Ceadrin looked as if he were giving the idea some consideration.
“Kill them, and I kill myself,” Myrana warned. “Then there’s no hostage. But let us live, and I know I can help in one other way.”
“How?” the raiders’ lone goliath asked.
“If I show myself, as they’re reaching the narrowest part of the pass, they’ll stop. Then you can make your attack, and even if they try to run, it’ll be from a dead halt. You’ll have a much easier time of it if I’m here. And cooperating.”
“She makes sense,” Ceadrin said. He turned toward Myrana and her friends and lowered his voice. “You always make sense, Myrana. It causes me to be suspicious of you. If I find that you’ve deceived us in any way, you’ll wish you had died that first day. I’ll let my friends kill yours, slowly, while you watch. And your own demise will be excruciatingly slow and painful. I promise you that.” He grinned at her, his orange eyes boring into her. “And like you, I take my promises seriously.”
Two days passed. The raiders and their captives waited in separate groups, high on the twin ridges overlooking the pass. Aric, Amoni and Myrana had been kept with Ceadrin’s group, while Ruhm and Sellis had been made to climb the opposite slope with a group commanded by the halfling. Aric was still working out the hierarchy of the raiders, but he gathered it had much to do with an individual’s ruthlessness and skill in battle. The halfling, for all her diminutive size, appeared tough, with no sense of fear or mercy.
Three raiders had taken the mounts and wagons to a point outside the hills to wait out of sight from the caravan regardless of which approach it took.
On the third morning, Aric woke up to find that most of the raiders had taken up their positions on the hillside. Myrana was nearby, sitting on the skins she slept under. Amoni stood close to her, staring into the southeast. They couldn’t escape from here, but none of the raiders paid them any attention. Their gazes were fixed, instead, on something that might have been a cloud of dust in the far distance. “How long do you think we have, Myrana?” Aric asked. “Sooner or later, they’ll figure out that the House Ligurto caravan isn’t coming through here after all.”
“They will,” Myrana agreed. “What I didn’t tell you is that this pass is indeed used for transit—just not by us.” She nodded her head toward the smudge on the horizon. “I’m not sure who that is coming this way, but it’s not House Ligurto.”
“Someone’s really going to be ambushed?” Amoni asked.
“So it would appear,” Myrana said. “And we’d better be ready to take advantage of it, because I doubt we’ll get another chance.”
“I wish we could tell Sellis and Ruhm.”
“Sellis will figure it out. I don’t know Ruhm well, but I expect he will, too.”
“You’re probably right,” Aric agreed. “I just hope we decide to take advantage of it in the same way.”
“Me too,” Amoni said. “And I hope our captors don’t figure out that’s not a House Ligurto caravan until it’s too late. Because they are going to be very, very angry when they do.”
They watched the approaching party, more than just a plume of dust at this point, but not yet discernible. Aric’s fingers rested lightly on the hilt of his sword, tapping against it. His left foot was twitching.
“Can you be still?” Myrana asked him.
“I’m anxious,” he admitted. “Since we were captured, we’ve been living under the threat of imminent death, any time they tired of us. But now … now death is more imminent than ever. Even I can tell that group isn’t a caravan. They’re moving too fast. Once the raiders figure that out, they’ve no reason to let us go on living.”
“I have a feeling that once they figure that out, they’re going to be a little busy,” Myrana said. “Those are thri-kreen.”
“You can see that far?”
“Far enough to make that out. Nothing else moves quite like thri-kreen.”
She was right, Aric realized. He remembered seeing individual thri-kreen in Nibenay—not often, as their insectlike race was drawn to be part of their birth clutch, and failing that to join any other pack available—and their odd build, taller than all but the tallest elves, with powerful legs and four arms and sand-colored carapaces sweeping behind them like cloaks, gave their gaits a unique and noteworthy strangeness. Their heads seemed oddly unbalanced on slender necks, and their antennae were constantly in motion as well.
More notable still was the sight when two or more walked down the street together. While each thri-kreen individual looked awkward, each step an unlikely series of jerky motions, in combination they moved exactly the same. Whether there were two or six, the largest group Aric had observed for any length of time, their motions matched exactly, as if there were only one mind operating all six bodies, all six sets of arms and legs.
“I’ve never seen them in combat,” he said. “But I know what you mean.”
“That’s them, all right,” Amoni said. The sun was still climbing into the sky. Sunlight gleamed off Amoni’s copper skin from the knees up, and below that her legs were shaded. “In combat it’s not quite the same, because they’re fierce fighters and they’ll take any advantage.”
Aric had an idea. He rose and stood next to Amoni. The raiders on the far hill were still completely in the shade, but he was, like Amoni, half lit by the sun. Soon enough the raiders would tell them to sit, because they would give away the ambush if they were seen.
So he slipped his sword a few inches out of its scabbard, facing into the sun and tilting it slightly. Sunlight winked from the steel blade. He directed that wink toward the southeast, toward the oncoming thri-kreen.
“What are you up to now?” Myrana asked.
“I’m letting them know someone’s up here. Stand between me and the other slope, Myrana, so they don’t see.”
Myrana hurried to do as he bade her. In her position, Amoni was already partially blocking him. “Clever,” she said.
“It’s my turn, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know about that. But this is an excellent time for it.”
The compliment made him beam almost as much as the sun flashing off his blade was.
He couldn’t keep it up for long, he knew. If he wasn’t careful one of the raiders on his side of the hill would see what he was doing, and then the three of them would likely be slain before the thri-kreen even made it this far. He had no way of knowing if the insectlike humanoids had spotted him, but he knew if he’d been in their place, looking toward where the canyon funneled down, he would have seen such a sign.
He let the blade sink back into its scabbard and sat down again. Still, his fingers played about the hilt, nervous as ever. He had done what he could do. Now it was just a matter of time.
You there!” one of the raiders shouted. He was another halfling, this one a male and no bigger than the female. He looked younger still, but Aric knew it was hard to tell with that race—from any distance at all they all looked like children. This one had wisps of dark hair growing from his chin. “No one said you could stand.”
“No one said we couldn’t,” Amoni replied.
“I’m saying it.”
“Fine,” Aric said. He sat down, and Myrana and Amoni joined him.
“I’m keeping my eye on you,” the halfling warned them. “So don’t think you’ll be able to try anything, when we attack that caravan.”
“It’s no caravan,” Ceadrin corrected. “I think it’s thri-kreen. We’ll let them pass, they’ve nothing we want. But keep an eye on the prisoners just the same—I’ll be wanting a word with the crippled girl when this is done.”
“Do your raider friends on the other side know you’re letting them pass?” Myrana asked. Her jaw was thrust toward the elf, her eyes narrow slits. Aric knew she didn’t appreciate being called a crippled girl—true as it might be, she got around fine, if more slowly than some, and didn’t feel crippled in any serious ways.