his neck and ears.
“Looks like we got ourselves a wizard for company,” muttered the Barbarian, as the newcomer joined Sardec in his howdah. The rest of the men groaned almost audibly. “Master Severin is coming with us.”
The mage’s presence made Rik nervous. He had his own secret reasons to fear them. Why was the wizard accompanying them? Mages usually did not go with patrols. They were too busy studying the stars, brewing spells and potions, and scaring the hell out of lesser mortals around camp.
“Move out!” shouted Lieutenant Sardec.
Chapter Two
The lead mahout blew his signal horn. The drivers gave their strange hissing call and struck their beasts on the back of the neck with their pike-length staves. With a stomach-sickening lurch the bridgeback rose and Rik found himself twice the height of a man above the ground. He felt the usual moment of fear. Sometimes straps snapped or buckles on howdahs gave way and they tumbled to earth, leaving their contents to be trampled under the claws of the wyrms. Another prod, another hiss and the beasts strode towards the distant hills.
Rik had heard a great deal about the sense of power being astride a bridgeback gave. It was nonsense. He felt very much at the mercy of the twenty ton creature carrying him. He had no control over the thing whatsoever, a fact brought home to him with every uncomfortable step. He felt like a sailor on the deck of a ship in a choppy sea.
Occasionally the wyrm turned its long, long neck to look at the occupants of the howdah and he felt as if he was being weighed up as a snack. He could almost feel the hunger that burned like fire in the creature’s belly.
He was embarrassed by the sense of relief he felt as it gave its attention back to the leaves of passing trees. Occasionally the huge tail whipped upward and long snakes of turd emerged. They turned into pungent pancakes as they smacked the ground. There was a lot of farting as well, which the Barbarian claimed was probably how alchemists produced the fatal gas they captured in their glass grenades. He should know, Rik thought, since he was a master producer of flatulence himself.
As they marched he thought about how many people were misled by the great parades they saw in Place of Sorrow, Tower of Joy and other cities of the Realm. Like so many others he had always thought of wyrms as moving in lock-step like Guards on parade, disciplined as elite soldiers. He now knew that most of the time, those wyrms were controlled by Terrarch sorcerers using leashes, sorcerous adjuncts that allowed their wearer to dominate the beast by force of will.
When under the direction of a mere mahout, a bridgeback’s progress was more like a meandering stroll. They left the track to seek choice morsels from the branches of nearby trees and returned to it only in response to a great deal of prodding, hissing and chanting by their drivers.
Still, for all the maddeningly erratic nature of their progress, they moved very swiftly. The wyrms' long stride ate the ground quicker than guards marching at double step. The foothills of the mountains came closer with alarming speed.
“This is the life,” said Weasel, fumbling in his pocket for a stick of biltong. The Lieutenant was far from their howdah, leading from the front as he always liked to do. With him were the wizard and Vosh. Rik shared the howdah with the Barbarian, Leon, Weasel and several others including the Sergeant. “No marching. No climbing any bloody hills. Just a nice, relaxing excursion into the countryside.”
“You call these hills?” said the Barbarian. “In the Northlands we would call them molehills, just as we would call those things you say are mountains hillocks.”
“Perhaps you would care to get down from the back of the beast and jog along beside us up them, as you were wont to do as a youth back in your rugged homeland?” said Leon in deliberate mockery of the Barbarian’s manner. The pipe had moved to the far left corner of his mouth and bobbed up and down cynically at every word.
“They are not steep enough to give me any exercise.”
“You’ll be getting exercise soon enough when we get where we are going,” said the Sergeant. They all looked at him, suspecting that, as he usually did, he had a better idea of what they were about than the rest of them.
“What do you know, Sergeant?” asked Weasel. “Don’t keep us in the dark. Spill the beans! Who is the little rat up front?”
The Sergeant gave one of his dry chuckles. A look of amusement made his little cheeks pinker and his small eyes even more monkey-like than usual. “You don’t think they have given us the use of their precious wyrms so that we can sample the fresh country air hereabouts, do you?”
“You never know,” said Weasel. 'The Exalted may be feeling generous today.'
“Why have they given us ten bridgebacks?” Rik asked.
“To get us where we are supposed to go quickly, and it must be some distance away. Ask yourself why they send out a company of Foragers on wyrms into these hills? Ask yourself which direction we are heading?”
“Towards the sun rise,” Rik said. “Towards the border.”
“Nice to see you are awake, Halfbreed,” said the Sergeant.
“You think there is going to be some incident with the Kharadreans?”
“I don’t know, but something big is afoot. Vosh was brought to the Colonel in the wee hours, and the Lieutenant was rousted from his bed along with a few others. Look up ahead now, what do you see?”
Even at this distance Rik could see Sardec was studying a map which he had produced from inside his tunic. The wizard leaned close to his shoulder and seemed to study it with him. The mountain man nodded his head as if in response to some question.
“He’s looking at some sort of scroll,” said the Barbarian. “Is he going to work magic? I never knew the Lieutenant had that in him.”
“It’s a map,” Rik said. “He’s checking where we are going.”
Even as he said this, the Lieutenant leaned forward and said something to his driver. “We’re going a fair ways into the hills, or we would not be on these beasts,” he said.
“You think we might be crossing the border?” Rik said.
“I think we’re going near it.”
“It’s probably bandits though,” Rik said. “Has to be. If it were anything else we would be moving in force.”
“Most likely,” said the Sergeant with as much reluctance as if he suspected something else entirely. Visions of spies and secret missions and all manner of things from the cheapest form of storybooks danced through Rik’s head, but he dismissed them as just too fantastic.
The Foragers discussed the matter in low whispered voices as the wyrms strode ever higher into the pine- covered hills until the shadow of the ancient mountains lay across them and chilled the heat of the sun.
Spring in the mountains was like winter in the valley. Snow still covered the peaks. Sometimes it fell in light flakes driven from the higher valleys, and discomforted the wyrms. Doubtless they would have been worse tempered had they not been so sluggish from the chill.
On the first night, the Foragers made camp in a hollow with the bridgebacks picketed to the trees and set sentries exactly as if they were in enemy territory. The hill-men of these parts had no love for soldiers of any sort, reckoning them all to be tax collectors or spies or thieves. In this they were not always incorrect, Rik supposed.
While they made camp, the wizard set wards, the old rune-covered sort that dated from the arrival of the Elder Race on this world. Rik had plenty of time to witness the weaving of magic as he gathered firewood for the others. Cold hands and a sore back were the price he had to pay today for his missing button and his mixed blood.
When Master Severin spoke the words to activate the ancient runestones a chill ran up Rik’s spine and a shiver passed through his body. He suspected that part of his heritage made him unduly sensitive to the presence
