“Harold, if it had been an orc in my place, you’d be dead already. And anyway, your crossbow’s not loaded. What happened here?”
“An orc, one of the Firstborn you were supposed to kill. Harold shot him, but I spotted him first,” Kli-Kli babbled, determined not to let me take the credit for his victory.
“No, Kli-Kli, he’s not one of ours.” The elf tugged the body onto its back and leaned down over the orc, studying his face dispassionately. “Miralissa bound them with the Net of Immobility and we finished them all off, they never even saw it coming. Four sitting round a campfire, another one nearby with the wounded soldier, six altogether. We killed them all.”
“Then where did this one come from? Or is this orc just the product of my morbid imagination?” the goblin muttered peevishly.
“It’s just that your lousy flinny didn’t bother to tell us about the seventh one,” said Hallas, appearing from behind a wall. “From the very beginning I said we shouldn’t trust that little flying bastard.”
“Where there was a seventh, there could be an eighth,” Egrassa said thoughtfully.
“Or even a ninth and a tenth,” said the goblin, deliberately rubbing salt into the wound.
“Let’s go and join the others, then decide what to do.”
We set off after the elf, with Hallas panting along behind us. Egrassa confidently led us through the labyrinth of overgrown buildings. There was ruin and decay on all sides, but at the same time the place was … well, beautiful. With the strange, mysterious beauty of thousands of years of time.
Columns soaring up to the height of the golden-leafs or lying on the ground, broken and overgrown with moss. A statue on a pediment, so ancient that it was impossible to tell who you were looking at—a man, an orc, or someone else who lived in Siala before the start of the Gray Age.
The four orcs lying beside the fire that was barely glowing had more arrows than necessary sticking out of them. Miralissa and Egrassa had really made sure of things. There were two more bodies lying a little distance away, under an old larch tree.
Egrassa told Milord Alistan briefly about the orc I had killed.
“The flinny might not have seen the Firstborn if he was in some secret hiding place,” said Miralissa, fingering the sleeve of her dark green jacket thoughtfully.
“He just didn’t want to see, milady,” said Hallas, still unable to forget the dance he had performed for the little news peddler.
“Hallas, Deler, Mumr, Eel! Divide up into pairs and find where that seventh orc was hiding,” said Alistan Markauz.
Eel nodded for them all, and the Wild Hearts disappeared into the ruins.
“It will be completely dark in an hour,” said Milord Alistan, narrowing his eyes and looking up at the sky. “Shall we stay here or carry on?”
“That depends on what our soldiers find,” Miralissa replied wearily, “but I’m in favor of moving on. There’s a full moon now, and plenty of light; we can easily walk until the morning and rest—and then we’ll be at Hrad Spein.”
“I don’t think we should stay here, either, cousin. We can rest once we get past the Red Spinney.”
“Harold, let’s take a look at the bodies,” Kli-Kli called to me.
“I’m not interested in corpses.”
“Well, you should be.”
While the goblin wandered around, looking at the bodies, I loaded up the crossbow with two new bolts.
“Skillfully done, Lady Miralissa. In the finest traditions of the Green Platoon! I definitely approve,” Kli-Kli told the elfess when he came back.
“Well, if even you approve of my work…” She laughed.
“No, I’m serious. We cast the Net of Immobility, then we have five seconds to stick arrows into them. I think that even when the net broke the last two had no idea what was going on and they were easily killed. Who finished off the wounded one?”
“Deler,” replied Alistan Markauz. “So how do you know about the methods of the elves’ commando groups?”
“I’m a polyglot in general,” Kli-Kli answered irrelevantly.
“Well, you can command your pooglits later,” said Deler, who had only heard the fool’s final words. “We have to get going, Milord Alistan. We missed one.”
“He got away. There were two of them. Over that way there’s something like a well shaft. That’s where they were hiding. One was unfortunate enough to run into Harold, the other made off to the southwest. Unharmed, milord. I tried to overtake him, but the moss doesn’t really hold tracks,” Eel said with a grim expression. “And anyway, I’m no tracker. The man we need here is Tomcat, may he dwell in the light.…”
“What were they doing in the well?” Alistan Markauz asked, and Mumr held out a scrap of cloth to him without saying a word.
“A man?”
“Yes, milord, he’s dead, and his face is cut to ribbons, but I recognized him from his clothes,” Lamplighter said with a nod. “He was with Balistan Pargaid’s men at the duel.”
“Are you planning to hide from them in the Palaces of Bone, milady?”
“That won’t be necessary. In the first place, they’re no fools. Since the evil awoke on the lower levels of the burial chambers, they don’t come within a league of that place. Nothing, not even the presence of elves, would make the orcs do something as stupid as approaching the Eastern Gates of the Palaces of Bone.”
“Then we won’t delay,” said Markauz, nodding to Egrassa for him to go on ahead and show us the way.
Our group walked on into the night.
In the forest at night, darkness comes quickly and yet somehow imperceptibly. The faint, narrow path ran out from under your feet, and then the night hid it completely.
The trees, branches, and bushes dissolved into the all-enveloping blanket of darkness, leaving nothing but memories (there was a pine tree there, and there was an old maple growing there, in that patch of inky blackness) and you had to raise your eyes to the sky in order to see the silhouettes of the interwoven branches that fenced off the stars sprinkled across the heavens.
For a few long, exhausting moments, you staggered along, straining so hard to see in the pitch blackness that your eyes hurt. And then the full moon came rolling reluctantly out from behind the dark veil of night.
It looked like a thick, dark yellow disk of Isilina cheese and, just like the cheese, its broad surface was covered with holes and wrinkles. The moon brought light into the world and gave it to the night below, and the beams of the moon’s gift flooded the sleeping forest, playing over the branches and trunks of the dreaming golden- leafs, creating the moon-mother’s reflection in a slowly murmuring stream, dancing on the fields of night mist rising from the moss in white wisps and reaching upward into the air. The moonlight made the forest as beautiful and magical as a fairy tale. And the moon transformed the ruins of the ancient city of Chu.
Falling on the faces of nameless idols, gnawed away by the teeth of time, the moonlight made them look alive, firing our imaginations.
The whole world and the whole of Zagraba breathed gently, snared by the silver threads streaming from the spindle of the full moon. It was as light as day, and only the stars were displeased by the moon’s awakening. They all dimmed their light and crept farther away from the earth to avoid falling under the spell of the radiant lamp of night.
The group was walking briskly, and the idols of the city of Chu, who had watched us go with reproachful eyes, had been left far behind. The track wound this way and that, appearing and disappearing in the thickets of bushes. And after another hour, it disappeared completely, and we had to force our way through close-growing young fir trees.
The shaggy, prickly arms lashed at us, and we had to protect our faces with our hands and double over. While I was scrambling through these prickly, unwelcoming thickets I cursed the entire world. Mumr, who was walking in front of me now, swore viciously when Eel let go of a branch too quickly, and the fir tree’s hand slapped him across the face. I don’t think I was the only one who sighed in relief when the path reappeared among the fir trees. It ran downhill now, and the firs were soon replaced by deciduous forest. We tramped across low hills
