Sorrail, a little further down, shouted wildly up at Orgos. “Fly! You cannot help him! Save yourself!”
“Go!” Orgos replied. “I will stand by my friend.”
Without another word Sorrail turned back toward where I stood, his eyes wild, then began once more to run. Then he saw Renthrette advancing, and managed to slow himself before colliding with her. He seized her sword arm briefly. “You must leave him! You cannot hope to repel such an enemy.”
He gave a desperate gesture back up the slope. Five or six of the bears with their goblin riders were only paces from Orgos, and two more were coming down each side toward us, one with a pair of huge drums slung across the beast’s back. How many more were behind them I could not say: a dozen at the very least.
Doubt flickered through Renthrette’s eyes as Sorrail pulled at her. She hesitated a moment and then ran with him, down into the valley, at the same moment that one of the bears reached Orgos’s position, reared, and struck him a heavy swash of its forepaw across his left shoulder. He did not have time to land even a single stroke from his sword. He was knocked back and sideways with the incredible force of the blow and fell against a boulder where he lay quite still. With precise brutality they set upon him, fallen though he was, and upon his friend of so many years, who lay defenseless close by. The onslaught hemmed them in until I could see their bodies no more.
“Orgos!” I screamed, but the foul beasts and their fouler riders were everywhere now, and still pouring toward us. I turned and began to run once more.
And I kept running. There was nothing else for it, and no one in their right mind would say otherwise. Sorrail had had to virtually drag Renthrette away, and she wept bitter tears as he pulled her, but I was watching my own path. Since where I was going mattered less than what I was getting away from, I paid little heed to the direction or to my companions. I dashed between the bushes and hollows of the vale which, as it turned out, was marshy and pocked with still, leaden pools. The grass was waist deep, so I was running blind, with no sense of where I might hit a rock or a pothole. I got the latter.
My foot sank calf-deep into a boggy hole and I pitched forward. I fought to get up, but my boot slid in the mud. Then it occurred to me that I might have more chance of survival lying low in the long grass and swamp than trying to outrun the enemy. So I hugged the ground and desperately tried to shrug off the pictures that rose, uncalled for, to my mind: claws and lance tips tearing flesh, great ursine jaws closing on limbs. Perhaps if I had not seen it happen, the images would have been less terrible, less savagely real. Then again, perhaps not.
I tried gingerly inching up enough to look through the grass for Sorrail and Renthrette, but they were nowhere to be seen. I lay on the edge of a pit, cold water seeping into my clothes, face down in the hard grass and rushes that grew around it, and wondered how I could have been so stupid as to lose them. I felt a sudden terrifying and unexpected grief for Orgos and Mithos welling up inside me, so I focused on the fear that I was nursing like a hole in the belly. This seemed to help. Perhaps it’s just me, but other people’s fates seem less pressing when you’re waiting to have your throat torn out by a creature you didn’t believe in a few hours ago.
I lay in the marshy hollow for about fifteen minutes, though I had no way of knowing exactly how long it was. The air was still and rank with the smell of stagnant water and decaying plant life. “Rank” is a bit of an understatement. A few years ago my housekeeper, Mrs. Pugh, cooked a pot of potatoes and then-God knows how-forgot about them for ten days of sweltering Cresdon summer. I wouldn’t have believed I would ever smell anything worse than that harmless-looking pot of olfactory horror. Right now, I would have bathed in it to rinse the foulness of the pool off me, a foulness you could almost see rising off the thick water.
The cries of the enemy had ceased and, after only a few minutes, the sound of their breakneck pursuit had faded to nothing. But I figured that if I stuck my head up I was still liable to have it lopped neatly off, so I stayed where I was, kept my head down, and felt sorry for myself. Little stirred except the wind in the reeds. A warbler burbled happily to itself before taking flight, and a small brownish toad caught sight of me and hopped into invisibility. I speculated darkly that they might be reporting back to creatures considerably larger and nastier than they, but there wasn’t much I could do about it if they were.
Then something moved only a few feet away from the lip of the pool, something large and careful. I held my breath and waited, catching the slightly bitter scent of an animal, then a muted grunt. I kept my head down, but felt-or thought I felt-a fractional chill as of a shadow passing over me. The reeds on the rim of the hollow shifted and snapped, and something huge inhaled, a series of powerful sniffs trying to gather an aroma, a trace, perhaps, of me. If I saw that bloody warbler again I’d give it something to sing about.
With infinite care I tipped my head slightly and looked up. Ten yards away, just on the lip of the pit and surrounded by eight-foot reeds and elephant grass with plumed white ears, was a goblin lancer mounted on a great steel-gray bear. The animal had its left flank toward me and was sniffing, its muzzle to the ground.
The goblin was squat, heavily muscled, and about my height. It was armored with black and rusted mail and heavy leather pads. Its head was unhelmeted and quite bald, its skin cracked and yellow-brown, like old mustard. Then it shifted, turning toward the center of the wet hollow, and I saw its face. It was thin and tight, each bone of the skull showing through the strained skin. It looked like a man, but hairless and with malice smoldering in its small, hollow eyes. The goblin seemed to look at me, but its eyes were focused elsewhere and the reeds screened me for the moment. It spoke, a stream of guttural noises and hard syllables spiked as sharp as the barbs on the lance it brandished in its sinewy right hand, and another goblin answered from close by. I put my head back down and hoped that the rancid stench of the pit itself would confuse the bear or whatever the hell it was.
Back in Cresdon or Stavis, people would pay good money to see a bear that would let you ride on it without demanding bits of your thorax in return. If I ever got out of here, maybe I could take one back with me and corner the market. Such thoughts were, however, premature. As the most experienced merchants will tell you, long-term economic plans must bow to surviving the next thirty seconds. Moving less than an inch at a time I began to slide backward into the cold, thick water of the pit. The movement was painfully slow. The thick, freezing water welled round my thighs, then around my waist, and then my chest, and still the bear and its rider did not stir. I slid back still further, my legs sliding in the slime under the water until they encountered something long and heavy lying on the floor of the pond: a log. I pushed until it shifted and my feet squeezed under it. I felt the water’s icy hand close about my throat.
The bear snorted, shifted, and uttered a sound that might have been a word in the goblin’s own filthy tongue, at which the rider turned to peer into the pool. I breathed in deeply and, eyes tight shut, pushed my head completely under the water. I clutched at a clump of weeds with one fist and pushed the other into the muddy ooze up to the wrist, to keep myself from floating to the surface. My feet squirmed under the fallen log, helping to anchor me in place. Though this all took less than five seconds, I felt that I was running out of air. Wildly I remembered how heroes in stories hid from pursuers by using reeds to breathe through as they floated downstream. Well, it was too damn late for that. Another five seconds passed and my wind pipe contracted and buckled as if I was going to vomit, but I swallowed it down and held on for another few seconds.
Then the log resting on my ankles shifted and-to my horror-swam slowly away. The gorge rose in my throat again and I could hold it no longer. I broke the surface as gently as possible and gasped at the air. The bear had not moved. Terror of the goblin and its mount warred in my breast with the gut-wrenching nausea inspired by whatever the creature in the pond was. Before any decision had been made, I was scrambling out in
blind terror of brushing against the chill skin of whatever was under the water. I snaked almost completely out and into the reeds, moving too quickly and thrashing slightly with involuntary revulsion. The goblin heard me.
It turned like a sprung trap and its muscles tautened, eyes and ears concentrated on the pool. It was motionless. I froze and held my breath as if I was still under the reeking water, but I could not look away. Its thin lips were parted slightly and I saw teeth in its immobile jaws. Its small, deep-set eyes flicked around the surface of the pond, and suddenly, as if caused by the hard stare of those eyes, the water broke with a small splash. Ripples coursed away and the body of some great eel or serpent, an oily olive green streaked with gray slime, arced back down to the bed from whence I had roused it. It sent a stream of heavy bubbles to the surface and, as it did so, the goblin’s face and body sagged. He grunted some word to his mount and turned away disinterested. The bear made another semi-articulate sound. There was a momentary pause, and then they moved off with remarkable stealth. I, pulling my feet from the water completely and huddling into a childlike crouch, breathed again.
I waited in the same position till the sun had begun its descent, sure that any movement would bring the monstrous riders back. All that time my eyes moved from the grass around the rim where the goblins might reappear and back to the dark water with its nameless inhabitant. But the shadows were lengthening fast, and this was not my idea of a fun place to spend the evening. If I wasn’t going to spend the night wandering around this desolate hole in total darkness, stumbling into bogs or the jaws of whatever nightmares lived in them, I was going to have to move quickly, goblins or no bloody goblins.
I crawled out and up, conscious that the mud clotting on my skin was beginning to stink even more as it warmed to my body heat. Nice. Peering out and across the valley floor, I scoured the land for signs of the enemy, but could see little through the long, coarse grass. Bugger all, in fact. Nothing of friends or town, road or track. And as if on cue, it began to rain, a cold, misty drizzle which didn’t rinse any of the mud off, but did manage to make me just that bit more miserable.
I clambered awkwardly to my feet and began, for want of a better idea, to move in the vague direction the path had been pointing before it petered out in this swampy wasteland. My mouth and nose were full of the pond’s stinking ooze and grit, and no matter how much I spat, there seemed to be more under my tongue or between my teeth making my drool brownish. I skulked forward, all hunched over, glancing furtively about and dropping to a hurried crouch in the long grass every few seconds like a crippled rabbit with a lot of enemies.
This went on for about two hours. The light began to lessen perceptibly, though I have no idea how far I traveled or if I was still heading in the same direction. With dull alarm I began moving faster and less cautiously, knowing full well that with the grass this long I could slam into the side of a bear without seeing it until it was ready for a second helping. I kept going, pressed on by the swelling darkness, the growing chill, and the absolute certainty that if I had to spend the night out here something would get me.
The ground began to dry out under my feet and the reeds thinned until I was crossing great fields of long tufted grass. Turning around, I thought I could make out the dim silhouette of the crags behind me in the far distance. Large insects, beetles, and some evil-looking form of cricket leaped and blundered out of my path as I sped away from the mountains and the creatures which lived there. I was filthy, miserable, and exhausted, but I picked up the pace, hoping against hope to find something more in my milieu, if you know what I mean. A pub with a friendly barmaid would be nice, but I’d settle for a house. And a beer. I could murder a beer.
I rested on a fallen tree which had been lying in the grass donkeys’ years and was overgrown with moss and strange leathery fungi. Sitting on it, I wheezed heavily, sucking the air into my lungs like a man at a desert oasis gulping water. I had a stitch in my side from running, and I found myself wishing, ironically, that Orgos had made me exercise more in Stavis. But that was not the way to think now, for lots of reasons. I thought of one of the heroes I had played in those old Thrusian history plays and figured that if I could make two-and-a-half-thousand bitter Cresdonites believe that Will Hawthorne, scrawny and fat at the same time, was Lothar the Wanderer, scourge of the unchivalrous and iambic-pentametered all-round good egg, once a month for two years, I could do anything. I got to my feet and began to run again with new and grim determination.
Ten minutes later, clutching my aching side and gasping with weariness, Lothar the Wanderer was flagging. I squatted in the grass and parted one great tuft (if “tuft” isn’t the wrong word for a clump of leaves twelve feet high), looking desperately around. There, directly ahead of me, I saw smoke: not the smoke of carnage and destruction, amazingly enough, but chimney smoke, hanging like a smudge of steely blue in the dark sky. Rising till I was almost vertical, I began, once more, to run, but this time I could see the audience admiring me. Lothar was doing the epilogue; I could smell it in the woodsmoke.
At times the gray billow disappeared behind the matted stalks of grass, but soon the land cleared and I could make it out plainly. I was in a meadow or pasture of some kind and only a few hundred yards ahead I could see the outline of trees, black against the sky. I stumbled on, ignoring the way my legs buckled with pathetic exhaustion, crossing the field to a crudely fashioned wooden fence. I paused and inhaled through my nose, and the smoke was bitter and woody over the damp greenery. Gasping for air though I was, I sucked it into my lungs like life itself. The audience’s applause swelled in my ears, and suddenly I saw it, appearing through a thicket of hawthorn hedge: a gabled roof, a gray stone chimney, and a sign hanging on a bracket above the door: The Last Refuge Inn.
“Thank you, ladies and gentlemen!” I said aloud, bowing to the field. “Thank you! Thank you!”
But the door of The Last Refuge Inn was locked. This rather un-pub-like development dashed my spirits a little, but I beat heartily on the door and called in a commanding fashion such as the long dead and probably fictional Lothar would have been proud of.
“The Wand’ring Knight has come to taste your cheer,
Since he has ’scaped his journey’s fearful doom,
And longs for hearth and dinner and a beer,
And welcome given to your daughter’s room.”
Hardly great verse, but not bad for the spur of the moment. There was no answer, but a curtain in a bay window moved, so I waited.
Nothing happened.
I tried again, knocking loudly and grinning as I called out, “Come throw the latch and summon Lothar in, since he is weary and he seeks for rest.”
Still nothing.
“Open the bloody door!” I yelled, losing patience and good humor at a stroke. “What the hell kind of pub is this? Should I have made an appointment? Do I need references? Come on, open the damn door.”
And, with a heavy clang, the lock turned and the door creaked open. With it came the point of a fine silver rapier which came to rest about two inches from my windpipe. It was held by a tall, fair man. Others were behind him, weapons in hand and eyes fixed on me with undisguised hostility.
“Hello?” I tried, leaning slightly away from the sword point.
The others did not speak, but their eyes hardened and the sword moved steadily under my chin. Gasping wordlessly, I wondered if I had perhaps violated some sort of dress code.
Farcical though such an instinct undoubtedly was, it wasn’t altogether wide of the mark. There was fear behind the menace in their eyes, and recognizing this, I guessed that the principal reason for this rather unwelcoming behavior lay in my appearance, since I was still caked from head to foot in a dark brown slime and the light in the inn was low. The truth struck me with sudden and comic force: They thought I was some sort of goblin. Imagining how I must appear to these quiet, law-abiding folk already spooked by tales of bear-riding demon assaults to have me banging on their door like a ravaging
swamp troll, I laughed with relief. This was apparently the wrong thing to do and seemed, momentarily, to convince them of my hellish origins.
“Strike!” hissed a young man peering round the doorjamb. He was addressing the rapier wielder and had one eye on me, the other on an axe he was raising.
“Wait!” I spluttered, specks of mud exploding from my cracked lips unhelpfully. “I am Will Hawthorne, a traveler and friend of. . of, what the hell is his name. .? You know!”
“Strike quickly,” advised the young man spitefully. “Heed not the words of the enemy, for his tongue is foul.”
Truer than you know, mate, I thought, spitting out more pond filth.
“It called itself Lothar. It is surely some devil from the waters beneath the mountains.”
“No,” I assured him. “That was just a bit of a joke. A sort of poem, you know. I was happy to see the tavern and. .” This no longer seemed plausible even to me, so I reverted to my previous tactic. “I’m a friend of that blond-haired chap. You know. . tall guy, pale, blond.” Since this brilliant description fit all four men I had glimpsed behind the door I added, “He’s got a spear with a kind of torch thing. . a light. And he killed a bear with it. You know. Whatsisname. Mr?. . Sorbet? Sor. . did? No. Sorrail. SORRAIL!”
There was a hesitant moment as the men exchanged glances. Clearly they recognized the name. That would keep my blood flowing internally for the moment. I grinned to myself, exultant, and then, unsure of what such a grin looked like through my new skin, scrapped it.
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