move. Miya was next.
The view shifted suddenly from Miya’s horrified face to the doorway. Wild-eyed apprentices were spilling into the room, armed with whatever came to hand-staves, hammers, a carpenter’s square. When they beheld the monster attacking their master and his mate, their faces went pale as candle wax.
“Don’t stare-fight!” Tol bellowed. He edged forward.
The terrified workmen mustered their courage and attacked. Forming a protective line between the monster and Miya, they held off the nightmare beast as best they could. Lightning-fast claws tore into them time and again, and the brave engineers went down bleeding, battered, eyeless. Only one still stood when more help arrived. These were older men, Elicarno’s journeymen, armed with halberds. They jabbed and hacked at the beast, its blood spattering their spearpoints.
Now the image began to shimmer, like a view distorted by heat. Miya snatched a halberd from one man and swung the thick blade at the monster’s head.
The monster drew away. The bloody paws it held up were no longer solid; Tol could see the carpet through them. It retreated from the valiant Dom-shu woman.
Leaving the remaining men to fend off the injured beast, Miya knelt awkwardly by her husband. Tears coursed down her cheeks. She lifted her face and let out a long shriek of grief.
A log in the fire broke, and the image dissolved in a tide of sparks.
Tol turned. “Felryn! Is Elicarno alive-?”
He woke up. He wasn’t standing by the fire, sword in hand, but sitting with his back to the chill boulder. His weapon, still sheathed, lay across his lap. The fire was only a pile of dimly glowing embers. Tol’s hands and legs were numb with cold.
“Early! Early, get up!”
A brief mumble was the kender’s only reply.
Tol forced himself to his feet, willing his icy limbs to move.
“The fire’s going out!” he said. “If it dies, we die!”
He stirred the coals, adding more deadfall wood. The embers blazed into life.
“What’s the matter?” Early asked, sitting up and blinking at Tol who was wildly circling the snowy clearing. “We bein’ attacked?”
Tol related the experience-dream? — he’d just had. He mentioned the one of the night before as well.
“There’s no sign anyone else was here,” he finished. “I don’t even know if what I’m seeing is real!”
The kender drew his fur collar up close to his eyes. “Oh, it’s real enough. If the Mist-Maker was throwing illusions at you, they’d be a lot worse. You say your woman friend lived, but her husband, this builder-fella, seemed bad hurt, maybe dead? Probably true, I say. If it was only an illusion, everything would’ve gone Mandes’s way, wouldn’t it?”
Early’s logic made horrible sense. On the other hand, Mandes was wily and might not overplay his hand. He knew Tol well enough to tailor his phantasms.
Tol drove a fist into the palm of his hand; This uncertainty was maddening! How could he know for sure?
Early was regarding him with surprising sobriety. “You’re going to have to kill him, you know,” the kender said. “Taking him back to your emperor ain’t gonna be enough.”
Snow hissed down around them, and the fire crackled with renewed life. Early was right. They couldn’t possibly take the rogue wizard all the way back to Daltigoth safely. No one Tol cared for would be safe until Mandes had drawn his last breath.
“I’ll stand by you,” Early added solemnly. “All the way.”
Now Tol was truly taken aback. While kender could be foolishly brave in the face of terrible peril, they weren’t noted for selflessness, or for sticking to a plainly dangerous course.
In Early’s green eyes Tol saw something he hadn’t before: determination. Moreover, the kender’s face seemed different somehow, its lines subtly altered.
“I’d like to finish this with you.”
“I’d welcome your company,” Tol said even as the odd phrasing, the tone of the words, stirred something within him.
Before Tol could say more, Early’s chin dropped to his chest and he muttered, “The passes’ll be treacherous. What we need are snowshoes…”
The words trailed off into raspy breathing. The kender had fallen asleep.
Tol slept no more that night. The cold was merciless, held at bay only by the little fire he tended. Conditions promised to be even harsher in the higher elevations ahead.
They skirted Caergoth the next day, keeping well clear of the flow of travelers drawn to the city. They saw smoke rising from myriad chimneys and knew snug hostels and a hot meal waited within the city’s walls, but also within were potential informers and assassins. The wizard’s gold could buy a great deal of trouble in Caergoth, so they were forced to pass it by, keeping to the gray shadows in the snowy woods.
The cold and lack of sleep wore on Tol, but he pushed onward even harder. Echo Pass, the gateway to Mount Axas, was eighty-odd leagues from Daltigoth, an eight-day journey under the best conditions. The deep snow would make the going even slower, but Tol was determined to make the pass in five days. Mandes’s dreams tormented him only by night, when he slept. If night and slumber were required for the attacks on his friends, Tol wanted to reduce the number of opportunities Mandes had to strike at them.
They turned north, following the west bank of the Caer River. Once they were through the Forest of Aposh, north of Caergoth, the snow eased. By late afternoon they had reached the fork of the Caer, where Tol had found the millstone in the Irda ruins half a lifetime ago.
The sky north and east was a band of bright blue, shining under the wooly mantle of clouds behind them. Across the fork was the Eastern Hundred, Tol’s old homeland. The high plain was dry, only lightly dusted with snow, but a bitter wind scoured down from the north, bringing tears to their eyes and cracking their parched lips. Early taught Tol an old kender trick: he smeared butter on their faces. The grease would protect them from the desiccating wind.
They camped on the bluff overlooking the confluence of the east and west branches of the Caer. Their short day ended, with Early laying the night’s campfire as Tol gazed down at the Irda ruins, almost invisible beneath the vines and brambles. He would like to visit the ruins but feared Mandes might be watching from afar. He didn’t dare betray any knowledge of the Irda. Mandes might connect that with Tol’s puzzling immunity to magic and infer the existence of the millstone.
The horses, tethered in the lee of the icy wind, huddled together for warmth. Tol fed and watered them, noting how they trembled with cold and fatigue, even his stalwart Tetchy. Tol felt as miserable as they looked.
Early, lying in his bedroll, groaned loudly. Though a seasoned wanderer, he’d never ridden so hard or so long in a single day before. He claimed to be too tired to sleep.
Tol, loath to fall asleep and leave himself open to Mandes’s manipulations, kept himself awake by regaling Early about his past, relating his adventures in the Great Green as a youth, how he had defeated the Dom-shu chief in single combat and thus earned his two “wives,” Miya and Kiya. He’d just begun to speak of XimXim and the Tarsis war when the kender interrupted him with a piping snore.
Tol sighed. He drained the last of the broth from his cup and hunkered down, facing the fire. His eyelids slowly closed.
Instead of the dreaded sound of Mandes’s voice, instead of the bitter, icy wind, Tol dreamt of warmth. He was on the Bay of Ergoth, the Blood Fleet under his command. The thumping of oars, the salt breeze, the hot sun were balm to his soul. He leaned against the mast of the quinquireme
“Ship to starboard, two points off the beam! A merchantman!”
Tol shifted his gaze. Though he’d given no order, the helm was put over, and the galley churned toward the tubby merchant ship. Sailors spilled out on deck, distributing cutlasses and pikes. A springald catapult on the poop was winched around and quickly cleared for action.
“Stand down!” Tol said. “We’re not attacking.”
No one paid him the slightest heed. Indeed, the pirates rushed past him as if he wasn’t even there. He tried
