by Logan Jacobs
The twins’ white bonnets bobbed up and down as they nodded. They were dressed more plainly today than I had seen them during the entire trip, Katrina in a light brown gown and Janina in an olive green gown and no jewelry on either of them, as if after last night’s run-in with their old nemesis, they were trying to blend into the landscape. What with the carriage and our accumulated herd of nine horses, it would be hard to miss us, but nonetheless I appreciated their effort. It suggested that their mindset had at least improved to taking matters of safety a bit more seriously than matters of fashion.
We continued on mostly in an uneasy silence for the next few hours, interrupted only when the twins wanted to ask if I’d heard or seen something, and I had to keep reassuring them that it was just a harmless animal passing by or even just the wind whipping through the grass. I considered that it was entirely possible that I had overestimated Sheriff Cavendish, and that he either wasn’t competent enough to find us again once he had lost our trail, or that he wasn’t truly that determined after all and had decided to cut his losses and stay home in Sunderly, where I was sure there must be plenty of petty crimes to occupy his attention. Maybe the last four days of my term of service with the twins would pass uneventfully after all, and soon I could just collect my well-earned thousand coins and kiss them a fond goodbye.
I kept on thinking that until the early evening, about an hour or so before the sun started to sink, when the light had started to grow dimmer but hardly enough to notice it yet.
Then, as we passed through a grove of trees, from the corner of my vision I caught sight of a furtive shape moving by. I didn’t catch any distinguishing features of the shape, the glimpse was so brief and so obscured by greenery, and couldn’t have said what it looked like, so I would have assumed it was simply some kind of animal, but it had a distinctly human gait. Like a human prowling on all fours, which we humans were simply not designed to do as gracefully as predatory cats and many other kinds of beasts could.
The twins didn’t seem to have noticed anything. As the day wore on and nothing bad happened, they were gradually regaining their usual confidence and cheer.
I considered my options. I could send the girls off at a gallop. I could dash off with them, and we could hope to outrun this mysterious stalker and leave him behind in the trees. At least, if he continued to pursue us, he’d have to do it out on the open plains instead, and we’d have a better chance of seeing him coming from afar. But something stopped me.
I doubted that he was alone.
The question then was, where were his companions? If they had been in the trees, then our best course of action would have been to run, since we had just walked into an ambush and were surrounded on all sides by enemies that we couldn’t see. But I didn’t think that was the case, simply because we would already be dead, or at least captured. We were already in the most vulnerable position possible. If we continued traveling in the same direction, we would soon be clear of the tree cover.
Which made me suspect that this fellow refrained from attacking because he was alone. A spy or a scout for a larger party in waiting elsewhere, to which he would report back our whereabouts. And I wasn’t going to let him do that if I could help it.
So I said to the twins, quite loudly, “Wait here, I’m going to take a piss.”
Then I crashed clumsily through the brush while whistling a merry tune and headed in the general direction of where the mysterious skulking figure had vanished into the foliage.
I passed the spot by a little while trying to appear as oblivious as possible and even unbuckling my belt. Then, I spotted it.
The tawny color blended almost perfectly with the dry golden grass. But the texture was different. It was sueded leather, cut into a fringe. Then, peeking through the fringe, smooth human skin the color of mahogany wood.
I tromped through the brush still whistling loudly and staring straight ahead as if I didn’t see the huddled form there. Then, at the last moment, I veered right, shrank my sword down as I whisked it from its sheath to turn it into a half a foot long dagger, and tackled the stranger, and placed the blade to his neck. At first he thrashed wildly in my grasp, but he quickly stopped when he felt the sharp steel against his neck.
“Drop it,” I commanded him. I could see the glint of his own knife in his fist. He didn’t immediately comply. I repeated the same command in Savajun. My command of the language was rudimentary at best, but Vera had taught me many useful phrases. Again, the words seemed to have no effect. The knife remained clenched in his fist, although he wasn’t making any immediate attempts to use it against me. I pressed a little harder with my miniaturized sword, not hard enough to slash his throat open, but just hard enough to nick the skin. Like magic, his fingers unfurled and his knife fell into the grass. I stepped on it firmly with my foot to make sure it stayed there.
“Get me a rope,” I yelled at the twins who were waiting about ten yards away. They had had to use abundant quantities of rope to secure all their luggage to their beasts of burden, so I knew there was plenty of it on hand.
After a minute they walked over warily, each holding one end of a generous length of rope, as they peered down to see who or what I had captured. They gasped a little when they realized it was a human man, and a Savajun at that.
“Now tie his wrists behind his back,” I instructed them.
“Us?” Katrina asked fearfully.
“Yes, my hands are occupied at the moment,” I said impatiently.
The Savajun let out an inhuman growl. I was pretty sure he understood every word we spoke, but he was just doing his best to terrify the girls.
They did shrink back, despite the fact that the man couldn’t make any move toward them without getting his throat slashed open by my tiny sword, but then they darted forward and hastily began performing their task. Their fingers were actually quite deft at looping, tightening, and knotting the rope, I suppose from all the practice they’d had so far securing their precious dresses and hats.
Once I was confident that the man was properly secured and couldn’t work himself loose again, at least not without some kind of extraordinary effort that would certainly attract my attention and give me the chance to stop him, I nodded to the twins and gestured to them to step back. I kept ahold of the end of the rope that wasn’t knotted around the Savajun’s wrists to ensure that he couldn’t run away, either.
“Now,” I asked him as I removed the blade from his throat, allowed him to get up from his huddled crouch into a kneeling position, and moved myself around to stand facing him, “Where is the rest of your party?”
I judged from the way his face flickered as I spoke that he did understand my language. However, his only response was to tighten his lips and look away.
I slapped him in the face, and he glared at me with hatred in his dark eyes. He was young, probably only about twenty or so.
“Your raiding party,” I barked. “Where are the other braves?”
At first I thought he wasn’t going to answer again. But then his lips parted in a sneer and he replied, “There are none.”
“Is that so?” I demanded. I didn’t believe it for a second. “Then what the hell are you doing skulking about here on your own?”
“Watching you,” he answered calmly. He tipped his chin to encompass not only me, but the Elliott twins, our carriage, the horses.
“Watching us to what purpose?” I snarled.
“To confirm that you are the ones they wanted,” he replied.
“That who wanted?” I yelled. I had a feeling I already knew who he meant.
“The palefaces,” he shrugged.
“Which palefaces?” I asked through gritted teeth. “And where are they now?”
“Ones like you,” he said disdainfully as he looked me up and down, then glanced over at the twins. His glance held no admiration or desire when he looked at them, the way that almost all men’s did. His expression was closer to one of resentment. Resentment for their elaborate clothing,
their timid mannerisms, their fair complexions and soft bodies, for their very existence. Some Savajuns were like that. They despised all whites for the crimes that some of our number had committed against their tribes. Just as far too many whites despised all Savajuns and sought to annihilate them, for the atrocities that certain members of their warriors had committed against their settlements.
There wasn’t any way I could convince them that these other palefaces, whomever they might be, weren’t just like me or just like the twins. In his mind, any differences between us were irrelevant. He clearly despised his employers just as much as he despised me, his captor. The fact that he happened to be working for them at the moment was a matter of chance, not principle.
“How many of them? And where are they now?” I hissed. That was what I really wanted to know. Needed to know at once.
“Many of them,” he repeated. Maybe he was refusing to give me an exact number, or he simply didn’t know how to count. I hoped that was it, considering that the alternative was that there were too many of them to count. But I didn’t think that was likely. There was no such thing as a standing army here, not on the frontier.
“And where are they now?” I took my sword, still in miniature form since that was most practical at such close quarters, and placed the tip against his throat.
The Savajun youth met my stare unblinkingly. There was bitterness and hatred and despair in his face, but no personal fear for himself. Even if his worldview had poisoned his spirit, I had to admire at least that trait in him.
“They are already here,” he announced as a mirthless smile curved his lips.
Chapter Fourteen
“They’re already here?” I repeated.
“Yes,” the Savajun’s smile acquired a gloating aspect. “I led them here.”
There wasn’t anyone immediately in the grove, so I handed off my sword to Janina, and it quickly returned to its normal size which startled her momentarily.
“Don’t let him escape,” I warned.
Then I quickly climbed the nearest tree that had a sufficient number of branches in order to peer above the foliage. I looked around in every direction, across the spreading plains, the endless unexplored land, until I caught a hint of movement from the east. Tiny black specks cresting the horizon. It was halfway dark already and hard to make out details, but I shielded my eyes with my hand to help them focus, and squinted hard. The specks materialized into horses and riders. Fourteen of them that I could count.
“Tie him to a tree!” I yelled as I scrambled down the tree. “As fast as you can.”
The Savajun was clearly a tracker, working for these mounted pursuers of ours, whom I reckoned must include the sheriff who was so devoted to my clients. My first thought had been to kill him to prevent him from tracking us any farther, but then I had another, better idea. One that would render him equally useless and perhaps further slow the pursuit, if Sheriff Cavendish was the kind of man I thought he was.
The twins heard the urgency in my voice and sprang to obey. Janina retained my sword, just in case he decided to resist them. Of course she didn’t really know how to use it, but nonetheless it wasn’t particularly hard to damage a person with a sharp blade when his hands were tied securely behind his back.
Meanwhile I took the knife that I had disarmed the Savajun of and sliced through all the straps that fastened the twins’ luggage to our horses. The sisters could see what I was doing even while they were busy at their own task and cried out in dismay as their petticoats and beribboned hats spilled out into the grass.
“It’s a matter of life and death,” I said before they could launch into a protest. Their frightened jewel-like eyes were indistinguishable from each other in the evening light as they gazed back at me.
But then, when I moved to the horses that were hitched to the carriage and started slicing through their harnesses, the twins let out a gasp.
“The chest,” Janina exclaimed. “It must weigh nearly three hundred pounds. How can we possibly transport it without the carriage?”
“Magic,” I said. “I’ll show you. But first I need to do something else, that you might not want to watch.”
I walked up to the prisoner they had just finished securing. He glared at me with his dark eyes and bared his white teeth. He had a sort of cornered animal look to him now. He didn’t want to reveal any fear to me, but he couldn’t help the primal sensations that must have been racing through his veins at that moment.
“Are you going to kill him?” Katrina whispered. I was sure that must have been the Savajun’s question, too.
“No,” I said shortly. I wanted to remind the twins to avert their eyes, but I decided that my consideration in that particular instance should be more reserved for the tracker, and he didn’t need a reminder that I was about to do something gruesome to him. I took two steps toward him, lashed out my leg, and smashed my heel into his kneecap. I heard an audible snap as the bone cracked, and the impact reverberated through my own leg.
I shouted at the top of my lungs in order to be heard over the man’s screams as they filled the sky, “Now ride!”
The riders were only about a mile away, and they’d probably pick up pace now that the screams had surely carried to their ears. I could have gagged the Savajun, left him tied, and waited for them to find him. But this way, he wouldn’t be able to sit a horse on his own. He was also bleeding copiously from the ruined leg that I had just cracked almost in half. They would have to either tend to him and bring him with them, thereby slowing down the entire party, or leave a couple of men to look after him and thereby subtract from their number, or leave him to die, which I didn’t think Sheriff Cavendish would be willing to do to someone who was injured while working for him.
The twins leapt onto the nearest mares. Theo was hovering at my side waiting for me to mount, but first, I ran over to the carriage that was now unhorsed and now stranded in this grove of trees. I opened the door, found the chest full of five thousand gold coins, which did weigh near three hundred pounds just as Janina had said, and laid my hand on it. The chest shrank down to the size of a hat. The coins inside shrank proportionately, as did its weight, so that it weighed probably about thirty pounds at its new size.
Then, I leapt up onto Theo’s back, while keeping the chest in my lap with one hand wrapped securely around it, and we chased after the fleeing twins.
The other two mares belonging to the Elliott sisters galloped with us to keep up with their companions, and so did one of the Hodgson’s horses, but the other three, freed from both harness and rider and even Theo’s usual guidance, kind of just stood and watched us go. That was fine, we had no further need of them, and if they preferred to be wild horses now, I wished them the best of luck. I didn’t think that Sheriff Cavendish and his party would bother to recapture them. Horses were valuable, but unfortunately my clients were his obvious priority.
“Where are we going?” Katrina shouted at me over the wind. Theo, despite being the only one of the horses now still carrying any additional load besides his rider, was easily in the lead, and holding himself back from attaining full speed in order not to leave the twins’ struggling mounts behind.
“I don’t know!” I yelled back. “We need to find some kind of defensive position. Or at least more tree cover to hide in.” The ancient oak forests of Delorne had been majestic. It was one of the few things about my childhood home that made my heart ache when I remembered it. The West had thick forests of its own, of the pine variety, but this particular region of it had little more than cacti and shrubs. “I can’t fight fourteen men on my own.”
“You won’t fight alone,” Janina replied while galloping by my other side.
“I, er, appreciate the sentiment-- ” I began as I glanced over at her in surprise.
“You have Theo,” she concluded as she flashed me a grin.
I had to chuckle at that one. At least her self-awareness and the fact that she hadn’t lost her sense of humor were reassuring. St
ill, I couldn’t help thinking that it would be nice if the Elliott twins had been gifted with the kind of magical powers that could make them useful in combat.
We rode hard, at what amounted to a canter for Theo and a gallop for the mares, for another two miles or so, and then we had to slow, or risk the horses collapsing from exhaustion. The same would be true for our pursuers, though, even if they hadn’t stopped for the Savajun tracker with the broken leg, which I hoped that at least a few of them had.
We maintained a brisk trot after that for another mile. It was getting dangerously dark now for the horses. My senses were on high alert as I waited for some sign that our pursuers had caught up to us. Our horses’ hooves were trampling down grass and leaving prints in the dirt, so I knew we wouldn’t be able to lose them easily, when there was no river to ford, no hard wood or stone to cross. We had three extra horses, so I did consider sending some of them off to create false tracks and cause the pursuing party to split up, but the horses weren’t intelligent enough to do that, not without Theo’s guidance, and I wasn’t willing to take the risk of being parted from him.
“What’s that?” Katrina spoke up and interrupted my grim thoughts. I looked at where she was pointing and could see a dim shape looming out of the darkness on the horizon to our left.
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. The shape wasn’t moving, and it was far too large to be a living creature of any kind, so it had to be either a building or a natural landscape feature of some kind. In other words, our present best hope for survival. “Let’s go find out.”
We changed course for the mysterious shape. As we drew closer, it became obvious that it was a rock formation in the middle of the desert. A huge one, probably fifty feet tall at its tallest point and about that wide across at its widest point, although the shape was too irregular for such measurements to give an accurate conception. And then, when we reached this rock formation, the true miracle occurred.
It turned out to be a system of caves.