overgrown with maples and bushes of blossoming redbrow. In the sunlight the small red flowers on the bushes probably looked like drops of blood, but now, like the rest of the forest, they were painted silver by the moon.
We walked along the edge of a lake with the moon and stars reflected in its black water, climbed yet another hill and walked down again, jumping across a small stream hurrying about its urgent business. There was a lot more redbrow here than beside the lake. It was growing everywhere I looked, squeezing out the other bushes and even the trees.
“Look, there’s one left at least,” Kli-Kli muttered behind my back.
“What are you talking about?” I asked him.
“Look, over there, there’s a forest spirit among the branches. Do you see the little eyes glowing? The flinny said they’d all left the Red Spinney.”
“You mean we’re already walking through the Red Spinney?”
“Well, where do you think we are? On the Street of the Sparks?” Kli-Kli asked acidly. “It’s obvious this is the Red Spinney.”
“It doesn’t look all that red to me; you’ve got something mixed up again, Kli-Kli,” Lamplighter said with a dubious chuckle.
“Open your eyes, Mumr. It’s night now! But in the daytime, and especially in early September, everything here is covered with redbrow flowers.”
“But the place doesn’t look anything like a spinney,” I said, supporting Lamplighter.
“Fools!” the jester said sulkily, and stopped talking to us.
That night the goblin was in a bad mood. But I think he was just feeling nervous.
I wasn’t feeling anything of the kind, and Valder wasn’t saying anything. But of course, he hadn’t said anything since I had that dream about the Master’s prison. Maybe the dead archmagician had finally left me in peace and gone his own way? Ha! There wasn’t much hope of that happening.
Who was Valder? I thought I’d already told you that. Valder was a magician who had unfortunately been killed because of the Rainbow Horn a few hundred years earlier, but had now moved into my head.… All right, it’s a long story, maybe someday I’ll write my memoirs, and then you’ll know all the details.
The grassy path rustled under our feet and Lamplighter’s back loomed close in front of my eyes. How many hundreds of steps had I taken since we left the ruins of the city of Chu?
It was already long past the middle of the night, the stars were floating across the sky, and the moon was getting brighter and brighter. The entire forest had been taken over by redbrow—it was growing under almost every golden-leaf. I thought there would never be an end to these accursed bushes. But what really annoyed me was the sour smell the blossoming bushes gave off. It worked its way up my nose, and after about an hour and a half of it, my head was splitting, and I had this monstrous urge to sneeze.
The deeper we went into the Red Spinney, the tenser the silence became. I couldn’t hear the usual whisper of the wind or rustling of the branches anymore, or the calls of the night birds or the buzzing of the nocturnal insects. Not a single glowworm … and there was no more sign of any forest spirits. Nothing but the quiet rustling of our footsteps drifting into the night.
All the life of the forest seemed to have died. The silence was oppressive and it made me feel vaguely anxious. Even the moonlight looked dead now, draped across the landscape like a pale shroud.
Behind me I heard the quiet rustle of a weapon being drawn from its scabbard. I looked back. Milord Alistan was walking with his naked sword in his hand, and the count’s face looked gloomy and anxious.
“I do-on’t li-ike this si-ilence,” Kli-Kli muttered, drawing out each word.
“It’s never killed anyone yet.”
“Oh, don’t say that, Harold. It has, it definitely has,” our little know-it-all replied.
For the next half hour we didn’t say a single word to each other. Everyone was listening to the silence that enveloped everything, hoping to catch at least some kind of sound apart from the rustle of our own steps.
That’s always the way of it. You never took any notice of the sounds around you, just took them for granted. A bird chirped on one side, a cricket chirred on the other, leaves rustled somewhere else. But as soon as the sounds your ear was used to disappeared, you realized how much you missed all this outside chattering and nattering that could sometimes be so very annoying.
“We’re here,” Hallas hissed through clenched teeth, tightening his grip on his battle-mattock.
The path ran onto a bridge that looked as old as Chu. I wouldn’t have been surprised in the least if it was the work of the same builders. But unlike the city, the bridge was still intact.
It was made of stone, thirty yards long and two yards wide. Two men could easily walk across it together. Running along the sides, taking the place of railings, were stone barriers, rising up to half the height of a man. Every few yards a column rose up out of the barriers to twice the height of a man. They had probably once supported a roof (which no longer existed). Or perhaps there never had been any roof, and the columns had been put there simply as decoration.
The bridge connected the two sides of a ravine or gorge—I don’t know what it was called, but the steep sides descended almost vertically into darkness filled with a silvery mist rising from an invisible bottom.
“This is the heart of the Spinney,” Kli-Kli informed us.
“We have to cross that? Somehow it doesn’t inspire me with confidence.”
“Don’t worry, Milord Alistan, the bridge is stronger than a cliff and has stood here for thousands of years,” Miralissa reassured the captain of the royal guard. “So let us not delay.”
“Wait,” said Eel, raising one hand and peering keenly at the far bank of the Spinney. “Lady Miralissa, Egrassa, you take your bows, and Deler and I will cross to the other side.”
“Eel’s right, if there’s an ambush over there, they’ll pick us all off on the bridge like plump partridges,” said the dwarf, changing his beloved hat for his helmet.
“All right,” Alistan Markauz said curtly, and nodded. “Go.”
The dwarf ran ahead with the blade of his battle-ax glimmering ominously in the moonlight. Egrassa and Miralissa stood with their bows bent, ready to fire. The two warriors ran across the bridge and disappeared into the bushes of redbrow.
I started counting to myself. When I reached sixteen, Eel appeared and beckoned to us with his hand. It was our turn now. Very soon the only ones left on the first side were Egrassa, with his bow still bent, and Lamplighter, covering the elf against any possible danger from the rear.
“Is it a long way down?” I asked the goblin halfway across the bridge.
“I’ve never been here before, just like you.”
“It’s just that you seem to know all these places so very well.…”
“To know places, you don’t have to have been there before, Harold. How do the gnomes and the dwarves find their way through their underground labyrinths? They’re children of the mountains, and they don’t have to ask every time which way is east and which way is west. The goblins, dryads, elves, and orcs are the children of Zagraba and we never get lost in it. We always know where we are, no matter which part of the forest we happen to be in. That’s something you men can’t understand.”
We carried on along our way. The redbrow started to thin out. The fir trees and larches gradually edged the bushes aside and the cursed smell of those flowers almost disappeared, but the silence still hadn’t gone away. Our group was still in the Spinney.
We walked on and on and on. The light sack gradually began pulling me down toward the ground, the chain mail chafed my shoulders and weighed heavy on my back, my legs were tight knots of pain and fatigue. It was well past time for us to call a halt, we’d been tramping along for hours, but Egrassa only stepped up the pace, trying to get us out of the Spinney as soon as possible.
Kli-Kli was the first to sense that something was wrong. He stumbled, looked back, and drew in a sharp breath of the night air.
“Kli-Kli, please don’t stop,” Hallas said to the goblin.
“Something’s not right,” the goblin said anxiously.
“What?”
“I don’t know,” the fool muttered, and hurried on.
Then Egrassa stopped and raised his hand to tell us to make less noise. The elf listened carefully to the gloomy darkness of the nighttime forest and then said something to Miralissa in their guttural orcic tongue.
She replied in the same language, and Egrassa led us on again. The elves kept looking back. I couldn’t help
