The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [83]
If the trail of the beast was poisonous, the last possibility could be left right out. Random wayfarers weren’t likely to be carrying the antidote for woorm venom with them and would be pretty ill right now.
That left them with Fend or against him.
Well, he didn’t have much longer to consider it, and the worst thing a man could do was dither. There were far too many of them for him to ask politely.
He sighted down his first shaft, aiming for the neck of the man in back: a human. If he could drop one or two of them before the others caught on, it would increase his chance of survival a good deal.
But…
With a sigh he shifted his aim and sent it into the fellow’s right biceps instead. Predictably, the man screamed and fell off his horse, thrashing wildly. Most of the others just looked at him, puzzled, trying to work out what was wrong, but one—and now Aspar could see it was a Sefry—leapt from his horse and began stringing a bow, eyes scanning the trees.
Aspar shot him through the shoulder.
This fellow didn’t scream, but his intake of breath was audible even at Aspar’s distance, and his gaze immediately found the source of his wounding.
“Holter!” He bellowed. “It’s the holter, you fools, in the trees! The one Fend warned us of!”
There, Aspar thought. I could have hoped for that before they knew I was here, but…
Another of the men had strung his bow, Aspar saw. He fired at the fellow, but the man was in motion, and the arrow only whittled a bit of ear. The man returned a shaft, a damned good shot, considering, but Aspar was already dropping to the next branch down.
He landed on slightly flexed legs, wincing at pain in his knees that wouldn’t have been there five years ago, and loosed his third dart at the other archer. The man was cupping his wounded ear and just starting to scream when the arrow went through his larynx, effectively silencing him.
Aspar fitted another shaft and carefully shot another Sefry who was just putting arrow to string. He hit him in the inside of the thigh, dropping him like a sack of meal.
A red-fletched missile spanged against Aspar’s boiled leather cuirass, just above his lowest rib, knocking most of the breath out of him. The world went all black spots and whirling, and he realized his feet weren’t on the branch anymore, though they were still roughly beneath him.
His left foot caught the ground first, but his body had fallen too far back for him to land with balance or for his knees to absorb the shock. He did manage to twist and take part of the fall with his shoulder, but that caused more pain, this time with white sparks.
Grunting, he rolled out of it and noticed he no longer had his bow. He reached for his hand-ax and, as he came up, found himself looking down the shaft of the third Sefry. He threw the ax and spun to his left.
The ax missed by a hairsbreadth, but only because the Sefry flinched, throwing his aim wide. Snarling, Aspar hurled himself at his assailant, unsheathing his dirk. Ten kingsyards should have provided plenty of time for the Sefry to fit another arrow and take a close shot, but he apparently didn’t know that, instead seeming to poise among shooting, drawing his blade, and running.
He finally settled on the blade, but by that time Aspar was there; he came in close, grabbing the Sefry’s shoulder with his free hand and turning him to expose his left kidney. His first stab met mail, so he changed elevation and slashed the carotid, blinking his eyes against the spray of blood and running on past as his foe became a corpse.
He felt suddenly blind, because he knew there was one uninjured man he had lost track of. The first two