Finding the raiders was not quite effortless, but I hadn’t expected it to be. It would have been nice to just lazily fly over the foothills and spot them immediately, but the area was large, and I needed to stay fairly high to be sure that nobody saw me. Herald had great night vision to go with her general hawk-eyedness, I knew that, and any organised force was sure to have at least a couple of people among them with similar advancements. Fortunately I was in no rush. I had all night, and all next night, and the one after that if necessary. I would find them. Nothing else was acceptable. Neither justice nor my pride would allow it.
The moon was a fat crescent above the sea as I reached the hills north of the search area, but soon vanished behind the heavy oncoming clouds as I turned south. I soon flew into wind and a light rain which gradually got heavier but, mercifully, never reached the level where it became unbearable.
My strategy was simple: if I saw a gathering of lights, I’d approach low and check it out. Since we didn’t know if the raiders had a camp or were operating out of villages that they occupied I’d have to get in close and make sure, but there were few people alive who could do that with the level of stealth that I could. Shadow form wasn’t quite invisibility, but at night it was close enough as to make no difference.
I got a lot of training doing stealthy approaches that night, and there the clouds and the rain helped. The hills were dotted with small villages and hamlets surrounded mostly by orchards and open pasture, but most of them could easily be dismissed. We knew that the raiders were mostly or all mounted, so I kept my eyes peeled for any large concentration of horses. Hiding that number of horses without, say, a barn wasn’t going to happen, so any place without large structures only got a cursory flyover. I did find one little place that had a large herd of horses wandering almost free in the hills around it, but when I went around the place it was clear that it was just a peaceful village that happened to raise horses, and nothing else.
I’d lost count of how many places I’d inspected by the time morning broke. Boredom and frustration had me glancing at their livestock, but I held myself back. I wasn’t hungry anyway. I’d flown back and forth over the area where Rallon suspected the raiders might be camped, and the area must be rich because there were a lot of little places. What had surprised me was how many of those places looked completely undisturbed, even in the southern end of the area. I’d seen a few burned out husks, empty or surrounded by poor souls trying to rebuild, but most of what I found was completely untouched. If the raiders had passed through, and if they were thought to be riding long distances to raid, why were they leaving so many little settlements alone? It just didn’t make sense!
During the night I’d scouted out a nice inaccessible cave high in the hills, and when sunrise was getting close I headed there. It was small and smelled like bat crap, but darkness and shelter from the weather was all I needed, and it served me well enough. The rain continued through the day, giving a pleasant background noise to sleep by. It was always nice to listen to the rain when I myself was nice and dry.
The next night the rain and clouds had passed, the moon was bright, and I went right back to my flyovers. Because the terrain was mostly steep hills separated by valleys and dells a decently hidden camp would have been easy to miss unless I flew almost directly over it, so all I could really do was to cover the same terrain again, only on a different route. This time I went in a zig-zag pattern north to south, then turned around and did the same heading north.
With sunrise only a few hours off, I found them.
They’d been hard to find, and no wonder. Not only were they tucked into a valley, its sides so steep that it was practically a canyon, but it was a wooded one as well. It was blind luck on my part that some of the trees had started losing their leaves early, letting me spot their fires shining through the empty patches and drawing me in for a look. When I snuck up in shadow form I found the place calm and silent, except for one sound that piqued my interest: muted crying.
In the centre of the camp was a stockade, and inside the stockade were half a dozen prisoners. They couldn’t be anything else by the state of them. They were being generally mistreated, wearing worn clothes and sleeping on the ground with only the most basic of bedding to keep the cold away. The source of the crying was a man, probably in his middle twenties, who lay crying softly with his head in the lap of a man perhaps in his late fifties. Unlike the prisoners the slavers had traded for from the valkin, there was no pattern among these except that no one was younger than the crying man. They were a mix of ages, both men and women. One of the men was missing a hand, but the injury looked old, not anything that had been done to him when he was captured.
I needed to know more. I had no idea why these people had been taken, and it wasn’t like I could speak to them. While the older man with the boy in his lap seemed to be awake, his hand slowly stroking the boy’s hair, there was a guard who was sure to hear any words that might be spoken. And there were other things I’d been asked to find out.
The first was easy. How many of them were there? After leaving the camp and shifting back to rest, I returned and started counting. Some slept in tents, some in the open. Some few were awake, guarding the prisoners, the camp in general, or the horses. All in all I counted twenty-five raiders, with sixty horses and six prisoners. While I counted them I also got a pretty good idea about their equipment, and while they weren’t wearing any kind of insignia it was pretty clear that this was some kind of professional force. Their weapons and armour, their tents, even their saddles were too similar to be just a hodge-podge of the best each man could afford. They weren’t identical, but there was a definite uniformity to them that suggested that they should be pretty much interchangeable.
They could still be bandits, of course. They could have deserted from that duchy in the south, taking their equipment with them and going north to avoid their own land’s justice, but I doubted it. It was the prisoners, really. They wouldn’t take, feed, and guard prisoners if they didn’t want them for something, and if these were bandits, well… I would have expected most of the prisoners to be young women.
Maybe it was a little paradoxical, but the fact that they had a middle aged man and an older woman in that stockade was reassuring. They should, hopefully, be in less immediate danger of anything horrible happening to them. It made it far easier to keep my promise to the sisters.
It was far too close to sunrise for me to head back to the city. I could have made it back to the cave I’d used easily enough, but now that I knew where the camp was I wanted to keep an eye on it. Not literally, unfortunately. I couldn’t find a suitable tree with a clear sightline to the place, and instead had to settle for one where I could see the edge of the area where they kept their horses.
The next night, I thought, I would move in as early as possible. The commander of the group had been easy to find, a big, scarred woman sleeping alone in one of the larger tents, and I hoped to hear some of what was said in or around that tent before everyone bedded down for the night. Then I could return to Karakan, report to Rallon, and lead the Wolves back here. It would be a goddamn slaughter, and I would enjoy every minute of it.
I curled up among the branches, hidden by the still dense leaves of the tree. This was getting harder, I noted a little sadly. I was getting too big to sleep way up in the crown and was going to need to settle for lower, sturdier branches soon. But that was tomorrow’s problem, and I might as well enjoy this while I could. I drifted off to sleep with visions of bloodshed dancing happily in my mind.
----------------------------------------
I woke to pre-dawn twilight and the sounds of people saddling and packing horses. I hadn’t slept long, an hour at most, and I could have slept through the bustling of the camp if I’d wanted to, but curiosity got the better of me.
It was still dark, and in shadow form I glided from tree to tree until I got a good look at the camp. There were two distinct groups preparing to ride out, it seemed. One, made up of about half of the raiders, were checking their gear or saddling their horses. The other group was already mounted, and consisted of five raiders, one of whom looked like some kind of officer by his finer dress and general attitude, and the six prisoners. The prisoners were tied to their saddles, the reins of their horses tied two to each of three of the raiders’ saddles.
Staying put never crossed my mind.
Three things came to mind. First, I couldn’t do anything about the larger force except harass and disrupt them, but then I would be exposed to our enemy. Second, the smaller group was taking the prisoners away. Maybe they were going to a different camp, and maybe they were going farther than that, but they were moving them. Which, third, meant that these raiders would be alone. Separated from their herd, so to speak. Vulnerable.
I could take five, probably. In the open and with surprise on my side it shouldn’t be a problem. Surely they wouldn’t be missed? And I had only promised not to fight if it wasn’t necessary. This definitely counted as necessary. This might be the prisoners’ last chance for freedom, after all. And I’d be back before nightfall, so I could still gather more information before returning to Karakan.
Stolen story; please report.
I didn’t even try to argue myself out of it. Instead I curled up in the best cover I could find where I still had a clear view of the smaller party. Just as the first rays of the morning sun hit the highest peaks of the mountains, as though that were the signal, they started moving. The passage of horses had worn a narrow path into the floor of the wooded valley, running right below me, and the raiders and their prisoners followed it south and out into the hills.
Following them among the trees was easy. The sun was low and it was still dark among the trees. It got harder once the woods ended and were among the hills, covered in nothing more concealing than grass, scrub, and low bushes.
I tried keeping up on foot, but while they weren’t pushing their horses too hard they still kept up a pretty good pace, faster than I could comfortably go for any length of time. The solution I settled on was hopping from hill to hill. I’d sit at the top of a hill and wait until the landscape inevitably broke our line of sight. Then I’d fly up just high enough to spot them, close in, and settle down to wait for them to disappear again. Sometimes they’d follow a ridge for a while, and then I’d have to improvise. I’d sneak along whichever side I thought I was less likely to be spotted, and if they saw me I’d just have to go.
I had followed them like that for about three hours, I’d say, when they stopped by a small stream to rest and water their horses, eat, piss, and whatever else they needed to do. They had the prisoners dismount as well, so they could tend to their own needs. That was good. I didn’t want someone disappearing over the horizon on a panicked horse.
Sneaking up on them wouldn’t be easy since the terrain around them was so open, but I didn’t need to. I sat at a distance for a while, watching them spread out a little to tend to their needs and listening to them talk loudly to each other. Whoever they were, they weren’t Karakanian, that was obvious from the language. The language wasn’t even similar, as different to Karakanian as that language was to Barlean. Although, come to think of it, there were a lot of similarities to Tekereteki, in the way that, say, Spanish and Italian were similar. In appearance the raiders were pretty much indistinguishable from their prisoners or any other average Karakanian. That didn’t mean much, necessarily, but it made me curious. I’d have to ask someone about it back in the city, but first I had some people to kill.
I barely reflected over how easily that thought came to me as I launched myself into the air, beating hard to pick up speed. I aimed for a woman at the centre of the dispersed group, by the water, and she turned just in time to begin a scream before I hit her with a wet crunch. Feeling someone basically crumple against me was as satisfying as the last time. Unlike last time, however, this time my target was less massive than I was, and instead of going down together in a rolling heap I managed to recover and stay in the air while she flopped bonelessly to the ground.
The only sound so far had been me ripping through the air, my victim’s aborted scream, and the sound of our collision. It took a moment for anyone to react, and the first thing that happened was that most of the horses panicked and scattered. Then the shouting started behind me.
“By the hells, what–”
“Maraga? Maraga!”
“Oh, gods, preserve us! Oh, gods!”
“What is that thing?”
“To arms! Quickly, together!”
“Oh, gods! A dragon! Oh, GODS!”
An arrow zipped past me right as I wheeled around. I hadn’t gone far, just a few seconds, but the remaining raiders were trying to put together a defence. Well, three of them were. One just stood with a lance in their hand, the point resting on the ground, apparently too terrified to even move. The prisoners were nowhere to be seen.
I identified the archer and dove for him next. An arrow passed right through the membrane of my left wing, and it stung like hell but didn’t seem to do any significant damage. He got off one more arrow which also hit, but I saw it coming and rolled slightly, and it glanced harmlessly off my scales. He realised quickly that he wouldn’t get another shot and dove to the side, but I turned with him and managed to grab him with one hand and my feet, dragging him into the air. I hadn’t done that since my first big fight, against the gremlins! But for all that I had grown and become stronger since then, this was no gremlin, and I was not going to be doing any fancy flying with my hollering cargo. Slow and careful, maybe, but this was no time for that. Besides, when I looked down the guy was already pawing for a dagger at his belt.
Well, shit. Be that way, I thought, and dropped him. From sixty or seventy feet above the ground and going fairly fast I doubted that he’d make it. I’d have to check on him later to be sure, even if the way his scream cut off sounded pretty final. I didn’t want any miraculous survivals coming back to bite me in the tail.
The two raiders who were still fighting had gotten together near the third. They had the right idea, I thought, and were holding their lances pointed in my direction. I’d need to be careful. I’d gotten some solid advice from Mak, but we’d still only trained for a few days.
I landed near them and advanced, wings out and body held low to the ground. They clearly didn’t know that I could understand them, because they were talking to each other, trying to decide on how to tackle me.
The third raider – a woman, I saw now, and not much taller than Mak – had dropped her lance and stood empty-handed on the grass. “Just surrender, you fools,” she said hopelessly. “Please! It’s a dragon. You can’t fight it!”
“Shut up and help us, coward!” one of the two men, the one I’d pegged as an officer, roared at her, though his eyes never left me. “By the Warrior, once we are done I will execute you myself if you do not step forward!”
The woman actually took a step or two before stopping herself. Some kind of command advancement, maybe? I wondered what else they had. Certainly not speed; they were both considerably slower with their weapons and less quick on their feet than Mak was. Something to do with riding, maybe, since they were cavalry?
Meanwhile, I was trying to coax them into attacking so that I could counterattack the way I’d practised. Going against one spear had been tricky enough, and now there were two of them, and these lances were longer than Mak’s spear. The problem was that while they probably wanted me dead, I was pretty sure that they would be just as happy for me to just clear off and leave them alone. They were fine with just keeping me at a distance until I… I don’t know, grabbed one of the bodies and flew off with it? That’s probably what they expected. They still got some glancing or non-penetrating hits on me as I feinted, and I was getting annoyed. I definitely needed to spar more.
“Please!” The unarmed raider was almost in tears. “I don’t know why it wants us dead, but if we–”
At that point I realised that I was being an idiot. I’d been approaching this the way I sparred with Mak, which meant that I wasn’t actually trying to hurt them. I’d been holding myself back so effectively against her that I’d forgotten one of my most effective weapons.
I gave the two raiders a good, long spray of venom. The woman at the back yelped and leapt back, while their simultaneous shouts of surprise turned into choking coughs and sobs of pain as it got in their eyes, mouths and noses. Instead of trying anything fancy I reared up, grabbed the shafts of their spears, and jerked them towards me. The officer held onto his and was pulled forward, where he was met by a clawed foot that brought him to the ground. I stepped off him to close on the other man, who’d let go of his lance and was scrambling backwards, trying to see through searing eyes as I lunged forward, my teeth closing over his neck from the side.
His hands closed over my face, trying to pry my jaw open, but I simply braced my hands on his head and shoulder and jerked my head back, sharp teeth sawing through muscle, tendons and gristle. The taste that filled my mouth was far too pleasant to think about as I turned around to finish off the officer, who was trying to rise to his knees. He wasn’t breathing, though his chest moved spasmodically. He made it halfway to his feet, staggered, and fell again. Good enough, I thought, and turned.
There was only me and the last raider left in the small gully. She was sitting on the grass, her legs beneath her like she’s just folded onto the ground, her hands at her sides. Just one left, no fuss, and then I could go find the prisoners.
“Please,” she said, speaking to me directly. “I surrender. You’re a dragon. You’re intelligent, right? Please! Even if you don’t understand my words, please understand me!” As I got closer she closed her eyes and started to babble, tears trickling down her face. “Please. I don’t know what we did but I’m sorry. I’m not a warrior. You don’t need to kill me! I surrender! Please!”
I hesitated. I wasn’t sure why. One swipe with my claws and I’d be done, and I could go find those prisoners. I needed to round them up so I could get them back to a village somewhere, maybe send them toward Karakan to report what they’d seen, and then get back to the raider camp.
She was crying in earnest as I reached for her throat. She choked as my claws touched her skin but quickly recovered and kept repeating, “Please! Please! Please!”
God damnit, why did she have to beg?
I let go of her neck and knocked her over with a shove to the chest, then pinned her to the ground. “Why?” I growled in her language, standing above her with my face inches from hers. “Why do you deserve to live when so many villages have suffered? Did you think retribution wouldn’t catch up to you?”
She opened her eyes and looked at me. Her mouth opened, but all that came out was a shuddering breath as she stared into my eyes.
“Nothing to say for yourself?”
Her mouth worked, and the words spilled out in a babbling, stuttering torrent. “I… I had nothing to do with that, I’m not a cavalryman or even a soldier, I never hurt anyone, I swear, I don’t want to be here, they made me, I’m a bonded healer, I don’t ride on raids, I don’t fight, they make me carry a weapon because everyone has to carry a weapon but I’m only here to tend to the prisoners, I swear, please don’t kill me, please!”
I looked at her, then sniffed her. She stank of sweat and fear and desperation, but that was no surprise and didn’t tell me anything new. I looked around. No prisoners. No horses. Nothing moved except flies and water.
I should kill her, I thought, even as I stepped off her. I should get rid of her so that I don’t need to worry about her returning to her troop. It would be so easy. She was defenceless.
I couldn’t do it.
“Stay here,” I told her, turning away in frustration. “Don’t bother trying to run. I can fly faster than your horses can gallop.”
Then I took off in search of the prisoners.