Hyllis Family Story 1: Telekinetic (20 page)

In fact
Tarc saw that many of the men were slowing and talking to each other. Some had turned back for their homes. Daum shouted, “Someone’s killed the deputies at the Smith’s station!” Tarc realized that the station they had stopped at was indeed near the town’s five blacksmiths, though he hadn’t heard it called that himself.

Daum’s call didn’t keep the men from stopping and turning for home. Probably they assumed it was a murder investigation rather than an invasion.

Tarc extended his ghost into the houses he was passing. People were up and about, peeking out windows, but not mobilizing like his father had obviously hoped.  He and Daum ran on toward the wall.

When they were about three blocks from the wall Daum
grabbed Tarc and jerked him into a side street. “Wha…?” Tarc began. Then he heard the hoof beats he hadn’t noticed in his concentration on what was happening in the neighboring houses.

As Daum held
Tarc in a deep doorway around the corner they watched a troop of horsemen ride by. “Shit!” Daum said, “The men who stayed at the tavern were there to open the gate for the rest of these men! Walterston has fallen without a fight!”

Tarc realized that someone must’ve killed the gate guards and opened the gates if men like these were riding in.

When the troop had passed, Daum said, “Let’s get to the armory, we need to get the town’s weapons out before these bastards figure out where they are!” He looked around the corner, then started off at a trot again. Tarc followed.

Daum rounded the corner to the armory and halted abruptly,
Tarc running into his back. “They beat us to it!” he said with dismay, shoving Tarc back around the corner. Daum carefully peered back around the corner again, “Shit, shit, shit, shit!

Tarc
looked with him. In the dim moonlight he could see a group of men stood outside the armory, swords drawn. Some men ran back and forth inside the drill center area. Tarc wondered where Captain Pike was. Pike lived full-time behind his office in the corner of the armory.

From behind them running boots approached.
Tarc turned and saw Sgt. Garcia running up.

“What’s
the hell’s going on?!” the sergeant demanded.

Daum turned. Seeing who it was, he said, “We’re being invaded.”

“Jesus, let’s get to the wall!” the sergeant said, starting to shoulder past them.

“It’s too late for that!” Daum said, grabbing Garcia by the elbow. “They brought in a small party yesterday
and that group opened the gate in the middle of the night. The bastards are already inside, so getting on the wall won’t do anything!”

“Inside! How did they get a party inside?!” Garcia asked, peering around the corner.

“Through the gate a few at a time during the day. Some of them stayed at the tavern this evening.”

“Christ! They’ve got the Captain!”

Daum leaned back around the corner to see, so Tarc got on his knees and looked around himself. Several men were jerking Captain Pike out the gate of the drill center. His elbows were bound over a stick behind his back and his ankles looked like they were tied with about a foot of rope between them.

A wagon pulled up and they jerked the Captain toward it.
Tarc saw with dismay that it was the tavern’s wagon pulled by Shogun. He realized now that when he’d scanned the stable for the men’s horses earlier that the stable had been completely empty.
How did I miss the fact that Shogun was gone too?!

The men lifted Pike up and threw him into the back of the wagon. More men ran out of the armory carrying
things that they threw into the wagon with him though Tarc couldn’t see what it was.

Daum turned to Garcia, “Should we go down there and try to free the Captain?”

Tarc’s stomach clenched on the thought of confronting those hard looking men with swords, but Garcia said, “It looks like they’re taking him somewhere. Maybe we can ambush them in transit. We’d have to be crazy to confront them there with just the two of us.”

Tarc
didn’t know whether to be relieved or offended that Garcia hadn’t included him in their putative attack.

The man driving the wagon snapped the reins and Shogun pulled away. Two of the men who’d been throwing stuff into the wagon next to Pike followed. Garcia said, “We’ll parallel them on this street,” and turned to trot to the next corner.

Tarc trotted behind the sergeant and his father, thinking that if you counted the driver the odds were still two to three. At the next corner they waited a moment, then Shogun came around the corner toward them.

Garcia pushed
Daum and Tarc back, then looked around. “The two guards have climbed up onto the wagon bed. That gives them a height advantage, but they’ll tend to be looking ahead.” He stepped into a doorway and motioned Daum into the next one. “We’ll run out quietly and cut the backs of their thighs just above the knees to hamstring them. If they see us coming we’ll be screwed because they have swords and height, we can’t win then. We’ll have to run away for now and try again later.” He saw Tarc then and said, “You go back a couple more doorways where you’ll be safe. If we have to abort the attack we’ll run on across the street and you’ll have to meet your dad back at the tavern.”

Tarc
hid in an indentation in the walls just beyond Daum, his heart pounding. 

Shogun passed the corner.

Garcia held up his hand to wait.

The driver at the front of the wagon passed the corner.

The two guards rolled past.

Even after the back of the wagon had gone by Garcia’s hand still said to wait. When it had traveled about ten feet past them, he waved forward and started running
after it himself, lightly on the balls of his feet.

Daum took off just behind him, slanting toward the guard on the right.

Too afraid to stay by himself, Tarc left his hollow and ran about ten feet behind the two men. He spread out his ghost and sent his attention everywhere he could send it but the street seemed otherwise empty.

Something seemed to have warned the two guards because they whirled to look back, seeing the two men approaching.

Daum and Garcia broke off their attack, Daum running right and Garcia left. Tarc started to run to the right after his father, but then realized that, instead of the expected sword, the guard on the right had a bow with an arrow nocked.

The guard lifted the bow and pushed it ahead, aiming the arrow at Daum’s unprotected back.

Tarc’s hand had already found the knife’s hilt behind his back.

His hand flashed forward.

The knife flew, guided by his ghost, and again rocketed into someone’s eye.

The guard convulsed, falling off the back of the wagon.

Tarc turned again and ran after his father.

Then he heard a heavy clanking thud and turned to see that the second guard had leapt off the wagon, revenge apparently on his mind as he
snarled with rage.

Tarc
thought that surely he could outrun the man, but found that he couldn’t bear the feeling that he had a target on his back. Reaching back, he grabbed the hilt of his second knife.

Spinning
, he flung it; then turned forward as he continued to run. His ghost didn’t need his eyes to guide the knife after all.

Again,
his talent sent the knife right into an eye socket. Going for the eye seemed to work well and he didn’t have to worry about whether they were wearing mail.

The guard crashed to the street, his body twitching and thrashing as it skidded in the dirt.

Tarc cupped his hands and called after his father as quietly as he thought he could and still be heard. He turned and trotted back to get his knives.

He’d just worked the second blade free and wiped it on the guard’s clothes when Garcia trotted
by, “What the hell happened to those guys?!” he called out.

Tarc
shrugged, holding the knives out of sight, but Garcia had already gone by after the wagon.

Daum picked up the man’
s bow and arrow. He nudged Tarc, then drew. Daum sent the arrow after the wagon, now going about as fast as old Shogun could pull it. Tarc’s ghost flew with the arrow, guiding it just over the man’s hunched shoulders and into his head. Though he hadn’t intended it, the arrow exploded out through the man’s eye.

With a grunt the man fell forward, tangling in the traces and pulling Shogun to a halt.

“Amazing shot!” Garcia yelled back, as he climbed onto the wagon.

Daum put one hand on
Tarc’s shoulder as the other held the neck of Tarc’s shirt open for him to slip his knives back into their sheaths. With a croak in his voice he said, “Thank you son. You saved my life there.”

Not knowing what to say
, Tarc merely nodded. He felt embarrassed to be credited, when actually he’d been saving his own life.

By the time Daum and
Tarc caught up to the wagon themselves, Garcia had thrown the driver off and started Shogun going again. “Untie the Captain,” he said, “In case we run into more of the invaders I want us to be farther from the dead guards so we could claim we just found the horse pulling the wagon through the streets.”

Daum vaulted into the back of the wagon and bent over Pike, cutting his bonds.
Tarc jumped on a moment later. Looking down he saw that the other objects the men had piled in beside Pike were weapons from the Armory.

Garcia turned in the driver’s seat
. To Daum he said, “After seeing that shot I can understand why they call you ‘the Archer.’ Did you figure out what happened to those other two guards?”

Daum shrugged. Pike’s arms were free and Daum started cutting at his ankle bonds. “Captain,” he began. “It’s those strangers I talked to you about.
The ones that looked like they’d been soldiers in the past. Some of them stayed in the tavern last night. Then in the middle of the night they all left. They killed the deputies at Smith’s Station and I suspect the ones at the main gate. They must have opened the main gate because troops came up the street from there.”

The Captain was sitting up now.
“I
told
Walters not to let very many of those bastards in town at a time. But, ‘Oh no, we’ve got them in control. They’re good customers, so we’d just be shooting ourselves in the foot.’ Shit!” He looked around, “Well, too late for recriminations now. Has anyone rung the alarm?”

Daum shrugged again,
“We rang the one at the Smith’s Station for a while, but then four of the invaders came so we had to stop.”

“How many of them are there?”

“The troop we saw riding down Main had about fifty. But I think there are others. Quite a few were already in town when those came in.”

Pike rubbed his ankles as he thought. “We
’ll need weapons. They’ve got the ones in the armory, but maybe they don’t know about the ones kept in the wall towers.”

Garcia turned the wagon toward the wall as Pike peppered them with more questions.
They didn’t know the answers to most of them, so Tarc began to feel as if he’d been singularly oblivious as they’d gone about the town that night.

When they got to the tower they found its weapons cache broken open and empty.

They tried another but it had been rifled as well.

Daum said, “We should get to the blacksmith’s shop
s. They should have some weapons in stock.”

Pike nodded and they headed that direction. They had to wake each of the blacksmiths up. When they did
, they found to their dismay that over the past couple of weeks the strangers had bought all the swords that any of the smith’s had had in stock.

Pike turned to them, “
Those bastards have been scouting us now for quite a while. They know who we are, and have evaluated our fighting ability as evidenced by the fact that they cleaned out the armories, killed the deputies, and tried to imprison me. I suspect they’re going to try to control the town by terror and force of arms. Our best bet is guerilla warfare against them. They have almost all the weapons, so these here in the wagon are incredibly valuable. Any ideas where we can hide them?”

Daum grunted, “
We have a hidden panel in the cellar of the tavern.”

Tarc
blinked,
We do?

They started for the tavern.
Tarc drove the wagon with Daum riding in the back, an arrow nocked in his bow. Pike and Garcia scouted ahead. After they’d been rolling a few minutes, Daum set a bow and quiver on the seat next to Tarc.

Tarc
had begun to hope they’d make it without meeting resistance, but when they were in the block before the tavern, Pike and Garcia suddenly stopped. They’d just looked around a corner. They stepped back and hid in doorways, motioning Tarc over to the side.

Tarc
pulled over against the buildings and stopped.

Daum hissed, “Get down!”

Tarc slid off the seat with his bow and quiver, pulling out an arrow and nocking it. He reached out to extreme range with his ghost. He could faintly feel six men who were about to come around the corner. Quietly he said, “Six men coming around the corner. Armed, so probably invaders.”