Good Company

by Dale Lucas

  That’s the price of disunity, Rem thought. A catastrophic unreadiness. Helplessness in the face of one’s enemies, because there is no plan—there is no priority. Everyone’s out for themselves . . . and everyone pays the price for that selfishness.

  It was a hard lesson, but Rem thought he’d finally learned it. Whatever happened from here on, he’d do his damnedest to make sure it involved everyone. Without some sort of unity, some plan for cooperation, they’d all die out here.

  There was rustling in the brush nearby. Rem turned toward the sound, curious, and froze when he had the swishing bush in his sights. Once again there was a minute shudder—a trembling of leaves, a small, small scraping sound as tiny paws moved over loose leaves. Something was in there. Something alive.

  Rem gripped his spear and felt himself lowering his whole body into a defensive crouch. If he was lucky—very lucky—some inoffensive little forest rodent would come waddling out of the bracken and move just close enough for him to spear it.

  If he was not lucky—and, truth be told, his luck hadn’t been terribly well starred since he began this whole expedition—the thing in the bush would be a famished hillcat, a young wolf on the prowl, or a bumbling bear cub whose proximity to an armed human would likely draw the ire of its murderous mother.

  Be calm, Rem thought. Be patient. Breathe. Pretend you’re Torval, who wouldn’t shrink or run even if the thing in the bushes were a grave wight loosed from the sundry hells.

  He watched. He waited. Once more the brush shuddered. Finally the overlapping fern fronds and weeds at the fore of the little copse broke, and out hopped a mad-eyed brown hare. It took two short hops, then stopped in the middle of the clearing that it and Rem shared.

  Rem stared. It was an ugly thing, pop-eyed and rangy, its limbs long and thin, indicating that it was underfed. So it offered no great storehouse of meat . . .

  But that made little difference. Rem’s mouth was already watering. If he could just get the thing skewered on his spear, he was reasonably sure he could skin it and dress it. In an hour he could be sitting by a fresh fire, eating roasted hare, satisfied that he was still a competent woodsman.

  He slowly altered his grip on the spear, moving his whole body with ponderous, deliberate slowness to put the point of the hastily made implement forward, toward the curious hare.

  The animal didn’t move. It snuffled the ground a little, rooted about in the littered loam surrounding it. Nibbled on a patch of sprouting weeds, then withdrew.

  Rem drew a deep breath. Blew it out.

  And struck.

  His speed startled even him. Perhaps it was hunger, or desperation, or who knew what, but the carved point of his long stick shot down with murderous accuracy and thrust right through the exposed flank of the hare. His own movement was so quick, and the hare’s flesh so yielding, that Rem had to look down after striking, just to make sure he’d been successful.

  There lay the hare, eyes wide in disbelief, twitching its last on the end of his stick. There was something about its movements—so weak, so small—that gave Rem pause.

  Hold on, he thought. That was too easy. What hare doesn’t hie at the first movement, the first indicator of trouble?

  Something moved in the leaf-littered loam then—something small and twisted. It was a piece of thin thread. Staring now, still holding the spear in both hands while its point stuck in the earth beneath the bleeding hare, Rem could see that the thread was looped several times around the hare’s rear left paw, and snaked off through the bushes the animal had emerged from.

  A snare? he thought.

  A moment later, when a noose fell over his head and closed savagely around his windpipe, Rem realized the thread on the hare’s foot was no snare at all.

  It was a leash, however small and primitive.

  The hare was bait.

  Rem was the catch.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “Rem!” Torval shouted for the forty-seventh time.

  He wasn’t sure how far he’d come. He’d set out just before dawn, quietly, so as not to rouse anyone in camp. Galen had been posted as sentry, but she’d just taken up a post north of camp, allowing Torval to slip off in the opposite direction. Part of him hated to abandon them—he wanted to see the girl, Tzimena, recovered, and he’d come to admire and respect every member of her personal guard—but despite those misgivings, Torval had only one burning desire at the moment: he had to find Rem, and once he found Rem, the two of them would head for home. Hang the reward. Hang the lord marshal. Hang the safety of strangers. His partner was lost. Torval would find him.

  So he’d been trudging along in the predawn darkness, using the road as his guide but intermittently venturing into the woods for signs of his comrade, for at least two hours now. What sort of distance was that? A mile? Two? If he’d been traveling steadily, in a straight line, he could better gauge, but his frequent off-road tramping and close search of the ground for indicators of Rem’s passage frustrated his efforts at truly measuring his progress.

  So far he’d found nothing. Heard nothing. Seen nothing.

  If the boy was dead—drowned in the river somewhere or already half-digested by a bear—Torval would never forgive himself. He’d made Indilen a promise, hadn’t he? The boy was his to guard, his to protect. They were partners, and he’d failed his partner.

  “Rem!”

  Forty-eight.

  Darkness was yielding to gray, a thin veil of mist snaking between the looming trees and the shaggy fern copses. Torval could clearly hear the river far off to his right, but couldn’t say how far away it was. The judgment of distance was not his strong suit, after all. For one thing, he’d been raised on dwarven measures; for another, he’d spent so long among humans that their own measures had tried to replace their dwarven equivalents in his mind; but for a third thing, he’d spent the better part of his adult life living in cities, wandering bounded streets. He thought in terms of blocks and wards, alleys and boulevards, not miles or leagues or furlongs or whatever silly spans one might apply out in this great, wide expanse of overgrown nothingness.

  Well, at least he wasn’t lost. There was always the road and the river. As long as he had those two things, within sight or hearing, he could always find his way back to camp. Or out of the woods, if it came to that.

  But I’m not leaving these woods, he thought decisively. Not without Rem. If all I can recover is a scrap of his shirt or a boot with a chewed-off foot in it, I’m not leaving here ’til I know that he cannot come with me.

  Something chuffed far off to his left. Torval turned toward the sound, every small hair on his muscular arms standing straight, sweat beading on his bald brow despite the chill in the early-morning air. The chuffing was followed by a long, low bellow and a heavy, ponderous sound, like the dragging of great feet.

  Gods, what was that?

  Torval stood still, listening—though he had no idea what he was listening for. The bestial groans and dragging subsided into the pale wash of background noise in the woods: the chitter of waking birds, the distant sloshing of the Kaarten, the rustle of trees in a delicate breeze.

  There, behind him. Another sound. Footsteps! Heavy boots moving slowly, warily across the soft, damp earth of the forest floor.

  Torval found a nearby cedar and backed himself into it. The tree was so tall that glancing up toward its high branches and unseen crown gave him vertigo. Was there a single tower in Yenara that high? In any city in the world? He imagined that if one could climb to the top of the damned thing, one could probably see all the way back to Yenara and the coast.

  He was certain that someone—or something—was following him. Tracking him. He waited, trying to still his breathing enough that it would not affect his hearing. Briefly he closed his eyes and listened.

  Boots, still moving slowly, cautiously. He heard the scrape of the toe against rustling weeds as they were lifted; heard the crunch of dead pine needles and rain-softened twigs as the heel fell.

  Cr
eak. Clink. Armor! Leather, tightly banded, along with some metallic component—maybe scales, maybe chain mail.

  Bird wings, rustling eagerly as the creature fled its shrub perch and took flight. Someone’s passage had disturbed the bird in its ground-level home . . .

  Torval opened his eyes. He tightened his grip on his maul, then let his left hand fall to one of the daggers at his belt. Slowly, eager not to let even the smallest sound give him away, he jostled the dagger to loosen the grip of its scabbard, then drew it forth.

  Blade in one hand, bludgeon in the other. He was ready.

  If they have bows, he thought, I’ll be no match for them. I might take one . . . two if I’m lucky . . . but it would only take one good shot to put me down.

  I could negotiate . . .

  No.

  I could try to be sneaky, to just watch . . .

  No.

  There’s only a fight, then. Steel to steel. Flesh to flesh. Their blood or mine, no mercy.

  Yes.

  He drew three deep breaths and exhaled them with equal patience, then leapt from behind the great cedar, brandishing maul and dagger as he did.

  A bow swung up, arrow already nocked. It creaked a little as the archer drew the bowstring taut for a shot.

  “Wait!” cried Wallenbrand.

  Galen did not loose. She held the drawn arrow in place, its point trained right on Torval’s broad trunk.

  Torval stared. Wallenbrand, Galen, and Tuvera. They were all armed—Wallenbrand and Tuvera with their swords in hand, Galen with her compound bow drawn and ready to skewer him. They stood in a broad skirmish line, each ten paces from the next. Clearly they’d been advancing through the woods toward the tree behind which Torval hid.

  Torval lowered his weapons. “Sundry hells!” he shouted. “I could’ve killed you!”

  “Unlikely,” Galen said with a crooked smile as she lowered the bow and reversed her draw.

  “What are you doing all the way out here?” Tuvera demanded. “Alone, no less?”

  “Searching for my partner,” Torval said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

  “It isn’t safe, master dwarf,” Wallenbrand said, looking strangely as Torval imagined he himself looked when trying to speak sense to one of his children.

  “And why should you care?” Torval asked, perhaps unfairly. “We are not your people. We are not your problem. You’ve got your own recoveries to make, your own wounded to tend to. I won’t interfere with your business in these woods, so don’t interfere with mine.”

  “You think we don’t want to find him?” Tuvera asked.

  “Why would you?” Torval countered. “What are we to you?”

  “Look,” Wallenbrand said, his voice craggy but eminently reasonable, “I won’t lie and say the lord marshal would want any of us out here searching for your friend. He wouldn’t. He’ll give us all a dressing-down when we get back. But, Torval, honestly . . . we would’ve helped if you’d given us the option.”

  “Maybe it’s the lord marshal who kept me from asking,” Torval said. “Or you, Captain Tuvera. You and the lord marshal are leaders, and you have to watch out for your people. You’ve lost too many already. You shouldn’t lose any more . . . not even to help me find Rem. He’s my responsibility—a burden I’m happy to bear. Just stay out of my way.”

  “Give us an hour more,” Tuvera said. “Let us help you for just that long, Torval. We’ll spread out, march south, and see what we find. If we find nothing by that time, we agree to head back to camp. How does that sound?”

  “I won’t refuse your aid,” Torval said, “but I’m not going back without him.”

  Tuvera looked to Galen, then Wallenbrand. Clearly they’d all discussed this possibility before they ever left camp. Torval could see it on their faces—the disappointment of an inconvenient but inevitable truth. He wasn’t sorry. Let them stamp their feet and argue all they liked, he had but one job now: find Rem and take him home. Nothing else mattered, so far as he was concerned.

  “Fine,” Tuvera finally said. “We’ll keep at it for an hour. At that time, we head back. If you refuse, we can’t force you. Fair?”

  Torval nodded. “Fair,” he said. “Now come on. We’re wasting time with all this yammering.” He led the way without looking back to see if they followed.

  Torval suspected he should be checking the river, but there was a part of him that refused to make that his first order of business. He’d search first out here, in the woods, for any sign that Rem had made it out of the Kaarten alive. Perhaps when he returned to camp he’d follow the river and look for the boy’s waterlogged corpse, only after he’d exhausted his woodland options. But some small part of him honestly believed that, so long as he only searched for places where a living, breathing Rem could be, a living, breathing Rem was the only thing he was likely to find.

  The sun was up and their hour of cooperative search almost spent when a sudden low whistle off to Torval’s left drew his attention. Torval turned and saw Galen, who’d sounded that whistle, standing twenty or thirty yards off, frozen with her bow half-raised, eyes staring intently into a broad line of laurel and lilacs crammed among a thicket of alder and cottonwood up ahead. Tuvera, farther off to Galen’s left, was staring at her companion, awaiting information. Torval supposed Wallenbrand, off on his right, was doing the same.

  But for the time being, Torval would not move. He stared carefully at the woman scout, the way her dark eyes narrowed and scanned that thick screen of brush ahead, as if trying to pick something out of it.

  Torval raised his shoulders a little in a puzzled shrug. Do you see something?

  Galen caught Torval’s movements in her peripheral vision, turned to spear him with her now-intent gaze, then swung her eyes back toward the line of brush again. This time she raised her bow, drew back the already-nocked arrow, and took aim.

  Wood snapped, somewhere far off to Torval’s right. His head whipped around toward the sound, but he could not see anything that might have made it. Wallenbrand, who had spaced himself about the same distance off from Torval that Galen had, was looking in the same direction. Clearly he’d heard it, too. The sound had been sharp, sudden—a twig broken by a falling foot, followed by no movement whatsoever.

  Torval tightened his grip on his maul and his dagger. He decided to take charge of the situation if no one else would. Slowly he picked a path forward, placing his big feet as carefully as he could, looking for a good spot to make a stand on. After stepping over several low tussocks of weeds and through the swaying fronds of some close-packed ferns, he came to a bald spot on the forest floor, just big enough for him to occupy comfortably. It would give him a good range of movement, if he had to fight. He kept his eyes fixed on the screen of brush ahead, the one that he knew Galen had her bow aimed at. Could Torval see something back there? Behind fern fronds and waxy green leaves and the net of swaying branches? The flicker of small, dark eyes? The flat, leathery wrinkles of skin?

  “Show yourself!” Torval finally shouted, his voice booming through the forest like the explosion of one of those blasting spheres the day before. “You’re surrounded, so you might as well come out right now!”

  The brush rustled a little. Someone or something was in there.

  “Come on out,” Torval commanded, “and maybe we can talk! The longer you hide, though, the less friendly we’ll deem you to be!”

  The brush rustled again. Finally Torval saw something big moving behind the screen, something hitherto crouched at last revealing its considerable height and bulk as it stood straight, the tops of the shrubs around it barely reaching its waist.

  It was nine feet tall, maybe ten, and as wide at its enormous shoulders as Wallenbrand was tall. Torval recognized the thick, wrinkled hide, the mottled, dark-gray skin turning lighter on the creature’s blunt face and exposed torso—as well as the broad, vaguely hunched shoulders and the small, round head thrust forward on a thick, bullish neck.

  A mountain troll, very far f
rom its home. And judging by the fact that it wore bracers of wound leather and fur around its enormous forearms and a cured leather loincloth around its middle, Torval guessed that it wasn’t just some wild wanderer. The only trolls that wore clothing—even the smallest scrap—were domesticated.

  Torval’s nostrils then caught a swirl of familiar scents on the cool breeze: sweat, animal musk, dung, and the tang of something vaguely astringent. That was a scent Torval recognized all too readily.

  He felt his heart start to beat in double time . . . then triple. It was a wholly unconscious reaction, one his body repeated every time it was in the presence of his old enemies . . . the slayers of his family . . . the scourge of all human-and dwarfkind.

  The troll wasn’t alone. There were orcs about.

  Torval wasn’t sure what to do. He wanted to charge, to lay into the thing with blade and bludgeon, to hurt it and bruise it and tear it down . . .

  But if it wasn’t alone?

  If it was part of a group?

  He threw a look back at Galen and Tuvera. She was shaking a little—Torval could see it in her shoulders and in the hovering point of the arrow. It wasn’t fear, though; the stony look on Galen’s face told him that. No, it was simple strain: the scout had held that draw for too long. She’d have to loose it soon, or else—

  Torval caught movement. He turned back toward the troll just in time to see the hulking brute raise its enormous, apelike arms above its head.

  “Hrzhat,” the troll said through its fierce underbite.

  Hold, it had said in a common orcish dialect.

  Too late. Torval heard the subtle twang of Galen’s bowstring and suddenly an arrow appeared, buried to half its length in the troll’s right pectoral, just above its nipple. The troll gave a groan, followed by another pair of words.

  “Djaba!” it roared. “Bowhra!”

  Torval heard the twang of another bowstring, sensed something suddenly splitting the air just before his nose, and heard a small thunk as something buried itself in the earth off to his left. He turned and saw an arrow fletched with crow feathers buried in the loam at an oblique angle. It must have passed just in front of his face, fired from somewhere off to his right and above.