woman with sunbleached hair drawn back in a bun slit the throat of a squealing deer and began to give a group of children a lesson in butchering and dressing meat.
'It's like a combination military camp and monastery,' remarked Darl in a low-pitched voice that carried only a few feet. Moriana glanced at him, nodded slowly.
Since their arrival in Thendrun, Darl had emerged from thecocoon of self-doubt and despair that had wrapped him since Chanobit. On their second night in the emerald keep they had once again become lovers. Whether Darl knew or not what had occurred between her and Khirshagk, he said nothing of it. Moriana felt tempted to ask Ziore if he suspected. She didn't. That would be an invasion of Darl's innermost privacy.
Still, there was something about him that disturbed Moriana. Was it fatalism, discouragement or simply feeling the onset of middle years, the slowing that comes inevitably to even those as robust as the legendary Count-Duke of Harmis? He had held up well on the rapid march from the keep of the Fallen Ones, though. When they had to leave their wardogs behind to advance silently through the badlands, he walked with a firmness and sureness of step that put Moriana, a decade and a half his junior, to shame. 'Where's the creature?' he asked.
'It generally stays in the vicinity of the camp. Sometimes it moves in the dead of night. No one ever sees it. In the morning, it's simply gone, only to turn up elsewhere.' 'Foraging?'
'Apparently not. The Ullapag doesn't eat. It seems to derive its sustenance from the mountain itself.'
'The same animal has survived for ten thousand years?' Darl shook his head in wonder. 'We deal with potent magic' Moriana said nothing.
Something scraped behind her. She turned her head slowly to see Khirshagk approaching gingerly over the sharp lava. The height of a tall man, the Zr'gsz leader moved with surprising grace. However, he and all his kin were less skillful at silent movement than the humans in the party.
After a council of war with the followers who had remained faithful into the depths of Thendrun, Moriana had decided to send one knight back across the Marchant into Samazant to muster men for a new attempt on the City. Darl had been afraid they'd used up their stock of sympathy among the men of the City States. But last night Moriana's crying spells had revealed the Sky City occupation of Kara-Est. News of the seaport's fall would have reached the Empire by the time Sir Thursz reached his home country. Those tidings would make men reconsider the princess's pleas for aid.
A Nevrym forester had gone north down the trail from Thendrun to his home woods to consult Crimpeace, the head of the woods runners. The foresters lacked the instinctive fear of the Hisser that most of the Realm harbored, but they were known also as redoubtable foes of the Dark. This reassured Moriana that her appraisal of the Zr'gsz was accurate. It also let her hope the Nevrymin might aid her, especially since she had promised a substantial gift of gold in return. Like their neighbors the Dwarves of North Keep, the foresters had a healthy regard for specie.
'Have you located the hellbeast yet?' asked Khirshagk, lowering himself beside the humans. His limbs sprawled in away the princess found disconcerting. His dark hide blended with the black rock and evergreens around them as if he had been bred in such surroundings. 'Not yet,' said Darl.
A file of men and women appeared abruptly below and to the left. They wore drab clothes like the folk in camp, with the addition of mottled green and black cloaks. The Zr'gsz were not the only ones practicing camouflage. Not even the four keen-eyed foresters accompanying them had known of that patrol's nearness.
'This country works both for and against us. You can hide an army in these folds. Not even the Watchers have a way of overcoming that.' Dari rubbed the dark stubble on his jaw. 'We may be able to bring this off, after all.' 'I hope you are right,' said Khirshagk.
Moriana reappraised her companion. After his bullheadedness and refusal to take her advice had helped lose the battle at the creek, she had fallen into the error of dismissing his military judgment. Now she was reminded that he knew more of infantry-lore than she; her greatest experience lay in aerial warfare. When the Watcher patrol appeared she had experienced near panic. Her imagination had peopled the tortured black landscape with hordes of Watchers closing unseen on them, Darl had restored perspective. If the intruders moved warily, the Watchers would only discover them through a stroke of luck. 'Maybe their vigilance has flagged,' she said, thinking out loud.
'No,' said Khirshagk simply. 'But…'
'Khirshagk, get back! It's looking this way!' At the urgent whisper from Ziore's jug, the lizard man slithered back down the slope. Moriana flattened herself on the rock and looked around wildly. 'What is? I don't see anything.'
'The Ullapag' said Ziore. 'It sensed Khirshagk.' 'Can it read thoughts?'
'Poorly. Enough to feel the alertness come into its mind. I deflected its attention, set it at ease. I think.'
'I wonder if it can communicate with the Watchers?' asked Moriana.
'Probably,' answered Darl. 'But I don't think it has.' The routine below dragged along calmly.
The two slipped away to join Khirshagk in a fold of the lava. A caprice of wind carried acrid smoke from a fumarole uphill to them. Moriana and Darl coughed and blinked back tears. Khirshagk rocked on his haunches. His eyes had a faraway gaze.
'The Heart. I taste its nearness.' Unconsciously, his tongue flicked from his thin-lipped mouth. It was forked. Moriana felt a disquieting tingle in her loins.
Moriana opened the lid of Ziore's jar. Pink mist spilled from the satchel, became a whirlwind of dancing bright motes and finally shaped itself into a woman, tall, serious and quite lovely despite advanced age.
'Which direction?' she asked. The Zr'gsz pointed a black claw south, past the camp. Ziore looked grave. 'The Ullapag lies that way as well.' 'It's guarding the Heart?' asked Moriana. 'So it seems.'
They made their way down the valley to where the others waited. The four Nevrymin waited with the Fallen Ones. Moriana sat on an outcropping of lava and let Darl explain the situation.
'We can't wait for night?' asked Quickspear, a narrow man whose habitual grin was rendered lopsided by a long knife slash down the left side of his face. He cradled the weapon that gave him his name, fingers nervously dancing along its shaft.
'My people do not function well in the cold.' TheZr'gsz weren't true reptiles. They fell somewhere between mammalsand lizards – furred yet scaly, nursing their young though oviparous, warm-blooded but inclined to become sluggish when the sun went down.
'We've only two hours of sunlight left us' said Darl. 'Here's my plan…'
Vapors steamed upward from the molten rock that bubbled in a pit cut like a slash across the mountain's flank. On a broad expanse of rock above the fumarole sat a vast creature, as unmoving as the lava beneath it.
A tall man could lie comfortably in the space between the bulging half-lidded eyes. Its hide was warty, green dapples on black mimicking the pattern of the Watchers' cloaks. Its immense body lay among four legs that seemed unable to support its bulk. It had the sloped back of a toad instead of the crooked back of a frog. Obsidian eyes stared out, missing nothing.
Moriana scarcely believed the thing lived. No motion of breathing stirred its bloated sides. But she felt its presence in her mind, alien and imposing.
She studied the natural amphitheatre scooped in the side of Omizantrim. Fifteen yards across and forty deep, its open side faced the Watchers' camp several hundred yards downslope. The fumarole lay at the inside end of the amphitheatre, with the Ullapag's rock raised like a dais above it. At either side of the opening stood a single Watcher. Two more Watchers stood in the rocks above the monster, armed with bows and spears. Though the pit's stinging fumes blew in their faces, they showed no sign of discomfort.
The four Nevrym Forest men were sneaking up on the four sentries. Moriana, Darl and Khirshagk, with several of his men, waited hidden on the northern wall. Though the foresters assured her they could capture the sentries without difficulty, she worried. She balked at killing any of the Watchers, and she didn't trust the Zr'gsz to be scrupulous in avoiding the slaying of their ancient antagonists. The bulk of the party of Hissers waited in concealment around the Watchers' encampment to bottle up any attempts at aiding the Ullapag. But that had to be done, mora! niceties or not.
If the sentries were alerted before the foresters reached them, Khirshagk and his men would have to deal with them willy-nilly. Moriana and Darl had to confront the Ullapag, by means mystic or mundane as required.
She still had no clear idea what the Ullapag did. It looked too ungainly to run down the fleet Zr'gsz in rough terrain like this. One thing it did attempt was to detect the nearness of the Hissers by a special sense. Ziore hovered beside Moriana, dulling the Ullapag's mental sensitivity to the presence of a hundred of the very beings it was meant to ward against.
