“We could outrun them back to the mountains,” the scout reminded.
“We could outrun them all the way to Pipery,” an eager Siobhan suggested.
Luthien’s thoughts were moving somewhere in the middle of the two propositions. His group was outnumbered, but held a tremendous advantage of maneuverability. Ponypigs, resembling warthogs the size of large ponies, were brutal opponents, with strong kicking legs and nasty tusks, and cyclopians could ride them well, but they were not as swift as horses.
“We cannot afford to lose any riders,” Luthien said to Siobhan, “but if this is part of Pipery’s militia, then better to sting them out in the open than to let them get back behind the village’s fortifications.”
“No doubt they think us an advance scouting unit,” Siobhan replied, “with little heart for battle.”
“Let us teach them differently,” Luthien said determinedly.
The young Bedwyr sent nearly half of his force to the north then, on a long roundabout, while he and Siobhan led the remaining riders straight on toward the approaching cyclopians. He spread them out in a line across a ridge when the enemy force was in sight, letting the one-eyes take a full measure, while he took the measure of them.
The scouts’ information was right on the mark. The cavalry groups seemed roughly equal in strength, by Luthien’s design. What the cyclopians didn’t know was that they were facing a force of mostly Fairborn, with a well-earned reputation for riding and for archery.
Luthien scanned the green fields to the north, but his other forces were not yet in sight. He had to hope that they had not encountered resistance, else his entire plan might fall apart.
“With the cavalry in front,” Siobhan remarked, referring to the fast-forming cyclopian ranks, riders on ponypigs forming a line in front of the foot soldiers. The half-elf smiled as she spoke, for this was exactly what Luthien had predicted.
Time to go, the young Bedwyr realized, and he drew out Blind-Striker, raising the sword high into the sky. Out came more than fifty blades in response, all lifted high.
A few quiet seconds slipped by, the very air tingling with anticipation.
Luthien jabbed Blind-Striker toward the sky before him and the charge from the ridge was on.
The cyclopians howled in response and the thunder of surging horses was more than matched by the thunder of charging ponypigs.
The elvish swords and Blind-Striker unexpectedly came down, the skilled Eriadoran riders deftly slipping them back into their sheaths. The close-melee weapons had been but a ruse, a teasing challenge to the savage cyclopians, for the Eriadorans never intended to battle in close combat. On Luthien’s command, up came the bows.
A cyclopian’s eye was a large and bulbous thing, and wider still seemed the eyes of the charging Praetorian Guards when they realized the ruse and understood that they would be under heavy assault before they ever got near their enemy.
Luthien Bedwyr felt like a rank amateur over the next few moments. He got his bow up and fired off a shot, barely missing, but though he was a fine horseman and a fine archer, by the time he got his second arrow in place, most of the Fairborn riding beside him had already let fly three, or even four.
And the majority of those had hit their mark.
Chaos hit the cyclopian ranks as ponypigs stumbled and fell, or reared in agony. Stinging arrows zipped through, felling rider and mount, dismantling the order of the cyclopian charge. Some one-eyes continued on; others turned about and fled.
And then a new rumble came over the field as the remaining Eriadoran riders swept down from the north, firing bows at the cyclopian foot soldiers as they charged.
Luthien drew out Blind-Striker again as he neared the leading cyclopian riders. He angled Riverdancer for a close pass on one, but an arrow beat him to the mark, taking down the one-eye cleanly. Luthien easily veered past the now-walking ponypig, crossing behind yet another cyclopian. The one-eye turned in its seat, trying to get its blocking sword out behind, but Luthien smacked the blade aside and stuck the brute in the kidney as he passed.
With a groan, the cyclopian slumped forward, leaning heavily on the ponypig’s muscled neck.
Luthien spotted another target and charged on, his crimson cape flying out wildly behind him. The cyclopian, like most of its companions, had other ideas, though, and turned about and fled.
Luthien coaxed Riverdancer into a full gallop and ran the brute down, hacking his sword across the back of the one-eye’s thick neck. He moved away quickly, not wanting to get tangled up in the ponypig as its rider slipped to the ground.
Many of the cyclopian foot soldiers turned to flee as well, but others formed up into a square, heavy shields blocking every side, long pikes ready to prod at any horsemen who ventured too near. That square marched double-time, right back the way they had come, toward Pipery.
The Eriadorans continued to nip at the one-eyes, particularly interested in running down any cyclopian rider who strayed too far from the main group, but when those Fairborn scouts watching the roads further to the east announced that a second force was coming from Pipery to reinforce the first, Luthien knew that the time had come to break off and await the approach of the larger Eriadoran army.
He eyed the field, satisfied, as he and his riders crossed back to the west. A couple of horses had been downed, with three riders injured, but only one seriously. The cyclopians had not gotten off so easily. More than a dozen ponypigs lay dead, or quickly dying, on the grass, and another twenty wandered riderless. Less than a quarter of the two-score cyclopian cavalry had escaped unscathed, with nearly half lying dead on the field, along with a handful of the foot soldiers.
More important than the actual numbers, Luthien’s group had met the enemy again, on the enemy’s home ground this time, and had sent them running in full flight. Luthien would continue with the scouting mission now, but he held few doubts that the larger Eriadoran army would roll through this part of their course. The road to Pipery, at least, would be an easy march.
Brother Solomon Keyes knelt in prayer, hands clasped, head bowed, in the small chapel of Pipery. A far cry from the tremendous cathedrals of the larger cities of Avonsea, the place had but two rooms: a common meeting room, and Solomon Keyes’s private living area. It was a square, stone, unremarkable place; the pews were no more than single-board benches, the altar merely a table donated after the death of one of Pipery’s more well-to-do widows. Still, to many in the humble village, that chapel was as much a source of pride as the great cathedrals were to the inhabitants of Princetown or Carlisle. Despite the fact that Greensparrow’s cyclopian tax collectors, including one particularly nasty old one-eye named Allaberksis, utilized the chapel as a meeting house, Solomon Keyes had worked hard to preserve the sanctity of the place.
He hoped, he prayed, that his efforts would be rewarded now, that the invading army rumored to be fast approaching would spare the goodly folks of his small community. Keyes was only in his mid-twenties. He had lived practically all of his life under the court of King Greensparrow, and thus he, and most of the people of Pipery, had never before met an Eriadoran. They had heard the stories of the savage northlanders, though, of how Eriadorans had been known to eat the children of conquered villages right before parents’ eyes. Keyes had also heard of the wicked dwarfs—the “head-bashers,” they were called in Avon—for their reputed propensity for using their boots to cave in the heads of enemy dead and wounded. And he had heard of the elves, the Fairborn, the “devil’s-spawn,” disguising their horns as ears, running naked under the stars in unholy tribute to the evil gods.
And Keyes had heard whispered tales of the Crimson Shadow, and that one, most of all, had the people of his village trembling with terror. The Crimson Shadow, the murderer who came silently in the night, like Death itself.