“Good point,” Narasan agreed. “About how much longer do you think it’ll take your men to finish?”
“If they stick right with it, I’d be willing to bet that they’ll have that top fifty feet cleared away by noon tomorrow,” Hook-Beak replied. “Then the rest is up to you. My people tear things apart. Your people have to build things.”
“You’re all heart, Sorgan,” Commander Narasan replied sardonically.
Keselo was fairly sure he’d just be in the way if he stood watching the Maags dismantling the top of the stairway, so he went back through the gap to the little glade at the top of the ravine. The bulky Dhrall known as Red-Beard was seated beside a small fire near the sparkling little brook that seemed to be the source of the river that had carved out the ravine.
“Maybe you can explain something for me, Red-Beard,” Keselo said.
“If I happen to understand it myself, maybe,” Red-Beard said, scratching his hairy cheek.
“Did your tribe live up here in the ravine at some time in the past? When we were coming up the north bench, Rabbit and I saw several abandoned villages over on your side of the river.”
“They’re not really important. As far as we know, nobody’s lived in them since long before our tribe came to this part of Zelana’s Domain.”
“Is that why you left them out when you were building your map back in Zelana’s cave?”
“Not entirely,” Red-Beard conceded. “Those places make the old men of the tribe edgy for some reason. Chief White-Braid didn’t come right out and tell me not to put them in my model, but I know him well enough to be fairly sure it wouldn’t have made him too happy if I had.”
“Is there something about them that frightens him?”
“I’m not sure if ‘frightened’ is the right word, Keselo. Maybe it’s just some old superstition. Those of us who live here in the Land of Dhrall take our superstitions very seriously. We avoid graveyards, and we always apologize to any animals we kill during the hunt. I’m not sure if it does any good, but it’s the polite thing to do, and it doesn’t cost anything. The cliff villages were here when our tribe first came to this part of Dhrall. Whoever built them was obviously not of our tribe. We don’t build our lodges out of stone, and we choose places that’re more convenient. Why all this sudden interest?”
“Curiosity, I guess,” Keselo admitted. “We have many ancient ruins down in the Empire, but they’re usually located on land more suitable for farming. Have you ever explored one of those villages?”
Red-Beard laughed. “Why would I want to do that? I’m a hunter, and I’m supposed to chase animals—or fish—to keep the tribe eating regularly. I don’t waste my time wandering around in ancient, empty villages or in the caves that crawl off in all directions under these mountains.”
“You have caves here as well?” Keselo was a bit startled about that.
“All mountains have caves, Keselo,” Red-Beard told him with a faint smile. “Everybody knows that. I have a theory, if you want to hear it.”
“Of course.”
“Mountains could be what happens when Father Earth eats something that doesn’t agree with him. When he burps, mountains pop up.”
“That’s absurd,” Keselo said, trying not to laugh.
“If you’ve got a better theory, I’d be happy to hear it,” Red-Beard said mildly. “Anyway, a burp isn’t anything but air that boils up out of a man’s stomach, so Father Earth’s mountains have chunks of empty air in the middle of them—burps that didn’t quite manage to make it to the surface, you understand.”
“Would you please be serious, Red-Beard?”
“‘Serious’ isn’t really very much fun, Keselo. All right, then, if you’re going to insist, the old men of the tribe tell us that those old villages are cursed and that we’re not supposed to go near them or even talk about them. Old men get very peculiar sometimes. Whoever it was that built them or lived in them isn’t around anymore. Either they all died or they just packed up and left. If they died, the villages are probably haunted, and if they ran away, something quite awful must have frightened them off. In either case, the old men of our tribe seem to think that staying away from the ruins might not be a bad idea.” He shrugged. “There’s probably nothing in them that’s worth very much anyway, so I don’t waste my time exploring. I’ve got better things to do with my time.” He squinted on down the ravine. “Most of us in the tribe more or less go along with what the old men tell us, but every now and then, somebody gets an overpowering urge to snoop around in the ruins, and he almost never comes back again.”
“Doesn’t that sort of suggest that the old men of your tribe might know what they’re talking about?” Keselo suggested.
“Not necessarily,” Red-Beard disagreed. “Our tribe’s been at Lattash for hundreds of years, and even places made of stone start falling apart after that long. Walls fall down, ceilings collapse, and for all I know, whole villages that used to be there fell down into those burp-holes under the mountains. It’s not always ghosts or curses that kill the snoopers, Keselo. It’s more likely that it’s just natural decay.”
“Are the villages only on the south side?” Keselo asked. “Rabbit and I didn’t see any of them on the north side as we were coming up here.”
“You wouldn’t have,” Red-Beard told him. “It’s always seemed to me that those old villages were built in places where they couldn’t be seen from the bench on the same side of the ravine. The people who used to live in the village probably did that on purpose. There were most likely unfriendly people back in those days too. Unfriendliness has been around for a long, long time. The closest one of those villages is only a few miles back down on the north side of the ravine. It wouldn’t be hard to find if you were on the north bench. There’s an old dead tree snag just above it on the rim of the ravine, and that snag sticks out so much that if you happened to be on the north bench, it should be clearly visible.”
“Maybe if there’s a lull in this war, I’ll go on down and have a look,” Keselo mused.
“What for? There won’t be anything there but some tumbled-down old buildings, and it might be very dangerous.”
“Curiosity again,” Keselo confessed. “It’s a failing of mine.”
Work continued on through the night, and by morning the Maags had quite nearly removed all the stone blocks on either side of the steadily narrowing central stairway.
Keselo and Rabbit were standing unobtrusively off to one side when Narasan joined Sorgan at the front of the gap. “I’d say that’s about enough,” he said to Hook-Beak. “I think it’s time to start building the fort, don’t you agree?”
“I’ll go along with you there,” Sorgan agreed. “If the snake-men down below start charging up the stairway now, we won’t be ready for them, so you’d better get your people to work on that fort.” He peered through the smoke at the work crews below. “Ho, Ox!” he shouted.
The bullnecked Maag who was supervising the work crews climbed up one of the dozen or more rope ladders Sorgan’s men used to stay clear of the increasingly crowded central stairway. “Aye, Cap’n?” he responded when he was about halfway up the ladder.
“The Trogites have all the building blocks they need,” Sorgan told him. “Call in the lookouts, and send most of the men on up here. Then tear what’s left of the stairway apart. Throw the blocks on down the slope. If the snake-men are trying to sneak up through the smoke, that might just make them a little nervous.”
“We’ll do ’er that way, Cap’n,” Ox called back with an evil grin.
“What do you think?” Hook-Beak asked Commander Narasan. “Should we let those bonfires go out?”
“Why don’t we keep them going until the fort’s finished?” Commander Narasan replied. He smiled faintly. “It’s an old Trogite saying: ‘Don’t let the customer see the product until it’s finished.’”
“I’m hoping that the customer won’t care much for the looks of our product, Narasan. Then maybe he’ll go shopping someplac
e else.”
“Let’s go find Longbow,” Rabbit suggested to Keselo. “We should probably let him know that the Maags have finished tearing the stairway apart and that Narasan’s people are starting on the fort.”
“Good idea,” Keselo agreed.
Longbow was coming down from the north rim, and Keselo and Rabbit went on up to meet him. “The Maags have finished, Longbow,” Rabbit told his friend. “Now Narasan’s people can start on the fort.”
“Good,” Longbow said. “Will they let the fires go out now?”
“Not until the fort’s finished,” Keselo replied. “Commander Narasan wants to hide what we’re doing from the enemy.”
“It works both ways, Keselo. They can’t see us, but we can’t see them either.”
“We’ve noticed that too, Longbow,” Rabbit agreed, “but the cap’n didn’t want to argue with Narasan about it. When you’ve got Maags and Trogites living together in the same camp, everybody needs to walk softly. Oh, I almost forgot. The cap’n sent word to his cousins, and Skell and Torl should be joining us in a few days.”
“That might not be such a good idea, Rabbit,” Longbow said dubiously. “If the creatures of the Wasteland find some way to get around us, the Domain of Zelana will lie unprotected.”
“You really think a lot of her, don’t you?” Keselo suggested.
“This is my home, Keselo, and I live but to serve Zelana. When I was younger, I thought I could avoid her and spend my life in the hunt for the creatures of the Wasteland, but when she called, I found that I couldn’t refuse her.”
“She seems to have that effect on people,” Keselo agreed.
“Some people rule by force, but Zelana rules by love. Love can be crueler than force, but it works better,” Longbow observed.
“I’ve noticed,” Rabbit added, “and the little girl’s even worse.”
Longbow smiled. “Oh, yes,” he agreed, “but delightful still, isn’t she? How long’s the building of the fort likely to take?”
“I can’t say for sure, Longbow,” Keselo replied, “but I’d guess that they’ll probably be finished by late tomorrow afternoon if they work on through the night. Then we can let the fires go out, and come morning on the day after tomorrow, the enemies will be able to see what we’ve done up here, and I don’t think they’ll like it very much.”
Gunda, Jalkan, and Padan supervised the construction of the fort, and, as was his habit, Jalkan bullied the soldiers under his command outrageously. When he wasn’t cursing them, he was slashing at them with a limber switch.
“That one wouldn’t last a week on board a Maag ship,” Rabbit told Keselo. “The crew would probably band up and feed him to the sharks.”
“Unfortunately, sharks are a little hard to find out on dry land,” Keselo replied.
“What is it that makes him so unpleasant? His men are working as hard as all the rest are.”
“He used to be a priest,” Keselo explained, “and the priests of Amar seem to enjoy flogging those who are beneath them.”
“If he was having so much fun as a priest, why did he join the army?”
“It’s a long story,” Keselo said shortly.
“We’ve got all kinds of time right now, Keselo,” Rabbit said. “That Jalkan fellow sort of rubs me the wrong way. If he started switching me the way he’s doing to those soldiers under him, he’d get a knife in his belly. Why does your commander let him get away with that?”
“I don’t think Jalkan will be with us much longer,” Keselo said. “Commander Narasan’s reprimanded him a few times already. Jalkan’s family was once quite prominent in Kaldacin, but they eventually became very corrupt. Jalkan couldn’t bear the idea of doing honest work, so he eventually joined the priesthood of the Amarite faith—the last refuge of the scoundrel. He won’t talk about his years in the church, but there are a few rumors floating about. If those rumors come anywhere close to what he was really up to, he should have been imprisoned—or even executed. Evidently, he became involved with some professional criminals, and he was making tons of money. When the head of the church found out about his little enterprise—and about the fact that Jalkan wasn’t sharing his profits with the church—the ‘most holy one’ expelled him from the church and even went through the Damnation Ceremony. That put Jalkan back out on the street again, and he used the last of his profits to buy himself a commission in Commander Narasan’s army. We’d all be much happier if he’d move on, but he doesn’t seem to want to leave.”
“If it bothers you all that much, why don’t you have a little chat with Longbow?” Rabbit suggested. “We’ve got lots and lots of arrows now, so we wouldn’t really miss one all that much. I’d say that your Jalkan fellow would look a whole lot nicer with one of Longbow’s arrows sticking out of his forehead.”
“Now that you mention it, he probably would,” Keselo agreed. “We’d all be terribly sorry, of course, but we could give him a nice funeral—and maybe even wait for a half hour or so before we started to celebrate.”
“A half hour sounds about right to me,” Rabbit agreed with a wicked little grin.
The fort went up rapidly, and, following Sorgan’s example, Commander Narasan’s men worked on through the night by the light of the bonfires on either side of the gap.
When the sun rose, Narasan put fresh men to work, and as Keselo had surmised, the Trogites were finishing up as the setting sun painted the western sky.
“Go tell Sorgan that we’re finished, Keselo,” Narasan said. “He might want to have a look.”
“Yes, sir,” Keselo replied smartly. He went down the back stairs of the fort and found Sorgan in the Maag encampment at the head of the ravine. “The fort’s completed, Captain Hook-Beak,” he reported.
“That was quick,” Sorgan said. “Where’s Narasan?”
“Up on top,” Keselo replied. “He seems rather pleased with the way it turned out.”
“I suppose I’d better go offer my congratulations.”
“I think he’d appreciate that, sir.”
“I wish you’d learn to relax, Keselo,” Sorgan told him. “You don’t have to call me ‘sir’ every time you walk past.”
“Habit, I suppose,” Keselo admitted.
The two of them went up the stairs at the back of the fort and joined Commander Narasan at the top of the front wall. The fort was fifty feet high, twenty feet thick, and it fit snugly against the walls of the gap.
“Nice job, Narasan,” Sorgan said. “I’m glad I’ll be on this side of it instead of the front side. I’d hate to have to lead an assault against it.”
“Practice, Sorgan,” Narasan replied modestly. “My men have built a lot of walls and forts over the years.” He surveyed the construction. “We were a little pushed for time on this one, but good or bad, it’ll have to do.”
“Quit worrying, Narasan. Those little holes your people put in that front wall give us a way to poke the snake-men in the bellies while they’re trying to climb up to get at us, and if Longbow’s right about how good that poison we’ve got on our spear points is, we’ll see a lot of poke-poke, die-die going on. And if the snake-men are as empty-headed as everybody claims they are, they’ll just keep coming, and we’ll be able to play poke-poke, die-die all day long for weeks on end.”
“I’ll have to remember poke-poke, die-die,” Commander Narasan said with no hint of a smile. “I think we might want to include that in the soldiers’ manual—probably someplace near parry-and-thrust.”
The bonfires had died out by the following morning, and the pall of smoke no longer obscured the view of the desert floor far below. The hordes of the Vlagh were gathering some distance back from the foot of the stairway, waiting, it appeared, for some sort of signal or command.
Keselo, Rabbit, and Longbow stood atop the wall in the early morning light. “I don’t think they like what they see very much,” Keselo said. “It must have taken them centuries to build that stairway, but we changed the top of it in about a week. It’s a stairway to no
-place now. They can run up those stairs as fast as they can, but once they reach the place where the stairs end now, they’ll come face to face with a blank wall and they’ll be easy targets for the Dhrall archers, won’t they?”
“They won’t be hard to hit,” Longbow agreed, “and our outlander friends can shower rocks on them from up here. I don’t think this is going to be one of their pleasant days.”
“What a shame,” Rabbit said in mock sympathy. “This just about ends the war, doesn’t it? We might have to spend the summer here, but come fall, we’ll still be here, and what’s left of them will still be down there.”
“It looks that way to me,” Longbow agreed.
From far below there came a thunderous sound, much like the deep-throated roar of an angry bull, and the hordes of the Vlagh shrieked their response. Then, almost like an incoming wave, the enemy force surged forward.
“Enemy to the front!” Keselo reported sharply to alert the Trogite soldiers and Maag pirates stationed atop the fort.
The Maags and Trogites, their ancient enmities laid aside now, came to the front wall of the fort to watch the now futile charge of the enemy.
Longbow watched and waited as the enemy force charged up the broad stairway.
“Shouldn’t your archers be alerted, Longbow?” Keselo asked.
“They’re watching,” Longbow replied. “The enemy isn’t quite in range yet. We wouldn’t want to waste our new arrows.”
“You’ve got no idea of how much I appreciate that, Longbow,” Rabbit said with a tight grin.
The enemy charge continued to swarm up the stairway. Oddly, there were no shouts or war cries. That seemed very unnatural to Keselo.
“That should be close enough,” Longbow said. He lifted his horn and blew a long, mournful note.
A cloud of arrows arched out over the stairway from either side of the gap. The arrows seemed almost to hang in the air for an interminable moment, and Keselo saw a certain beauty in the perfect symmetry of that arch.
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