The Lost Stories (22 page)

Will hesitated, looking at the torn piece of paper in Halt's hands.

“Isn't that a little sneaky?” he said. Halt grinned happily.

“It certainly is. And isn't that what Rangers are supposed to be?”

 

An hour later, they were on the road to the southwest. Mindful of Ebony's recent abduction by Roamers, Will had left her at the castle, in Pauline's care. Intelligent and loyal as she was, Ebony was still young and excitable. They couldn't risk taking her along on what would probably turn out to be a dangerous assignment. Pauline was delighted to have the dog for company, and Ebony was devoted to her.

As they rode, Will chuckled quietly to himself. Halt turned in his saddle to look at him.

“Something funny?”

“I keep thinking about Gilan doing that Battleschool report,” Will said. “You're right. It's so sneaky.”

Halt beamed. “It serves him right for all the times he tried to ambush me on the way to Gatherings,” he said. “Sometimes former apprentices lose all their respect for their former masters.” He glanced meaningfully at Will, who hastened to reply.

“Not me!” he said. “I still have enormous respect for you, Halt!” Halt looked searchingly at him for several moments, then, seemingly satisfied, he nodded to himself. “Just bear it in mind.”

They continued without speaking any further for a few hundred meters, then Will broke the silence again.

“The good thing about this is that I can work on my speech in the evenings,” Will said.

“You brought it with you?” Halt asked him, a little apprehensively. Will nodded.“I thought it would be a good opportunity to work on it without distractions.”

There was a long silence, then Halt said, “I certainly won't interrupt you. I mean, I wouldn't want to impede the creative flow or anything like that. In fact, you can just consider me not there at all if you want to work on it.” He wondered if Will would detect the sarcasm behind that statement, but his former apprentice nodded gratefully.

“Thanks, Halt. I appreciate that. Now, what's our course of action going to be?”

Halt considered for a few moments as he marshaled his thoughts.

“As I said this morning, we can't expect any help from the locals. We can't take the chance that they'll betray us to the moondarkers.”

“The moondarkers aren't locals, then?” Will asked.

Halt shook his head. “No. They travel up and down the coast. If they work one area for too long, word gets out and people like us turn up to stop them. Also, ships quickly learn to avoid that part of the coast.”

“You said you had word from an informer. Can we expect any help from him?” Will asked. But again, the answer was in the negative.

“If he's wise, he'll have nothing to do with us. After all, he's got to live in the area after we've gone.”

“That makes sense. So what's our plan?”

“We'll make camp and scout around—hopefully without being seen ourselves. Usually the moondarkers don't stay in the villages, so they'll have a camp somewhere in the area as well. That'll be hard to conceal because there will be fifteen to twenty of them. So we scout around for that—and we look for signs that they're getting ready.”

“Like what?”

“Like a beacon fire being prepared on the wrong headland. They'll have to build that a day or two in advance. Plus we'll need to post a lookout to the north for ships making their way down the coast. And we need to keep an eye out for other people who are looking for the same thing.”

“And if we see any of these things happening?” Will asked. Halt smiled at him. The smile reminded Will of a wolf showing its teeth.

“Then I'll ask them to stop. I can be very persuasive when I put my mind to it.”

“I've noticed that in the past,” Will said.

They made good time for the rest of the day, setting the horses into the Ranger forced march pattern, alternating between cantering and walking. Dusk was falling when Halt indicated a cleared spot under a group of trees.

“That looks like a decent campsite,” he said. “We may as well get set up before it's too dark.”

“Do you want me to cook?” Will asked. He knew Halt was capable of doing it. But Will actually enjoyed the work of preparing meals and he was an excellent camp cook, always carrying a traveling kit of spices and ingredients to improve the flavor of the meals he prepared. Since Rangers were often forced to exist on dried meat and fruit and flat bread, he always felt they should enjoy good meals when they had the chance.

Halt agreed with him in this matter.

“I'll look forward to it,” he said. “Once we're near Hambley, it'll be cold camps and hard rations, so we might as well enjoy some hot food and coffee while we can. I'll clean up later.”

In spite of their former master-apprentice relationship, Halt nowadays considered Will an equal and was always willing to share campsite chores with him.

“Excellent,” Will said. Like a lot of cooks, he liked the process of preparation but was less enthusiastic about the cleaning up that followed. “That'll give me time to work on my speech.”

“I'll look forward to that, too,” Halt said, straight-faced.

A RIDGE OF HILLS RAN BEHIND THE TOWN OF HAMBLEY, ABOUT half a kilometer inland. The town itself was built around a small but well-protected harbor. On the northern breakwater, Will could see a large metal framework some six meters in height.

“That's the real beacon,” Halt told him, noticing his interested gaze. “It's lit every night and it shows any approaching ship where the north breakwater is and gives them a steering point. But as you can see, the tall headland behind it hides it from the view of any ship coming down the coast until the ship is only half a kilometer away.”

They were lying on their bellies at the top of the ridge of hills overlooking the town. The horses were back on the reverse side of the ridge, out of sight. The two Rangers, lying prone and concealed by their cloaks, would be invisible to anyone within fifty meters, let alone half a kilometer.

“Now look farther north,” Halt said, and Will obediently shifted his point of view. Beyond the headland, a curving strip of beach swept north, ending in another, slightly lower headland. “My guess is, that's where they'll build the false beacon. You can see how the water is shallow for several hundred meters out from the beach. Any ship turning in there, thinking they've found the harbor, will be on the sand before they know it. I imagine the wreckers will set up spot fires and lanterns on the low ground behind the beach so it'll look like the town. The ship's captain will see what he expects to see. A beacon and a township. But it'll be a kilometer farther north than the real one. This ridge of hills we're on will create a dark backdrop. Someone looking from out to sea will see the lights against the darkness. They won't see details.”

He rubbed his jaw thoughtfully, brushing away an ant that had ventured to explore his beard.

“That shallow sandy bottom will suit them admirably. The ship will be stuck on it, but unless there's really bad weather, she won't break up. That means the moondarkers can wade out at low tide and unload her at their leisure. And they'll get all the cargo instead of losing some as it's washed away.”

Will glanced sideways at the gray-bearded Ranger. “You seem to know a lot about how they work, Halt.”

Halt nodded grimly. “Moondarking was a blight on this nation during the first war with Morgarath,” he said. “The King's troops were too preoccupied with the rebellion to attend to other matters. And you know how quickly criminals will take advantage of a situation like that.”

Will nodded. “So how did you stamp them out?”

“Oh, after the war, Crowley and I mounted a bit of a campaign against them. After a while, they seemed to decide that Araluen wasn't the best place to go moondarking. Most of them moved on to Gallica, where conditions were more conducive to their trade.”

“Most of them?” Will asked. “What about the others?”

“They stayed here,” Halt said grimly. “You'll find their graves up and down the west coast if you look closely.”

“You and Crowley were quite a team in the early days, weren't you?” Will asked. A ghost of a smile touched Halt's mouth.

“We had our moments,” he said. Then he began to slither back from the top of the ridge, staying low until he could stand without being skylined to any observer below them. Will followed and looked expectantly to his old teacher for orders.

“We'll head north toward that beach,” Halt said. “We'll camp on the ridge and keep watch for any activity on the headland or on the low ground inland from the beach.”

“You're sure that's where they'll set up?” Will said.

Halt shrugged. “You can never be sure of anything. But it's the most logical place. Any farther north and they'd be too far away from Hambley itself. Besides, the coastline curves in to the east up there, so the whole topography is different. This spot is close enough to the real town to confuse any skipper who's not on his toes. We'll scout through the woods as well, to see if we can find their camp. If they're in the area, they shouldn't be too hard to find. They won't be trying to remain hidden the way we will be and it'll be a big camp.”

“You said there could be fifteen to twenty of them . . . ,” Will began.

“That's right. And they'll need carts and horses to carry away the cargo, so the camp will be a big one.”

“Can we handle that many?” Will asked tentatively.

Halt looked steadily at him. “These men are cold-blooded murderers,” he said. “But they're not warriors. They'll get one warning to surrender, then we start shooting. Crowley and I handled this many. It shouldn't be a problem.”

“That was Crowley and you,” Will said. He was surprised by Halt's answer.

“You're better than Crowley.”

Will would have been even more surprised if Halt had added what was in his mind:
You're probably better than me, too.

They struck north and set up a small, well-concealed camp in a thicket of trees on the inland slope of the ridge. Abelard and Tug were unsaddled and left to graze close to the camp. If by chance they were discovered, their shaggy coats and lack of saddles or bridles would probably lead their discoverers to assume they were wild ponies. There were numbers of those roaming the hills in small groups.

There would be no campfire, and the two Rangers sighed as they resigned themselves to a diet of cold water and hard rations for the duration of the mission. They set up an observation post on the ridge, digging a shallow pit, then roofing it over with dirt, branches and leaves so that they could watch the beach and the headland unobserved. It was not unlike the sort of hide that hunters built, Will thought. Then he smiled grimly as he realized they
were
hunters. But they were hunting men.

There were still a few hours of daylight left when they finished. Halt gestured to the pit.

“Keep an eye on things,” he said. “I'm going to scout around and see if I can find any sign of a camp.”

Will nodded. A camp would confirm that they were on the right track. After all, they were still working off information received from the anonymous informant. It could well be a wild-goose chase. But one of the first things a Ranger learned was to watch and listen patiently for hours or days on end.

Will moved in a crouch to the observation post, which was on the slope of the ridge overlooking the beach, and crept inside. He settled down, made himself comfortable and leaned back against the dirt wall. They had left an observation slit that ran the entire width of the hide, and as he sat back in the deep shadows, he had an uninterrupted view of the headland and beach.

He reached into the satchel he had slung over one shoulder and took out paper, pen and a small traveling inkwell. The draft of his speech was in there too, but for the moment he would content himself with noting down impressive phrases to include in it. He could do that while keeping a keen eye on the beach below him. Reading or rewriting the speech would be too much of a distraction. But jotting down the odd descriptive phrase would only take a second or two at a time.

One such came to mind—a description of Horace and Evanlyn—and he quickly unscrewed the inkwell, dipped in his pen and jotted it down.

The much beloved boon companions of my tender youthful years,
he wrote. And muttered to himself, “Oh, that's good. Very good.”

He scanned the beach and the headland again, but nothing was moving. Then he jotted down another phrase.

“I do like that. Very much,” he said to himself. He sighed happily and leaned back against the earth wall of the pit, waiting for further inspiration to strike.

 

It took Halt less than two hours to find the camp.

Not surprisingly, it was the smell of wood smoke that first alerted him to the presence of people in the woods. It was faint at first, but as he followed in the direction from which the light breeze was blowing, it became stronger. Then he began to notice other signs. A dog barked. Then he heard the ring of an ax on wood. The sounds and smells took him back over the ridgeline, into the woods on the seaward side. Eventually, he found himself looking down into a cleared hollow in the trees.

There were half a dozen tents pitched in a neat group, and several cooking fires were already lit. Off to one side, four solid-wheeled carts were parked. Beyond them, he could make out horses tethered among the trees. People moved about the campsite, talking and calling to one another. There was no real attempt at concealment, as there was nobody to remain concealed from—so far as the moondarkers were concerned.