Wesh kept the lead in front of the gypsy caravan and strode down the road at a steady clip. He definitely seemed to have somewhere he wanted to get.

Yann stared at the spot where the road vanished over the horizon in the distance. He still didn’t see any town or destination Wesh might be heading for.

Niyazi snapped everyone back to their senses. “Heads up!” he called. “We got company!”

The Watchmen spun around to check what he meant. Yann’s stomach dropped when a line of black figures appeared over a hill to the party’s left.

Yann couldn’t make the figures out from here. They might have been people, but he didn’t recognize their bizarre features. Some seemed taller than others. Some had strangely shaped heads or they might have been some kind of horned creatures.

“Barbarians!” Wesh hissed.

“How can you tell from this distance?” Rien asked.

Wesh pretended not to hear him. He sliced his forefinger at the others. “Stand your ground and get ready to fight. They outnumber us and outsize us. The Barbarians are fierce and bloodthirsty. They won’t stop unless you kill or maim them.”

“At least they aren’t mounted,” Omer observed.

“They’ll come heavily armed,” Wesh went on. “More heavily armed than we are.”

“You can take them down with your magic, can’t you?” Yvan asked.

“They’ll bring magic-users with them—at least one. They always bring at least one—and they’ll send multiple fighters after me so the rest can get to you.” Wesh narrowed his eyes at all the Watchmen. “I don’t know who and what you’ve fought before, but you’ll have to fight your hardest against them.”

“We’ve fought Darklings before, old man,” Niels replied. “Remember?”

“I remember well enough,” Wesh replied. “I remember you got your asses handed to you—or you would have without our help—and we don’t have Eliska with us now. Look out! Here they come!”

The Watchmen closed into a line as the ranks of Barbarians swooped down the hills. They formed a line, too. They crossed the landscape unbelievably fast.

Yann found it difficult to believe these were ordinary human beings and not some otherworldly creatures. How could anyone run that fast?

He still didn’t recognize them as human from this distance. Their size and shapes made them look even more monstrous and grotesque as they got closer.

He raised his glaive to strike. He didn’t see anything to convince him that they were human until they got twenty yards from the Watch.

By the time he did recognize their bizarre headdresses, costumes, jewelry, and the black face paint around their eyes, it was already too late.

Each of the Barbarians dwarfed every man of the Watch, including Barsali. A few of the Barbarians carried axes. Most carried clubs studded with spikes.

They definitely struck more terror into Yann’s heart than the Darklings. He knew how to fight Darklings.

He put it completely out of his mind that these things were human. They weren’t. They were some kind of demon from the Dark Realms—even worse than Darklings.

He didn’t have to show these people any mercy, but he did have to figure out a way to fight them. He didn’t stand a chance of fighting them on strength alone.

He would just have to play his own advantages. He had speed and agility on his side—and then, in a flash of insight, he realized.

These weren’t Darklings or demons. They were just people painted up to look fierce.

That thought gave him all the courage he needed to face them.

They must have seen him, Neils, and Rien standing together. By sheer chance, Barsali, Omer, and Niyazi all wound up together on one end of the line with Yvan, Vidal, and Wesh between those three and Yann’s end of the line.

The Barbarians turned out to be smarter than they looked. They recognized the three smaller men as the weakest part of the line. The Barbarian assault split into three. The majority turned on Yann, Neils, and Rien.

Three Barbarians with bald heads and less decoration went for Wesh. Those three must be the Barbarian magic-users.

Only three others engaged with Barsali, Niyazi, and Omer. The Barbarians threw everything else at the three smallest Watchmen.

The Barbarians wanted to reduce the Watch’s numbers and before diverting their manpower to the bigger, stronger Watchmen.

A huge man with hulking muscles and towering hair spikes charged Yann and swung a massive club. Two other equally enormous Barbarians went after Rien. They flanked him on both sides.

He raised his longsword. One of his attackers hefted his club on high and brought it down with a punishing blow that shattered Rien’s longsword. The weapon splintered halfway down and left him with the jagged stump.

Yann couldn’t pay attention anymore to what the others were doing. The Barbarian rushing him raised his club with huge arms.

Yann’s glaive couldn’t take that blow. He had to avoid it and somehow neutralize this attacker as quickly as possible.

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Yann went all in with everything he had and sprang forward to meet the Barbarian’s charge.

Yann going on the offensive must have been the absolute last thing this Barbarian expected. He didn’t hesitate, but he didn’t react in time.

He exposed his midsection when he raised his club. Yann sprang sideways under the man’s arms, stabbed his glaive between the ribs on the left side, and shoved the weapon in all the way to the heart.

Yann let his own weight drive the glaive shaft forward to slice backward. He kept on going until he wound up behind the incoming line of Barbarians.

The others ran straight past him. He spun around and let his speed take over. He could move so much faster than any of these men.

He leapt for the next nearest assailant. The guy had been trying to flank Yann at the place where Yann had originally been standing.

By the time Yann whipped around to go after the guy, the Barbarian still faced that one spot trying to figure out what happened.

Yann’s first victim crumpled and fell right in front of his friends. They looked down at him in surprise and completely missed looking to see where Yann was.

He lunged for the second man, swiped his glaive down the back of the guy’s neck in the quickest, shortest stroke possible, and dropped the guy before Yann sprang away to three Barbarians surrounding Neils.

Rien and his broken longsword had no problem handling his two assailants. He pulled out another short sword he got from the gypsies.

The Barbarians came at him from both sides, but these men actually turned out to be easier to fight than the Darklings.

They still had numbers on their side. They sent four more after Yann and surrounded him. He couldn’t fight them all—not by himself.

He responded by leaping away and stabbing one of Rien’s attackers from behind before Yann’s enemies completely cut him off.

Rien yelled, “Thanks!” over the Barbarians’ furious yells and the noise of crashing steel.

Yann glanced around trying to figure out who to attack next, but the four Barbarians coming after him understood his tricks now. He got lucky by springing a surprise attack on the first two.

That wouldn’t work now. The Barbarians backed him toward the rest of the Watch and closed him in with Neils and Yvan.

The three Barbarian magic-users cornered Wesh exactly the way he said they would. He fired magical pulses at them again and again, but they bombarded him with so many explosions that they brought him to the ground in no time.

One stayed behind to finish him off while the other two turned on Barsali, Omer, and Niyazi. They put up the most resistance, but they couldn’t fight magic. None of the Watch could.

Yann bumped into Neils. The two of them turned back to back just as Rien joined them from the other side. Barbarians ringed the three men in a solid pack.

Yann’s eyes darted from one Barbarian to another. How much longer did he have before they struck?

How pathetic would it be if the remaining Watchmen fell to these marauders? The Watch survived Darklings, gypsies, hurricanes, heaving landscapes, and freezing cold.

At that moment, another magical explosion went off behind Yann’s back. Was that the shot that took out Yvan? Was Yann’s father dead now?

Yann didn’t believe it when the Barbarian magic-users hurtled away from Wesh and the others.

Yann actually forgot to fight and defend himself when Eliska stormed over the nearest hill and blasted the magic-users flat.

They crashed down in the grass and she rotated around to confront the rest of the Barbarians.

Her arrival surprised the other Watchmen enough that they all forgot to fight, too. Even the Barbarians forgot to fight—but only for a second.

They recovered first and wheeled away from the Watchmen to defend themselves. She bombarded them from a distance, launched magical blasts across the fields, and leveled three more Barbarians who’d been surrounding Yann, Neils, and Rien.

The remaining Barbarians roared in fury and rushed her raising their weapons. The Barbarians completely abandoned the Watchmen, but they never got near her.

She unloaded on them one after the other and cleared the field in a few minutes.

She stalked into the group, went from one Barbarian after another, and jammed her staff into each of them as they tried to get up. She nailed each man with a powerful thump straight into their bodies.

Yann and the others stared down at the unconscious Barbarians. Then everyone stared at her.

Yann still could not bring himself to believe that she came back. She saved them all again.

She pretended not to notice everyone gawking at her with their mouths open. They all still held their weapons ready to fight someone.

“We have to move,” she snapped over her shoulder. “We can’t stay here.”

She went over to Wesh, took hold of his arm, and tried to pick him up.

When he didn’t respond right away, she scowled down at him for a minute and then laid her hand on top of his head.

He stayed slumped on the ground with his grey hair hanging over his face. Eliska went very still for a second and then Wesh crumpled the rest of the way to the ground.

He collapsed on his side, rolled in the grass, and groaned with his eyes clamped shut.

“Just lie still for a minute, Wesh,” she murmured under her breath. “You’ll be all right, but we need to move away from here.”

“Eliska! What are you doing here?” Barsali gasped. “You said you would leave us.”

“I did,” she replied over her shoulder. “I heard these Barbarians talking in a tavern. They were talking about attacking you so I followed them here. Someone hired them to come after you to get whatever it is you’re carrying—which means that whoever hired them will either hire someone else or send someone else to get it. We can’t stay here—and you can’t go to a town. We need to stay off the roads and travel across country.”

She cast a hard look around the horizon.

“But if we can’t go to a town…..where will we go?” Neils asked.

“We have to stay in the Ancestral Empire,” she decided. “The Coil is too unstable elsewhere. We need to stay in an Island. We just need to move to another part of it.”

“Is there any part without Barbarians?” Omer asked.

“Barbarians are everywhere, not just in the Ancestral Empire. We would have to deal with them anywhere even if someone didn’t hire them to come after you.”

“They shouldn’t……” Wesh choked. “They shouldn’t…..be taking jobs…..for pay…..”

“Loot is loot to a Barbarian,” she muttered. “They don’t care where they get it. We would have to deal with them more in places with people around them. We need to stay away from towns and roads. Follow me. There could be more of the same group around and they could have set up more ambushes for you.”

She took hold of Wesh a second time and pulled him upright. The other Watchmen gathered around.

Omer and Vidal both sustained injuries during their fights against the Barbarians. Eliska went through the group one man at a time and healed them where they needed it.

No one said a word, not even to thank her. Did she plan to stick around this time—for how long? Yann didn’t dare to ask and no one else did, either. No one asked why she came back in the first place.

She kept shooting sidelong frowns in Wesh’s direction. Whatever the Barbarian magic-users did to him left him stunned and wobbly.

He kept tottering on his heels, nearly falling over, and steadying himself. She held onto him to help him keep his balance.

Niyazi grabbed him once on Wesh’s other side to stop him from toppling into the grass again. Eliska didn’t do anything else to heal him.

She must have decided he was ready to travel. She took a few steps in front of Neils and Rien, passed her hand through the air from her head height down to her knees, and opened another window like Wesh’s.

This one didn’t tumble around in an array of collapsing landscapes. It opened into another calm scene of sparse trees, bushes, and rocks lining a river somewhere.

Rolling hills rose on either side of the river. Yann didn’t see any sign of human habitation or even any footprints in the whole river valley.

“Let’s go,” Eliska ordered and she stepped through the window into the other landscape.

End of Chapter 16.