Pavek slapped his hand against Yohan’s and pulled himself to his feet. “Better you than me.” Which was a lie. He had no idea what templars said to each other.
But Yohan laughed and shook his hand heartily. “That’s good. I’ll remember that.”
“See that you do.”
They released each other’s hand and took a step backward toward the quadrants of the circle they’d selected for themselves. For a moment Pavek wanted to say something more, something sincere, then Yohan turned away and the moment was gone.
* * *
Escrissar brought his force through the trees in a compact group: a dozen fighters in the front rank and three or four in each of the files. If Telhami’s estimate of their enemy’s strength was correct—and Pavek saw no reason to doubt it—the interrogator was committing himself personally to a single thrust and holding nothing in reserve.
On second glance, the interrogator wasn’t committing himself to anything, unless he was the black-haired half-elf marching second-from-the-left. There wasn’t a black enamel mask to be seen, like Telhami and Akashia, Escrissar was holding himself out of the battle, mind-bending from a safe distance.
And that wasn’t the worst thing Pavek saw, or didn’t see. He spotted Rokka and a few other templars he recognized from Urik, about ten in all, just as he’d figured. They’d left their yellow robes behind—no surprise; heavy sleeves were a dangerous obstacle to a swinging sword-arm—and marched in such oddments of weaponry and armor as they’d scrounged from the templarate armory and private armorers in the elven market. Their rag-tag panoply stood in considerable contrast with the fighters who marched around them.
Escrissar had filled his force not with the ill-equipped rabble from the market he’d hoped for, but with some three dozen hardened fighters, each of whom carried a polished wooden shield, a javelin, and a yard-long knobkerrie club all carved from bronze-hard agafari wood.
The agafari tree grew near Nibenay, and, as far as Pavek knew, no where else in the Tablelands. Nibenay’s templarate was composed of the Shadow-King’s wives only, so he was either looking at army conscripts—which didn’t seem likely given the way they marched—or one of the numerous mercenary companies Nibenay’s ruler employed to augment his harem.
But whether the Shadow-King knew that his mercenaries were here, far northeast of Urik, was a question only Elabon Escrissar could answer.
Nibenay’s mercenaries threw their single javelin before they descended into the trench around the outer rampart. Two farmers went down. One took a shaft through his left arm; he might recover from the shock to fight again. The other was gut-struck, and his screams were horrible to hear.
While the Quraiters hurled their first and second sharpened-stake volley, Yohan pulled every other fighter from that part of the inner circle that did not face the attack and repositioned them in the quadrant that did.
Agafari shields easily deflected those few stakes of the first Quraite volleys that were well-aimed and forceful, deflected as well the stakes of the third and fourth. Pavek hadn’t expected the stakes to inflict much damage, except, perhaps, to the enemies’ resolve. And perhaps they would have, if the bulk of Escrissar’s force had been rabble from the elven market. But the Nibenay mercenaries were laughing as they came over the outer rampart.
With luck—a monumental amount of luck—that laughter would make them careless.
He chose a place where the right flank of mercenaries would come against the inner rampart and hurled javelins himself, aiming for the Urik templars who lacked shields. He got one, too, square in the neck. She went down and a loud cheer went up from the Quraiters.
A shrieking, blood-red streak momentarily blinded Pavek, whether in the sky or in his mind’s eye, he couldn’t have said. His vision cleared in an instant and the apparition wasn’t repeated, but it wasn’t a good omen, either, if Akashia and Telhami could be so easily distracted.
But the enemy’s front rank was atop the second rampart, now, and no longer laughing. Pavek shouted for the Quraiters to take up their hand weapons. One druid, already so unnerved that she couldn’t move to attack or defend, was doomed, if she didn’t recover quickly. But her fate was hers to call; the Nibenay mercenaries in the second rank of the outside file charged forward, wailing the Shadow-King’s war-cry, and for Pavek, the battle had begun in earnest.
There was nothing skilled or subtle to his fighting, just beat or parry—with the flat of his sword when he could, because the agafari wood was more resilient than