Margaret Weis - Heroes And Fools

With luck, they’d follow the stony trail right back to the road again, though they wouldn’t know that till they’d come in sight of Gardar’s Tower five miles or more away. By then, I thought, slipping silently into the wood, that goblin would be minded to find himself a new pair of breeches somewhere else.

They aren’t long days, those of the Falling, and we’d wasted much of the first day of our journey to Haven on the dancy red mare and the bandits. By the time I reached the three caves, light lay old on the ground, and shadows were long. We’d be going nowhere until morning. Griff knew it as well as I. The middle cave had a settled look about it when I came walking up, packs against the wall inside, Olwynn sitting in the thin sunlight outside, her babe asleep in her arms. She huddled close in her cloak. The wind blew colder up here than down below, and stronger. Few trees grew to break it.

They greeted me variously, Griff with a curt nod and Olwynn with a smile and a glad word.

“I worried for you,” she said, settling Cae more comfortably. “You were a long time gone.”

“As long as it took,” I said. I scooped up a newly filled water bottle and drained it dry.

“Will we have a fire?” Olwynn asked, looking from one to the other of us.

I snorted. “Sure. I’ll build it while you go stand on the hill and shout to every bandit and outlaw in Darken Wood that we’re here.” I reached into my pack and pulled out some jerked venison. “Eat that,” I said, tossing it to her.

The little dove didn’t flinch from that growl of mine. She only tucked her child closer to her body and moved inside the cave, out of the reach of the waking wind. I turned to walk away, thinking I’d take the first watch and thereby gain a night’s uninterrupted sleep. Turning, I saw Griff shrug out of his own cloak, the thick green wool, and pass it over to Olwynn.

Softly she murmured her thanks.

“Never mind that,” he said roughly. “Get some sleep now. We’ll be early up.”

Never mind that, eh? Perhaps she didn’t, but I took it up the hill with me, laughing. What a tender guide he was! Or so she might think. Me, I recalled words of Griff’s spoken harshly in the wood: Am I not keeping your father’s precious treasure well enough, Mistress Haugh? Precious treasure, all right, and more like Griff’s than her father’s, for she was his way into his enemy’s house.

I forgot all that when Griff came up the hill much too soon to relieve my watch. He came walking in the light of the red and silver moons, and something about the look on him, bone-white and skullish, sent a spider-footed chill up my neck.

He said, “What?” when I looked hard at him, and he scowled and spat.

“You,” I said. “You look like. .”

“Like what?”

I shrugged. It was hard to explain. He looked like Death walking, hollow-eyed and unstoppable, and no surprise there. For Olwynn Haugh’s father, Death is what he was. But he looked like one caught by Death, too; like a man gnawed and chewed over and not much left on the bone. Wind cut across the top of the hill, whining a little. It had grown colder since the sun’s setting. Griff put his back to it, hunching his shoulders. Eyes on the cave, that yawning dark mouth, he nodded, almost absently.

“Go on down,” he said, “ and see if you can get a fire going.”

“What?” I almost laughed. “Are you crazy? Every bandit-”

He rounded on me, snarling, “Do it! You hide out in these hills all the time, and no one knows you’re here till you walk up on ‘em. Are you going to tell me you never build a fire?”

I wasn’t going to tell him that. No one makes a quicker or cleaner fire than I do. Still, it seemed too risky now. As quickly as he’d roused to snarl, however, that easily did Griff calm again.

“Those bandits are long gone,” he said. “We won’t see them again. The girl’s my passage into her father’s house. I’ve got to keep her and her child safe and well till we get where we’re going.”

Well, she was my passport too, to a fine fat fee, one that would keep me warm and fed and in dwarf spirits all the winter through. I thought about where the bandits would be now and reckoned they were either back in Long Ridge or cursing me up one side of Gardar Tower and down the other. The wind ran from the direction of that old pile of stone, and nothing in the sky or the scent of the chill air spoke of a storm to change the sky’s mind.

“All right, then,” I said, shaking my head. “A fire it is.”

Griff said nothing, only sat down in the lee of the hill where the wind wouldn’t bite and took out his bone-handled dirk and a small whetstone. Plying one against the other, he watched the blade bleed small sparks while I scuffed around a bit to see if we had more to say to each other. We didn’t, and so I left him to watch.

When I returned to the cave, Olwynn smiled to see my arms full of wood and tinder. She set her child upon the ground, snug among the packs, and rose to help me at the fire-building. One breath she drew to speak, that small smile still on her lips, when all the silent night ripped apart, torn by Griff’s wild war cry.

Seven men fell upon us with howling and steel, seven bandits who didn’t know when the game was over. Moonlight ran like spilling silver along the keen edges of swords. Olwynn cried out, “Broc!” and Cae woke shrieking and screaming.

“Into the cave!” I shouted. “All the way back!” She didn’t wait to argue or ask a question. She ran with her child wailing, hunched over and seeking the safety of deeper darkness. The bandits laughed, thinking they’d have no trouble getting past me. Well, there were seven of them, and maybe they’d have been right. We never learned about that, though. No sooner did I smash the knees out from under one of the goblins than the other one died screaming. Griff’s blade slipped between his ribs from behind. The thick coppery stink of blood filled the air as I finished my man, relieving his skull of his brains, and spun on my heel, Reaper’s weight carrying me, to shatter the ribs, then the whole chest, of another.

We were good, Griff and I, workmanlike at our killing. It took less time than the telling to dispatch two more with sword and hammer, and now there were but two bandits left. One was a tall, thick-shouldered fellow, the other thin with a poxy face. Each had a fine bright blade. The tall bandit lunged for Griff, the other feinted toward me, sword tip circling tightly, taunting just beyond Reaper’s range. Griff’s man lunged again, then sidestepped Griff’s return. In that stepping, he moved toward the cave’s mouth. Cae’s bawling echoed far back in the darkness. Laughing, the bandit vanished, swallowed into the darkness, trusting Cae’s howling to lead him.

“Damn!” Griff shouted, leaping too late to stop him. “Damn and damn!” and he flung himself into the cave, leaving me standing, eyes locked with the pox-faced bandit.

He grinned, that bandit, a baleful light in his eyes. Just a little light flickered, and I spied his intent. I stepped back and to the side just as he lunged. Stumbling, he turned to find me. Reaper, whistling in the air, took him in the back of the neck and shattered his spine. With his own sword I put him out of his pain.

Steel clanged on stone inside the cave, then one blade belled against another. Closer than I’d thought to hear, those sounds, and closer still Olwynn’s sudden cry of dread. In the instant, one sword fell clattering to the stony ground, and then the other. Olwynn bolted past me, child in arms. Like demons, two men followed, the last bandit weaponless, Griff on his heels.

Blood dripped from the bandit’s sword arm, and his other hand clenched tight. I leaped over the corpse at my feet, Reaper ready, but I moved too late. The bandit turned, hitting me hard between the shoulders.