Fistandantilus Reborn - Douglas Niles [78]
“Forget about the book!” hissed Danyal. “Remember, we’ve got to get away from here before daylight!”
“The boy is right,” Emilo said. “I picked this place for your escape carefully, and we’ve got a bit of a head start, but we don’t want to dally any longer than we have to.”
The historian looked as though he were about to argue, but Danyal stepped in front of him and addressed Emilo Haversack. He felt like a chronicler himself, wanting to ask a thousand questions-starting with why the kender had taken such a risk. Instead, he forced his thoughts along practical lines.
“Where do we go from here? What’s our best chance of getting to some kind of hiding place before daylight?”
“If we go downstream, we’ll meet the river in a few miles. We won’t be able to cross, but there’s thick woods in the valley, and we could go either right or left along the bank. The walking’s easy, with lots of cover.”
“So they’ll assume we went that way?” Danyal was trying to think, remembering how easily their camp had been discovered late on the night when he had met Foryth Teel.
Emilo nodded in response to the question. “Upstream, there’s still woods, but we’ll find groves of evergreens, like this one, or aspens, with lots of meadows in between. Also, there’s a few cliffs where the stream turns to a waterfall.”
“I remember.” In fact, Danyal had spent the hour of sunset looking over this same valley, though from the road high on the ridge, the terrain along the streambed had looked much less daunting than it did from here. Still, he didn’t think any of the cliffs would prove unclimbable.
“We should go upstream,” Danyal urged. “I don’t think they’ll try to look for us that way, and the route down the valley is too easy, too obvious.”
“I agree,” Emilo said, quelling any objections Foryth Teel might have raised.
Surprisingly, the historian also nodded in agreement. “Loreloch is somewhere up in these mountains, so I certainly don’t want to waste a lot of time marching back down to the lowlands.”
Danyal looked at the historian in amazement. “You still want to go to Loreloch?”
“My dear boy, a slight setback should never be allowed to deter the diligent research of the hard-working historian.”
“Setback? You were captured! For Gilean’s sake, he held you for ransom!”
“Tsk-and that provided me with a perfect opportunity to conduct my interviews. An opportunity which, through no fault of my own, has been indefinitely postponed. Now, am I correct in assuming that we should be on our way?”
“Quite right,” the kender declared with a curt nod.
Emilo led the way, with Mirabeth at his side and Foryth stumbling through the darkness behind. Shaking his head at the historian’s single-minded obstinacy, Danyal brought up the rear.
They tried to climb in silence, but the terrain was rough, and overhanging pines, as well as sharp crags of rock, cast much of the footing into deep shadow. As a result, they frequently stumbled over unseen obstacles, tumbled loose stones into the river, and generally made enough noise, Danyal thought, to rouse the dead from their graves.
Fortunately they encountered no sign of the bandits. Emilo postulated, reasonably enough, that the men would have backtracked along the road for quite a distance, assuming that in the darkness the escaped captives would not have dared to venture on the steep slopes above and below the rutted track.
Danyal had no difficulty keeping up, even over the rough ground. In fact, he found himself anxious to continue when Foryth and Emilo paused to catch their breath. They had progressed no more than a mile, and the youth was vividly aware of the dawn that must eventually illuminate the skyline and reveal the muddy slide that had been their escape route.
“I’ll have a look ahead,” he said, passing the historian and the kender, who had taken seats on flat rocks near the bank of the stream.
“I’ll come with you,” Mirabeth said.
“We’ll be along in a minute,” Emilo promised, while Foryth nodded weakly in agreement.
The kendermaid seemed unaffected by fatigue as