by Rick Shelley
The Titan Mountains were closer than they had been too. They were a line across the south, individual peaks clearly visible in the foreground, higher ranges behind nearer lower ranges, ranked off into invisibility. The grefcns of mountainside trees blended away into a more distant violet. Clouds capped the higher peaks and swam in between, cuddling the mountains, obscuring them.
There wasn’t a dragon in sight. The way things had been happening lately, that was almost a surprise.
It was beautiful country. Varay has a pastoral attraction that can only be weakly imitated by any place back in the “real” world. A lot of the buffer zone is like that.
When I climbed back down to our camp, Lesh had one of his smokeless fires going and he was heating water for coffee and warming our food—real food; we hadn’t started on the packaged camping rations yet. The horses were on a picket line with room to graze and a chance to get at drinking water. The pack frames were still on our extra horses, but their loads had been taken off and arranged on a flat rock away from the water. The elf’s head was perched there as well, and he was scowling.
“What’s your gripe now?” I asked.
“You’re wasting time.”
“Not so much,” I said. “And since I don’t know exactly where we’re going or how long it will take to get there, I can’t decide if it’s too much. Some things have to be done immediately.”
“You’re risking everything.”
“You did your own share of stalling back at Basil. You haven’t given me much incentive to hurry, not if it ends with me going to your father’s lair.”
He shut his eyes then, his way of ending the conversation.
Xayber’s son hadn’t said anything that I hadn’t told myself at least hourly since we left Basil, following this diversion rather than jumping straight over to Thyme. Some good was coming out of it, though. The elf was showing his worry about the possibilities again. Farther along the road, I might be able to pull some advantage out of that. If I saved all of the realms of existence, I wanted to be around to enjoy them with Joy.
We ate and settled in for the night. I took the first watch, a habit. While I was on watch, I walked around the perimeter of our camp, irregularly, not like walking a fixed post. The Varayan night was no stranger to me any longer. I knew most of the dangers it might pose. I could recognize the normal sounds, the brief, soft noises of predators and prey acting out their life-and-death rituals. And after Lesh relieved me, I got right to sleep, thinking about Joy, missing her already.
When Timon woke me, near the end of the night, I felt troubled. My danger sense had perked way up, but the danger wasn’t immediate yet.
“Wake the others, quietly,” I told Timon. “Trouble.”
Dawn was still an hour away. Lesh and the others started loading our horses, slow work in the dark. I could feel the danger drawing nearer. The easy guess was that the trolls had doubled back, but I couldn’t be certain. We moved our animals back near the rock outcropping when they were ready, and where they would be as safe as possible.
“Trolls,” our elf said in a loud stage whisper. “All around, moving in like soldiers. And something else, someone else.” Eyes of Fairy: the dark was no handicap for him.
“One of your kin?” I asked.
“I think not.” He was silent for a moment. “They are close.”
I could tell that too. My danger sense was screaming. One of the things it was screaming was that if there was an elf with the trolls, Xayber’s son might try to attract him, hoping to win an easier trip back home. It might all come down to a matter of how badly he wanted to be reunited with his body.
I drew Dragon’s Death and held it out toward the edge of camp. The sword’s battle song came to my lips as always, starting softly and building. The first wave of trolls came in a solid line. As soon as all four of us were engaged fighting that bunch, more came at us from behind.
It wasn’t the sort of mad melee that my previous encounters with trolls had been. These moved as if they had someone ordering the battle, as if they had drilled extensively, and that was totally alien to the troll style. They might not have an elf behind them, but there had been somebody, sometime.
The first attacks ended. Survivors pulled back, but my danger sense got more frantic instead of less.
“They were just checking our strength,” I said, just loud enough for my companions to hear. “The next attack will be the real thing, more of them.” And the first engagement had taxed us. I looked to the sky. Dawn was closer, but there wouldn’t be enough light for accurate bow work for another twenty minutes or more, and the trolls weren’t about to give us that much time.
The second assault started.
Numbers? It’s hard to count in the middle of a fight, even if you’ve got light. I started to think that the estimate of one hundred we’d heard in Nushur couldn’t be far wrong. In any case, there were too many trolls, even for a Hero, his elf swords, and three valiant companions. We could slow them down, make their victory expensive, but there didn’t seem to be any way to beat them.
Then my danger sense hit me with an extra twist, causing me to duck to the side just in time to miss an arrow flying through the space my head had occupied just microseconds before.
12
The Titans
The itch I felt in the middle of my back had nothing to do with the extra danger sense I inherited with the title of Hero of Varay. This was something much more primitive, a feeling that somebody had me lined up in his sights. I had chain mail on, but that won’t necessarily turn an arrow. I had more experience than I wanted in the limitations of chain mail. The itch translated itself into frantic movement as I hopped around as much as the setting and the trolls permitted. Arrows in the dark didn’t sound like an archer from Nushur. There was no one in Nushur who had the eyesight of an elf.
I saw a second arrow go past me and pierce the forehead of a troll. There may have been more arrows. It wasn’t light enough that I could expect to see them but by chance or extremely close proximity. I shouted a warning to my companions. My frantic gyrations had separated me from them. An elf sword demands a lot of room, and I had moved away from Lesh and the others at the beginning of the fight, long before I felt the need to take extra evasive actions. My sword song got louder and more intricate and I started to clear a larger circle around me.
The trolls finally noticed that there was an archer involved in the fight. It seemed that each arrow found one of them, but I was slow to pick up on that clue. At first, I might have dismissed it as the inevitable consequence of there being so many more of the trolls than there were of us. But the earlier trolls, along the road … in the heat of battle, they slipped my mind far too long.
A little more light. I could see the attacking trolls and the growing stacks of their dead. I didn’t have to count on the instinctive awareness of where everyone was. My people were all on their feet, still fighting. Timon and Harkane were back to back, covering each other, moving as a unit. Lesh was off to the side, jabbing with a short spear held in his left hand and whirling a battle-ax in his right.
I finally quit my mad gyrations when it sank in that the archer was aiming at trolls and not at me. I didn’t want to make it any harder for him than I had to. I would feel foolish dying by mistake when there were so many ways to die intentionally—by someone else’s intention.
Dragon’s Death seemed almost weightless in combat, eager to move in answer to my will. I pulled more volume from the battle song as the fight went on, apparently drawing energy from the tune. The blade glowed brightly from the blood that washed it, but the sword’s glow lessened as the light of dawn increased. Drawing the second sword, the blade taken from the son of Xayber, was purely unconscious. I shifted my grip on Dragon’s Death to hold it in my right hand alone, and reached over my shoulder to draw the second weapon with my left hand. Two sword songs intertwined themselves—and I’ll never know how my throat managed both at the same time. I was whistling a duet by myself, ev
en though the elf head was also whistling the song of his sword off to the side.
I moved into the heaviest concentration of trolls, slicing left and right, propelling myself forward with the force of the swings. I’ve read accounts where the hero went through a wild melee and was then able to describe his every move in technical fencing jargon. Bull. At a time like that all you can do is make every move you can think of to keep your head on your shoulders. If you’re competent with your weapons, the moves come faster than you can think. Reflex and instinct, carefully honed by training and practice, do the job. There’s little chance of remembering every sequence afterward.
More light made better targets. When I could spare the odd nanosecond, I tried to spot the archer who was helping us. But I didn’t have any luck until the attack ended. One troll screamed a series of guttural sounds and the whole troop, those who were still able to, broke off and ran, chased by several more quick arrows. I turned and saw the archer on the next rise.
Annick.
We stared at each other, maybe sixty yards apart, for a frozen time. Before I recovered enough from the surprise to say anything, she had mounted her horse and ridden off out of sight behind the rise. I caught one more glimpse of her through the trees and she was gone.
“That was Annick,” Lesh said—as if I might have failed to recognize her.
“Either her hunting tastes have changed or elves are out of season,” I said, almost gasping the words. I was still short of breath from the fight.
So were the others. A quick inspection showed that Harkane was the only one with anything worse than scratches. He had a long gash along his right forearm, a cut that ran almost from wrist to elbow. Along the center of the slice, the wound looked dangerously deep, but the bleeding was seepage, not the gushing that would have indicated a severed artery. It was serious, but not as bad as it might have been.
“I’m going to have to sew that up,” I told Harkane after I cleaned the wound. There was a fairly complete first-aid kit in our supplies. Timon found it for me. After I gave Harkane a long swig of the local painkiller—a foul-tasting brew called something that the translation magic rendered as number—I put in several butterfly stitches to draw the sides of the wound together, then doused the cut with antiseptic again and bandaged it. There were tears at the corners of Harkane’s eyes until the number took effect, but he gritted his teeth and didn’t make a sound. As long as the wound didn’t get infected, he would be okay.
“What now, lord?” Lesh asked when I finished with Harkane and the rest of us had treated our scrapes and scratches with iodine. “Do we keep after the trolls and finish ’em?”
I looked at the bodies strewn around us.
“No, we’ve got to get on with our main job. Just make sure that all of these are really dead.” I got caught by a troll playing possum once. I didn’t want it to happen again.
Lesh grunted and set to work. It was a task that didn’t seem to bother him, and it would have bothered me to do it—I had done it before and wouldn’t hesitate to do it again if I had to, but as long as I didn’t have to, I didn’t even want to watch. Timon and I rechecked the loads on the horses to make sure that there had been no mistakes in the dark. An unbalanced load would be miserable for the horse, and if things started falling off, we might lose time or more.
Then I went over to our elf head.
“What will you do about the bowman? Who is he? I couldn’t see.” Xayber’s son was more agitated than I had seen him since our fight, and his death.
“I’m not going to do anything,” I said. “And the archer wasn’t a he, but a she. That was the niece of Baron Resler.”
“That hellbitch? His voice climbed two octaves. Annick would have been pleased to know the effect she had.
“You know of her?” I asked, trying to keep my voice flat.
“I know of the banshee. We all do.”
“She must be slipping,” I told him. “If she had spotted you, she would have slipped an arrow between your eyes just for the pleasure of it.” Xayber’s son closed his eyes. I had a curious thought. I wondered if his body, back at Castle Basil, was shuddering from the revulsion he so clearly felt for Annick.
“There’s thirty-four of ’em dead, lord,” Lesh reported. “Twelve were killed by arrows, all clean shots-chest, throat, or head. She was a wicked eye with a bow, lord.”
“How’s Harkane doing?” I asked softly, not turning to look.
“He’ll be right soon enough.”
“Let’s break out a beer apiece before we start riding. The beer should be halfway cool and we can all use a little boost.”
“Aye, lord.”
Lesh knew just where the beer was packed, which was no surprise. One beer wasn’t nearly enough for me, or for the others, but we had only one case of Michelob along and I had no idea how long it had to last, how long it might be before we got back out of the mountains.
Then it was time to ride.
The surviving trolls had run northeast. Annick had headed due north. We went southeast.
“We’ve got a long way to go to reach the proper pass into the Titans,” our dead elf told us. “You’ve come too far out of the way.”
I had no intention of resuming that argument, and when I didn’t respond, he closed his eyes.
We rode at a good pace that day, trying to make up ground. When we started to come upon long open stretches near the edge of Precarra, we angled more to the east. Riding took the nervous lumps out of my gut after the early-morning fight. When we stopped for lunch, I checked Harkane’s arm—so far, so good. There was no bleeding and no trace of infection, though I didn’t know if infection would appear that soon. He didn’t complain of pain, and he seemed too alert to be hiding much, so I just gave him aspirin rather than another dose of the Varayan number. That stuff was potent, but I wouldn’t give or take it unless it was absolutely necessary. Our supply was limited and we might have worse injuries to deal with by the time we got back to Basil.
Despite what I had told our elf, I was worried about the time we had lost by riding to Nushur and then chasing the trolls. I didn’t know how much time we had until the general craziness and deterioration reached whatever critical mass it needed to trigger the End of Everything. I didn’t know how long we would need to reach the shrine in the Titans, then the shrine out in the Mist, and finally to do whatever had to be done with the family jewels of the Great Earth Mother in order to reverse the magical entropy, or whatever it was that put the real world and the buffer zone at risk of annihilation. Dad used to say that it’s crazy to worry about things you can’t change, but it’s hard to avoid it sometimes.
There weren’t any real roads in this section of Varay. There simply was too little traffic to keep nature from reclaiming any path. Grapes were hauled out in the autumn, wool in the spring, metals in small quantities every couple of months. Mostly, the trails there were led to the nearest stream that would float a small flat-bottomed boat and the goods went downstream to villages nearer the center of Varay. Supplies came back upstream over the same routes.
“We’d better top off our water bags every time we see good water,” Lesh said after we finished lunch. “Out in the wilds ahead, we can’t count on finding much this time of year.” With Harkane injured, Lesh was leading two packhorses and Timon handled the third.
Before we left the forest for good, we came across a small pack of the seven-foot lizards, the almost-dragons, like the one that had been my welcome to Varay when I came through the first time. The midget dragons scuttled off ahead of us, their tiny wings fluttering madly even though they were too small to get the dragons off the ground. Lesh speared one—“Just for practice,” he said.
The land started getting wrinkled before we left the forest, and beyond Precarra there were deep folds, and the kind of fissures that earthquakes can cause. Layers of adjacent rock might be separated by a hundred feet, horizontally or vertically. Finding a secure path took effort when the land was at its wildest. This was
a part of Varay I had not seen before, rugged but tempting, like the Badlands of the Dakotas.
But there were also islands of green, sometimes quite extensive. There were small stands of trees, pastures, the very rare farm. Lesh warned us not to expect hospitality in this quarter of Varay, and he was right. Not even the king’s Hero got more than a surly greeting or a grunt. And those were the more genial ones. Usually, we were pointedly ignored. “They’re uncommon independent sorts,” Lesh said, understating beautifully.
Near sunset, we had to start detouring to find a place to cross one river that did meander through the wilds. It ran in a narrow canyon between steep walls. Even if we could have worked our horses down to the river, the waters was too swift and too deep to ford.
“Comes down off the mountains,” Lesh said. “It’ll be cold water too.”
We followed the canyon upstream, toward the mountains, looking for a place to cross. We didn’t find it that afternoon. We just went on until we found a decent place to camp, in an area of broken rock, boulders the size of houses scattered around.
“Can’t sleep just out in the open,” Lesh said. “Even if those forest trolls aren’t chasing after, there’s rock trolls and always the chance of a dragon flying over looking for a feed.”
There was no fuel handy for a fire, so we made do with cold food. Lesh lowered a canvas bucket to the river on a long rope, several times, to water our horses after they cooled off. The water was frigid. I thought about hanging a six-pack of beer down to cool in the river, but decided that we had better save it for a while longer.