White sparks geysered from the wound with a sound like a massive snake hissing. The wood-weird snapped down at Young Laska as she spun away, but Swinther swung his axe again, knocking the certainly fatal bite aside.
“Back! Swinther! Back!” shouted Young Laska, grabbing her bow and crawling away along the path as fast as she could. Ferin also retreated, sending another useless shaft into the wood-weird, the arrow again simply bouncing off and falling down the hillside.
Swinther backed up, swinging his axe in fast diagonals, but the blade did not cut; no wood chips flew. He could knock the forelimbs aside, but that was all. The wood-weird continued after him, though it did not move as swiftly as before. White sparks continued to fountain from its eyes and joints, but otherwise it did not seem to be much damaged.
“Go!” shouted Swinther. “I will slow it! Go!”
In answer, Ferin reached off the path and grabbed the corner of a slab of shale half her own size, though only three or four inches thick.
“Help me!”
Young Laska saw at once what Ferin intended. Dropping her bow again, she picked up the other side of the stone.
“Duck!” they shouted together, and as Swinther dropped low, they heaved the stone against the wood-weird’s already damaged foreleg. Once again, it did not affect the ensorcelled timber. But the stone broke into pieces and fell under the creature’s questing forelimbs, making it pause for a dozen seconds as its long rootlike legs tentatively felt for solid ground amid the rubble.
Useful seconds, which allowed Swinther to back away and Ferin and Young Laska to retreat several more paces around a corner where the ridge and the path upon it turned sharply north.
“Small stones!” shouted Ferin. “Break them in front of it!”
She started picking up smaller pieces of shale, hurling them to shatter in front of the wood-weird. Young Laska copied her, both of them picking up and throwing slabs as quickly as they could, covering the path with pieces of broken stone.
The wood-weird, blinded by the still-sparking Charter-spelled arrows in its eye sockets, came on cautiously, feeling about in the broken shale with its forelegs. It moved more erratically now, the Charter-spelled arrows working away in the joints to sever the Free Magic that articulated and drove the cleverly fashioned timber.
Swinther retreated around the turn in the path, dropped his axe behind him, crouched down, and started to throw slabs of shale as well. Ferin and Young Laska were now using both hands to scoop and throw, so that the path ahead of the creature was piled high with broken shale.
The wood-weird, blind and probing with its crippled forelimbs, and now confused by the shale everywhere and no clear path to find, missed the turn. It continued straight ahead, several steps too far. Its forelimbs slipped and it fell forward, rear legs scrabbling as the shale in front collapsed. For a moment it looked as if it might draw back, but then a whole great layer of shale slid down the hill, precipitating a sudden avalanche of stone.
The wood-weird surfed down the side of the ridge amid a clattering wave of broken shale, until it came to a halt several hundred feet below with a sickening crack. A second later it was buried by the several tons of shale that came down after it, and a great cloud of grey stone-dust rose up to the sky.
As the dust rose, there was a scream of rage from farther back along the ridge. A shaman climbed up to the path, ignoring the keeper who was heaving on the silver chain about his neck to keep him still. The shaman tried to run toward Ferin and the others, but only managed two or three steps before the neck-ring closed and he fell, choking.
The keeper climbed up behind the fallen shaman, knelt on his back, and jerked the chain savagely several times, as a warning or to ensure compliance. Then she let go, dropped the chain, and stood up to take the bow from her back.
Even before this keeper could take an arrow from the case at her side, she was struck by one of Young Laska’s ordinary, unspelled arrows. The yard-long shaft should have killed her, piercing her through and through, but just before it hit, some unseen force sent it spinning away.
“Charmed!” spat Young Laska, and sent three shafts in quick succession at almost exactly the same target: high on the left of the keeper’s chest.
Two arrows spun away like the first, diverted by the Free Magic charm. But the power of the defense failed with the last arrow, or at least did not entirely work. The arrow veered, but only by a few inches, and the keeper fell, transfixed through the neck by a bloodied shaft.
Ferin had drawn too, but not shot, thinking she was likely to miss at that range, and with the wind blowing.
The shaman, freed from the restraint of his keeper’s silver chain, slowly got to his feet. He paused for a moment, then came staggering along the path, face set in a mask of anger. He was just beginning to raise one hand in a spell-casting gesture when Young Laska sent three quick arrows at him as well. Either he had no defensive charm, or it was not ready, for all three struck. The shaman was spun about and fell from the ridge with one last screech of pain and anger, his descent accompanied by a cascade of shale. A few seconds later the stone-dust rose again, just as it had for the wood-weird he had made.
“Eleven to go,” said Ferin.
“I have no more Charter-spelled arrows,” said Young Laska in a matter-of-fact tone. “And only eight ordinary shafts.”
“We’d best not let them catch us, then,” said Swinther. He was examining the front of his leather jerkin, which had been ripped open by the sharp foreleg of the wood-weird, and was bloody underneath.
“You’re wounded?” asked Ferin. Her ankle was hurting much more, as Astilaran had predicted, but it was still nothing like as painful as it had been. She could move without restraint.
“No . . .” replied Swinther, wiping his bloodied hand on his breeches. “It swiped me, sure, but those limbs were strangely hot. It cauterized as it cut. A bite would have been a different matter, those snaggled, splintered teeth. . . . Stay still, I will come around you. The path grows very narrow soon and forks with a false dead-end ridge in the offing. Then there is the sharpest part of the ridgeline to pass, where we will need our hands and bare feet to grip. I do not think even that eight-legged creature could cross there.”
Young Laska looked up at the clouds that were drawing closer, and then down below. She was puzzled by what she saw, for only one silver-chained figure and his or her keeper were beginning to ascend, and they had no wood-weird with them. The other keepers were gathered close, their sorcerers kept in a huddle between them. From the look of all the gesticulating and the faint sound of shouts, there was an argument under way, one that had so far fallen short of blows.
“There’s only one sorcerer and keeper coming up,” said Ferin.
“Can you see which tribes the keepers are from, in the main body?” asked Young Laska.
“No. They are too distant to see the colors on their sashes,” said Ferin. She gestured back along the path. “That one you killed, he was Yrus. Sky Horse. Are you thinking they will fight each other? They will not, not when they are under orders from the Witch With No Face.”
“I think they don’t want to send their wood-weirds up the shale,” said Young Laska. She pointed where the ring of keepers was suddenly expanding, sorcerers being dragged back by chains, wood-weirds rising up on their tree-root legs. “Look, they are heading back toward the village.”
“To loot and burn, most likely,” said Swinther heavily. “Still, better we lose our houses and boats than our lives.”
“They will not go away unless they are sure I will be taken or killed,” said Ferin, a note of puzzlement in her voice. “But to send only one shaman, one keeper, not even with a wood-weird . . .”
Young Laska looked up at the clouds again—darkening clouds, moving quite rapidly toward the sun—and then she gazed back down at that lone shaman.
“I would hazard a guess their wind-eater is also a wind-caller,” she said slowly. “And not only that, a necromancer to boot. I can think of n
o other reason they would want to block the sun.”