Everyone was howling and yelling, the voices of the bowmen supported by a ragged chorus of pikemen. The shouts were growing louder, more and more panic-stricken.
The monster stopped, supported itself on its thumb and little finger, and raised its other three fingers skyward to reveal its palm, a large area of which was occupied by an immense mouth with sparse, needle-sharp teeth. The hand clearly felt it had done enough panting already, so, for the sake of a little variety, it roared.
And that was when everyone started to run. A couple of the very bravest bowmen fired their arrows at the monster, but they got stuck in its finger-legs without hurting the hand at all.
“Get out of here! Run for it! Save us! Into the forest!” Kli-Kli’s piercing shouts were taken up by the chasseurs dashing along the road.
“Into the forest! Into the forest! Run for it! Run for it!”
The soldiers in white and crimson disappeared as if the wind had swept them away, leaving behind only the most stupid and those who hadn’t found a place to hide yet.
The magicians joined in the fray, shooting fiery beams of light at the hand.
“Come on! Our group has already taken off!” Kli-Kli dug his heels into Featherlight’s sides and dashed off after the rapidly receding Wild Hearts.
I followed him, leaving behind the elves and the battle between the magicians, the bravest of the chasseurs, and the monstrous hand.
There was a sudden shrill gust of wind, and I looked back. Miralissa and Ell were galloping right behind me, leaning down low over the necks of their horses.
The monster hand went flying sideways, crushing a few birch trees. The magicians were weaving their hands about constantly, and it was clear that they had the advantage. Little Bee’s hooves drummed on the wooden bridge and I caught a brief glimpse of the stream before it flew back and away at tremendous speed. We had broken out. Nobody had even tried to stop us. They were all too busy trying to save their own lives.
“We have to keep moving,” Loudmouth gasped. “If they come after us . . .”
Our group had stopped on the summit of the hill from which we had first seen the village of Vishki burning. Nothing had changed—the black smoke was still staining the sky, showing no sign of abating.
“Calm down,” said Arnkh, taking off his helmet and running one hand over his sweating bald patch. “Didn’t you hear them say that the village is under . . . what’s it called?”
“Quarantine,” Kli-Kli prompted.
“That’s it! Quarantine! They won’t stick their noses out for another three months! You’ve no need to worry about any pursuit.”
“Well, then they’ll report to Ranneng so that we can be intercepted,” Loudmouth persisted.
“Damn it, you stupid man! I said quarantine! They won’t send out a messenger or even a lousy pigeon! Isn’t that right, Lady Miralissa?” asked Arnkh, turning to the elfess to confirm that he was right.
“If there really was copper plague in the village,” she said thoughtfully, keeping her eyes fixed on the sooty smoke rising over the forest.
“But what was it, if not the plague?” asked Marmot, genuinely surprised.
“It could be anything!” Hallas declared. “You can expect anything at all from that Order of theirs. You human beings look the other way and meanwhile the magicians get up to all sorts of dirty business behind your backs. Well, who says I’m wrong?”
The gnome gazed round the group sternly, searching for someone to disagree with his opinion. There were no fools who wanted to get into a fight.
Hallas was right. The Order was always playing with fire. I immediately recalled my dream about the blizzard that had raged in Avendoom after the unsuccessful attempt to destroy the Nameless One with the help of the Horn. That had earned us the Forbidden Territory. And no one knew about the part played in all of that by the Order that everyone loved so much. If we didn’t know about one of the magicians’ little slips, there might be another one we didn’t know about. And the other one might be far more serious. Even if there was plague there, they probably started it themselves. The learned have cast their spell, for their own profit, and too bad for everybody else.
Hallas bent his arm in a gesture known to the whole world since ancient times. The gnome was simply bursting with hate for the Order. I wondered why.
“Forgive me, Lady Miralissa, but this is a sore point with me! The magicians themselves set up the whole thing. I don’t know what happened there, but there was some kind of mess-up, and then they sent a dozen bolts of lightning and a hundred fireballs shooting down from the sky to cover their tracks. Flattened the entire village!”
“How do you know they flattened it? Did you see?” Honeycomb boomed.
“A gnome doesn’t need to see. We work with fire from when we’re kids, and you only get smoke like that if you burn a heap of earth’s bones in the furnaces. That’s magical fire! I can smell it. That’s why they brought the chasseurs here, so they could detain everybody until the magicians finish what they’re doing!”
“All right,” said Loudmouth, interrupting Hallas’s accusations. “Whether there was plague there or something else, we’ll never know now, but in any case, we have to get as far away as possible. We can’t be too careful.”
“But did you see that beast they’d lured in?” Deler asked thoughtfully. “Maybe there are as many hands like that in the village as there are gnomes in the mountain caves!”
“That beast wasn’t theirs; Tresh Miralissa created it!” said Kli-Kli. “By the way, milady, how did you know that we’d need a hand like that?”
“I did not know, inestimable Kli-Kli.” The elfess’s black lips stretched into a venomous smile. “I actually prepared a sleeping spell. They should all have fallen asleep.”
