The Foolhardies 17 Broken Arrow

"What in brimstone is happening?!" Varda exclaimed. "What are we doing, Dean?"

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"A few stone golems would be handy right about now!" I yelled back at her as I sent my falchion toward a second black-hooded figure who had darted for Luca.

This one was shorter and thinner than the first and was also way quicker. It would have cut into Luca's exposed left leg if I hadn't intervened.

My shadowblade met the dagger that parried my slash, but with my momentum and my sneak attack giving me an advantage, the dagger and its wielder were blown back.

I caught a glimpse of an ebony brow and pale eyes, almost white but with a shade of red, as I pushed away my opponent. This backward movement made its cloak flutter briefly and gave away the feminine form hidden underneath it.

Our exchange lasted seconds, which was the exact amount of time Varda needed to form a response for my advice about summoning golems, "But I need a large number of rocks to make golems?!"

"We're literally outside a canyon, Varda!" I parried her verbally while also parrying my opponent's dagger strike as it came slicing through the air where my stomach was just a second ago. "There are big rocks everywhere!"

"Oh, yes, right!" Varda yelled back.

While Varda and I had this quick conversation, from the corner of my eye I kept tabs on Luca and the lead hooded figure as they traded sword blows. Luca had more power in his swings but his opponent was lighter on his feet and swifter with his shadowblade. Just like my own opponent who used the moment my little brother's fight distracted me to attack me a third time.

However, there wasn't a need for me to react defensively as a Firebolt fired from behind me came hurtling at my attacker, forcing her to duck for cover.

At the same time as Aura's timely attack, the last two members of the thieves' party ran past me without even a second glance.

One of them, a short child-like fairy, carried a heavy sack over its shoulders, and as it went by, the smell of fresh-baked pastry wafted out of the sack. However, the second one, a tall broad-shouldered fairy, had something in his arms that made my gut clench tightly.

Two child-like fairies, both with ebony skins and silver hair, clung to the one carrying them. They looked like they were only four years old and yet both of them had steel manacles wrapped around their wrists attached to recently broken chains. And while one child had its face buried in the folds of the dark cloak of the fairy carrying it, the other child gazed back at me as they passed with an anxious expression on his face.

A quick glance at the two retreating figures with their luggage and I decided not to give chase. Somehow, my gut told me it was the right thing to do. Unfortunately, I was the only one who thought so because it was at this time when the city guard finally showed up and made things worse.

The crowd of onlookers parted to give way to the guards who moved to surround all combatants. They wrongfully included me and Luca in this encirclement.

My eyes darted past the circle of guards and eventually found Aura looking back at me with mild concern while she was half-hidden by Edo's bulky form. Varda was nowhere in sight—and I couldn't help but wonder where the dwarf went to find her rocks.

There were twelve members of the city guard in total. All of them were dwarves who wore the same orange tabards—embroidered with the broken sword insignia of Broken Sellsword's Canyon—over steel chain mail shirts. They all carried similar weapons too. Round shields and polearms that were just the right length for fairies under five feet tall.

The eight male dwarves were your typical tan-skinned, heavy bearded fellows with narrow eyes half-hidden under very bushy eyebrows. Their hair, also in different shades of black and brown and red, were all similarly long and braided.

The five females in the guard were all typical dwarven beauties with fair skins, chiseled features, and hair all tied in a tight bun behind them.

Both I and the female thief I was fighting glanced around worriedly at the sharp shadowblade tips that the guards pointed at us in this tightening circle. Yet it seemed neither Luca nor his opponent knew of the danger as they continued with their swordplay despite the new arrivals.

The guard leader, an especially stout dwarf with a braided beard long enough to go past his stomach yelled for everyone to throw away their weapons and surrender.

"Hold on... we're trying to help you!" I reasoned and received a hostile glare from the leader for my trouble.

"Put down your weapons or I'll—"

His threat was cut off mid-speech by the black arrow with red fletchings that had just pierced his throat. Blood seeped out of his wound in rivulets.

Then the screaming started and panic overcame the crowd. Human and fairy onlookers dispersed in a mad dash for the Canyon's gates. Chaos ensued.

A second arrow came zooming past me and struck one of the female guards who was closest to the dagger-wielding thief. The guard next to her screamed bloody murder and was also struck down by a red fletching arrow.

I dived to the ground to avoid the fourth arrow and glanced over to where Aura was. She was crouching behind Edo who was using his own massive body as a meat shield.

Someone bumped into my shoulder as I got up to my feet, and immediately afterward, I felt a blade slice through my pants and cut into my leg. With a grinding of teeth, I worked through the pain and slashed at my attacker but she'd pushed past me too quickly and bolted toward her other two companions who'd escaped in the same direction the arrow fire originated from. That's when I saw him.

At a distance of about forty meters, half-hidden inside a covered wagon was a fifth hooded figure who carried a bow in its hand.

I quickly activated Fool's Insight while this archer finished notching another arrow to its bow, and in the same moment as the warm sensation of power filled my eyes the archer fired another shot.

My eyes collated the information gleaned from several factors, the angle of the archer's bow to the distance of the shot as well as the wind factor, and turned all this into insight that told me the target was—

With my falchion in hand, and despite the pained protest of my bleeding leg, I pushed off sideways like a goalie in a soccer match and sliced through the arrow as it came speeding for Luca's back.

After my spectacular save that no one noticed, I spared a second's glance at the broken arrow before I pulled myself back up and readied my falchion for the second shot that never came.

While I was saving his life, Luca cut down his opponent with a massive swing toward the gut. Blood sprayed out of the hooded thief's stomach. Then he crumpled to his knees and breathed his last before falling on the hard ground.

Seeing this abrupt and bloody conclusion to its comrade, the archer vanished inside the wagon. He didn't come out again.

the female thief I fought spared one last glance at her dead companion by Luca's feet before she too disappeared inside the wagon.

Once the arrows stopped coming, the city guard who had lost four of their number in that short round of sniper fire finally shifted gears and reformed their formation into a line with their shields in front, ready to receive incoming projectiles.

I got behind their line and waited vigilantly with Fool's Insight still active but the arrows never came. We received the answer to this silence a short time later.

Something from the inside it ripped apart the top cover of the wagon the thieves were hiding in, and in a gust of magical wind four giant wing shapes made of similar black cloth to the cloaks worn by the thieves shot out of the wagon like bats out of hell.

They soared up to the brightly lit night sky, and once they were in higher altitude, glided toward the western horizon.

"Are those…" Luca had walked over to me. He was nursing a cut on his cheek. "wings?"

"Magical gliders…" I shut my eyes and deactivated Fool's Insight. When I opened them again, I turned to my brother. "Luca…"

"I know, Dean. I'm…" Luca was at a loss for words. He understood how much trouble he'd gotten us into and how things could have gone horribly wrong. "I'm sorry…"

I winced at the slight pain from my latest scar. "No one died…" I said, sympathetically. Then I remembered the many dead bodies currently on the ground. "Well, at least none of our guys died."

I decided not to tell Luca about the two freed child slaves I briefly encountered. I didn't want the possibility of us being the bad guys in this encounter to make him feel worse.

"Come with me," I led Luca back to his fallen opponent. "pull down his hood, Luca. I want to see his face."

Luca knelt on the ground, and after only a moment's hesitation, he removed the cover that had been hiding the face of the dead fairy thief.

There were similar features on the bloodied face to the two fairy children I let escape. They shared the same ebony skin and the same silver hair—and I finally recognized the dead fairy staring lifelessly into nothing. Seeing this creature sent my thoughts immediately to Aura and my eyes darted through the crowd until I founder her.

They were closer to the iron gates now, standing by a crowd of stubborn onlookers who remained behind during the fight to watch. Edo was restraining her from running over to us. I thought it was a wise decision as the city guard, no longer under threat of sniper fire, turned their attention on the remaining trouble makers, the two armed humans.

I mouthed the word "Drow" to Aura and hoped she got the message. She must have because she nodded her head. Then I watched her whisper my warning to Edo, who, after hearing that drows were close by, took Aura by the arm and dragged her deeper into the crowd of nosy fairies. As going incognito went, Edo's was a poor attempt. After all, he towered over everyone, and anyone with a good eye would have spotted him and Aura as well as the agitation clearly showing on their faces.

But that was none of my concern anymore because dwarven guards who were a little too high on adrenaline surrounded me and Luca.

There was a lot of shouting and demands for surrender which Luca and I did our best to comply with. We even threw down our weapons and put up our arms in a gesture of surrender.

Unfortunately, our attempts to placate the guards went in vain as soon as everyone noticed the two stone golems jogging in our direction from the road leading to the city gates. There was an out-of-breath female dwarf in a brown cloak similar to mine running between them, and she was calling my name at the top of her lungs.

Chapter end