“Are you sure of what you’re doing?” I asked her cautiously.
“I’ve never been so sure of anything, Dancer. Of course, it’s not the Hornets of Vengeance, but I don’t think they’ll like the Hammer of Dust much better.”
“How many of them are there?”
“The same number as attacked us. Only seventeen.”
“We were attacked by seventeen orcs?”
“And five of their grun dogs. Didn’t you notice? If not for Egrassa and his bow, they’d have us given a far worse mauling.”
“Listen to me,” said Alistan Markauz, suddenly breaking his silence. “We don’t need to give battle now. Kli-Kli, catch!”
He threw something small to the gobliness and she caught it deftly. It turned out to be a silver ring with the count’s personal crest.
“Milord, don’t!” she cried out in fright.
“I must, jester, it’s your only chance. If you get back, give it to my son.”
“What’s going on?” asked Mumr, not understanding a thing.
He wasn’t the only one who didn’t understand. Not everyone’s as bright as Kli-Kli and Eel.
“Are you sure?” the Garrakian asked. “Perhaps I should go?”
“I’m sure,” replied the captain of the royal guard. “The shaman knew, that’s why he gave the thing to me. I’ll try to lead them as far away from you as I can. Egrassa, lead the unit on!”
“Don’t worry, milord, I’ll lead them all the way to Avendoom,” the dark elf said with a solemn nod. “Will you take the krasta? You’ll be able to hold out longer with it.”
“No, I’m used to a sword. Harold!”
“Yes, milord?” For some reason my mouth had gone dry.
“Give the Horn to Artsivus so that he can drive that snake back into the snow. If you don’t, be sure I’ll get you, even from the next world!”
I just nodded. The count took Glo-Glo’s gift and squeezed the lump of earth in his fist. Our phantom doubles appeared out of thin air. Milord Alistan swung round and ran off to the west without looking back. Our doubles followed him, leaving perfectly real tracks on the ground.
“Egrassa, we have to hurry. Glo-Glo’s spell won’t last forever; we’ll soon start leaving tracks again.”
“You’re right, Kli-Kli. Harold. Mumr! Pick up the gnome!”
* * *
The sound of the horns had faded away a long time ago, but we kept on running and running. I had a terrible empty feeling—we were only alive because Milord Alistan had led the orcs away from us. I realized in my mind that none of us would ever see the count again, at least, not in this life … but hope was still glimmering somewhere in my heart. Maybe he’d manage to outwit the orcs and then catch up with us?
“Until I see his body, I shall believe milord is still alive,” said Kli-Kli in a quiet voice as she ran beside me. She might have been reading my thoughts. “What am I going to say to the king?”
Her question was left unanswered.
“We have to stop,” Mumr panted. “His wound’s started bleeding again.”
I squinted at Hallas. Yes, blood was oozing from under the bandage.
“Egrassa! Eel!” Kli-Kli called to the warriors ahead of us. “Stop.”
“This isn’t the time.”
“If we don’t stop the bleeding, Hallas will die!”
“All right, but do it quickly. The hunting units have lost our trail, but that’s only a brief respite.”
We put Hallas down on the carpet of autumn leaves and Kli-Kli and Eel started attending to the wounded gnome.
“Harold, Mumr, one moment,” the elf called to us. “I’ll stand guard, and you get two long, strong poles. While we have time, we’ll try to make a stretcher.”
“We need more than just two poles, Tresh Egrassa.”
“I know. We’ll tie drokr cloaks between them. The material should take the weight. Don’t waste any time, we have almost none left.”
Mumr took Hallas’s mattock off his belt, put it beside the krasta, and picked up his two-handed sword. It didn’t take long to find what the elf wanted. Lamplighter cut down two young trees with his bidenhander, then chopped off their branches, and we were left holding two poles that we carried back to the spot where Kli-Kli was still looking after the gnome. With the elfin cloaks and the two poles we made a pretty good stretcher and then put Hallas on it.
“How is he?” I asked Kli-Kli.
“In a bad way. If only Miralissa was here.…”
“Miralissa’s gone,” Egrassa snapped ruthlessly. “Put your hope in the gods, not the dead. The gnome’s life is in the hands of the gods. Eel, let’s go.”
And now the gnome was carried by the elf and the Garrakian. Kli-Kli led the way and Lamplighter and I followed the stretcher. An hour later I took Eel’s place and Mumr replaced Egrassa. It was a lot more convenient carrying Hallas this way than in our arms. We moved faster, especially when Kli-Kli led us out onto a wide animal track that ran due north.
During the afternoon a dank autumn drizzle started to fall, and I had to cover Hallas with my cloak—I still had the jacket, and that was fine. Now our substantially reduced group was led on by Egrassa. Kli-Kli, freed from her honorable duties as guide, kept getting under our feet and checking on Lucky’s condition. Sometimes the gnome groaned, and the gobliness took hold of his hand and started whispering quietly to herself.
When the wounded gnome quieted down, Kli-Kli walked along beside him, occasionally glancing back. She was clearly hoping Milord Alistan would come back, just as I was. Kli-Kli noticed my fleeting glance.
“The mist’s thinning out.”
“Yes, a bit,” I agreed. “Probably because of the rain.”
The gobliness snorted quietly at that, but she didn’t say anything.
“How long will it take us to walk through the Golden Forest?”
“If Hallas lives, a week and a half, or maybe even longer. If…” She paused. “If he doesn’t live, a week.”
Such were the facts of life—the wounded gnome was slowing us down. Of course, abandoning Hallas was out of the question, but … Egrassa could decide to do it if we were really up against it. If he had to choose between his duty as a comrade and his duty to all the rest of the world, I was sure the elf would choose what he saw as the lesser evil, and Eel might not like that at all. I tried not to think what would happen then.
We walked on through the cold rainy forest for two hours. I thanked the gods that this was the south of Valiostr. In the north of the kingdom the first ground frosts should have started some time ago, and in the morning the puddles were probably covered with a thin crust of ice. I hoped we could get out of Zagraba before the start of November, when it would be really cold and uncomfortable.
Hallas wasn’t groaning any longer. His face was almost the same color as the snow in the barren wastes of the Lonely Giant. Neither Kli-Kli nor Egrassa could do anything to help the gnome. We had all known for a long time that Hallas wouldn’t survive the night, but we stubbornly carried the stretcher, as if we were trying to overtake death itself.
Bo-oom! Boo-oom! Boo-oom! Boo-oom! Boo-oom!
“Orcs! Very close,” Kli-Kli gasped, snatching out her knives.
Ah, darkness! The rumble of the orcs’ drums seemed to be coming from behind those golden-leafs over there. Close. Very close. Egrassa did his familiar trick of listening to the ground. When the elf got to his feet, the expression on his face promised nothing good.
“The Firstborn are no more than a fifteen-minute run away. And there are many of them.”
“How many?” I said, asking the question that was on everybody’s minds.
“More than forty. We are on the land of the Grun Ear-Cutters now.”
Lamplighter uttered a picturesque description of the mothers of all orcs. Nobody needed to be told that we couldn’t hold out against that many of them. Fifteen would have been enough to dispatch us into the light. We were too tired after all this running through Zagraba without a break.
“We need a clearing!” Kli-Kli said suddenly. “Egrassa, I need a large clearing!”
“What have you got in mind?”
“I’ve prepared the Hammer of Dust, all I still have to do is draw the activating rune. The spell is our only chance of holding out now. For it to work properly, there shouldn’t be any trees around. We need a clearing, a big one if possible.”
“Are you sure of your spell?”
“May the forest spirits take me, I am! This time you’ll have to trust me. It’s the spell or your swords! I’d put my money on the spell.”
“We’ll do it your way. A clearing, you say?”
The drums were rumbling like demons’ hearts. Kli-Kli ran on ahead, and the four of us carried the stretcher.
“Stop!” Egrassa barked. “Off the path! To the left!”
I didn’t know what the elf had sensed there, but the gobliness immediately did as he said and dashed into a dense fir thicket.
“Set him down!” Egrassa ordered.
We put the stretcher on the ground and the Garrakian grunted as he picked the gnome up in his arms.
“Forward! Get the branches out of the way!”
Egrassa reached for his s’kash, but I handed him the krasta. The Gray One’s magical spear cleared the branches away as if they were blades of grass, and the elf easily cut us a path through the thick fir grove, without bothering at all about the orcs finding our trail. They’d find us in any case.
Boo-oom! Boo-oom! Boo-om!
The fir grove came to an end, and we emerged into a large black clearing veiled in trembling mist.
“How did you know?” Lamplighter blurted out.
“I smelt it,” said the elf, and suddenly smiled. “I think Kli-Kli did, too. There’s been a fire here. Look, the trees are scorched.”
Black mud born from the meeting of rain, ash, and soil squelched under my boots. It was slippery, which meant that fighting would be difficult. When we stopped in the middle of the clearing, the trees surrounding it seemed like black phantoms hiding in the mist. We couldn’t see a thing. Mumr put a cloak on the ground and Eel laid Hallas on it.
“When it starts, stand behind me and don’t move forward, until I say so. All right?” Kli-Kli asked us as she hastily used her finger to draw something in the mud that looked like a fat caterpillar with little wings.
“All right. When you finish, go over to Hallas and stay there,” said Egrassa, changing the string on his terrible bow. “Eel, you cover me as well as you can. Mumr, Harold, take the flanks. Don’t move forward, thief.”
“I wouldn’t think of it,” I answered him hoarsely.
Boo-oom! Boo-oom! Boo-oom! Boo-oom!
“They’re close. Now’s the time to start praying.”
“This isn’t a very good time that you’ve chosen. Especially for magic like that.”
The clear young voice from behind our backs came as a complete surprise. For a moment it even seemed to drown out the rumbling of the drums. Egrassa swung round sharply, with an arrow poised to go flying from the string of his bow. Eel’s “brother” and “sister” rustled out of their scabbards, the bidenhander circled round above Lamplighter’s head. Kli-Kli looked up from her drawing and gave a quiet gasp. We had been taken by surprise in the most blatant manner possible, and the sensitive goblin and experienced elf hadn’t sensed a thing.
When I saw the speaker, I was amazed. I was expecting anything at all, up to and including a h’san’kor riding a bubblebelly, but not four young girls, not in this place.… This was absolutely absurd!
There were four of them and they all looked very much like each other. Like sisters. A thought flashed through my mind: How could four twelve-year-old girls have come so far into the forest, and what were their parents thinking of?
They were just children. Not very tall, with short black hair soaked by the rain. Their eyes were large and round, almost black. The strangers had a zigzag line painted in red on their left cheeks—it looked very much like a bolt of lightning. In fact, only three of the girls had a single lightning bolt. The fourth, who had spoken to us, had lightning bolts on both cheeks and two thin red lines drawn under her eyes.
The little girls were dressed in jackets of leather, wool, and fur. Short skirts made out of long strips of leather. No shoes. They clearly weren’t bothered in the slightest by the autumnal chill or the rain. But I would certainly have thought twice before wandering about barefoot in this weather.
The only jewelry they had were strings of carnelian beads and bracelets. And their only weapons were straight daggers with broad blades narrowing to a fine point.
Egrassa lowered his bow and unexpectedly went down on one knee. Kli-Kli bowed very respectfully indeed. Eel, Lamplighter, and I looked rather surprised. Well, never mind Kli-Kli, but for an elf of a royal family to bow the knee before a bunch of little girls! This really was amazing!
“The son of the House of the Black Rose greets the Daughters of the Forest!” Egrassa declared.
I gaped wide-eyed, unable to believe it.
The Daughters of the Forest! That was what the elves and the orcs called the dryads. Was this really yet another legend of Zagraba standing right here in front of me?
All sorts of things were said about the dryads, but very few men had ever met the Daughters of the Forest, and not even the elves, orcs, and goblins were very far ahead of us when it came to that. Those who had the blood of Zagraba flowing in their veins were never quick to reveal themselves to others’ eyes.
The elves and orcs regard themselves as pretty much the masters of Zagraba, but there are many other inhabitants of the forest kingdom. The dryads are really part of the forest, and they are the ones who rule it. They merely tolerate the presence of others in their forest, and the young races understand this and try not to annoy them. Even the proud and intolerant orcs bow their heads to the Daughters of the Forest.
At least, that’s what they say. The dryads weren’t interested in squabbles between the orcs and the elves until they started to cause damage to the forest. And they were even less interested in men. Dryads were concerned with the life of Zagraba itself. They took care of the forest and helped it, from the moths and the broods of mice to the families of oburs and the groves of golden-leafs.
And I had imagined all sorts of things, but not that they would look so much like ordinary human girls.
“The Black Moon…,” said the dryad standing in front of the others, and laughed. “Proud as the flame and passionate as the water.” This was a reference to the House of the Black Flame and the House of Black Water. “What is your name, elf?”
“Egrassa, madam. I am at your service.”
“At our service? We have no need of anyone’s services. The forest helps us. But I am forgetting my manners, forgive me. My name is Babbling Brook,” said the little girl, looking at the elf with a serious expression.
He bowed his head even lower.
“We are pleased to meet the Mistress,” Kli-Kli squeaked in a shrill voice.
The drums were rumbling behind us, and Mumr couldn’t help looking round. Babbling Brook noticed this and said, “Do not be afraid, man. We have a little time before what has been predestined happens. Arise, elf. It is not fitting for a king to kneel, even before the Mistress.”
“Madam is mistaken, I am no king,” Egrassa said guardedly, rising from his knees.
“Madam is merely running ahead of events,” the dryad replied, imitating the elf’s tone. “I am looking into the future, although I cannot see very much. Everything is covered in ripples because that man carries a blizzard within him.”
Babbling Brook looked at me. “You took something from the cradle of the dead that should not have been taken, and now it is in my forest. Before, when the elves had it, I closed my eyes to the matter, but now, when its power is failing, I do not wish to see Zagraba destroyed. You must leave the forest, and go as quickly as possible.”
“Believe me, my lady,” Kli-Kli replied meekly. “
That is what we wish. We have not the slightest desire to harm the forest.”
“As is clear from the fact that you were about to work a battle spell capable of reducing a grove of golden-leafs to splinters,” said Babbling Brook, shaking her head, but, fortunately for Kli-Kli, none of our group paid any attention to the Mistress’s words. “I see your comrade is injured.”
“Orcs.”
“Orcs.” She shook her head sadly. “A flinny told me what was happening, but I was not able to come any sooner. Sunpatch will attend to your friend.”
One of her three companions went to the injured man and leaned down over him.
I thought about the flinny. The little lad had promised to warn those who should be warned, but how could I have guessed that he meant the dryads?
The drums kept rumbling.
* * *
“The orcs are proud and stubborn,” Babbling Brook sighed. “The Horn has blinded them. They refused to listen to me and leave the artifact to its fate.”
“The orcs dared to disobey?” Kli-Kli whispered in horror. “But—”
“And they are coming here to take what you have in your possession,” the Mistress declared in a severe tone.
“But surely madam will not allow the Firstborn to take possession of the Horn?” Kli-Kli squealed plaintively.
“I will not allow it, although I would have preferred if it had never left the dark depths of the Cradle of the Dead. The Firstborn have made their choice, and I have made mine. The forest stands above all other things, and I shall help you leave Zagraba.”
“Please pardon me for interrupting. I mean no harm by it, I’m only a simple man,” Lamplighter said slowly. “But how can four little girls stop the Firstborn?”
Kli-Kli hissed at this sacrilege, but the dryad only smiled sadly. “Where steel cannot help, the forest will, man.”
There was a deafening smashing and cracking sound from behind the trees, and Eel snatched his two blades out again.
“Put away your weapons!” one of the dryads told the Garrakian in a cold voice.
Eel cast a questioning glance at the elf. Egrassa nodded gently, keeping his eyes fixed on the trees. Something big was crashing its way through the forest toward us. Babbling Brook’s lips were set in a mysterious smile. The bushes at the edge of the clearing swayed and collapsed with a crack. Immense shadows loomed up out of the mist.
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