At the same time, the swordsman took the opening to leap forward with a strike. But the dagger neatly picked it off and turned the blade out wide. The bandit disengaged skillfully and spun to square up against his diminutive foe. He found the halfling holding the dagger in front of him, but with only one of its serpent-like side blades now apparent.
“Good sir, I fear you have broken my fine knife,” the halfling said.
The swordsman smiled—but only until the halfling threw the “broken” tine at him. It struck him on his blocking forearm, doing no immediate harm, but the piece transformed from a metal side blade into a tiny living serpent. Before the surprised bandit could react, the snake rushed along with incredible speed, up his arm, over his shoulder, and around his neck, and there it circled and tightened. The swordsman clawed at it with his free hand, working to keep his sword up in an attempt to ward off the halfling.
But this was more than a small magical serpent. It was a garrote, and one that summoned a most awful specter right behind the victim, an undead entity that tugged with such tremendous force that the swordsman was yanked off his feet and sent flying backward and to the ground.
And there he lay, writhing, choking. He dropped his sword and grabbed at the serpent with both hands, but to no avail.
And then how the bulky man roared, lifting his beautiful new weapon up over his head with both hands, charging for the unarmed barbarian, determined to crush the fool’s skull with a single, mighty downward chop.
It took him a couple of long strides to realize that he wasn’t holding the warhammer any longer, and a couple more halting steps to come to the realization that the barbarian now had the weapon securely back in hand.
And by that time, of course, the portly bandit found himself standing right in front of the huge, muscular—and armed—barbarian.
“Huh?” the ruffian asked, clearly at a loss.
Wulfgar stabbed the head of Aegis-fang forward into the man’s fat face, cracking teeth and splattering his nose, stopping the attacker in his tracks. The portly bandit stumbled back a step, staring at Wulfgar in disbelief, unable to sort out how that warhammer could have possibly been taken from him so cleanly, and from several strides away.
He didn’t understand Aegis-fang, and its connection to Wulfgar, son of Beornegar and son of Bruenor, and how the simple whisper of “Tempus” would magically teleport the hammer to Wulfgar’s waiting hand.
The bandit staggered. He shook his head. He fell over onto the ground.
Wulfgar couldn’t watch that descent. A thrumming sound from the bluff alerted him to danger. He threw himself back, turning his head and sweeping his arms up in front of his chest and face—and a good thing he did. When he hit the ground in a roll, he had an arrow sticking out of his muscled forearm!
He paid it little heed, coming around and to his feet then in a fast half-turn from which he sent Aegis-fang flying for the hidden archer.
The warhammer hit the wooden blind and blew apart the planks, driving through in an explosion of splinters. Wulfgar heard a cry, a woman’s voice, and the female archer went flying out the back of her ambush spot.
“Tempus!” Wulfgar roared, though he really wasn’t even certain if that name meant anything to him anymore.
Still, the hammer appeared in his hand, and so his battle cry was one well-chosen.
The woman grabbed up her spear again, wincing with pain but with no choice but to battle through it. She thrust ahead, more to keep the halfling at bay than in any hopes of scoring a hit, but Regis was far too quick for that.
In perfect fencing balance, left foot trailing and perpendicular to the fight, he quick-stepped a retreat, then came rushing ahead. Seeing her error, the woman tried to send her spear forward again, but Regis was inside the head and the strength of the thrust then, and a fast down-and-out sweep of the rapier turned the spear out wide.
The dashing halfling stepped in behind, and, one-two, stabbed the woman in her shoulders.
He swept out to the side, toward the man being choked to death on the ground by the spectral apparition.
A quick stab of Regis’s splendid rapier ended that drama, the simple hit on the apparition making it disappear to nothingness. The swordsman fell flat, gasping.
“Do stay down,” Regis warned him, rushing back the other way, sweeping his rapier in circles around the stabbing tip of the woman’s spear. And when her eyes, too, began to spin as she tried to keep up with the movement, the halfling reversed the flow, driving his rapier down and across his body, taking the spear inside while he stepped outside and forward.
Now his dagger came in, catching the spear fully, and he lifted it high, waded in underneath the lifted tip, and brought his rapier’s point in under the woman’s chin.
“Oh, dear lady, I do not wish to end your life,” he said graciously. “So please do drop your nasty spear.”
Head tilted way back, nowhere to flee, she looked down at him and swallowed hard—and did indeed let go of the spear.
Regis flicked it far aside, then called over his shoulder to the swordsman, who was stubbornly trying to rise.
“I am sure I told you to stay on the ground,” he said.
The man paused, but then started up once more.
“I have another …” Regis started to explain, but he just sighed and sent his dagger’s second magical snake flying at the man.
Regis didn’t even watch the result. He didn’t have to.
He turned his attention back to the woman at the end of his rapier, and her eyes told the tale, as did the swordsman’s desperate gasp, when a second apparition appeared at the back of the new garrote and began choking the life out of him once more.
This time, Regis let the undead fiend choke the man unconscious before he calmly walked over and poked the specter, dispelling the deadly magic.
Regis heaved a great sigh. “Sometimes, they are so stubborn,” he said to Wulfgar, his complaint interrupted by the crack of a tree branch up above. The archer, sound asleep from Regis’s poisoned hand crossbow dart, fell heavily to the dirt right beside the barbarian and the female prisoner.
Regis looked from the groaning, broken man to Wulfgar, and shrugged.
Wulfgar motioned to Regis’s magical pouch, where he kept his potions, salves, and bandages. The barbarian hoisted his warhammer up on one shoulder then kicked softly at the man on the ground in front of him. “If you stand up,” he warned the portly bandit, and then extended the warning to the wagon driver as well, “I will crush your heads.”
To emphasize his point, he sent his hammer swinging down, the head driving deeply into the ground right in front of the prone bandit’s face.
“Stay down and right there,” Wulfgar reiterated. Then he stalked off, breaking through the remaining splinters of the blind between the oaks and moving into the brush to find the second archer, the woman. He carried her out over his shoulder, with her groaning in agony with every step. One of her arms hung limp and twisted, terribly shattered, and her breathing came in gasps. The hammer had driven through her arm and collapsed half her chest.
Without magic, she would surely die in short order. Fortunately for her, and for the other archer, Wulfgar and Regis were not without magic. Even as Wulfgar moved over to lay the wounded woman on the back of the wagon, Regis had his portable alchemy lab set up, and the spear-wielding woman he had captured was moving from one fallen bandit to another with potions of healing.
“These unguents and potions are not cheaply made,” Regis grumbled to Wulfgar. He reached for a potion bottle, but noting the extent of the woman’s wounds, went instead to a small jar of salve.
“What gold value is too much?” Wulfgar asked.
Regis smiled and began applying the healing salve.
A rustle caught their attention and they turned to see the other woman, the one Regis had captured, rushing away through the underbrush.
Regis looked up at Wulfgar. “Do you think she has more friends?”
Wulfgar looke
d around at the motley crew scattered all about. These were farmers, or perhaps tradesmen, dirt poor and desperate.
“Should I catch her, that we can hang the lot of them together?” he asked.
Regis’s horrified expression lasted only the moment it took for him to realize his large friend was teasing. But even in that jest, Wulfgar had set out a perplexing question. Whatever were they to do with this group? They had no intention of executing them, for clearly these were not hardened murderers and thieves.
But still, could they leave them alive and free here on the road, where they might bring more mischief and even harm to the next unwary travelers who got into the back of the treacherous driver’s wagon?
“Justice can be harsh on the Trade Way,” Regis remarked.
“Would the Ponies execute this bunch?”
“Only if they were found to have killed someone.”
“Then what else?” Wulfgar asked. The man choked unconscious by Regis’s garrote awakened then, coughing and sputtering and struggling to sit up. Wulfgar stepped over and helped him, grabbing him by the front of the tunic and hoisting him to his feet with just the one arm.
“Thieves are put to work for merchants or craftsmen,” Regis explained. “Hard labor until their debt is repaid for the trouble they have caused.”
“I … We … we … we could have killed you,” the swordsman sputtered.
“No, you could not have,” Wulfgar replied, walking the fellow over to the wagon. “Nor did you want to when you thought you had me helpless, and that is the only reason any of you are still alive.”
“So then what do you mean to do with us?” asked the leader of the group.
“We hired a wagon to take us to the Boareskyr Bridge,” Wulfgar explained. “And so you shall do exactly that. All of you.”
He shoved the man away. “Go and find your woman who tried to stab me,” Wulfgar instructed, nodding to the brush where the woman had run. “Bring her back. If you return, you will ride with us to the bridge. If you do not return, you will find your four friends dead right here, and we will be gone with the wagon. And know that if you do not return to us quickly, if I ever see you again, I will kill you.”
“Do you think he’ll come back?” Regis asked when the man disappeared into the underbrush.
“Are you asking for a wager?”
The halfling grinned.
SOON AFTER, THE sun beginning its western descent, the wagon once again rolled down the Trade Way toward the Boareskyr Bridge, with Wulfgar sitting on the bench beside the bruised and terrified driver and Regis right behind him, keeping an eye on the two archers, the most badly wounded of the bandit group.
The portly man who had foolishly thought to wield Wulfgar’s hammer sat on the back of the wagon, his legs dangling.
They had barely begun to roll out when the other two bandits appeared on the road behind them, running to catch up—and with a familiar robed figure right behind them, prodding them along.
“Bah, a gold piece for Wulfgar, then,” Regis grumbled.
But he was glad that his big friend had guessed right, and glad, too, to see that Brother Afafrenfere had come at last.
“BUT I WOULD be foolish to try, yes?” the swordsman, Adelard Arras of Waterdeep, said to Wulfgar soon after they broke camp the next morning.
“Yes,” Wulfgar replied.
“And since I know this, I would not try!”
Wulfgar looked at him skeptically.
“I am no fool!” Adelard protested.
“But you are a highwayman. And not a very good one.”
Adelard sighed and shook his head. “The road is dangerous, my friend.”
“Never confuse me as your friend,” Wulfgar warned.
“But you did not kill me, nor any of my companions,” Adelard protested. “Yet you are a fierce warrior, of course, and would not shy from such extreme retribution. Indeed, by your own admission, you spent a great deal of wealth in the form of potions and salves to save us.”
“She shot me with an arrow,” Wulfgar reminded him, nodding back at the woman who rode, much more comfortably now, in the back of the wagon.
“And yet we live! All of us! Because you see in us—”
“You are not getting your weapons back,” Wulfgar declared with finality. “In the time between here and the bridge, prove to me that you’ll not waylay others and perhaps I will show mercy, perhaps even let you go free—under watchful eyes.”
Adelard started to protest, but Wulfgar cut him short.
“Trying to trick me into returning your sword does not help you,” he said.
“Trick?” Adelard acted as if he were truly wounded, but Wulfgar merely snorted, or started to, until Regis said sharply, “Silence!”
All eyes turned to the halfling.
“What?” Wulfgar whispered, seeing his diminutive friend’s faraway look.
Regis motioned to Afafrenfere, who was on the road behind the wagon, kneeling with his ear to the ground.
Wulfgar stopped the wagon, all eyes on the monk.
“Horses,” Afafrenfere explained. “Coming fast from behind.”
All eight others of the party held silent then, straining to hear. Sure enough, a slight shift of the breeze brought the sounds of several horses galloping down the road from behind them.
Wulfgar looked around. They had just come through a copse of trees, but there was no time to get back around the bend and into cover.
“Arm us,” Adelard whispered.
Wulfgar eyed him dangerously, warning him to silence. The barbarian tied off the reins and hopped down from the bench, motioning Regis to his side at the back corner of the wagon, where Afafrenfere stood waiting.
“Bandits?” the monk asked.
“Likely,” Regis replied.
“If there are many, do we arm our companions?” Wulfgar asked, looking around at the ragtag band of six they had taken prisoner.
“Only the swordsman is a worthy fighter,” Regis reminded him. “And we gamble that he will know the group approaching and join in with them.”
“Then I kill him first.”
Regis shrugged.
The sound of the approaching riders was clear then, nearing the copse of trees that was still in sight down at the bend in the road.
“Go and hide, all of you,” Wulfgar told the bandits. “To the tall grass.”
The six began to scurry, but not quickly enough. The posse—a dozen riders kicking up dust and thundering along the Trade Way—came around the bend. They drew their fine swords as soon as they pulled in sight of the wagon. Steel gleamed in the morning sunlight almost as brilliantly as Regis’s wide smile.
“Is it …?” Wulfgar started to ask.
The dozen approaching riders seemed quite easy in the saddle, as if they had ridden many, many miles over many, many months—and they were all quite short.
The barbarian put a hand on Brother Afafrenfere’s shoulder, coaxing him out of his battle stance.
Wulfgar heard more than one bandit groan.
The Grinning Ponies had come.
“Hold, wagon, hold!” cried the rider in the center of the leading line, a finely dressed fellow with a wide-brimmed leather hat, one side pinned up and plumed.
“If we held any more, Master Doregardo, we would be rolling back at you!” Regis yelled in answer. He moved forward out of Wulfgar’s shadow, drew his fine rapier, and dipped a low bow.
“Spider!” shouted the halfling at Doregardo’s side.
Up the troupe thundered, kicking dirt and rearing their ponies. Even as his mount’s forelegs touched back down, Doregardo lifted a leg over his saddle and dropped skillfully to the ground.
“Why, Master Topolino, it has been far too long!” Doregardo exclaimed, and he rushed up and exchanged a grand hug with Regis.
“But, good sir,” he added, pushing Regis back to arms’ length, “you seem to have lost your mount!”
“It has been a long and eventful few years, my old friend,” Regis re
plied. “Years of war and adventure.”
“And you will tell us all about it, then, aye,” said Showithal Terdidy, the halfling who had first shouted Regis’s name. He, too, slipped from his saddle and rushed over to embrace Regis.
“We were pursuing a band of highwaymen known to be in the area,” Doregardo explained.
“Highwaymen and women,” Wulfgar replied, gesturing at the six bandits, none of whom had managed to get off the road and out of sight.
“By the gods,” they heard Adelard grumble, and he added quietly to the disheveled driver, “You gave a ride to a Grinning Pony?”
“They found us,” Regis explained.
Doregardo glanced around curiously, waving his hand as he did so. The mounted halflings flanked left and right and began encircling the troupe.
“They are quite caught,” Regis assured Doregardo. “We were allowing them the time to the Boareskyr Bridge to convince us they would mend their ways.”
“Or kill you in your sleep,” muttered Showithal.
“I do not sleep,” said Afafrenfere, drawing a hard stare from Showithal.
“I give you Brother Afafrenfere of the Monastery of the Yellow Rose,” Regis quickly explained. “Brother Afafrenfere, dragonslayer.
“And this is my long-time friend, Wulfgar of Icewind Dale,” Regis pressed on, thinking it prudent to clarify the situation a bit, given the still-threatening look on Showithal’s face. That one had always been eager for a fight, eager to elevate the stature of the Grinning Ponies above that of his old vigilante band from Damara, the Kneebreakers. Regis could well imagine Showithal drawing his sword on Wulfgar, and then the rest of them trying to figure out how to get poor Showithal down from the top branches of the tallest nearby tree after Wulfgar threw him up there.
Doregardo gave a little laugh, and graciously bowed to Wulfgar. “We are honored, good sir,” he said politely, then turned to Regis. “And pray tell what you planned to do in the case that these ruffians could not convince you of their mended ways?”