Shadow Prowler

by Alexey Pehov

  “You were snuffling.”

  “Oh no I wasn’t!” the jester protested, and sat down beside me on a step.

  “Oh yes you were.”

  “Oh no I wasn’t! And anyway, what do you mean by arguing with the king’s jester?” Kli-Kli asked resentfully, and to confirm what he had just said he put on the green jester’s cap with little bells that he had been holding in his hand.

  “I’m not arguing,” I said with a shrug.

  “Would you like a carrot?” the goblin asked amicably, producing one from behind his back.

  The carrot was almost half as big as Kli-Kli himself. A queen of carrots. A massive great carrot.

  “No, thank you.”

  “You don’t want any? All right then. I can only ask, and there’ll be more left for me, anyway!”

  The jester didn’t try to insist, he just bit a good-sized piece off the orange vegetable and started crunching on it, squinting contentedly at the sun.

  “Vegetables are good for you, Harold,” the jester declared with his mouth full. “You can’t live on just meat.”

  “Are you and I about to have a gastronomical debate?” I asked, arching one eyebrow.

  We just sat there like that, me saying nothing and watching the gnomes at work, Kli-Kli dining and sometimes twitching his little feet, evidently trying to perform some dance that only he knew. I must say that it looked very amusing.

  “I have two pieces of news, good and bad. Which one shall I start with?” Kli-Kli asked when there was exactly half of the oversized carrot left.

  “The good news, I suppose,” I muttered lazily.

  It was hot, but the weather was marvelous, and I was enjoying basking in the sun.

  “The good news is this,” said the goblin, shaking the tip of his cap so that the bells jingled joyfully. “You’re going tomorrow morning.” Jingle-jingle.

  “Now let’s have the bad news.”

  “The bad news is this.” The jester sighed sadly and the bells tinkled mournfully. “Unfortunately, I’m staying in the palace and not going with you.”

  “Hmm . . . Your sense of values is all topsy-turvy, jester,” I hemmed. “It’s the other way round for me. The good news is bad and the bad news is good.”

  “Hah,” Kli-Kli sniffed resentfully. “You’ll be sorry yet that I didn’t go with you!”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Who’s going to protect you on the way?” he asked with a perfectly serious expression on his face.

  “I think I’ll get by all right,” I replied in the same tone of voice. “What are the Wild Hearts and the Rat for?”

  “By the way, about the Wild Hearts,” Kli-Kli said, and sank his sharp teeth into the unfortunate carrot again. “Have you had a chance to get to know them yet?”

  “No. Why, have you?”

  “I should say so! They’ve been here for about a week,” the jester answered indignantly.

  But of course. How dare I cast doubt on his ability to make new acquaintances.

  “I’ll introduce them to you, only from here, at a distance, if you have no objection.”

  “Have you managed to offend them already?” The only possible reason for Kli-Kli’s reluctance to approach the soldiers was that the little parasite had played some kind of nasty trick on the Wild Hearts.

  “Why do you assume I’ve offended them?” the jester asked sulkily, looking at me with his bright blue eyes full of reproach. “All I did was pour a bucket of water into each of their beds, and they got upset about it.”

  “I expect they did!” I chuckled.

  “Well then. You see those ones playing dice? The big one with the yellow hair is Honeycomb. The one beside him with the beard is Uncle. The skinny, bald one. He’s the leader of this glum group. And that one over there, the plump one, is called Tomcat. Miaow!” said Kli-Kli as loud as he could, and stuck out his tongue.

  “I see,” I said, examining the threesome playing dice.

  Honeycomb was a broad-shouldered hulk two yards tall with powerful, sinewy hands, a head that appeared to have no neck but grew straight out of his shoulders, and hair the color of lime-blossom honey. His rather simple features identified him as a country boy. You can tell them from the city types straightaway.

  “Huppah!” laughed Uncle as he tossed the dice once again and leaned down over them with his comrades.

  Uncle was more than fifty years old, with a few sparse gray hairs that had somehow survived on his bald head, and a thick gray beard. Compared with Honeycomb he didn’t look very tall, but he and the giant Honeycomb and the other Wild Hearts all had one thing in common: the experience of men who serve on the walls of the Lonely Giant on the edge of the Desolate Lands.

  “I swear on a h’san’kor,” Tomcat growled, “but your luck’s in today, Uncle! I pass.”

  The fat, round-faced Wild Heart’s behavior and harsh voice were nothing at all like a cat’s. The only thing that did lend him any resemblance to the animal was his mustache, which looked a bit like a cat’s whiskers.

  “Don’t play if you don’t want to,” his leader laughed.

  Tomcat waved his hand at his partners and lay down on the grass in front of the fountain, beside the sleeping soldier.

  “I suppose that one must be called Sleepy or Snorer?” I asked ironically.

  “The one beside Tomcat?” the jester asked. “No, they call him Loudmouth.”

  “Why?”

  “How should I know?” asked Kli-Kli, pursing his lips. “They won’t talk to me. And all I did was leave a dead rat in their room!”

  “Don’t I recall that just recently you mentioned water in their beds? You didn’t say anything about rats.”

  “Well, the rat was a little bit earlier . . . ,” said the jester, embarrassed.

  “Never mind, let’s forget it,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me about that pair over there?” I nodded, drawing the goblin’s attention to two soldiers sitting apart from the others and sipping wine from a bottle.

  “The rotten swine,” Kli-Kli muttered, ignoring my question. “That’s my wine!”

  “Then why have they got it?”

  “A trophy of war,” the goblin muttered.

  “What?” I asked, surprised by his answer.

  “I stuck a nail in that swine’s boot for a joke. But they got angry about it—”

  “Naturally, I would have got angry, too, and torn your green head off.”

  “They tried to do that, too.” The goblin bit off another piece of carrot. “But all they could get was the bottle. Eh, Harold! If you only know how much effort it cost me to steal it from the king’s wine cellar!”

  “You’re the king’s jester. Couldn’t you have just taken it?”

  “Pah! How boring you are!” Kli-Kli shook his head in disappointment, setting his little bells jingling in lively fashion. “I can take it, but it’s much more interesting to steal it.”

  I didn’t try to argue with him.

  “An amusing pair, don’t you think?” he asked, and showed his tongue to the soldier who was holding the bottle.

  Amusing? That was putting it mildly! They were amazing! I never thought I would ever see a gnome peacefully sipping a bottle of highly expensive wine with his eternal enemy—a dwarf. The powerfully built dwarf, who could bend horseshoes with his bare hands, and his smaller, narrow-shouldered cousin with a beard, obviously had no intention of going for each other’s throats.

  It looked to me as if the lads had already taken a drop too much. Which was strange—one bottle wasn’t usually enough for that with these races.

  “Kli-Kli, are you sure that the trophy of war is only one bottle?” I asked the miserable goblin slyly.

  “Of course it’s only one,” the jester said, and spat. “They swiped a whole crate from me, but that’s the last bottle.”

  That certainly seemed closer to the truth. Even a gnome and a dwarf could easily get tipsy on a crate of wine.

  “The ginger one’s called Deler,” Kli-Kli sai
d with another sigh. “In the language of the dwarves that means ‘fire.’ And his friend who stepped on the nail goes by the name of Hallas. In their language that means ‘lucky.’ That one there,” said Kli-Kli, pointing to a man beside a bed of roses, who was practicing with two swords, “is called Eel. Never says a word, and he simply takes no notice of my jokes. It’s impossible to get him stirred up.”

  Kli-Kli simply couldn’t bear that kind of insult to his profession. My attention was entirely absorbed by the Wild Heart’s practiced, precise movements. They were entrancing: in the hands of the Garrakan—he was definitely a native of Garrak, you can always tell them by their swarthy skin and blue-black hair—the “brother” and the “sister” swords.

  Eel flowed from one position into another, his stance changing every second, the blades slicing through the air with terrifying speed, the sister stabbing so rapidly that my gaze could only catch a blurred gleam of silver lightning. A stroke, another stroke, a jab, a sharp move to the left, the brother descends onto the head of an invisible opponent, a swing around his axis and Eel’s arm stretches out to an unnatural length, extended by the sister, to reach a new enemy’s stomach. The Wild Heart takes a step backward, covering himself with the brother against an imaginary slashing blow from the right and then, out of defense, he suddenly strikes with both blades at once. The sister pierces the head of an imaginary opponent in a predatory thrust and the brother strikes a terrible blow lower down, below the shield.

  “Beautiful!” the jester said with an admiring whistle.

  I entirely agreed with him. Despite the heat of the scorching sun, Eel continued with his training and performed it astonishingly well. He was well muscled and agile, with a red, aristocratic face and a slim beard.

  “Harold, take a look at that individual over there, the funny one.”

  I couldn’t see anything funny about the soldier the jester pointed to. He looked a bit like Tomcat, but he wasn’t so well fed. An entirely unremarkable face with thin lips and arched eyebrows, pale blue eyes, and a lazy glance that loitered for a moment on me and Kli-Kli.

  “So what do you find funny about him?” I asked the jester.

  “Not the man, you blockhead!” the jester exclaimed. “By the way, his name’s Marmot. I meant the animal on his shoulder.”

  It was only then I looked closer at what I had taken for a tasteless decoration of gray fur on the soldier’s shoulder. It was a small, furry animal, dozing quietly.

  “What is it?” I asked, giving the jester a curious glance.

  “A ling. From the Desolate Lands. It’s tame. I tried to feed it some carrot a couple of times. It actually scratched me,” the goblin said.

  “You were unlucky,” I sympathized.

  “I was really lucky,” Kli-Kli disagreed. “If Marmot had caught me when I was feeding his little animal rotten carrots, he wouldn’t have given me a pat on the head. I swear he would have flattened me!”

  At this point I couldn’t restrain myself any longer and burst into laughter.

  “Now I understand why you’ve decided not to go with me, Kli-Kli! Almost everyone who’s traveling has a grudge against you. They’d throw you into the first ditch at the edge of the road!”

  “Nothing of the sort,” the goblin protested with a sniff. “It’s Artsivus and Alistan. They don’t want to let me go.”

  Kli-Kli shook his fist at the sky in annoyance.

  “Hey, Marmot, don’t happen to feel like going to the kitchen, do you?” the Wild Heart who hadn’t spoken so far asked his friend stretched out on the grass.

  Judging from the chain mail and the lack of hair on his head, the soldier was a native of the Border Kingdom. Only they would be prepared to burden themselves with metal even in this blazing sun. The man from the Borderland had just stopped sharpening his sword, and now he was looking for something to do.

  “What for? What is there I haven’t seen in the kitchen?” Marmot asked in a lazy voice.

  “You can feed Invincible; he’ll die from hunger soon. He doesn’t do anything but sleep and sleep.”

  “He sleeps because it’s hot, but let’s go to the kitchen anyway, I know what you’re after.”

  “We all know that,” Tomcat put in, getting up off the grass. “The cooks are really tasty!”

  Honeycomb and Uncle started laughing merrily and the Wild Heart who had suggested the walk joined in the laughter.

  “Well, are we going then?” asked the Borderman.

  “That’s Arnkh,” said Kli-Kli, introducing the man to me. “It means ‘scar’ in orcish.”

  “He doesn’t look like an orc.”

  “He’s a man, blockhead! It’s just a nickname.”

  There was the thin white line of a scar running across Arnkh’s forehead.

  “Listen, Kli-Kli,” I said impatiently. “The lieutenant brought me here and told me to wait until someone came to get me. How long do I have to wait? I’m about ready to melt in this heat.”

  “I came to get you,” the jester giggled.

  “Then what are we waiting for?”

  “Hang on, Harold, what’s the hurry? The king’s lecturing his subjects, giving them what for, and they’re all silent, pale, and sweaty. Why would you want to be there? Look over that way; I still haven’t told you about the last Wild Heart.”

  The last of the ten Wild Hearts was sitting under a spreading apple tree, clutching a massive bidenhander with both hands. It looked to me as if the two-handed sword was too heavy for this short and apparently not very strong man. There was a golden oak leaf on the hefty black handle of the sword.

  “Is he a master of the long sword?” I asked the goblin in disbelief.

  “You can see the handle, can’t you? Of course he’s a master, unless he stole that lump of metal from someone.”

  “But that thing weighs more than he does!”

  “No it doesn’t,” the goblin objected. “But it is heavy, that’s true. I checked that myself.”

  “Don’t tell me you tried to pinch the lad’s sword!”

  “Naah, I just wanted to know how much it weighs. There was a real crash when I couldn’t hold it any longer and dropped it on the dwarf’s foot.”

  I didn’t answer; I was busy studying the man. He wore a funny hat that looked like one of the cathedral bells.

  “He’s called Mumr. But everyone calls him Lamplighter. Oh no!”

  Kli-Kli’s final phrase was not addressed to me. Lamplighter had taken out a little reed pipe, set down the bidenhander, and was about to play.

  “Anything but that!” the goblin wailed.

  Mumr blew, and the pipe gave out an excruciating, hoarse screech. The jester howled and pressed his hands to his ears. If there had been any dogs nearby, they would certainly have started howling, or died in torment.

  “I’m going to throw this at him!” Kli-Kli said, grinding his teeth and shaking the stub of the carrot in his hand.

  “Hey, Uncle!” Deler called to the leader of the Wild Hearts. “Tell Mumr to shut up!”

  “That’s right!” Hallas agreed, raising the bottle to his mouth.

  “Let me get some sleep, will you?” Loudmouth muttered sleepily, turning over onto his other side.

  Without interrupting his game of dice, Uncle found a small stone beside him and flung it at Lamplighter. In order to dodge the flying missile, Lamplighter had to break off tormenting his poor whistle.

  “You ignoramuses,” he said, annoyed. “You don’t know a thing about music!”

  “And that’s what it’s been like all week, Harold,” Kli-Kli said, taking a deep breath.

  “And, of course, you know about Miralissa,” he said. “It doesn’t take a wizard to see that your interest has been awakened. La-la, she is something, isn’t she?”

  “Jester, you must be hallucinating. I think these Wild Hearts have bopped you one time too many.”

  I hadn’t noticed Kli-Kli reaching into my unguarded bag. Now he was holding one of the little magical bottles in his hand,
one that contained a dark cherry colored liquid with gold sparks floating in it.

  “Put it back,” I roared at the goblin, but it was too late.

  Kli-Kli nimbly dodged my outstretched arms, dashed across to the gnomes, who had finally loaded the cannon, and flung my magical purchase. The bottle tinkled as it broke against the barrel of the cannon. There was a bright crimson flash, and the weapon disappeared.

  What in the name of the Nameless One had possessed me to buy a transport spell from Honchel? (Does carrying a mountain of things seem too much like hard work? Nothing could be simpler! Break one little bottle against your load, and it simply disappears. Break another, and it appears again.) I’d been keeping that magic for Hrad Spein. Just in case I stumbled across any old heaps of diamonds or emeralds. Farewell, treasures of the dead! I’ve inherited the gnomes’ cannon instead.

  A shocked silence hung over the garden. Even Eel stopped twirling his swords. But the silence didn’t last for long. It was shattered by the insane howling of the furious gnomes. Kli-Kli didn’t bother to wait for their retribution; he came dashing back to me at full tilt, bells jingling.

  “Harold, stop dawdling!” Kli-Kli exclaimed. “Follow me, I’ll take you to the king.”

  And so saying, the goblin disappeared through a door. I was seething with fury, but there was nothing I could do except follow the little blackguard.

  18

  THE COUNCIL

  I could glimpse the jester’s figure up ahead of me, so I wasn’t going to get lost in the immense labyrinth of corridors and stairways. But I had to hurry to keep up with Kli-Kli in his gray and blue leotard. Well-trained servants in livery opened the doors for the goblin to admit him, and therefore me, into the inner sanctum of the royal palace.

  My desire to tear the little green mischief-maker’s head off was gradually fading, but my new friend decided not to tempt fate and he kept his distance from me. And basically he was right. The joker certainly deserved a good thump.

  I swerved round a corner, trying to catch up with the goblin, and came nose-to-nose with a bevy of court matrons taking their aging little daughters for a stroll. Without even stopping, the jester bowed with an irreproachable technique worthy to be included in all the textbooks on etiquette, and skipped straight through this unexpected barrier of wide skirts.