He landed right next to the tents but
was able to duck away into the undergrowth. He had no idea where he was
fortunately there were an awful lot of trees to hide behind. He needed to find
out was what was in the tents, but he had very little spell energy left, so first
he’d have to rest for an hour or two. He
looked up at the sky; it was early morning, and so he knew that they were
somewhere on the western continent, at least eight hours behind Kinspit, where
it was about four in the afternoon. That could be somewhere in Oket, he
concluded, so it might well be Viola and her team. He backed away very
carefully into the forest.
There was a tangle of
ivy dangling down from a small oak tree that provided an almost perfect place
to rest. Hardacre sat with his back
against the tree and listened. He could hear voices away beyond the tents and
although he could not hear what they were saying it was very obvious what
language they were speaking. Rhylic here, so far east, strongly suggested the
CRS. If this was Oket and if the voices
really belonged to the CRS then this must be Viola’s team who were in trouble.
The problem now was how he could help.
After about ten
minutes of thinking and resting he heard a tiny noise at the entrance to the
ivy den. There was something trying to get in. He was sure, at the same time,
that he heard a voice saying ‘who art thou?
Art thou a servant of our lady?’ A
very small drab green parrot was standing, shivering, on the floor in front of
him, talking in a very old dialect of Archaic Elven.
‘I believe that I am’ he whispered, ‘if thou meanst by our lady the elf named Viola Ortiensis’
The parrot nodded her
head solemnly. She spoke with a very soft, but rather brittle, voice
‘I am Akenopteryx, one
of our lady’s scouts’
‘Viola; is she
captured?’ asked Hardacre
‘She is and so are
her companions. Their captors are rough speakers with strange voices – I think
they are not Kaths’
‘Kaths?’ Hardacre
asked, and then smiled, ‘Oh, I see. Thou speakest truth – they are not of that
tribe, but I am, most certainly’
‘Can thou helpest us
to rescue them?’
‘Well, I will certainly
try’
Akenopteryx jumped on
to his hand. She looked up at his face.
‘Art thou Viola’s
principal helper?’
For some reason
Hardacre found this question perturbing – what was the correct answer? He
wasn’t sure that he should be helping Viola at all.
‘I have helped her a
little, but no, I have another who I help more’
‘Is she another Old
Elf?’
He shook his head,
wondering exactly what the parrot meant; he was sure that Viola was not an
Ancient Elf.
‘No, he’s a human…’
Akenopteryx cocked
her head. ‘Is he a Kath?’
‘Yes, but humans are
not just Kaths – the evil men are also human’
‘Oh’ she said, ‘I am
sorry for that’
‘We are too’ sighed
Hardacre, ‘particularly for those humans over there’
‘What shall we do?’
‘We can only decide
that when I know exactly what is happening, Can thou tellest me who is in the
tents?’
So the little scout told him about her
Micropsitta companions and about the three elves and Kath and briefly how they
had all met. She also described in as much detail as she could the humans who
had captured them and how the Micropsitta had avoided being seen at all by
their enemies. She then went to get the
other scouts and they huddled together in the hide away.
‘How is it that thou knowest them?’ asked
Hapalonyx, who had the softest voice of all.
Hardacre considered this. He sensed that these
birds needed complete honesty – they were creatures of duty just like himself. And
for now his duty was to the greater good.
‘We have worked
together before – in very trying circumstances – and they among my closest
friends’
‘So, are we to rescue
them?’
‘Yes, we are, but the
odds are against us; eight to one’
The scouts looked
puzzled and briefly twittered among themselves. Akenopteryx jumped forward as
their spokesbird.
‘How hast thou made
that calculation, sire? We see four of us and that four of ours are captured.
Is that not even odds?’
‘Well’ mused
Hardacre, ‘I suppose that it is’
‘In that case, sire –
let us act’
‘Yes we will,’ he
agreed, ‘but first let me explain something about myself that may come as
something of a surprise. And after that
– let’s see if we can scare our foes right out of their skins’
***
Hardacre made them all invisible. This
was easily done with a single spell: the difference between his weight and the
weight of the parrots was in the margin of error for the incantation. He just
used the left over scraps of thaum to make the birds invisible too. He was
still weak and he was relying on freeing his friends without much additional
magic. He would have rested for longer, but it was clear that the CRS thugs
planned to move their captives very soon.
The eight humans were
sitting or standing in the small clearing in front of the tents. They were
clearly low-ranking hoodlums, probably recruited for their brutality and taught
just the rudiments of witchcraft – Bea and Kratos liked to keep their darkest,
most powerful, skills mostly to themselves. On this occasion that could be
turned to Hardacre’s advantage – they might well be susceptible to some simple
trickery.
The parrots flew off
to the top of the tree canopy and began pulling off whatever they could find;
twigs, moss, bits of bark, and strands of mistletoe. Hardacre did ask them to
do this, but they also added some little deposits of their own, just to help it
all stick together. They formed these into spiky balls and flew off with them
over the heads of the captors, but high up enough so that the balls weren’t
seen. They swooped over their enemies and then dropped the little bombs on to
their heads. Even from a short distance this was very painful and, of course,
shocking. The kidnappers looked up immediately, but by then the payloads had
gone and there was no sign of what had dropped them. The parrots did this
several times, until the thugs were running around and throwing rocks at what,
to them, might as well have been imaginary targets.
Hardacre walked as
quietly as he could into a stand of oaks with one enormous very ancient tree.
He stood in front of it, breathed in and then whispered ‘utgana’. This was a spell he normally disapproved of strongly (suitable
only for students and conjurers) but, for once, he could see a use for it. It
amplified his voice and made it reverberate through the whole space in front of
him. He declaimed in his best Rhylic:
‘Foolish humans – you have broken the law of the forest; you have cut my
branches and burnt them; you have defiled this holy place; you have brought
evil into a refuge of the sylvan spirit’
The thugs turned towards
the great oak and saw nothing. A murmur of terror seemed to rise among them.
‘Who is there?’ asked
their leader, ‘who is speaking’
‘That is none of your concern. Care only that I have power over you’
‘The tree’s talking, boss;
it’s the tree that’s talking’
The leader looked
around at his companions and then back at the big tree.
‘It’s just a tree’ he
said, ‘it can’t harm us’. He gestured that they should move towards the
voice.
Hardacre walked
forward three long slow paces to behind where he had seen a particularly deep
accumulation of leaf litter under a small hat of hollies. There he whispered ‘chwthwm’. The hollow erupted into a wave
of spiky debris and it swept over the approaching thugs; rushing through the
air and lacerating everything in its way. The thugs, although not badly hurt,
were thrown backwards, each one lifting their hands up to their cut faces. Three of the them ran off into the
undergrowth, but their leader, a slightly braver and more resourceful man,
shook off the leaves and twigs and came forward, brandishing a sword.
‘You’re no bloody
tree, you’re a coward – come out from wherever you’re hiding and fight fair’
Hardacre smiled
grimly – he wasn’t exactly hiding,
was he. He looked up into the tree canopy and located something. He kept his
eyes fixed on it as the man approached him. When his enemy was standing just
under the right place Hardacre murmured ‘thor’
and the branch broke with a sharp crack – it fell down right on to the leader’s
head with a sickening crunch. He fell
and lay moaning on the forest floor.
Hardacre began to
flicker as his invisibility spell wore off, but this just made the overall
effect more unearthly. He lifted his
hands up and walked towards them, a black and pulsing spectre shouting, ‘leave now, you fools!’. He fervently
hoped that none of them had ever seen an invisible person re-materialising
before. Clearly they hadn’t as they were
all gone, tumbling through the trees, within a second of him speaking. By the time the others appeared, freed by the
scouts, the tall witch was entire but sepia.
He could have been purple with green spots as far as they were
concerned, they were just so delighted and relieved to see him.
‘You must be Mr
Herdaker’ said Dom, grinning.
‘And you must be the illiterate mage with the
quick brain’ said Hardacre brandishing Dom’s mail paper.
‘I’m not really a
mage’ said Dom
Hardacre stared and
him for a few seconds, as if he couldn’t quite work out what it was that he was
looking at.
‘Not a mage – ah,
that explains a lot’ he said.
‘I’m sure that it
does, sir’ said Dom, bowing low, ‘anyway – let me introduce myself – my name is
Dominic Shavosky and I am forever in your debt’
‘Well, thank you for
that, Master Shavoksy. But for future reference’ Hardacre said, pointing at the
mail paper, ‘that’s not how you spell either ‘Laurence’ or ‘Hardacre’
‘I will bear that in
mind, sir’ Dom said, still smiling. He wanted to explain what had happened, but
by then, Hardacre had been engulfed in hugs by his relieved friends and the
moment had passed.
‘We’re so glad you’re
here!’ said Viola, ‘you’ve saved us again!’.
‘You’re a marvel,
Laurence’ said Kath, ‘a bloody marvel ’.
Potentilla, however,
was too busy kissing him repeatedly on the cheek to say anything at all.
