Shadow Prowler

by Alexey Pehov

  “Where there are old bones, there are gkhols,” said Lamplighter, setting his hand on the hilt of his bidenhander.

  “They’re too old. Do you hear the way they crunch under the horses’ hooves? There haven’t been any gkhols here for a long time.”

  “It’s grisly,” Tomcat muttered.

  “What is?” asked Lamplighter, jumping down to the ground.

  “I mean it’s grisly, them just lying there like that. Not buried. Imagine your remains not lying in the ground, but out in the open for centuries.”

  “It’s a bit too soon for you to be thinking about dying. Better watch out in case Sagra hears you,” said Lamplighter, trying to joke.

  The joke was a failure.

  “Dead men everywhere! It’s wrong to be walking over the bones of soldiers. . . . Tomcat’s right, this place has the whiff of death, there’s something unnatural about it.” Arnkh tossed away the grass stalk that he had been clasping in his teeth for the best part of an hour.

  “Who told you the bones were human?” asked Ell, getting down off his horse. He rummaged in the mud and then tossed something black across to Arnkh. “Look at that.”

  Arnkh caught the object and started turning it over in his hands, then flung it indifferently into the ravine. I just had time to notice that it was a lower jaw with unnaturally large and long canine teeth. Just like the ones Ell or any elf had. Or any orc.

  “Orcs?” Arnkh asked with a curious glance at Miralissa’s k’lissang.

  “Who else?” said the elf, and his golden eyes glittered. “There are some human bones, too, but a negligible number compared to the orcs. The Firstborn were mown down in large numbers here.”

  “Yes, they took a real lashing.”

  “There were more than just arrows here.” Tomcat nodded to indicate signs that only he could spot. “There was magic at work, too. The walls of the ravine have been melted by heat. You see? Someone turned the place into an oven.”

  “Hey, Dancer in the Shadows!” Kli-Kli had come across to me. “What are you thinking about?”

  “I thought I asked you not to call me that,” I growled at the goblin, but the little shit didn’t bat an eyelid.

  Only now he wasn’t looking at me, but at the road.

  “Harold,” Kli-Kli said in a very grave tone of voice, “as Loudmouth says, we’re up the backside now. All the way up. They’ve outflanked us!”

  And so saying, the goblin went dashing back, yelling as if a giant had stepped on his favorite little bell on his cap. I went dashing after the jester, afraid that he might have lost his mind. Those green creatures are very hard to understand, especially when they’re in such a panicky state.

  When they heard Kli-Kli’s shouts, everyone started staring at him in bewilderment. At least, the expressions on Alistan’s and Egrassa’s faces reflected the same thought that I had had—the jester must have gone insane.

  Meanwhile the king’s jester reached them and began performing something like a dance by a flea high from smoking charm-weed, at the same time yelling all the while that Tomcat had been right about the cloud.

  When I reached him, he was still howling, and the others were staring at him as if he had the plague.

  “Harold!” Kli-Kli cried, turning to me. “You listen to me at least! The cloud!”

  “What cloud, my friend?” I asked in the most ingratiating voice I could manage, the way they talk to crazy people.

  “Open your eyes and look! Not at me, you idiot! At the sky!”

  Arguing with someone who’s sick in the head is more trouble than it’s worth and so, under the goblin’s keen gaze, I started looking at the rain clouds. Several other members of the group followed my example. But neither they nor I could see anything frightening.

  Just the same clouds as an hour earlier: gray, unbroken, spewing rain down onto the ground.

  “Mmm . . . They all look the same to me.”

  “That one there!” said Tomcat, pointing way off into the distance with one finger.

  In response there was a flash of lightning on the horizon and immediately one of the clouds was lit up for an instant with purple fire.

  Hallas swore quietly.

  “I was hoping I could be wrong,” Tomcat said bitterly.

  The thing that the storm created by the Nameless One’s minions had been hiding had finally reached us, even though it had been obliged to make a substantial detour along the way.

  “Sagra save us!”

  “What is that rotten garbage, Tomcat?”

  “Everyone shut up!” Markauz roared above the others’ howls and questions. “Tomcat, can you do anything about this?”

  “No.”

  “Lady Miralissa, Tresh Egrassa?”

  “We’ll try.”

  Miralissa and Egrassa started drawing something on the soaking wet ground—a cross between an octopus and a star with a hundred light beam tenctacles. The elfess whispered words rapidly. The lines of the form on the ground began pulsating with yellow flame.

  I was really hoping that their shamanism would help us. Ell stood in front of the two working the magic, almost on the very edge of the precipice, holding his bow at the ready, although I didn’t think arrows would be effective against magic. The others, including me, crowded together behind the elves and observed the approaching danger.

  It was making straight for us at full speed. Somewhere inside that seething cloud, at its very center, a purple flame was being kindled, and the cloud was moving against the wind with only one goal in mind—to overtake us.

  Miralissa stopped whispering and began singing in orcish. Every word seemed to hang in the air like a tiny, jingling bell, vibrating and humming, its sound reflected in the yellow shape drawn on the ground.

  “What are those repulsive beasts?” Loudmouth gasped.

  He was as white as chalk, and I’m sure that right then my face didn’t look much better, either.

  A winged creature dived down out of the cloud. Then another, and another.

  And then there were ten of the long creatures with broad wings circling in a predatory dance, disappearing into the purple glow and then reemerging from it. Their flight was smooth and spellbinding, but just then I didn’t particularly feel like admiring the creatures’ fluent grace.

  “What is that, may an ice worm freeze my giblets?” Honeycomb whispered, clutching his useless ogre hammer desperately in both hands.

  “I don’t know!” said Tomcat, staring fixedly at the creatures.

  They were small and rapacious, absolutely unlike anything else. Their oily skin had a purple shimmer to it. And that was what I disliked the most.

  “S’alai’yaga kh’tar agr t’khkkhanng!” Miralissa shouted out the final words of the spell.

  Something yellow spurted out of the drawing on the ground and went shooting off toward the magic cloud with the speed of one of the gnomes’ cannonballs.

  Whatever it was, along the way it grew until it reached the size of a small house.

  The yellow met the purple and burst straight into the body of the cloud, which shuddered as if it were a living being, and recoiled. There was a blinding flash inside it.

  And that was all.

  The cloud had eaten the elves’ creation.

  The magical purple glow with those creatures dancing in a circle stopped right above our heads. Then the circle broke up and the creatures attacked.

  Six of the ten flyers soared past high above our heads and four dived headlong at us, moving so rapidly that we barely managed to react in time.

  A bowstring twanged as Ell fired at the first creature. He hit the mark, but the arrow passed straight through the flyer and disappeared, without causing our enemy any harm.

  The elf just barely managed to jump out of the way of his attacker, saved only by his natural agility. The monster rushed past him, skimming the top of the grass with its belly and shrieking in disappointment, then began gaining height again and joined the other six circling above the cloud.


  “Look out!”

  Deler fell to the ground and pulled down Hallas, who was brandishing his mattock belligerently, by the legs. The gnome gave a howl of protest as he fell facedown in a puddle and the second creature zipped past just above his head and then followed its predecessor back up into the sky.

  The two other creatures attacked in unison, flying down simultaneously and coming straight at us, choosing their victims on the way. Everybody went dashing in all directions like quail facing an attack by a hawk, but the creatures had picked out their targets. The first was Tomcat, who froze at the very edge of the steep slope, and the second was me.

  Click!

  In the hourglass of the gods, time slowed almost to a complete standstill. I saw the purple creature fly-ing slow-ly toward me. Now I was able to get a look at its face. And it was a genuine human face, the face of a man who was not yet old, frozen so that it looked like a death mask.

  Miralissa shouted something to us, but I couldn’t hear, my gaze was riveted to approaching death. Somehow I knew that after an encounter with this thing, I would not see Sagra, there would be neither light nor darkness, but total, all-consuming nothingness, from which there would be no return.

  Tomcat waved his hand slowly and a solitary blue spark flew out of his fingers. A desperate attempt to use something from the arsenal of weapons that the magician who never finished his training had been saving for a day like this. The spark touched the creature’s face, tearing open the skin and the flesh to reveal the skull, but the creature felt no pain, it probably didn’t even know what pain was, and it went crashing into its victim with a howl of triumph. In an instant it passed straight through the Wild Heart’s body like a small cloud of purple mist and then soared back up to the big cloud, while Tomcat, his face completely drained of blood, began slowly tumbling over onto his side.

  “Gaaaarret!” The jester’s shout reached me through the dense jelly of time, and I looked back at the second creature.

  “This is the end!” The absurd thought flashed through my head.

  I realized I’d hesitated for too long. The creature was approaching very rapidly, and I still hadn’t jumped aside to get out of its way.

  “I’ll help,” a painfully familiar voice whispered inside my head.

  And then the agony came. Hellish, unbelievable pain. My insides were seared with fire, something boiled and seethed up inside me . . . then it broke out and smashed silently into the creature, tossing me aside at the same time.

  A piercing shriek.

  The winged creature disintegrated like fog in the face of a hurricane.

  The ground came rushing up to meet me.

  Click! And time started speeding up again.

  The impact of my landing knocked almost all the air out of my lungs. I was left cross-eyed from pain and wheezing hoarsely as I strained to restore my breathing. On both sides hands grabbed me by the elbows, lifted me up, and tried to set me on my feet, but my legs were too soft, as if I’d drunk too much young wine. Honeycomb swore as he and Loudmouth began dragging me away from the edge of the ravine.

  “Valder! You son of a bitch,” I croaked out loud. “You promised to leave me alone!”

  Naturally, no one replied. The magician had gone into hiding, and I couldn’t sense him anymore. Only when things had got too hot, had he surfaced out of the depths of my own self and saved my skin.

  “Who’s that he’s talking to?” Loudmouth asked warily. “Are you sure that brute didn’t touch him?”

  “I’m certain!”

  Meanwhile the other nine creatures were circling again, with the clear intention of continuing the attack. The speed of their roundelay continually increased until the creatures fused into a single blurred circle that burst like a soap bubble and they came diving down toward us.

  “Curses!” Loudmouth let go of me and pulled out his sword.

  With no support, I tumbled to the ground, overwhelmed by a sudden wave of weakness.

  Along the entire line of the edge of the ravine the air suddenly trembled and vague shadows began appearing—human silhouettes armed with bows. With every heartbeat they became more clearly defined.

  “Do you see that?” Honeycomb whispered, stunned.

  I gave a bemused nod, but I don’t think he noticed.

  The purple creatures were still falling from the sky. In real time no more than two seconds had gone by, but it seemed like an eternity to us.

  A voice rang out above the ravine choked with rain.

  “At the enemy! Choose your target! Correction half a finger to the right! Fire, you whores!”

  The gray shadows of arrows went soaring up into the sky to meet the death that was diving down at us. With a scream of horror and disappointment, the flyers broke apart, dissolving into the air, and the purple cloud groaned.

  “Together, fire!”

  I had heard that voice before somewhere a long, long time ago, probably in a former life or, perhaps, in a dream.

  We couldn’t hear the twang of the bowstrings or the flight of the arrows. There was only the rain rustling on the ground and the cloud constantly groaning like an expiring ghost. The flight of transparent arrows bit into its belly, leaving behind huge ragged holes.

  The loud, lamenting wail of a doomed creature rolled on and on above the earth, farther and farther . . . I put my hands over my ears, the sound was so loud and so terrible. I think they must have heard it even in Djashla.

  The phantoms fired a third time and the cloud flared up as bright as the sun, flooding the surrounding region with purple light. In less than a minute I had collapsed from exhaustion and been deafened and blinded. There was nothing left to do except to curl up in a ball and try to emerge from this appalling nightmare.

  When I came round, it was all over. There were no more purple storm clouds in the sky, the phantoms had disappeared as if I had simply dreamed them, and even the rain had stopped. The clouds had disappeared, giving way once again to a clear blue sky. The sun was shining straight into my eyes, but the former suffocating heat had been replaced by warm summer weather.

  I tried moving first one arm, then the other, and then tried my legs. I seemed to be alive. Squinting downward, I saw that I was lying on a blanket and someone’s considerate hand had covered me with another one.

  “Welcome back,” a voice said above my head, and then Uncle’s bearded, smiling face appeared in my field of view. “So you’re awake now? We were thinking of singing you the funeral song of forgiveness.”

  I cleared my throat and tried to sit up. I managed it without any difficulty, which meant that I was already back to normal after the piece of magic that Valder had worked. Once again I tried mentally summoning the archmagician who had swapped the Forbidden Territory for a life inside my head. But as always, it didn’t work. The magician had either hidden himself away and didn’t want to answer or he had simply disappeared.

  “How long have I been lying here?” It was evening when those purple flyers attacked us and now, if the gods hadn’t changed all the rules while I was out of it, it was early morning.

  “A little while,” said Alistan, walking up to me.

  “How long exactly?” I persisted.

  “A little over a day.”

  Not bad going.

  “How are you feeling?” Miralissa had come over with the count and now she put her hand on my forehead. Her skin was dry and her palm was hot.

  “I seem to be in good shape. What happened?”

  “We should ask you that,” said Alistan. “What happened at the edge of the ravine, thief?”

  “I don’t know.” I frowned. “I can’t remember.”

  “Well try, Harold.” Markauz’s voice had an ingratiating tone to it and he even forgot to call me thief. “It’s very important.”

  The entire group looked at me expectantly.

  “First those creatures were flying at us, then Tomcat did something, but it didn’t help, then I saw one of them getting close to me, and then something happ
ened.”

  “Something?” Miralissa echoed, raising one eyebrow in surprise. “Do you really not know what happened?”

  “I really don’t,” I said without the slightest twinge of conscience.

  I genuinely didn’t know what the archmagician had done to kill the flyer and toss me out of its path. So I hardly had to lie at all.

  “In the hundredth part of a second someone created an attack spell of such great power that I thought my hair would burst into flames! Only a very experienced magician is capable of doing that.”

  Uh-huh. Someone like my friend Valder.

  “Well, it definitely wasn’t me who did it.”

  “Naturally,” Alistan said coolly. “But we’d like to know who did.”

  I shrugged.

  “And the phantoms? Who, I mean, what were they?”

  “They’re the spirits of the men whose bones lie on this side of the ravine,” I said. “The soldiers of the Dog Swallows Brigade returned to our world when they sensed the shamanic magic at work.”

  Miralissa kept her pensive gaze fixed on me. I think she knew perfectly well that I wasn’t telling her everything, but for some reason she didn’t try to shake the truth out of me right there and then.

  “What the Nameless One’s shamans created could have awoken the spirits of the fallen.”

  “And what happened to that cloud?” I asked.

  “It disappeared.”

  “And Tomcat?”

  Everyone turned their eyes away.

  “He’s dead, Harold,” Uncle answered eventually.

  “What happened?” Somehow I couldn’t believe in the death of the platoon’s tracker.

  “That creature, whatever it was, passed through him and killed him. That’s all we know. Are you fit to sit in the saddle, thief?” asked Alistan.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. We’ve lost a day and we need to get out onto the highway. Is everything ready, Uncle?”

  “Of course, captain,” the sergeant of the Wild Hearts said with a nod.

  “Get up, Harold, we need to see a soldier off on his last journey.”