harm to come to her mother, even if it meant revealing her identity.
The canyon had its drawbacks, there was no question about that. The most obvious was the one Kalten had raised. If the Trolls ever reached the canyon rim above them, the situation would quickly become untenable. Kalten made quite an issue of pointing that out. ‘I told you so’ figured prominently in his remarks.
‘I think you’re over-estimating the intelligence of Trolls, Kalten,’ Ulath disagreed. ‘They’ll come straight at us, because they’ll be thinking of us as food, not as enemies. Supper’s more important to them than a military victory.’
‘You’re just loaded with cheery thoughts today, aren’t you, Ulath?’ Tynian said dryly. ‘How many of them do you think there are?’
‘It’s hard to say,’ Ulath shrugged. ‘I’ve heard ten different voices so far – probably the heads of families. There’s probably a hundred or so of them out there at the very least.’
‘It could be worse,’ Kalten said.
‘Not by very much,’ Ulath disagreed. ‘A hundred Trolls could have given Wargun’s whole army some serious problems.’
Bevier, their expert on fortifications and defensive positions, had been surveying the canyon. ‘There are plenty of rocks in the stream-bed for breastworks,’ he observed, ‘and whole thickets of saplings for stakes. Ulath, how long do you think we have before they attack?’
Ulath scratched at his chin. ‘The fact that we’re stopping gives us a bit more space,’ he mused, ‘If we were still moving, they’d attack right away, but now they’ll probably take their time and gather their forces. I believe you might want to re-think your strategy though, Bevier. Trolls aren’t going to shoot arrows at us, so breastworks aren’t really necessary. Actually, they’d hinder us more than they would the Trolls. Our advantage lies in our horses – and our lances. You really want to keep Trolls at a distance if you possibly can. The sharpened stakes would be good, though. A Troll takes the easiest way to get at what he wants – us, in this case. If we can clutter up the sides of this narrow place and funnel them through so that only a few at a time can come at us, we’ll definitely improve the situation. We don’t want to take on more of them at any one time than we absolutely have to. What I’d really like is a dozen or so of Kurik’s crossbows.’
‘I have one. Sir Ulath,’ Khalad volunteered.
‘And many of the knights have longbows,’ Bevier added.
‘We slow them down with the stakes so that we can pick them off with arrows?’ Tynian surmised.
‘That’s the best plan,’ Ulath agreed. ‘You don’t want to go hand to hand with a Troll if you can possibly avoid it.’
‘We’d better get at it, then,’ Sparhawk told them.
The work was feverish for the next hour. The narrow gap was necked down even more with boulders from the stream-bed, and a forest of sharpened stakes, all slanting sharply outward, was planted to the front. There was a method to the planting of the stakes. They bristled so thickly along the sides of the gap as to be well-nigh impenetrable, but the corridor leading to the basin at the head of the canyon was planted only sparsely with them to encourage the monsters to follow that route. Kring’s Peloi found a large bramble thicket, uprooted the thorn-bushes and threw them back among the thick-planted stakes at the sides to further impede progress.
‘What’s Khalad doing there?’ Kalten asked, puffing and sweating with the large rock he carried in his arms.
‘He’s building something,’ Sparhawk replied.
‘This isn’t really the time for the construction of camp improvements, Sparhawk.’
‘He’s a sensible young man. I’m sure he’s usefully occupied.’
At the end of the hour, they stopped to survey the fruits of their labours. The gap had been narrowed to no more than eight feet wide, and the ground at the sides of the gap was dense with chest-high stakes angled so that they would keep the Trolls on the right path. Tynian, however, added one small embellishment. A number of his Alciones were driving pegs into the middle of the pathway and then sharpening the protruding ends.
‘Trolls don’t wear shoes, do they?’ he asked Ulath.
‘It’d take half a cow-hide to make shoes for a Troll,’ Ulath shrugged, ‘and they eat cows hide and all, so they’re a little short of leather.’
‘Good. We want to keep them in the centre of the canyon, but we don’t want to make it too
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