barrier that was the closest thing there was to a gate.
Geth couldn’t see what the camp harbored that was worth protecting, but he could see why the bugbears would want to protect a claim on their territory. The saddle of the mountain opened onto something of a miracle, a snug little vale sheltered on the north by another ridge sweeping down from the mountain peak. The ridge blocked the north wind, hid the vale from anyone traveling south along the ruined road, and trapped the sun’s warmth. What was more, the southern saddle they’d climbed wasn’t the only approach to the vale. A second trail led from the camp down another gentle slope to the west. From atop the ridge, Geth could look down both the southern and western saddles and see broad, level plateaus among the surrounding mountains. Judging from the carcasses strung up around the camp, hunting was very good.
A third way led down from the vale as well. Between the ridge on which they lay and the western saddle, the land plunged into a deep valley. The way down into the valley wasn’t gentle. There was no trail and it didn’t look like the bugbears went that way often or at all. There was a patch of worn dirt at the edge of an especially steep bit of the valley wall, and the bushes below seemed broken, as if things were frequently thrown down into the valley. Maybe the valley served as the bugbears’ waste dump-though from the condition of the camp, Geth would have guessed they otherwise lived happily among their own filth.
Wrath left no doubt of which way they needed to go. The blade pointed unerringly into the valley.
Geth peered over the edge of the ridge. The valley wall below was so steep as to be almost sheer, and spiked with stunted trees that poked out of the crumbling rock. Climbing down that way wasn’t an option. If they wanted to get into the valley, they’d have to go past the camp.
“Any ideas?” Ashi whispered to Chetiin.
“Yes,” said the goblin. “Ekhaas.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
She began singing before the camp came into sight over the last rise of the trail. The song was an ancient one, gentle and soothing, a song for lingering afternoons, composed in a time when the emperor of Dhakaan was the sun and the long night of the empire’s fall was something not even imagined. She took her time, walking up the trail in time to the song. When she reached the crest of the rise and stepped into the vale, the bugbears guarding the crude camp had already turned eyes and ears in her direction.
Her first sight of the camp brought a silent curse of disgust. It really was as foul as Geth had described. How far, Ekhaas thought, the dar have fallen!
The disgust never reached her voice or her face. She kept walking with a measured pace, still focused on the bugbears and singing to them as if each one were an emperor. None of them moved as she approached. They just stared at her, caught in the beauty of her song.
Ekhaas had found the music when she was thirteen, though sometimes she felt as if the music had found her. The duur’kala had taken her for training in her eleventh year, recognizing a quick mind and a zeal for the great history of Dhakaan. Not all of the children chosen for training with the mothers of the dirge found the music, but Ekhaas learned later that there had been very high expectations of her talent almost from the first. On the day that those expectations had been fulfilled, she had been singing a lament of the Haata Dynasty for one of the mothers when something had begun to resonate within her. She’d lost herself in the music, the words of the lament fading into the pure sorrow beneath. The performance had left the mother with tears in her eyes and Ekhaas forever tuned like the strings of a kiirin to the music of the ages. In her waking moments she could feel it in her bones; when she slept, she thought she heard it in her dreams.
After years of training, drawing it up to fill her songs and stories with power was as natural as the simple act of singing.
She stopped when she was close enough to the camp that the smell of pine pitch that bubbled in the firepit almost covered the fetid reek of rot. Bugbears had the most famously sensitive noses of all the goblin races, and she wondered how the tribe could stand their own stench. The guards still stared at her, unspeaking, big ears cupped in relaxation. There were no sounds from the other crude buildings of the camp-if the other members of the camp heard her song in their sleep, they would only drift farther into their dreams. Ekhaas focused on the largest of the three guards and wove a suggestion into her song.
“Rest,” she said. “This is a daydream. You see nothing.”
The guard’s eyelids drifted down until they were half closed and a contented smile spread across his face.
Ekhaas looked to the next guard and pointed at the peak that rose behind the camp. “Listen to the bird that sings on the mountain. Isn’t it beautiful? You see nothing.”
The second guard turned to look up at the mountain’s slopes, scanning them with rapt attention for a bird that didn’t exist. Ekhaas fought back a smile and sang to the last guard, “The sun is warm and your friends are watching for danger. Sleep and see nothing.”
The final guard’s head sagged down so quickly he must already have been half asleep before her song had caught him. Still singing to the bugbears, Ekhaas raised her hand in a signal.
She heard the quiet rush of feet as the others left the cover of the trail to slip past the camp and down into the valley. There were no hoofbeats-they’d left the horses in the forest, blindfolded to keep them calm, guarded by Marrow to keep them safe. Ekhaas winced at the speed with which the others moved in spite of her warnings. The trance brought on by the song was fragile-any hint of a threat, even fast movement, could break it-but it was also more subtle than the focused power of a spell. It seemed an eternity until she heard the soft birdcall that indicated all of the others were out of sight once more. Ekhaas risked a glance over her shoulder to be sure she was going in the right direction, then backed away from the camp. None of the guards showed any sign of breaking free of her suggestions, but she still kept singing.
Her heels found the steep slope of the valley, and hands reached up to help her keep her balance. Ekhaas took a few more paces backward before crouching below the valley’s rim. The camp and the guards disappeared from sight. On her left, Geth nodded. Ekhaas let her song fade. Quiet descended on the afternoon once more. She, Geth, and Dagii on her other side waited, listening.
A loud snore broke the silence. It was followed by a curse and a reprimand for sleeping on duty. There were a few grumbles of discontent, a muttered comment about snoring loud enough to scare birds on the mountain, then the guards were silent again. Geth grinned at her before creeping down the slope. Dagii touched her hand lightly, and she glanced at him.
For a moment she stared directly into his shadow gray eyes, then he lowered his gaze and dipped his ears in recognition. She gave him a brief nod in return before hurrying after Geth as quickly as the slick grass that covered the slope would permit.
Ashi, Chetiin, and Midian were waiting just a little farther down, close enough to come charging to their aid if the guards had woken from the song with any suspicion that intruders had come past them. No one said anything, though, until they were all well down the slope and out of sight of the camp, then everyone clustered around her to murmur congratulations. Ekhaas accepted their praise with nods, but reserved a sharp glance for Chetiin. “How did you know I was able to do that?” she asked him.
His ears twitched. “There’s an old saying among the Silent Clans: Know your friends as you know your enemies. I’ve heard stories of duur’kala singing their way across battlefields.”
“Do you believe all the stories you hear?”
“I heard that!” said Midian. The gnome gave Ekhaas a crooked smile. “I knew the duur’kala had to have a bit of sense when it came to stories.”
“I know a story about a gnome, a duur’kala, and a dull knife that I’d believe,” Ekhaas said. Through their journeys she’d found Midian to be a better companion than she had expected when he’d joined them at Sterngate, but the researcher could still grate on her.
Dagii put an end to the conversation. “Enough. Let’s get out of the open. If one of those guards happens to look into the valley, we could still be seen.”
The steep grassy slope that led into the valley gave way to thick bushes where the valley floor grew level and broad. Bushes quickly turned into trees. Ashi, looking far more like the hunter Ekhaas had first encountered nearly a
