Well, at least he wouldn't have to repeat the whole process, he thought as he carefully lifted himself out of the hammock, untied the chest strap, then climbed down the tree. The hammock would still be there.
He could have just unbuttoned his trousers and relieved himself right there, but the whole idea of sleeping in a tree was to avoid announcing your presence. Besides, on the way in, he had smelled fresh wolf sign on a tree, and that would make good enough cover for his own spoor.
He found the spot easily in the dark. Memorizing his way in was second nature to him, and while he moved as quietly as he could, nothing human could move silently through the forest, so he didn't let it bother him. He was good at this, and anybody else would announce their presence to him long before he announced his presence to them.
He unbuttoned his trousers and relieved himself. There was something absurdly pleasurable about a good piss in the woods at night, although Kethol wouldn't have admitted that to anybody else; it seemed funny and embarrassing to him.
He made his way back to his tree and up to his hammock, and stretched out.
The music of the forest would have lulled him to sleep quickly if he'd have stayed awake to let it.
Leathery wings beat against the night sky above the field of bitter oats. The night was filled with gnats, and bats by the dozen had come out of somewhere to feed. They were only shadows flittering against the star-spattered sky, but still Pirojil shivered.
Bats. Pirojil hated bats. It was something about their featherless wings, and the evil faces. He wasn't sure why - much worse had come flapping out of Faerie during the Breach, after all; and he had worn an uglier face than any bat all his adult life - but ordinary bats bothered him.
The Old Emperor used to say that bats were beneficial, that they daily ate their weight in noxious insects, and, he'd add with a secret smile, there was another virtue or two they had, as the Engineer would swear - but he would never explain what that was all about, or why caves where bats lived were Engineer property by imperial fiat.
The Old Emperor had hinted once or twice that it might have something to do with the secret of gunpowder. Pirojil didn't know much about magic - if you couldn't see the glyphs, what was the point? - but maybe bat wings were an ingredient that made gunpowder make bullets fly.
No, that seemed unlikely. After all, bullets flew straight, and bats didn't. They twisted and turned and capered in the night sky in their search for some preposterous number of bugs. Somehow - perhaps they had night vision like dwarves? - the bats never seemed to bump into each other as they fluttered and fed, as though they had their own system of precedence, with presumably commoner bats staying out of the way of noble bats.
Back when he was -
Pirojil cut off the thought with a savage shake of his head. He had tried to burn those memories away, and even the screams in the dark were long forgotten.
They had to be.
- back a long time ago, somebody Pirojil had known had taught him a trick to do with bats.
His blunt fingers felt on the ground for a round pebble, and flicked it underhand, high, high into the air over the bitter oats field.
A small shadow dove on it, then fell almost to the ground before it righted itself, and cluttered its discomfort as it climbed into the dark.
Instead of a nice juicy gnat, the bat had found itself trying to swallow a pebble that probably weighed as much as it did, and it didn't like that much. Pebbles weren't supposed to be flying through the night sky; just bugs and other bats - must have been frustrating for the little creature.
Off in the distance, an owl hooted three times, then three times again.
Pirojil's mouth twitched. Trouble.
Kethol had come awake with a start. Not enough to move, but his whole body twitched.
There was something wrong, and it took him too long to place what it was:
The night was quiet. No chirping of insects, no taroo of a distant gray owl chortling over a fresh field mouse, not even a distant wolf's cry.
Nothing.
Anybody who had spent as much as a night in the woods knew what that meant: something was moving out there, and that something was either human or worse. Orcs hunted at night, by preference, and their bitter smell of sour sweat would be enough to frighten anybody off.
It probably meant humans, and humans moving at night ought to be making a lot of noise clomping down the road. Animals had learned to avoid that noise.
But it was silent. No sound save for the rustling of the leaves and the almost deafening lump-lump-lump of his own heart.
He willed it to be silent, and was unsurprised when the noise in his ears dimmed.
The night was awash in shades of grays and blacks as Kethol climbed down out of the tree, moving slowly, scanning all around with his eyes. That was the trick of the night: you saw better out of the corner of your eye than with the middle, and that was the mistake too many city people made out in the dark. The dark had its own ways, and you could either live with them or die with them.
Miron had had four men with him, and five against three would have been bad enough odds even if Lord Miron hadn't been a noble with so much time on his hands that he could practice the sword for pleasure. Kethol begged to doubt that they could get within sword or even pistol range of Durine without his sounding the alarm, but that would still leave five against two.
There was, of course, another alternative.
His bow was stashed near his horse, with his tack and the rest of his gear. Hauling everything his horse carried around the woods as night was falling had had no appeal for Kethol, and if they had been after deer, while he would have considered having been at a stand at sunrise - there were spots along the edges of the bitter oats fields that just shouted they were deer feeding grounds - but they were traveling fast and light and couldn't afford the time for a leisurely hunt.
For game.
The only problem was that the deer trail that led to the meadow where he had left his horse was a good hundred leagues back, and the meadow was even further down the trail. Getting to his horse and gear meant getting to the road, which was fine, and it meant walking down the road, which wasn't.
Still, there was no choice about doing it. But regardless of what Pirojil said about him, he wasn't so foolish as to rush in without thinking, without listening.
Kethol leaned back against the bole of an ancient elm and listened again. Nothing. No sound except for the breeze in the leaves.
Very well. They were out there somewhere, but he couldn't count on Pirojil or Durine having spotted them, not yet. They had made a good choice in campsites; the farmhouse and outbuildings had been built on a mound overlooking the fields. But it was possible that somebody really good could sneak up through the bitter oats, leaving behind a trail of crushed plants that you would have to be looking for to see in the dark. Walter Slovotsky certainly could have done it easily, and Kethol himself could have.
The wind had changed while he slept, blowing toward the fields, toward the ruins. A shout would have carried, but it would also have announced to all and sundry that they'd been spotted. Better than letting his companions be surprised, but...
Better.
He pursed his lips and gave the hoot of a forest owl, as loud as he could, three times. With any luck, Miron and his companions wouldn't know that a forest owl always hooted twice only, or wouldn't notice.
He waited for a moment for the sound of boots crashing through the woods in search of whoever had so badly impersonated an owl, but none came.
Good, Maybe it wasn't such a bad impersonation, after all.
He crept quietly back to the deer trail he had taken most of the way into his hiding place for the night - you didn't want to sleep right next to a trail; that permitted anybody or anything to walk right up to your tree without making a sound.
The night felt as if it had a thousand eyes, and each one of them was fixed on his back.
But the silence still rang in his ears. Which
was good. It meant that whatever was going to happen hadn't started yet. Miron and his companions were probably taking their time setting up. By now, Pirojil and Durine would both be awake and looking out over the fields, watching and waiting, their pistols out and ready, their crossbows loaded.
Crossbows. Kethol snickered silently. There was nothing wrong with a crossbow, except that the rate of fire was pitiful, and the accuracy wasn't much better.
But it had its advantages.
You could take a peasant conscript right out of the pig shit, hand him a crossbow, and with even a tenday or so of practice - aided, if necessary, by a clout or two alongside the head to assist in the instruction - he could be a competent shot with a crossbow. Now, that wouldn't make him stand and fight, and it surely wouldn't make him hold his position among a line of archers, but that could be done, too, with only a little more work, another few dozen more clouts, and perhaps a blooding here and there.
But training a real archer took almost as long as training a swordsman.
Reclaiming his bow took too long, and he silently congratulated himself for having stashed his hidden gear on the other side of the meadow from where his horse stood grazing. Not the most observant of animals, she didn't stop in her munching in the dark. Amazing how much clover she could put away.
He strung his bow, and slung his quiver over his shoulders. It would have been nice to use his shooting glove, but while the wooden sear laced into the surface of its fingers made his every loose clean and pure - Kethol had always had to fight a certain amount of pluck in his loose; there were times it got so bad that he thought he should have been a lutist - it also made it impossible to grip his sword with his right hand, and he could easily find himself needing his sword without sufficient warning.
He settled on his left-arm sheath and stalked back down the trail, bow in his left hand, his right hand reaching up to untie the mouth of his quiver, his fingers counting the arrows by touch.
Good.
There was only one more bit of preparation. Kethol carefully set his bow on the ground, then sat down on the hard-packed dirt and removed his boots. He tied them together, slung them across his shoulder, and replaced them with the woodsman's deerskin buskins he kept rolled up in his pack. It had been a long time since he'd worn them, and there was something comforting about their softness, about the gentle way they held his feet.
It felt too good to be wearing buskins again; he had been a soldier too long, and this short respite was like a cool stream flowing through the middle of his soul. A painful stream - his feet weren't as toughened as they'd been when he was a boy, and the sharp rocks on the rough path hurt, but the whole idea was to be able to feel the ground underneath him. Tales told around campfires about heroic deeds almost always had somebody stepping on and breaking a twig at just the right - or wrong - moment, and while Kethol had no objection to heroic deeds, he did have a strong objection to making noise. The idea here was to heroically shoot their attackers in the back with longbow and barbed arrow, not to draw their attention and sacrifice himself.
He stopped just short of the road, and looked and listened. It would have been nice if the wind had been blowing in his face instead of against his back, but it wasn't, and circling around to downwind from them would have required both a lot of time and knowing where they were.
He moved slowly to the road, and looked across the fields at the ruins.
Nothing.
There was no sign of life or activity, which was either very good or very bad. Kethol would have preferred something somewhere in the middle, something safer - some hulking motion in the darkness that spoke of Durine moving about impatiently, waiting for the attack.
He set his boots and his rucksack down on the ground and stood, still as the boy Kethol had on stand, waiting for the deer to come within range of his bow, and waited. And waited.
And waited.
The night was still quiet. He was beginning to think that maybe he'd been wrong, maybe it had been that clumsy Erenor who had alarmed the creatures of darkness into a warning silence, maybe-
No. It took the wind to show him, but there were dim trails in the bitter oats. Kethol could count ten.
Ten? Where had Miron gotten so many men? He had been riding with -
Never mind that. Three against ten was horrible odds, and Kethol wasn't willing to bet a life he cared about on there being only ten of them.
But one of them was less dexterous than the rest. A dark shadow rose up momentarily in the sea of bitter oats, then ducked down.
Kethol nocked an arrow, and drew it back. Nine against one was almost as bad as ten against one, but... You kill a band of enemies the way you slice an onion: one slice, one shot at a time. Nine could be cut down to eight, could be cut down to seven ...
He drew a deep breath, let half of it out, and held the rest. It would have been nice to have warmed up with some practice shots, but that was hardly practicable.
The string pressed hard against the tips of his fingers, tempting him to a plucking loose. It was all the same whether the target was straw-filled ticking, a deer, or a man. It was a matter of years of learning that burned deep into muscle and mind and bone and soul, so he waited until he was ready, until every instinct and every bit of training told him that the arrow would arc to the spot where the enemy had ducked down, and let fly with a pure loose that sent the shaft on a flat arc that ended in a groan.
A dark shape lunged up and out of the darkness, screaming some painful obscenity.
Everything broke loose at once. A dozen or more other men rose instantly out of the field, some with swords in their hands, at least two with long hunting spears, and rushed the encampment. Kethol already had another arrow nocked, and let fly, but his target was bobbing and weaving as he charged up the slope, and the arrow disappeared somewhere in the dark.
A dozen? The other two didn't stand a chance. Kethol would do his best to avenge them, but even Pirojil and Durine had their limits, and -
The darkness was shattered by a flash of light as white as a cloud, as bright as the sun.
Chapter 17
Seemings
The three hoots had brought Pirojil fully alert. For a moment, he allowed himself to smile - three to split the night watch was a lot better than two - until the triple hoot was followed by another, instead of the expected call.
And then by silence.
Durine was already on his feet by the time Pirojil made it back into the ruins of the stable, belting his sword and pistols about his massive waist by the light of a ragged sliver of Faerie silver that he had picked up somewhere, sometime. His face was sallow and lined in the pale light, and he looked half again his age.
'Trouble," the big man whispered. A statement, not a question. He slipped the shining metal back into its leather sheath. "What is it?"
"I just heard a forest owl hoot three times."
Durine grunted, and if Pirojil hadn't known better, he would have thought that the big man was smiling in the darkness. "I think, perhaps, he has too much faith in you and me, Piro."
That was certainly true enough. Well, everybody has to believe in something.
Pirojil jerked his chin toward the field. Durine nodded; he cocked his crossbow and nocked a bolt before he moved, much more quietly than one would think such a big man could, toward the skeletal timbers at what had been the front of the stable.
Lady Leria was sleeping in what had been a stall; Durine had made his bed at the entrance to it, as though trouble couldn't simply step over the raggedly waist-high foundation that was all that remained of the walls. Pirojil walked past her stall to the one where Erenor slept, snoring quietly, peacefully.
He clapped his hand over Erenor's mouth. That was the only safe way to wake a wizard - a real one could easily come awake spewing out some defensive spell - although in this case, it was more of a way to prevent Erenor from crying out than spells from issuing from his mouth.
The wizard's eyes snapped open, wide and white ab
ove Pirojil's hand. "Quiet, now," Pirojil said, removing his hand only when Erenor raised his palms in a gesture of surrender.
"We have trouble," Pirojil said. "How many times does a forest owl hoot?"
"I wouldn't know," Erenor said quite quietly, his tone saying, And I wouldn't care quite loudly.
Pirojil didn't know much about owls, and was about as interested in them as he was in rocks, but Kethol had always had a tendency to go on about woodcraft, and he had mentioned over more campfires than Pirojil cared to count that the forest owl always hooted twice.
"It's one of Kethol's... preoccupations." He had stopped himself from saying "obsession." Not in front of Erenor. Pirojil didn't think friendship required one to turn a blind eye to faults, but neither did it permit revealing them to outsiders.
"Forest owls - the big ones, the ones with the deep voice like a silverhorn - always hoot twice over their kills." Why hoot at all? Was it a signal to other owls that there was good hunting, or was it to warn them away from their prey?
Or was it simply the owl announcing, with pride, that he had caught yet another field mouse or vole?
"So there's a deranged owl out there who hoots three times," Erenor said. "Thank you very kindly for the lesson, Master Pirojil," he said, "and now may I get back to sleep?"
There was the temptation to slap Erenor until his face sloughed off, but Pirojil manfully resisted it.
"No. What it means is that it's Kethol out there, and that there's trouble." If Kethol was simply announcing his own presence, warning them that he was coming in so that they wouldn't accidentally send a crossbow bolt through him in the dark, he would have quickly followed up with a shout, or a repetition, or something.
It also meant that there was more trouble than Kethol himself could have handled. One scout - Kethol's only problem would have been what to do with the body. Two might be a little trickier, but Kethol would have trusted in his own abilities to take on two, and with the element of surprise on his side, it was a good bet.
Not Exactly The Three Musketeers Page 21