All That Glitters (3 page)

Artus climbed with both packs as fast as Tyvian did with none—­something to be said for the power of terror—­and soon both of them were on their hands and knees at the top of the chimney, coughing, wheezing, vomiting out the disgusting remnants of their would-­be killers.

Tyvian wiped a film of green slime off his face and gasped in the clean, fresh forest air. “I . . . I told you there was a third trap.”

Artus rolled over on his back. “Saints . . . I thought I was a goner . . . I thought I was dead . . .”

Tyvian shook his head to try and get the gunk out of his ears. “Would have been, were it not for my heroic efforts. I hope you appreciate the lengths I go to.” Slowly, he got to his feet, letting his eyes adjust to the midday sunlight.

Artus opened his pack and pulled out the Heart of Flowing Sunlight. “We got it.”

Tyvian, though, didn't react. “Artus,” he said calmly, “You know how you thought you were dead a few moments ago?”

Artus sat up. “Yeah?”

Tyvian put his hands up slowly. “You might still be right.”

“What?” Artus rubbed the goop out of his eyes and looked around.

The only thing he saw were the arrowheads of a score of drawn bows and the angry, filthy faces of the Forest Children surrounding them.

 

T
he Forest Children, also known as the woodkin to those of a more Galaspiner bent, or the Vel'jahai, if you happened to be one of them, were barbarous savages who lived within the vast confines of Isra'Nyil, or, more simply, the Great Forest. Tyvian had heard an awful lot of rumors about them over the years, and none of them had been flattering. His observations of their movements during the last few weeks had confirmed more rumors than they dispelled. They were superstitious, violently territorial vegetarians who “lived in harmony with nature,” which evidently meant sleeping in burrows like human badgers, bathing infrequently, and rutting like wild animals in open daylight, where any passing fifteen-­year-­old farmboy might gawk at them and ask his partner/mentor extremely inappropriate questions about human anatomy.

Tyvian prepared to be shot with at least a dozen arrows immediately. When it didn't happen, he found himself talking. Talking, he had found, usually got him out of a lot of sticky situations. “Greetings, friends! I have wonderful news!”

Tyvian's smile and cheery tone took the savages temporarily aback. They muttered among themselves in their slippery, silvery language. It sounded like pigeons trying to coo at each other with polysyllabic words.

Tyvian kicked Artus out of his open-­mouthed shock. “Bow-­wards!” he hissed, and then kept turning on the charm. “My partner and I have performed an in-­depth investigation, and we have discovered that your god is false!”

Artus slowly took off his pack and began to rummage around.

Tyvian shot him a withering look. “My pack, fool! In my pack!”

The arrows quavered in their bows as the petite, wiry builds of the Forest Children struggled to hold them. They looked confused, perhaps even afraid. Tyvian just kept smiling. “Now, I know this comes as a shock to you all—­I understand. However, consider the advantages! No longer must you pitch your hard-­earned fruits and vegetables down a dark hole in the midst of a forest—­Isra isn't eating them, believe me—­and you can now devote that time to more productive pursuits such as, for instance, the knitting of pants. I mean, let's face it, gentlemen—­some of you fellows are one misguided falcon's dive away from compulsory celibacy!”

Artus was elbow deep in Tyvian's pack. “I don't see them anywhere.”

The Forest Children had stopped muttering among themselves. Their faces were now grave. Tyvian kept smiling, but growled out the side of this mouth, “Artus, bow-­wards now, please.”

“I'm looking!”

The savages were parting, allowing someone at the back to push their way to the front. Tyvian knew whoever it was probably wasn't there to bail them out. “Look much,
much
faster.”

“They in the big pocket or the side pockets?”

“Big pocket, dammit.
Big
pocket!” Tyvian kept his eyes fixed on the person approaching, though all he could currently see was a mop of matted red-­orange hair drawing close. He heard Artus fumbling around inside the pack, cursing under his breath.

Tyvian found himself looking at a young woman clad in only a loincloth, a few elaborate tattoos, and a colossal mane of hair that spilled over her shoulders and fell almost to her knees. Were she cleaner and not flanked by men who planned to kill him, Tyvian might have spent a good minute ogling her rather taut, compact frame and athletic curves. He reflected, suddenly, that he usually seemed to meet the most attractive women the exact same way—­just before they tried to kill him.

The woman drew a spike from her hair that looked like a very large thorn with a crossbar that allowed her to hold it, with the “blade” portion poking between her middle and ring fingers. She pointed it at Tyvian. “You Destroyers have defiled the holy temple of Isra. Why?” Her voice was clear and penetrating—­the voice of an orator.

Tyvian looked back at the hole. “Is
that
what that was? Honestly, we were just looking for somewhere to—­”

“Lies!” she snarled, showing her teeth.

“Got them!” Artus announced, slapping something into Tyvian's hand—­a smooth, elliptical amulet fashioned from an alchemical mix of lodestone and steel.

Tyvian slipped the amulet over his head. “We were robbing you of your giant enchanted diamond—­there, happy now?”

The woman's green eyes seemed to glow with anger. “Your blood must be used to cleanse the temple space! Surrender to the Ja'Naieen and we will only kill one of you!”

Tyvian shrugged. “Hardly tempting—­I need Artus to carry the packs.”

That did it. The woman chirped something angry at the Forest Children archers, and they loosed their arrows in one terrifying salvo.

Tyvian, of course, knew that the Vel'jahai's weapon of choice was the bow, which was why he had invested in bow-­wards for both himself and Artus. The thing was, however, that bow-­wards were designed to stop only a few arrows at a time, working under the assumption that you weren't, say, standing less than five paces from twenty archers who had nothing else to shoot at but you and your friend. So, when all of those razor-­sharp projectiles came whistling straight at Tyvian's torso and struck the boundary of the ward more or less at the same time, the result was a complete overload of the ward's capacity. This, of course, meant Tyvian's ward exploded with a flash of blue light and a thunderclap roar that caused everyone present to hold their ears and fall to their knees.

Everyone, that was, except Artus and Tyvian.

“Time to run!” Tyvian grabbed his pack and sprinted, Artus just behind him. He kicked one of the Forest Children in his skinny, beardless chin as he rose to stop them but otherwise didn't break stride. They dove into the forest like a pair of big dogs through a hedge, eschewing dexterity and stealth for sheer, brute speed.

Arrows began to zing past their ears shortly thereafter, embedding themselves in trees or sticking in their packs as they ran, bobbing and weaving among the broad mossy trunks of the deep forest.

“Where the hell is Hool?” Tyvian snarled, more to the air than to Artus.

Artus answered anyway. “She's probably by the temple entrance. We came out the back!”

Tyvian leapt over a dead stump and ducked back into a hollow, Artus just beside him. This bought them a few seconds from the arrows. “Which way is the temple entrance?”

Artus looked around. “I dunno! I don't even know where we are!”

Tyvian poked his head up, only to have an arrow embed itself in the tree stump no more than three inches from his face. “Gods! I hate the gods-­damned forest!”

“Which way do we run?”

Tyvian threw up his hands. “Away! Does it really matter? Go, boy, go!”

Artus took the lead. Tyvian wished he had the time to dig out his sword, Chance, from his pack as he ran, for the thought of being overrun by savages and having no blade to stab them with was among the most depressing ends he could think of. He couldn't, though, since his pack was doing a good job doubling as a pincushion for errant woodkin arrows.

Their lead, small to begin with, was vanishing every second. The Forest Children were on either side of them now, trying to flank. Tyvian imagined they had no more than a few more seconds before they were surrounded again.

They broke out of the trees, and Tyvian saw a form of salvation—­a canyon, perhaps fifteen feet wide, with a large tree fallen across it. Tyvian pointed toward it breathlessly, but Artus had already seen it. The boy engaged reserves of energy only a teenager seemed to have and pulled ahead of Tyvian, bounding across the fallen trunk like a squirrel.

Tyvian was a few seconds behind him, with a half-­dozen Forest Children, including Red-­hair, nipping at his heels. He leapt onto the trunk and tried running across but stumbled halfway. He flailed around at errant branches to regain his balance and tried to stand up when a sweating, dirty Forest Child jumped on his back, grabbing him around the throat.

Tyvian estimated the little man to weigh no more than one hundred ten pounds, soaking wet, and therefore the smuggler found himself in the rare circumstance of being both larger and stronger than his opponent. He stood up, gagging against the man's forearms locked over his windpipe, and threw himself backward atop the trunk. Tyvian heard the man shriek as a particularly sharp broken end of a branch pierced his back. The Forest Child loosened his grip, after which Tyvian found it a simple matter to disentangle himself and kick the fellow over the side.

This marked the first time Tyvian had looked down. The canyon was more than twenty feet deep, and the rushing white water looked exceptionally rough. The thought of falling suddenly made him dizzy.

Another Forest Child lunged at him with one of those punch-­spike things. This was more in line with what Tyvian was used to—­he deflected the blow and, grabbing the man by the scruffy hair, pulled him off-­balance and pushed him off the tree again. Two down, at least—­he looked up—­thirty-­five or so to go. Wonderful.

Red-­hair was next to step onto the tree, but she was more cautious than the others. She kept her distance. “There is no escape for you, Destroyer.”

Tyvian pointed over his shoulder. “I was under the impression that I could escape
that
way.”

Red-­hair laughed. The laugh seemed remarkably genuine—­a deep belly-­laugh that made her breasts shake and her mouth open all the way.

Tyvian didn't like that laugh one bit—­what was wrong with crossing the canyon? He cast a look over his shoulder.

Artus was running back in his direction. His face was deathly pale. “Run! Run!”

Tyvian looked behind Artus to see what, for a split second, he thought to be some kind of shambling haystack the size of a dray wagon. He was wrong.

It was a bear.

“Kroth's bloody teeth!” he swore. “Can this
possibly
get any worse?”

Red-­hair roared incoherently in the direction of the bear, tipping her head. The bear answered in kind, nodding its massive head in similar fashion. It stopped at the edge of the tree trunk and roared at Artus and Tyvian, who were now standing back to back over a drop to certain death.

Tyvian sighed. “She can talk to bears. Right. That's worse.”

Artus was clearly one more surprise away from total panic. “What do we do? What do we do? Saints, we're dead! Dead!”

Tyvian looked at Red-­hair and the rows of Forest Children lining the edge of the canyon, bows ready. He looked back at the bear, its head low and its black eyes fixed on him and Artus. He looked down. “I've got a plan, Artus.”

Artus blinked. “Really?”

“Hold your breath.”

“What?”

Tyvian pushed Artus off the tree trunk. The boy screamed the whole way down. Red-­hair was agape, her mouth hanging open. Tyvian gave her a wink and followed Artus down.
He
remembered to hold his breath.

It didn't do a hell of a lot of good.

S
ome eighteen hours later Tyvian crouched at the edge of a lake in his underclothes, watching the dawn mists slowly burn off in the face of the sunrise. It looked like something out of a poem: the water was a deep blue-­green and spotted with the pristine white of countess-­lilies; the grass glittered with dew beneath the full boughs of the trees. Somewhere nearby a loon whistled for its mate. When Tyvian had selected this place for their rendezvous point, the idea had been to cap off his stunning heist with a beautiful sunrise picnic. He had even preselected what they would have for breakfast—­it was packed up in Brana's satchel.

Unfortunately, Brana's satchel was now at the bottom of a river, lost when the gnoll pup and his mother, Hool, had dragged his and Artus's floundering arses from the rapids and deposited them on the shore.

The four of them had spent the better part of last night scurrying through the woods like weasels, trying to put distance between them and a host of woodkin that wanted them dead with a religious fervor. Even now, Hool and Brana were out making false trails to throw off pursuit. Tyvian was using the time to recuperate from having to swim in filth. Artus was using the time to complain.

“I mean, seriously—­how many times are you going to throw me off a bridge into a river?” Artus had Tyvian's shirt on a rock and was absently rubbing it with another rock—­his peasant version of “doing laundry,” apparently.

Tyvian tried not to look at the mauling of a good tailor's work, focusing instead on the charming natural environs of Isra'Nyil's outer edges. “No doubt you are teeming with alternative escape plans from that situation, tactical mastermind that you are.”

“Oh, that's rich!” Artus snapped, brandishing his laundry-­rock at Tyvian. “I don't remember you asking me nothing, so how do you know? You just pushed me off a damned log without even a wink!” He returned to pummeling the clothes. With gusto.

Tyvian couldn't help but snort. “Artus, we were about to become pincushions for poisoned arrows or a light snack for a bear
or
both
. It wasn't exactly the time to have a conversation. Besides, you were busy soiling yourself. I think the only “plan” you might have suggested would have involved the fetal position and a lot of weeping for our mothers.”

Artus leapt to his feet and cocked the rock over one shoulder as if to throw it. “You leave my mother out of this, you—­”

He was interrupted by the great, golden-­furred mass of Hool emerging from the nearby underbrush and fixing him with a coppery glare that could probably kill a bird dead. “Shut up, Artus! You are making too much noise again!”

Tyvian nodded. “Thank you, Hool. I've been trying to—­”

“You shut up, too. You make almost as much noise as he does.” Hool brushed a few stray brambles from her mane. “Me and Brana just worked very hard to hide your stupid human footprints and you are going to spoil it by shouting all the time. Be quiet.”