Shadow Blizzard

“But…”

“She was a true daughter of the House of the Black Moon—she did it so that we could finish what we came here to do. We elves have a completely different attitude toward death. She did not die in vain, and there is nothing more to say.”

The goblin nodded hastily and blew his nose into a huge handkerchief.

We moved on when there was nothing left of the pyre but a heap of glowing embers.

*   *   *

There was no more than two hours left until dawn and Egrassa led us on without making any allowances for our tiredness.

I still couldn’t believe we had lost Miralissa. Anyone else, but not her. Somehow I’d been sure that she would be with us right to the very end. But as they say, man proposes and the gods dispose. The elfess with the ash-gray hair and mysterious yellow eyes, and that polite half smile constantly playing on her blue-black lips, had left us now, disappeared into the fire.

Now as we made our way through the forest, we were completely dependent on the elf’s knowledge, and, to a lesser degree, the goblin’s. If they hadn’t been with us, the group would have lost its way in the trees and never found the burial chambers, even if they were only a hundred yards away from us.

Miralissa’s death was an irreplaceable loss in another way, too—we had effectively been left without any magical defenses. Yes, Egrassa knew how to do a few things, but they were limited to the superficial knowledge possessed by every member of the ruling family of a house of dark elves. The elfess wasn’t a fully fledged shaman, either, but her knowledge was far deeper than Egrassa’s.

Of course, there was still Kli-Kli—the one-time student of his shaman grandfather—but you couldn’t afford to trust him in serious business like this, or you might end up getting the soles of your feet roasted at the most inconvenient moment. There had been precedents already, when the goblin’s knowledge of magic had almost dispatched our group to a meeting with the gods. I personally didn’t feel like taking any more risks.

As we prepared to leave the site of the funeral pyre, the goblin pulled his throwing knives out of the h’san’kor’s dismembered body and gave the severed head a final kick of farewell. I picked up the sack the monster had dropped.

Kli-Kli was still sniffing as he trudged along in front of me.

“How are you?” I asked the goblin sympathetically.

“Fine,” he said through his nose, furtively wiping away his tears. “Absolutely fine.”

“I’m sorry she was killed, too.”

“Why do things like that happen, Harold?”

“I don’t know, my friend. I don’t make a very good comforter. Everything is decided by the will of the gods.”

“The gods? That gang of bandits only exists because some Dancer allowed them to move in when he created this world!” He sighed. “All right, let’s not talk about that.”

A Dancer …

That’s my curse. According to the goblin, I’m a Dancer in the Shadows, too. At least, that’s what the goblin shamans’ famous Book of Prophecies says. I don’t know how Kli-Kli figured out that I’m a Dancer (the first one for ten thousand years), but if a goblin says you’re a sheep, proving to him that you’re not is about as easy as making the sun run backward—one thing is as impossible as the other. So sometimes the jester called me Dancer in the Shadows. I tried for two weeks to shake out of him exactly who this Dancer was and what he was supposed to do, and eventually the infernal little blackguard gave way and fed me his half-witted tribe’s old campfire yarn.

Apparently there used to be a world of Chaos, the first and only world in the Universe, and people lived there. Some of these people possessed the strange power of being able to create new worlds. And to do this they required any shadow from the world of Chaos.

So these special people were called Dancers in the Shadows. They created thousands of worlds and eventually made so many of them that the world of Chaos had almost no more miraculous living shadows left, and Chaos died. But that’s not the point. If the goblin’s theory is right, then our world was created by one of the Dancers in the Shadows. And the lad was obviously a little crazy—otherwise would our world have turned out to be such a rotten, lousy place?

And as for me, I didn’t feel like any kind of Dancer, no matter how much Kli-Kli harped on about it. Although it would be fun all right, to create a world of my own, where mountains of gold would just appear, and there wouldn’t be any rotten skunks of guards or municipal watchmen. But anyway, there’s nothing I can do about that, because to create new worlds, you need shadows from Chaos.

Ah, darkness! Who can make any sense of these goblin superstitions?

Egrassa suddenly threw his arm up in the air as a signal for us to stop. Another slight gesture—and everyone reached for their weapons. With an arrow already on his bowstring, the elf took a step forward and one to the side in order to let the warriors past him.

The track had led us to a small forest clearing with two bodies in it—a h’san’kor, slit open from the neck to the groin, and a man in a gray cloak who had been torn to pieces. His legs and the lower half of his trunk were lying beside the h’san’kor, and his upper half had been tossed a few dozen yards away.

“Both dead,” Alistan Markauz declared, thrusting his sword back into its scabbard.

“What a stench its innards give off!” Hallas said, making a face and covering his mouth and nose with the sleeve of his shirt.

The gnome was right, the dead h’san’kor stank worse than a hundred corpses decomposing in the heat.

“We-ell now,” Lamplighter drawled, “this lad gutted the beast very neatly. Putting paid to a h’san’kor single- handed sounds like a very tall tale, in fact.…”

“A legend,” put in Eel, who was carefully examining the spot where the fight had taken place. “He put paid to it all right … but look at the signs here.… Egrassa?”

“Yes, he slit its belly open with this.” The elf was holding the stranger’s black spear. “But that still didn’t save him. The mortally wounded monster was still dangerous. Even as it was dying, it was able to tear the man in half. …”

“A blow for a blow,” Eel muttered, studying the flattened grass.

“What do you mean?” asked Milord Alistan.

“They each struck only one blow, milord. You see these marks here on the grass? I’m not Tomcat, but I can read them quite clearly. It was over very quickly. The man stepped forward, struck upward, and spilled out all the flute’s innards.”

“He must have been very agile to do that. He’d have to move as fast as the h’san’kor,” said Deler, refusing to believe what Eel had said. “Men aren’t capable of that.”

“Did you see how fast this man in gray ran past us? And you see what he did to the monster? What more proof do you want, in the name of darkness,” Hallas asked Deler.

“I don’t know,” the dwarf muttered reluctantly. “I just can’t believe it.”

“But it’s true,” Eel continued. “The lad killed the beast all right, but it was the first time he’d come across a h’san’kor, and his ignorance of the monster’s ways was what killed him. He thought he’d struck a fatal blow and he let his guard down. Before the flute died, it had one second to tear its killer in half.”

“Come on, Deler, chop the horns off its head,” said Hallas, thoughtfully stroking the handle of his beloved mattock as he looked at the dead beast.

“What?” asked the dwarf.

“You heard! Is that a battle-ax or a stick in your hands! Chop the horns off the head!”

“Why should I, may the darkness take me?”

“Because! Do you know what a h’san’kor’s horns are worth?”

“No, I’ve never sold any to anyone.”

“There, you see! You’ve never sold any! They’re priceless! Just think how many gold pieces the Order, may it burn in the abyss, will shell out for a wonder like this! Imagine it, we’ll buy a hundred barrels of the finest elfin wine, that Amber Tears, for example.”

“You’ll burst, Hallas,” said Lamplighter, teasing the gnome.

“No, I won’t. I won’t buy it just for myself! We’ll take it to the Lonely Giant, it’s high time we fill our cellars up