The Shadowland

Алексей Ланг The Shadowland

Guard captain Ferras Vansen woke to the sickly glow of the shadowlands, unchanged since he had fallen asleep. His cloak was no longer covering his face and rain spattered him. He groaned and rolled over, scrabbling for the hem of the heavy woolen garment, but it was trapped between him and the dampening ground and he had to sit up, groaning even louder, to free it.

He was just about to roll back into sleep when he saw a hint of movement at the corner of his gaze. He held his breath and turned his head as slowly as he could, but saw nothing except the long, wet grass and the familiar lump of Barrick’s sleeping form. Beyond lay the terrifying creature called Gyir, but the warrior-fairy also seemed to be asleep.

Vansen let out what he hoped sounded like the honest snort of someone whose slumber had been briefly but inconsequentially disturbed, then lay silently, praying that his heart was not really beating as loudly as it seemed to be. He knew he had seen something more than the simple bouncing of rain-bent grass.

Movement resumed beside the soggy remnants of last night’s fire, a rounded shape bobbing along slowly only a few paces from the sleeping prince.

Vansen flung his cloak at it and dived after; the thing let out a muffled squawk and tried to escape, but it seemed to be tangled. Vansen scrambled across the wet ground on elbows and knees and managed to catch it before it disappeared into the darkness again. As he held it wrapped in the damp wool, he found it smaller than he had feared and surprisingly light, loose as a bundle of sticks and cloth in his hands: even with a poor grip on it, his strength seemed more than equal to the task of holding it. The captive creature let out a terrified, whistling shriek that sounded almost like a child’s cry. He could feel by its struggles that it was a large bird of some kind, with wings that must stretch nearly as wide as a man’s arms.

As he tried to protect his face from the darting beak something else rushed toward him, startling him so that he did not even fight when the bird was ripped out of his hands. By the time Vansen could turn his head, the shadow-man Gyir had a squat knife with scalloped edges pressed lengthwise against the creature’s throat as the bird thrashed and made odd, almost human noises of fear. It was a raven, Ferras Vansen could see now, mostly black, with a few patches of white random as spatters of paint, but Vansen paid it little attention. He was terrified and astonished at the sudden appearance of Gyir’s knife, and shamed by his own incompetence.

Great Perin, has he had that all along? He could have murdered us at any time! How did I miss it?

But he could not ignore the bird after all, because it had begun to talk.

“Don’t kill us, Masters!” The voice rasped and whistled, but the words were clear. “Us’ll never do wrong at you again!

Us were only so hungry!”

“You can speak,” said Vansen, reduced to the obvious.

The raven turned one bright yellow eye toward him, beak opening and shutting as it tried to get its breath. “Aye. And most sweetly, too, given chance, Masters!”

Prince Barrick sat up, tousle-haired and puffy-eyed, looking at least for this moment more like an ordinary sleepy young man and less like the maddening enigma he had been. “Why precisely are you two pummeling a bird?” He squinted. “It’s rather spotty. Might it be good to eat?”

“No, Master!” the raven said, struggling uselessly. Patches of gray skin showed where it had lost feathers, making it seem even more pathetic. “Foul and tasteless, I am! Pizen!”

Gyir changed position to steady the squirming bird, poised to kill it.

“No!” Vansen said. “Let it be.”

“But why?” asked the prince. “Gyir says it’s old and going to die soon, anyway. And it was thieving from us.”

“It speaks our tongue!”

“So do many other thieves.” The prince seemed more amused than anything else.

“Aye,” the bird panted, “speech it good and well, thy sunlander tongue. Learned it by Northmarch when I lived close by your folk there.”

“Northmarch?” It was a name Vansen had barely heard in years, a haunted name. “How could that be? Men have not lived at Northmarch for two centuries, since the shadows rolled over it.”

“Oh, aye, us were young then.” The raven still struggled helplessly in Gyir’s grasp. “Us had shiny pins and joints all supple, and us’s knucklers were firm.”

Vansen turned to Gyir, forgetting for a moment that it was harder to communicate with him than with the raven. “Two centuries old? Is that possible?”

The fairy came the closest to a human gesture Vansen had yet seen, a kind of slithery shrug. The meaning was clear: it was possible, but why should it matter?

“Yes, it matters.” Vansen knew he was replying to words not spoken and perhaps not even intended, but at this moment he did not care: in the land of the mad, a land of talking animals and faceless fairies, madness was the only sane creed. “He talks like my mother’s father, although that means nothing to you. I have not heard speech like that since I was a child.” Vansen realized that he ached for conversation — ordinary talk, not the elliptical mysteries of spellbound Prince Barrick, each answer bringing only more questions. In fact, he realized, he was so lonely that he would accept comradeship even from a bird.

But it wouldn’t do to make that clear just yet — even a bird could be suspect in these treacherous, magical lands. “So why shouldn’t we kill you?” Vansen asked the struggling raven. “What were you doing in our camp, poking around? Tell, or Iwilllet him slit your throat.”

“Nay!” It was half shriek, half croak, a despairing sound that made Vansen almost feel ashamed of himself. “Mean no harm, us! Just hungry!”

“Gyir says he smells of those creatures,” Barrick offered, “—the ones who attacked him and killed his horse. ‘Followers,’ they’re called.”

“Not us, Masters!” The raven struggled, but despite its size, it was helpless as a sparrow in the fairy-warrior’s hands. “Was just following the Followers, like. Can’t fly much now, us — pins be all a-draggled.” It carefully eased one of its wings free, and this time Gyir allowed it. More than a few shiny black feathers were certainly missing. “Went to eat summat a few seasons gone by, but that summat be’nt quite dead yet,” the raven explained, bobbing its head. “Tore us upwise and downwise.”

“And the smell of those…Followers?”

“Us can’t stay high or fly long like us did oncet. Have to follow close, go from branch to branch, like. Followers have a powerful stink.” It ruffled its parti-colored feathers with its beak. “Can’t smell it, usself. Poor Skurn is old now — so old!”

“Skurn? Is that what you’re called?”

“Aye, or was. Us were handsome then, when that were our name.” He poked his beak toward Gyir. “Hisfolk drove all the sunlanders out from Northmarch. Life were good then, for a little while, in the fighting — dead ’uns every which side! But then sunlanders were gone and poor Skurn was leaved behind to shift as us could when twilight come down.” The beak opened to let out a mournful sigh, but the shiny eyes looked to Vansen with calculating hope, like a child searching for the first light of forgiveness.

He had no stomach to kill the thing. “Let the bird go,” he said. Nothing happened. Gyir was not looking at him but at Barrick. “Please, Highness. Let it go.”

Barrick frowned, then sighed. “I suppose.” He waved his hand at Gyir, still showing a remnant of the royal manner even here beneath the dripping trees. “Let it go free.”

As soon as the blade was withdrawn the bird rolled to its feet and took a few hopping steps, quite nimble for all its professed age. It flapped its wings as though surprised and pleased to find it still had them. “Oh, thank you, Masters, thank you! Skurn will serve you, do everything you ask us, find all best hiding places, rotting dead ’uns, birds’ nests, even where the fish go scumbling down in the muddy bottom! And eat so little, us? Never will you know us is even here.”

“What is he talking about?” Vansen said crossly. He had expected it to bolt for the undergrowth or fly away, but the bird had distracted him and he had forgotten to watch where Gyir hid the knife; now the Twilight man’s hand was empty again.

“You saved him, Captain.” Amusement rippled coldly across Barrick’s face. Suddenly he seemed a boy no longer, but more like an old man — ageless. “The raven’s yours. It seems you’ll finally taste the pleasures of being lord and master.”

“Lord and master,” said the raven, beginning to clean the mud from his matted feathers with his long black beak. He bobbed his head eagerly. “Yes, you folk are Masters of Skurn, now. Us will do you only good.”

The forest track they followed seemed to have once been a road: only flimsy saplings and undergrowth grew on it, while the larger trees — most with sharp, silvery-black leaves that made Vansen think of them as “dagger trees”—formed a bower overhead, so that the horses paced almost as easily as they might have on the Settland Road or some other thoroughfare in mortal lands. If the going was easier, though, it was not a peaceful ride; Vansen had begun to wonder whether saving the wheezing raven might not have been his second-worst decision of recent days, exceeded only by the choice to follow Barrick across the Shadowline. Reprieved from death, Skurn could not stop talking, and although occasionally he said something interesting or even useful, Vansen was beginning to feel things would have been better if he had let Gyir the Storm Lantern spit the creature.

“…The other ones, Followers and whatnot, are pure wild these days.” Skurn bobbed his head, moving continuously from one side to the other off the base of the horse’s neck like a cat trying to find the warmest place to sleep. It was a mark of how the last days had hardened Vansen’s mount that it paid little attention to the creeping thing between its shoulders, only whinnying from time to time when the indignity became too much. “Scarce speak any language, and of course no sunlander tongue, unlikes usself. There, Master, don’t ever eat that ’un, nor touch it. Will turn your insides to glass. And that other, yes, th’un with yellow berries. No, not pizen, but makes a fine stew with coney or water rat. Us’d have a lovely bit of that now, jump atter chance, us would. Knows you that soon you be crossing into Jack Chain’s land? You’ll turn, o’course. Foul, his lot. No love for the High Ones and wouldn’t lift a hand but for their own stummicks or to shed some blood. They like blood, Jack’s lot. Oh, there’s a bit of the old wall. Look up high. A fine place for eggs…”

The nonstop chatter had begun to blend into one continuous rattle, like someone snoring across the room, but the bulwark of ruined stone caught Vansen’s attention. It rose from a thicket of thorns, its top looming far above his head, and was sheathed in vines that flowered a dull blood red, the thick, heart-shaped leaves bouncing with the weight of raindrops.

“What did you say this was?”

“This old wall, Master? Us didn’t, although us is pleased to name it if that be your wish. A place called Ealingsbarrow oncet in thy speech, if our remembering be not too full of holes — a town of your folk.”

Vansen reined up. The crumbling golden stones looked as though they had been abandoned far more than two centuries ago: even the best-preserved sections were as pitted and porous as honeycomb. In many places trees had grown right through the substance of the wall and their roots were pulling out even more stones, like young cuckoos ousting other birdlings from a nest. The forest and the incessant damp were taking the wall apart as efficiently as a gang of workmen, tumbling the huge stones back to earth and wearing them away as though they were nothing more than wet sand, steadily removing this last trace that mortal men had once lived here.

“Why have we stopped?” asked Barrick. The prince had ridden beside Gyir all morning, and Vansen could not escape the idea that the two of them were conversing wordlessly, that the faceless man was instructing the prince just as Vansen had once been instructed by his old captain Donal Murroy.

“To look at this wall, Highness. The bird says it is part of a town named Ealingsbarrow. Northmarch must be only half a day’s ride away or so.” Vansen shook his head, still amazed. The old, cursed name of Northmarch reminded him that what had happened there and here in Ealingsbarrow might soon happen to all the mortal cities of the north — to Southmarch itself. “It is hard to believe, isn’t it?”

Barrick only shrugged. “They did not belong here. No mortals did, building without permission. It is no wonder it came to this.”

Vansen could only stare as the prince turned and rode forward again. Gyir, riding behind him, looked back a few moments longer, his featureless face as inscrutable as ever.

“Burned blue in the night for six nights when it fell, this place,” said Skurn. “Like old star had fallen down into the forest. The keeper of the War-Stone gave it to the Whispering Mothers, you see.”

Vansen was shivering as they left the last wall of Ealingsbarrow behind them. He did not know what the raven meant and he was fairly certain he was better off that way.

The rain began to abate in what Vansen estimated was the late afternoon, although as always he got no glimpse of sun or moon in the murky sky to confirm a guess about time. He had fed the hungry raven out of the last of his own stores, and had nibbled in a desultory way himself on some stale bread and a finger’s width of dried meat, but he was feeling the grip of hunger in a way he hadn’t before. Since the prince seemed to have become a little less strange and distracted, and since a full day had passed without any sign of the monstrous, faceless Twilight man Gyir trying to kill them all, Vansen’s fearfulness had abated a little, but the respite only served to make him more aware of his other problems. The possibility of starving was one of them, although not the biggest.

I am completely ruled by something I cannot change or understand,he thought.Worse even than if these fairy-folk had made me a prisoner. At least then I would expect to be helpless. But this — this is worse by far! Home is behind us, there is no reason to go on into this place of madness, and yet on we go, and it seems I can do nothing to stop it.

“We cannot follow this road any farther, Master,” said Skurn suddenly. His beak tugged at Vansen’s sleeve. “Cannot, Master.”

“What? Why?”

“TheNorthmarch Road, this is, and now I smell Northmarch too close. I told you we were coming near Jack Chain’s land.” The bird’s eyes were blinking rapidly. He fidgeted on the horse’s neck, almost comically frightened. “The bad is all on it, these days.”

Northmarch Road of course, Vansen thought, no wonder they had found this so much easier a track than others they had followed. He could see nothing beneath his feet but undergrowth and grass and dead leaves, but still the hairs on the back of his neck stirred. Knowing the road was beneath him and had been for hours was like discovering he had been standing on a grave. Still, a part of him was loath to give up such ease of travel. “It has a fearful name, but surely it has been empty now for ages.”

“You don’t understand, good Master.” Skurn flapped his wings in disquiet. “These lands benotempty. They be Jack Chain’s and you will lose your life at least an’ he catches you.”

Vansen relayed the raven’s words to Barrick. The prince paused for a moment, as though listening to something that silent Gyir might be telling him, then at last slowly nodded his head.

“We will make camp. There is much to decide.”

Only days ago, in an ordinary world where the sun came up and the sun went down, Barrick Eddon knew he would have looked on the fairy Gyir as something hideously alien, but somehow he had come to know Gyir the Storm Lantern as well as he knew any other person, even those of his own family.

Except for Briony, of course — Briony, his other half… Barrick did his best to push the thought of her away. If he was to survive he must harden himself, he had decided, cast even the most precious of those beads of memory behind him. He couldn’t let himself be weak as other men were weak — like Vansen the guard captain, still living in the old ways and as out of place here (or anywhere in the new world that was coming) as a bear sitting at a table with a bowl and spoon. Barrick knew that Vansen had saved the disgusting, corpse-eating raven mostly because it spoke his mortal speech, as if being able to mumble that outdated tongue was anything other than a mark of irrelevance.

The bird Skurn had many vile habits, and seemed to reveal a new one every few moments. Only an hour had passed since they had made camp and already the creature had defiled it, not even leaving the vicinity to defecate but instead simply pausing beside the campfire and discharging a spatter as wet and foul-smelling as the goose turds that had made it such a hazard to walk beside the pond in the royal residence back home. Now the disgusting old bird was crouched only a few steps from Barrick, noisily finishing off a baby rat he had found in a nest in the wet undergrowth, the tail danging from his mouth as he chewed the hindquarters. A moment later the whole of it, tail following to the very end, slid down his throat and disappeared.

Skurn belched. Barrick scowled.

Do not waste your fires on anger,Gyir told him.Especially on one such as that. You will have need of every spark, cousin.The words were simply there, as though whispered inside his skull. There was no sound, no quirks of speech as with regular talk, but the words had a shape and a feeling that Barrick could tell, even without comparison, made them Gyir’s and no one else’s.

Cousin? Why do you call me that? Because we share something. What? What could we share?

The love of our lady, and loyalty to her. She saved you as she saved me. Saved me from…And then the fairy’s words trailed off, or changed, so that they felt like words no longer, but rather a sensation of cracking thunder and a rain as heavy and terrifying as a flight of arrows.

“Highness,” said Vansen suddenly, his speaking voice as harsh as a frog’s croak after the taut musicality of Gyir’s soundless words. “I think we need to listen to what the bird says…”

“Listen!” snarled Barrick. “Listen! It is you who cannot listen!” How could the man continue to scrape and bray like that when he could have wordsandsilence, music and stillness, both the plucked string and the expectant pause before the lute sounded? But perhaps the guardsman couldn’t. Perhaps Barrick was being unfair. He himself had been touched by the Dark Lady — poor, earnest Ferras Vansen had not. “I apologize, Captain,” he said, and was pleased by his own magnanimity. No wonder he had been chosen from the crowded, mad battlefield, singled out like the oracle Iaris, who of all men had been given the words of Perin to bear back to humanity. “What is it that…that squawking gore-crow has to say?”

“Cannot go this way,” the raven said. “The High One with no food-hole, the caulbearer,heknows it. These be Jack Chain’s lands now, since the queen sleeps and the King has grown so old. Us that care for our life don’t go there.”

“He’s talking about Northmarch, Highness,” Vansen said. “It seems to belong to some enemy — some dangerous person.”

“I am not stupid, Vansen. I understood that.” Barrick scowled. At this moment, the captain reminded him more than he would wish of Shaso: the old man, too, had always been judging him, always underestimating him, speaking words that sounded full of reason to the ear but made him sting with shame. Well, half a year in the stronghold had no doubt made Shaso dan-Heza a little less proud and scornful.

A twinge of shame, a distant thing but still painful, made him want to think about something else. Shaso had brought his doom on himself, hadn’t he? Nothing to do with Barrick.

“I am sorry, Highness,” Vansen said, and bowed, the first time he had done that since they had crossed over the Shadowline. “I have overstepped.”

“Oh, stop.” Barrick’s mood had gone sour. He turned to Gyir, tried to form the words in his head so the other could understand him. It was so easy when the faceless man spoke to him first — like a flying dream, no labor, just the leap and then the freedom of the air.What is this creature talking about? Is it true?

I do not know. I have not traveled here, in this part of…Here another idea floated past that seemed to have no words, a jumble of formless shapes that somehow spiraled inward like snailshells.Except when the army went to war, but none would have dared to attack us in that force. Still, there are many here behind the Mantle that do not love…Again there was a picture rather than a word, this one a paradoxical image of black towers and shining light. Only after it had ceased to glow in his head did Barrick perceive the words that went with it.Qul-na-Qar.

What is that? Is that you, your people?

That is the place we have made the heart of our…Here an idea that seemed to mean not so much “rule” or “kingdom” as “story.”That is where the Knowing make their home. Those Qar who know what was lost, and what sleeps.

Barrick shook his head — too many ideas he could not understand were floating through his mind, although he had finally come to understand one of Gyir’s idea-sounds,Qar,meant “people like myself”—those Barrick still thought of in the back of his mind as “fairy folk.” Still, even the clearest of Gyir’s ideas were as slippery as live fish.I need to know if what this unpleasant bird says is important,Barrick said.The…the Lady…has given you a charge, that you told me. You must do what she asked.Although he had no idea of Gyir’s task, he knew as well as he knew that his bones were inside his body that what the dark woman wanted must be done.

I am not allowed to delay, it is true. My errand is too vital. Still, it is hard to believe that one of our enemies has grown so strong here, an enemy that was thought dead. If it is true, I fear my luck — the luck of all the People, perhaps — has turned for ill. We are far from my home and in dangerous lands. I am wounded, perhaps crippled forever, your companion has my sword, and I have no horse.

Gyir’s thoughts were heavy and fearful in a way that Barrick had not felt before. That alone was enough to make the prince really frightened for the first time since the giant’s war club had swung up high above him and his old life had come to an end.

“I don’t know what that fairy’s done to you, Highness, what kind of spell he’s put on you, but I’m not giving him back his sword. He may pretend friendship, but he’ll likely kill us if we give him a chance. Don’t you remember what he and his kind did to the men of Southmarch at Kolkan’s Field? Don’t you remember Tyne Aldritch, crushed into…into bloody suet?”

The prince stared at him. “We will talk more of this,” Barrick said, and mounted his horse. The faceless man Gyir, with an agility that Vansen carefully noted — he was recovering very swiftly indeed from wounds that would have killed an ordinary man — swung himself up behind the prince.

Vansen pulled himself up into his own saddle. Unlike Barrick’s strange black horse, Vansen’s mount was beginning to look a little the worse for wear, despite the long pause for rest. It shuddered restively as Skurn climbed the saddle blanket with beak and talons and hopped forward to a perch on the beast’s neck. Pleased with himself, the black bird looked around like a child about to be given a treat.

Mortal horses weren’t meant for this place,Vansen thought.No more than mortal men.

Although a dragging succession of hours had passed, and Vansen himself had slept long enough to feel heavy in his wits, his head was foggy as the tangled forest into which Barrick and Gyir now rode.

“Where be they going, Master?” Skurn asked, agitated. “Us must turn back! Didn’t uns listen? Don’t uns see that this be all Jack Chain’s land round about?”

“How should I know?” Vansen had no command of the situation, and the addition of the fairy-warrior to their party had made things worse, if anything. Gyir, the murderer of Prince Barrick’s people, a proven enemy, now seemed to have become the prince’s confidant, while Ferras Vansen, the captain of the royal guard, a man who had already risked his life for Barrick’s sake, had become some kind of foe. “Why do you ask me, bird? Can’tyouunderstand that Gyir thing?”

The raven groomed himself nervously. Up close he was quite repulsive, scaly skin visible in many places, what feathers remained matted with the gods only knew what. “Not us, Master. That be a trick of the High Ones, to talk so, without voices, not such as old Skurn. Us knows nothing of what they are saying or where they think they go.” “Well, then, that makes two of us.”

The remains of the ancient road stayed wide and relatively flat beneath them, but now the trees had grown thick again around them, shutting out anything but the briefest glimpses of the gray sky, as though they traveled down a long tunnel. Birds and other creatures Vansen could not identify hooted and whistled in the shadows; it was hard not to feel their approach was being heralded, as though he were back on one of the Eddons’ royal progresses with the trumpeters and criers running ahead, calling the common folk to come out, come out, a king’s son was passing. But Vansen could not help feeling that those who waited in this place did not wish them well.

His sense of danger, of being visible to some hostile, lurking force, grew stronger as the day of riding wore on. The unfamiliar bird and animal sounds died away, but Vansen found the silence even more foreboding. Barrick and the faceless man ignored him, no doubt deep in unspoken conversation, and even Skurn had fallen quiet, but Ferras Vansen’s patience had become so thin that every time the little creature moved and he caught a whiff of its putrid scent, he had to steel himself not to simply sweep it off onto the ground.

“This was once a great road, Highness, just as the bird said,” he called at last, and then wished he hadn’t: the echoes died almost immediately in the thick growth on either side of the road, but even the absence of an echo made the noise seem more stark, more exceptional. He could imagine an entire gallery of shadowy watchers leaning forward to listen. He spurred his horse forward so that he could speak more quietly. “This is the oldNorthmarch Road, not simply a forest path. If we follow it long enough we will arrive at something — perhaps the raven’s Jack Chain — but it will not be something we’ll like. Can’t you feel that?”

The prince turned his cool stare on him. Barrick’s hair was stuck to his forehead in damp red ringlets. “We know, Captain. We are looking for another road, one that crosses this one. If we ride overland through this tangled forest, we will come to grief.”

“But it is only a short way to Northmarch, and that is where Jack Chain has his hall!” squealed Skurn, hopping up and down, which made Vansen’s horse snort and prance so that he had to tighten his grip on the reins. “Even if we are lucky and One-Eye bes far away, and there be no Night Men about, still Jack-Rovers and Longskulls there be all around here, as well as the Follower-folk who remember not sunlanders nor nothing even of the High Ones! They will capture us, poor old Skurn. They will kill us!”

“They will certainly hear us if we stop to argue every few paces,” Barrick said harshly. “I did not bring you here, Vansen, and I certainly did not bring that…bird. If you wish to find your own way, you may do so.”

“I cannot leave you, Highness.”

“Yes, you can. I have told you to do it but you do not listen. You say you are my liegeman, but you will not obey the simplest order. Go away, Captain Vansen.”

He hung his head, hoping to hide both the shame and rage. “I cannot, Prince Barrick.”

“Then do as you wish. But do it silently.”

They had been riding for what seemed like most of a day when an astonishing thing happened, something that alarmed not only Vansen, but the raven, too, and even Gyir the Storm Lantern.

The sky began to grow dark.

It crept up on them slowly, and at first Ferras Vansen thought it no more than the ceaseless movement of gray cloud overhead, the blanket of mist which thickened and even sometimes thinned without ever diminishing much, and which gave the light of these lands its only real variety. But as he found himself squinting at trees beside the wide road, Vansen suddenly realized he could not doubt the truth any longer.

The twilight was dying. The sky was turning black.

“What’s going on?” Vansen reined up. “Prince Barrick, ask your fairy what this means!”

Gyir was looking up between the trees, but not as though searching for something with his eyes — it was an odd, blind gaze, as though he were smelling rather than staring. “He says it is smoke.”

“What? What does that mean?”

Skurn was clinging to the horse’s neck, beak tucked under a wing, mumbling to himself.

“What does he mean, smoke?” Vansen demanded of the raven. “Smoke from what? Do you know what’s happening here, bird? Why is it getting dark?”

“Crooked’s curse has come at last, must be. Must be!” The black bird moaned and bobbed its head. “If the Night Men catch us or don’t, it matters not. The queen will die and the Great Pig will swallow us all down to blackness!”

He could get nothing more out of him — the raven only croaked in terror. “I do not understand!” Vansen cried. “Where is the smoke coming from? Has the forest caught fire?”

“Gyir says no,” Barrick said slowly, and now even he sounded uneasy. “It is from fire someone has made — he says it stinks of metal and flesh.” The prince turned to look at silent Gyir, whose eyes were little more than red slits in his blank mask of a face. “He says it is the smoke of many small fires…or one very big one.”