looking at the water.
“They couldn’t have got out,” Eel said gloomily. “I leapt into the water straight after Harold. Uncle didn’t have enough time, he was right in the middle of the ferry, with the horses. And Arnkh … He was wearing chain mail, and plenty of other metal.… Even if he did jump, he sank like a stone.…”
There was a somber silence. How would we manage now without our staid, gray-haired Uncle and the man from the Borderland, with his gleaming bald patch? We couldn’t believe they were gone.
“May they dwell in the light,” Deler said in a dull voice, taking off his hat.
Kli-Kli was sniffing and rubbing his eyes, trying to hide his tears.
We left an hour later, after the Wild Hearts had held the rites for their fallen comrades and Hallas had buried the cannon. The gnome had insisted, saying that his people’s greatest secret must not fall into alien hands.
We were all feeling gloomy and depressed, which is hardly surprising. We set out, moving away from the Iselina, which would always be the Black River for us.
11
The Soulless One
All the following week we drove our horses hard to the southeast, moving ever closer to the Borderland, the area adjoining the Border Kingdom and Zagraba.
An undulating, hilly plain extended for tens of leagues around us, crisscrossed with narrow rivers, loud- running brooks, and sparse mixed forest. There were not many villages in the area; during the last two days we had only seen one, and we gave it a wide berth, not wishing to make our presence known to the locals.
The earth in these parts was fertile and rich, and the grass reached up for the sun. But there were few people who wished to cross the Iselina and settle this part of the kingdom. Just ahead of us lay the Borderland, and beyond that the eastern forests of Zagraba and the famous Golden Forest, where the orcs lived.
Alistan kept veering more and more to the southeast, avoiding the trading routes running between Valiostr and the Border Kingdom. As I understood it, he was hoping to get us to the border between the two states in a week, and then take our group in a straight line from there to the Forests of Zagraba.
All the packhorses had been killed on the ferry, which had taken our provisions and our armor to the bottom of the river. Hallas and Deler bewailed this loss for a long time, but of course there was nothing to be done. We only had the chain mail that had been on the horses that had crossed on the first trip, and the elves had kept their armor, with the crest of their houses engraved on the chests.
Marmot and Lamplighter had been left without any kind of armor at all, apart from their jackets of stone- washed leather with metal plates sewn onto them. The provisions, spare clothing, and much else besides had been left behind forever at the bottom of the river. But we did not go hungry; there was plenty of game in these parts, and there was always meat roasting on our fire.
On the fourth day after the ill-starred crossing of the Iselina, the weather finally turned bad and the rain came lashing down. It tormented us for seven whole days, and I had to wrap myself in a cloak kindly lent to me by Egrassa.
The continuous rain poured down from the low, gray clouds, and the conditions were always damp, cold, and vile. It was especially hard getting up in the morning and lighting the fire. Our arms and legs were stiff; it felt as if we had been sleeping on snow and not on grass, with a cloak of waterproof drokr to keep off the interminable rain falling from the sky. Kli-Kli caught a cold and he coughed and sniffled all the time. Marmot treated him with herbal concoctions, which made the goblin spit and gag, saying that he’d never tasted anything so bitter in all his life.
The rain just kept pouring down.
The ground turned into a huge lake of mud, and every now and then the horses slipped and stumbled in this mush, threatening to throw their riders to the ground. The dozens of tinkling brooks and little rivers that crisscrossed the terrain all swelled up and overflowed their banks. On low-lying land there was genuine flooding, and sometimes the water was as high as our stirrups, so that we had to search for a long time to find an elevation above the plain where we could make camp for the night.
It was only after the heavy downpour stopped that the water started to recede a little, but the rain was still sprinkling down. When we approached the Borderland, Alistan gave orders for everyone to put on their chain mail. I couldn’t stand any kind of metal garments—they made me feel like I was in a coffin—they were so cramped and heavy, and they made it so uncomfortable to move. But in this particular case there were no objections raised on my side—I really didn’t want to take an arrow in the stomach from an orc who happened to have wandered far from Zagraba. When Kli-Kli saw me putting on the mail, he nodded approvingly.
“Kli-Kli, I thought you told me you didn’t need chain mail, because you’re such a small target that you’re hard to hit,” I teased him, remembering how the goblin’s armor had almost dragged me down to the bottom of the river.
He looked out at me from under his hood and said: “I may be small, but I still have to look after my health. I got it ’specially in Ranneng…”
Just when does this little weasel manage to get everything done?
Bass didn’t have any chain mail. During the last few days, he had been as dour as the sky above our heads. The rain was no help to Snoop’s state of mind, and I could understand how he must be feeling. Being dragged off to someplace you don’t even know about with a tight-lipped elf riding beside you is very definitely bad for the nerves. Ell was still following my former friend about all the time, and I couldn’t spot a single spark of sympathy in those yellow eyes.
My former friend …
Yes, I suppose that’s how it was.
There was no friendship left between us. Yes, we were still bound by a great many things, but these things were only memories, no more than that. During the time when we had not seen each other, Bass and I had both changed a great deal. We had followed different paths through life. And I still hadn’t forgiven him for that trick he had pulled so long ago, when he ran off, leaving me and For, stealing the money that belonged to all of us.
Kli-Kli with his cold was not the only one who had a hard time because of the rain. Hallas’s pipe refused to light, and the gnome was absolutely furious with the whole wide world. Deler huddled up under his short green cloak, muttering the ancient songs of the dwarves to himself. This really drove Hallas wild, but the weather was not conducive to arguing, and the gnome just grunted irritably and made yet another unsuccessful attempt to light his pipe.
Honeycomb was now the Wild Hearts’ commander, and his mind seemed to be roaming somewhere very far away. The yellow-haired giant’s eyes had acquired a thoughtful, weary look. He had been too close a friend of Uncle’s and simply could not accept that he was gone. Alistan paid no attention to anything at all, he just looked straight ahead and drove his battle horse on toward Zagraba. Egrassa and Marmot stopped the squad often in order to ride back and check if there were any pursuers. But the horizon was empty, and when the elf and the soldier returned they shook their heads.
When the rain took a short break, everybody cheered up a bit. Even the horses seemed to start moving more quickly and easily, taking no notice of the clouds that had still not dispersed. But sunshine was no more than a distant dream.
It wasn’t long before we saw a pillar on one of the lower hills that was overgrown right to the top with tall coarse grass. It was made out of black basalt, but not even that had saved it from the ravages of time. As far as we could tell, the pillar must have been set up at least a thousand years earlier.
“The Borderland,” Milord Alistan announced, and urged his horse on again.
The Borderland was an immense territory where the land belonged to the border barons. This was where my new friend Baron Oro Gabsbarg lived—the one who had invited me to drop in to see him.
During one of the halts, when everyone was busy with his own business, I went up to Miralissa, who was sitting all alone beside the spluttering fire, and asked the question that had been bothering me for almost two weeks: “How did they manage to find us, Lady Miralissa?”
She understood immediately who I was asking about.
“I don’t know, Harold. Recently there have been many things that I don’t know. They shouldn’t have been
