Lady Melei was unwilling to spare any of her guards or knights to help search for Shell -- she wanted all her men battle-ready in case the bandits decided to attack -- so it was left to the three of them: Arai, Lillandra, and Sir Estil.

"Are you sure she left of her own accord?" Arai asked. "Maybe the bandits came back and kidnapped her."

"Unlikely," Lillandra said. "What would they want with a child? And anyway, Shell's not helpless. She would have fought back, made noise. I didn't hear a thing."

"You said the man was a sorcerer," Arai countered. "He might have used magic to silence her and slip past the sentries."

"It's possible," she admitted. "But you didn't hear her earlier. She was going on and on about these starving children in the outlaw camp. I'm almost certain she went up there to deliver them some food."

Arai sighed. Shell was a tough little kid, and usually very practical, but she was strongly affected by certain things -- the mistreatment of animals, the sufferings of children. Her own upbringing on the streets of Kingsaile -- by her own account she had come pretty close to starvation herself, on more than one occasion -- probably had something to do with that.

But this was foolishness -- rushing off into the dark to deliver food to children who may or may not even exist. He sighed again.

Fortunately the moon was bright and high in the sky, and they had little trouble seeing where they were going in the dark. The Titan's Barge -- the ship-shaped rock formation around which the outlaws had made their camp -- was a dark shadow in the distance, but they could see the flicker of firelight in a few places. Arai wondered how many outlaws were camped up there. And were they really starving? This was a difficult place to make a living, he was sure, but unlike the rest of the Tarnak, there was a fair amount of vegetation here, and monsters seemed to be less common in the mountains than in the deserts below. Life couldn't be any more inhospitable here than it was in the Hardways, back in Velon, at the foot of the Frozen Mountains.

Arai hoped they could find Shell and get her back to the caravan without any trouble, but he had come prepared: he had outfitted himself in the white armor Sir Estil had given him, and his hand was never far from the pommel of his sword. Sir Estil, too, was fully armored, and Lillandra had brought along a number of zemi, including the Assassin's Cloak. The strange garment rippled into the shadows and rendered her almost invisible in this half-light; all he could see of her was the white of her face.

They crept through the darkness, trying to make as little noise as possible. When they were perhaps three hundred yards from the outlaw camp, Arai stopped, frowning thoughtfully. How to proceed? Should they attempt to infiltrate the camp and look for Shell? Lillandra might succeed at that, with the Assassin's Cloak, but he was reluctant to send her off on her own.

He glanced at Sir Estil. "Any ideas?"

"We should try to get a bit closer," he said. "We don't want to run into--"

"Arai! Lillandra!"

Surprised, Arai scrambled for his sword, but the voice -- an urgent whisper, coming out of the darkness -- had belonged to Shell. The elf girl appeared as if from nowhere, sliding down a boulder and making her way over to them.

"Shell!" Lillandra whispered back. "Where have you been? We've been looking for you!"

"Sorry."

Arai breathed a sigh of relief. "You had us worried. What the hell are you doing out here?"

"I...was going to sneak into the camp and give some food to the children," she said, sounding a little embarrassed. "But there weren't any children. At least, I didn't see any."

"You went into their camp?"

"The outskirts of it, anyway. I was close enough to hear them talking." She looked up at them seriously. "Arai...we have to do something. We have to stop them."

"Stop them?"

"They're going to attack the caravan tomorrow morning, at first light," she said. "I heard them talking about it."

"Starving children, indeed," Sir Estil grumbled. "Those two riders Lady Melei spoke with yesterday came out of their camp to reconnoiter, to gauge our strength up close. How many are there?"

"I stopped counting at a hundred," she said. "I didn't see a lot of swords, but almost all of them had bows."

"Archers," Sir Estil mused. "A hundred, you say?" He shook his head. "That's more than I was expecting. I don't think we can fight off that many; they outnumber us almost three to one. Are you sure of what you saw?"

"I drank one of Emi's potions before I came up here," she said. "The one that lets you see in the dark. That's how I was able to spot you just now."

"And they have a sorcerer as well," Arai reminded them. "This isn't good."

"I heard a couple of the men talking," Shell said, "about Roth and Nessa. They're afraid of them."

"Afraid?"

"Roth can transform himself into some kind of beast. And Nessa is an assassin, from the west."

Arai's ears pricked up. "From the west? You mean she comes from Elent?"

"I don't know. All they said was that she was an assassin, and that she murdered a princess, and that she fell in with Roth after fleeing from her homeland."

Arai searched his memory. "A female assassin...who murdered a princess..." His eyes went wide. "The Skile Massacre."

"What's that?" Lillandra asked.

"It happened about five years ago. Princess Nattali and all of her guards and couriers were murdered in their beds while they were visiting the town of Skile, on the southern coast of Elent. Many of the victims were young women. The brutality of it shocked everyone; people were still talking about it in the Holy Empire years later."

"And they never caught the assassin?"

"Not to my knowledge."

"Who was Princess Nattali?" Shell asked.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

"The third in line to the Elentish throne. Elent is a huge nation, with a strong army, but the queen rules over a number of different peoples, and they don't always get along. There's the Jek Chiefdoms in the north, the Tessian Clans of the Crag, the so-called Mages of the Dark Mist. Some of these tribes would prefer to rule themselves. And the Queendom had its own succession crisis a few generations ago -- Queen Alfaze is from the Palais line, but she has cousins from the Pantheme line who still have their eyes on the throne. It was believed that the assassination was carried out by Quentis, a claimant from the Pantheme line, with the help of the Tessians in the Craglands. Queen Alfaze sent her armies into the Crag after the Massacre and captured Quentis, but..." He frowned. "The Craglands are just south and west of the Scarred Lands. It's possible some of her people managed to escape."

"Including this assassin, perhaps," Sir Estil said.

"Perhaps," Arai said. "It was no ordinary assassin who carried out the Skile Massacre, though. She killed over a dozen men, including a couple of sorcerers, with little more than a dagger."

"It might not be her," Lillandra pointed out.

"In any case," Arai said, "we have to warn the caravan. We have to try to prevent them from carrying out this attack."

"I don't see how that's possible," Lillandra said. "A hundred archers? What could we possibly do to stop them?"

Arai considered their resources. "What about your zemi?" In addition to the zemi they had collected at Nharlek's castle -- the Mermaid's Glass, the Witch's Dagger, the Badge of Deflection -- they now had a handful of zemi which Lillandra herself had made, including the Stone of Many Tongues, the Rabbit's Feet, the Assassin's Cloak, and a handful of others. He didn't see how any of these could help, but maybe Lillandra had some kind of ace up her sleeve.

"I don't have anything that would allow me to fight off a hundred men," she scoffed. "And if I tried to attack them with the Blades of Ice or the Burning Malestrom I'd probably kill us all."

"I'm not talking about fighting them off," Arai said. "That's obviously impossible. But there must be something we can do, to slow them down at least."

"I have an idea," Shell said. She reached into her backpack and showed them the leather case full of stoppered potions, which the potion-maker Emi had given to her some months ago. "There's a large basin in the middle of their camp. It's probably where they're getting their drinking water." She removed one of the vials. "If I dump this potion into it..."

"What does it do?"

"It's a sleeping draught," she said. "According to Emi's notes, a single drop is enough to put a man to sleep for two or three hours."

"The water will dilute it," Lillandra pointed out.

"It won't be enough to knock them out," Shell agreed, "but if I pour a whole vial into their water supply, it ought to slow them down, at least."

"It's not a bad idea," Arai said. "In fact it's probably better if it simply makes them slow and sluggish. If they drank the water and started falling asleep immediately they'd become suspicious of it right away. If it's just enough to make them muddle-headed, however, they won't understand what's happening to them until it's too late."

"But how many of them are likely to drink from the basin before the attack?" Lillandra asked. "Half of them? A third of them?"

"I think it's a worth a try," Sir Estil said. "Even if it is only a third. If there's anything we can do to reduce their numbers..."

Lillandra sighed. "Very well. Give me the potion."

Shell blinked at her. "You?"

"I have the Assassin's Cloak. I won't be seen."

She was practically invisible in the dark, while wearing that cloak, but Arai didn't like the idea of Lillandra sneaking into the bandit camp by herself. "I'll go with you."

"No, it's too risky. Don't worry -- I'll sneak in, contaminate their water, and sneak out as quickly as I can. It shouldn't take more than a few minutes." She turned to Shell. "Tell me more about this camp. Where this basin?"

Shell gave her a rough sketch of the camp, and told her the easiest way to approach it. "Guards?" Lillandra asked.

"I saw some men wandering around the perimeter," Shell said, "but I don't think they were guards."

"These are outlaws we're dealing with," Sir Estil said. "They probably have very little organization."

Lillandra snatched the potion from Shell's hand and threw her hood up. "All right. I'm going."

Arai stopped her, however, just as she was leaving. "Be careful," he warned her, looking into her eyes.

She met his gaze, nodded once, and ran off, melting into the shadows until nothing could be seen of her but the slightest suggestion of movement. Arai crouched back down behind the boulder and said a prayer to the God of the Monuments for her safe return.

Ten minutes passed, then fifteen, then twenty. Arai was now growing restless -- had something happened to her? Had she been captured? He peeked over the boulder, trying to see what he could of the camp, but even in the bright moonlight it was difficult to make out anything but shapes and shadows from this distance.

When she had been gone for perhaps thirty or thirty-five minutes, Arai rose to his feet, resolved to go after her. It would be dawn soon; he was already beginning to see a faint glow on the eastern horizon. The outlaws would be on the move shortly.

Before he could make a move for the bandit camp, however, Lillandra suddenly appeared, almost seeming to materialize out of thin air. "It's done," she said. "But I may have been spotted as I was leaving the camp."

"What took you so long?" Arai asked.

"There's a lot of men up there," she said. "And many of them were awake, and hanging around near that little rock-pond in the middle of the camp. I had to wait for an opportunity to get close." She shrugged. "But it's done."

"We should return to the caravan," Sir Estil. "As quickly as possible."

They got up and started making their way back down the high, sloping hills: Shell and Sir Estil in the lead, Arai and Lillandra following behind them. They had only gone about a hundred yards, however, when Arai suddenly heard a whooshing noise coming from above them, something like the beating of a wyrm's wings. He immediately looked up.

Flying in the air above them was some kind of shadowy monster, gliding through the dark sky. It was hard to make it out in the half-light, but its feathered wings, claws, and snakelike tail were obvious; it also appeared to have a long, pointed beak. It looked something like a cross between a dragon and a harpy.

At the same time the creature appeared, Sir Estil stumbled and fell forward. This was unusual; the knight was usually very surefooted. He caught himself as he fell, but was unable to rise to his feet. "What happened?" Arai called out, racing to the old man's side.

But he figured it out a moment later, when an arrow struck the earth just a few inches to his right, impacting on the ground. He looked up, and saw something that he hadn't seen before: there was a woman perched on top of the flying monster, and she had a bow in her hands.

Sir Estil had been struck in the back on the leg, below the knee, one of the few places which his armor did not cover. Arai reached down to help him up, but then he was struck with an arrow well. It hit the upper part of his cuirass, near his shoulder, and bounced away, but the impact of it nearly knocked him off his feet. He grimaced. That had been close; another inch and the arrow would have struck him in his unprotected shoulder.

The arrows continued to rain down. Shell, wearing the Badge of Deflection, could not be harmed by these projectiles, but the rest of them were in great danger, out in the open; this archer was a dead shot. "Lillandra!" Arai shouted. "Over there!"

He was pointing to a concavity beneath one of the great cliffs which rose out of the northern side of the pass. The top of the cliff projected well over a hundred feet over their heads; if they could get beneath it, they might find some protection from these arrows.

Lillandra understood his meaning, collected Shell, and headed for the cliff, while Arai pulled Sir Estil to his feet and helped him along. The knight was limping badly -- the arrow was still in his leg -- but he was able to drag himself forward. More arrows plunked into the earth all around them; one of them nicked Arai's ear, drawing blood. He winced and did his best to ignore it.

It took a minute, but they eventually made it beneath the cliff. The archer, and the monster on which she was riding, did not give up their pursuit, however -- the monster, flapping its huge, heavy wings, began gliding down to the ground, coming closer and closer. It landed near where they had gathered, beneath the cliff, and here Arai got a better look at it: it was a weird, chimerical thing, part lizard and part bird, with four stumpy legs and a snarling mouth full of white teeth. What the hell was it? Some kind of monster? But a monster would never allow a human being to ride it in that way...unless that human being was a sorcerer, equipped with a Dragon's Bit.

But it all became clear a moment later. The archer hopped off the monster's back, and almost immediately it began to change, its body melting and morphing into a new shape -- a smaller shape, a more manlike shape. And suddenly it wasn't a monster at all, but a man: Roth. And the archer, standing next to him, was his blonde-braided companion, Nessa.

"You see, my dear?" Roth said to her. "I told you they wouldn't get far."