Bearers of the Black Staff

by Terry Brooks

  He gave her a smile. “I wouldn’t bet against it.”

  THEY SET OUT AGAIN SHORTLY AFTERWARD, still moving south through the mix of haze and gray. The rains returned in a slow, steady drizzle, and the temperature dropped further. The low ground, already swampy and slick, turned to mud covered by large stretches of surface water forming small lakes and connecting waterways. Walking was all up and down, a tiring slog that quickly sapped their energy. The footing was uncertain, resulting in constant slips and slides that cost them valuable time. Everything about them was turning into a morass.

  Deladion Inch tried to take comfort in the fact that it would be just as hard on anyone tracking them, but soon grew so tired from picking himself up that he no longer found comfort in anything. His arm had begun to throb anew, pain shooting up and down it in sharp rushes, and the girl gave him some more of the leaves to chew. But his body was aching everywhere by now, not just in the places where his ribs were cracked and his arm fractured, and his misery was pretty much complete. He guessed they were still several hours’ walk from his safehold, and they might not reach it by nightfall. He regretted endlessly the loss of the crawler, a dependable rolling fortress he could never replace. He thought of countless ways he might punish Taureq Siq for his part in this, but all of them required that he first get through the day.

  Not a sure thing, at all, he decided when he heard the distant baying of the Skaith Hounds.

  He cursed under his breath, gave the girl a quick reassuring smile, and kept walking as if the howling didn’t matter. But they both knew that somehow, against all odds, the beasts had found their trail and were hunting them and that his efforts at misleading the Drouj had gone for naught. He began measuring their chances of reaching safety before the hounds caught up to them and decided they were slim or none. They would have to find a fresh way to throw off their pursuit or stand and fight.

  He decided their best chance was to make use of the chain of waterways and lakes formed by the surface water, wading through in directions that would confuse the beasts. Leading the way, he took the girl into deeper water that covered their feet and ankles and then slogged ahead across vast stretches linked by connecting streams, careful never to step out of the water, never to touch ground that might give them away.

  “We could double back on them,” Prue suggested at one point, but he quickly shook his head.

  “Too dangerous. If they get between us and the fortress, we have no chance at all. We keep going ahead.”

  She didn’t argue. She did not complain or ask to rest. She did not slow. She just did what she was told. He admired this girl.

  “How long have you known Sider Ament?” he asked after a time, weary of the silence.

  She shrugged. “A few weeks. I only knew of him before that.”

  “That’s long enough, I guess. I only met him recently myself. First I knew of anyone living in those mountains. Why didn’t your people come out of there before now? What kept you in hiding?”

  “It’s a long story. We couldn’t leave. We were warded by magic that locked us in. The valley was all we knew.”

  “Bet you wish that was still the case, don’t you?”

  “It would be easier. But the barrier’s down and it won’t come back up. We have to face life outside the valley, like it or not.” She glanced over, her green eyes unsettling. “How did you become a mercenary?”

  He shrugged. “I needed a way to make a living. I didn’t have any people, no family, no anything. I’d been on my own since I was ten or twelve. I was living in a village south of here and doing what I could to stay alive. I used to scavenge for things in the ruins that I could barter or sell.” He pointed at the weapons slung over his right shoulder. “These brought in good money. I tried using them, found I could, decided to take up a new trade. It made me a valuable commodity to those in search of an edge against their enemies. I liked how that made me feel.”

  “Don’t you get lonely?”

  “Sometimes. Everyone does. But I like living alone, being on my own, making my own decisions. Safer that way. Did Sider tell you about what it’s like out here?”

  She shook her head. “I only met him the one time. I haven’t seen him since. But I can guess what it’s like.”

  He laughed softly. “No, you can’t.”

  He proceeded to describe it in detail, a straightforward recitation that left nothing out. He embellished a little, but not much. It wasn’t necessary. Things were horrible enough as they were without the need to add anything. She only needed to grasp the gist of it. So he described the killings and the enslavement and the destruction, the basic elements of the savagery that had dominated everyone’s life in the aftermath of the Great Wars—or at least everyone who hadn’t found the sort of shelter from which she came.

  She listened carefully and didn’t interrupt. When he was finished, she said, “You’re right. I couldn’t have guessed at most of it. I don’t know how you tolerate it.”

  “I don’t think about it,” he said. “I don’t let it get too close.”

  She frowned. “But it’s all around you.”

  “It helps to have these,” he said, touching his weapons. “They keep everything at a distance.”

  From behind them, closer now, the baying of the Skaith Hounds rose and died. Inch glanced over his shoulder. It sounded like the beasts were farther west, perhaps following a false trail. “Let’s keep moving.”

  They walked on for another hour, the day winding down. He thought they were getting close to the fortress, but he couldn’t be certain in the shroud of darkness and damp. He didn’t usually come at it from this direction, in any case. Everything looked different.

  A fresh round of baying rose out of the silence, deep and powerful. The girl stopped where she was and looked back. “They’ve found our trail. They’re coming for us.”

  “Maybe not,” he said, not liking how certain she seemed.

  “No, they’re coming. I can feel it. It’s my gift to know. My instincts warn me when I’m threatened. They’re warning me now.”

  He wasn’t sure he believed her, but he didn’t see any point in taking chances. He quickened their pace, moving out of the water slicks and onto solid ground again. They needed to get out of the open, to put some walls between themselves and their pursuers. But they would have to hurry. If they failed to reach cover before dark, they would have no chance at all.

  The baying rose and fell, continuous now. It was getting stronger, closer. The girl was right. The Skaith Hounds had found their trail. He gave momentary consideration to turning around and waiting for them, setting an ambush to kill them all. Without the hounds, the Drouj would have difficulty tracking anyone in this weather. But the risk was too great. If he failed to kill even one of the beasts, they would lose any advantage they might gain by staying ahead of the pursuit.

  He slipped the flechette from his shoulder, released the safety, and clutched the big gun to his chest. He would be ready for them.

  All of a sudden there were ruins ahead, a maze of half walls and collapsed roofs, of passageways and rubble. For just an instant he thought they had reached his fortress keep. Then he realized these were only the outbuildings. Still, any sort of protection was better than none. The walls at least gave them something to stand behind when the Trolls caught up to them. Even a piece of a wall would …

  He was in midthought as the Skaith Hound launched itself at him from out of the darkness, a deadly, silent assassin. The huge beast was on him before he could bring the flechette to bear, knocking him backward off his feet and onto the ground. He only just managed to get the flechette between himself and the hound’s jaws, jamming the barrel between the rows of teeth as he fought to fling the animal off. He heard the girl scream, and a second hound appeared, racing across the open ground to join the first. The barrel of the flechette was pointed right at it, and he pulled the trigger while it was still a dozen feet away, the charge tearing into it.

  Then he used all of his
considerable strength to heave the first beast clear and used the weapon a second time.

  He looked around quickly, the barrel of the flechette sweeping the darkness. Nothing else appeared, although he could hear more baying in the distance. There was no hiding now. They would have to stand and fight.

  “Inside!” he ordered the girl, gesturing toward the ruins.

  She leapt to obey and they hastened through the maze of walls, working their way deep into the cluster of buildings. They were still several hundred yards from the safety of the fortress, but they might reach it if nothing else slowed them down. He found himself laboring as he ran, which surprised him. Then he glanced down and saw the blood soaking his left leg. The first hound had managed to savage it, ripping through the leathers and body armor.

  He was bleeding freely, and he could feel the muscles tightening up. He knew what that meant.

  Don’t think about it!

  Guttural cries rose from behind them. Trolls. They had discovered the bodies of the Skaith Hounds. Fresh baying rose and died. It was suddenly silent save for the sound of his breathing and their footfalls. The girl was keeping pace, darting this way and that through the debris, negotiating their passage effortlessly. It made him smile for just a moment. She was a keeper. He’d wondered a moment earlier why he had let himself get into this mess, but now he decided he knew.

  Arrows flew past his head, and then one buried itself in his back. But the leathers and the armor stopped its penetration. He snatched at the girl, pulling her down behind a wall just ahead, and he turned, swinging up the barrel of the flechette. He fired three times, booming coughs that ruptured the stillness and ended a handful of lives in seconds. Without pausing to consider the number of dead, he was up and running anew, pulling the girl after him.

  “There’s more!” she screamed, just as several bodies vaulted a low wall to their left, spears thrusting. They missed the girl, but skewered him, shoulder and leg both. He killed his attackers quickly, efficiently. He bent down and broke off the spearheads and pulled free the shafts. It cost him something to do that, but he didn’t hesitate or shy away from it.

  Bleeding now from several wounds, he backed away with the girl behind him, watching the darkness. “Anything?” he asked her.

  “No. They’ve fallen back. But not far.”

  Of course, not far. They had him now. Her, too, if he didn’t do something about it. Then all this would have been for nothing.

  He dropped behind another wall and knelt close to her. “I want you to go on ahead without me. Don’t argue. You have to reach the fortress and open the door for me. I won’t have time for that once I catch up. The locks are hidden. But I can show you how to find them. Listen carefully.”

  He told her where to go and what to do. He made sure she understood. He sketched a quick map in the dirt, which showed her the route she must follow. “Go now,” he told her.

  She shook her head, the first time she had questioned him. “I can stay and help …”

  “You don’t have a weapon, and you don’t have fighting skills. You’ll only slow me down if I have to worry about protecting you. Here, take this.”

  He handed her a Flange automatic, a twelve-shot handgun he had recovered from its hiding place about five years back and restored to working order. He showed her how to use it—how to release the safety, how to hold the weapon steady, how to fire it once or multiple times. “Just in case,” he told her.

  She nodded once, and then she was off, sprinting away into the darkness. Good girl, he thought. She knew, but she wasn’t making a mistake by saying so, by staying to argue. He respected her for that. She was worth saving. Sider hadn’t made a mistake in asking his help.

  He turned back to the darkness, listening for sounds of approaching Trolls. An attack was inevitable, but it might not come right away. He backed into the ruins a little farther, searching the walls and doorways for the right spot. He found it finally, a corner slot formed by adjoining walls beneath a deep overhang. They could only get at him from in front.

  He braced himself against the walls once he was concealed in the shadows, reloaded the flechette, and propped the spray up next to him. Then he looped a cord around the firing pins of three of the flash-bangs and fastened them to his chest armor where they could be easily reached. He set two more of the explosive devices on a protruding stone on his left, then changed his mind and moved them to another on the right. His left arm wasn’t working well enough to do anything more than brace the stock of whatever weapon he was holding. When the attack came, he would have to move quickly.

  He leaned back into the darkened corner and waited. It was a good run, he thought. I don’t like that it’s ending, but you don’t always get much of a say in that sort of thing. You just take what’s given you. He would miss seeing Sider again. But the girl would explain. What was her name? Prue, wasn’t it? It fit her.

  Time stopped. The night went still, the darkness closed about, and his breath turned to frost on the cold air. He could almost make himself believe he was going to get out of this.

  The attack came all at once and without warning. But he was ready, and he fired the Tyson into everything that moved until it was empty, jammed in a second clip and fired again. He was struck repeatedly by arrows and darts, but most failed to penetrate and nothing did any real damage until the Drouj came at him in waves. By then the flechette was empty and he was using the spray, riddling the bodies until they were stacked all around him, Trolls and Skaith Hounds alike.

  There was a small lull, and he found himself laughing at the absurdity of it all. He was still laughing when they came at him a final time, too many for him to stop, and as they reached him he pulled the cord attached to the pins on the flash-bangs and everything disappeared in sound and fury.

  THIRTY

  MILES AWAY, ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUNTAINS, the Gray Man was trekking west toward the pass at Declan Reach. It was night and he was traveling quickly. He was no longer tracking Arik Siq; his quarry’s destination already known, his course fixed. Matters had taken an unexpected turn here, too, and here, too, time was running out.

  When he had left Arborlon in pursuit of the deceiver, he had begun tracking him under the assumption that he was escaping the city with the intention of going back through Aphalion Pass. If his purpose in coming into the valley in the first place was to gather information that would aid the Drouj in their planned invasion, he would be anxious to impart to his father what he had learned before his duplicity was discovered. In order to do that in the fastest way possible, he would take the shortest route out of the valley, and that meant going through Aphalion.

  So Sider had set out in that direction, not bothering with trying to pick up the Troll’s footprints, choosing instead to sacrifice caution for speed in order to reach the pass quickly. He did so, only to learn from the Elves on watch that no Trolls had passed that way in the past week. The Orullian brothers, in particular, were adamant that no one could have gotten past the watch they had set at both ends of the pass without someone finding out. Since no sightings or incidents had been reported, Arik Siq must have gone another way.

  It was a disturbing discovery, and after doing his own reconnaissance of the terrain surrounding the pass, the Gray Man went back down the interior slopes of the mountains toward Arborlon, this time checking carefully for some indication of where the elusive Troll had gone.

  He found it when he was almost all the way back to the Elven city and scouring the terrain above the forest where the boy Xac Wen had last seen the Troll going down the Carolan. The tracks he found were clearly made by a Troll, so the Gray Man was able to follow them easily enough. To his surprise, they led northwest upslope into the foothills for only several miles before turning directly west.

  Shortly after that, in a dense forest formed by a mix of hardwoods and conifers grown so thick it was impossible to see much of anything once you were in their midst, he found something that caused him both confusion and concern. In a c
learing ringed by spruce, he discovered tracks made by dozens of Trolls and a handful of four-footed beasts that had come down out of the high country west of Aphalion. Having joined up with Arik Siq, the entire bunch had set out west along the high slopes, carefully keeping to the shelter of the ridges and forests below the snow line.

  At first, Sider couldn’t figure out what all the Trolls and their beasts were doing. The pattern of the tracks seemed to indicate that they knew Arik Siq was coming and had waited for him. There were no indications of a disturbance, nothing to show that his arrival was unexpected. But if the Trolls were Drouj, how had they managed to get into the valley without being seen? How had they managed to communicate the details of this meeting with Arik Siq without speaking to him directly?

  Sider couldn’t be sure of the answer to the latter question, but he deduced an answer to the former pretty quickly. The beasts accompanying the Drouj were Skaith Hounds, which explained almost everything. When he had brought Arik Siq into the valley, there were no defenses in the pass, nothing to prevent anyone living outside from entering. The assumption was that no one could find a way in because no one knew where the passes were. But they had all overlooked the obvious. Simply by returning, they had left a trail. Skaith Hounds could track a quarry anywhere, as Deladion Inch had told him earlier, and since Arik Siq was already planning to betray the valley’s secrets, he had simply arranged before leaving camp to have the hounds set on their trail as soon as they were safely out of sight.

  Which meant that the Trolls who had gathered to meet with Taureq’s duplicitous son could have found Aphalion Pass easily and gotten safely inside the valley long before the first Elves arrived to set watch and build their defenses. They could have prearranged a meeting and waited for its time to roll around by hiding out somewhere high up in the rocks where they would be safe from discovery. How they had managed to decide when and where the meeting was to take place remained a mystery, but it seemed clear to the Gray Man that this was what had happened.