Free Demontech: Gulf Run by David Sherman Page B

bringing any down. Still, they brought in more deer, boar, elk, and rabbits each day than was needed to feed the caravan. The meat was supplemented by fruits, tubers, mushrooms, and other forest edibles gathered by foraging women and children. Each day they spent giving the wounded time to heal, the refugees’ store of food grew.
    Reconnaissance patrols ranged far enough to see the ruins of Eikby in the distance, but they never saw sign of Jokapcul following them. They did see the Jokapcul constructing a base just outside Eikby’s ruins, though.
    The healers were pleased with the progress of the wounded. The land trow and aralez were tremendous aids in mending wounds. After two days, only half of the wounded were still unable to resume the march to Dartmutt under their own power—and all were out of danger.
    Zweepee, backed by Jatke, wanted to stay another day or two in order to gather more food. Nightbird and the other healers—magicians and witches both—wanted to give the wounded more time to heal before stressing their healing injuries by moving them. But Haft and Silent threw their weight to Spinner in his insistence that even if the Jokapcul weren’t coming directly at them from the south, the enemy was still on the move and they should move on as well. Alyline reluctantly conceded that Spinner, for once, was right.
    They broke camp on the morning of the third day and resumed their slow progress north. To direct the scouts who were still out after they returned, Haft stayed behind with a rear guard.
    The rest, brief as it was, was good for more than just the wounded. The people of Eikby had been in a state of high tension and activity since the arrival of Spinner and Haft and their company several weeks earlier: first with the Rockhold bandits who had attacked the town and had to be dealt with, then while preparing for another bandit attack, and finally the attack by the Jokapcul, which ended up destroying the town and imprisoning half its surviving population before the two Frangerian Marines and their fighting men rescued them and defeated the remaining Jokapcul. They then fled northward before more Jokapcul could arrive.
    The two days in the encampment was the first respite the townspeople had had in all that time. Short as the rest was, it rejuvenated them and raised their morale—especially when it sunk in that they’d once more defeated the supposedly invincible Jokapcul. They started thinking of the Jokapcul as highly vincible.
    Tramping or riding merrily along, on the fourth day after the rest, the van of the caravan topped a last rise and looked over the plain that led to the walled city of Dartmutt. They saw more smoke rising from the city environs and the harbor than could be accounted for by hearth fires alone.

II

FALLING WALLS

 
     
     
    CHAPTER

FIVE
     
     
     
     
     
    The ground sloped down to a broad plain that wrapped around the city of Dartmutt, which itself fronted the harbor. For almost a mile around the walls of Dartmutt, the plain was colorful chaos. Thousands upon thousands of people talked and cried and shouted in a score or more languages and dialects, and their garb was as varied as their tongues. The extravagance of smoke plumes that rose above the city was from the cookfires that lay at the center of many of the clusters of refugees. There was no order; each newly arriving group parked its wagons or pitched its tents wherever it could find space, and sometimes where it couldn’t. Frequent fights broke out when one group decided a neighbor intruded on its space; blood was sometimes drawn or bones fractured, not infrequently a broken body was removed for burial.
    The city itself was a square with thirty-foot-high stone walls nearly half a mile on a side. The tops of the walls had crenellations, barely seen from where the mountain road opened to the plain, and were cantilevered so they jutted out a man’s length beyond the curtain wall. Towers situated at the corners of the walls