Moments of Tension

We walked a few dozen paces further, Amaranz falling back to trail us again. We rounded a point of rock and suddenly I heard a light slap of skin on skin, just before I was shoved not too gently into a hollow in the very rock outcropping we’d just rounded. “Got a corkscrew?” Oornoe’e said.

Recovering my wits quickly, I shut my eyes and turned my head, my mind’s eye scanning the trail behind us, only dimly aware of the faint sound of rain that always accompanied this power. Clairsighting along the trail from a vantage point back on the other side of the rock outcropping and maybe fifteen feet up, I glimpsed of a knot of trolls cresting a rise, lumbering unhurriedly up the trail in our direction. They seemed to be two or three hundred-paces behind us, their long gangly legs eating ground quickly. I opened my eyes and shoved Oornoe’e back onto the trail.

“We’ll be late!” I breathed. She and I quickstepped to catch up to Luth and Amaranz, who had just kept walking. As we came up Amaranz shot me an apologetic look. I shrugged. Evidently it had been he who had spotted the hollow and alerted Oornoe’e to hide me there so my ‘champagne bubbles’ wouldn’t be visible to the trolls. He just hadn’t counted on Oornoe’e shoving me into it.

“What were you two doing?” Warban wanted to know.

“Gathering herbs,” Oornoe’e answered before I remembered that code. “Right, Dauroh?”

“Right. I got some thyme,” I said, trying to calculate when the trolls might catch up to us at their pace. Not that we were ambling along, but trolls are fast when they want to be.

“How much?”

“Oh … fifteen, twenty sprigs, maybe,” I guessed. “Is that enough?” I certainly hoped a quarter hour was enough to let us reach Amaranz’s ‘tea room.’

“Plenty.”

The trail made three more switchbacks, which I took care not to round immediately before Oornoe’e; shortly after that, Amaranz exclaimed expansively, “Ah! th’ tea room.”

The ‘tea room’ turned out to be a dense copse of poplars about five paces off the trail, inexplicably plunked down in this rugged, rocky patch of the Hoarmoss Ridge and in a shallow ravine to boot: a place to hide (chairs), but without any advantage of terrain from which to spring an ambush (no table). “Quickly, now,” Warban said, and summarily picked up Luth and threw him into the copse. Tossed, actually; Luth sailed over the intervening brush and rock without leaving any trace of his passage — the point of the exercise, after all — and handily snagged a branch, by which he swung himself up into the foliage and scrambled behind the tree’s trunk. Oornoe’e did the same, her flight a graceful, acrobatic dive into the trees. Warban reached for me, but I dodged, indicating the order I thought we should go in: first him or the wemic, then me, then Amaranz (allowing him to disguise the way our passing disappeared conveniently in front of the copse). Warban chose the wemic. I walked up to him, laid a hand on his chest, and quickly grabbed a foreleg as he floated up off the trail. Miming a bird in flight, I waved him toward the copse. My estimation of him went up a bit more as I watched him paddle awkwardly through the air and into the foliage, admiring how quickly he’d accepted my power impression. Not a sound escaped him.

With Amaranz’s help, Warban essentially jumped into the copse, producing a worrisome krak I hoped was a branch and not a bone. As I climbed up into Amaranz’s interlaced hands, I pressed a palm to his forehead, imprinting him with the same power I had given the wemic. A moment later I was brushing leaves out of my face and trying to find a convenient stout limb to settle on, having been warned off the branch Warban had cracked on landing. Amaranz joined us a little later, having erased our footprints up the trail, I gathered, as far as just before the last switchback. Luth’s slim hands wove the slow rhythmic patterns of a spell, probably a mirage to hide whatever bits of us might by chance be visible from the trail. For a minute or two the only sound in the copse was the pleasantly arrhythmic soughing of wind. This was briefly interrupted by the wemic bellowing, “What?! You cowards! May your carcasses rot —”

Warban had to physically restrain the wemic from jumping down to the ground and taking the trolls on himself. Apparently one or the other had finally taken a moment to tell or ask what exactly we were doing hiding in a poplar copse. “Let me go,” he growled menacingly, looking as if he was about to maul Warban. “I shall demonstrate what true courage is!”

“True courage, or true idiocy?” Warban growled back, which pulled the wemic up short (not only figuratively). “Which do you want more, to maim a knot of trolls for sport, or find your pride? We have been delayed enough on that matter.”

Reluctantly, the wemic admitted that it was wiser attempting to avoid the trolls. He clambered back into a secure perch, where while he fairly seemed to quiver with the desire to mow down a few trolls, he nevertheless sat still and made no sound. I had to wonder whether there was any point to that, considering the din he’d been making moments earlier.

Since we couldn’t see the trail for the same cover that was concealing us from the trolls, it was nominally up to me to conduct periodic checks on the trail. We figured we’d be able to hear it if or when the trolls passed by. The minutes dragged by — well past the quarter hour I’d estimated for Warban — with no trolls in sight. I was beginning to get a headache from having to sit with my knees against my chest, keeping me from drawing the deep breaths necessary to buffer the energy surges clairvoyance required. The next time Warban indicated I should check the trail, I almost said “Ugh” out loud. I suppose Amaranz noticed the look on my face, because he tapped me on the ankle with some sort of long, pipe-like contraption he’d dug out of his pack and indicated he would check the trail. I gave him a grateful you’re-welcome-to-it wave and went back to massaging my temples.

Although I could feel the resonance of my power impression was absent from his body, Amaranz glided as silently as a shadow from limb to limb to the north side of the copse. It always impressed me how quiet he was for someone his size. Carefully settling himself on a branch, he fell backward to dangle by his knees, holding the pipe to one eye. Several moments later he swung sideways to catch another, nearby branch. Once he was straddling the branch he’d just been hanging by, he signaled to Warban that he had seen four of the trolls coming in our direction.

We kept quiet for several minutes. Footsteps filtering through the leaves set off a round of significant looks. It did sound like a small group of trolls marching down the trail in our direction. Very slowly, Amaranz leaned down, pipe to his eye, and leaned back again nodding and signaling for quiet. As if we could hold more still than we were already! He and Luth and Warban looked tense. Oornoe’e looked bored, sitting primly sidesaddle on a thick limb. I wanted to stretch out at least one leg to let me breathe deeper, but I didn’t dare move. The wemic I didn’t look at, but no doubt he was even more uncomfortable than I was. Eventually the footsteps seemed to tromp near, and we heard troll grunts and that funny scritching sound they communicate with. Luth listened with a crooked smile on his face, broke into a grin, then all at once looked surprised and sat up very straight. On the trail, an argument seemed to break out. We heard some scuffling, several shouts, accompanied by the sort of whacking noise made by rocks struck together, followed by a loud fibrous thump crack. Amaranz’s tree groaned, shedding leaves. It took him, and the rest of us, several moments to realize one of the trolls had been thrown against it, and that it was very slowly tilting over into the copse.

From where I was, I could just see the scabrous bulk of a trollish shoulder behind the trunk of Amaranz’s tree. It wasn’t moving — but the tree was. Amaranz was trying to get a better grip on his branch and at the same time looking for a place to get to before the tree fell over completely. For now, it was snagged in the branches of other trees around it, but clearly it wasn’t going to hold for long.

We were so occupied with watching Amaranz that we all forgot about the wemic, and didn’t even notice that his tree was almost directly in the felled tree’s way. Only when I heard a sudden scrabble of claws on wood and a quick gasp did I turn around, to see the wemic hanging by his fingers from a branch, all four legs kicking frantically.

Warban moved before I did, but Luth moved before Warban, and faster. He leaped through his tree toward the wemic’s, approaching him from behind. Calmly — Amaranz was in another tree now, the felled one still almost upright but tipping noticeably now — Luth climbed to a branch above the one the wemic was hanging onto and signaled for him to let go. The wemic shook his head vehemently, not that I blame him. It wasn’t pretty to watch a gnome and a wemic starting to have an argument, so I started toward them as well. Before Warban got there, Luth just shook his head, swung down a branch, and fell on the wemic’s back, tangling his arms in Csim’Yabil’s mane. The sudden weight, of course, jerked his claws free. I heard Luth’s quick double snap of fingers only because I had a good idea of what he intended and was listening for it. The wemic’s look of rage turned to one of surprise when he discovered that, rather than plummeting to the ground, he was drifting gently downward, surrounded in a nimbus of faintly coruscating coppery motes, Luth hanging on to his neck.