I've done the edits.