CHAPTER 1.30 - ASSAULT ON HIGHBARROW: II
Hugo almost swallows his tongue as the restless bandit’s eyes sweep towards his location. He tries to suppress his body’s urge to freeze, to stop breathing entirely. Instead, he compels himself to inhale slowly and evenly, to resist his rising panic. Stiffening, holding one’s breath, he knows make for jerky motions that absolutely draw an observer’s eye. Better, if movement is necessary, to slump in place, focus on not checking out whether the moonlight is glinting off his crossbow. He understands that he can’t do a thing now to compensate for any tells but will certainly create some if he allows prey instincts to compel him.
The man’s eyes pass over him – literally, it appears, his gaze levelled above Hugo’s head –as he turns from the alcove formed by a dormer. Hugo has to bite back the urge to express his relief, particularly when the man heads towards the flight of stairs at the far end of the space. Truth be told, this would be easier without Anuk’s furious glare. She has no visibility of the attic barring Hugo’s hidey-hole but her attention’s making him nervous.
It's his worst nightmare, he thinks. He didn’t want to initiate anything until Anuk was inside, never mind the fact that she’s supposed to provide some nebulous ‘signal’ to Rian and Thae downstairs. Fate forces his hand, however, as the bandit sets foot on the top step towards the prisoners’ floor.
He raises his crossbow as smoothly as he can, feeling as though it’s dragging through mud, and squeezes the trigger just as the man’s chest is disappearing below the level of the banister. He has done his best to oil and service the weapon, but their time in Thaesurala’s grove was so fleeting and couldn’t reverse the abuse inherent to bandit ownership of an already cheap weapon. He previously owned a crossbow that emitted only the softest hiss as it was fired. He pushes away the thought, the butterflies in his stomach, watches the bolt fly. The men in their alcoves are responding to the click, the buzzing flight of the projectile, and Hugo knows their silent surprise is blown before they’ve even begun.
Anuk, it seems, watched him fire. At least Hugo’s bolt has flown true, caught the man as he descended the stairs. His comrades’ attention is suddenly dragged away from the sound of Hugo’s shot to their friend’s footsteps blurring, becoming an accelerating tumble down the stairs. Then Hugo’s bowels threaten to void as all hell breaks loose. In an instant, the window he had slipped through slams up, fully open. More terrifying, though, is the rattling sound as every other window in the space shakes in their frames as they too attempt to fly up. Anuk dive-rolls past him, past the enclosed alcove, hand already raising. Hugo doesn’t bother to mask his relieved sigh, focuses instead on reloading as efficiently as possible.
While silent, undetectable assault is his favoured approach, the woman is teaching him to appreciate full-blown fucking CHAOS. Anuk’s first bead catches the closest of the bandits flat-footed as Hugo hears the main door smash open two floors beneath them. It appears Anuk’s unsubtle signalling worked out, the thought almost making him giggle. But then his shot’s thrown off as his mind parses how Anuk conjured the explosive blast she just hurled. It simply cannot be. He watches one of the two remaining men on their level cringe away from his missed shot, still cowed by the residual rattling of the windows. The man shudders his weapon towards Anuk as she points two fingers at him and invokes her magic incantation. “Bang.”
Hugo has to suppress a mad giggle, busies himself pressing his back into the alcove and reloading. Onomatopoeia might be powerful, but no archanic language he has ever heard of includes “Bang” as an element. As he watches Anuk leap away from the bolts coming her way, Hugo knows he needs to solve this mystery. Assuming they live. He leans out, catches the third man staring into the shadows trying to perceive from which he’s being attacked. Rather than attending to his spent weapon. The man’s face slackens as Hugo buries a bolt into it, a lovely shot diminished by his racing mind. He didn’t peg Anuk as a Tower wizard, but her reliance on her book made him think she was cobbling together a similar style of magic. Maybe instead she’s simply feeling out a way to liberate some inherent magic living inside her?
He watches her lips form the ridiculous trigger word. Wonders why, in that case, the book at all? Decides this mystery has to be for later as Anuk and the remaining bandit are locked into cover at opposite ends of the long room, both too ensconced to fire well or to be hit. Besides, he can’t be certain that the bandit’s allies aren’t lying in wait drawing a bead on one or both of them.
Feeling Three shift against his heart, Hugo sprints diagonally across the floor towards the middle dormers. Just before he leaps and tumbles past the crumpled form lying out of the alcove, he remembers his own trigger word. A gout of flame jets towards the surprised man trying to shoot Anuk. He hears rather than sees the impact of his shot, the man’s scream. Urgently, he turns his attention to the shape at his feet. Hears another detonation as Anuk breaks any remaining impasse, nailing the burning man with a life-ending blast. The bandit at his feet isn’t breathing, isn’t moving, but Hugo knows he doesn’t have time to celebrate.
He reloads the crossbow as he sprints towards the head of the stairs, angling a raised thumb back towards Anuk. He wonders if it might be an illusion of the moonlight, but he could swear the woman’s grinning at his back. But the sounds of battle below him are undiminished, and that worries him. He swears he can hear impacts against wood and stone, his blood chills as he imagines a bandit going room to room, executing prisoners. His heart lightens a little as he spots the man at the foot of the stairs. This bandit is very obviously dead. If the bolt embedded in his neck weren’t sufficient, the twisted posture in which he landed would have ensured his end.
There’s little to see on the middle floor, the space seemingly sectioned into rooms with wooden walls. The stairs to the ground floor are ahead of him. To his left, a corridor stretches most of the length of the building with doors coming off either side and at the end. He can detect some muffled noises but cannot afford the time to investigate. At least none of the sounds seem imminently threatening. He realises that he can only make this guess because the battle has finished below him. But no, he must gather the party before they go door-to-door hunting stragglers. Particularly with the possibility of a caster, of Perasta lying in ambush.
He can hear Anuk above him, apparently ensuring their enemies are dead and moving towards him as he rushes for the ground floor.
He emerges into the focal area of the hall’s lowest level. This space is partway between the aesthetics of the other two floors, a wooden wall dividing the furthest third of the building from the open space into which he has stepped. The mass of tables and benches stacked and pushed to the periphery of the room speak to an erstwhile dining area. The bandits must have cleared this, anticipating combat. One man lies face down on the floor, the puddle of blood beneath him speaking to an encounter with Rian’s pike. Another body lies like a drunk, partly on a table and partly on a bench the bandit might have been using. He thinks of how appropriate the term ‘caught dead’ might be.
As Hugo scans around, suspecting the man on the bench might still be breathing, Rian pushes through the closer door, revealing a large but plain kitchen area beyond. Behind the big man, Thae’s looking flushed, presumably from ferocious battle. The woodsman glances back at the cleric before urgently asking Hugo “Are you two okay?” Before he can respond, he hears Anuk’s clipped “We’re fine, Rian” from above, in a tone that belies her attention is somewhere else entirely. Hugo smiles, nods back at the pair emerging from the kitchen. “You two healthy?” Swears Thae’s eyes drop to the floor as Rian points to the bandit sliding slowly down off the bench. “This one could be waking up. No sign of Perasta.”
-x-
A few minutes later, Hugo’s eerie uncertainty about Anuk has heightened. She’s actually being nice to him. They did the sweep of the middle floor together, accompanied by Thae and an extremely anxious Atheran. No sign of that fucking…wizard? Hedge wizard? But thankfully, the hunters and villagers in the rooms were largely unharmed beyond some being tied to the beds. Marek, they discovered, was clinging to life so barely that he had been dumped without any restraints. In response to Atheran’s cry on seeing the man, Anuk had offered “Hugo’s plan went off without a hitch” entirely unbidden. Followed up with “And I’ve seen what Thae can do.” This as the cleric began applying healing light and a gentle hand to the man’s chest. The youth’s breath had more of a rasp to it than Hugo liked, but his trust in Thae was absolute.
With little more to do, he accompanies Anuk downstairs in silence to where Rian is standing over the bandit. The man is spreadeagled; his wrists and ankles bound by rope to the table’s legs as he muzzily comes to consciousness. As the big man looks round, Anuk’s pace speeds up, obviously keen to question this hapless bastard. Rian seems relieved to see the pale woman take charge, seemed stumped about how to proceed. Hugo hasn’t really thought as far as interrogation, reeling as he is from his plan teetering so close to disaster. Besides, the woman intimidates him, why not this guy?
The girl leans down over the man’s face, his eyes still rolling. She frowns, briskly slaps him across the cheek. This seems to focus him, although to Hugo his eyes appear somewhat glazed. “Where’s that prick Perasta?” The woman’s clipped tones radiate fury. The man begins muttering something, receives another stinging slap. “Speak up!” The bandit looks terrified, but his voice sounds thick as he pushes out “..abandoned us, ran away.” Rian has placed the man’s weapons safely on one of the tables edging the room, but Anuk picks up a small pouch next to his thigh. The man starts, limbs pulling against his restraints as he can’t see what she’s doing beyond her proximity to his soft parts. A dulled relief colours his expression as she empties several heavy gold coins from the pouch onto the table, produces a fuller pouch from her belt and pours dozens more onto the pile.
“Well paid for this, weren’t you? By whom?” The man blears, “…Rasta’s money, paid us direct.” He seems like he might throw up, but Anuk’s relentless. “What were your orders for when you found us, huh?” The bandit’s silent, beyond trying to catch his breath. Anuk gives this a moment, sighs. “What were you supposed to do to us if you found us? We know Perasta can track us.” The man’s eyes are rolling back, his mouth moving but nothing coherent coming out. Anuk moves behind his head to the end of the table, grabs the man’s bound wrist with one slim hand.
“What is he using to track us? Tell me!” At the shout, the man whimpers “I don’t know, I don’t know…” Anuk’s dagger is out of its sheath and whips between the man’s fingers in a flash. Hugo jumps, sees Rian respond similarly, each looking to the other in confusion. They’ve both seen her do weird things and to Hugo’s mind this could be an illusion. The moment is frozen as, from the edge of his vision, he spies Thae and Atheran, deep in whispered discussion, coming down the stairs. The pair freeze in place, staring at the tableau in front of them. As Hugo looks back towards the table, he watches thick gobbets of blood dropping from the wounded man’s palm, hears the bandit begin to emit a keening, childlike groan of horror.
His stomach twists.
