Teleporter (a Hyllis family story #2) (20 page)

“No, I don’t think we can kill
all
of them. But I think if we take out some of their guards, it’s going to scare the
hell
out of them. If they run away,” she shrugged, “problem solved.”

The kid got a distressed expression on his face. He said, “That’s what we thought when they left Walterston.”

She recognized how torn he was, “You heard what you just said, didn’t you? You just made my argument for me!” She put a hand on his shoulder, “Tarc, the world would be better off if they were
all
dead.”

He looked numb, but nonetheless Tarc nodded at her. She wasn’t sure whether he agreed or just wanted to make her happy. Lizeth said, “Good, I’m going to keep walking on around the farm buildings, waiting to get challenged. You stay a little ways behind me as my backup.”

“Um, I should be in front. When you respond to the challenge in a girl’s voice, they’re gonna know that something’s wrong.
You
should be backing me up.”

“We need someone stealthy out in front.”

“I followed you here all the way from the caravan.”

She grinned at him in the dim moonlight. He had her there and she’d just as well admit it. “Damn! I guess that must mean you’re stealthy all right. Otherwise it means I suck at watching my six.” She waved her sword in the direction they’d been going, “Okay, you take the lead.”

They started out, Tarc walking quietly along. He said, “I’m just going to walk normally but quietly. If I look like I am trying to sneak up on them it seems much more likely that the guard will attack us without challenging first.”

Deciding that sounded reasonable, Lizeth quietly said, “Okay.”

Lizeth had the distinct impression that Tarc was unsurprised when a man said, “Corn,” from behind a tree trunk about 12 feet in front of him.

Tarc paused and said, “Cob.” He looked around, “You seen anything?” He reached up to scratch his neck.

“Naw,” the guard said, “all I’m seeing is
red,
dammit. Can you believe that stupid son of a bitch Johnson has got
six
of us out here standing watches? Like he thinks those pansy caravaners are going to come after us in the middle of the…”

Tarc’s scratching hand had reached down into the back of his shirt, then abruptly shot back out of his shirt and towards the man. As the guard fell over, Lizeth realized that he must keep his knife hidden in a sheath between his shoulders. She walked up and stared at the body. Looking back up at Tarc, she said, “You really
can
hit them in the eye socket
every
damned time can’t you?”

Tarc shrugged, “Not if they’re facing the other direction.”

Lizeth snorted. “Well, if this guy was telling the truth, there’s only three more guards.”

Tarc nodded, quickly retrieved and cleaned his knife, then started walking on around the farm buildings. When they came to the next watch stander, it once again seemed like Tarc was walking directly towards him. You’d think he knew where they were! Tarc responded to the man’s challenge, but kept slowly walking around to the other side of the guy. Sure enough, the guard slowly turned with him, this one also complaining about standing an unnecessary watch. Unfortunately for the guard, this left his back to Lizeth. The man suddenly stepped a little closer to Tarc and began to say, “Wait, who are y…”

Lizeth struck.

Tarc stared at the guard as he lay dying, then at Lizeth for a moment, then walked on. Lizeth could tell he still felt conflicted about what they were doing.

They made a complete circuit of the farmhouse and indeed found and killed a total of six guards. Tarc, looking exhausted, said, “Okay, we headin’ back to the caravan now?”

Lizeth said, “With the guards gone, we should be able to cause a lot more mischief.”

“Like what?” Tarc asked warily.

“Set the farm house and barn on fire.” Lizeth said, her eyes on the small cluster of tents that some of the soldiers were staying in. “I don’t think we can do much to the bastards that are in those tents.”

“The women are in that barn!”

Lizeth turned to stare at him. He’d said it like he
knew
it, “What makes you think that? Granted, now that you mention it, it seems likely, but how would you
know
?”

“Um, I don’t…” Tarc said. Lizeth couldn’t know that he’d been able to tell by the shapes of the people in the barn that they were almost all women. “I’ve just been wondering where the women are. The barn is the most likely location, don’t you think?”

“Okay,” Lizeth said slowly, turning to look at the barn, “I suppose you’re probably right.” She looked around, “We can at least set the house on fire.”

Tarc shook his head, “They, um, probably have some of the women in there too don’t you think? Whoever their new leader is, he probably has…” Tarc petered out, not wanting to say that his ghost told him that the biggest room in the farmhouse held a large man and a young woman. He had an arm carelessly draped over her. She lay rigidly at the very edge of the bed.

Lizeth sighed, “I guess you’re probably right about that too. You gonna make any suggestions of your own, or you just gonna shoot
mine
down?”

Tarc looked around the camp. After a moment, he reluctantly said, “We could do the same as they did to us.”

Lizeth frowned, “Like what?”

“You know, shoot arrows into their camp.”

“Oh!” She turned to look at the tents. “You mean just shoot randomly into their little tent city?” Musingly she said, “Their tents aren’t all packed together like the caravan was.”

“I can hit their tents.”

Lizeth turned to look at him, considering. “Well, if you can shoot
anything
like your dad, I guess you can.”

Like everyone else, Lizeth had assumed all the archery yesterday had actually been done by Tarc’s father. He was the one that’d hit the bullseye repeatedly back at the tavern after all. The kid had hit close to the bullseye though. She looked at the tents again. They were bigger than the entire archery target, he probably could hit them, even from where they stood.

Lizeth had been thinking, now she pointed, “Do you think you could hit the tents reliably from over behind the bushes? Then when they come out they won’t immediately see us.
And
, when things start to get too hot we’ll have a shorter run to the woods.”

Tarc nodded and started walking that way. The bushes actually provided a pretty good screen. He reached over his shoulder and started drawing an arrow out of his quiver, but Lizeth stopped him. “Wait, hand me your quiver and I’ll hold it in front of you so the butts will be ready for you to draw. We want you to be able to shoot as many as possible before we have to run.”

Tarc shrugged out of the quiver and handed it to her. She stepped in front of him and angled it back, “Is this good?”

“Uh-huh,” Tarc said drawing and nocking an arrow.

Before Tarc drew, Lizeth stopped him again, “Wait. Let’s see, you have…” she counted, “twelve arrows.” She looked out at the tents, “There are… fifteen tents.” Musingly she said, “Do you think it would be better to shoot several arrows at each of a few tents to try to be sure you hit some of the bastards? Or, one arrow into each of twelve tents to spread the panic wider?”

“One in each,” Tarc said, drawing. He shot them one at a time, irritating her by pausing long enough after each one for it to hit before shooting the next.

“Shoot a little faster!” she hissed at him, not knowing that he was tracking each one into one of the warm bodies in a tent before shooting the next. He didn’t respond by speeding up at all which
really
frustrated her.

Though Lizeth couldn’t tell it, six of the tents had only had one raider in them. Their tent mates had been the ones on guard. Tarc shot those six tents first, presuming that they would be least likely to raise the alarm. Then he moved on to the tents with two bodies in them, dropping arrows into one of the two bodies in each tent. He shot for the chest rather than the skull, afraid that the tent fabric would deflect his arrows enough to miss a head shot.

Even back where Tarc and Lizeth were standing, they could hear the “whump” the arrows made when they went through the walls of the tents. Shortly they started to hear the grunts and moans of the men who’d been struck, but not killed immediately. Next there began to be shouts from the second man in the tents where someone had been hit. By the time Tarc got to his last two arrows the tents were rapidly emptying with the men scattering in all directions.

Lizeth expected him to stop shooting and save the last two arrows, but he shot them anyway. Two men who had by chance started running toward Tarc and Lizeth fell down,
Did he actually hit those guys even though they were running?
she wondered.

Tarc took the quiver from Lizeth and turned to begin sprinting for the woods. As he went, he managed to throw the empty quiver over his shoulder, carrying only the bow in his hand. 

Lizeth ran just behind him, casting frequent glances back over her shoulder. The raiders’ camp seemed much more disorganized than she would have expected from a military group in which a few people had been hit by arrows. In any case, no one had gotten organized enough yet to begin a pursuit.

Before they’d started running, Lizeth thought she should lead in the woods, but Tarc headed into the most obvious visible passage, so she stayed right behind him. He ran at a reasonable ground-eating lope. When the opening narrowed, he cut over to an animal trail going the right direction without searching for a passage like she had expected. When the animal trail started to tail off to the east, he broke off of it into a small meadow she hadn’t noticed either. He led Lizeth across the open area and immediately found another animal trail, this one heading more directly towards the caravan.

As they neared the other side of the woods, Tarc slowed to a walk desperately short of breath. Lizeth said, “We should keep on at a slow run if you can. We don’t want them gaining ground on us.”

Tiredly, Tarc gazed at her, wanting to tell her no one was back there. Instead, with a sigh he started jogging again. Lizeth ran lightly along beside him. Irritatingly, she seemed as if she’d be able to keep going for miles.

As if to cheer him up she said, “I wish I’d happened onto these animal trails when I was on my way here. I got caught in a couple of blind alleys and had to double back!”

Tarc only grunted in response. He couldn’t very well tell her he’d found the trails with his ghost.

Unaware of how embarrassed he felt that she could still talk while running beside him, she said, “I’m pretty sure at least your last two arrows hit a couple of those guys! For sure two of them fell down right after you shot. I wonder if any of the arrows you dropped into their tents actually hit some of the bastards?”

Tarc shrugged, though she didn’t see it in the dim light while they were running. He’d been worrying that she’d seen that his last two arrows were head shots. He felt conflicted about her knowing how well he shot, on the one hand wanting her to respect him for his ability with the bow, on the other hand not wanting everyone in the caravan to find out how easily he could take a human life. Tired as he was, his imagination still let him worry about everyone being horrified and thinking he was a monster.

When they were still a couple hundred yards from Prichard’s, Tarc slowed to a walk, puffing hard. “Let’s rest a little. We don’t want to arrive back at the caravan looking like a pair of blown horses.”

Panting, but not breathless like Tarc, Lizeth gave a little laugh, “Well, maybe
one
blown horse and one tired horse.”

Tarc snorted but couldn’t really laugh while still gasping for air. When he’d walked long enough for his breathing to slow, he said, “You’ll keep my secret?”

“Secret?”

“Yeah, about the knives?”

Lizeth snorted, “Sure, though if I could throw a knife like that, I’d damn well want everyone to know about it. Nobody’d be giving me ‘girl guard’ crap then!”

“Yeah, I can see that. But, you make your living as a fighter. I make my living as a healer.” He shrugged, “Don’t want people being afraid of you when you’re trying to get them to come to you for treatment.” To himself, Tarc thought,
Hmmm, I didn’t think I wanted to be a healer.
He felt startled to realize that he actually did. At least he’d rather be a healer than a killer.

***

“You’ve got to be shittin’ me!” Johnson said, a chill of desperation running down his spine. When the caravaners had shot Wayne, he’d actually been pretty excited to take over as captain of their little band. He’d only been a corporal in Krait’s company, but he was big and the remaining lieutenant and two sergeants were afraid of him. He’d thought that being bigger, stronger, and meaner than anyone else qualified him to be captain, but now, dealing with this crisis made him wonder. “
How
many killed and how many wounded?” he asked again, not able to really comprehend the numbers.