Now they could see the sarifs just below their own vantage point. They clustered at either end of the cliff-walled trap, their arrows and the jagged boulders they had collected effectively barring any attempt by the soldiers to cut their way through. Already more than half the Tarnish fighting men were down, and it was but a matter of time until the last of them died.
Further to the east, in a stream-watered little park, the wagons were bulked in a rude circle. They were fewer now, less than thirty were left of the original train, and they were patched and travel-stained. "We had better divide, Kern Rensom," said Hardan thoughtfully. "You take ten men and take cover above the western party. I will take the others to capture the wagons and the other party."
"Good," agreed the little man from Aarth, and he started issuing orders at once.
Taking advantage of whatever cover the broken nature of the uplands afforded, the Aarthmen and the Wetlanders slipped downward toward the sarifs. Nor were they detected before they had reached a bulging ridge of flinty red rock twenty feet above them.
Hardan cupped his hands and shouted down at the fifteen ragged men below, "Throw down your weapons, sarifs. You are surrounded."
The men turned, startled, to look upward into the eyes of twenty strange little men and the two Wetlanders. Nor could they fail to see the arrows that centered on their vitals. One by one they loosed their bows and spears, their nerveless fingers twitching.
Nowhere could Hardan see Nitka Porn, though he counted five of the rebel sarifs immediate underlings in the group.
"Where is Nitka Porn?" he demanded.
The sarifs stirred uneasily, their sullen green eyes shifting and their tongues dabbing at blackened cracked lips. They were a hopeless, stupid-looking crowd. From them the Drylands had sapped their strength and sucked dry their brains. Nor had the browbeating of Nitka Porn been without influence in this final result.
One of them, a broken-toothed oldster who feared the rebel sarif the less because he was so near to death, stepped clumsily forward.