Rurik's Arc

Chapter 17 of 22

The pass held. But the enemy did not leave. They pulled back past the tree line and stopped, out of sight. Rurik stood at the narrowed gap and watched the empty ground. Silence was worse than the charge. He could not tell if they meant to march home or circle wide and strike his blind side. Eleven bows could not guard two directions at once. "They're doing something down there," Rurik said. "I can't see what." Thorin climbed the cask beside him. The old dwarf carried his father's axe, its runes cut deep in the steel. He had walked out of one betrayed pass alone; he knew the shape of men planning a second blow. "Could be a retreat," Thorin said. "Could be they're splitting to come around. You wait to find out, you find out too late." "Then I stop waiting." Rurik turned to the wyrm. It lay coiled below the barrel wall, the black gash still wet along its iron scales. Its gold eye rolled to him. He knew he asked too much. It could not climb the wall again. But it could still fly, if only for a moment. "One pass," Rurik told it. "Look. Then come back." Bjorn caught his arm. The dark-braided warrior had bargained safe passage for a stolen blade, and held Rurik's own belt-knife as hostage against the gold still owed. He did not waste words. "It's hurt. Send it up, it may not come down." "If they circle, we're all dead by dusk," Rurik said. "I need eyes." Bjorn let go. "Your creature. Your call." Rurik put his hand flat on the cold scales. The wyrm gathered itself, uncoiled, and rose off the ravine floor. One side of its body dragged. It climbed slow, wobbling, over the tree line, and vanished south. Kjell watched it go from below, a hand on his traps. "If it drops, I can't reach it," the hunter said. "Not before they do." Rurik counted his own breaths. Twenty. Forty. Then the wyrm came back over the trees, low and crooked, and folded down behind the wall. It hummed. The sound came up through the dirt, a deep vibration in Rurik's boots. He had trained his men to know it. One pulse, then two. "Two," Thorin said. "That's the split signal." "They're not retreating." Rurik felt the truth settle in his gut. "They're coming wide. West side, past the rim." He looked at the eleven exhausted bows, at Gunnar leaning on a pried iron door, at the traps seeded in mud that guarded only the mouth. The blind blow had a direction now. It had a direction, and it was coming for the one flank he had left open. Rurik pulled his men off the narrowed gap. "Leave the mouth to the traps," he said. "We swing west. We meet them before they crest the rim."