The Hero of Varay vm-2

by Rick Shelley

  "Trolls can move fast when they've a mind to, lord," Lesh said as we rode out of Nushur. "With a day and a half lead, it may be too much for us to catch 'em, horses and all."

  "I'll be satisfied if they keep heading south," I said. "If we catch them, that's a bonus." A Hero has to make sounds like that, I suppose. If we caught them, we'd have a fight on our hands, and I never looked forward to battle with anything but distaste.

  "Folks back there was sayin' there was a hundred of 'em," Lesh said. "Mayhap not. Scared folks in the night may count three for one, but they must still be a fair number to dare attack a town, even a village so small as Nushur."

  "It's not normal, lord," Harkane said. "Trolls don't attack towns less they got someone pushing hard." He glanced at our elf, who stayed out of the conversation.

  Bad as it was, Nushur's tragedy could have been worse. The food shortages would only be temporary. The trolls hadn't burned the fields, and the coming harvest would see plenty of food for the village. The livestock had been run off, but some of the animals might return, and even if they didn't, meat would be available as soon as the villagers got up the nerve to go into the forest to hunt. Game was plentiful in Precarra. And Baron Kardeen would certainly see to replacing the lost livestock. Once the villagers got to work, they could get the houses rebuilt in just a few days. Only the more substantial buildings, the manor and the inn, would take longer. But those buildings were less important. They wouldn't be needed until Nushur had a new magistrate and innkeeper.

  The dead couldn't be replaced so easily, and they certainly wouldn't be forgotten in Nushur, but life would go on. Probably. That might depend on whether or not I succeeded in my primary mission.

  The forest trolls didn't leave much of a trail, but there were signs enough. Not far south of Nushur they had stopped to butcher a couple of the cows they had driven off. They hadn't bothered with a cooking fire, but bones had been dumped over the next several miles as they were chewed clean. I couldn't get any real idea of the size of the raiding party, but enough feet had passed over the same summer-scorched grass to leave marks. Where the ground was soft, near the frequent pitiful creeks, there were occasional bare footprints visible-splayed troll feet.

  And we saw marks of a single shod horse overlying troll prints in a couple of places. It looked as if there was a rider with them, driving them along.

  Then we found the body of a troll who had apparently been killed by an arrow through the neck, though we didn't find the arrow. Trolls don't use bows normally, and I thought that an elf would be more likely to use his sword if one of his troops had to be executed. The long claymores, like the two I carried, seemed to be de rigueur among elf warriors.

  "Some elves do use bows," Lesh reminded me. "That party we raided in Fairy, you recall?"

  I nodded, but I still wasn't completely satisfied.

  Not long after we found the body, we made camp for the night, moving well off to the side of the trolls' track. We set up in a clearing next to a creek. My danger sense was quiet except for the tiny tickling of distant peril that I had felt since arriving in Nushur. Our supper was the most perishable of the food we had brought from Basil. We ate, rested for a couple of hours, then rode on slowly, taking advantage of a moon that was just past the full… two moons just past the full. A couple of hours before dawn, we stopped again to get a little sleep.

  I almost missed the second dead troll. If I hadn't moved well away from our campsite to relieve myself, I might not have spotted the body rolled off against the edge of a bramble patch. With the aid of a flashlight, I saw that this troll had died the same way as the first. There were matching puncture wounds on the chest and back, the kind of holes an arrow would make. But, once more, there was no arrow. I showed the body to the others at dawn, before we started riding again. Huge brown eyes stared sightlessly out of the porcine face. Large canine teeth protruded in front of bluish lips.

  "Takes a powerful bowman to put an arrow through chest and back like that," Lesh said, pushing the body over with his boot.

  "Or a long spike of some kind?" I made it a question.

  Lesh shrugged. "Never heard of no weapon like that."

  We mounted up and started riding, following the trail and keeping watch for any more bodies. One troll corpse was interesting trivia. Two made it a real mystery.

  By noon, the forest started to thin out. Occasional patches of rocky ground intruded on the greenery. Lesh said that we were getting close to the wild southeastern quarter of Varay, a region inhabited mostly by shepherds, grape farmers, and miners.

  "Forest trolls can't go much further," Lesh said. "They're like to trespass on other tribes soon."

  But the trail did go on, bending a trifle to the west, staying in the forest. The trail seemed to be getting fresher-meaning that we were gaining on the trolls-but none of us had enough tracking experience to know how much closer. My danger sense wasn't shouting alerts yet, though.

  Conversation was limited to the most essential information while we rode, observations about the trail, the condition of our horses, suggestions for breaks, that sort of thing. Normally, we did a fair amount of talking on the road. We spent so much time together that I knew Lesh, Harkane, and Timon better than I had ever known my own parents. But we didn't do much talking on this trip. Our elf inhibited the talk more than the trolls that were somewhere up ahead. At least our elf wasn't overly talkative either.

  We found three more dead trolls that day, each killed the same way, at widely separated spots.

  "Someone else is tracking them," I decided, and Lesh nodded. "Someone a lot closer than we are."

  "Someone from Nushur, like as not," Lesh said.

  It was possible. The Nushurites were peasants in the classical sense, people of the land, but it wasn't too farfetched to think that one of them had found the gumption, or the hatred, to track the trolls and kill whenever he could do it safely. A village hunter would be a good shot with a bow, and he might be thrifty enough to recover his arrows so he could use them again.

  Each time we found another dead troll, my danger sense got a little more active. By late afternoon, I was convinced that we were getting fairly close to the raiders.

  "We may be only a couple of hours behind them now," I told my companions. The last troll seemed that freshly dead. I didn't want to overtake the trolls at night, so I decided to make camp before dusk and stay put for the entire night. That might let us catch up with the trolls the next day, before they ran out of forest.

  "They turn one way or t'other soon," Lesh said. "Mayhap they even turn back on their own trail after whoever's killing them."

  "They might not know what's going on," I suggested, "if the bowman's content to pick off stragglers… maybe trolls who stop to take a leak."

  "I reckon even trolls got to stop for that now and again," Lesh allowed.

  We rode on a little farther. I wanted to be choosy about our campsite, find a place that would offer a little protection. An isolated copse on a slight rise with plenty of open space around it would have been perfect, offering concealment for us but letting us spot any trolls coming in while they were still far enough away for us to put a few arrows into them. Harkane and Timon had both developed into fair archers. Timon didn't have his full strength yet, but within the range of his lighter bow, he was an ace.

  We had to make do with what we could find, though. I spotted a little glen off the track we had been following. There was no clear killing zone around the nook, but it was fairly well concealed from any angle but one. There were two exits, so we couldn't be bottled up easily and there was spring water coming out of a slab of rock to gather in a small pool below it.

  While the others unloaded the horses and made camp, I climbed the rock above the spring to get a look around. I found a place in some scrub brush and turned slowly through a full circle, letting my senses reach out as far as they could. It was summer and we were in the south of Varay. There was a rich country smell to the air, a light breeze that
felt wonderful after a day of hot riding. As I turned, my feeling for danger ebbed and flowed. We were close enough to the trolls that I could follow them just on the strength of the danger signal-like a radio direction finder. They were southeast of us, which meant that they had curved off to the left again. They were close, but not too close.

  The Titan Mountains were closer than they had been too. They were a line across the south, individual peaks clearly visible in the foreground, higher ranges behind nearer lower ranges, ranked off into invisibility. The greens of mountainside trees blended away into a more distant violet. Clouds capped the higher peaks and swam in between, cuddling the mountains, obscuring them.

  There wasn't a dragon in sight. The way things had been happening lately, that was almost a surprise.

  It was beautiful country. Varay has a pastoral attraction that can only be weakly imitated by any place back in the "real" world. A lot of the buffer zone is like that.

  When I climbed back down to our camp, Lesh had one of his smokeless fires going and he was heating water for coffee and warming our food-real food; we hadn't started on the packaged camping rations yet. The horses were on a picket line with room to graze and a chance to get at drinking water. The pack frames were still on our extra horses, but their loads had been taken off and arranged on a flat rock away from the water. The elf's head was perched there as well, and he was scowling.

  "What's your gripe now?" I asked.

  "You're wasting time."

  "Not so much," I said. "And since I don't know exactly where we're going or how long it will take to get there, I can't decide if it's too much. Some things have to be done immediately."

  "You're risking everything."

  "You did your own share of stalling back at Basil. You haven't given me much incentive to hurry, not if it ends with me going to your father's lair."

  He shut his eyes then, his way of ending the conversation.

  Xayber's son hadn't said anything that I hadn't told myself at least hourly since we left Basil, following this diversion rather than jumping straight over to Thyme. Some good was coming out of it, though. The elf was showing his worry about the possibilities again. Farther along the road, I might be able to pull some advantage out of that. If I saved all of the realms of existence, I wanted to be around to enjoy them with Joy.

  We ate and settled in for the night. I took the first watch, a habit. While I was on watch, I walked around the perimeter of our camp, irregularly, not like walking a fixed post. The Varayan night was no stranger to me any longer. I knew most of the dangers it might pose. I could recognize the normal sounds, the brief, soft noises of predators and prey acting out their life-and-death rituals. And after Lesh relieved me, I got right to sleep, thinking about Joy, missing her already.

  When Timon woke me, near the end of the night, I felt troubled. My danger sense had perked way up, but the danger wasn't immediate yet.

  "Wake the others, quietly," I told Timon. "Trouble."

  Dawn was still an hour away. Lesh and the others started loading our horses, slow work in the dark. I could feel the danger drawing nearer. The easy guess was that the trolls had doubled back, but I couldn't be certain. We moved our animals back near the rock outcropping when they were ready, and where they would be as safe as possible.

  "Trolls," our elf said in a loud stage whisper. "All around, moving in like soldiers. And something else, someone else." Eyes of Fairy: the dark was no handicap for him.

  "One of your kin?" I asked.

  "I think not." He was silent for a moment. "They are close."

  I could tell that too. My danger sense was screaming. One of the things it was screaming was that if there was an elf with the trolls, Xayber's son might try to attract him, hoping to win an easier trip back home. It might all come down to a matter of how badly he wanted to be reunited with his body.

  I drew Dragon's Death and held it out toward the edge of camp. The sword's battle song came to my lips as always, starting softly and building. The first wave of trolls came in a solid line. As soon as all four of us were engaged fighting that bunch, more came at us from behind.

  It wasn't the sort of mad melee that my previous encounters with trolls had been. These moved as if they had someone ordering the battle, as if they had drilled extensively, and that was totally alien to the troll style. They might not have an elf behind them, but there had been somebody, sometime.

  The first attacks ended. Survivors pulled back, but my danger sense got more frantic instead of less.

  "They were just checking our strength," I said, just loud enough for my companions to hear. "The next attack will be the real thing, more of them." And the first engagement had taxed us. I looked to the sky. Dawn was closer, but there wouldn't be enough light for accurate bow work for another twenty minutes or more, and the trolls weren't about to give us that much time.

  The second assault started.

  Numbers? It's hard to count in the middle of a fight, even if you've got light. I started to think that the estimate of one hundred we'd heard in Nushur couldn't be far wrong. In any case, there were too many trolls, even for a Hero, his elf swords, and three valiant companions. We could slow them down, make their victory expensive, but there didn't seem to be any way to beat them.

  Then my danger sense hit me with an extra twist, causing me to duck to the side just in time to miss an arrow flying through the space my head had occupied just microseconds before.

  12 – The Titans

  The itch I felt in the middle of my back had nothing to do with the extra danger sense I inherited with the title of Hero of Varay. This was something much more primitive, a feeling that somebody had me lined up in his sights. I had chain mail on, but that won't necessarily turn an arrow. I had more experience than I wanted in the limitations of chain mail. The itch translated itself into frantic movement as I hopped around as much as the setting and the trolls permitted. Arrows in the dark didn't sound like an archer from Nushur. There was no one in Nushur who had the eyesight of an elf.

  I saw a second arrow go past me and pierce the forehead of a troll. There may have been more arrows. It wasn't light enough that I could expect to see them but by chance or extremely close proximity. I shouted a warning to my companions. My frantic gyrations had separated me from them. An elf sword demands a lot of room, and I had moved away from Lesh and the others at the beginning of the fight, long before I felt the need to take extra evasive actions. My sword song got louder and more intricate and I started to clear a larger circle around me.

  The trolls finally noticed that there was an archer involved in the fight. It seemed that each arrow found one of them, but I was slow to pick up on that clue. At first, I might have dismissed it as the inevitable consequence of there being so many more of the trolls than there were of us. But the earlier trolls, along the road… in the heat of battle, they slipped my mind far too long.

  A little more light. I could see the attacking trolls and the growing stacks of their dead. I didn't have to count on the instinctive awareness of where everyone was. My people were all on their feet, still fighting. Timon and Harkane were back to back, covering each other, moving as a unit. Lesh was off to the side, jabbing with a short spear held in his left hand and whirling a battle-ax in his right.

  I finally quit my mad gyrations when it sank in that the archer was aiming at trolls and not at me. I didn't want to make it any harder for him than I had to. I would feel foolish dying by mistake when there were so many ways to die intentionally-by someone else's intention.

  Dragon's Death seemed almost weightless in combat, eager to move in answer to my will. I pulled more volume from the battle song as the fight went on, apparently drawing energy from the tune. The blade glowed brightly from the blood that washed it, but the sword's glow lessened as the light of dawn increased. Drawing the second sword, the blade taken from the son of Xayber, was purely unconscious. I shifted my grip on Dragon's Death to hold it in my right hand alone, and reached over my shoulder to
draw the second weapon with my left hand. Two sword songs intertwined themselves-and I'll never know how my throat managed both at the same time. I was whistling a duet by myself, even though the elf head was also whistling the song of his sword off to the side.

  I moved into the heaviest concentration of trolls, slicing left and right, propelling myself forward with the force of the swings. I've read accounts where the hero went through a wild melee and was then able to describe his every move in technical fencing jargon. Bull. At a time like that all you can do is make every move you can think of to keep your head on your shoulders. If you're competent with your weapons, the moves come faster than you can think. Reflex and instinct, carefully honed by training and practice, do the job. There's little chance of remembering every sequence afterward.

  More light made better targets. When I could spare the odd nanosecond, I tried to spot the archer who was helping us. But I didn't have any luck until the attack ended. One troll screamed a series of guttural sounds and the whole troop, those who were still able to, broke off and ran, chased by several more quick arrows. I turned and saw the archer on the next rise.

  Annick.

  We stared at each other, maybe sixty yards apart, for a frozen time. Before I recovered enough from the surprise to say anything, she had mounted her horse and ridden off out of sight behind the rise. I caught one more glimpse of her through the trees and she was gone.

  "That was Annick," Lesh said-as if I might have failed to recognize her.

  "Either her hunting tastes have changed or elves are out of season," I said, almost gasping the words. I was still short of breath from the fight.

  So were the others. A quick inspection showed that Harkane was the only one with anything worse than scratches. He had a long gash along his right forearm, a cut that ran almost from wrist to elbow. Along the center of the slice, the wound looked dangerously deep, but the bleeding was seepage, not the gushing that would have indicated a severed artery. It was serious, but not as bad as it might have been.