Shadow Prowler

25. THE DANCER IN THE SHADOWS

Harold!” said someone, cautiously touching my shoulder. “Harold, get up.”

I opened my eyes and looked at the jester, who was leaning down over me.

“Kli-Kli!” I groaned in desperation. “Now why aren’t you asleep?”

He looked at me reproachfully and made himself comfortable on a saddlebag.

“You were shouting last night,” said Kli-Kli. “What was it, nightmares?”

“It was all your fault,” I muttered.

“Eh?”

“You tell us all those stories, and then they give me no peace all night long.”

“What stories? You mean Hargan’s Brigade?”

“Yes, I was dreaming all night about them fighting the orcs.”

“Oho!” Kli-Kli exclaimed admiringly.

“By the way, Alistan and the lads arrived during the night,” the goblin threw out casually.

“Why didn’t you say so straightaway?” I asked, jumping to my feet.

“Shhh!” the joker hissed, opening his eyes wide. “Don’t yell like that. Can’t you see everyone’s asleep?”

It was true. Even though it was already light, everyone was still lying wrapped up in their traveling blankets. Only Deler and Hallas were walking round the border of the camp, keeping watch over our rest.

The jester had not lied about our comrades’ return. I spotted Markauz’s huge steed and the horses of the Wild Hearts who had arrived with him.

“Then why did you wake me up?”

“I told you, you were shouting. And I wanted to tell you before the others what it was that our Tomcat sniffed out.”

“Then tell me.”

“He was right all along. There was something going on behind our backs. He and Egrassa got there just in time. The tracker’s instincts led him to a small forest glade quite a long way off the highway. And there were three fellows there, every one of them exactly like the sorcerers who sneaked into Stalkon’s palace. Tomcat says they all had rings like the attackers that night.”

“What rings do you mean?”

“Ooooooh…,” the goblin gasped disappointedly. “I can see you just slept through the whole thing. All the men who attacked the palace had rings made like ivy. That’s one of the Nameless One’s emblems. So that they could recognize each other. Anyway, these lads in the glade had got a fire going and put a pot over it. I don’t know what they were planning to cook up, but it certainly wasn’t a fancy cake. As soon as the purple smoke started rising out of the pot-”

“Purple?” I asked.

I hated that color ever since Miralissa had sent me off to that incredible vision when I was being introduced to the key. Besides, it’s a color for the rich and privileged.

“I was surprised, too, but that’s exactly the way Tomcat tells it. And don’t you interrupt! Well, then… You’ve put me off now, Harold!” Kli-Kli whispered furiously.

“Purple smoke,” I prompted him.

“Ah, right! Well then, as soon as the purple smoke started rising out of the pot, Egrassa took his bow and killed the two shamans so fast, they never even knew what was happening. Tomcat overturned the pot and stamped out the fire, and then the creature that had been following all the way appeared out of thin air. Tomcat sensed it a long time ago, only it was invisible. It was some kind of tracker dog. Anyway, they killed it and set off to catch up with us-”

“And it took them all this time to do it,” I said acidly, completing the goblin’s story.

“Just wait, will you!” Kli-Kli said exasperatedly, jumping to his feet. “Now look, you’ve put me off again. I’m not going to tell you anything.”

“They set off back to catch us up,” I said hastily.

“Only they didn’t get very far,” said the goblin, sitting back down beside me again. “Either Tomcat and Egrassa missed one of those skunks, or the elf didn’t shoot fast enough, but one of the shamans must have managed to raise the alarm. Anyway, the road was blocked off in front of them and behind them by several squads of men who appeared out of nowhere. And Tomcat sensed that they’d started working their sorcery again somewhere close to the place where he’d just been. There must have been another group of sorcerers in the forest, but so far they’d been keeping quiet, and that was why Tomcat hadn’t sensed them. The Nameless One’s followers had our lads caught in a trap, so Tomcat and Egrassa had to turn off into the forest to get away from them, and that’s why it took them so long to get here. Their pursuers dropped back, there was no point in hunting the two of them through the undergrowth and fallen trees-the elf’s too good at confusing his tracks. And a day later, when Tomcat and Egrassa came out onto the road, they ran into Alistan and Eel. And that basically is the whole story.”

“Brrrr! I don’t understand a thing.”

“You’re not the only one.” The jester sighed. “The count and the elves were talking all night. It seems there are more shamans in Valiostr than Doralissians in the Steppes of Ungava. And the Nameless One’s supporters are absolutely countless. And then there’s your Master and his henchmen, and the strange magicians in the plague village. All hunting us, and all using magic to do it. It’s quite likely that if Tomcat and Egrassa hadn’t interfered in time with the spell those shamans were working, our group wouldn’t exist any longer.”

“But someone has worked the magic. You told me that someone else could have replaced the dead sorcerers.”

“So what?” The jester shrugged. “You have to understand that shamanism isn’t the wizardry of the Order, its laws are quite different. It only has to be knocked slightly off course and it turns out quite different from how the person working it intended. Remember the hand monster! Well, it’s the same thing here. There’s no knowing what it eventually turned into. We’re still alive, anyway.”

“Where did you get all your brains from, Kli-Kli?”

“From my grandfather, he was a shaman.”

“Yes, so you’ve told me a hundred times. So you think that whoever was plotting against us will simmer down now?”

“Why?”

“Well, you just said that the shamanism didn’t work.”

“If it didn’t work the first time, it will the second,” the goblin said with a shrug. “Working magic’s no problem for these lads, they’ll send some terrible monster with big teeth after us and then just disappear, as if they’d never even existed. The job’s done, their Master’s instructions have been carried out, they can hide away until the Nameless One comes out from behind the Needles of Ice.”

“They don’t have long to wait.”

“That’s what I’m saying. We need to get to Hrad Spein as quickly as possible and spoil the Nameless One’s mood for another five hundred years or so.”

Hallas came up to us.

“Listen, lads,” said the gnome, taking his pipe out of his mouth and blowing smoke rings. “It’s time to wake everyone up, or they’ll sleep until the coming of the Nameless One.”

“Well, let’s wake them up then,” said the jester, jumping to his feet and completely forgetting all his worries. “Don’t happen to have a bucket of cold water handy, do you?”

The complete absence of wind promised a very hot day. Almost as hot as the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that, and… I could carry on for a long time.

No one was particularly surprised when at noon we found ourselves roasting in a charming oven.

I personally always anticipated that time of day with a shudder. Neither a wet rag nor the goblin’s jokes and jingles were any help. But even so, everyone listened to the jokes and even laughed. Kli-Kli really pulled out all the stops in his efforts to demonstrate the skills of a royal court jester.

The group was complete once again and, despite the heat, we were in an exceptionally good mood… even me. Only every now and then a shadow of anxiety ran across Miralissa’s face. Once, as I drew level with the elfess’s horse, I heard a snatch of her conversation with Egrassa. She was still concerned about the shamans cooking up something horrible in their pots far behind us. From what she said it seemed that they wouldn’t rest until they had completed their sorcery.

I trusted the elfess’s intuition completely. The Nameless One’s minions could send some kind of filthy garbage crashing down on our heads at any moment. As they say, the laws of universal beastliness always take effect just when you’re not expecting anything.

That was why, to keep my nerves nice and calm, I kept glancing sideways at Tomcat in case he sensed anything in advance. But the overweight Wild Heart and failed magician of the Order remained serenely calm, even cheerful. And so the uneasy feeling that had overcome me gradually eased.

Hargan’s Wasteland was a welter of tall grass and low tangles of heather. Sometimes the narrow line of the path was completely hidden under the grassy covering. Our ears were set buzzing by the chirring of thousands of crickets. When we rode into particularly thick grass the gray-green trilling insects cascaded out from under the hooves of the horses, complaining at our invasion of their kingdom.

After a while, we made our way between massive boulders of black granite, each the size of a small house, and came upon a rickety old hut. Honeycomb said that the scythe men who made the winter hay for the surrounding villages spent the nights in it. The long rows of mown hay lying across the grassy meadows confirmed what he had said.

“It’s a long way to the next village; how long will they have to cart it?” Uncle asked in surprise.

“This is the best grass in the whole district. They come here from twenty leagues away,” said Honeycomb. “And the scythe men come for the whole summer. There’s plenty of hay for everyone and to spare.”

“But no cart will get through here. Look how far they have to drive from the road. Half a day at the least,” Uncle protested.

“Ah, it’s plain to see that you’re no country boy.”

“You’re the country boy here, graybeard. I spent all my young days in Maiding,” said Uncle.

An hour after that, when the track completely disappeared and our group had to advance through the meadows of grass and mazes of bushes without being able to see the way, Loudmouth spotted a large herd of cows, about two hundred head. The animals were solemnly browsing on the juicy grass, flicking their tails lazily to drive away the buzzing clouds of midges hovering around them. We were seen, and a dozen shaggy, black-and-white herdsmen’s dogs came dashing over, barking at the uninvited travelers.

Arnkh hissed through his teeth and reached for his crossbow, but a sharp whistle rang out across the meadow and the dogs ran back, growling in annoyance. Only the largest of them, no doubt the leader, stopped not far away from us and began observing our group with cautious interest.

“Just look at the way that beast is watching us,” Deler muttered.

“Didn’t you know they feed on dwarves?” Hallas chuckled, earning himself a dark look from his partner.

“You’ll open your mouth once too often someday, longbeard. I’ll take my favorite chair and belt you.”

The gnome didn’t even feel it necessary to respond.

The herdsman who had called off the dogs was also observing us, shading his eyes against the sun with one hand. He stared as if he was watching some kind of marvel, as if we were no ordinary horsemen riding by, but the twelve gods of Siala with the Nameless One in tow. The boy herdsman standing beside his older comrade had his mouth open so wide I felt afraid one or two hundred flies would go flying in.

The sight really was an amazing one for them. It’s not every century that you come across an entire platoon of strangers from different races, all armed to the teeth, in the heart of a wasteland so far away from the nearest inhabited village that not even every shepherd would risk going into it.

Kli-Kli couldn’t resist the temptation, and he stuck his tongue out at the young herdsman, frightening the boy half to death. It was obviously the first time the village lad had ever seen a goblin.

“Well now, Kli-Kli,” said Eel, opening his mouth for the first time that day, “now there’ll be talk all winter long. The boy will tell everyone he saw a live ogre.”

“Who’s an ogre?” the goblin said resentfully. “Me? Ogres roar like this!”

The goblin set up a miserable howling, frightening not only the little herdsman and the dogs, who began barking again, but also half the horses of our group.

“Quiet down, Kli-Kli!” Marmot said irritably. “You’ll spoil Invincible’s appetite for a whole month.”

“I was only showing how ogres roar,” the goblin explained.

“Ah, come on. You’re useless,” Deler grumbled. “That’s the way your dear departed granny roars, not a full-grown ogre. Show him, Mumr.”

Lamplighter, who was riding behind me, was only too delighted to do as the dwarf asked, and he produced a sound that almost made me fall off my horse. The herdsmen’s dogs started howling in fright behind our backs.

“Hey you lot!” Uncle shouted to our little group. “You dratted comedians! Stop frightening the crickets!”

“Oh, come on, Uncle,” Deler shouted. “There’s nothing else to do.”

The sergeant just flapped his hand at us and gave up.

For the rest of the day nothing important happened to our party.

Another two days of riding across the wasteland flew by. We were crossing a huge area at the heart of Valiostr that people had never got around to developing. The famous impenetrable forests were on our right.

“The day after tomorrow we ought to reach the highway,” Honeycomb said on the third day of the journey.

“Eh, the sooner the better. I want some beer.” Deler sighed. “I start to get vicious without my beer.”

The song of a lark trilled out in the sky.

“There’s going to be rain,” Tomcat said after a long silence.

Everyone looked round at the same time. There was a line of storm clouds expanding along the horizon: dark violet, with occasional patches of blue-black.

“Hoo-ray!” said Marmot. “The coolness we’ve all been waiting for is on its way.”

The ling on his shoulder livened up and twitched its pink nose excitedly. Obviously it could sense the approaching storm, too.

“I just hope we don’t get caught out,” Tomcat muttered, casting a concerned glance at the black line of cloud.

It had already swollen up, like a goatskin filled to overflowing with water, and seemed to have moved a bit closer. This was not just rain coming toward us, it was a genuine tempest.

No one heard what Tomcat had said. Well, almost no one.

Deler set his hat dashingly on the back of his head and started singing:

If you have a rope on your neck-there will be treason under the mountains. If you tread clay with your feet-you’ll get a sharp knife in your back. If you fall asleep in disgrace-your dreams will be shattered by an arrow. And you will not forge strong fetters for holding your friends or your enemies! If you do not wish to enter the world of shadows-strike first and kill if you can! Strike first and kill if you can!

“Why so gloomy?” Kli-Kli asked after listening to the dwarf’s simple little song.

“That’s the way it ought to be,” Deler said solemnly. “That’s the war march of the dwarves.”

“It sounds better for marching to the chamber pot than against the enemy,” Hallas said scornfully.

“Some connoisseur of war marches you are!” Deler retorted. “You bearded midgets don’t even have any like that.”

“Shut up! Right now!” Tomcat growled.

The gnome and the dwarf stopped arguing and gaped at him in astonishment.

“Oh, come on, Tomcat,” Deler said, clearing his throat. “Nothing terrible’s going to happen. We’ve already made up, haven’t we, Hallas?”

Hallas nodded eagerly.

“It’s nothing to do with you!” the tracker exclaimed, stopping his horse and staring fixedly up at the sky. The storm clouds were closer now; they had licked away a quarter of the blue sky. A distant rumble of thunder was carried to us on a light wind.

“What’s disaster?” asked Loudmouth, who also had his eyes fixed on the horizon. He had been infected by the tracker’s alarm.

“Shut up, will you!” Tomcat growled irritably, sniffing at the air.

Speaking for myself, I couldn’t smell anything at all. So what if it did rain a bit and we got wet? What was there to get all alarmed and excited about?

“And the day started so well,” Kli-Kli said dejectedly.

“Those bastard children of lowdown skunks did it after all!” Tomcat whispered. He dug his heels into the sides of his horse and hurried to catch up with the elves and Alistan, leaving us behind, bewildered, at the back of the group.

“Who was that he was swearing about?” Hallas asked, staring in amazement at Tomcat’s wild gesticulations as he spoke to Miralissa.

Whatever it was that Tomcat had sensed, Miralissa and Markauz both looked alarmed. And Ell kept glancing at the advancing clouds.

“What did I tell you, Harold,” Kli-Kli whispered.

“What?” I asked mechanically, trying like everyone else to see what Tomcat had spotted in the sky.

“Do you ever listen? I said the shamans would never stop until they managed to work their magic.”

Meanwhile the tracker had finished explaining something to Miralissa. She looked at Alistan, and he nodded decisively.

“What’s happened?” asked Uncle, barely able to contain himself.

“Let’s go and ask,” Arnkh suggested wisely.

During our journey a certain order of travel had been established. Alistan and the elves always rode at the front. They spoke about subjects that only interested them and made decisions for us about matters of importance for the group. The Wild Hearts kept company with each other, trying not to butt into the conversations between the elves and Markauz. There could be no question of simply talking to them on the road, without any special reason. The only exceptions were Eel’s long conversations with Ell.

It wasn’t that the men were shy or they avoided the leaders of our group, it was simply that they felt, clearly on the basis of many years as soldiers, that everyone should do his own job and there was no point in bothering the commanders with petty details. They’d call you if necessary.

And while we were on the road the Wild Hearts themselves were divided up into little groups. Either according to their interests, or simply on the basis of a natural liking for each other. But that’s perfectly normal-on a journey it’s very hard to travel as one big pack. Honeycomb and Uncle. Eel, Tomcat, and Arnkh. Hallas, Deler, Marmot, me, and Kli-Kli. Loudmouth and Lamplighter. Although Kli-Kli was also the only one who dashed from the head of the group to the tail and back on Featherlight, managing to talk to everyone at least a hundred times a day.

I personally couldn’t give a damn for all these rules, but it just turned out that I found myself in a small party that included Marmot, as well as the gnome and the dwarf, with whom I had close connections from the fight in Stalkon’s palace, so I stuck to their company.

Arnkh’s suggestion that we should go and find out what was going on was not destined to be acted on. Miralissa rode back to us herself.

“Tomcat says that the advancing storm is artificial in origin.”

“Can you put that more simply?” Loudmouth asked plaintively.

“What’s so hard to understand?” Tomcat asked in amazement. “Someone conjured up these clouds, you thickhead!”

“Shamans?” Lamplighter asked with a reproachful glance at Egrassa.

Of course, Mumr felt that Egrassa hadn’t done enough work with his bow in the forest where the servants of the Nameless One were trying to work their magic. If the soldier had been in the elf’s place, he wouldn’t have let slip the opportunity to swing his bidenhander a couple of times.

“Maybe shamans and maybe not,” Tomcat said with a shrug. “But it’s magic, that much I can guarantee.”

“It has to be shamans, it couldn’t be anyone else!” Kli-Kli sighed.

“Can we avoid it?” asked Markauz, tugging on his mustache.

“I can’t do anything,” said Miralissa, spreading her hands helplessly. “My skill’s not great enough. I can’t feel anything.”

“It’s weather sorcery. The element of rain is pretty unstable,” Tomcat muttered.

“What’s that?” Hallas said impatiently.

“We were taught…” Tomcat hesitated for a moment. “We were taught that the rain magic created by shamanism is unstable. It lasts for no more than four or perhaps five hours and is heavily dependent not only on the skill of the shamans, but also on natural phenomena. The wind, for instance.”

“You want to try to get away from these clouds?” asked Ell, one of the first to grasp what Tomcat was thinking.

“Uh-huh. The wind now is blowing directly to the southwest, so we can gallop southeast. If we’re lucky we’ll part company with the storm.”

“Oh, sure,” Honeycomb snorted. “It looks like someone’s driving it along. Just look how fast it’s moving!”

I glanced involuntarily at the wild weather advancing toward us.

“And just what can that little cloud do?” I couldn’t help blurting out.

“Nothing.” Egrassa answered me instead of Tomcat.

“Then what are we planning to run away from?” asked milord Markauz, getting the question in ahead of me.

“From what that cloud is trying to hide,” Miralissa answered him in an extremely dismal voice.

“That will be an ordinary rain cloud, with ordinary thunder and lightning,” Tomcat said. “The worst it can do is soak us to the skin. And if the shamanism is really good, there’ll be a really wild storm. But not directly aimed. That is, it won’t try to destroy us especially. It will be an ordinary storm, just like hundreds of others. If anyone’s hurt, it will be by accident.”

“You ought to give lectures at the university in Ranneng. I didn’t understand a thing!” Deler complained. “What about the thing the clouds are trying to hide?”

“A bank of rain clouds with thunder and lightning always covers up any other magic,” Miralissa explained. “There isn’t a magician in Siala, even if he’s worth three of the Nameless One, who can see hostile magic inside a thundercloud until the sorcery is literally right there under his nose. Tomcat senses that the storm was created by shamanism, but he doesn’t know what it might be hiding. The shamans could have hidden something that they don’t want the magicians of the Order to see. Clouds make a magnificent screen.”

“The nearest magicians are tens of leagues away, they needn’t have worried,” Arnkh growled.

“Then they must be hiding something that can be seen for tens of leagues,” Kli-Kli disagreed.

There were more lightning flashes and rumbles of thunder, still in the distance, but much closer now.

“Enough idle talking! Tomcat, since you can sense the storm, you’re the one to get us out of this. Lead on!” said Markauz. He had no intention of waiting for the rain.

And our crazy game of tag with the weather began.

Tomcat took control with an assured hand and set the horses a pace no worse than when we were hightailing it out of Vishki. The rumble of the thunder kept getting closer and closer. The wind grew stronger, bending the tall grass right down to the ground. The music of the crickets and the songs of the birds fell silent. Every now and then one of us would look back to check how much farther we could gallop before the rain hit us.

But I just kept looking straight ahead. In the first place, at such a furious gallop, I was afraid of falling off Little Bee, and in the second place, the one time I did look round I got such a fright that I almost yelled out loud. The cloudy sky that was dogging our heels was black enough to darken a hundred worlds.

Even Eel had turned pale, and that was completely out of character for the coolheaded Garrakan.

“The wind’s changed!” Kli-Kli shouted. “To the east! The clouds are being carried off to the side!”

I forced myself to look round. Now, no matter how hard the storm tried, there was no way we could end up at the very heart of it. It had shifted far to the east of us. But our group would still be caught by the edge of the magical tempest, that much was certain. And though the downpour might be less powerful, the rain would still be pretty substantial-no one had the slightest doubt about that.

The menacing clouds blocked off the entire sky. A furious wind tossed up handfuls of sand aimed at my face and I had to pull the hood of my elfin drokr cloak up over my head.

Others suffered worse than I did. Deler screwed up his watering eyes and swore nonstop until the sand got into his mouth. The wind flapped Hallas’s beard and the horses’ manes. Mumr’s hat was torn off his head, but he didn’t stop to try to take the wind’s new plaything away from it.

A whirlwind of a thousand demons howled in our ears and the solid wall of clouds advanced on us like a herd of cattle on the rampage. Again and again the festoons of diamond-bright lightning flashes fused together into broad sheets running across the entire horizon and lighting up the wasteland, which looked even more desolate in the dark. The wind was like an insane cowherd, driving his rain-swollen clouds straight at us. The rain hadn’t actually started yet, but soon, very soon, behind the rumbling of the thunder and the flashing of the lightning, streams of water would come cascading down onto the ground that was frozen in impatient anticipation.

There was a flash, and we heard an angry rumble on the wind.

Another flash.

“Now there’ll be a real bang!” shouted the jester.

There was a right royal bang. The skies were split apart by the roaring of the gods, and the horses whinnied in fright.

“Forward!” Tomcat shouted from somewhere up ahead, trying to make himself heard above the noise of the wind.

An intense peal of thunder reverberated across the sky, hurtling past us like a wild stallion and blocking my ears for a moment. The thunderclap was loudest right above our heads.

I barely managed to keep my seat on Little Bee, and Loudmouth’s horse reared up, almost throwing its rider. Deler was unlucky: He went flopping down onto the ground and if not for Marmot, who adroitly grabbed the dwarf’s horse by the ear, the startled animal would have bolted. Deler showered the “stupid beast, unworthy to carry a dwarf on its thrice-cursed hump” with fearsome abuse and scrambled back into the saddle. We all had to make an incredible effort to calm our frightened horses.

“Forward!” Tomcat had no intention of stopping, and he set his horse to a gallop.

The group strung out into a line and followed the tracker.

The rain covered us with its wet wings, and the isolated drops were replaced by a roaring cataract cascading down from the sky. In the blink of an eye, everyone who wasn’t wearing an elfin cloak was soaked to the skin.

The thunder and lightning, the cataracts of water and other attributes of any decent, self-respecting storm shifted farther east. The booming was more distant now, no longer threatening us.

But the rain had not gone away. The entire sky was shrouded in dismal clouds that poured water down onto the earth from their inexhaustible heavenly stores. Not a single blue patch, not a single ray of sunshine. Hargan’s Wasteland was enveloped in a gloomy, autumnal atmosphere. The earth was soaked with water and thick mud appeared out of nowhere under the horses’ hooves, completely covering the grass.

The weather was foul, cheerless, and cold, especially for men who had grown accustomed to constant heat. Hallas suffered the worst of all. He was soaked right through and shuddering with the cold, and his teeth could be heard chattering ten yards away. The stubborn gnome rejected Miralissa’s suggestion that he should put on a cloak.

“Watch out, you’ll fall ill, and I won’t make a fuss over you,” Deler muttered from under his cloak. “Don’t expect me to spoon-feed you medicine.”

“You!” the gnome snorted. “I wouldn’t take any medicine from you. I know your lousy k-kind! You’ll sprinkle in some poison or other and then I’ll wheeze, turn blue, and k-kick the bucket. I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction!”

“You’re no good to me soaking wet,” the dwarf said sulkily.

Hallas snorted and didn’t say anything else. The group was no longer galloping headlong through the meadows of the wasteland; the horses had changed to a rapid walk.

In about three hours it would start to get dark, so we would have to stop for the night somewhere soon.

“Ah, when’s this going to stop?” the gnome finally cried out in exasperation.

His lips had turned blue and his teeth were rattling out a tattoo that would have turned the orcs’ drummers green with envy. “Not before tomorrow morning,” said Honeycomb, casting a glance up at the gray sky.

“Tomorrow morning!” Hallas groaned.

“Definitely not before then.”

As evening came on, the rain grew stronger. It had already completely soaked the ground, and now the meadows were transformed into vast puddles of water. The hooves of the horses stuck in this shallow marsh and the animals began to tire, even though we were moving rather slowly. But after two leagues of this, we left the meadows behind us and came out onto something like a track.

“These are the remains of the old road. The one that led from Ranneng to Avendoom,” Kli-Kli declared from under his hood, as if he had heard my thoughts.

“It’s incredibly well preserved,” Marmot muttered. “Almost five hundred years have gone by, and it’s only been overgrown by grass.”

“Noth-thing surprising about that,” Hallas grumbled. “It was b-built by gn-gnomes.”

“Come on, you joker, pull the other one,” Lamplighter said dismissively.

“I’m not p-pulling your leg. Th-this is our work. I can smell it. Deler, you t-tell him.”

“Of course it’s yours,” the dwarf agreed amicably. “But you’d do better to keep quiet and get warm. You can’t even keep your teeth together.”

“Why makes you so concerned for my health?”

“If you die, I’ll have to dig your grave.”

Hallas wrapped himself more tightly in the cloak and didn’t answer.

Despite the rain, mist started rising from the ground. The transparent white wisps trailed across the earth, insinuating themselves between the stalks of grass, enveloping the hooves of the horses. But as soon as a wind sprang up, the mist dispersed and retreated for a while.

Markauz rode up to us and reined in his horse.

“Hey, Tomcat! Are you sure about those dangers? You didn’t get anything confused at all?”

“That’s right!” said Loudmouth, supporting Alistan. “The storm passed over ages ago. We’ve been getting soaked for the last four hours, and we still haven’t had any particular problems from the sky.”

“Well, thanks be to Sagra, let’s hope we don’t have any for another hundred years,” Uncle drawled.

“I can’t understand what’s going on myself,” Tomcat replied, sounding bewildered. “I felt it before, but now I don’t. There’s nothing. I’m beginning to think I must have imagined it.”

“What about Miralissa and Egrassa?” Mumr asked Alistan cautiously.

“No, they don’t know anything.”

“So it’s passed us by then,” Loudmouth said with a sigh of relief.

“Don’t go building your hopes up too high,” said Kli-Kli, putting on a sour face. “It’ll pass us by all right, then turn round and hit us really hard!”

“You’ll jinx us, saying things like that, you green dummy!” Honeycomb rebuked the goblin angrily. “You should just say it’ll pass us by, and not think bad thoughts.”

“Well, of course, I’m an optimist by nature, but traveling with Harold tends to introduce too much pessimism into my character.”

Kli-Kli cast a significant glance in my direction. I replied in kind with a look that promised the goblin a wonderful life if he didn’t shut up. The jester merely giggled.

A goblin’s eyesight is about ten times keener than a man’s. What looked to me like a gray shadow barely visible through the rain and the mist was an unexpected discovery to Kli-Kli. He cried out in surprise, whooped to his horse, and raced off to overtake the elves.

There was something rustling and crunching under the horses’ hooves, something in the grass that had grown over the road, as if the horses were treading on a crust of frozen snow. I leaned down from my saddle, but I couldn’t see anything except the tall green stems.

Little Bee’s hoof came down on the end of some kind of stick, and as the horse stood on it I again heard the sound that had caught my attention. After another ten yards there was another stick. This time I could make it out quite clearly. Black, blacker than an I’ilya willow, irregular and lumpy. It was a fragment of a human shinbone.

I turned cold. The horses were walking over bones. We were trampling the remains of dead strangers. I heard that crunching and scraping first on one side, then on the other.

“May I kiss a frying pan,” Lamplighter swore. “There was a battle here!”

Kli-Kli came back, and his little face was darker than the cloud that had been chasing us in the morning.

“And what a battle it was, my friend Lamplighter. The battle of Hargan’s Brigade.”

“That’s impossible,” Marmot objected. “In five hundred years bones sink deep into the earth. They would have disappeared completely, they couldn’t just be lying here as if was only two years since the battle happened.”

“I don’t like it here,” Loudmouth said slowly.

“The bones are as fragile as Nizin porcelain,” Kli-Kli muttered. “And you’re wrong when you say the remains aren’t from the time of that battle, Marmot. The ravine that I told you about is just up ahead.”

But the goblin didn’t need to tell us, we could already see for ourselves the obstacle that had appeared in front of us. A deep gap in the body of the earth-the ravine was overgrown with tall grass, as high as a man’s chest, with a stream swollen by the rain and babbling loudly-it must have been a truly formidable barrier for the attackers during the storming of the brigade’s fortifications.

The light mist in the hollow of the ravine thickened, acquiring density and form and almost hiding the bottom. The walls were no longer quite as steep and abrupt as they had been before. In five hundred years the snow and the plants had smoothed them out.

I didn’t even realize that everyone had fallen silent. No one said a single word. We simply stared through the increasing rain at the far side of the ravine, from where centuries ago hordes of orcs had come flooding across to confront four hundred men.

“There must be a lot of bones down below,” said Honeycomb, breaking the silence. “You can see why a road like this was abandoned.”

“Where there are old bones, there are gkhols,” said Lamplighter, setting his hand on the hilt of his bidenhander.

“They’re too old. Do you hear the way they crunch under the horses’ hooves? There haven’t been any gkhols here for a long time.”

“It’s grisly,” Tomcat muttered.

“What is?” asked Lamplighter, jumping down to the ground.

“I mean it’s grisly, them just lying there like that. Not buried. Imagine your remains not lying in the ground, but out in the open for centuries.”

“It’s a bit too soon for you to be thinking about dying. Better watch out in case Sagra hears you,” said Lamplighter, trying to joke.

The joke was a failure.

“Dead men everywhere! It’s wrong to be walking over the bones of soldiers… Tomcat’s right, this place has the whiff of death, there’s something unnatural about it.” Arnkh tossed away the grass stalk that he had been clasping in his teeth for the best part of an hour.

“Who told you the bones were human?” asked Ell, getting down off his horse. He rummaged in the mud and then tossed something black across to Arnkh. “Look at that.”

Arnkh caught the object and started turning it over in his hands, then flung it indifferently into the ravine. I just had time to notice that it was a lower jaw with unnaturally large and long canine teeth. Just like the ones Ell or any elf had. Or any orc.

“Orcs?” Arnkh asked with a curious glance at Miralissa’s k’lissang.

“Who else?” said the elf, and his golden eyes glittered. “There are some human bones, too, but a negligible number compared to the orcs. The Firstborn were mown down in large numbers here.”

“Yes, they took a real lashing.”

“There were more than just arrows here.” Tomcat nodded to indicate signs that only he could spot. “There was magic at work, too. The walls of the ravine have been melted by heat. You see? Someone turned the place into an oven.”

“Hey, Dancer in the Shadows!” Kli-Kli had come across to me. “What are you thinking about?”

“I thought I asked you not to call me that,” I growled at the goblin, but the little shit didn’t bat an eyelid.

Only now he wasn’t looking at me, but at the road.

“Harold,” Kli-Kli said in a very grave tone of voice, “as Loudmouth says, we’re up the backside now. All the way up. They’ve outflanked us!”

And so saying, the goblin went dashing back, yelling as if a giant had stepped on his favorite little bell on his cap. I went dashing after the jester, afraid that he might have lost his mind. Those green creatures are very hard to understand, especially when they’re in such a panicky state.

When they heard Kli-Kli’s shouts, everyone started staring at him in bewilderment. At least, the expressions on Alistan’s and Egrassa’s faces reflected the same thought that I had had-the jester must have gone insane.

Meanwhile the king’s jester reached them and began performing something like a dance by a flea high from smoking charm-weed, at the same time yelling all the while that Tomcat had been right about the cloud.

When I reached him, he was still howling, and the others were staring at him as if he had the plague.

“Harold!” Kli-Kli cried, turning to me. “You listen to me at least! The cloud!”

“What cloud, my friend?” I asked in the most ingratiating voice I could manage, the way they talk to crazy people.

“Open your eyes and look! Not at me, you idiot! At the sky!”

Arguing with someone who’s sick in the head is more trouble than it’s worth and so, under the goblin’s keen gaze, I started looking at the rain clouds. Several other members of the group followed my example. But neither they nor I could see anything frightening.

Just the same clouds as an hour earlier: gray, unbroken, spewing rain down onto the ground.

“Mmm… They all look the same to me.”

“That one there!” said Tomcat, pointing way off into the distance with one finger.

In response there was a flash of lightning on the horizon and immediately one of the clouds was lit up for an instant with purple fire.

Hallas swore quietly.

“I was hoping I could be wrong,” Tomcat said bitterly.

The thing that the storm created by the Nameless One’s minions had been hiding had finally reached us, even though it had been obliged to make a substantial detour along the way.

“Sagra save us!”

“What is that rotten garbage, Tomcat?”

“Everyone shut up!” Markauz roared above the others’ howls and questions. “Tomcat, can you do anything about this?”

“No.”

“Lady Miralissa, Tresh Egrassa?”

“We’ll try.”

Miralissa and Egrassa started drawing something on the soaking wet ground-a cross between an octopus and a star with a hundred light beam tenctacles. The elfess whispered words rapidly. The lines of the form on the ground began pulsating with yellow flame.

I was really hoping that their shamanism would help us. Ell stood in front of the two working the magic, almost on the very edge of the precipice, holding his bow at the ready, although I didn’t think arrows would be effective against magic. The others, including me, crowded together behind the elves and observed the approaching danger.

It was making straight for us at full speed. Somewhere inside that seething cloud, at its very center, a purple flame was being kindled, and the cloud was moving against the wind with only one goal in mind-to overtake us.

Miralissa stopped whispering and began singing in orcish. Every word seemed to hang in the air like a tiny, jingling bell, vibrating and humming, its sound reflected in the yellow shape drawn on the ground.

“What are those repulsive beasts?” Loudmouth gasped.

He was as white as chalk, and I’m sure that right then my face didn’t look much better, either.

A winged creature dived down out of the cloud. Then another, and another.

And then there were ten of the long creatures with broad wings circling in a predatory dance, disappearing into the purple glow and then reemerging from it. Their flight was smooth and spellbinding, but just then I didn’t particularly feel like admiring the creatures’ fluent grace.

“What is that, may an ice worm freeze my giblets?” Honeycomb whispered, clutching his useless ogre hammer desperately in both hands.

“I don’t know!” said Tomcat, staring fixedly at the creatures.

They were small and rapacious, absolutely unlike anything else. Their oily skin had a purple shimmer to it. And that was what I disliked the most.

“S’alai’yaga kh’tar agr t’khkkhanng!” Miralissa shouted out the final words of the spell.

Something yellow spurted out of the drawing on the ground and went shooting off toward the magic cloud with the speed of one of the gnomes’ cannonballs.

Whatever it was, along the way it grew until it reached the size of a small house.

The yellow met the purple and burst straight into the body of the cloud, which shuddered as if it were a living being, and recoiled. There was a blinding flash inside it.

And that was all.

The cloud had eaten the elves’ creation.

The magical purple glow with those creatures dancing in a circle stopped right above our heads. Then the circle broke up and the creatures attacked.

Six of the ten flyers soared past high above our heads and four dived headlong at us, moving so rapidly that we barely managed to react in time.

A bowstring twanged as Ell fired at the first creature. He hit the mark, but the arrow passed straight through the flyer and disappeared, without causing our enemy any harm.

The elf just barely managed to jump out of the way of his attacker, saved only by his natural agility. The monster rushed past him, skimming the top of the grass with its belly and shrieking in disappointment, then began gaining height again and joined the other six circling above the cloud.

“Look out!”

Deler fell to the ground and pulled down Hallas, who was brandishing his mattock belligerently, by the legs. The gnome gave a howl of protest as he fell facedown in a puddle and the second creature zipped past just above his head and then followed its predecessor back up into the sky.

The two other creatures attacked in unison, flying down simultaneously and coming straight at us, choosing their victims on the way. Everybody went dashing in all directions like quail facing an attack by a hawk, but the creatures had picked out their targets. The first was Tomcat, who froze at the very edge of the steep slope, and the second was me.

Click!

In the hourglass of the gods, time slowed almost to a complete standstill. I saw the purple creature fly-ing slow-ly toward me. Now I was able to get a look at its face. And it was a genuine human face, the face of a man who was not yet old, frozen so that it looked like a death mask.

Miralissa shouted something to us, but I couldn’t hear, my gaze was riveted to approaching death. Somehow I knew that after an encounter with this thing, I would not see Sagra, there would be neither light nor darkness, but total, all-consuming nothingness, from which there would be no return.

Tomcat waved his hand slowly and a solitary blue spark flew out of his fingers. A desperate attempt to use something from the arsenal of weapons that the magician who never finished his training had been saving for a day like this. The spark touched the creature’s face, tearing open the skin and the flesh to reveal the skull, but the creature felt no pain, it probably didn’t even know what pain was, and it went crashing into its victim with a howl of triumph. In an instant it passed straight through the Wild Heart’s body like a small cloud of purple mist and then soared back up to the big cloud, while Tomcat, his face completely drained of blood, began slowly tumbling over onto his side.

“Gaaaarret!” The jester’s shout reached me through the dense jelly of time, and I looked back at the second creature.

“This is the end!” The absurd thought flashed through my head.

I realized I’d hesitated for too long. The creature was approaching very rapidly, and I still hadn’t jumped aside to get out of its way.

“I’ll help,” a painfully familiar voice whispered inside my head.

And then the agony came. Hellish, unbelievable pain. My insides were seared with fire, something boiled and seethed up inside me… then it broke out and smashed silently into the creature, tossing me aside at the same time.

A piercing shriek.

The winged creature disintegrated like fog in the face of a hurricane.

The ground came rushing up to meet me.

Click! And time started speeding up again.

The impact of my landing knocked almost all the air out of my lungs. I was left cross-eyed from pain and wheezing hoarsely as I strained to restore my breathing. On both sides hands grabbed me by the elbows, lifted me up, and tried to set me on my feet, but my legs were too soft, as if I’d drunk too much young wine. Honeycomb swore as he and Loudmouth began dragging me away from the edge of the ravine.

“Valder! You son of a bitch,” I croaked out loud. “You promised to leave me alone!”

Naturally, no one replied. The magician had gone into hiding, and I couldn’t sense him anymore. Only when things had got too hot, had he surfaced out of the depths of my own self and saved my skin.

“Who’s that he’s talking to?” Loudmouth asked warily. “Are you sure that brute didn’t touch him?”

“I’m certain!”

Meanwhile the other nine creatures were circling again, with the clear intention of continuing the attack. The speed of their roundelay continually increased until the creatures fused into a single blurred circle that burst like a soap bubble and they came diving down toward us.

“Curses!” Loudmouth let go of me and pulled out his sword.

With no support, I tumbled to the ground, overwhelmed by a sudden wave of weakness.

Along the entire line of the edge of the ravine the air suddenly trembled and vague shadows began appearing-human silhouettes armed with bows. With every heartbeat they became more clearly defined.

“Do you see that?” Honeycomb whispered, stunned.

I gave a bemused nod, but I don’t think he noticed.

The purple creatures were still falling from the sky. In real time no more than two seconds had gone by, but it seemed like an eternity to us.

A voice rang out above the ravine choked with rain.

“At the enemy! Choose your target! Correction half a finger to the right! Fire, you whores!”

The gray shadows of arrows went soaring up into the sky to meet the death that was diving down at us. With a scream of horror and disappointment, the flyers broke apart, dissolving into the air, and the purple cloud groaned.

“Together, fire!”

I had heard that voice before somewhere a long, long time ago, probably in a former life or, perhaps, in a dream.

We couldn’t hear the twang of the bowstrings or the flight of the arrows. There was only the rain rustling on the ground and the cloud constantly groaning like an expiring ghost. The flight of transparent arrows bit into its belly, leaving behind huge ragged holes.

The loud, lamenting wail of a doomed creature rolled on and on above the earth, farther and farther… I put my hands over my ears, the sound was so loud and so terrible. I think they must have heard it even in Djashla.

The phantoms fired a third time and the cloud flared up as bright as the sun, flooding the surrounding region with purple light. In less than a minute I had collapsed from exhaustion and been deafened and blinded. There was nothing left to do except to curl up in a ball and try to emerge from this appalling nightmare.

When I came round, it was all over. There were no more purple storm clouds in the sky, the phantoms had disappeared as if I had simply dreamed them, and even the rain had stopped. The clouds had disappeared, giving way once again to a clear blue sky. The sun was shining straight into my eyes, but the former suffocating heat had been replaced by warm summer weather.

I tried moving first one arm, then the other, and then tried my legs. I seemed to be alive. Squinting downward, I saw that I was lying on a blanket and someone’s considerate hand had covered me with another one.

“Welcome back,” a voice said above my head, and then Uncle’s bearded, smiling face appeared in my field of view. “So you’re awake now? We were thinking of singing you the funeral song of forgiveness.”

I cleared my throat and tried to sit up. I managed it without any difficulty, which meant that I was already back to normal after the piece of magic that Valder had worked. Once again I tried mentally summoning the archmagician who had swapped the Forbidden Territory for a life inside my head. But as always, it didn’t work. The magician had either hidden himself away and didn’t want to answer or he had simply disappeared.

“How long have I been lying here?” It was evening when those purple flyers attacked us and now, if the gods hadn’t changed all the rules while I was out of it, it was early morning.

“A little while,” said Alistan, walking up to me.

“How long exactly?” I persisted.

“A little over a day.”

Not bad going.

“How are you feeling?” Miralissa had come over with the count and now she put her hand on my forehead. Her skin was dry and her palm was hot.

“I seem to be in good shape. What happened?”

“We should ask you that,” said Alistan. “What happened at the edge of the ravine, thief?”

“I don’t know.” I frowned. “I can’t remember.”

“Well try, Harold.” Markauz’s voice had an ingratiating tone to it and he even forgot to call me thief. “It’s very important.”

The entire group looked at me expectantly.

“First those creatures were flying at us, then Tomcat did something, but it didn’t help, then I saw one of them getting close to me, and then something happened.”

“Something?” Miralissa echoed, raising one eyebrow in surprise. “Do you really not know what happened?”

“I really don’t,” I said without the slightest twinge of conscience.

I genuinely didn’t know what the archmagician had done to kill the flyer and toss me out of its path. So I hardly had to lie at all.

“In the hundredth part of a second someone created an attack spell of such great power that I thought my hair would burst into flames! Only a very experienced magician is capable of doing that.”

Uh-huh. Someone like my friend Valder.

“Well, it definitely wasn’t me who did it.”

“Naturally,” Alistan said coolly. “But we’d like to know who did.”

I shrugged.

“And the phantoms? Who, I mean, what were they?”

“They’re the spirits of the men whose bones lie on this side of the ravine,” I said. “The soldiers of the Dog Swallows Brigade returned to our world when they sensed the shamanic magic at work.”

Miralissa kept her pensive gaze fixed on me. I think she knew perfectly well that I wasn’t telling her everything, but for some reason she didn’t try to shake the truth out of me right there and then.

“What the Nameless One’s shamans created could have awoken the spirits of the fallen.”

“And what happened to that cloud?” I asked.

“It disappeared.”

“And Tomcat?”

Everyone turned their eyes away.

“He’s dead, Harold,” Uncle answered eventually.

“What happened?” Somehow I couldn’t believe in the death of the platoon’s tracker.

“That creature, whatever it was, passed through him and killed him. That’s all we know. Are you fit to sit in the saddle, thief?” asked Alistan.

“Yes.”

“Good. We’ve lost a day and we need to get out onto the highway. Is everything ready, Uncle?”

“Of course, captain,” the sergeant of the Wild Hearts said with a nod.

“Get up, Harold, we need to see a soldier off on his last journey.”

They had buried Tomcat before I came round. He had found his final resting place under a young rowan tree with silvery bark and branches that spread out above the large gravestone. On the stone someone had traced the words TOMCAT. BROTHER OF THE WILD HEARTS.?-1123 E.D.

“Good-bye,” Uncle said for all of us.

“Sleep well,” Miralissa whispered, passing her hand above the grave.

Kli-Kli was blinking rapidly, trying to hold back the tears. Arnkh was clenching and unclenching his fists helplessly. Deler and Hallas looked like twins now-both small, sullen, and somber.

And then Lamplighter launched into the song “Forgiveness.” The song that the Wild Hearts sing over the bodies of their brothers, no matter whether they fell in battle or died of old age. It’s a strange song, not really suitable for warriors. After all, how can warriors forgive their enemies?

But this song was as old as the Wild Hearts and the Lonely Giant, and it had been sung since such hoary old times that now no one knew who first sang it to see warriors off on their final journey.

Kli-Kli and Alistan and Miralissa and the elves and I listened to this strange song that semed so incongruous for soldiers, and yet wrung the heart in such bitter enchantment. After the first couplet all the Wild Hearts joined in.

When the song came to an end, only the chirping of the crickets disturbed the silence of the morning. No one said a word; no one wanted to be the first to break the silence of mourning.

Our group had lost a comrade. But would he be the last? No one knew who or what was waiting for us up ahead. We still had so many obstacles to overcome in order to reach the Forests of Zagraba, where the burial chambers of Hrad Spein lay concealed.

“That’s it.” Uncle’s voice sounded like flintpaper. “Time to go.”

“Have a good winter, Tomcat.”

Kli-Kli turned away, trying to conceal his tears. I had a bitter feeling in my heart. As well as the pain of loss we all felt a violent, seething anger. If the creators of that cloud had been there then, I swear I would have torn them limb from limb with my bare hands.

The group rode almost all day long without talking. Hallas and Deler stopped arguing, there were none of those interminable little songs from Lamplighter’s reed pipe, Kli-Kli forgot about his jokes and sniffed occasionally, with his eyes noticeably redder than usual. Marmot frowned dourly and stroked Invincible, who was frozen as still as a statue on his shoulder.

I rode apart from everyone else, immediately behind Uncle and Honeycomb. I was in a foul mood and didn’t feel like talking to anyone. My solitude was only interrupted once, when Alistan rode up to me.

Somehow he appeared out of nowhere on my right and we rode together for several leagues. I didn’t object to his silent company and was actually a little surprised when he broke the silence.

“You know, Harold, Tomcat’s lying in a good place.”

“Is he?” That was all that I could force out to express my surprise at his words.

“Beside the grave of heroes. He has good neighbors.”

“For him, yes,” I replied after a moment’s pause. “But who will remember him in ten years’ time? A grave in a wilderness. Perhaps one cowherd a year ever finds his way to that spot.”

“You’re wrong, thief, he’ll be remembered in the force,” said Uncle, who had heard our conversation. “Beside the slopes of Mount Despair, not far from the Lonely Giant, there’s a graveyard. That’s where all the warriors of the force rest, it doesn’t matter if their bodies are in the graves or were left behind forever out in the snowy tundra. Tomcat will be remembered.”

For the rest of the day we didn’t exchange a single word.

After all the rain that had poured down on the earth, the unbearable heat seemed to have receded. In the days that followed we traveled in relatively warm and very pleasant weather. The meadows of luscious green grass and impassable thickets of bushes were left behind and the open wilderness was replaced by sparse pine forest.

The mood of the group was gradually restored. Tomcat’s death was not forgotten, it was just that the problems of the day pushed it into the background.

Conversations sprang up, first on one side, then on the other. Deler and Hallas started bickering again because they couldn’t agree on whether they’d seen poisonous toadstools or edible mushrooms growing in the little meadow where we spent the night before. Out of the kindness of his heart, Kli-Kli got Ell up in the morning with the help of Deler’s hat, which was full of water. For this escapade the goblin very nearly caught it in the neck from the elf and the dwarf, but he managed to hide behind me in time, lamenting that no one appreciated his talent.

Several times during the journey I caught Miralissa’s thoughtful gaze on me, but she didn’t ask me anything, evidently waiting until we would be alone together. So I took pains to avoid her company.

Without knowing why, I didn’t want to tell anyone about Valder and the help he had given me.

We lengthened our journey by traveling parallel to the highway and taking our time before riding out onto it. Day followed day, and I was already thinking I would never lay eyes on the main road that we had all been longing to see. However, on the eighth day of the journey, already well into the second half of July, Kli-Kli gave a howl of joy and pointed to a light strip that had appeared between the trees.

We had finally emerged from Hargan’s Wasteland onto the highway.

And it was only then that I noticed what the goblin was holding in his hand.

“Where did you get that from, Kli-Kli?” I asked when I recovered the power of speech.

“What do you mean?” the jester asked, and then he followed my glance, understood, and said: “Ah, you mean this trinket? You’ll never believe it! While you were lying there out cold, we started looking for a spot for Tomcat’s grave, may he dwell in the eternal light. I walked away from the others a bit and I noticed this thing.”

“You just noticed it?

“This was lying on a stone that was covered with moss. There were even words written on the stone, but I couldn’t make anything out.”

“So you took it?” I asked.

“And why not?” the goblin said with a shrug. “You can see what a beautiful thing it is. Why should something that good go to waste? I’ll be able to sell it.”

“Don’t sell it, Kli-Kli,” I said in a soft, insinuating voice.

“You don’t think I should?” The jester cast another curious glance at his find, then fastened the chain round his neck and hid the silvery, drop-shaped amulet under his cloak. “Miralissa told me the same thing. Are you two in cahoots, then?”

“No, just trust me. Perhaps someday it will save our lives.”

Kli-Kli looked at me seriously. “You’re full of riddles, Dancer in the Shadows.”

“We’re all full of riddles and mysteries, Kli-Kli. I am, and Miralissa is, and you are. It’s true, isn’t it?”

“Uh-huh,” he agreed, then suddenly smiled and said, “So you don’t object to my calling you Dancer?”

“What good do all my objections do? They don’t stop you anyway. Call me whatever you like. In any case now I’m going to do everything I can to retrieve the Horn.”

“And that’s another of the prophecies of the shaman Tre-Tre that has come true,” the goblin said triumphantly. “The Dancer in the Shadows has accepted his new name and decided to go through with things to the end.”

“There you go again, you and your stupid book!” I flared up immediately. “What if somebody else takes the same name?”

“First you find me the idiot who would agree to do it,” Kli-Kli said.

What a pity that the little wretch managed to dodge my hands and avoid a good solid smack!

Early on the twenty-eighth of July, the walls of a city emerged from the morning mist in front of us.

Our group had reached Ranneng.

Moscow 2002