Chasers of the Wind (29 page)

“I wonder why that is?” I interjected. “The city is much closer than Okni or Gash-Shaku.”

“I really don’t know. But for now they’re leaving Al’sgara alone. So the road there should be free. But it’s going to be a while before we find horses. ’Til we get to Bald Hollow, at least.”

“How far do we have to go?” Ga-Nor approached her too quickly, but his hands were in sight and I wasn’t about to get twitchy over a trifle. “How many days?”

“As many as we need,” I replied. “The sooner we set off, the faster we’ll get there. So let’s not delay uselessly.”

The rain had stopped a while ago, but the road was studded with puddles and there was so much mud that we had to walk on the shoulder, where it was a bit cleaner. The thick spruce forest continued to stretch on to our right, but it soon dropped away to the left, giving way to the cheerless landscape of a swamp. Moss and flimsy saplings are not at all pleasing to the eye. I wanted to pass through this part of our journey as quickly as possible. I didn’t feel like feeding the mosquitoes, and there were more terrible things that could emerge from the swamp to feed on us. People say all sorts of things about these places and most of them are bad. I’m not inclined to believe in nonsense, because I know that the Blazogs are far from monsters, but besides this fairly peaceful race, there really are dangerous creatures living here as well. The sole good thing about our environs was that in the summer vast numbers of birds nested in the swampy lakes, and I held on to the hope that we might not have to go without dinner. To that end, I put a fresh string on my bow so I would be ready to shoot at any moment.

Ga-Nor didn’t look backward once the entire time we were walking. The pace the northerner set was astonishing. It was like he wasn’t tired at all, but was ready to walk across the entire Empire. Luk was humming a tune I didn’t recognize and after a while Layen began to accompany him. I snorted. The song got stuck in my head. If the Healer joined in, we’d make a pretty band of traveling musicians.

Fkhut! Shloop!

Shen, who was bringing up the rear, gave a strangled cry.

I deftly hopped forward, while simultaneously spinning around. The Healer was lying in the road, floundering in a gray slime which only by some miracle hadn’t hit him in the face.

“Hold still, you fool!” I yelled, but he didn’t heed me. He kept struggling and spewing curses. The muck he was covered in was beginning to harden.

“What is that?” Luk instantly forgot about his ditty. Without a second’s pause I gave him back his axe, which definitely convinced him that the Healer was in a lot of trouble.

“Layen, give the northerner his sword,” I said, not taking my eyes off the gloomy wall of the forest.

Right now it was better to give them their weapons. They might be needed very soon.

The gray slime clinging to Shen finally hardened and he was completely immobilized.

“What’s attacking us, screw a toad?” Panicked notes slipped into Luk’s voice.

“A shpaguk.” Ga-Nor took his sword from its sheath and stepped aside.

“A male,” I clarified. “That means that the female might be nearby. Don’t all stand together. Disperse. So it can’t reach all of us at once.”

“So what can’t reach us?” Now the soldier was looking into the forest as well.

“Its saliva.”

“What should we do about him?” Layen nodded at the Healer.

“Let him lie there. We don’t have time for him right now.”

Fkhut!

A clump flew out of the trees and would have hit Luk directly if he hadn’t jumped to the side with all the grace of a blind boar.

Shloop!

The soldier lost his footing and fell face-first into a puddle. But he immediately hopped to his feet, spitting and swearing fiercely.

Fkhut!

This time it was Layen who had to move aside, and the shpaguk missed again.

Shloop!

I finally marked where it was spitting from and randomly shot off an arrow in that direction. Of course, it didn’t connect, but the threat forced our opponent to go from spitting to attacking. It jumped out onto the road from the upper branches of a spruce tree, landing dangerously close to Shen, and croaked deafeningly.

It was short, about waist high, and as round as a saucer, with eight furry legs that ended in serrated claws. Thick green fuzz blanketed the creature’s entire body, and its two pairs of small, black eyes looked like precious stones. It clicked its formidable mandibles, and its flexible tail, tipped with a yard-long stinger, flicked up threateningly. Naturally, a man couldn’t expect anything good to come from being struck by that. As far as I know, there’s no antidote to its venom.

“Shoot him!” yelped Luk.

The first and only arrow I shot struck the shpaguk in his mandibles. He shot up into the air and landed right next to me, spitting. I could do nothing but drop down and let the saliva pass over me. I didn’t have time to jump up, and the brute was about to slam its stinger into me, but Ga-Nor leapt in front of me and used his sword to cut through the shpaguk’s tail at the very base. Then the snap of a crossbow rang out—Layen was shooting.

The creature chirred, forgetting about me, and turned to face its new opponent. I rolled away, losing my arrows along the way. Luk resolutely stepped between me and the forest creature. It was occupied with raising its front claws as it prepared to attack the northerner. With a grunt, the soldier plunged his axe into the level back of the shpaguk, and a nasty substance spurted in all directions. Our adversary croaked hoarsely and began stumbling toward the trees on shaky legs, but it never reached them. It died at the very edge of the road.

Baring her knife, Layen rushed over to free Shen. Luk just stood there staring at the animal.

“Help her!” I quickly gathered my arrows. “Come on!”

“What a monster that was.” The soldier’s face was smeared with mud and the blood of the shpaguk. “I hit him good. What? Is he going to come back to life or something?”

“The male hunts. The female waits and eats,” explained Ga-Nor as he walked past us.

“And she might put in an appearance,” I added.

That made the man move. The three of them hacked into the strong cocoon of petrified saliva and liberated Shen from his imprisonment.

Just in the nick of time.

Only a deaf man couldn’t hear that something was crashing toward us through the underbrush. Magpies soared out of the nearby trees with vile shrieks, and a new foe broke out onto the road about twenty yards from us. She was much larger than her mate. Unlike him, she was dark green, and she stood on bulky, barbed legs. Female shpaguks don’t have a tail and they don’t spit petrifying saliva, but a thing that size doesn’t really need those kinds of weapons.

The creature saw its dead mate and headed for us, croaking menacingly.

“Little pig, little pig…” An arrow struck her in the leg.

“Where are you…”

In the eye.

“… roving? Little pig…”

In the head.

“… little pig, where are … you going?… Run faster, little pig … up to the trough.… Slops there, little pig … up to the … top.”

On the eleventh shot, when the enormous female was already towering over me, I finally got her. Right in her gaping jaws. The shpaguk went into convulsions, striking out to the left and right with her claws, hoping to catch one of us. Only after several minutes did she deign to die.

Luk cleared his throat behind my back.

“Very impressive. I thought for sure she was going to rip you apart.”

“Me too. Me too,” I muttered, and peered into my quiver. There were only two arrows left in it.

“What was that you were singing?” Shen wasn’t looking at me but at the green carcass lying on the road.

“That … It was a children’s nursery rhyme.”

“I didn’t expect anything more intelligent from you.”

“Then perhaps you should have helped me, instead of hiding behind my back,” I said nastily.

“Enough!” Layen shouted at us. “When we make camp you can bicker to your heart’s content but right now we’d best get out of here. Sometimes they live in swarm.”

“Shpaguks only swarm toward mid-fall.” Ga-Nor shoved his sword into its sheath. “But it really is best if we leave.”

I didn’t bother cutting out my arrows. It would take far too much time, and plus the creature had broken almost all of them with the short claws that grew near her mouth. However, I did stop by the male’s tail.

“You want to take the venom?” Ga-Nor asked as he noiselessly walked up to me.

“I’m thinking about it.”

“It’s a good thought,” he approved. “It doesn’t get old. Always works.”

“I know.” I cut into the flesh around the stinger. I pried up the plates with the edge of my dagger, revealing a refluent, blue sac that resembled a fish’s air bladder.

“That’s enough to poison an entire fortress.” Luk peered at it over our heads. “It would have been handy to drop that in the cooking pot of a Nabatorian regiment.”

“That wouldn’t work. You could drink the whole thing and nothing would happen to you. It kills only through the blood.”

“Ah,” he drawled disappointedly and walked away to Layen, who was waiting impatiently for us.

I carefully pricked the wall of the bladder with my knife and held my flask under it, from which I had first emptied the water. A few drops of transparent venom landed on my hand but I didn’t pay them any attention. My hands could be washed once the priceless poison had been transferred from its unstable sac to my container.

“You shoot fairly well, Gray.” Ga-Nor was attentively observing my actions. “You’ve got good speed.”

“I can’t complain.”

“Were you taught by a southerner?”

“I wouldn’t have thought you’d have an eye for different styles of archery,” I said, chuckling, in no hurry to reply.

“Somewhat.” He did not bother to deny it. “The Imperials have a completely different stance. And they draw their strings differently. And if you had picked it up from my people, you would never carry a bow like that.”

“You’re correct,” I capitulated. “A southerner taught me. A Sdisian, curiously enough.”

“I figured as much.” Ga-Nor nodded, not at all surprised. Then he asked, “Did you soldier in Sandon?”

“Is it so obvious?”

“I just recall that some Sdisian mercenaries served there. In the Arrows of Maiburg. One of those lads could easily have taught you a few lessons.”

“That’s ancient history.” I smiled crookedly.

“I hope you aren’t waiting for me to give my sword back to you.” He swiftly changed the topic of conversation and I raised my eyes to him.

“So you won’t give it back?”

“No.”

“All right, carry it yourself.” I shrugged my shoulders. “It’ll be easier on Layen.”

For some reason he laughed cheerfully and finally left me alone. I called out to him, “Hey, ginger!”

“Yes?”

“Thanks for saving my hide. I owe you one.”

For a moment he looked at me intently and seriously, and then he broke into a smile, which caused his already threatening face to become downright predatory.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

*   *   *

We passed through two hamlets, so small they didn’t even have inns, came to the shore of a slow river overgrown with reeds, made our way across the river on a small ferry, and finally found ourselves on a low hillock overlooking a small town with an absurd name: Dabb’s Bald Hollow. The road traveled down alongside a large cemetery, right beyond which the settlement began.

It grew up on the intersection of four roads. One came from the east—we arrived on it; another came from the west, from Al’sgara; the third came from the north, from Okni; and the fourth came from the south, from the mining villages that were located a week’s ride away in the Boxwood Mountains. It was from the western part of that mountain range that merchants transported iron and silver ore to the southern part of the Empire. Essential goods passed through Bald Hollow and then traveled throughout the country. Before the silver mines near the Gates of Six Towers had been exhausted, the eastern road had been no less lively than the southern. But now it was desolate and the merchants who had lost their principal source of income in the region rarely traveled through the Forest Belt.

In my estimation, Bald Hollow should have been teeming with people, even though the Feast of the Name had long since passed and the main summer fair was over. People have a hard time dispersing to their homes after a weeklong drinking spree.

“It’s as quiet as the grave,” said Luk, looking around.

“Open your eyes! We are walking by a cemetery.” Over the past few days Shen’s mood had not taken a turn for the better.

“It’s you who should open his eyes,” objected the soldier. “The dead can not only make noise if they’ve a will to, but they can run quite quickly as well. I saw it myself, screw a toad.”

“Be silent,” I admonished him. “Do you want to draw them down on us?”

He shut up.

We traveled along the cemetery road, passed by the standing stone at the intersection of the four roads, and approached the town. Ahead of us was a low, gray wall, two wooden towers for archers (now empty), and the gaping panels of the gate. Three guards in beribboned jackets holding crossbows were next to them. They didn’t pay any attention to us. Not even the presence of the northerner intrigued them. The men were dead drunk from too many toasts with reska
(melon vodka)
.

“Good little defenders, aren’t they?” Luk twisted up his face as if all his teeth had suddenly started aching. “Don’t they know about the war?”

“It’s very strange, all of it,” said Ga-Nor.

“What’s strange?” asked Shen.

“Where is the army? Why are there no patrols here and only three drunk degenerates? It’s not all that far to Dog Green. The enemy wouldn’t need much time to attack. A few swift assaults, and the road to Al’sgara is open. I don’t see a single soldier. There wasn’t even a measly roadblock.”

“The army is keeping the enemy in check in the north. Apparently, they agreed that the Steps of the Hangman are more important than Al’sgara right now. Besides, why do you think anyone would care about this town? The army isn’t deployed here, and all our fortifications are westward.”