“Aye. And we are to have a sorcerer with us.”
“If all the tales the locals tell are true, that might be not only useful but essential.”
“If you believe the stories...”
The inhabitants of Selsmot were riddled with the dread of the Snarly Hills. Travel toward the south went invariably all the way around in boats on the River of Bloody Jaws. The trails went east and west, for a way; not south.
The conversation, such as it was, became general as Ornol, fretfully, exclaimed, “But the bandits have stopped attacking the caravans and the river traffic. Why, then, is there still this superstitious dread of the Snarly Hills?”
The Pachak, Kalu Na-Fre, said, “Perhaps a greater evil has settled there.”
The lady Ilsa looked flustered. Skort the Clawsang rubbed a skeletal hand across the rotting roots of his teeth. Ornol’s color rose. And Exandu fluttered his yellow kerchief in a wild and vain attempt to halt a tremendous sneeze.
“There is a draught! I am sure of it! Shanli, my pet, find the draught—”
“Yes, yes, master. It is there, over by that window—”
She started to rise, and, in truth, a breath of air did fan in from an ill-fitting window shade. Seg stood up.
“Mistress Shanli. Please allow me.”
She flushed.
Exandu, fluttering his kerchief, did not notice and Seg went across and adjusted the shade. We thought nothing of the incident.
No one spoke further on the subject of greater evils.
The risks ahead of us we could guess would be great. There is on Kregen a saying — “Don’t dice with a four-armed fellow” — which attempts to caution against taking foreseeable and unnecessary risks. What we would be facing would be perils of the unknown kind.
The locals, while relishing relating to us all manner of ghastly stories of the Snarly Hills and accepting drinks, did not wish actively to be too closely associated with us. They would not sit at our table. Their grimaces and winks, their grave nods, even the way they quaffed the ale we bought for them, all contributed to a creeping horror about to overwhelm us.
One of the locals, a Rapa, having imbibed a skinful, decided it was time to go home. His strongly vulturine face, the sharp beak surrounded by a bristle of brown and grey feathers, turned toward the door before the fellow’s body followed the commands of his brain. His plain tunic was ale-stained. He was happy, though.
Tangle-footed, he swayed toward the door and then — and the transition was abrupt — he lurched sideways in terror and crashed into a table. Ale spilled. Tankards flew. The people at the table leaped back; but their protests died in their throats.
Through the open doorway came the sixth member of our party.
“At last,” said Strom Ornol. “Fregeff. Now perhaps we can decide.” The young lord took no notice of the turmoil the sorcerer’s entrance caused.
This Fregeff, one could see at a glance, was an Adept of the Doxology of San Destinakon. Swathed in an enveloping gown of brown and black lozenges that bewildered with their subtle shifts of alignment as he moved, he presented an imposing figure simply because one knew what he was. Set against wizards of other cults, an Adept of the Doxology of San Destinakon appears dark, somber and eclipsed. This is an illusion.
Because he was a Fristle, his powerful catlike features arrogant within the hood, he did not bear a woflovol upon his left shoulder. The bronze cham about his waist connected to a bronze necklet, and that hoop rested securely around the neck of a vicious winged reptile, a volschrin, one of the rissniks. The narrow head lay low beside the Fristle’s ear. A red tongue darted. The membranous wings were folded back, and the barbed tail was hidden within the sorcerer’s hood. When those wings unfurled and were spread and the volschrin flew wickedly to tear out the eyes of his victim, they spanned a full arm’s breadth. But his body was no larger than that of a cat, and, like his catman master, he hissed.
The hissing voice said, “Greetings and Lahal.”
We all replied politely. The sorcerer moved toward our table and the empty seat. He placed his wooden-hafted bronze flail upon the sturm-wood table, and sat down. The brown and black lozenges adorning his robe shifted eye-wateringly.
No one ventured to suggest he was late for the meeting.
Fregeff turned his head and whispered to the reptile on his shoulder, and then called, “A dish of blood, and swiftly!”
Without delay a pottery dish awash in fresh chicken blood was hurried in. The serving girl, a plain-faced gentle soul, trembled as she placed the gory dish upon the table.
The volschrin hopped down, bronze links clanking, and lapped.
“Well,” said Strom Ornol, his voice quivering from affronted dignity, “perhaps now we can get started.”
Through the Snarly Hills
“Hold on a moment, Seg,” I said, and halted on the forest slope to catch a breath. “My lungs are on fire, and my side burns.”
Seg stopped to look back. Some of the others took the opportunity to halt in a straggly line between the trees under the dim green light. Seg didn’t believe me.
“It’s all uphill and down my old dom, I know. But—?”
Strom Ornol bustled up. His pale face looked greenish in the light and — was that a flush of color along the cheekbones? Possible, although unlikely...
“What are you lollygagging about for? Come on, come on!”
Skort the Clawsang passed me, his bulging knapsack just about finding room between me and the tree I leaned against. I had to pull back to let him pass. His skull face turned toward me, but he said nothing. Only his crimson eyes gleamed as he passed.
“Sink me!” I burst out. “I’ll rupture my inward parts if we gallop along like this.”
Seg’s face was a picture.
The Fristle sorcerer, for whom we had waited for our meeting in The Dragon’s Roost, also passed without a word. His winged pet balanced agilely on his shoulder, every now and again flirting a wing out to maintain balance. A right pair, they were...
Exandu waddled up.
His face resembled Zim at the going down of the day, seen through a misty haze, embracing all around him with a roseate glow. Sweat dropped. He puffed.
“I have—” he gasped, and swallowed, and tried again. “I have a thorn through my foot. I am sure of it. And my face — I am bitten through to the bone by these pinheads!”
Shanli helped him. Her face was intent.
“I have ointments, master — when we rest—”
“When! That Ornol strides on like a madman!”
“We rest now, Exandu,” I said. I turned as the blue shadow that was the lady Ilsa halted, gasping, her hand to her side. “We rest now.”
“Oh” said Seg. He beamed. Then: “Why didn’t you just tell the infernal idiot?”
“He believes he leads us. That is fine—” I looked away as Ilsa more fell than sat down. She still did not accept us as equals, and Seg and I couldn’t care less. I said to no one in particular, “If I can’t have a rest now, I will not answer for the consequences.”
When Strom Ornol strode back along the line of struggling people with their burdens he found us sitting comfortably, our backs against the tree, sipping ale.
He frowned.
He picked on the lady Ilsa.
“Up, Ilsa. We must get on. You keep me waiting.”
“My feet, Ornol—”
Her moccasins were strong and sensible, supple and resistant to thorns. But no one was in any doubt that marching over this forested range of hills was a laborious and painful business for anyone, let alone a girl. I had ventured, just the once, to suggest that the ladies be left in Selsmot. I had been told by Ornol to shut my mouth and keep out of his business, and by Exandu that, much as he regretted the necessity, Shanli had to go. “It’s my insides, you see. Shanli understands them. She keeps me alive.”
We crawled to our feet after a bit, following Ilsa, who obeyed the strom. But that was not the first or the last time I called for a halt because I was too fatigued to go farther.
Seg told Ornol, “You see, strom, he was stung by a Cabaret Plant. It has drained his strength.”
“If he’s this bad, he shouldn’t have started.”
Walking along, Hop the Intemperate said, sotto voce, “If he’s this bad he’d be dead.”
Seg walked with Hop for a space after that, and explained the situation. Hop’s hairy face moved in an expressive way. He grasped it. Later he was seen talking to Shanli, and later still, when we stopped again, Exandu took the opportunity to say in a quiet voice, “You are a man of parts, Dray the Bogandur. A man of resource.”
“I felt for your inward parts, Exandu.”
“And my poor feet! And my skin, which is like Shanli’s pin cushion — oh, oh, that Beng Sbodine, Mender of Men, should abandon me now!”
“Well, Exandu,” said Seg in his hateful voice, “you’ve got the Bogandur to look after you on that score.”
When we’d had a quick word to decide what names we could give these people, for they already knew we were Seg and Dray from mistress Tlima, Seg had suggested the Sublime for me. I’d riposted with the Ineffable for him.
Then I said, “How about Seg the Fearless?”
“Oh, no! Oh, no, a fellow would get into too many fights with a name like that.”
“Well, if you’re Naming me the Bogandur, I can but suggest the Horkandur for you, my lad.”
So that was that.
We pitched camp that night and Ilsa and Exandu were not the only ones to lament their aches and pains.
A long straggly line of people stumbling through a jungle, with those in front hacking a way through when necessary, presents a prime target, but we had only a few desultory attacks from predators to ward off, and we lost only two porters. Having eaten enough food to lighten loads, we could accommodate the dead men’s burdens. We carried waterproof packs on our backs, and these, we promised ourselves, would be filled with gold and gems when we returned this way.
Ha!
The reason for Seg’s and my presence here was not forgotten by either of us. We even debated if, perchance, one or other of the people here in the party were agents of Spikatur Hunting Sword.
“Somebody could be,” pointed out Seg. “Luring us to our doom.”
“Wager?”
“We-ell...”
“Who do you fancy?”
“They’re all runners.”
“That’s true, by Krun!”
Seg half glanced about as I used that Hamalese oath; no one paid us any attention. Everyone was too tired.
Everyone except Strom Ornol. From his tent the sound of singing broke discordantly on the night. A lamp gleamed through the canvas. I thought — I was not sure — a woman’s shape showed, dancing.
“He likes his comforts, the strom,” observed Seg.
“Aye.”
“I’d mark him down. A bad egg, kicked out by his father the trylon, taken up with bad company. Anxious to hit back at the aristocratic lot who disowned him. A likely candidate for Spikatur.”
“I remember a fellow, a kov, a great hunter, called Kov Loriman the Hunting Kov. He was an adherent of Spikatur. Mind you, that was in the days Spikatur struggled against Hamal and not against all and sundry.”
“Well, my old dom, if we get to the place we’re going, we’ll find out why they changed.”
“I feel that, too. But we could be mistaken.”
Seg yawned. “Maybe. Just that it feels right. No, I won’t back the dandy strom. Mayhap Exandu?” He yawned again.
I said, “I have the middle watch, and so I need my sleep even if you do intend to stay up all night.”
In the midst of his reply Seg yawned again, and then, confound it, so did I. We turned in, to be roused out to stand our watch when the time came. At last the next day dawned in a muted green radiance dropping down through the leaves, and we could eat our breakfast and shoulder our burdens, take up our weapons and set off.
The routine of marching and resting, of fighting off predators, of arguing and surmising, and of eating and sleeping continued for a sennight as we slogged through the Snarly Hills.
We were, in truth, an oddly assorted party.
No one in his or her right mind was going to pick a quarrel with the sorcerer.
Pachaks detest quarrels as being indicative of low mental abilities and deplorable moral outlooks.
The Clawsang kept to himself and the people of his small group, and refused to be drawn into a quarrel.
Exandu turned any argument into a complaint about the state of his health, parlous, parlous in the extreme...
Wanting to quarrel with any and everybody, Strom Ornol turned on Seg and me, and we, like Skort the Clawsang, refused to be drawn. We could act like onkers when we wanted to. We enraged the young strom by our obtuseness. All the same, Seg had a word with Shanli, and she had a word with Ilsa, and — by chance or not — the young dandy strom moderated his tone. Again, the hold of unpaid debts restrained him.
“The trouble is,” I said, “he’s holding himself in. One fine day he’ll blow up.”
“Let him scatter himself all over,” said Seg. He spoke with a bright satisfaction. “All over.”
On Kregen the image herein conjured was not that of this Earth, where an explosion means that; on Kregen the image was of a volcano blowing up. And the image pleased Seg mightily. I didn’t blame my blade comrade. The truth was, Strom Ornol was well nigh insufferable. He always wanted to be in the right. He always wanted to know it all. He was, in short, a pain in the neck.
One day toward the end of the third sennight in the forest we broke through into a wide upland clearing. Water glimmered near the center, and the jungle ringed the clearing with solid dark green. We all stopped, taking our breath.
“Straight across, and skirt the lake,” said Ornol.
“Well, now—” started Exandu.
The strom cut him off. “If you wish to toil through the jungle, you may, fat man. As for me, I take the manly path.”
Seg rolled up his eyes. I did not laugh. Ilsa came up to cling to Ornol’s arm. Shanli hovered at Exandu’s side. Skort stood, impassively waiting. Kalu Na-Fre looked carefully around the clearing and over to the far jungle. Fregeff the sorcerer shook his bronze flail.
“The water is evil,” he intoned.
To be honest, that did not surprise us.
The sense of danger scraped at our nerves.