The Doom of Kings: Legacy of Dhakaan - Book 1 (28 page)

They were all up with the sun and ready to attack the mountain. It was still a daunting chunk of landscape to search. Broadleaf trees hugged the lower slopes, giving way to the thick dark green of pines and firs higher up. The peak, shining in the morning sun, was a cap of bare rock dotted with thin patches of grass like hair on the head of a bald man. Dagii rode a little farther along the old road to get a different view and came galloping back to them. “There’s a saddle just around the mountain and about halfway to the peak,” he said. “We should be able to reach it. Using Aram there should eliminate the need to search at least half the mountain.”

It was frustrating to leave the road again and re-enter the green world of the forest. The trees seemed particularly thick on the mountain. Within paces of leaving the road, they had lost site of it. It took a long while before the ground started rising, and they had to stop and wait at least twice while Chetiin climbed a tree to check their position. The second time he came down, he said, “I see the saddle,” and led them off at an angle to the way they’d been heading.

The ground began a sharp ascent shortly afterward. By mid-morning it was too steep to ride the horses, and they had to dismount. Even Chetiin got off Marrow and let the worg pad about on her own. The speed of Tariic’s magebred horses had ceased to be a benefit days before. Geth was glad that they had also been bred for endurance.

“Should we leave them behind?” he asked Dagii after a particularly difficult stretch that left them all sweating. “We could go faster on our own without them.”

“I’d rather haul them up the slope than risk something happening to them. We’ll still need to get out of the mountains and back to Rhukaan Draal.” The warrior was covered with dirt and leaf mould from slipping face first to the ground during the climb, but he still managed to keep his stiff manner. Maybe he was even more stiff, as if trying to hold onto his dignity. Geth felt the distinctly
unheroic urge to push him down again, just to see if he could get him to laugh.

He didn’t have a chance to act on the urge. Marrow, who had been wandering ahead, came loping back. Her black fur stood on end, adding bulk to her neck and shoulders, and she was growling. She trotted to Chetiin and said something in the snarling language of worgs. Chetiin stiffened, and his ears flicked.

“What is it?” Dagii asked, and suddenly his stiffness didn’t seem so out of place.

“Bugbears. Marrow caught their scent. They’re not close, but we’re in their territory.”

“That’s not good, I guess,” said Ashi.

Dagii shook his head. “The Marguul tribes of the mountains have resisted swearing allegiance to Haruuc,” he said. “A few Marguul tribes are loyal, but others only acknowledge their oaths when it’s convenient to them. Tribes in the high mountains often don’t even bother to pretend.”

“And these are the high mountains.”

“Oh, yes.”

Chetiin listened to a few more yips and growls from Marrow. “There’s a hunters’ trail a short way ahead.”

“We need scouts,” Dagii said. “Chetiin, Geth, Ashi—follow Marrow and see what we’re dealing with. We’ll wait here.”

“Mazo,”
said Chetiin. Geth shrugged out of his pack, Ashi did the same, and the three of them slid into the forest after Marrow.

The trail was only about thirty paces away. If they’d kept going, they would have blundered right into it. The four of them crouched in the brush a short way off the trail and watched for a short while. When there was no movement, they crept closer. Geth gestured, and Ashi stepped out into the open while Geth and Chetiin remained behind, hands on weapons. Ashi walked a few paces up and down the trail, then rejoined them.

“I don’t know what bugbear footprints look like, but a lot of big creatures on two feet use this trail frequently,” she said, and pointed first south, then north. “They walk that way with light loads and return heavily laden. There’s drops of old blood. Most likely hunters returning to a camp or a village with prey.”

“Camp or village?” asked Chetiin.

“Given how often the trail is used, I’d say smaller than a village, but more permanent than a camp.”

Geth cursed and drew Wrath. The blade pointed across the trail but at an angle that followed it up the mountain. “It doesn’t look like they’re in our way.”

“There’s no telling where this trail ends,” said Chetiin. His big eyes narrowed. “Bugbears are more nocturnal than other goblin races. We should take advantage of that to have a look around.”

Geth cursed again. He kept Wrath out as they made their way cautiously up the trail with Marrow shadowing them from the cover of the trees. The trail followed a relatively gentle slope up the mountainside. If nothing else, it was easier than walking with the horses. When the slope became even more gentle and the trees began to thin out, Geth guessed that they had almost reached the top of the saddle. A little farther on and Marrow whined gently in warning. “She smells the camp,” said Chetiin.

“I
smell the camp,” Geth whispered as a gentle breeze from above brought a stink of rotten meat and dung.

A ridge rose from the woods on the left side of the track. Geth nudged Chetiin and pointed to it. The goblin nodded. A short time later, the two of them and Ashi were stretched out on top of the ridge in the afternoon sun and looking down on the bugbear camp.

Ashi was right. It was more permanent than what Geth would normally call a “camp” but it was also so disgustingly dirty he couldn’t call it anything else. Half a dozen large huts dotted the camp, as well as a longhouse that had been built against the steep fir-covered slope leading to the mountain’s peak. Geth suspected that the longhouse concealed the entrance to a cave in the mountainside. The whole camp was surrounded by what could loosely be called a yard of patchy grass and worn soil. Animal carcasses—deer, boar, mountain lions, wolves—hung from rough frames between the huts, and a big firepit lay at their center. Pots of something dark and steaming were dug into the ashes at the edge of the pit. Pine pitch to be used as a weapon, Geth guessed. Nasty stuff that would stick as it burned. Thick stakes sharpened, smeared with more pitch, and set into the ground at an angle made a crude barrier
around the camp. Three bugbears dressed in rags of leather lounged sleepily near the opening in the barrier that was the closest thing there was to a gate.

Geth couldn’t see what the camp harbored that was worth protecting, but he could see why the bugbears would want to protect a claim on their territory. The saddle of the mountain opened onto something of a miracle, a snug little vale sheltered on the north by another ridge sweeping down from the mountain peak. The ridge blocked the north wind, hid the vale from anyone traveling south along the ruined road, and trapped the sun’s warmth. What was more, the southern saddle they’d climbed wasn’t the only approach to the vale. A second trail led from the camp down another gentle slope to the west. From atop the ridge, Geth could look down both the southern and western saddles and see broad, level plateaus among the surrounding mountains. Judging from the carcasses strung up around the camp, hunting was very good.

A third way led down from the vale as well. Between the ridge on which they lay and the western saddle, the land plunged into a deep valley. The way down into the valley wasn’t gentle. There was no trail and it didn’t look like the bugbears went that way often or at all. There was a patch of worn dirt at the edge of an especially steep bit of the valley wall, and the bushes below seemed broken, as if things were frequently thrown down into the valley. Maybe the valley served as the bugbears’ waste dump—though from the condition of the camp, Geth would have guessed they otherwise lived happily among their own filth.

Wrath left no doubt of which way they needed to go. The blade pointed unerringly into the valley.

Geth peered over the edge of the ridge. The valley wall below was so steep as to be almost sheer, and spiked with stunted trees that poked out of the crumbling rock. Climbing down that way wasn’t an option. If they wanted to get into the valley, they’d have to go past the camp.

“Any ideas?” Ashi whispered to Chetiin.

“Yes,” said the goblin. “Ekhaas.”

S
he began singing before the camp came into sight over the last rise of the trail. The song was an ancient one, gentle and soothing, a song for lingering afternoons, composed in a time when the emperor of Dhakaan was the sun and the long night of the empire’s fall was something not even imagined. She took her time, walking up the trail in time to the song. When she reached the crest of the rise and stepped into the vale, the bugbears guarding the crude camp had already turned eyes and ears in her direction.

Her first sight of the camp brought a silent curse of disgust. It really was as foul as Geth had described. How far, Ekhaas thought, the
dar
have fallen!

The disgust never reached her voice or her face. She kept walking with a measured pace, still focused on the bugbears and singing to them as if each one were an emperor. None of them moved as she approached. They just stared at her, caught in the beauty of her song.

Ekhaas had found the music when she was thirteen, though sometimes she felt as if the music had found her. The
duur’kala
had taken her for training in her eleventh year, recognizing a quick mind and a zeal for the great history of Dhakaan. Not all of the children chosen for training with the mothers of the dirge found the music, but Ekhaas learned later that there had been very high expectations of her talent almost from the first. On the day that those expectations had been fulfilled, she had been singing a lament of the Haata Dynasty for one of the mothers when something had begun to resonate within her. She’d lost herself in the music, the words of
the lament fading into the pure sorrow beneath. The performance had left the mother with tears in her eyes and Ekhaas forever tuned like the strings of a
kiirin
to the music of the ages. In her waking moments she could feel it in her bones; when she slept, she thought she heard it in her dreams.

After years of training, drawing it up to fill her songs and stories with power was as natural as the simple act of singing.

She stopped when she was close enough to the camp that the smell of pine pitch that bubbled in the firepit almost covered the fetid reek of rot. Bugbears had the most famously sensitive noses of all the goblin races, and she wondered how the tribe could stand their own stench. The guards still stared at her, unspeaking, big ears cupped in relaxation. There were no sounds from the other crude buildings of the camp—if the other members of the camp heard her song in their sleep, they would only drift farther into their dreams. Ekhaas focused on the largest of the three guards and wove a suggestion into her song.

“Rest,”
she said.
“This is a daydream. You see nothing.”

The guard’s eyelids drifted down until they were half closed and a contented smile spread across his face.

Ekhaas looked to the next guard and pointed at the peak that rose behind the camp.
“Listen to the bird that sings on the mountain. Isn’t it beautiful? You see nothing.”

The second guard turned to look up at the mountain’s slopes, scanning them with rapt attention for a bird that didn’t exist. Ekhaas fought back a smile and sang to the last guard,
“The sun is warm and your friends are watching for danger. Sleep and see nothing.”

The final guard’s head sagged down so quickly he must already have been half asleep before her song had caught him. Still singing to the bugbears, Ekhaas raised her hand in a signal.

She heard the quiet rush of feet as the others left the cover of the trail to slip past the camp and down into the valley. There were no hoofbeats—they’d left the horses in the forest, blindfolded to keep them calm, guarded by Marrow to keep them safe. Ekhaas winced at the speed with which the others moved in spite of her warnings. The trance brought on by the song was fragile—any hint of a threat, even fast movement, could break it—but it was also more
subtle than the focused power of a spell. It seemed an eternity until she heard the soft birdcall that indicated all of the others were out of sight once more. Ekhaas risked a glance over her shoulder to be sure she was going in the right direction, then backed away from the camp. None of the guards showed any sign of breaking free of her suggestions, but she still kept singing.

Her heels found the steep slope of the valley, and hands reached up to help her keep her balance. Ekhaas took a few more paces backward before crouching below the valley’s rim. The camp and the guards disappeared from sight. On her left, Geth nodded. Ekhaas let her song fade. Quiet descended on the afternoon once more. She, Geth, and Dagii on her other side waited, listening.

A loud snore broke the silence. It was followed by a curse and a reprimand for sleeping on duty. There were a few grumbles of discontent, a muttered comment about snoring loud enough to scare birds on the mountain, then the guards were silent again. Geth grinned at her before creeping down the slope. Dagii touched her hand lightly, and she glanced at him.