Free Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles) by Robert Brady Page B

to keeping me on his back.
         That night I set up a few landfalls and other such traps that I made up on the spot.  I doubted any of them would actually work, but I kept it up while we had light.  I slept again without dreaming and awoke nonplussed but better rested.  The stallion had made another attempt to get at my food supply but fortunately I slept on top of it.
         The next day I actually tried to spring my traps and one of them worked.  I congratulated myself and made as many of that type as I could.  I had bent a sapling over and pinned it to the ground with a root, and then used a length of bark to hold it in place.  That piece of bark formed a loop on the opposite side of the sapling – when anything stepped on the bark, it pulled the root away and the sapling sprung free, pulling the bark loop with it.  Then I covered the strip of bark with leaves and debris.  The terrain here consisted of rough scrub grass, little bushes and an occasional tree to hide my handy work. I didn’t think I would actually find a fellow Man hanging upside-down by one of these contraptions, but I would hear the thing go off.
         By that night my hands were raw.  I did a few drills with the sword to make sure I could still fight and decided I would be no worse off than usual.  Again, I reflected that I would be about dead if I came up against an experienced swordsman.  The stallion had followed me the entire day but stood far back while I whipped the sword around.  Smart animal!
         The next day my hands felt better and I practiced some more with the sword, then with the long bow that the Uman had tried to use on us.  I set up a target and made sure that I kept the stallion behind me, and tried my hand.  I hit the target one of twelve times and broke one arrow, leaving me with eleven.  Just before noon (assuming noon here was the sun at its apex) I heard one of my traps spring.
         I mounted the horse, sword in hand, and followed the sound, which wasn’t too hard to find because of the loud swearing.  I slowed as I approached an angry Kvitch untying a noose from his ankle.  The dirt in his beard and the dig in the ground next to him told me that the trap had not only taken him by surprise, it had leveled him.
         “I suppose this is your handiwork?” he asked, his eyes dark with anger.
         “Yep,” I said, dismounting with my back to him to hide the smile on my face.
         The rock that took me between the shoulder blades told me this hadn’t worked.  “Hey!” I said.
         “Serves you right, Man,” he said.  “Cut this infernal thing from me.”
         I knelt at his feet and he handed me a twelve-inch knife, handle first.  The grip had been wrapped in strips of leather; the blade curved and hand-pounded, sharp as a razor.  I cut the noose from his ankle and he flexed his foot.
         “Dwarven bones break hard,” Kvitch told me.  Then he rubbed his nose and shook the dirt from his beard.  “Our noses, however, are different.  What was that thing?”
         “Rabbit snare,” I told him.
         “Ah,” he nodded.  I guess they had rabbits here, too.  “Not too bad.  No one would actually look for it.  If you kept a dagger you could have bent the sapling the other way, used a longer strip of bark and made a more lethal trap.”
         That made sense; I could envision it in my mind.  I looked around and didn’t see anyone else.  Kvitch stood and smiled. 
    “No,” he said, “and you won’t see them, either.  We are Dwarves and this is our land.  The dust cloud from the approaching army isn’t far.  We just beat the Dorkans here.”
         “How many Dwarves did you bring?”
         “Two hundred.  How many Dorkans?”
         “Two thousand would seem about right.  I saw hundreds of cook fires when I found the camp.  I saw a separate camp with about thirty Men, which I assume are your ‘wizards.’  I