“How much better?” I asked Kli-Kli cautiously.
“A lot. The orcs are getting their butts kicked on all fronts!” she informed us with a delighted look on her face.
“Wha-a-at?” Hallas exclaimed, gaping in amazement with his one eye.
“That’s the way of it, my dear gnome. Apparently we’re not such pushovers after all. Somehow we found out about the invasion two days before the war started. Most of the border garrisons had enough time to prepare and they withdrew.”
“Withdrew?” I didn’t quite catch the connection between the words “prepare” and “withdrew.”
“Oh, yes. The Borderland Kingdom’s forces weren’t going to retreat anywhere, but our men pulled back, and the glorious army of Valiostr came to meet them. The Heartless Chasseurs, the Hounds of Fortune, the Unyielding Ones, the Tramps, Gimo’s Clowns, the Loons of Fate, and many, many more. At Upper Otters—a familiar name that, isn’t it? They went into battle at Upper Otters and gave the Firstborn such a thrashing that it took them two days to recover. And by that time our army had vanished into thin air. We fell back again, this time beyond the Iselina. The orcs seemed to lose their senses; they advanced and got another thrashing for their efforts. By this time the northern army had arrived, too. There was a full-scale engagement near Ranneng and the orc army was split into three parts. The first part, the biggest, was driven all the way back to the Border Kingdom, but we don’t know what happened there yet. The remnants of the second part managed to limp back somehow to their beloved Golden Forest, and the third part was caught and surrounded in Margend County, which is only a stone’s throw from here. You can’t imagine how delighted I am! The central army of the orcs has been smashed to smithereens!”
“Mm, yes,” I said, unable to believe my ears. “Is all this definite?”
“Of course it’s definite, blockhead! The commandant himself told Egrassa! The moment he saw the papers with the royal seal, he turned as smooth as silk. If you don’t believe me, ask Eel.”
This time the valiant army of Valiostr really had proved itself to be valiant, and the nightmare of the Spring War had not been repeated. The enemy had been stopped and thrown back. Ha-ha! That was what you could do with timely information and the northern army of forty thousand men that the king had assembled as a welcoming committee for the Nameless One.
“And how are things with the orcs’ second and third armies?”
“The Borderlanders seemed to be standing firm and they’ll hold out until our forces reach them. So the Firstborn are to be pitied. Soon they’ll clear off back to their Golden Forest and won’t stick their noses out for another three hundred years. They’ll remember a crushing defeat like this for a very long time. As for the third army, that’s all quite simple. The elves have rallied, and the latest information is that the situation in the Black Forest has stabilized. And as for the orcs who attacked Maiding”—Kli-Kli laughed conspiratorially—“they were in for just as big a surprise as the ones who went for Ranneng and ran into the Wild Hearts and the Heartless Chasseurs and the border garrisons. Our lads were expecting them, and then help arrived, and—”
“Wait, Kli-Kli!” Lamplighter interrupted, speaking for the first time. “Where did help come from there?”
“Have you forgotten about our fifteen thousand men permanently stationed on the border with Miranueh?”
“I haven’t forgotten, but I’m sure Miranueh didn’t forget them, either. The whole of the west is under the command of the Carp now.” (This was a disdainful name for the inhabitants of Miranueh.)
“Don’t worry about that! Everything’s just great there as well! Twenty thousand Firstborn advanced against Maiding. The King of Miranueh couldn’t bear the sight of such injustice and he added ten thousand of his pikemen and four thousand cavalry to our fifteen thousand.”
“Wha-a-at!” This time all three of us gaped in amazement.
“Uh-huh. The orcs had really got up His Majesty’s nose one way or another, and His Majesty decided to intervene to help his neighbor to the north.”
“I don’t believe it! I’ll believe anything, but not Miranueh! All these centuries we’ve been squabbling over the Disputed Lands, and then this!”
“Don’t the priests say that you should be generous, Harold?” the gobliness giggled. “Darkness only knows what made the king of Miranueh act so generously at just the right moment, but our own obliging Stalkon bowed gratefully and handed Miranueh the Disputed Lands.”
Hallas choked on his wine and started coughing. Eel thumped the gnome on the back.
“No great loss. All those years spent haggling over twenty leagues of swampy land that’s no good to anyone … Only northerners would do that sort of thing.…”
“Well, in Garrak you’ve got plenty of land to spare, but it’s in short supply up here,” said Lamplighter, springing to the defense of his native kingdom. “But what’s done is done. So the orcs were driven back from Maiding?”
“Not just driven back, but surrounded and wiped out!” the gobliness positively sang. “Victory on all fronts! And the allied army didn’t stop at that, it went into the Black Forest, to help our brothers the elves. If our generals have any brains at all, they’ll clear the Firstborn out of the Golden Forest completely.”
“For which—three cheers,” said Hallas, raising his glass.
“So the ones who attacked Moitsig were a surviving fragment of the central army?”
“No, Mumr. They were lured out of Zagraba. Our soldiers were lucky, they picked up the clan chief of the Grun Ear-Cutters himself as he and his rabble were making their way back to their native forest. And they strung him up on the city gates, as a lesson to anyone who doesn’t want to stay quietly at home in the Golden Forest. And those young pups didn’t understand the message and crept out under the eye of Sagra. They wanted to retrieve the body. Well, they were massacred.… Right, Harold. And now for you. While you were cooling your heels in the barracks, I managed to run a couple of errands and pick up a few things.” And so saying, the gobliness reached into the sack and set a crossbow on the table, together with twenty short bolts. “There … without a decent weapon you’ll soon pine away.”
I picked up the crossbow. Of course, it wasn’t my little beauty, the one I’d left behind in Hrad Spein, but it wasn’t bad at all. I used to have one just like it before. A “wasp”—a light weapon, and very reliable.
“Where did you get it?”
“I filched it, of course. From their armory,” she said, bursting with pride.
“And what if they catch me with it now?” I chuckled, amazed at Kli-Kli’s sheer cheek in stealing a weapon from right under a soldier’s nose.
“If they catch you, Dancer, then you’ll have to deal with it. I’ve done my bit. All the rest is your problem.”
“Thanks a lot, Kli-Kli,” I said sarcastically to my “benefactress.”
“Don’t mention it,” she answered in the same tone of voice, and grinned gleefully. “And by the way, all of you, better get those jaws working, I’ve still got to take you to get some warm clothes. Winter’s almost here, and you’re still prancing about in those rags.”
“Are we all going thieving together?” Hallas inquired, rolling his one eye.
“You have a very poor opinion of goblins, Lucky,” the gobliness said resentfully. “Why do we have to go thieving? Egrassa’s settled everything with the commandant. All we have to do now is pick up some warm things and we can hit the road. When we reach Avendoom, the real frosts will start to bite, and then all of you will say thank you to the little goblin, yes you will, for the nice warm clothes, because, if not for me, you would all have frozen to death.”
“I thought you just said that Egrassa made the arrangements for the clothes, not you,” Eel remarked innocently.
“But who do you think told him?” Kli-Kli asked spitefully.
“You told me,” Egrassa replied as he walked into the room. “Get ready, there’s an armed detachment leaving Moitsig in an hour. We’ll leave with them.”
“Why with them?” Hallas asked with a scowl. “Are we likely to lose our way?”
“You’re forgetting that although the orcs have been routed, the chances of running into scattered units of Firstborn are still very high. Would you like to lose your second eye, too?”
The gnome’s answer to that was to brag that he’d like to see the orcs try to get anywhere near him, and that if they did, a certain mattock would smash their skulls in for them.
“Are the Moitsig warriors going to Ranneng, too?”
“No, Eel. They’re in a hurry to get to Margend County. Part of the central army of the Firstborn has been
