Shadow Prowler

by Alexey Pehov

  “As you wish,” Balshin said with a polite smile. “Inform him, but only after the quarantine has been lifted, not before. You have nothing to fear. Our magic will protect you.”

  It seemed to me that the magician’s advice wasn’t worth a spit from the top of the cathedral dome. And the enchantress’s cheek had twitched nervously when Miralissa mentioned the Order.

  “What will happen if we refuse to obey you?” Ell asked calmly.

  “We shall be obliged to use force,” Balshin said regretfully.

  “Calm down, k’lissang,” Miralissa said to Ell. “We shall not spill blood and we shall comply.”

  “I knew that you would heed the voice of reason,” the magician said with a polite bow.

  “Where will you accommodate us?” asked Miralissa. She snapped the small stick in half with a casual gesture and threw it away.

  The magicians took no notice of the elfess’s gesture. What did it matter what she might have broken and thrown away? Balshin and Klena were far too delighted that the haughty elfess had not pulled out her s’kash to pay any attention to such trifles.

  “Oh, you need have no concern, Tresh Miralissa! You will be in the chasseurs’ camp, it is very—”

  Balshin never finished telling us about the camp, because there were sudden howls of horror from the area of the banners. And—why deny it?—I was terrified at first, too. Until that day I’d never seen a human hand strolling down the road all on its own.

  Oh yes, at first glance it was a straightforward human hand, only a bit larger. About a hundred times larger. Three riders and their horses could have fitted on its palm.

  The monster shuffled its fingers in lively style as it rambled along from the direction of the village straight toward the howling bowmen. As it approached it panted sadly, and the red eyes, set on the joints of each finger, peered disapprovingly at the bellowing men.

  Everyone was howling and yelling, the voices of the bowmen supported by a ragged chorus of pikemen. The shouts were growing louder, more and more panic-stricken.

  The monster stopped, supported itself on its thumb and little finger, and raised its other three fingers skyward to reveal its palm, a large area of which was occupied by an immense mouth with sparse, needle-sharp teeth. The hand clearly felt it had done enough panting already, so, for the sake of a little variety, it roared.

  And that was when everyone started to run. A couple of the very bravest bowmen fired their arrows at the monster, but they got stuck in its finger-legs without hurting the hand at all.

  “Get out of here! Run for it! Save us! Into the forest!” Kli-Kli’s piercing shouts were taken up by the chasseurs dashing along the road.

  “Into the forest! Into the forest! Run for it! Run for it!”

  The soldiers in white and crimson disappeared as if the wind had swept them away, leaving behind only the most stupid and those who hadn’t found a place to hide yet.

  The magicians joined in the fray, shooting fiery beams of light at the hand.

  “Come on! Our group has already taken off!” Kli-Kli dug his heels into Featherlight’s sides and dashed off after the rapidly receding Wild Hearts.

  I followed him, leaving behind the elves and the battle between the magicians, the bravest of the chasseurs, and the monstrous hand.

  There was a sudden shrill gust of wind, and I looked back. Miralissa and Ell were galloping right behind me, leaning down low over the necks of their horses.

  The monster hand went flying sideways, crushing a few birch trees. The magicians were weaving their hands about constantly, and it was clear that they had the advantage. Little Bee’s hooves drummed on the wooden bridge and I caught a brief glimpse of the stream before it flew back and away at tremendous speed. We had broken out. Nobody had even tried to stop us. They were all too busy trying to save their own lives.

  “We have to keep moving,” Loudmouth gasped. “If they come after us . . .”

  Our group had stopped on the summit of the hill from which we had first seen the village of Vishki burning. Nothing had changed—the black smoke was still staining the sky, showing no sign of abating.

  “Calm down,” said Arnkh, taking off his helmet and running one hand over his sweating bald patch. “Didn’t you hear them say that the village is under . . . what’s it called?”

  “Quarantine,” Kli-Kli prompted.

  “That’s it! Quarantine! They won’t stick their noses out for another three months! You’ve no need to worry about any pursuit.”

  “Well, then they’ll report to Ranneng so that we can be intercepted,” Loudmouth persisted.

  “Damn it, you stupid man! I said quarantine! They won’t send out a messenger or even a lousy pigeon! Isn’t that right, Lady Miralissa?” asked Arnkh, turning to the elfess to confirm that he was right.

  “If there really was copper plague in the village,” she said thoughtfully, keeping her eyes fixed on the sooty smoke rising over the forest.

  “But what was it, if not the plague?” asked Marmot, genuinely surprised.

  “It could be anything!” Hallas declared. “You can expect anything at all from that Order of theirs. You human beings look the other way and meanwhile the magicians get up to all sorts of dirty business behind your backs. Well, who says I’m wrong?”

  The gnome gazed round the group sternly, searching for someone to disagree with his opinion. There were no fools who wanted to get into a fight.

  Hallas was right. The Order was always playing with fire. I immediately recalled my dream about the blizzard that had raged in Avendoom after the unsuccessful attempt to destroy the Nameless One with the help of the Horn. That had earned us the Forbidden Territory. And no one knew about the part played in all of that by the Order that everyone loved so much. If we didn’t know about one of the magicians’ little slips, there might be another one we didn’t know about. And the other one might be far more serious. Even if there was plague there, they probably started it themselves. The learned have cast their spell, for their own profit, and too bad for everybody else.

  Hallas bent his arm in a gesture known to the whole world since ancient times. The gnome was simply bursting with hate for the Order. I wondered why.

  “Forgive me, Lady Miralissa, but this is a sore point with me! The magicians themselves set up the whole thing. I don’t know what happened there, but there was some kind of mess-up, and then they sent a dozen bolts of lightning and a hundred fireballs shooting down from the sky to cover their tracks. Flattened the entire village!”

  “How do you know they flattened it? Did you see?” Honeycomb boomed.

  “A gnome doesn’t need to see. We work with fire from when we’re kids, and you only get smoke like that if you burn a heap of earth’s bones in the furnaces. That’s magical fire! I can smell it. That’s why they brought the chasseurs here, so they could detain everybody until the magicians finish what they’re doing!”

  “All right,” said Loudmouth, interrupting Hallas’s accusations. “Whether there was plague there or something else, we’ll never know now, but in any case, we have to get as far away as possible. We can’t be too careful.”

  “But did you see that beast they’d lured in?” Deler asked thoughtfully. “Maybe there are as many hands like that in the village as there are gnomes in the mountain caves!”

  “That beast wasn’t theirs; Tresh Miralissa created it!” said Kli-Kli. “By the way, milady, how did you know that we’d need a hand like that?”

  “I did not know, inestimable Kli-Kli.” The elfess’s black lips stretched into a venomous smile. “I actually prepared a sleeping spell. They should all have fallen asleep.”

  “But then where did that beast come from, Tresh Miralissa?” asked Ell, genuinely surprised.

  “Ask our green companion that, my faithful k’lissang. He was the one who drew beside my spell! The credit for the appearance of such a creature must go entirely to Kli-Kli.”

  “How was I to know?” the goblin said with a guilty sniff.
“I didn’t think you’d written anything special there.”

  “You ought to be isolated from society, Kli-Kli.” Deler chuckled good-naturedly.

  “Why, you ought to thank me!” the goblin declared indignantly. “If not for that hand, who knows how the whole business would have turned out? I told you my grandfather was a shaman. It’s hereditary!”

  “Playing rotten tricks?” asked Marmot. “If you’re a shaman, I’m the leader of the Doralissians!”

  “I tell you, I have the blood of the finest goblin shamans running in my veins, including the great Tre-Tre! He’s an ancestor of mine through my mother’s grandmother.”

  “That’s enough. Loudmouth is right. We need to get as far away as possible,” said Miralissa, interrupting Kli-Kli.

  “Shall we try the forest?” Honeycomb suggested.

  “Go round the village? I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” Uncle said. “The chasseurs could have traps under every tree, and if we run into them again, they won’t let us go so easily.”

  “Do you suggest going back?” asked the elfess, clearly not pleased with this idea. “The ride to the highway is a lot farther than to Ranneng. We would lose a huge amount of time.”

  “There is another road,” said Honeycomb. Like me, he had already removed his chain mail, and now he started drawing a simple map in the sand. “This is the highway.” A straight line ran across the sand, looping in its middle like a horseshoe and then straightening out again. “This is Ranneng.”

  The line ran straight into the blob that represented the city. From the point at which the highway looped, another line ran down and to the right. It crept farther and farther away from the highway until at one point it started running parallel with it, and then converged with the highway again, meeting it right beside the city.

  “There’s an abandoned track here. Or at least, there used to be.”

  “You suggest that we ought to take it?”

  “Yes, Lady Miralissa. At least it offers us a way out of our situation. The road through Vishki is closed and it is too far to go back.”

  “It is decided then,” the elfess agreed. “We will go back to the place where the track starts and await the return of Milord Alistan, otherwise he will ride on and fall into the hands of the magicians.”

  “Won’t we lose more time, making our way over the hills?” Lamplighter asked doubtfully.

  “No,” said Honeycomb with a shake of his head. “We’ll leave the hills on our left. The area is known as Hargan’s Wasteland. Thin forest, ravines, clumps of heather, and not a single person for twenty leagues in all directions. A desolate area. If our enemies are trying to find us, they’ll have to look very hard.”

  “Then what are we waiting for?” Loudmouth growled, putting one foot in a stirrup.

  It was already late evening; the July sky was gradually turning paler and the sun had almost set. We set out along the road back with the twilight treading on our heels. All of us were in a subdued mood. The men didn’t speak. Hallas puffed on his pipe and swore quietly to himself and Kli-Kli tied knots in a piece of string, threatening to show us all the famous shamanism of the goblins.

  24

  HARGAN’S WASTELAND

  It took us a long time to find that almost invisible track in the total darkness. Several times Honeycomb stopped the group, dismounted, and walked along the wall of bushes, thoughtfully scratching the back of his head. Then he climbed back into the saddle and we galloped on, moving farther and farther away from the hills and the unfortunate village of Vishki. The point came when we had to light torches—the moonlight was simply not enough—and Loudmouth immediately started grumbling that now even a blind man could see us.

  When Honeycomb dismounted for the tenth time, even the imperturbable Marmot started groaning:

  “So where is this track of yours? How long can we carry on prowling about in the dark? Let’s put it off until tomorrow! We’re all tired, and the ling needs to be fed.”

  “Just wait a bit with that mouse of yours,” the huge man retorted. “It’s somewhere near here. I think we need to turn round and ride back a bit.”

  “You said that half an hour ago,” muttered Hallas.

  “Let’s look for it in the morning,” said Kli-Kli, supporting Marmot.

  The goblin had been tying knots in his string almost without a break. Now he had hundreds of them, and he claimed that very soon they would produce some terrible goblin magic.

  No one took any notice of his blather, except for Deler, who asked to be warned when everything was ready so that he could hide as far away as possible from the place where the failed shaman planned to demonstrate his abilities.

  “Are you sure this track is here? Have you walked along it yourself?” Eel asked.

  “No. I was still a little kid then. My grandfather showed me it. The shepherds used it to take their sheep out to graze all summer in the wasteland. The grass there was really something.”

  “That’s hardly surprising,” Kli-Kli commented dryly.

  “Do you know something about this place?” Miralissa asked.

  “I’ll tell you all an interesting story at the halt, if you don’t fall asleep.”

  “I remember!” Honeycomb suddenly howled and slapped himself on the forehead. “I remember! It began beside two trees that leaned toward each other like a pair of drunks!”

  “There was something like that,” said Ell, brushing aside a lock of hair that had fallen over his eyes. “About fifty yards back.”

  Everyone heaved a sigh of relief, realizing that the halt they had been anticipating for so long would soon arrive. I myself was barely able to stay in the saddle and my dearest wish was to get down from Little Bee.

  “That’s it! There they are, the darlings!” Honeycomb exclaimed when the silhouettes of two aspens emerged from the darkness, looming up in isolation above the bushes. “The track starts right between them.”

  “Right then, a halt.” Hallas climbed gratefully out of his saddle and I followed his example. “Uncle! Are we going to eat anything today or do we bed down on an empty stomach?”

  “You never think of anything but filling your belly, longbeard.” Deler laughed.

  Do I need to tell you what the gnome said to that? Everything had come full circle.

  “Someone promised to tell us a story,” said Arnkh some time later, when we were all sitting round the campfire with hare stew in our bellies.

  “If you wish,” said Kli-Kli, setting aside his bundle of knotted strings. “What would you like to hear?”

  “You mean you know a lot of stories?”

  “I am the king’s jester, after all,” the goblin said, offended. “I have to know them for my job.”

  “You promised to tell us about Hargan’s Wasteland, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Ah-ah . . . ,” Kli-Kli drawled. “Have none of you ever heard about Hargan’s Brigade?”

  Some shook their heads, some shrugged indifferently. The name didn’t mean anything to anyone.

  “You people have such short memories.” The goblin sighed. “You know, it all happened only a little less than five hundred years ago.”

  “Come off it,” Loudmouth laughed. “That’s time enough to forget anything at all.”

  “But not the Dog Swallows Brigade to which Avendoom probably owes its very survival to this day.”

  “Dog Swallows?” Uncle echoed with a frown. “I don’t recall any such unit. At least, it doesn’t exist in Valiostr . . .”

  “It doesn’t now, and it never will again,” Kli-Kli said in a sad voice. “It all happened during the Spring War. The orcs came pouring out of the Forests of Zagraba in an endless flood, taking everyone by surprise. Tens of thousands of them descended on the Border Kingdom, but the main thrust of the blow was directed at Valiostr—”

  “You don’t need to tell us that,” said Arnkh, interrupting the goblin.

  “Who’s telling this story, you or me?” Kli-Kli asked furiously. “If you’re
so smart, you do the talking, and I’ll go to bed! But if you can’t, keep quiet!”

  Arnkh raised both hands in a gesture of submission.

  “Grok set his army on the march and gave battle on the banks of the Iselina. For six days the Firstborn tried to force the river, but the men held firm. On the seventh day, at the cost of enormous losses, the orcs broke through Grok’s defenses in four places and threw back the army of men, forcing it to retreat to the north. The whole of south Valiostr was lost. There was no news from Shamar, and Grok thought that the Borderland had already been annihilated.”

  “Ha! The Borderland doesn’t surrender that easily! We withstood that siege!” said Arnkh, but fell silent when he caught Kli-Kli’s eye.

  “Isilia, as usual, did not get involved in the war, hoping that the cup of woe would pass it by. It was pointless to ask for help from Miranueh—your state had never lived at peace with that country. It made absolutely no sense to say anything to the dark elves after the Long Winter came, following the grotesque death of their prince; none of them had even been seen in Valiostr for many years. . . . The kingdom was left to face the enemy alone. Only destiny and the army, gentlemen, could halt the flood of orcs.”

  “The Firstborn had never attacked in such numbers before. That was a terrible time,” Uncle said with a nod.

  “The humans despised the other races too much. How could they accept half animals as their allies? And then this happened. No one had anticipated the coming of the orcs, and they paid a heavy price for their lack of vigilance. After a long retreat, the weary army engaged the Firstborn under the walls of Ranneng and lost the battle. The capital was taken and then destroyed. The army and the king retreated to the north. The exhausted men, constantly harassed by the advance units of the enemy, fell back toward Avendoom in order to fight its final battle there—they had nowhere else to retreat to. Except to the Cold Sea, or past the Lonely Giant into the Desolate Lands.

  “Either of those would have been suicide. All they could do was to die with dignity. Grok needed time to prepare for the final battle—time which, unfortunately, he didn’t have. The army had to rest, if only for one day.