by Alexey Pehov
Contents
Title Page
Map
1. The Golden Forest
2. The Red Spinney
3. At the Gates
4. The Road to the Doors
5. Through the Slumbering Gloom
6. The Masters of Gloom
7. The Dance of the Sunlight
8. Playing Tag with the Dead
9. The Deal
10. The Level Between Levels
11. The Rainbow Horn
12. The Moth
13. In Captivity
14. The Labyrinth
15. The Shaman and the Jester
16. The Song of the Flute
17. Out of the Forest
18. The Margend Horseshoe
19. The Field of Fairies
20. The Player
Epilogue
Glossary
Tor Books by Alexey Pehov
About the Author
Copyright
1
THE GOLDEN FOREST
The little green goblin reacted rather sensitively when I criticized the Forests of Zagraba. “So what were you expecting, Harold? A fanfare?” Kli-Kli asked, waxing indignant. If I expressed dissatisfaction with anything, even some withered little flower, the royal jester launched into a passionate tirade in defense of his home country.
“No, I just thought Zagraba was a bit different from this,” I relied peaceably, already regretting that I’d started this conversation.
“So what do you think it ought to be like?” Kli-Kli asked me.
“Well, I don’t know…,” I drawled thoughtfully, trying to get the tedious goblin off my back.
“If you don’t know, then why are you talking nonsense?” The blue-eyed fool kicked a tussock of grass that was unfortunate enough to be in front of his foot. “He doesn’t like this! He doesn’t like that! What did you hope your naïve and innocent gaze would behold? Majestic trees ninety yards high? Or streams flowing with blood and oburs under every bush? I’m sorry, we don’t have that here. Zagraba’s a real forest, not a collection of children’s stories!”
“I realize that,” I said with a placid nod.
“He realizes, hah!”
“Kli-Kli, don’t make so much noise,” Eel said without turning round. He was walking in front of us.
The surly titch gave the tall swarthy Garrakian a resentful look, pouted, and stopped talking, and for the next two hours it was impossible to drag a word out of him.
This was our fifth day of walking through Zagraba. Yes, yes, that didn’t seem to make sense. Nine crazy characters, including two dark elves, one goblin, one broad-shouldered dwarf, one cantankerous bearded gnome, one gloomy knight, two warriors, and a fairly young, rather shifty-looking guy, striding along between the pine trees and bawling at the tops of their voices.
Why were they bawling? Because they were all crackpots.
Why were they crackpots? Because no normal person would stick his nose into the Land of Forests for any kind of money, and especially not into the territory of the orcs, who were famous throughout Siala for the warm welcome they give to strangers.
But in actual fact we weren’t all that crazy (speaking for myself, at least). It’s just that we were forced to stick our noses into Zagraba by a certain circumstance that went by the name of the Rainbow Horn.
What in the name of darkness did we want that damned tin whistle for anyway? Well, if it was up to me, I wouldn’t go to Hrad Spein to get the Horn for love or money. But I wasn’t a free man; I had a Commission hanging over my head, and by midwinter, I had to bring the Horn back to the Order of Magicians in the glorious city of Avendoom, otherwise we could say good-bye to the kingdom.
The Rainbow Horn, stupidly hidden by magicians of the past in the very depths of the Palaces of Bone, was the only thing holding back the Nameless One, who had borne a grudge against our kingdom for the last five hundred years or so. And the power of the Horn was weakening, and next May we could expect the sorcerer to come visiting, together with all the forces of the entire Desolate Lands. Naturally, nobody was exactly waiting to greet the Nameless One with open arms, and the Order of Magicians was desperate to get hold of the Horn in order to drive the enemy back into the icy wilderness.
So that was what we were doing in Zagraba. We were collecting the Horn, saving the world, and getting up to all sorts of other useless and foolish nonsense.
Stupid? Well, maybe. I woke up every morning with that idea in my head, but for some reason no one wanted to listen to me. Miralissa didn’t—and Alistan Markauz most certainly didn’t.
But it was my own fault—I accepted a Commission that couldn’t just be torn up. So I had to puff and pant, run and shout as I struggled to clamber out of a heap of … problems.
But then, the Commission did have its good points, too. When the work was done, I’d get fifty thousand gold pieces and a royal pardon … it’s just that I’d never heard of dead men being in any need of money or a pardon. What corpses usually require is a deep grave and a headstone.
Why would I say all this? Because everything that happened to our group on the way from Avendoom to Zagraba was a mere afternoon stroll in the park. But in Zagraba, and especially in Hrad Spein, things were going to get really tough. I didn’t have any illusions (well, maybe just the tiniest little one) about the success of our mission.
“Harold, are you playing the fool again?” Kli-Kli’s voice distracted me from my gloomy thoughts.
“Playing the fool is your job. I’m a thief, not a royal jester,” I told the little swine morosely.
“That’s your bad luck. If you were a jester, you wouldn’t have got caught out with this Commission from the king. You’d be sitting at home, swigging beer.…”
I suddenly felt an irresistible desire to give the little green wretch a good kick, but he evidently read my thoughts and went darting after Eel, so I had to postpone my reprisal for another time.
From the very moment we set foot in Zagraba, Miralissa had set a frantic pace for the group, and at the end of the first day I almost died. We stopped for the night in a forest clearing, and I felt like I wouldn’t be able to get up next morning. If everyone else liked tramping through the forest so much, then that was their right, but I’d rather lie on the grass and take a rest. If they liked, they could take turns carrying me piggyback, because I was willing to swear by Sagot that I didn’t have any strength left for strolling through the woods.
And the next morning really was tough. I had to force myself to get up, grit my teeth, and tramp, tramp, tramp. But by lunchtime I’d more or less got into the rapid rhythm, and the next day I almost stopped feeling tired. In fact, I began to suspect the elfess was adding some of her magical supplies to the cooking pot to make our daily marches easier to bear.
Since we entered Zagraba, all the fires had been lit by Egrassa. And amazingly enough, a fire lit by Miralissa’s cousin gave almost no smoke. The first night I was a little bit nervous that the flames might attract unwelcome attention, but the cautious elf didn’t seem too worried, and that meant there was no point in me getting agitated, either.
Despite my skeptical attitude to Zagraba, during the five days we had been walking through the forest, we had seen many wonderful things. We followed animal tracks that appeared and then disappeared again in the tangled ferns and prickly brambles. We walked through dense copses of black Zagraban oak, pine groves, forest clearings, and small meadows flooded with sunlight and overgrown with forest flowers. We jumped across babbling brooks with crystal-clear water. The forest stretched on and on: leagues and leagues of groves and copses, impenetrable tracts of fallen timber that we had to skirt round, losing precious time in the process, dozens of meadows and boggy hollows in places where streams dammed by
unknown creatures had overflowed.
And not a sign of orcs.
Only the squirrels greeted us with their furious chatter and followed the group, jumping from branch to branch and tree to tree. The day before yesterday, after clambering through trees felled by a spring storm, we came out into a beautiful forest meadow covered by flowers in colors so bright they seemed to ripple in front of my eyes. But the moment Egrassa stepped into the meadow, the flowers exploded into a brilliant rainbow and went soaring up into the sky, turning into thousands of butterflies of every possible size and color. With his natural curiosity, Kli-Kli tried to catch one of them, but he wound up stuck up to his ears down someone’s burrow. We wasted a lot of time getting the goblin out of there and he caught it hot from Miralissa and Count Markauz. From then on Kli-Kli tried to keep out of their sight and strode along in the company of your humble servant.
Beside a copse of oaks, where there was a jolly babbling stream carrying along the fallen leaves like little boats, we came across a wild boar. He was a mature tusker—two men could easily have sat on his back at the same time. If a beast like that ended up on the dinner table, two companies of ravenous soldiers would have had a hard time finishing him off.
Deler, as the most intelligent and agile, was up a tree in a moment. And that despite the fact that the beech had no branches near the ground, which any self-respecting dwarf would have needed for climbing up. The tusker gazed at us with his small, black, malicious eyes, grunted furiously, and came for us.
But Miralissa only had to flash her yellow eyes and hold out her hand for the boar to stop dead and then just walk away, grunting apologetically.
Deler looked down at the elfess with sincere admiration from the height of his refuge and then climbed back down. We moved through the forest in single file, following Egrassa’s lead, with the rear of our little column brought up by Alistan Markauz. The count’s hand never left the hilt of his beloved sword, but the triangular oak shield hung behind his shoulder.
The elf said that moving in this way had already saved our lives three times. With true gnomish stubbornness, Hallas objected rebelliously that that was absolute nonsense, and he definitely didn’t like seeing a dwarf’s backside right under his nose. Egrassa simply laughed at that.
“As soon as I get the chance, I’ll be glad to demonstrate the surprises of Zagraba to the respected master gnome,” he said.
His chance came soon enough. Egrassa jabbed at the ground ahead of him with a stick that he had picked up, and it collapsed, revealing to our gaze a deep wolf pit, with its bottom set as thick with spikes as a hedgehog’s back.
“Just think, gnome, what would have happened if you weren’t walking behind me,” the elf said merrily, flashing his fangs to emphasize the point.
Hallas grunted in bewilderment, took his helmet off, and scratched the back of his head, but he only took his words back after the elf had disarmed another two traps in front of his very eyes—a bow rigged with a tripwire, hidden in the bushes, and a huge heavy log hanging high up in the leaves of an oak right above the path. If that had come tumbling down, someone would have been crushed.
“But who set up these traps?” Lamplighter asked, shifting his terrible two-handed sword from his left shoulder to his right.
“Who knows?” said the elf with a cunning smile, looking down at the short man. “There are too many paths to follow every one.”
“But you know where to find a trap like that!” said Mumr, determined to get an answer to his question.
“Just a little magic—that’s all there is to it,” said the swarthy elf, adjusting the s’kash behind his shoulder.
Egrassa was clearly not prepared to share the secrets of his people with outsiders.
Once, after Kli-Kli sank up to his chest in a swamp (when he got the bright idea of wandering away from the path) an elk came out onto the path in front of us. It was a king of the elk, with horns more than three yards across. The beast sniffed at the air, glanced at us indifferently with its huge velvet eyes, and trotted off briskly into the young fir trees. Hallas grunted in annoyance and regretted he hadn’t thought of felling the massive beast.
“What a feed of meat we’d have had then.”
Deler laughed merrily and said that all the gnome’s brains must have gone onto his beard, or he’d realize what a bad idea it was to tackle a huge monster like that.
All day long birds chirped and twittered and sang in the branches of the trees. When we lay down for the night the oak trees whispered a forest lullaby to us and the owls hooted soothingly in the silence of the night. On the fourth day of our journey Miralissa said that we had to pick up the pace, and from now on our group would travel at night, too. Someone groaned quietly (I think it might have been me) but, naturally, no one took the slightest notice.
The full moon appeared in the sky, so there was plenty of light in the forest, and in any case the elves seemed to see in the dark as well as cats. Now we walked for most of the night and lay down to sleep in the hours before dawn, in order to continue on our way to Hrad Spein after midday.
It was at night that I learned about the magic of Zagraba. During the hours of darkness the forest was transformed into a world that was wild, alien, and mysterious, but very beautiful in its own way.
The dark branches of the oaks and maples were like arms, and there was a mysterious murmuring in the crowns of the trees—either the leaves rustling or some mysterious creatures talking to each other. We could hear low whispering and squeaking and faint laughter from the trees, the bushes, and the tall grass. And sometimes we were followed by the bright sparks of tiny eyes. Green, yellow, and red. The nocturnal denizens of the forest observed and exchanged opinions, but they were in no hurry to come out of their little hidey-holes and meet us.
“Who’s that?” I asked Kli-Kli in a whisper.
“You mean those little chatterers? My people call them the forest spirits. Every tree, bush, forest clearing, and stream has its own forest spirit. Take no notice of them, they’re perfectly harmless.”
“They’re small fry,” said Deler, testing one of the blades of his poleax with his thumb. “You should see the kind of forest spirits we have in the Slumbering Forest! You never know what to expect from them, but these just sit there and don’t bother anyone, they just…”
“They just watch,” Hallas concluded for Deler.
“That’s right,” said the dwarf, agreeing with the gnome for once.
But the spirits weren’t the only things in the Zagraban night. Once we saw the air in the forest burning. There were thousands of fireflies soaring between the trees, flashing with emerald, turquoise, and scarlet fire. Kli-Kli caught a dozen or so of these harmless creatures and put them on his shoulders, and for a few minutes the goblin shone like a holy character from the priests’ stories, then the glowworms got tired of riding on the royal jester and flitted off to join their brothers in the living kaleidoscope.
Night was the time of the owls, who drifted silently above the meadows in the moonlight. The birds were looking for food, listening to the sounds coming from the grass.
Night was the time of the wolves—we heard them howling in the distance several times. Night was the time of creatures whose names I didn’t even know. The cries of the night birds sounded like a madman’s laughter; there was roaring, hooting, chattering, growling. All sorts of different creatures lived in the night, and they weren’t always welcoming to uninvited guests.
Four times Egrassa and Miralissa led us off the path and we hid and waited for danger to pass. The elves didn’t condescend to explain what we were hiding from in the bushes alongside the track. But at moments like that even the fidgety goblin and the argumentative gnome fell silent and obeyed all the elves’ instructions.
At night Zagraba became multicolored. The colors were bright and lush—fresh, pure emerald, delicate turquoise, icy blue, sweet fiery red, and poisonous green. Flaming auroras of cold fire filled the forest with a magical, enchanting life.
The glowworms glimmered with all the colors of the rainbow, a gigantic spider’s web glinted bright blue, and the body of the spider that owned it shimmered with purple (the beast was at least the size of a good pumpkin), rotting tree stumps glowed bright green, and the veins on the emerald caps of the huge mushrooms—big enough for a grown man to shelter under during a shower—pulsed blue and orange. Pink fire wandering through the branches of willows by a lake was reflected in the water.
The cold fire of wandering lights, the bright blue sparks in the crowns of the trees, the glimmering of the forest spirits’ eyes, the scent of the forest, the grass, the damp earth, the half-rotten leaves, the fir tree needles, the resin of the pines, oak leaves, and the freshness of a stream. Whatever I might say to Kli-Kli during the daytime, I was completely overwhelmed by the incomparable, wild beauty of the Zagraban night. Although most of the time at night Zagraba was almost black, and then we had to walk by the pale silver light of the moon.
In the evening of the fifth day the narrow track winding between moss-covered larches finally led us to the Golden Forest.
“The gods be praised!” exclaimed Lamplighter, dropping his sack on the ground. “It looks like we’ve arrived!”
“You’re right,” Miralissa confirmed. “It’s only one and a half days’ march from here to Hrad Spein.”
For some strange reason, when she said that I got an unpleasant prickly feeling in my stomach. So this was it! We were almost there! What had seemed so distant that it was almost out of reach only two hours earlier was now less than two days’ journey away.
“Just an ordinary forest,” said Hallas, squinting contemptuously at the trees with the golden leaves. “The Firstborn are always making themselves out to be some kind of chosen people! Anybody would think their shit was solid gold, too!”
“I hope you won’t get a chance to ask them, Hallas,” Eel said with an ominous laugh. “The orcs are not in the habit of answering questions like that.”
“Come on, we have to keep going.” Milord Alistan took off one of his boots, shook out a stone, and pulled it back onto his foot.
