A stillness fell and, for a moment, we looked in wonder at our timely savior. He, quite calm and still, looked back. His age was hard to guess. I might have said something over forty, though his movements had the ease and vigor of a younger man. He drew the hood back from his head and his hair, which was fair, spilled out over his shoulders. His skin was also fair, but weathered and tanned by the sun. His eyes were an ice blue, startling and intelligent. His countenance, though severe as Mithos’s, flickered into a smile and he bowed politely.
“It seems my finding you was fortuitous,” he said in a clear and faintly musical voice. “There are dark creatures abroad these days.”
There was a pause, then Orgos spoke. “I am Orgos, from Thrusia, and I offer our thanks for your help. As you can see, however, we have all suffered some hurt and Mithos, our leader, needs particular attention.”
“Forgive me,” said the stranger. “I am Sorrail of Phasdreille, a watcher of the paths. I first observed you an hour before sundown. I would have come to you earlier, but I was unsure of your allegiances. Your appearances are, shall we say, misleading.”
“Allegiance to who?” asked Orgos. “We are travelers in this land and know little of its business.”
“Indeed,” said Sorrail, “you must have come from far afield not to know what stirs in the mountains here. But come, bind your wounds and rest. I must chase these creatures of foulness to earth. I will return at first light to guide you.”
So saying, he took from inside his habit a leather satchel full of bandages and ointments. These he gave to Orgos and, without further comment, turned on his heel and left us, taking his strange spear with him.
“Helpful chap,” I remarked. This was a laughable attempt to make light of our brush with being steak (heavily marbled in my case). No one, myself included, was taken in for a moment.
There was another long silence and Orgos got to work on Mithos. Renthrette, whose injury was not so bad that she could not use her hands, took another roll of bandage and squatted beside me.
“Let me see your wound,” she said.
I removed the sodden rag of fabric about my wrist and her face darkened.
“I can bind it for now, but this needs more expert attention.”
I winced as she began to wind the fabric about my arm, but said nothing. The dressing was cool and slightly moist and gave off a sweet scent like honey and rose petals. Renthrette kept her eyes on her work but, as if considering the question even as she spoke, said, “Why did you throw that rock? This could have been avoided.”
“You have got to be joking,” I said. “They came in here after us.”
“They were beasts hunting. They might not have attacked,” she answered.
“True,” said Orgos from where he was examining Mithos, “but they did, and I don’t know why. There was something strange about these creatures, and never have I heard of bears and wolves hunting together so deliberately. These were no ordinary animals. Perhaps, as our new friend said, there are dark creatures abroad.”
Renthrette fell silent, thoughtful. I spoke up. “So what the hell were they? They sure looked like animals to me. Wolves and a bear. No question, no mystery.”
Orgos looked at me, and he could see that I was looking for agreement that would silence my own doubts. “Have you ever seen bears or wolves of that size?” he asked.
“Clearly they get a lot to eat,” I remarked, considering how close we had come to being just another meal on the run.
“Their voices,” gasped Mithos. We all turned to look at him. He was pale and still bleeding heavily. His words came with a struggle that clearly filled Orgos with alarm, and the feeling spread to Renthrette. “I have not heard . . .” Mithos managed. “I have never heard animal voices so . . . so coherent. . . . So much . . . like . . . speech.”
“Quiet,” said Orgos gently. “Lie still.”
But Mithos was right. It made no sense, but I had had the same feeling about the noises the beasts had made to each other. It was something similar to that deliberation with which they moved and the glimmer in their eyes. It wasn’t just watchful, and it wasn’t just hungry. Indeed, it wasn’t animal at all. There was a keenness there that had made me catch my breath. It was like you could see a mind through those eyes, a mind that was working, processing. It was an alarming sensation, and though I wanted to put it down to never having been this close to a wolf before, I knew that that wasn’t it. I have seen the eyes of beasts in cages before, and I have looked into the faces of dogs and cats and cattle and pigs, and what I have always seen is a blankness that tells of instinct: a gateway not into mind but into body, the creature’s impulses for food and self-protection. This was different. In the eyes of those wolves there had been thought.
Except, of course, that there couldn’t have been.
Gradually, and with some effort, the questions slipped from our minds and we grew quiet, finding our own ways into rest, even into sleep. When I woke there was a soft light in the cave and, for a moment, before the pain of my wound spiked through my wrist like a pickaxe, there was a sense of calm and contentment. The morning was fair and cold and I woke slowly, the corpses of great wolves gradually painting the night’s events as if they had been experienced by someone else.
We were sharing out the last of our sparse rations when Sorrail returned. He had been walking most of the night but still seemed a good deal fresher than I felt. Smiling, he drew a pair of rabbits from his satchel and laid them on the ground by the fire.
“Breakfast,” he said. “Not much, I’m afraid, but you need to restore your strength.”
He inspected our wounds and, though he paused long over my wrist and longer over Mithos’s side, he seemed satisfied. “We will need to carry him to the rest house,” he said, “but it is not far and the day is mild as yet. You sir, can you walk?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Good. It is unfortunate that your horse perished, but we can make a sling of the blankets and fasten them to my spear. It is a sturdy weapon and will bear his weight, I think.”
“And it’s magic,” I said. “Orgos has one of those.”
Sorrail gave me a swift glance, and there was something hard and unreadable in his eyes.
“Is it a secret?” I said. “I won’t say anything.”
He blinked, then said, “Orgos, you and I must carry Mithos between us. Perhaps the lady could roast us that brace of conies before we set out?”
So that was that. Sorrail told us what to do and we did it. He was a politely straightforward fellow, but he was companionable enough so long as you didn’t ask about his spear. I would never have dared presume to tell Renthrette to do anything as obviously “feminine” as cook, though she did it often enough. In this case, however, she set about skinning and preparing the meat without the slightest suggestion of having taken offense. In just over an hour we had dined and were ready to set out.
Sorrail said little as we made our way along the cinder path. His eyes were always scouring the crags and embankments and he barely responded to my questions, and then only obliquely. Like Mithos, he seemed to ration his words, as if there may not be enough to last him till the end of the week. He said that these were the Violet Mountains and that we were “many leagues” from the northernmost reaches of Thrusia. I wasn’t certain what a league was, exactly, but it didn’t sound promising, and despite his words I wondered if he had ever even heard of Stavis or Thrusia, since he clearly knew nothing about either. Given the fact that he styled himself a wanderer, this was not a good sign. I pressed him for names for this land, but he only repeated absently that these were the Violet Mountains and that beyond them lay the White City. Just when I was getting used to the idea that names had been shelved in favor of colors round here, he added that the White City was properly called Phasdreille.
He spoke like someone in a play: an old play, full of larger-than-life heroes. It was odd. I’d spoken lines like that, had even written a few. But the closest I had come to hearing
them delivered as actual speech in real life was listening to Mithos and Orgos encouraging me to do my duty or some other damned thing, and neither of them came close to this character. I wanted to ask him if he was for real, or if he was rehearsing a part or something, but he also had Mithos and Orgos’s demeanor, which didn’t encourage questions, much less mockery. I risked a sort of smirk at him after he had made some remark about Phasdreille being “fairest of the cities of light” to suggest he was overdoing it a bit, but he just stared at me.
“What about the creatures we fought last night?” I asked, figuring that I may as well play along. “What were they?”
“It is better not to speak of such things,” said Sorrail, his eyes meeting mine for the first time. “The enemy is abroad and his shapes are many. This land is full of his spies. We will talk of this in more secure surroundings, not before.”
Right you are, squire, I thought. You stay in your heroic tale and I’ll ignore it as best I can. Now that I thought about it, if no one mentioned our little encounter with those . . . whatever they were till we were back in Stavis, I’d be positively ecstatic.
So Sorrail strode on, Mithos slung between him and Orgos, his eyes seeking out every stump of tree or boulder that could be hiding the servants of this nebulous “enemy.” Renthrette brought up the rear, a good twenty yards back, her sword drawn. On the pretext of getting a stone from my shoe, I dropped back. Though she loitered as long as she could, she eventually caught up.
“Listen,” I said, dropping my eyes, “about last night . . .”
“Forget it,” she said, picking up the pace a little.
“No, I mean,” I began, though I wasn’t sure what I did mean. She kept walking and I, after a pause to gather resolution, scampered after her like a puppy and blurted, “I mean, I’m sorry.”
She stopped and turned to me. “I said, forget it,” she said.
“I was well out of line,” I persisted, “and I’m sorry.”
It was a relief to say it, and I took a deep breath. She looked at me in that careful, scrutinizing way of hers, like someone picking over meat that was suspiciously under-priced, then said, “It was an honest mistake, I suppose.”
This was curious.
“Was it?” I said, uncertainly.
“I suppose. It wasn’t very clever tactically. . . .”
“What are we talking about?” I interrupted.
“I thought we were talking about you throwing the stone that nearly got us all killed,” she said. “Aren’t we?”
“No,” I gasped. “I’m saying sorry for the story by the fire last night. I thought I was being clever, you know, stringing together a few bits of information and filling in the blanks with guesswork. But I didn’t mean, you know . . .”
There was the briefest pause, a momentary hesitation on her part that was completely unreadable. “Forget it,” she said. The words were the same, but her face had frozen over like the surface of a pond, hiding whatever lay in its depths. A wall had gone up around her and, like a face seen through thick, imperfect glass, she was momentarily distorted by it: barely recognizable. Then she brushed her hair from her face and walked away.
After about an hour, the path began to descend, winding in a slow, erratic spiral down the side of a great russet peak whose stone gleamed with flecks of metal ores. Sorrail said its name was Naishiim, but it was commonly called The Armored One. I suppressed a derisive snort of laughter and stared at it to hide my grins. Absurdly melodramatic though it was, the title did seem appropriate, since the mountain had steep shoulders and a rise in the center which, at certain angles, looked like a head. It stood as a giant sentinel on the edge of the clustered range, glowering down on the path, which traced its way into a series of lower rises, sheer-sided, but mere swelling hills in comparison.
“It is good that we have passed the mountain,” said Sorrail as we paused to rest. His eyes moved from the path ahead back to the foreboding mountain. “From here on, the journey will be easier and we will be in less danger of assault. Dread creatures dwell on the upper slopes of The Armored One, and it is just as well that our journey has kept us largely at its feet. Few have passed a night on its top unscathed, and recently the place has become a haunt for still fouler beasts than those you saw last night. A company of goblins passed through here some months ago, and it is thought that they have made their home in one of its foul crevices.”
“Excuse me, what?” I stuttered, not bothering to mask my incredulity. “I think I misheard. What passed through here?”
“Goblins,” said Sorrail, his face straighter than an Empire road. “About two hundred of them, large and well equipped. The road has been barely used since.”
“No doubt,” I said, brushing aside his traffic concerns. “And what exactly do you mean by goblins? I mean, where I come from, goblins are nasty fairies or something that you tell children about to make them eat their porridge.”
“Indeed?” said Sorrail, serious as before. “I fail to see the connection.”
“I mean,” I said with a sigh at having to spell it out, “they aren’t real and never have been. They are just a barely remembered ingredient from old folktales that relied on nasty beasties running around so the good guys would have something to kill without feeling bad about it. You know what I mean? I guess, for some reason, you use the same word for something more mundane. Some large and unpleasant squirrels, perhaps, or some bad tempered beavers, or . . .”
He cut me off with a word and a stern glance that was almost offended. “These are not squirrels,” he said.
“Well, no,” I persisted, “probably not. I’m just saying that they are probably something that we call by another name. . . .”
“These are the spawn of the enemy and they are not to be made light of,” he said coldly. “They are creatures of darkness and hatred, corrupt to the core. They are like men but twisted by the evil which dwells in each of them and shows forth in their speech and their deeds, even in their very countenance. You would look upon them, Mr. Hawthorne, and despair. They are dreadful, and since they have become organized and armed, they lead the enemy against all which is true and fair in the world. You would do well to speak of them less frivolously.”
Well, that, not for the first time, was me told. I shut up and we marched on. The others did not speak and avoided my eyes when I rolled them in their direction. Goblins? What was he on? I shut up, feeling irritated, righteous, and a bit confused, and started to lag a little behind—separate enough to show my discontent, close enough to have support should I get assaulted by some shrieking hoard of mythical monsters. Mixed feelings, in other words. My brain said that this was lunacy, but I had to admit to having seen beasts that moved with human deliberation, birds that conversed, and the flash of unearthly light from a long spear.
Not long ago you didn’t believe in magic swords, either, I reminded myself.
And then there was the mystery of how we had got to this place. We had no idea where we were, after all. We could be a thousand miles away from Stavis, on a different continent entirely. Maybe the bears did talk here. Maybe there were whole cities of cats and monkeys ruled by a big blue pig.
No. It was all bollocks. Some wolves had decided that following a bear got them the scraps the bear didn’t eat. Simple as that. I could believe in flashes of power from swords and spears—just. But goblins? Come on. I’d accept lions playing poker before that. At least lions existed.
If the others questioned the fact that all semblance of reality as we knew it had been abandoned the moment we set foot in this place, they gave no indication of it. I shot Orgos an inquiring glance and pulled a comically skeptical face, mouthing “Goblins?” soundlessly. He did not respond except to give me a hard look, as loaded with dour concern as it was long. I drew closer to the rest of the company and kept my eyes open.
A couple of hundred yards farther on, a yew tree grew beside the path. It was windblown and stunted so that its limbs were twisted up as if with long anguish.
Sorrail set his foot onto one of the lowest branches, and, in seconds he was fifteen or twenty feet up, scanning the land about us. The mountain was behind us and ahead, just visible through a fine morning mist, I could make out a valley that spread wide below us. I caught my breath with surprise. So much had my attention been fixed on the slopes at our sides and rear that I had barely noticed the territory in front.
“Good,” said Sorrail. “The worst is past. After this last descent, our way becomes easier.”
He slipped easily down the tree and turned smilingly upon us. Then his head tipped slightly to one side and he became very still. I began to ask what the matter was, but he cut me off with a quick gesture of his hand. He was listening intently, his eyes squeezed shut.
So we listened, too, and, for a while, heard nothing. Then, distantly, as if carried on the breeze, we heard a low booming which I might have ignored were it not so steadily, deliberately repeated. Drums, I thought, and getting louder.
Sorrail turned on his heel and stared back the way we had come, eyes flashing hard and alert across the steep sides of the mountain. Then, after the briefest double take, his gaze rested on a point midway up one of the slopes. His face, which had been pale but full of energy, faded somehow. I turned.
Barely visible in the gray haze which slept on the armored head of Naishiim, shapes were moving. They were moving down the mountain toward us and they were moving fast. The drums were clearly audible now and, if I wasn’t mistaken, there were voices among them which chanted darkly, though I did not know the words.
“This is a most evil fortune,” gasped Sorrail, his eyes wide. “We must fly! Down the path into the valley. Fast as you can go! Run!”
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