Shadow Blizzard (47 page)

“I don’t know, milord. I’m no master at weaving these spells. I can only say that there are many of them.”

“Your little bees didn’t do us much good, shaman!” Hallas told Glo-Glo in a frankly spiteful tone. “Now what are you going to do?”

“Take you by the legs and give the orcs’ army a good hammering with your head!” Glo-Glo replied furiously. “If it wasn’t for my spell, they’d be roasting the soles of your feet already!”

“Can you help us, most venerable sir?” asked Milord Alistan, taking the bull by the horns.

“If milord has in mind delightful little bees or some kind of thunder and lightning, then my answer is no. I won’t be able to work any real impressive magic for a long time. Just a few small things.”

“What about Kli-Kli?” I blurted out.

“Not advanced enough, Harold,” said Glo-Glo, shaking his head. “He still has far too much to learn.”

“A jester working spells is all I need now! Is there anything you can do?”

“Yes, I can draw the pursuit away from you, at least for a while. And take this.” Glo-Glo handed Milord Alistan something that looked like a lump of soil.

“What’s that?” Lamplighter asked.

“Your salvation,” said Glo-Glo, wiping his hands on his cloak. “If you really have your backs against the wall, crush this lump in your fist, and those who are pursuing you will follow the one who crushes it.”

“How do you mean?” Eel asked.

“The idea is that the one who activates the spell runs away from the group, and the orcs will follow him, thinking that they are chasing all of you. The trouble is that the solitary individual will probably be killed, the orcs will not lose the trail, and sooner or later they will catch up again. So milord, decide for yourselves which of you will run if it should come to that. I can lead away those who are following us now, and lead them a long way off—the forest spirits be praised, I have enough strength for that—so beware, not of those who are behind, but those who are ahead. Since they have survived, our pursuers have probably informed their kinsmen about the fugitives, and there are two large orc settlements ahead. The forest is full of orcs, so keep your eyes open. Follow the stream to the lake and turn northwest. Perhaps you will break through. Tresh Egrassa, may fortune smile on you.”

The elf nodded.

“That’s all I have to say. Move quickly and try not to stop, but don’t get careless. Kli-Kli, one moment.”

Glo-Glo took his granddaughter to one side and the others set about checking their weapons.

Kli-Kli came running up, and Glo-Glo addressed all of us: “May the forest spirits preserve you.”

And then he added, just for me: “Take good care of yourself, Dancer, and do what must be done.”

I didn’t know what he meant by that “do,” but I nodded, just to be on the safe side.

“Thank you for getting me out of the Labyrinth, Glo-Glo.”

The old shaman just chuckled, then he nodded in farewell and disappeared into the trees.

“Forward,” said Egrassa, and started running alongside the stream.

16

THE SONG OF THE FLUTE

I had no more strength to run and I collapsed and fell. What I needed now was to lie there for a while, get my breath back, recover my strength. But my dreams were not fated to come true. I was grabbed by the arms from both sides and jerked back onto my feet.

We will catch you.… We will kill you!
the drums sang behind the wall of mist.

“Run, Harold!” Eel hissed.

“Just a little farther!” said Lamplighter, adding his plea to his comrade’s. “Run, lad! You can do it!”

Gulping, I nodded. I had an unmerciful stabbing pain in my side, but I had to run, I had to.

“Take him!” Eel barked, and he and Mumr dragged me on.

I set one foot in front of the other as best as I was able. Hallas and Deler followed the example of their two comrades and grabbed the exhausted Kli-Kli. She didn’t have any strength to resist. So the gobliness and I were the only two who had broken down after the two-hour chase. But the warriors were tired, too, and now we were weighing them down. I accepted the support from Eel and Lamplighter for about ten minutes and then ran on my own.

“Can you manage?” the Garrakian asked me uncertainly. “Give me the spear.”

I nodded weakly.

We will catch you.… We will kill …

At noon the mist was still hanging all around us, as if Zagraba had decided to hide us forever from the eyes of the world and its own primeval thickets. But I didn’t care anymore. An eternity later, when Egrassa realized he was the only one who could maintain the pace he had set and everyone else urgently needed a rest, the elf ordered a halt. I dropped where I stood.

“How d’you like dashing about like this?” Kli-Kli wheezed.

“I’m not used to such long-distance sprints,” I answered. “How about you?”

“I’m all right, but Deler was carrying me piggyback for the last forty minutes, and he was suffering.”

“Don’t worry, my friend, I’m all right,” said Deler, breathing like a punctured blacksmith’s bellows—as we all were.

“The drums have stopped!” Eel said, interrupting us. He was sitting on the ground, leaning back against an old golden-leaf.

“Have they really gone?” Mumr asked in relief.

Lamplighter had had it harder than anyone else. Running through the forest with a bidenhander and looking after me at the same time was no easy job.

“Either the Firstborn have decided to pursue us in silence, which isn’t like them at all, or the goblin has managed to put them off our trail,” Egrassa mused thoughtfully. “How much time do you need to rest, milord?”

“How much time do we have?”

“A little more than ten minutes, then we’ll have to set out again if we don’t want the orc patrols to find us. We’ll go along the stream—it flows northward. The orcs aren’t gods, they could quite easily lose our trail, and if we hurry, we’ll be out of the Golden Forest in a week.”

“And then it will take us another week to get out of Zagraba. We’ve stirred up the Firstborn, Egrassa; they probably won’t stop following us at the edge of the Golden Forest,” Eel objected.

“Maybe you’re right, and maybe you’re not,” the dark elf told the Garrakian. “If we don’t make any noise and attract attention to ourselves, I’m quite capable of leading us out of Zagraba. Only in the name of all the gods—move quietly. The mist is thick, the orcs are very close, and I’d prefer it if we noticed them before they know we’re here.”

*   *   *

I’d have said the eight orcs were moving very quietly, but to Egrassa’s keen hearing they sounded very noisy, so we had no trouble concealing ourselves and falling on the enemy en masse. We couldn’t afford to let the Firstborn go—they might come across our tracks and realize we’d duped them and then come after us again or, even worse, warn their friends. In that case the element of surprise would be completely lost, and we’d find ourselves back in the role of foxes running from a pack of hounds.

It was all over before it even started. The orcs hadn’t been expecting our ambush, and the element of surprise was decisive—and fatal. Kli-Kli and Eel threw knives at the same instant, and Egrassa used his bow. Before the orcs realized what was happening, four of them were dead. The other four drew their yataghans and one dashed toward Egrassa, as the most dangerous of our group. But the Firstborn’s way was blocked by Mumr, who had been ordered to protect our only bowman at any cost. Lamplighter met the Firstborn, struck him in the groin with a rapid jab, immediately dodged aside so that he was behind his opponent, and sliced off the Firstborn’s leg with a single smooth stroke.

The skirmish was so brief, I didn’t have time to join in. Alistan, holding his sword with both hands, clashed with another orc, but the two enemies had only exchanged one blow apiece when Egrassa put an arrow in the orc’s back. The same fate overtook the orc who went for Deler.

The last of the four was felled by Hallas. The Firstborn tried to hit the gnome with an ax, but Lucky grabbed hold of the handle and struck the orc on the leg with his mattock. When the Firstborn let go of his ax and fell over on his back, the gnome brought his mattock down on his enemy’s head. The whole battle lasted just over twenty seconds.

“Kli-Kli, pull out your knives and my arrows; everyone else grab these orcs by the arms and drag them well away from the stream,” the elf ordered. “I’ll risk using a little bit of magic, perhaps it will put them off our trail.”

We hid the bodies among the roots of two old oaks that were almost intertwined with each other and then piled a heap of moldy leaves over them. Eel and Hallas went back over the site of the battle and tried to eliminate all traces of blood. Meanwhile Egrassa put some kind of spell on the improvised grave.

“It’s a waste of time,” Mumr sighed, wiping off the blade of his sword with a bundle of leaves. “It looks like it’s been trampled by a herd of mammoths. You can’t put the soil back in place or spread the leaves out again. If only Lady Miralissa was here.…”

*   *   *

The gods were kind, and for the rest of that day nobody found us. Once Egrassa thought he could hear a distant rumble of drums, but it was only the wind wandering through the branches of the trees that had lost most of their leaves. The stream that had been our escort for the last two days had grown to the size of a small river and the river flowed into a large lake, which we reached in the twilight. The mist and the advancing darkness made it impossible to see the opposite shore.

We settled in for the night beside the lake, making our resting place among the dense growth of tall reeds. It was a restless and very chilly night. Cold gusts of wind swirled through the rustling sea of reeds, chilling me to the marrow of my bones. I woke up several times, shuddering from the cold, and then went back to sleep, but the moment I did, I started dreaming there were orcs creeping through the tall reeds, about to attack us. I woke up again and stared for a long time at the swaying wall of dry grass.

Milord Alistan got us all up when it was still dark and, still shrouded in thick mist, we moved on toward the north.

*   *   *

By the time it grew light we’d covered quite a distance. The lake was far behind us now, but the cursed mist showed no signs of dissolving in the first rays of the sun, and Zagraba looked like a forest out of some ghost story.

The dark forms of tree trunks loomed up out of the thick mantle of white. Everything around us seemed to be dead or hiding, waiting for the mist to clear out of the forest. The only time I’d heard silence like this in Zagraba was when we were crossing the Red Spinney. And the moment I thought about what had happened there, I seemed to feel a blunt needle jab into my heart. I pulled myself up short and tried not to think about bad things. The last thing I wanted to do was call down the disaster of a h’san’kor on our heads. But the harder I tried not to think about anything frightening, the faster all sorts of unpleasant thoughts came crowding into my head. That blunt needle was still there, and I winced and gasped whenever it jabbed me really hard. Eventually I stopped trying to ignore it and turned to Kli-Kli, who was the first to sense something the last time.

“Kli-Kli, isn’t there anything bothering you?” I asked in a whisper.

She stopped, sniffed at the air, thought for a moment, and replied, “A cold in the nose.”

“That’s not what I mean!” I protested, just a little bit annoyed by her slow-wittedness. “You sensed something was wrong in the Red Spinney, didn’t you?”

“I did,” she agreed. “There was real danger there. But I don’t feel anything like that here. If there’s danger here, it’s perfectly ordinary, and I can’t sense that kind. But you … you’re the Dancer in the Shadows, maybe that’s why.… Deler, go and tell Egrassa that our Harold’s feeling uneasy.”

Deler didn’t argue, in fact he wasn’t even surprised, he just gave me a quick, sharp glance from under his ginger eyebrows and went off to the elf at the front of our group.

But the dwarf didn’t have time to warn anyone. It all happened quickly and very unexpectedly. Shadows with naked yataghans came diving at us out of the mist, another two or three jumped down out of the trees beside our track, and, to top it all, in two places the ground exploded into fountains of leaves as raging beasts emerged from concealed pits. They looked like a cross between a monkey and a wolf. The ambush had been planned brilliantly. They must have been waiting for us for a long time, and this time we were the ones taken by surprise.

“Orcs!” yelled Mumr, swinging his bidenhander down off his shoulder.

“Didre draast! Pu’i edron!”
[Take them alive! Apart from the elf!] yelled one of the enemy.

One of the Firstborn blew a small hunting horn and the surprisingly loud sound resounded through the forest, startling the mist. Egrassa’s bow was already in his hands, and the orc dropped his horn and clutched at the arrow sticking out of his chest. But it was too late. Another horn sounded somewhere far away, at the very limit of hearing. Before the battle swept me into its deadly vortex, I had time to see Eel holding off two orcs who were trying to reach Egrassa. Then I had my hands full myself.

Kli-Kli and I were closest to the pits, and the wolf-monkeys came dashing at us, growling. They moved very nimbly, but almost sideways, like crabs. They had gaunt bodies, covered with dirty-yellow fur with reddish patches, an impressive set of wolfish teeth, and heavy collars with metal studs.

“Gruns!” Kli-Kli squeaked, and flung one of her throwing knives at the nearest creature. The knife stuck neatly in the side of the orcs’ beast, which turned a somersault over its head and started twitching, scraping at the soil and the leaves with its paws. The others kept coming at us, not bothered at all by their comrade’s death.

Bang!
The loud noise came from behind my back.

Hallas had used his last pistol shot. The sudden sound made one of the gruns stop dead in its tracks, and Deler, who had just polished off his orc, took his small throwing ax out from behind his back and flung it at the beast. The weapon shattered the grun’s head with a dull crunch. But it didn’t kill it. In its pain and fury, the beast fastened its teeth in the leg of the nearest orc.