Franziskus squinted, unsure he was even looking in the right place. “I don’t see anything,” Franziskus said.
“Just wait,” Angelika whispered.
Franziskus concentrated his attention on the bump’s highest point. For a moment a black speck of movement flickered, then ceased. He gave Angelika a questioning look. She pointed him back to the knob. The movement repeated.
“A spear tip,” said Angelika.
Franziskus studied the object, whatever it was, as it poked intermittently up behind the wall. As far as he was concerned, it could have been anything. Perhaps a flitting bird. A darkened leaf or seed pod on a bush, blown back and forth by the wind. An old coat caught on a branch. Franziskus listened. A songbird chirped. Blowflies buzzed.
Now a flash of motion came from the side of the rocky knob. Franziskus thought he saw a hand, perhaps holding the haft of a spear, as Angelika had said. She was right. Someone was back there, thinking he was hiding from them. Under a gaze less keen than Angelika’s, he would have been.
Franziskus widened his eyes, cupped his palms out, and held them out to Angelika, asking, who is it up there?
Angelika shrugged, a tight twitch of a gesture.
“What do we do?” Franziskus asked, quiet as he could.
Another tight gesture, a shake of the head: nothing, it said.
Franziskus hunkered down. The thing to do was wait. Let whoever it was expose himself, come to get them. Then act accordingly.
It occurred to him that the two of them communicated best when words were disallowed.
On top of the outcrop, a hat appeared. Franziskus found it difficult to make out, from so far away. Eventually he identified it as a floppy felt cap, green as the grass around them.
“Halflings!” Angelika growled.
“Halflings?” Franziskus asked.
Angelika’s reaction was one of an exasperated tutor. “That cap’s too small for a human head. Or a dwarf’s, for that matter.”
Franziskus frowned. He had learned to trust in Angelika’s keen senses, but it was a mite unfair of her to expect the same acuity from him. “They’ve put the hat up there on purpose,” he said, hoping to prove himself less than a complete dullard.
“Yes, testing us to see if we have missile weapons, and are so dumb as to fire them.” Neither Angelika nor Franziskus were, in fact, equipped with gun or bow.
“If these are halflings, you don’t imagine they are friends or relatives of these poor wretches here?” Franziskus indicated the slain half-men she’d just been manhandling.
“I do imagine.”
“And if they meant to dispute with us in a civilised manner, they wouldn’t be skulking behind that rock, would they?”
The question was rhetorical, so Angelika let it go unanswered. “We have the superior position here,” she said.
“When we’re sprawled flat on wide-open ground?”
“They can’t see us until they charge from out behind that rock. When they do, follow me. Be ready to—”
She stopped short. A flare of reflected sunlight blazed from the gulley’s opposite ridgeline. She pushed Franziskus flatter into the ground.
Jonas Rassau watched the two freebooters through his spyglass. The woman seemed to look directly at him, then freeze. He cursed and slipped back below the ridgeline: she’d seen the sun flash against his lens.
Beside him was Emil, his sergeant. Below were the unit’s two remaining horses. The unit was safely encamped a mile or so to the west.
“The halflings spotted you, sir?” Emil asked. There was reproach in his flat tone. Without saying so, he’d already made clear his disapproval of Jonas’ side mission. He was one of those sergeants who thought a commanding officer should never go off and do anything for himself, that Jonas should instead sit like a wilting flower inside the perimeter, and let others do for him what glory demanded he do himself. Also he’d taken none too kindly to Jonas’ bringing him along. One of the two of them should be with the men at all times, he’d argued. Jonas thought otherwise. If the men couldn’t secure a simple encampment on their own, they’d be no good whatsoever in their new role as mountain harriers. He’d given Glauer his old rank, as second lieutenant. To command a camp at rest would be an easy first test of his abilities.
“No, not the halflings. The woman,” he said, answering his sergeant’s question.
“With respect, sir. We’ve better things to do than trail halflings about while they chase looters.”
Shouting from the opposite ridge drowned out Jonas’ reply. He popped his head back up to see a trio of halflings boil over the rocky knob to slide with uncontrolled speed down the gulley slope. The two human looters on the floor of the hollow were already in motion. To Jonas’ surprise, they did not flee directly away from their short-legged pursuers, toward his ridge. Instead, they ran south for a few yards, then up onto the same slope the halflings hurtled down.
Jonas tapped Emil on the shoulder, tugging on his garment until he crawled up alongside him. “Watch this,” he said.
The halflings reached the gulley floor, one of them losing his footing and tumbling face first onto the chewed-up sod. His spear flew out at his side. His fellows grabbed an arm apiece and roughly hauled him to his feet. They ran down the gulley floor to the spot where they’d first seen the two looters. For their part, the looters had already scrambled up the slope and were a mere few yards from the far ridgeline. The baffled halflings scoured the tall weeds for them, poking at every bush and bramble with the heads of their spears.
“I don’t understand,” Emil muttered. “Can’t the half-men see the looters up on the slope?”
Jonas grinned. “No, they can’t.”
Emil hunched forward, face screwed up in confusion. “But they’re right there. What is it? Magic, of some odd sort?”
Jonas slapped his back and laughed. “The magic of geometry, sergeant. It took me a moment to see it myself. It’s a matter of sightlines. These slopes curve and swerve, and appear wholly different from any given vantage. By running south, these two obscured themselves behind that bend in the gulley wall there.” He pointed to the relevant spot and Emil peered quizzically at it. “We could see them from over here, but to the halflings it was as if they’d vanished. Most clever, wouldn’t you agree?”
The two soldiers watched as Angelika and Franziskus reached the ridgeline and hopped down, disappearing behind its other side.
“Not so clever now that you explain it.”
The halflings had fallen into quarrelling. The largest of the three had seized the smallest by the tunic and was shaking him. The remaining one kept fruitlessly poking the ground with his spear, declining to intervene in the struggle between his mates.
“You’re always slow to admire, Emil. If we go down onto that gulley floor, I’ll show you how clever it is.” He stood, placing himself in the halflings’ plain view. Emil reached up to pull at him, but he ignored his sergeant. Raab stood beside him, the lines on his face contracting as the sun hit them. Jonas turned himself sideways to make his way deftly down the slope toward the halflings. Emil stuck close to his side.
“Besides,” said Jonas, “they were wily, and did the unexpected. If you were being chased by halflings, what would you do?”
“Halflings? I’d stand my ground and cut them down.”
“Well, granted,” said Jonas. “But let us say you had reason to fear them should they catch up with you.”
“I’d run away.”
“In the opposite direction, yes?”
“Naturally.”
“Did these two do that? No, they defied these little beggars’ expectations.”
Finally the halflings ceased their quarrelling and took notice of them. They wheeled, spears at the ready, even though Jonas and Emil were still many yards away, and were advancing on them at a casual pace, weapons sheathed.
“Not so startling an accomplishment,” said Emil. “These ragamuffins are dumb as dirt.”
“Who goes
there?” called the tallest of the halflings, who wore a beaded ring through the lobe of his right car and was missing much of his left. He gripped his spear tightly and pointed it toward the approaching humans with as much menace as he could muster.
“I am Lieutenant Jonas Rassau, of the Gerolsbruch Swordsmen,” said Jonas, his voice calm and commanding. “This is my sergeant. Who are you, and what’s the commotion down here?” Neither soldier slowed his stride.
The one-eared halfling widened his stance and jabbed his weapon at them. “Leader of swordsmen you may be, but you’ve no right to order us around or question our movements.” The other two gathered themselves behind him, spears in hand and trepidation on their faces.
Jonas became stern as he swept toward them. “This is a battlefield and I am an officer of the armies of Stirland. I may order and question you as I deem fit. Now stand your weapon down.”
The smallest of the three, whom One-Ear had been wrestling with, placed a hand on his arm, prompting him to lower the spear. Eyes cast down, he pushed himself forward. His hair was dark, his features compressed and somewhat ratlike. “We’re from Hochmoor,” he said, pointing vaguely south-east. “A little town not far from here. I’m Filch, and these are my brothers, Curran and Deely.”
The one-eared brother, evidently the one called Curran, clouted Filch on the back of the head and stepped forward to bear the burden of Jonas’ attention. “Many of our boys made up a militia and went out from town to fight the enemy. This is what’s happened to them.” He gestured to the bodies sprawled in the grass. “That’s my cousin there, and that’s our town blacksmith, Elias Two-Beer. So we’re good and loyal sons of the Empire, and you’ve no right bossing us around nor threatening us, neither. We’ve bled for you, and haven’t much to show for it, have we?”
Deely, whose thinning pate and crow’s feet made him seem the eldest of the three, interposed himself between Jonas and his brothers. “Don’t be mad at my brother. We’re all cut up by grief, seeing our friends all dead like this.”
Curran wheeled on him, jabbing a thumb back toward the humans. “It’s them what let us down, isn’t it? They couldn’t hold the Kurgan horde, could they? Why should we take orders from them?” He spun around to Jonas, still brandishing his spear. “This here’s what you ought to know. There was grave robbers down here, desecrating our dead. That’s what the commotion was. We was chasing them, ready to run them through. I don’t suppose you saw hide nor hair of them, did you?”
Jonas scratched idly at his nose. “No, we didn’t. We were out for a forage, heard you shouting, and came down to see what was afoot. I thought you fellows might have run into some Kurgs and could use the help. You know there will still be scattered elements of the barbarian army about.”
Curran dropped his spear to his side. “Well if we run across them they can fear the same fate as those accursed grave robbers.”
Jonas fixed the halflings in the light of his finest smile. “You must be mindful, my friends. There may be further fighting, and Stirland needs all its able-bodied sons hale and ready.”
The one-eared halfling studied him intently, then took a similar appraisal of Emil. “You didn’t see nobody leave this gulley?”
“If I had, I would certainly tell you. I’d pursue them myself. The Empire takes a dim view of looting.”
“But they was just here.”
“What way would they logically have gone?”
The three halflings fell into fretful conference, reconstructing their movements and pointing out possible exits from the gulley. At length, they concluded that they must have run to the west. Jonas concurred with their reasoning, then asked for a description of the looters. “Should we run across them,” he said, “you can know we’ll capture them and take them to your townsmen for just punishment. In the meantime, perhaps you should go back and get pallets to reclaim your dead. You don’t want the wolves getting at them. Or more looters, for that matter.”
Curran was unconvinced. “Maybe I’ll send Filch back. Someone’s got to pay for what was done here.” Shoulders slumped, he stalked off to the west, remaining on the gulley floor. His brothers tagged after him. Jonas and Emil watched them until they rounded a bend in the ravine and were gone from sight. Then Jonas beckoned his sergeant to the spot where the two looters had lain. He kneeled down, and gestured for Emil to do the same.
“Look here,” he said. “Lying here, would you have known to run that way?” He pointed to the southern slope, where Angelika and Franziskus had fled.
Emil removed his helmet and massaged his scalp. “I suppose not, but like I said, with just those three halflings why not stand and fight?”
Jonas clapped arms around the big man’s shoulders. “You really don’t see it, do you, Emil? The brilliance of it. Think.”
With straightened spine, Emil staunchly withstood his superior’s unseemly familiarity. “I don’t understand, sir.”
Jonas gesticulated wildly. “The bend in the gulley wall is hard to see from here, yes? Much harder than from where we were before.”
“Yes.”
Jonas urged him on, dragging up the slope to the knob of rock where the halflings had hidden. He pointed to the spot they’d just occupied. “Now, from up here, you can see how obstructed the view is. How they’re completely out of sight if they simply run a few yards to our left.”
“Yes I see it sir, but what has this to do with our mission?”
Jonas circled around the gulley’s edge, where the two ridgelines met, heading back toward the old fence where they’d tethered their horses. Emil struggled to keep up with his commander.
“That woman, from down on the gulley floor, could look at the terrain and calculate in her head what it would look like from up on the rock. Two completely different views, Emil. In her head.”
Ravens had gathered on the ridgeline, waiting for the soldiers to depart. They scattered into the air, then lazily circled overhead, knowing they would soon return to their meals.
“We’re going to catch up to those two,” Jonas said. “She’s what Vogt told me to find—a proper scout. I bet she knows mountains like she knows her own name.”
“A woman, sir?”
“A gift of the battlefield, sergeant. Fate has provided her to us, and we shall take her.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Angelika and Franziskus ran until they found a place to hide. They dashed across a meadow oversown with fiery summer wild flowers. Angelika skirted around a mound of piled human bodies, barely pausing to note that most of them still wore expensive armour pieces.
Corpses grew scarcer as they travelled. Occasionally they glanced back; Franziskus thought he might have seen shapes on the horizon behind them. Finally, they spotted a dark tangle of what seemed like gnarled, stunted trees and made for it. Only when they were closer did they identify it as a burned-out vineyard. They charged downhill and vaulted a wall of crumbling stones. They sat up against it, gasping for breath. With jittery hands they rubbed at the cramped muscles of their sides and legs.
“You should go home, Franziskus,” Angelika said, when she had air to speak.
“Home?”
“It’s somewhere around here, isn’t it? Your family’s estate?”
“Did you hear hoofbeats behind us?”
“Hoofbeats?”
“I thought I heard hoofbeats.” Franziskus turned to peer back over the wall. Angelika winced. He caught the message and hunkered down again. “I admit that I am a merely serviceable swordsman, Angelika, but it is humiliating to have to cower before mere halflings.”
“We likely could have taken them,” said Angelika, tossing her head back against the wall. “But you never know. You can’t get killed in a fight you don’t get into.”
She reached into her pack for her canteen and guzzled its contents. “You can go home now, Franziskus. Your promise to me is done with.”
“I swore to stay by your side in times of danger. If this isn’t danger, what is?”
Sh
e handed him the canteen. “As soon as we’re sure we’re not pursued, we’ll part ways. I was an idiot to…” She paused, her words swallowed by the need for air. Finally she composed herself. “It was stupid to try to work here, where people live. Down in the inhospitable Blackfire, it’s different. No angry relatives to catch you in the act as you’re stripping a corpse of the family heirlooms. But here…”
He drank her water sparingly as he had his own. “We’ll have to lay low here for a while, I think. We can worry about the future when we’re sure we lost them.”
Angelika shook her head. “No, the future is now. Continuing is out of the question. I owe those halflings a debt of gratitude, Franziskus.”
“Personally I feel poorly disposed toward anyone who tries to stick me with a spear.”
“That time it was only halflings, but next time it could be a whole regiment. This is likely the richest battlefield I’ve ever stumbled across, but why should that matter? I’ve already got all the money I need. Isn’t that what half the stories in the world are about? Fools destroyed by their own greed?”
“It is a common theme of troubadours and minstrels. Yet they pass the hat around at the end of every show.”
Angelika threw up her hands and let out an incredulous laugh. “I don’t believe what I was about to do.” She tapped her forehead, as if attempting to jolt her brain back into proper balance. “I was about to fall into the oldest trap in the book.” Then she settled back. “If I let myself be killed or captured now, over a few more measly coins, I’d never forgive myself.”
Franziskus saw a look on her face he’d never seen before—not only was she smiling, but she seemed to be mocking herself, and in a comradely manner. He should have been glad to see her finally treating him in this way. Instead, her smile made his heart sink, for it meant their time together was over.
Her words confirmed his worries. “This is it,” she said. “I’m done. Retired, as of this instant.”
[Angelika Fleischer 03] - Liar's Peak Page 4