by Alexey Pehov
“Remember, you’ve only got one shot.”
“Don’t put me off, Kli-Kli!” the gnome growled. “Everybody plug your ears.”
I quickly followed his advice. Hallas raised his burning pipe to an opening in the cannon, ran back, stuck his index fingers into his ears, and watched.
A bluish gray haze rose from the barrel.
BOOM!
The cannon was shrouded in a pall of stinking bluish smoke and it jerked backward sharply. There was a whistling sound in the air, and then, at the spot where the ferry was, a column of fire and smoke hissed up into the air, mingled with water, men, horses, planks of wood …
We heard the sound: Cra-a-ash!
“Bull’s-eye!” the gnome exclaimed. “I hit them! I hit them!”
“Ye-e-es!” Kli-Kli yelled. “How about that?”
All that was left of the ferry and the people on it was rubbish floating on the water.
The count’s men on the opposite bank were also looking at the spot where their friends on the ferry had been just a few moments ago. Then several of the horsemen consulted, and the entire cavalcade turned and galloped rapidly away from the riverbank.
“If I just had another ball,” said Hallas, stroking the side of the cannon affectionately.
“Where are they off to?” asked Lamplighter.
“To look for a ford, where else?” Honeycomb said, and spat.
“There are twenty-eight of them,” said Ell, unstringing his bow.
“Right, so it’s time we were leaving.…”
“They won’t get across here,” said Miralissa, shaking her head as she gazed after the horsemen. “The Iselina is too broad and deep at this point. It’s more than forty leagues to the nearest ford.”
I started wringing out my shirt. The wet clothes clinging to my body felt cold and clammy.
“Honeycomb,” Alistan said with a glance at the smooth, settled surface of the river. “Take command.… You’re the sergeant now.”
How could he be a sergeant, with only six men of the Wild Hearts platoon left?
“Maybe they got out farther downstream?” Honeycomb asked wearily. Like everyone else, the warrior was looking at the water.
“They couldn’t have got out,” Eel said gloomily. “I leapt into the water straight after Harold. Uncle didn’t have enough time, he was right in the middle of the ferry, with the horses. And Arnkh … He was wearing chain mail, and plenty of other metal.… Even if he did jump, he sank like a stone.…”
There was a somber silence. How would we manage now without our staid, gray-haired Uncle and the man from the Borderland, with his gleaming bald patch? We couldn’t believe they were gone.
“May they dwell in the light,” Deler said in a dull voice, taking off his hat.
Kli-Kli was sniffing and rubbing his eyes, trying to hide his tears.
We left an hour later, after the Wild Hearts had held the rites for their fallen comrades and Hallas had buried the cannon. The gnome had insisted, saying that his people’s greatest secret must not fall into alien hands.
We were all feeling gloomy and depressed, which is hardly surprising. We set out, moving away from the Iselina, which would always be the Black River for us.
11
THE SOULLESS ONE
All the following week we drove our horses hard to the southeast, moving ever closer to the Borderland, the area adjoining the Border Kingdom and Zagraba.
An undulating, hilly plain extended for tens of leagues around us, crisscrossed with narrow rivers, loud-running brooks, and sparse mixed forest. There were not many villages in the area; during the last two days we had only seen one, and we gave it a wide berth, not wishing to make our presence known to the locals.
The earth in these parts was fertile and rich, and the grass reached up for the sun. But there were few people who wished to cross the Iselina and settle this part of the kingdom. Just ahead of us lay the Borderland, and beyond that the eastern forests of Zagraba and the famous Golden Forest, where the orcs lived.
Alistan kept veering more and more to the southeast, avoiding the trading routes running between Valiostr and the Border Kingdom. As I understood it, he was hoping to get us to the border between the two states in a week, and then take our group in a straight line from there to the Forests of Zagraba.
All the packhorses had been killed on the ferry, which had taken our provisions and our armor to the bottom of the river. Hallas and Deler bewailed this loss for a long time, but of course there was nothing to be done. We only had the chain mail that had been on the horses that had crossed on the first trip, and the elves had kept their armor, with the crest of their houses engraved on the chests.
Marmot and Lamplighter had been left without any kind of armor at all, apart from their jackets of stone-washed leather with metal plates sewn onto them. The provisions, spare clothing, and much else besides had been left behind forever at the bottom of the river. But we did not go hungry; there was plenty of game in these parts, and there was always meat roasting on our fire.
On the fourth day after the ill-starred crossing of the Iselina, the weather finally turned bad and the rain came lashing down. It tormented us for seven whole days, and I had to wrap myself in a cloak kindly lent to me by Egrassa.
The continuous rain poured down from the low, gray clouds, and the conditions were always damp, cold, and vile. It was especially hard getting up in the morning and lighting the fire. Our arms and legs were stiff; it felt as if we had been sleeping on snow and not on grass, with a cloak of waterproof drokr to keep off the interminable rain falling from the sky. Kli-Kli caught a cold and he coughed and sniffled all the time. Marmot treated him with herbal concoctions, which made the goblin spit and gag, saying that he’d never tasted anything so bitter in all his life.
The rain just kept pouring down.
The ground turned into a huge lake of mud, and every now and then the horses slipped and stumbled in this mush, threatening to throw their riders to the ground. The dozens of tinkling brooks and little rivers that crisscrossed the terrain all swelled up and overflowed their banks. On low-lying land there was genuine flooding, and sometimes the water was as high as our stirrups, so that we had to search for a long time to find an elevation above the plain where we could make camp for the night.
It was only after the heavy downpour stopped that the water started to recede a little, but the rain was still sprinkling down. When we approached the Borderland, Alistan gave orders for everyone to put on their chain mail. I couldn’t stand any kind of metal garments—they made me feel like I was in a coffin—they were so cramped and heavy, and they made it so uncomfortable to move. But in this particular case there were no objections raised on my side—I really didn’t want to take an arrow in the stomach from an orc who happened to have wandered far from Zagraba. When Kli-Kli saw me putting on the mail, he nodded approvingly.
“Kli-Kli, I thought you told me you didn’t need chain mail, because you’re such a small target that you’re hard to hit,” I teased him, remembering how the goblin’s armor had almost dragged me down to the bottom of the river.
He looked out at me from under his hood and said: “I may be small, but I still have to look after my health. I got it ’specially in Ranneng…”
Just when does this little weasel manage to get everything done?
Bass didn’t have any chain mail. During the last few days, he had been as dour as the sky above our heads. The rain was no help to Snoop’s state of mind, and I could understand how he must be feeling. Being dragged off to someplace you don’t even know about with a tight-lipped elf riding beside you is very definitely bad for the nerves. Ell was still following my former friend about all the time, and I couldn’t spot a single spark of sympathy in those yellow eyes.
My former friend …
Yes, I suppose that’s how it was.
There was no friendship left between us. Yes, we were still bound by a great many things, but these things were only memories, no more
than that. During the time when we had not seen each other, Bass and I had both changed a great deal. We had followed different paths through life. And I still hadn’t forgiven him for that trick he had pulled so long ago, when he ran off, leaving me and For, stealing the money that belonged to all of us.
Kli-Kli with his cold was not the only one who had a hard time because of the rain. Hallas’s pipe refused to light, and the gnome was absolutely furious with the whole wide world. Deler huddled up under his short green cloak, muttering the ancient songs of the dwarves to himself. This really drove Hallas wild, but the weather was not conducive to arguing, and the gnome just grunted irritably and made yet another unsuccessful attempt to light his pipe.
Honeycomb was now the Wild Hearts’ commander, and his mind seemed to be roaming somewhere very far away. The yellow-haired giant’s eyes had acquired a thoughtful, weary look. He had been too close a friend of Uncle’s and simply could not accept that he was gone. Alistan paid no attention to anything at all, he just looked straight ahead and drove his battle horse on toward Zagraba. Egrassa and Marmot stopped the squad often in order to ride back and check if there were any pursuers. But the horizon was empty, and when the elf and the soldier returned they shook their heads.
When the rain took a short break, everybody cheered up a bit. Even the horses seemed to start moving more quickly and easily, taking no notice of the clouds that had still not dispersed. But sunshine was no more than a distant dream.
It wasn’t long before we saw a pillar on one of the lower hills that was overgrown right to the top with tall coarse grass. It was made out of black basalt, but not even that had saved it from the ravages of time. As far as we could tell, the pillar must have been set up at least a thousand years earlier.
“The Borderland,” Milord Alistan announced, and urged his horse on again.
The Borderland was an immense territory where the land belonged to the border barons. This was where my new friend Baron Oro Gabsbarg lived—the one who had invited me to drop in to see him.
During one of the halts, when everyone was busy with his own business, I went up to Miralissa, who was sitting all alone beside the spluttering fire, and asked the question that had been bothering me for almost two weeks: “How did they manage to find us, Lady Miralissa?”
She understood immediately who I was asking about.
“I don’t know, Harold. Recently there have been many things that I don’t know. They shouldn’t have been able to find us so quickly, I put up defenses.…” She sighed. “Perhaps that woman can sense the Key.”
I immediately felt like tearing the artifact off my neck.
“Or perhaps that has nothing to do with it, and there is some other sign that they use to track us.”
There was another question I was very curious about.
“Was the thing that hit the ferry Kronk-a-Mor?”
“Yes, the ogres’ most dangerous magic, and now a human being has control of it. But Lafresa doesn’t have the experience of the Nameless One, and what she created on that day should have killed her on the spot.”
“But it didn’t kill her.”
“No. The House of Power is capable of defending its servants,” said Miralissa, looking hard at me.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” I said, shaking my head. “The House of Power is no more than an empty phrase to me. Isn’t it time to stop playing at riddles?”
“The time for answers has not yet come, Dancer in the Shadows,” said the goblin, who had crept up behind me unnoticed.
“I’m afraid that when the time does come, it will be too late, fool,” I replied rather angrily. “I’m sick of mysteries! I’m sick of my dreams!”
“You are the Dancer in the Shadows, and that is why you have these dreams.”
“Just at the moment you’re not much like a royal jester, more like a fat priest spouting sacred nonsense to fleece the worshipers of a few more coins.”
“What do you want to know, Harold?” Kli-Kli sighed, sitting down beside me.
“Everything.”
“A praiseworthy aspiration,” the goblin giggled. “But what’s impossible is impossible. It’s good that you’re no longer a child and I think you’re capable of understanding.… I’ll tell you about the Four Great Houses and the Creation. This story was told to me by my grandfather. We goblins remember things that the orcs and the elves have forgotten; we remember things that you humans never even knew.”
“Yet another goblin fairy tale?” I asked him rather churlishly.
“A fairy tale? I suppose so. But you’ve got nothing against that, have you? I thought not. Where should I begin? When the world was young … No, not like that.… When Siala did not yet even exist, when even the gods were carefree children, and no one had ever heard of ogres, only one world existed throughout the entire universe. Now it is called the World of Chaos. It was the First, the Primal World, and in it there lived —” The jester hesitated for a moment. “—people, probably. One day, one of them discovered a secret—that creatures were living in the shadows of their world, even if they were rather different. The shadows were the seeds, the prototypes of other universes. And if a man knew how to control them, that is, if he could ‘dance’ with them, he could take any shadow in Chaos and build a new world. His own world. Or at least, he could try to build it—it might not work out too well for everyone. Not everybody was capable of doing this, only one in a hundred million, or perhaps two hundred million, but in those hoary old times there were a lot more of them than now. Those who were capable of creating worlds out of shadows came to be known as Dancers in the Shadows.”
I shuddered.
“Are you trying to tell me that I can take any shadow and make something like Siala out of thin air?”
“You can deny it if you like, Harold, but you are the Dancer, and there’s no way you can get away from that. And as for the shadows, the answer is no, you can’t. I told you. A new universe can only be created from shadows of the World of Chaos. The shadows of our world are only shadows of shadows of shadows of shadows of the Primal World. They are dead and not capable of dancing.”
“But if I did end up in Chaos, then I could manage it?”
“How would I know? It’s only a fairy tale, after all, and you don’t know how to wander between different worlds…”
“And Sagot be praised for that,” I said with a sigh of relief. “Carry on then, let’s hear a few more lies.”
“Where was I, now? Ah, yes! The Dancers took the shadows, and thousands and thousands of new worlds appeared, thanks to them. But in creating new worlds, the Dancers took away a little part of their own world, and the time came when the World of Chaos died. There were no shadows left there. It was filled with the darkness and the fire of the Elemental Time. The people left it and settled in other worlds, and the way to the Primal World was forgotten. None of the Dancers in that time tried to save the World of Chaos, although they could have done it. What for? With so many new and unusual universes all around, why bother trying to restore an old piece of junk?”
“What are you thinking about, Harold?” asked Miralissa, who had kept quiet all this time.
“About the joker who created our world. So, Kli-Kli, you say that Chaos can no longer be restored?”
“No. The way to it has been forgotten. And if there was a way to get there, you need a shadow from that world in order to breathe life into it.”
I remembered the three female shadow-friends dancing on the crimson tongues of flame and asking me to save their world. I got an itchy feeling in my stomach—maybe the jester was right? Maybe there was an element of truth in his fairy tale?
“Why are you telling me all of this? I have enough trouble sleeping at night already. And just how does the House of Power fit into your story?”
“This is only the prehistory.… To be honest, Harold-Barold, I don’t really know anything about these houses.… My grandfather said there were Four Great Houses, and that they were supposedly creat
ed by the Dancer who gave life to our world. But no one knows why he created these houses. The goblin books don’t even hint at the reason.”
“But it is mentioned in the Annals of the Crown,” said Miralissa, joining in the conversation again. “In the very first pages of the chronicles there is a small paragraph about the houses. There were four of them, absolutely different and quite unlike each other: the House of Love, the House of Pain, the House of Fear, and, finally and most importantly, the House of Power. It is said that those who have visited them became immortal. No matter how many times you kill these people, sooner or later they are reborn in the House of Love. Someone who has been through the four houses can be killed forever only when he is in one of the houses. But I don’t know which one.”
“What were they created for?”
“You must understand that we know nothing for certain and can only guess. That one short paragraph in the annals, written by an unknown author, has provoked controversy among our historians for thousands of years. Entire works of scholarship have been written, based on that fragment, but how reliable are they? We only know that someone who has passed through all the Four Great Houses is no longer simply a man, an elf, or a dwarf—he is something completely different. I have no idea what they do in the Houses of Love, Pain, and Fear. The only thing we do know is that those who are in the House of Power are exceptionally powerful in magic, or rather, in its initial aspect—shamanism. And that is all I know, Harold.”
“That is all you know?” I repeated like an echo. “And you hid this knowledge from me? A stupid story about how our world was supposedly created, and assumptions based on some tiny little paragraph? Is this the greatest and most terrible secret of the goblins and the elves?”
I was amused. Go into any tavern and you’d hear a better story than that. And it would sound a lot more plausible than what Kli-Kli and Miralissa had told me.
“This knowledge is very dangerous,” the elfess rebuked me gently. “Especially for certain people—when they learn that they can become even greater than the gods and create their own world.”
