Shadow Blizzard (32 page)

“A fine catch, Marmot,” Arnkh said with a nod of approval as he tossed the dice.

“Ah, Sagra! You win again!” Tomcat exclaimed, shaking his head in disappointment. “What rotten lousy luck! Uncle, when are we going to eat?”

“When everyone’s here,” the sergeant of the Wild Hearts growled into his beard.

“A-a-ah, that’s no good!” Marmot drawled, dropping the pike and the net on the grass. “We’ll be waiting forever!”

“Look, Harold’s already here,” Arnkh announced, getting up off the grass. “Are you here to stay or just dropping by?”

“Just dropping by,” I mumbled stupidly.

“Like some fish soup, Harold?” asked Uncle, trying the broth with his spoon and grunting in delight as he took the pot off the fire.

“But you’re all dead,” I said stupidly.

“Really?” Marmot and Tomcat glanced at each other in surprise.

“I’m more alive than all the living, and I’m very hungry,” Tomcat eventually replied. “Are you joining us?”

I shook my head and backed away from the fire.

“Well then, if you’re not hungry, we’ll get started, and you go down to the water to get the others; we can’t wait for them forever!”

I nodded, but kept on backing away. This wasn’t where I belonged! This was only a dream! It was a different world! A different reality! Where my friends were still alive and had no intention of dying.

“Hey, Harold! Tell Hallas I wasn’t supposed to be cooking today!” Uncle’s shout reached me just as the picture in the mirror started to disappear.

*   *   *

I walked on and saw Lafresa. She was staring into the mirror about ten yards ahead of me.

Lafresa tore her gaze away from the mirror, noticed me, and narrowed her eyes. Then she took a step away from me and froze in front of the mirror wall. I followed her example and found myself …

*   *   *

A forest meadow, surrounded by a stockade of tall fir trees. The grass was completely covered with the bodies of elves. Only two of them were still alive, standing there without speaking, looking at the prostrate body of a h’san’kor. I couldn’t make out who these two were, I could only see that they were an elf and an elfess. Then I understood.…

I involuntarily took a step toward them. They both heard the rustling of the grass and turned round. The elf drew his bow, and the arrow pointed straight into my face. The elf’s one golden eye carefully followed every movement I made. The other eye was missing—an old injury from an orcish arrow.

Ell.

“What do you want here, man?” Miralissa asked in a hoarse voice.

“I…”

“Get out, this is our forest!” said the k’lissang, and his one eye glinted brightly.

“Why have you come here?” asked Miralissa, wiping away the blood streaming out of her ear.

“For the Rainbow Horn.”

“The Rainbow Horn?” she asked, shaking her head sadly. “Too late. The Firstborn have the Horn now, and even we can do nothing. The elves lost the battle, and Greenwood is destroyed. This is no place for you.”

“Very well,” I said, and stepped back.

The elves in front of me were not the ones I had known. They were quite different. Alien.

Ell kept his one eye firmly fixed on me and said something in orcish. His words sounded like a question.

“Dulleh,”
Miralissa answered, and turned away, no longer interested in me.

Dulleh
. I thought I’d heard that word before. I jumped at the very same moment as the elf shot his arrow at me.…

*   *   *

I fell on the floor and looked at the empty mirror in horror. In orcish
dulleh
means “shoot.” If I hadn’t remembered the word that Miralissa once said to Egrassa, I would have been lying dead with an arrow in my head. I walked on, hurrying after Lafresa, who always managed to be ahead of me, waiting to see what surprises the mirrors had in store.…

*   *   *

The mirrors called to me with offers, requests, entreaties, demands, and threats, trying to draw me into themselves forever. Faces passed before me in a series of bright pictures—the faces of those I had known, the faces of those I would know in the future, the faces of those I would never see.

“Harold! Come here!”

“Die!”

“Why can’t you just stop?”

“Come in, you’re one of us now.”

“Hey, Harold, can you see me?”

“Please, kind gentleman, please!”

I took no notice of them, I just pushed them away and tried to break free of the mirrors’ sticky cobweb, now that I’d learned to tell reality from illusion. I didn’t always manage to do it straightaway, sometimes the pictures were so bright and powerful that it cost me a great effort to reject the hallucination.

Lafresa was walking on ahead of me, and she was having difficulty. Sometimes I started to catch up, and then I fell behind again when I froze in front of one of the mirrors. And then Lafresa would disappear, and I was left completely alone. A step, another step, another …

“Hey, Harold!” Loudmouth called to me with his monstrously gnawed face. “Come here, let’s talk!”

I just shook my head and walked past the mirror.

“In the name of the king, thief!” Baron Frago Lanten and ten guardsmen tried to block my way. “Come here, or it’s the Gray Stones for you!”

I took no notice of them at all.

“Do you want gold, Harold?” asked Markun, shaking a whole sack of gold under my nose. “All you have to do is stop!”

I just laughed, and he shouted shrill obscenities at my back.

“Who’s going to pay for my inn?” asked Gozmo, wringing his hands in despair.

I shrugged.

“Hey, Harold!” a familiar voice called to me. “Come here!”

I stopped, stared at the reflection for a long time, and took a step toward the mirror.…

*   *   *

I looked at him, and he looked at me. We had time to study each other. We had an entire eternity of time in our hands; there was no need to hurry.

“Well, how do you like the look of me?” he asked, genuinely curious.

“To be honest, not very much.”

“That’s not surprising, I had a bad example to follow.” He grinned, and his grin turned out ugly and repulsive. Was my grin really like that, too?

I carried on looking at my double—a perfect copy of the master thief, Shadow Harold. A pale face; black circles under tired, sunken eyes; a back stubbly beard; clothes that were dirty, crumpled, and torn. A fine sight. Some dead men, not to mention beggars, looked better.

“Who are you?”

A rather timely question, wasn’t it?

“I’m just me. Or you. It all depends what side you look at us from and what you really want to see in the end.”

“You called me, didn’t you? So tell me what you want, I’ve got plenty of my own business to deal with, without making conversation with my own reflection.”

“Which of us is the reflection, that’s the question, Harold,” he said, and his eyes narrowed maliciously.

“Are we going to have a battle of words, double?”

“Do you have something against battles of words, double?”

“Yes.”

“That’s the first difference between us; you’re not very fond of talking, Harold.”

“What do you want?” His face (my face) was beginning to infuriate me.

“Come on, take it easy!” he said, with a glint of mockery in his eyes. “Take a more cheerful view of the world, reflection! There are lots of fine and beautiful things in it; you just don’t know how to take advantage of them.”

I said nothing, waiting.

“Well, all right,” he said with a sigh. “What do you want all this for?”

“All what?”

“You don’t understand?”

“No,” I told him quite sincerely.

“All this stress and strain trying to save someone or something, all these friends, all these moral complexes and other unprofitable garbage. Why did you get involved in this crazy adventure? You were never like this before. You used to be more like me.”

“I’m glad we have nothing in common any longer.”

“Oh, come off it, Harold! All this scurrying about has turned you into a namby-pamby, a wimp who depends on other people. Remember the golden days when there was just you and the night, when you relied on no one but yourself and didn’t drag all these friends, obligations, and rules around with you? Didn’t we have good times then? Remember the times when you used to break into some fat-assed goon’s house just for fun and completely clean him out! Remember the times when you used to plant a crossbow bolt in anyone who got in your way without thinking twice. You used to kill easily, you wouldn’t have left Paleface alive before.”

“I never killed anyone who simply got in my way, reflection! That way I’d have put half of Avendoom in the graveyard. I always defended myself to save my own life. Don’t confuse me with you. I don’t take any pleasure in killing! If this is just a friendly chat about old times, I’d better be going. This conversation’s not going to get us anywhere.”

I stepped back and ran into the cold silver surface of a mirror. He laughed, and I didn’t like the sound of it. He and I were not at all alike now, we were completely different people.

“You can only leave here with me, Harold.”

“Who are you?” I asked him again.

“I already told you who I am.”

“You didn’t call me over just for idle conversation, did you? You’re always looking for your own advantage, aren’t you, double?”

“Advantage? Well, you’re not completely hopeless, reflection.” A faint gleam of interest appeared in his eyes. “Yes, there’s a very profitable deal in the offing, and for old friendship’s sake, I want to offer you a share in this little business.”

I decided to play by his rules.

“A little business means small profits,” I said with a grin, trying to copy his leer.

He laughed again.

“Good old Harold! And I thought I’d lost you completely! Don’t worry, there’s a great big profit to be made from this paltry little business.”

“What do we have to do?”

“We? I swear by the darkness, but I like that! Strictly speaking, nothing. How do you like those odds? A heap of gold for doing nothing at all?”

“I’m always ready to take part in that kind of difficult business.” This time it was much easier to copy his leer.

“Excellent! All you have to do is not drag that cursed tin whistle out of the Palaces of Bone, and we’ll collect a whole sackful of gold.”

“A whole sackful?” I asked, making a surprised and doubtful face. “Are you sure about that?”

“Don’t worry, my old friend, I’ve already agreed to everything.”

“And who’s the client?”

“Let’s just say, an outside observer. His name wouldn’t mean anything to you.”

“I’ve got nothing against it in principle, but there’s just the previous Commission.…”

“Oh drop that. I don’t believe in stupid signs and the wrath of the gods. Well then, do you agree?”

“I think so,” I said with a nod, and the reflection relaxed. “But I do have just one small thing to add to what I said before.”

“What’s that?” he asked, moving closer to me.

“Remember I said I didn’t take any pleasure in killing?”

“Well?” my double asked, with a puzzled look in his eyes.

“I lied,” I said, pulling out my knife and stabbing at my reflection’s chest. He either knew what was coming or he sensed something and managed to jump out of the way. I only tore his clothes. And an instant later there was a knife in his hand, too.

“Fool!” he spat out, and flung himself on me.

It’s very difficult fighting yourself. I always knew where I was going to strike, and if I knew, then he knew, too. We were equally good with our knives, and after a minute circling between the mirrors we only had a few shallow cuts each.

Now he was going to strike at my throat, and when I stepped forward and to the left, he would try to get me on the shoulder with the backswing.

He struck at my throat, I stepped forward and to the left, and the reflection immediately tried to strike me in the right shoulder. I knew it was coming and parried his knife with mine. Then I moved straight into the attack, aiming for his face, grabbed him by the chest with my free hand, pulled him toward me, and immediately got a knee in the belly. I jumped back and ducked to avoid a slashing blow, put some distance between us, and tried to get my breath back.

“You’re getting old,” he chuckled, blowing a tuft of hair from my head off the blade of his knife.

I didn’t say anything, and he came at me again. Whirling and spinning, knife clanging against knife, hissing through teeth when one of us got another scratch. Neither of us could win; all my efforts to reach my double ran up against my own (or his?) defense. Finally we stopped, facing each other and breathing heavily.

“It’s tough fighting someone who can read your mind, isn’t it, reflection?” he asked, licking his bloody wrist.

“It’s easy,” I said, and threw the handful of the metal stars I’d taken from Paleface at my double.

Of course, he read what I was going to do and tried to dodge out of the way, but this time he couldn’t. I threw the stars without aiming, and with my left hand, and he didn’t know which way to jump. After I flung them, each of the five stars followed its own absolutely random trajectory (I told you already that I’m not much of a thrower).

Three missed, but two struck home. The first hit my double precisely on his right wrist and he dropped his knife and jerked out of the way of another two stars flying at him, but ran into a third that stuck in his left leg. My double cursed and collapsed on the floor. In two bounds I was there beside him, then I moved behind his back and held my knife against his throat.

“What a stupid way to get caught,” my reflection said in a wooden voice. “I don’t think you’ll do this.”

“Why not?”

“It’s rather hard to kill yourself. Did you know there’s a superstition that if you kill your double, you follow him into the darkness?”

A single drop of sweat slid down his temple.

“Wasn’t it you who said you don’t believe in stupid signs?” I asked the reflection, and slit his throat.