The Dragon Revenant - Katharine Kerr [93]
Rhodry could guess who that someone had to be and the kind of danger they represented.
“Jill!”
He scrambled to his feet and ran for the boulders with a swearing Salamander following. Something grabbed at his ankle—one of the evil Wildfolk, he assumed—and he went down, rolling smoothly and bounding up in the same motion.
“Jill!”
There was no answer, no sound at all, truly, except the far distant hiss and chuckle of the floodtide river. Even the horses, apparently, were far out of earshot. Panting a little, Salamander joined him at the edge of the rock-strewn terrace, where nothing moved.
“Do you think they’ve got an archer or suchlike with them?” Salamander whispered. “I can make a light if it won’t make us a target.”
“A light in this damp? Are you daft? No one could—oh, of course, my apologies. Well, if they were going to stick us like pigs, they would have done it by now.” Rhodry tipped his head back and called as loudly as he could. “Jill!”
A pale yellow light blossomed in the air above them to reveal a gleam of metal beside a heap of crumpled blankets. Rhodry raced over, stumbling a little, and picked up her sword, graved with the device of a striking falcon and running only with water now, not blood. His eyes burned tears.
“They’ve taken her.” He could barely speak. “I don’t know why, but the bastards have taken her.”
“I wonder, too, younger brother, but let us not despair. You forget that we have a vast if not truly mighty army at our command.”
“What? You’ve gone daft!”
Salamander whistled once under his breath and snapped his fingers. All around them in the golden light Wildfolk appeared, gnome and sprite and sylph, each one tiny, true enough, but there were hundreds of them crowding round, gray and brown, mottled and purplish-black, with their thin lips bared to reveal needle-sharp teeth, their eyes, yellow and red and green, gleaming with rage and indignation as they shook tiny clawed fists in the air. Although they were eerily silent, from the distant river Rhodry heard voices calling out to urge them on.
Jill woke suddenly to dim daylight and a hard floor. The side of her face stung like fire, every muscle in her body ached, and she was so cold that she was shaking, lying huddled in a corner on some kind of packed earth tiles. When she tried to stretch out, she realized that her hands were tied behind her back and her ankles lashed together. By moving very carefully and very slowly she managed to haul herself up to a sitting position and prop herself against the corner of the tiny bare room. The walls were whitewashed, and where one of them joined the ceiling was a small slit of a window. Since she could see earth through it as well as sky, she decided that she had to be in some sort of cellar, and from the smell as well as the burlap sacks lying around, she could guess it was a root cellar. Whispering so quietly that she was thinking more than speaking, Jill called her gnome. He appeared straightaway, bringing with him two large black-and-purple warty fellows with sharp teeth and big ears.
“Can you untie my hands?”
The bigger gnomes shook their heads in a mournful no, then proceeded to chew through the rope. Once she was free, rubbing her painful wrists with numb hands, her gnome and his friends disappeared again, leaving her to untie her ankles herself. For a long while she worked on her aching and complaining hands and legs, rubbing, stretching, shaking until at last she could stand up, cursing and stamping as the blood flowed back with fiery prickles. Outside the window something scuffled and scraped. She looked up to see a pack of purplish-black gnomes pushing a small bundle through the opening, something that dropped to the floor with a clatter. She pounced on it: her silver dagger in its leather sheath.
“My thanks, my friends. May your gods or whomever you serve bless you for this!”
When outside the door she heard sudden voices, she slipped the dagger out of sight into her shirt. There was a clang, and a curse or two as someone struggled with a lock; then the door opened and two