All That Glitters

by Auston Habershaw

  “I’m looking!”

  The savages were parting, allowing someone at the back to push their way to the front. Tyvian knew whoever it was probably wasn’t there to bail them out. “Look much, much faster.”

  “They in the big pocket or the side pockets?”

  “Big pocket, dammit. Big pocket!” Tyvian kept his eyes fixed on the person approaching, though all he could currently see was a mop of matted red-­orange hair drawing close. He heard Artus fumbling around inside the pack, cursing under his breath.

  Tyvian found himself looking at a young woman clad in only a loincloth, a few elaborate tattoos, and a colossal mane of hair that spilled over her shoulders and fell almost to her knees. Were she cleaner and not flanked by men who planned to kill him, Tyvian might have spent a good minute ogling her rather taut, compact frame and athletic curves. He reflected, suddenly, that he usually seemed to meet the most attractive women the exact same way—­just before they tried to kill him.

  The woman drew a spike from her hair that looked like a very large thorn with a crossbar that allowed her to hold it, with the “blade” portion poking between her middle and ring fingers. She pointed it at Tyvian. “You Destroyers have defiled the holy temple of Isra. Why?” Her voice was clear and penetrating—­the voice of an orator.

  Tyvian looked back at the hole. “Is that what that was? Honestly, we were just looking for somewhere to—­”

  “Lies!” she snarled, showing her teeth.

  “Got them!” Artus announced, slapping something into Tyvian’s hand—­a smooth, elliptical amulet fashioned from an alchemical mix of lodestone and steel.

  Tyvian slipped the amulet over his head. “We were robbing you of your giant enchanted diamond—­there, happy now?”

  The woman’s green eyes seemed to glow with anger. “Your blood must be used to cleanse the temple space! Surrender to the Ja’Naieen and we will only kill one of you!”

  Tyvian shrugged. “Hardly tempting—­I need Artus to carry the packs.”

  That did it. The woman chirped something angry at the Forest Children archers, and they loosed their arrows in one terrifying salvo.

  Tyvian, of course, knew that the Vel’jahai’s weapon of choice was the bow, which was why he had invested in bow-­wards for both himself and Artus. The thing was, however, that bow-­wards were designed to stop only a few arrows at a time, working under the assumption that you weren’t, say, standing less than five paces from twenty archers who had nothing else to shoot at but you and your friend. So, when all of those razor-­sharp projectiles came whistling straight at Tyvian’s torso and struck the boundary of the ward more or less at the same time, the result was a complete overload of the ward’s capacity. This, of course, meant Tyvian’s ward exploded with a flash of blue light and a thunderclap roar that caused everyone present to hold their ears and fall to their knees.

  Everyone, that was, except Artus and Tyvian.

  “Time to run!” Tyvian grabbed his pack and sprinted, Artus just behind him. He kicked one of the Forest Children in his skinny, beardless chin as he rose to stop them but otherwise didn’t break stride. They dove into the forest like a pair of big dogs through a hedge, eschewing dexterity and stealth for sheer, brute speed.

  Arrows began to zing past their ears shortly thereafter, embedding themselves in trees or sticking in their packs as they ran, bobbing and weaving among the broad mossy trunks of the deep forest.

  “Where the hell is Hool?” Tyvian snarled, more to the air than to Artus.

  Artus answered anyway. “She’s probably by the temple entrance. We came out the back!”

  Tyvian leapt over a dead stump and ducked back into a hollow, Artus just beside him. This bought them a few seconds from the arrows. “Which way is the temple entrance?”

  Artus looked around. “I dunno! I don’t even know where we are!”

  Tyvian poked his head up, only to have an arrow embed itself in the tree stump no more than three inches from his face. “Gods! I hate the gods-­damned forest!”

  “Which way do we run?”

  Tyvian threw up his hands. “Away! Does it really matter? Go, boy, go!”

  Artus took the lead. Tyvian wished he had the time to dig out his sword, Chance, from his pack as he ran, for the thought of being overrun by savages and having no blade to stab them with was among the most depressing ends he could think of. He couldn’t, though, since his pack was doing a good job doubling as a pincushion for errant woodkin arrows.

  Their lead, small to begin with, was vanishing every second. The Forest Children were on either side of them now, trying to flank. Tyvian imagined they had no more than a few more seconds before they were surrounded again.

  They broke out of the trees, and Tyvian saw a form of salvation—­a canyon, perhaps fifteen feet wide, with a large tree fallen across it. Tyvian pointed toward it breathlessly, but Artus had already seen it. The boy engaged reserves of energy only a teenager seemed to have and pulled ahead of Tyvian, bounding across the fallen trunk like a squirrel.

  Tyvian was a few seconds behind him, with a half-­dozen Forest Children, including Red-­hair, nipping at his heels. He leapt onto the trunk and tried running across but stumbled halfway. He flailed around at errant branches to regain his balance and tried to stand up when a sweating, dirty Forest Child jumped on his back, grabbing him around the throat.

  Tyvian estimated the little man to weigh no more than one hundred ten pounds, soaking wet, and therefore the smuggler found himself in the rare circumstance of being both larger and stronger than his opponent. He stood up, gagging against the man’s forearms locked over his windpipe, and threw himself backward atop the trunk. Tyvian heard the man shriek as a particularly sharp broken end of a branch pierced his back. The Forest Child loosened his grip, after which Tyvian found it a simple matter to disentangle himself and kick the fellow over the side.

  This marked the first time Tyvian had looked down. The canyon was more than twenty feet deep, and the rushing white water looked exceptionally rough. The thought of falling suddenly made him dizzy.

  Another Forest Child lunged at him with one of those punch-­spike things. This was more in line with what Tyvian was used to—­he deflected the blow and, grabbing the man by the scruffy hair, pulled him off-­balance and pushed him off the tree again. Two down, at least—­he looked up—­thirty-­five or so to go. Wonderful.

  Red-­hair was next to step onto the tree, but she was more cautious than the others. She kept her distance. “There is no escape for you, Destroyer.”

  Tyvian pointed over his shoulder. “I was under the impression that I could escape that way.”

  Red-­hair laughed. The laugh seemed remarkably genuine—­a deep belly-­laugh that made her breasts shake and her mouth open all the way.

  Tyvian didn’t like that laugh one bit—­what was wrong with crossing the canyon? He cast a look over his shoulder.

  Artus was running back in his direction. His face was deathly pale. “Run! Run!”

  Tyvian looked behind Artus to see what, for a split second, he thought to be some kind of shambling haystack the size of a dray wagon. He was wrong.

  It was a bear.

  “Kroth’s bloody teeth!” he swore. “Can this possibly get any worse?”

  Red-­hair roared incoherently in the direction of the bear, tipping her head. The bear answered in kind, nodding its massive head in similar fashion. It stopped at the edge of the tree trunk and roared at Artus and Tyvian, who were now standing back to back over a drop to certain death.

  Tyvian sighed. “She can talk to bears. Right. That’s worse.”

  Artus was clearly one more surprise away from total panic. “What do we do? What do we do? Saints, we’re dead! Dead!”

  Tyvian looked at Red-­hair and the rows of Forest Children lining the edge of the canyon, bows ready. He looked back at the bear, its head
low and its black eyes fixed on him and Artus. He looked down. “I’ve got a plan, Artus.”

  Artus blinked. “Really?”

  “Hold your breath.”

  “What?”

  Tyvian pushed Artus off the tree trunk. The boy screamed the whole way down. Red-­hair was agape, her mouth hanging open. Tyvian gave her a wink and followed Artus down. He remembered to hold his breath.

  It didn’t do a hell of a lot of good.

  Some eighteen hours later Tyvian crouched at the edge of a lake in his underclothes, watching the dawn mists slowly burn off in the face of the sunrise. It looked like something out of a poem: the water was a deep blue-­green and spotted with the pristine white of countess-­lilies; the grass glittered with dew beneath the full boughs of the trees. Somewhere nearby a loon whistled for its mate. When Tyvian had selected this place for their rendezvous point, the idea had been to cap off his stunning heist with a beautiful sunrise picnic. He had even preselected what they would have for breakfast—­it was packed up in Brana’s satchel.

  Unfortunately, Brana’s satchel was now at the bottom of a river, lost when the gnoll pup and his mother, Hool, had dragged his and Artus’s floundering arses from the rapids and deposited them on the shore.

  The four of them had spent the better part of last night scurrying through the woods like weasels, trying to put distance between them and a host of woodkin that wanted them dead with a religious fervor. Even now, Hool and Brana were out making false trails to throw off pursuit. Tyvian was using the time to recuperate from having to swim in filth. Artus was using the time to complain.

  “I mean, seriously—­how many times are you going to throw me off a bridge into a river?” Artus had Tyvian’s shirt on a rock and was absently rubbing it with another rock—­his peasant version of “doing laundry,” apparently.

  Tyvian tried not to look at the mauling of a good tailor’s work, focusing instead on the charming natural environs of Isra’Nyil’s outer edges. “No doubt you are teeming with alternative escape plans from that situation, tactical mastermind that you are.”

  “Oh, that’s rich!” Artus snapped, brandishing his laundry-­rock at Tyvian. “I don’t remember you asking me nothing, so how do you know? You just pushed me off a damned log without even a wink!” He returned to pummeling the clothes. With gusto.

  Tyvian couldn’t help but snort. “Artus, we were about to become pincushions for poisoned arrows or a light snack for a bear or both. It wasn’t exactly the time to have a conversation. Besides, you were busy soiling yourself. I think the only “plan” you might have suggested would have involved the fetal position and a lot of weeping for our mothers.”

  Artus leapt to his feet and cocked the rock over one shoulder as if to throw it. “You leave my mother out of this, you—­”

  He was interrupted by the great, golden-­furred mass of Hool emerging from the nearby underbrush and fixing him with a coppery glare that could probably kill a bird dead. “Shut up, Artus! You are making too much noise again!”

  Tyvian nodded. “Thank you, Hool. I’ve been trying to—­”

  “You shut up, too. You make almost as much noise as he does.” Hool brushed a few stray brambles from her mane. “Me and Brana just worked very hard to hide your stupid human footprints and you are going to spoil it by shouting all the time. Be quiet.”

  Brana tumbled out of a tree, yipping cheerfully. He had almost quadrupled in size this year, going from less than forty to nearly a hundred fifty pounds of fur, muscle, and teeth. His mane had thick streaks of white in it and his eyes were pure gold to his mother’s copper, but he was without a doubt his mother’s son . . . pup . . . whatever. They seemed to share the same joy of criticizing humans. “Noisy! Very too noisy!” he barked.

  His Trade needed some improvement.

  Artus said nothing, but he was still glaring at Tyvian when he sat back down to continue assaulting the smuggler’s clothing. The process was becoming more and more nakedly metaphorical by the second. Tyvian knew the argument was far from over, but he was too tired, filthy, and hungry to consider pursuing it on his own.

  The gnolls had with them an impressive collection of dead birds and squirrels—­already plucked and prepared to cook—­hanging from the lanyards they wore about their torsos. Leave it to gnolls to take a harried escape into the wilderness in the dark of night and turn it into an opportunity to collect breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

  Hool handed her portion of her catch off to Brana and crouched next to Tyvian. “We saw only two or three of the little ­people this morning, but they were going the wrong way. They are good trackers, but they are scared of something, so they make stupid decisions.”

  Tyvian nodded. “They’re afraid of the open—­if an Eretherian patrol spots them, they’re good as dead. After we eat, we move south a few more miles and we’ll be out of the forest entirely. Nothing to worry about then.”

  Artus grunted sarcastically and opted to abandon Tyvian’s shirt in order to assist Brana with setting a campfire.

  Tyvian couldn’t let it pass. “Oh, what’s your problem now?”

  Artus rolled his eyes.

  Tyvian sat up straighter. “Out with it!”

  “Nothing.” Artus groaned, breaking a stick over his knee. “Nothing is wrong. Everything is super fine and dandy-­like.”

  Hool laid her ears back. “Stop being sarcastic.”

  “Stop sarcazamazy!” Brana said, punching Artus in the arm.

  “Ow!” Artus rubbed his arm and then hooked Brana’s ankle with his leg and swept the gnoll pup off his feet. He then leapt on top of him and the battle was begun. Artus worked on getting a headlock while Brana scrambled around on the ground, working his leverage to try and make for a reversal.

  Hool was on her feet in an instant, offering advice. “Artus, get his arm behind him! Brana! Quick now! Use your legs! Brrghh! Roof! Whrraggh!”

  The two juveniles rolled around, crushing the budding campfire and scattering their supplies. Artus got on top of Brana, straddling the gnoll’s stomach, and planted a few good punches into Brana’s chest (punching in the nose was off-­limits except in real fights, Hool insisted). Brana, though, caught Artus’s forearm in his jaws and immobilized him without breaking the skin or his arm (since actual biting was off-­limits except in real fights). They struggled in this impasse for a moment or two.

  “Groin!” Hool barked, leaning down beside the pile. “Go for the groin!”

  Tyvian watched the impromptu hand-­to-­hand combat lesson progress with a sigh, noting how his shirt remained filthy and wet, his breakfast lost, and the prospect of a campfire and a meal in the near future was becoming more slight. “This is my life now,” he said, putting his head back against a tree trunk. “This is what it’s all come to.”

  He held up his ring hand, where the simple iron band seemed to glower at him.

  He glowered back.

  CHAPTER 3

  CIVILIZED COMPANY

  Tyvian didn’t say much as they made their way from the outskirts of the forest and southwest into the Eretherian Gap, following a worn, wagon-­rutted highway called the Forest Road, which would take them to Derby—­the closest thing the northern reaches of Eretheria had to a city. It was there that Tyvian planned to fence the Heart of Flowing Sunlight. It was also there that Artus expected Tyvian to blow that money on buying old and rare books. Again.

  They had strung their still soaked clothing between them on a rope to dry as they walked. The sun was hot on Artus’s shoulders as he followed Tyvian, but he didn’t complain. Tyvian was always accusing him of complaining, so he kept his mouth shut just to prove him wrong.

  Artus could tell by the way Tyvian walked that he was wrestling with something and that it wasn’t a time to ask questions. Anytime the smuggler had his shoulders tight and his head down meant he was “upset,” and if he was looking at his ring hand a lo
t, that meant he was currently arguing with himself. Then there was the fact that he was mostly naked, wearing only a pair of underbreeches and soggy boots. Disturbing him in this state was a good way to get a tongue-­lashing.

  Artus knew to read Tyvian’s body language because of Tyvian himself. The smuggler had spent months teaching him to understand what he wanted without any words, saying that such information could likely save both of their lives someday. Artus found the instruction immensely confusing, since only a few mistakes would result in Tyvian being so frustrated that Artus had trouble seeing anything else in the way he held himself. He never did get the hang of “worried,” “cautious,” “happy,” or “relaxed,” but Artus had become a master of noticing frustration and anger. He could tell if Tyvian was angry from the front, from behind, from above, from beneath, in the dark. He could see frustration in the way he held his shoulders, his sword, the way he moved his hands, the way he held his feet—­if nothing else, Tyvian had trained him well in being able to notice when he shouldn’t bother the smuggler.

  So, Artus spent his time watching the scenery as they walked. He had to say that of all the places he’d been in his life, Eretheria was the prettiest. The great pasture of the gap, stretching from the forest in the north to the farms of Lake Country in the south, rolled golden-­green across the gentle swell of low hills. There were small copses here and there, clustered around natural springs or ancient rock formations. The trees were of species Artus didn’t know—­tall, broad-­leafed, with yellow and white flowers blooming under the summer sunlight. In the distance he could make out cattle ranches—­long, clean buildings with colorful shingled roofs and glass windows, completely lacking in the fortifications seen on every ranch in his homeland. “This is Eretheria,” the pretty little buildings proclaimed, “there is no danger here.”

  Artus knew that wasn’t strictly true, though. He thought back to their escape from Draketower a month or so before—­the riders atop the griffons, their enchanted bolts screaming through the air. He thought of poor Saley—­the girl Tyvian had tried to “rescue” from the lord of Draketower—­now lying beneath a cairn of stones by the side of a nameless lake.