Shadow Blizzard (6 page)

Columns soaring up to the height of the golden-leafs or lying on the ground, broken and overgrown with moss. A statue on a pediment, so ancient that it was impossible to tell who you were looking at—a man, an orc, or someone else who lived in Siala before the start of the Gray Age.

The four orcs lying beside the fire that was barely glowing had more arrows than necessary sticking out of them. Miralissa and Egrassa had really made sure of things. There were two more bodies lying a little distance away, under an old larch tree.

Egrassa told Milord Alistan briefly about the orc I had killed.

“The flinny might not have seen the Firstborn if he was in some secret hiding place,” said Miralissa, fingering the sleeve of her dark green jacket thoughtfully.

“He just didn’t want to see, milady,” said Hallas, still unable to forget the dance he had performed for the little news peddler.

“Hallas, Deler, Mumr, Eel! Divide up into pairs and find where that seventh orc was hiding,” said Alistan Markauz.

Eel nodded for them all, and the Wild Hearts disappeared into the ruins.

“It will be completely dark in an hour,” said Milord Alistan, narrowing his eyes and looking up at the sky. “Shall we stay here or carry on?”

“That depends on what our soldiers find,” Miralissa replied wearily, “but I’m in favor of moving on. There’s a full moon now, and plenty of light; we can easily walk until the morning and rest—and then we’ll be at Hrad Spein.”

“I don’t think we should stay here, either, cousin. We can rest once we get past the Red Spinney.”

“Harold, let’s take a look at the bodies,” Kli-Kli called to me.

“I’m not interested in corpses.”

“Well, you should be.”

While the goblin wandered around, looking at the bodies, I loaded up the crossbow with two new bolts.

“Skillfully done, Lady Miralissa. In the finest traditions of the Green Platoon! I definitely approve,” Kli-Kli told the elfess when he came back.

“Well, if even you approve of my work…” She laughed.

“No, I’m serious. We cast the Net of Immobility, then we have five seconds to stick arrows into them. I think that even when the net broke the last two had no idea what was going on and they were easily killed. Who finished off the wounded one?”

“Deler,” replied Alistan Markauz. “So how do you know about the methods of the elves’ commando groups?”

“I’m a polyglot in general,” Kli-Kli answered irrelevantly.

“Well, you can command your pooglits later,” said Deler, who had only heard the fool’s final words. “We have to get going, Milord Alistan. We missed one.”

“He got away. There were two of them. Over that way there’s something like a well shaft. That’s where they were hiding. One was unfortunate enough to run into Harold, the other made off to the southwest. Unharmed, milord. I tried to overtake him, but the moss doesn’t really hold tracks,” Eel said with a grim expression. “And anyway, I’m no tracker. The man we need here is Tomcat, may he dwell in the light.…”

“What were they doing in the well?” Alistan Markauz asked, and Mumr held out a scrap of cloth to him without saying a word.

“A man?”

“Yes, milord, he’s dead, and his face is cut to ribbons, but I recognized him from his clothes,” Lamplighter said with a nod. “He was with Balistan Pargaid’s men at the duel.”

“Are you planning to hide from them in the Palaces of Bone, milady?”

“That won’t be necessary. In the first place, they’re no fools. Since the evil awoke on the lower levels of the burial chambers, they don’t come within a league of that place. Nothing, not even the presence of elves, would make the orcs do something as stupid as approaching the Eastern Gates of the Palaces of Bone.”

“Then we won’t delay,” said Markauz, nodding to Egrassa for him to go on ahead and show us the way.

Our group walked on into the night.

In the forest at night, darkness comes quickly and yet somehow imperceptibly. The faint, narrow path ran out from under your feet, and then the night hid it completely.

The trees, branches, and bushes dissolved into the all-enveloping blanket of darkness, leaving nothing but memories (there was a pine tree there, and there was an old maple growing there, in that patch of inky blackness) and you had to raise your eyes to the sky in order to see the silhouettes of the interwoven branches that fenced off the stars sprinkled across the heavens.

For a few long, exhausting moments, you staggered along, straining so hard to see in the pitch blackness that your eyes hurt. And then the full moon came rolling reluctantly out from behind the dark veil of night.

It looked like a thick, dark yellow disk of Isilina cheese and, just like the cheese, its broad surface was covered with holes and wrinkles. The moon brought light into the world and gave it to the night below, and the beams of the moon’s gift flooded the sleeping forest, playing over the branches and trunks of the dreaming golden-leafs, creating the moon-mother’s reflection in a slowly murmuring stream, dancing on the fields of night mist rising from the moss in white wisps and reaching upward into the air. The moonlight made the forest as beautiful and magical as a fairy tale. And the moon transformed the ruins of the ancient city of Chu.

Falling on the faces of nameless idols, gnawed away by the teeth of time, the moonlight made them look alive, firing our imaginations.

Oo-oo-hoo-hoo-oo!
The hoot of an owl, or some other bird, spread in thick ripples through the beams of moonlight, echoing off the larches and golden-leafs and the walls of the dead buildings.

The whole world and the whole of Zagraba breathed gently, snared by the silver threads streaming from the spindle of the full moon. It was as light as day, and only the stars were displeased by the moon’s awakening. They all dimmed their light and crept farther away from the earth to avoid falling under the spell of the radiant lamp of night.

The group was walking briskly, and the idols of the city of Chu, who had watched us go with reproachful eyes, had been left far behind. The track wound this way and that, appearing and disappearing in the thickets of bushes. And after another hour, it disappeared completely, and we had to force our way through close-growing young fir trees.

The shaggy, prickly arms lashed at us, and we had to protect our faces with our hands and double over. While I was scrambling through these prickly, unwelcoming thickets I cursed the entire world. Mumr, who was walking in front of me now, swore viciously when Eel let go of a branch too quickly, and the fir tree’s hand slapped him across the face. I don’t think I was the only one who sighed in relief when the path reappeared among the fir trees. It ran downhill now, and the firs were soon replaced by deciduous forest. We tramped across low hills overgrown with maples and bushes of blossoming redbrow. In the sunlight the small red flowers on the bushes probably looked like drops of blood, but now, like the rest of the forest, they were painted silver by the moon.

We walked along the edge of a lake with the moon and stars reflected in its black water, climbed yet another hill and walked down again, jumping across a small stream hurrying about its urgent business. There was a lot more redbrow here than beside the lake. It was growing everywhere I looked, squeezing out the other bushes and even the trees.

“Look, there’s one left at least,” Kli-Kli muttered behind my back.

“What are you talking about?” I asked him.

“Look, over there, there’s a forest spirit among the branches. Do you see the little eyes glowing? The flinny said they’d all left the Red Spinney.”

“You mean we’re already walking through the Red Spinney?”

“Well, where do you think we are? On the Street of the Sparks?” Kli-Kli asked acidly. “It’s obvious this is the Red Spinney.”

“It doesn’t look all that red to me; you’ve got something mixed up again, Kli-Kli,” Lamplighter said with a dubious chuckle.

“Open your eyes, Mumr. It’s night now! But in the daytime, and especially in early September, everything here is covered with redbrow flowers.”

“But the place doesn’t look anything like a spinney,” I said, supporting Lamplighter.

“Fools!” the jester said sulkily, and stopped talking to us.

That night the goblin was in a bad mood. But I think he was just feeling nervous.

I wasn’t feeling anything of the kind, and Valder wasn’t saying anything. But of course, he hadn’t said anything since I had that dream about the Master’s prison. Maybe the dead archmagician had finally left me in peace and gone his own way? Ha! There wasn’t much hope of that happening.

Who was Valder? I thought I’d already told you that. Valder was a magician who had unfortunately been killed because of the Rainbow Horn a few hundred years earlier, but had now moved into my head.… All right, it’s a long story, maybe someday I’ll write my memoirs, and then you’ll know all the details.

The grassy path rustled under our feet and Lamplighter’s back loomed close in front of my eyes. How many hundreds of steps had I taken since we left the ruins of the city of Chu?

It was already long past the middle of the night, the stars were floating across the sky, and the moon was getting brighter and brighter. The entire forest had been taken over by redbrow—it was growing under almost every golden-leaf. I thought there would never be an end to these accursed bushes. But what really annoyed me was the sour smell the blossoming bushes gave off. It worked its way up my nose, and after about an hour and a half of it, my head was splitting, and I had this monstrous urge to sneeze.

The deeper we went into the Red Spinney, the tenser the silence became. I couldn’t hear the usual whisper of the wind or rustling of the branches anymore, or the calls of the night birds or the buzzing of the nocturnal insects. Not a single glowworm … and there was no more sign of any forest spirits. Nothing but the quiet rustling of our footsteps drifting into the night.

All the life of the forest seemed to have died. The silence was oppressive and it made me feel vaguely anxious. Even the moonlight looked dead now, draped across the landscape like a pale shroud.

Behind me I heard the quiet rustle of a weapon being drawn from its scabbard. I looked back. Milord Alistan was walking with his naked sword in his hand, and the count’s face looked gloomy and anxious.

“I do-on’t li-ike this si-ilence,” Kli-Kli muttered, drawing out each word.

“It’s never killed anyone yet.”

“Oh, don’t say that, Harold. It has, it definitely has,” our little know-it-all replied.

For the next half hour we didn’t say a single word to each other. Everyone was listening to the silence that enveloped everything, hoping to catch at least some kind of sound apart from the rustle of our own steps.

That’s always the way of it. You never took any notice of the sounds around you, just took them for granted. A bird chirped on one side, a cricket chirred on the other, leaves rustled somewhere else. But as soon as the sounds your ear was used to disappeared, you realized how much you missed all this outside chattering and nattering that could sometimes be so very annoying.

“We’re here,” Hallas hissed through clenched teeth, tightening his grip on his battle-mattock.

The path ran onto a bridge that looked as old as Chu. I wouldn’t have been surprised in the least if it was the work of the same builders. But unlike the city, the bridge was still intact.

It was made of stone, thirty yards long and two yards wide. Two men could easily walk across it together. Running along the sides, taking the place of railings, were stone barriers, rising up to half the height of a man. Every few yards a column rose up out of the barriers to twice the height of a man. They had probably once supported a roof (which no longer existed). Or perhaps there never had been any roof, and the columns had been put there simply as decoration.

The bridge connected the two sides of a ravine or gorge—I don’t know what it was called, but the steep sides descended almost vertically into darkness filled with a silvery mist rising from an invisible bottom.

“This is the heart of the Spinney,” Kli-Kli informed us.

“We have to cross that? Somehow it doesn’t inspire me with confidence.”

“Don’t worry, Milord Alistan, the bridge is stronger than a cliff and has stood here for thousands of years,” Miralissa reassured the captain of the royal guard. “So let us not delay.”

“Wait,” said Eel, raising one hand and peering keenly at the far bank of the Spinney. “Lady Miralissa, Egrassa, you take your bows, and Deler and I will cross to the other side.”

“Eel’s right, if there’s an ambush over there, they’ll pick us all off on the bridge like plump partridges,” said the dwarf, changing his beloved hat for his helmet.

“All right,” Alistan Markauz said curtly, and nodded. “Go.”

The dwarf ran ahead with the blade of his battle-ax glimmering ominously in the moonlight. Egrassa and Miralissa stood with their bows bent, ready to fire. The two warriors ran across the bridge and disappeared into the bushes of redbrow.

I started counting to myself. When I reached sixteen, Eel appeared and beckoned to us with his hand. It was our turn now. Very soon the only ones left on the first side were Egrassa, with his bow still bent, and Lamplighter, covering the elf against any possible danger from the rear.

“Is it a long way down?” I asked the goblin halfway across the bridge.

“I’ve never been here before, just like you.”

“It’s just that you seem to know all these places so very well.…”

“To know places, you don’t have to have been there before, Harold. How do the gnomes and the dwarves find their way through their underground labyrinths? They’re children of the mountains, and they don’t have to ask every time which way is east and which way is west. The goblins, dryads, elves, and orcs are the children of Zagraba and we never get lost in it. We always know where we are, no matter which part of the forest we happen to be in. That’s something you men can’t understand.”

We carried on along our way. The redbrow started to thin out. The fir trees and larches gradually edged the bushes aside and the cursed smell of those flowers almost disappeared, but the silence still hadn’t gone away. Our group was still in the Spinney.