The Elder Gods (35 page)

“If it bothers you all that much, why don’t you have a little chat with Longbow?” Rabbit suggested. “We’ve got lots and lots of arrows now, so we wouldn’t really miss one all that much. I’d say that your Jalkan fellow would look a whole lot nicer with one of Longbow’s arrows sticking out of his forehead.”

“Now that you mention it, he probably would,” Keselo agreed. “We’d all be terribly sorry, of course, but we could give him a nice funeral—and maybe even wait for a half hour or so before we started to celebrate.”

“A half hour sounds about right to me,” Rabbit agreed with a wicked little grin.

The fort went up rapidly, and, following Sorgan’s example, Commander Narasan’s men worked on through the night by the light of the bonfires on either side of the gap.

When the sun rose, Narasan put fresh men to work, and as Keselo had surmised, the Trogites were finishing up as the setting sun painted the western sky.

“Go tell Sorgan that we’re finished, Keselo,” Narasan said. “He might want to have a look.”

“Yes, sir,” Keselo replied smartly. He went down the back stairs of the fort and found Sorgan in the Maag encampment at the head of the ravine. “The fort’s completed, Captain Hook-Beak,” he reported.

“That was quick,” Sorgan said. “Where’s Narasan?”

“Up on top,” Keselo replied. “He seems rather pleased with the way it turned out.”

“I suppose I’d better go offer my congratulations.”

“I think he’d appreciate that, sir.”

“I wish you’d learn to relax, Keselo,” Sorgan told him. “You don’t have to call me ‘sir’ every time you walk past.”

“Habit, I suppose,” Keselo admitted.

The two of them went up the stairs at the back of the fort and joined Commander Narasan at the top of the front wall. The fort was fifty feet high, twenty feet thick, and it fit snugly against the walls of the gap.

“Nice job, Narasan,” Sorgan said. “I’m glad I’ll be on
this
side of it instead of the front side. I’d hate to have to lead an assault against it.”

“Practice, Sorgan,” Narasan replied modestly. “My men have built a lot of walls and forts over the years.” He surveyed the construction. “We were a little pushed for time on this one, but good or bad, it’ll have to do.”

“Quit worrying, Narasan. Those little holes your people put in that front wall give us a way to poke the snake-men in the bellies while they’re trying to climb up to get at us, and if Longbow’s right about how good that poison we’ve got on our spear points is, we’ll see a lot of poke-poke, die-die going on. And if the snake-men are as empty-headed as everybody claims they are, they’ll just keep coming, and we’ll be able to play poke-poke, die-die all day long for weeks on end.”

“I’ll have to remember
poke-poke, die-die,
” Commander Narasan said with no hint of a smile. “I think we might want to include that in the soldiers’ manual—probably someplace near
parry-and-thrust.
”

The bonfires had died out by the following morning, and the pall of smoke no longer obscured the view of the desert floor far below. The hordes of the Vlagh were gathering some distance back from the foot of the stairway, waiting, it appeared, for some sort of signal or command.

Keselo, Rabbit, and Longbow stood atop the wall in the early morning light. “I don’t think they like what they see very much,” Keselo said. “It must have taken them centuries to build that stairway, but we changed the top of it in about a week. It’s a stairway to no-place now. They can run up those stairs as fast as they can, but once they reach the place where the stairs end now, they’ll come face to face with a blank wall and they’ll be easy targets for the Dhrall archers, won’t they?”

“They won’t be hard to hit,” Longbow agreed, “and our outlander friends can shower rocks on them from up here. I don’t think this is going to be one of their pleasant days.”

“What a shame,” Rabbit said in mock sympathy. “This just about ends the war, doesn’t it? We might have to spend the summer here, but come fall, we’ll still be here, and what’s left of them will still be down there.”

“It looks that way to me,” Longbow agreed.

From far below there came a thunderous sound, much like the deep-throated roar of an angry bull, and the hordes of the Vlagh shrieked their response. Then, almost like an incoming wave, the enemy force surged forward.

“Enemy to the front!” Keselo reported sharply to alert the Trogite soldiers and Maag pirates stationed atop the fort.

The Maags and Trogites, their ancient enmities laid aside now, came to the front wall of the fort to watch the now futile charge of the enemy.

Longbow watched and waited as the enemy force charged up the broad stairway.

“Shouldn’t your archers be alerted, Longbow?” Keselo asked.

“They’re watching,” Longbow replied. “The enemy isn’t quite in range yet. We wouldn’t want to waste our new arrows.”

“You’ve got no idea of how much I appreciate that, Longbow,” Rabbit said with a tight grin.

The enemy charge continued to swarm up the stairway. Oddly, there were no shouts or war cries. That seemed very unnatural to Keselo.

“That should be close enough,” Longbow said. He lifted his horn and blew a long, mournful note.

A cloud of arrows arched out over the stairway from either side of the gap. The arrows seemed almost to hang in the air for an interminable moment, and Keselo saw a certain beauty in the perfect symmetry of that arch.

The enemy charge faltered as the front ranks went tumbling lifelessly back down over the top of the following ranks.

Rabbit chuckled. “I think their day just turned sour,” he said, “and the sun’s barely over the eastern horizon.”

Longbow, however, was frowning with a slightly puzzled expression. “Something isn’t right,” he said. “They rush toward the foot of the stairs by the thousands, but only hundreds come up. Where are the others going?”

Rabbit peered down toward the foot of the stairway. “It
does
look a bit odd, doesn’t it?” he admitted. “It’s a little hard to see from way up here, but it almost looks like better than half of that army just vanishes when it reaches the stairway. Where are they going?”

A cold certainty suddenly struck Keselo. “Could the stairway just be a diversion?” he suggested.

“A what?” Rabbit demanded.

“Something that’s supposed to attract our attention away from the
real
attack,” Keselo explained.

“But where’s the real attack going to come from?” Rabbit asked. “They’re down there, and we’re up here. They
have
to come up that stairway to get to us. As far as I can tell, most of the enemies just vanish when they reach the foot of the stairs. They’re kicking up a lot of dust down there, but that shouldn’t change the numbers, should it?”

“Burps?” Keselo mused, half to himself as he remembered Red-Beard’s humorous description.

“I didn’t quite follow that,” Rabbit admitted with a puzzled expression.

“It’s just something Red-Beard told me a few days ago,” Keselo explained. “I was asking him about those ancient ruins we saw up on the sides of the ravine, and he happened to mention the fact that there are quite a few caves running through these mountains. If he was right, isn’t it possible that the creatures of the Wasteland have been moving toward Lattash through those caves instead of down the ravine?”

“What’s that got to do with what’s happening down there at the bottom of the stairway, Keselo?”

“Let’s say that there’s a cave mouth somewhere on the face of this cliff,” Keselo continued, “or maybe even down at the foot of the cliff, for that matter. And just suppose that the cave went through the mountains here to someplace on down the ravine. If the enemies wanted to hide that cave from us, this stairway would be the perfect way to conceal it. First they’d build a kind of corridor that’d lead to the cave, and then they’d cover the corridor by building this stairway right over the top of it.”

“Keselo, you’re talking about something that would have taken hundreds of years to build,” Rabbit scoffed.

“Let him talk, Rabbit,” Longbow said. “Time doesn’t mean anything to the creatures of the Wasteland, and this notion of his explains what’s happening down there. Go ahead, Keselo.”

“All right,” Keselo continued. “The stairway hides the corridor—or tunnel—that leads to the cave mouth. The next question is where does that cave go?” He snapped his fingers. “Obviously! It goes right straight through the mountain and comes out somewhere on down the ravine—where the enemies could come out between our fort here and Lattash.”

“Like maybe right behind those old villages that nobody seems to be living in?” Rabbit suggested.

“Of course!” Keselo exclaimed. “Red-Beard told me that every now and then somebody in his tribe gets curious and tries to explore one of those ruins, but those people almost never come back.”

“I think that maybe we’d better go have a look,” Longbow said bleakly. “How close is the nearest one of those ruins?”

“Red-Beard said that there’s one a few miles down on the north side of the ravine,” Keselo replied. “He told me that there’s a dead snag on the rim just above it and that the snag sticks out far enough that we’d be able to see it if we were on the north bench. Rabbit and I saw several on the south side while we were coming up the ravine, but they all seemed to have been built in places that wouldn’t be visible if you happen to be directly under them.”

“We’ve had some very interesting notions here, but they’re just guesswork. Let’s see if we can find anything to back those guesses up.” Longbow’s face was bleak, and his tone of voice seemed tense.

“Did Red-Beard give you any idea of how extensive these caves might be?” Longbow asked Keselo as they started down the north bench in the bright spring sunshine.

“He didn’t really go into too much detail,” Keselo replied. “I got the feeling that he’s not really curious enough about caves to go exploring—or possibly the caves make him sort of nervous. I’ve heard that some people have problems with enclosed places. I sort of got the impression from what he said that the caves are quite extensive. From what we’ve seen so far, I’d say that there’s a strong possibility that the enemies
are
using the caves to slip behind us so that they can block us off.”

“Well, all we know for certain is that a sizeable number of our enemies disappeared when they reached the foot of the stairway,” Longbow replied. “These ruins are a possibility. We may have to come up with others, but let’s look into this possibility first.”

Keselo looked on down the ravine. “I think that might be the dead snag Red-Beard told me about,” he told the others, pointing up toward the rim.

“Let’s stop here,” Longbow said. “If there
are
enemies in that ruin, we don’t want to come up right below them.”

The wall of the ravine was steep, certainly, but it wasn’t a sheer rock face such as the cliff at the edge of the Wasteland. They climbed slowly to avoid making any noise that might alert anyone—or anything—in the ancient stone ruins.

They angled up the side of the ravine until they were a short distance from the overhanging ledge above the village. Longbow stopped, his eyes searching. “There,” he whispered, pointing at a grassy protrusion that lay between them and the ancient ruin. “If we move carefully, we can take cover in the tall grass without alerting anyone that we’re there.”

They climbed carefully up the back side of the knoll, and as they neared the top, Keselo motioned to the others and crawled through the grass until the ruins were in plain sight. Then he crawled back to rejoin Rabbit and Longbow. “We’ll be just a bit above and a little to one side,” he whispered. “If there’s anybody there, we should be able to see them if they come out into the open.”

“Let’s go watch,” Longbow whispered back. “If our suspicions turn out to be right, it won’t be long before there’ll be too many enemies in the village to hide.”

They crawled along through the rustling grass until they could see most of the village lying slightly below them.

“It looks almost like a fort instead of a village, doesn’t it?” Rabbit suggested quietly. “That front wall’s fairly flat, except for the places where part of it crumbled away and rolled on down the hill. Maybe it really
was
a fort, and part of that front wall got knocked down during a war.” He frowned. “But if that flat front wall was solid, how did the people who lived there get down to the river for water?”

“If my suspicion is anywhere close to what that fort
really
is, nobody ever actually lived there,” Keselo said. “The only purpose it serves is to conceal the mouth of the cave. Red-Beard said that the Dhralls avoid those ruins because they believe that they’re cursed—or maybe haunted. If it was never a real village, there wouldn’t have been any need for water or for any level ground for growing food.” Then Keselo saw a brief flicker of movement in the ruin below. “There!” he hissed. “Over near the west side of the ruin.”

As the three of them watched, more and more furtively moving figures came out of the shadows at the rear of the ancient ruin. The figures were all cloaked and hooded and very small, but many of them moved awkwardly, half bent over, as if standing erect was strange for them. Then one of them barked a command in a raspy voice that sent a chill through Keselo. The hooded figures all stopped, and four of them gathered atop one of the ruined buildings.

The one which had previously spoken reached up and pushed back its hood with a gleaming black appendage that looked much like the claw of a crab. The face of the creature was rounded at the top; it had two waving things protruding from its forehead, and its large eyes bulged.

“It’s a
bug!
”

“So it would seem,” Longbow replied tensely.

Another of the tiny enemies pushed back its hood to reveal a pale human face, and it spoke at some length with the insect. A third enemy joined them, and that one had a flickering, forked tongue and scaley skin. The last one had a furry face and long, sharp teeth, and it wasn’t much bigger than a dog.

“What kind of army is that?” Keselo demanded in a hoarse whisper. “Bugs, snakes, animals, and people all mixed together and talking to each other?”