by Alexey Pehov
“The Iselina,” she explained.
It was so cold that clouds of steam erupted from our mouths as we spoke. If the Black River ran nearby, I certainly couldn’t see it. The water was as black as the forest all around us.
“And now what?” Hallas blurted out, wrapping himself in his cloak.
“Thank you, Runner in the Moonlight,” Fluffy Cloud said to the elk.
The beast’s snorting surrounded the dryad in steam, then he turned and disappeared into the forest. Our other mounts followed him. The group of elk disappeared in an instant, and the bushes didn’t even crack, as if we had been carried by intangible phantoms, not animals of flesh and blood.
“Now? Now we go by river,” Sunpatch answered the gnome.
“Right now?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you think it’s a bit too dark and cold for a swim, dear lady?”
I swear by all the gods that in her heart of hearts Sunpatch must have regretted that she ever healed the gnome. In any case, she ignored Hallas’s question. But Fluffy Cloud answered him.
“Wait a little while, and you’ll understand everything.”
There was nothing for it, we had to wait. I spotted two little blue dots in the branches of the nearest tree.
“Look, Kli-Kli. A forest spirit.”
“I saw him ages ago. He’s looking after this section of the forest.”
“But where are all the others?” Eel asked. “There were far more of them in Zagraba in September.”
“Hibernating. They’ll sleep until spring now. They’ve left lookouts to keep an eye on the forest.”
“That’s bad luck for the lad,” I said, sympathizing with the forest spirit. “Now he has to hang about here all winter.”
Just then a small round sphere radiating a steady golden light flew out of the forest and landed on Sunpatch’s shoulder. On closer inspection, the sphere proved to be a huge firefly. But it wasn’t its size that surprised me. I’d never seen fireflies in late autumn. According to all the laws of creation, the insect ought to have died long ago, or hidden itself away in some cranny; it shouldn’t be flying around the forest like some holy hermit’s lamp. But this one obviously cared nothing at all for the laws of creation. Or maybe it just hadn’t had time to study them yet.
“Now we can go to the water. Everything’s ready,” Sunpatch said, setting out confidently toward the river. The firefly gave more than enough light for us to see the path.
“Just as I thought!” Hallas muttered when we reached the river’s edge. “A boat! I hate boats!”
“It’s not a boat, it’s a raft,” Kli-Kli contradicted the gnome.
“What’s the difference? Boat, raft, ferry, ship, or tub? I hate everything that floats.”
The raft was large, and there was plenty of space for all of us. Eel, Lamplighter, Egrassa, and I took up the poles, and the dryads, the goblin, and the gnome stayed in the center. Hallas immediately started feeling sick.
The elf untied the thick rope holding the raft by the bank, and then we had to strain a bit, heaving on our poles, to get our new means of conveyance out into the middle of the river.
“How did a raft happen to be here?” Lamplighter asked, leaning hard on his pole.
“No doubt the dryads arranged it,” I answered the warrior.
“What difference does it make how it got here? The important thing is that it did. And whether the dryads arranged it or Sagra sent it to us, I couldn’t care less,” Eel said, pulling his pole out of the water and laying it carefully at his feet.
I lifted my pole up, too, and the raft floated on. The bottom was too deep to reach now, so there was no point in straining myself anymore.
When it was light, the firefly soared up off Sunpatch’s shoulder and flew away, buzzing, toward the forest. The gloomy, morose trees towered up on both sides of the river as if some giant was trying to squeeze it in a tight embrace. The Iselina was far narrower here than it was near Boltnik. The current carried us along at a brisk rate, so fast that the water at the stern seethed furiously.
Soon the already cloudy sky was even more overcast, and after another two hours or so it started spitting rain. It wasn’t a very pleasant day—stuck on a raft in the middle of a river with water pouring down from the sky, too. We huddled up under our cloaks, but that couldn’t save us from the cold and the damp.
“The last rain of the year,” Kli-Kli said with a sniff.
“How do you make that out?”
“We have a nose for things like that, Mumr-Bubr. If I say it’s the last, then it’s the last. Cold weather’s already on the way.”
“It’s been cold for ages,” Hallas objected. “I can’t even straighten up in the mornings.”
“That’s nothing,” Kli-Kli said dismissively. “But now it’s really going to get cold, and if anything falls from the sky, it’ll be snow.”
“You’re a real expert, Kli-Kli,” Eel laughed.
“Of course!” the gobliness agreed, then squinted up at the leaden sky and sighed sorrowfully.
“The river trip is almost over, Hallas. We’ve reached the boundaries of Zagraba. We’ll be in Valiostr tomorrow morning,” the elf reassured the gnome.
“If we don’t drown first,” the gnome grumbled.
The gobliness started whining. “Can’t we light a fire? We’ll be traveling all night!”
“What fire?” Mumr asked in amazement. “In rain like this? And we’d have to row to the shore, there’s no timber here. Or are you thinking of lighting a fire with your cloak?
18
THE MARGEND HORSESHOE
“Are you certain there aren’t any orcs here, Egrassa?” Lamplighter asked the elf.
“Yes,” Egrassa replied, but he kept hold of his bow.
That made me feel a bit nervous—and the others, too. We were used to trusting the dark elf’s instincts. And right now Egrassa was tense and focused, as if we were about to be attacked at any moment.
“What makes you so sure?” Kli-Kli asked.
“You heard the flinny say there weren’t any orcs near Moitsig, didn’t you?”
“But when was that? From Maiding to Moitsig is five days’ riding. The orcs don’t like horses, but they’re quite capable of covering the distance in that time. It’s a long time since we saw the flinny, so I wouldn’t be surprised if everything’s changed ten times over by now and these lands are teeming with Firstborn.”
“Don’t talk disaster,” Hallas told Kli-Kli good-naturedly. The gnome was walking in front of me.
“I’m not talking disaster, I’m just feeling a bit anxious.”
“Then stop whinging, or I won’t hear when an orc creeps up on you,” the gnome advised the gobliness.
Our group lapsed into silence. We were all too busy looking for any signs of possible danger, and the conversation petered out of its own accord.
Early that morning, our raft had landed on the left bank of the Iselina. It was no more than three hundred yards from there to the edge of Zagraba. The dryads were the first to disembark from the raft, then they waited until we were all on the bank and led the group on. Early in the night it had stopped raining, and in the middle of the night there had been a light frost, so now the ground and the tree trunks were covered with hoary rime. The rare puddles were covered with a crust of ice.
A few more minutes, and we were out of Zagraba. Ahead of us a hilly plain stretched out for as far as the eye could see, covered with open woodland. Our group was on the southern border of Valiostr.
The dryads exchanged a few words with Egrassa in orcic. Then they nodded to us without speaking, glanced for a brief moment at the bag with the Horn in it, and walked away into the forest. I thought I saw bushes and the bare, leafless trees part to let the Daughters of the Forest pass.
Egrassa straightened his silver coronet and led us out of Zagraba in silence. After we’d gone about five hundred yards, I couldn’t help looking back. It wasn’t likely I would ever see the legendary forest a
gain.
Zagraba was a dark, silent wall behind us. It was quite different now from the land teeming with greenery that I’d seen from the battlements of Cuckoo, and it certainly didn’t look anything like a golden kingdom of autumn any longer. Just an ordinary forest, even if it was a big one. November had devoured all its colors. No wonder the elves and the orcs called it the gray month.
* * *
We had a very real chance of running into Firstborn now. In the two hours since we left Zagraba, everything had been quiet and peaceful. There was no indication that an army of many thousands had passed this way—there weren’t any tracks on the ground apart from our own. Egrassa was leading the group along the river, and by his reckoning we should soon reach Moitsig, which stood on the left bank of the Iselina. We couldn’t avoid the city, because we needed horses (I could just imagine how the prices must have soared once the war started) and news of what was happening on the borders of the kingdom.
This war had come at a bad time. Even if we stood firm and the Firstborn didn’t drive us back to the Cold Sea, the losses would be too great, and the army might not recover from the blow in time for spring. Our only hope was Artsivus and the Order. Maybe they would be able to do something with the artifact and then the Nameless One wouldn’t come swooping down on us.
After walking down a low hill covered with aspens, we came out onto a wide road. The frost had frozen the mud created by the previous day’s rain into a whimsical pattern of bumps and hollows. It wasn’t very easy to walk on, but still a lot better than the liquid slush that would have delayed us for a long time if the weather hadn’t turned cold. I’d already regretted that we didn’t have any horses four times at the very least. I’d had quite enough of tramping about on my own two feet. Sagot be praised that the cobbler hadn’t deceived me, and my boots hadn’t fallen to pieces somewhere in the Labyrinth.
“Have you noticed anything strange?” Eel suddenly inquired.
“You have the right idea,” Egrassa responded. “I don’t like it, either.”
“What do you mean?” asked Kli-Kli, puzzled. Just in case, she snatched out one of her throwing knives.
“We’ve been walking along the road for an hour, but we haven’t met anybody,” Eel explained.
“What’s so strange about that?” said Mumr, shifting the bidenhander from one shoulder to the other. “Who’d want to go to Zagraba? That’s where the road leads, doesn’t it?”
“Some people would,” Egrassa objected. “As I recall, there are several fishing villages along the edge of Zagraba, and this is the time when the fisherman should have sold their fish and be on their way home from Moitsig.”
“Maybe the fish weren’t biting? Or they don’t need to sell any fish?” I suggested.
“When there’s a war on? The prices for grub should shoot up so far that any fisherman could make his monthly earnings in a single day! Skipping into town and selling is exactly what they need to do!” Hallas droned.
“Then I don’t know…”
“I do! I swear on my mountain mattock, Harold, there’s something not right here. We’re about to get clobbered! I swear by the Fury of the Depths that we are!”
“Now you’re the one who’s talking disaster,” Kli-Kli teased the gnome.
“We have to do something, and not just wander along the road like a flock of sheep. Any bowman could pick us off here! Egrassa, why don’t I go on ahead? That way, if we run into trouble, I’ll have time to warn you.”
“No,” said the elf after a brief moment’s thought, and he shook his head. “Eel and I will go. You stay on the road for now; we’ll give you a sign if anything happens. Harold, hold the spear.”
The elf handed me the krasta and he and the Garrakian went running on ahead. We waited for the two warriors to disappear over the top of the next hill before we moved on. For half an hour nothing happened, and then we heard a whistle.
For a moment my heart dropped into my boots, but Lamplighter dispelled my fears.
“That’s Eel. Let’s get a move on. There’s something interesting up there.”
“And doesn’t interesting mean dangerous?”
“If it was anything dangerous, he’d have whistled in a completely different way. But try to keep behind me just in case.”
“I promise not to stick my neck out. And I’ll keep hold of Kli-Kli so he doesn’t get under your feet.” Whatever anyone might say, I do have heaps of good qualities, and the most important one is common sense.
We hurried forward as the road climbed the next low hill. Eel appeared on the top and waved to us. When we got up there, we saw what had attracted our scouts’ attention—there was the city of Moitsig ahead of us.
“And who was trying to tell me the Firstborn hadn’t come this far?” Hallas growled.
His question went unanswered. From up on the hill there was an excellent view of the river, a huge uneven open space with scattered patches of open woodland, and the city, just a quarter league away from us. Towering up on the right, between the open space, the city, and the river, were the mighty gray walls of a small fortress. I knew there were another two fortresses on the other side of Moitsig. The reason for building them like that was to have the city at the center of a triangle of three citadels. Quite a good defensive arrangement—before you could storm the city walls, you had to deal with the outposts, otherwise you had a good chance of being hit on the flanks or from the rear by soldiers from the castles making a sortie while you were busy trying to break down the city gates.
But storming one of the bastions was risky, too. While you were dealing with one, help could arrive from another, and the soldiers in the city wouldn’t let a chance to take a lunge at you pass them by. So Moitsig was a genuinely tough nut to crack. It was practically impossible to take by storming it head on, unless you launched simultaneous attacks on all three castles and the city, using a very big army. If all the orcs had gone for Moitsig and not split up into three separate armies, they would have had a chance, but this way—this way was obviously hopeless, as the scene on the open field made clear.
It was absolutely littered with corpses. The scene was too far away for me to make out the details, but a blind beaver could have seen that the orcs had tried to storm the nearest castle and then been hit with a blow on their flank by forces from Moitsig and the other two bastions. The citadel they tried to take had stood firm, but parts of its walls and three of its six towers had been destroyed. I wouldn’t have been surprised if that was the work of orcish shamanism. But not even magic had helped the Firstborn, and they had been overwhelmed by the army of men. I never doubted for a single moment who had won this battle.
“How many are there?” I asked unthinkingly.
“Without counting, no more than three thousand,” said Hallas, screwing up his only eye. “They got a right royal battering. It’s a pity we didn’t get here in time to join in the scrap.”
Personally speaking, I didn’t have the slightest regret that we’d arrived late for the massacre. Darkness only can understand these gnomes, always so desperate to break someone’s armor open with their mattocks.
“I don’t think there are three thousand,” Lamplighter objected.
“What point is there in guessing? Let’s go and take a look! Or, better still, ask someone!”
“Slow down, Hallas! I reckon we’d better not stick our noses in! Our own side could take us for deserters, and that would be the end of us. If this is the way things are, I suggest we ought to avoid the city. Why go sticking your own head in the noose?”
“We’ll have to go in, Mumr. It will take us too long to reach the next town without horses.”
“What do we need a town for, Egrassa? We can call into any village and buy horses.”
“Uh-huh!” said Kli-Kli, positively radiating skepticism. “Sure, they’ll sell you horses. And throw in smart bridles and saddles to go with them. You should try using your head sometimes! You won’t find a single worn-out nag in any of the villages aroun
d here! All the horses have been commandeered for the army, and if they haven’t, the peasants won’t let you have their own plow horses.”
“So Harold will have to steal the horses from them,” Mumr parried coolly.
“I’m no horse thief,” I exclaimed, and added hastily, “Anyway, they could regard it as looting and string us up from the nearest tree.”
“We’ll have to go in,” said the elf. “Right now information is far more important than horses. We have to listen to what they know here before we set out for Avendoom. The Firstborn could have the whole area ringed off, and this detachment might be no more than the advance guard.”
And so saying, Egrassa started walking down the hill. The rest of us followed him. Kli-Kli took hold of my sleeve just to be on the safe side, but this time I didn’t try to free myself from her tenacious fingers.
“What were they hoping to achieve?” I asked out loud. “It’s almost impossible to take a fortified city like this with three thousand soldiers.”
“Why is it impossible?” said Eel, who had heard me. “It’s quite possible. If I remember my military history and the history of the Spring War, two thousand Firstborn took Maiding at a trot when they surprised an army of men three times that size, and then they held the city until their main army arrived. These lads probably thought they could repeat the heroic feat of their ancestors.”
“But they bit off more than they could chew,” Hallas concluded pitilessly. “What were they thinking of? Trying to break through defenses like these! Even dwarves would have realized the city must have heard about the orcs moving down the east bank of the Iselina and had plenty of time to prepare! These Firstborn are real oafs! Only the Doralissians could be more stupid!”
“The Firstborn weren’t stupid,” the elf objected. “They were young, and youth tends to be overconfident.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Egrassa’s eyesight is better than yours,” Kli-Kli explained to the gnome. “Wait until we reach the battlefield, then you’ll understand.”
“Maybe we should go round the battlefield?”
