The itch I felt in the middle of my back had nothing to do with the extra danger sense I inherited with the title of Hero of Varay. This was something much more primitive, a feeling that somebody had me lined up in his sights. I had chain mail on, but that won't necessarily turn an arrow. I had more experience than I wanted in the limitations of chain mail. The itch translated itself into frantic movement as I hopped around as much as the setting and the trolls permitted. Arrows in the dark didn't sound like an archer from Nushur. There was no one in Nushur who had the eyesight of an elf.
I saw a second arrow go past me and pierce the forehead of a troll. There may have been more arrows. It wasn't light enough that I could expect to see them but by chance or extremely close proximity. I shouted a warning to my companions. My frantic gyrations had separated me from them. An elf sword demands a lot of room, and I had moved away from Lesh and the others at the beginning of the fight, long before I felt the need to take extra evasive actions. My sword song got louder and more intricate and I started to clear a larger circle around me.
The trolls finally noticed that there was an archer involved in the fight. It seemed that each arrow found one of them, but I was slow to pick up on that clue. At first, I might have dismissed it as the inevitable consequence of there being so many more of the trolls than there were of us. But the earlier trolls, along the road… in the heat of battle, they slipped my mind far too long.
A little more light. I could see the attacking trolls and the growing stacks of their dead. I didn't have to count on the instinctive awareness of where everyone was. My people were all on their feet, still fighting. Timon and Harkane were back to back, covering each other, moving as a unit. Lesh was off to the side, jabbing with a short spear held in his left hand and whirling a battle-ax in his right.
I finally quit my mad gyrations when it sank in that the archer was aiming at trolls and not at me. I didn't want to make it any harder for him than I had to. I would feel foolish dying by mistake when there were so many ways to die intentionally-by someone else's intention.
Dragon's Death seemed almost weightless in combat, eager to move in answer to my will. I pulled more volume from the battle song as the fight went on, apparently drawing energy from the tune. The blade glowed brightly from the blood that washed it, but the sword's glow lessened as the light of dawn increased. Drawing the second sword, the blade taken from the son of Xayber, was purely unconscious. I shifted my grip on Dragon's Death to hold it in my right hand alone, and reached over my shoulder to draw the second weapon with my left hand. Two sword songs intertwined themselves-and I'll never know how my throat managed both at the same time. I was whistling a duet by myself, even though the elf head was also whistling the song of his sword off to the side.
I moved into the heaviest concentration of trolls, slicing left and right, propelling myself forward with the force of the swings. I've read accounts where the hero went through a wild melee and was then able to describe his every move in technical fencing jargon. Bull. At a time like that all you can do is make every move you can think of to keep your head on your shoulders. If you're competent with your weapons, the moves come faster than you can think. Reflex and instinct, carefully honed by training and practice, do the job. There's little chance of remembering every sequence afterward.
More light made better targets. When I could spare the odd nanosecond, I tried to spot the archer who was helping us. But I didn't have any luck until the attack ended. One troll screamed a series of guttural sounds and the whole troop, those who were still able to, broke off and ran, chased by several more quick arrows. I turned and saw the archer on the next rise.
Annick.
We stared at each other, maybe sixty yards apart, for a frozen time. Before I recovered enough from the surprise to say anything, she had mounted her horse and ridden off out of sight behind the rise. I caught one more glimpse of her through the trees and she was gone.
"That was Annick," Lesh said-as if I might have failed to recognize her.
"Either her hunting tastes have changed or elves are out of season," I said, almost gasping the words. I was still short of breath from the fight.
So were the others. A quick inspection showed that Harkane was the only one with anything worse than scratches. He had a long gash along his right forearm, a cut that ran almost from wrist to elbow. Along the center of the slice, the wound looked dangerously deep, but the bleeding was seepage, not the gushing that would have indicated a severed artery. It was serious, but not as bad as it might have been.
"I'm going to have to sew that up," I told Harkane after I cleaned the wound. There was a fairly complete first-aid kit in our supplies. Timon found it for me. After I gave Harkane a long swig of the local painkiller-a foul-tasting brew called something that the translation magic rendered as number-I put in several butterfly stitches to draw the sides of the wound together, then doused the cut with antiseptic again and bandaged it. There were tears at the corners of Harkane's eyes until the numb-er took effect, but he gritted his teeth and didn't make a sound. As long as the wound didn't get infected, he would be okay.
"What now, lord?" Lesh asked when I finished with Harkane and the rest of us had treated our scrapes and scratches with iodine. "Do we keep after the trolls and finish 'em?"
I looked at the bodies strewn around us.
"No, we've got to get on with our main job. Just make sure that all of these are really dead." I got caught by a troll playing possum once. I didn't want it to happen again.
Lesh grunted and set to work. It was a task that didn't seem to bother him, and it would have bothered me to do it-I had done it before and wouldn't hesitate to do it again if I had to, but as long as I didn't have to, I didn't even want to watch. Timon and I rechecked the loads on the horses to make sure that there had been no mistakes in the dark. An unbalanced load would be miserable for the horse, and if things started falling off, we might lose time or more.
Then I went over to our elf head.
"What will you do about the bowman? Who is he? I couldn't see." Xayber's son was more agitated than I had seen him since our fight, and his death.
"I'm not going to do anything," I said. "And the archer wasn't a he, but a she. That was the niece of Baron Resler."
"That hellbitch? His voice climbed two octaves. Annick would have been pleased to know the effect she had.
"You know of her?" I asked, trying to keep my voice flat.
"I know of the banshee. We all do."
"She must be slipping," I told him. "If she had spotted you, she would have slipped an arrow between your eyes just for the pleasure of it." Xayber's son closed his eyes. I had a curious thought. I wondered if his body, back at Castle Basil, was shuddering from the revulsion he so clearly felt for Annick.
"There's thirty-four of 'em dead, lord," Lesh reported. "Twelve were killed by arrows, all clean shots-chest, throat, or head. She was a wicked eye with a bow, lord."
"How's Harkane doing?" I asked softly, not turning to look.
"He'll be right soon enough."
"Let's break out a beer apiece before we start riding. The beer should be halfway cool and we can all use a little boost."
"Aye, lord."
Lesh knew just where the beer was packed, which was no surprise. One beer wasn't nearly enough for me, or for the others, but we had only one case of Michelob along and I had no idea how long it had to last, how long it might be before we got back out of the mountains.
Then it was time to ride.
The surviving trolls had run northeast. Annick had headed due north. We went southeast.
"We've got a long way to go to reach the proper pass into the Titans," our dead elf told us. "You've come too far out of the way."
I had no intention of resuming that argument, and when I didn't respond, he closed his eyes.
We rode at a good pace that day, trying to make up ground. When we started to come upon long open stretches near the edge of Precarra, we angled more to the east. Riding took the nervous lumps out of my gut after the early-morning fight. When we stopped for lunch, I checked Harkane's arm-so far, so good. There was no bleeding and no trace of infection, though I didn't know if infection would appear that soon. He didn't complain of pain, and he seemed too alert to be hiding much, so I just gave him aspirin rather than another dose of the Varayan numb-er. That stuff was potent, but I wouldn't give or take it unless it was absolutely necessary. Our supply was limited and we might have worse injuries to deal with by the time we got back to Basil.
Despite what I had told our elf, I was worried about the time we had lost by riding to Nushur and then chasing the trolls. I didn't know how much time we had until the general craziness and deterioration reached whatever critical mass it needed to trigger the End of Everything. I didn't know how long we would need to reach the shrine in the Titans, then the shrine out in the Mist, and finally to do whatever had to be done with the family jewels of the Great Earth Mother in order to reverse the magical entropy, or whatever it was that put the real world and the buffer zone at risk of annihilation. Dad used to say that it's crazy to worry about things you can't change, but it's hard to avoid it sometimes.
There weren't any real roads in this section of Varay. There simply was too little traffic to keep nature from reclaiming any path. Grapes were hauled out in the autumn, wool in the spring, metals in small quantities every couple of months. Mostly, the trails there were led to the nearest stream that would float a small flat-bottomed boat and the goods went downstream to villages nearer the center of Varay. Supplies came back upstream over the same routes.
"We'd better top off our water bags every time we see good water," Lesh said after we finished lunch. "Out in the wilds ahead, we can't count on finding much this time of year." With Harkane injured, Lesh was leading two packhorses and Timon handled the third.
Before we left the forest for good, we came across a small pack of the seven-foot lizards, the almost-dragons, like the one that had been my welcome to Varay when I came through the first time. The midget dragons scuttled off ahead of us, their tiny wings fluttering madly even though they were too small to get the dragons off the ground. Lesh speared one-"Just for practice," he said.
The land started getting wrinkled before we left the forest, and beyond Precarra there were deep folds, and the kind of fissures that earthquakes can cause. Layers of adjacent rock might be separated by a hundred feet, horizontally or vertically. Finding a secure path took effort when the land was at its wildest. This was a part of Varay I had not seen before, rugged but tempting, like the Badlands of the Dakotas.
But there were also islands of green, sometimes quite extensive. There were small stands of trees, pastures, the very rare farm. Lesh warned us not to expect hospitality in this quarter of Varay, and he was right. Not even the king's Hero got more than a surly greeting or a grunt. And those were the more genial ones. Usually, we were pointedly ignored. "They're uncommon independent sorts," Lesh said, understating beautifully.
Near sunset, we had to start detouring to find a place to cross one river that did meander through the wilds. It ran in a narrow canyon between steep walls. Even if we could have worked our horses down to the river, the waters was too swift and too deep to ford.
"Comes down off the mountains," Lesh said. "It'll be cold water too."
We followed the canyon upstream, toward the mountains, looking for a place to cross. We didn't find it that afternoon. We just went on until we found a decent place to camp, in an area of broken rock, boulders the size of houses scattered around.
"Can't sleep just out in the open," Lesh said. "Even if those forest trolls aren't chasing after, there's rock trolls and always the chance of a dragon flying over looking for a feed."
There was no fuel handy for a fire, so we made do with cold food. Lesh lowered a canvas bucket to the river on a long rope, several times, to water our horses after they cooled off. The water was frigid. I thought about hanging a six-pack of beer down to cool in the river, but decided that we had better save it for a while longer.
The night passed without alarm, and we got an early start in the morning. A couple of hours later we crossed the river and turned east again. There were other rivers, creeks, and dry canyons to cross, but eventually we managed to get over each. We spent a full week riding east like that before our elf finally said that it was time to angle south to the mountains. We were near the pass we needed to use to enter the Titans.
When I first arrived in Varay, all that anyone had to say about the Titans was that they were impassable, unscalable, the southern boundary of the buffer zone, an absolute barrier. No one knew how far south they extended or what might lie beyond. No one went there. At least, no one came back. Gradually, I learned that there were qualifications. The Titans weren't simply a blank wall. There were foothills, and then a progressively higher series of mountain ranges, one beyond the other. People did go into the nearer reaches. Some folks lived on the lower slopes of the northernmost mountains. There were a few villages, collections of people with their farms, their sheep and cattle. There were also the mines that produced the metals, precious and common, that Varay and the other kingdoms needed. To the people of the buffer zone, the steel, tin, and copper found in the mountains were as important as the gold and silver. Our precious metals weren't draped with the same mystique in the buffer zone. Gold and silver were used as money, but barter was more common. The standard of exchange was more likely to be weights of corn or wheat than weights of gold or silver. The metals were measured against the grain, not the reverse. Mostly, gold and silver were considered useful for paying Heroes, for occasional trade with the mortal realm, and for decorative purposes. It was local currency only by default, when something more compact than grain was required. That was one of the things about the seven kingdoms that I had the most trouble adapting to.
The Titan Mountains. You could see them from any prominence in the southern half of Varay, which made it easy to keep your directions straight. There was always a line of white and purple and brown separating sky from ground in the south, though the intersection was often blurred or hidden by clouds or haze. The closer you got to the mountains, the more impressive they became, always reaching into the sky, towering. Until you got so close that the mountains overwhelmed everything else.
As we approached the bulwark, we crossed two ridges in the foothills, then went down a long, deep valley that left us in shadow from midafternoon on. The way led downhill to the base of the first range of the real mountains. I spent so much time looking up toward the peaks that my neck ached. The way ahead of us did seem to be nearly sheer, but I knew that it wasn't.
When we camped for the night, the sky overhead was still bright, but the shadows in our valley made it seem like twilight. The trees in the valley were all stunted, perhaps from the limited sunlight they received. Lesh collected enough wood to keep a decent fire going through the night. We thought it might be quite chilly.
"It'll be worse when we get up into the mountains, and we can't count on being able to run a fire every night, even if there's wood," I reminded him.
"But no sense freezing when we don't have to," Lesh said. Then, " 'Less you think it's too risky."
I thought about it. The idea of a fire made me nervous on general principles, but it didn't cause any recognizable twitching of my danger sense. "We'll try it, tonight at least," I said. We were going to light a fire to heat supper, so we might as well let it burn afterward.
I was glad for the fire when I got up for my second sentry turn a couple of hours before dawn. It might be August, and we might be in the southernmost reaches of Varay, but we had already picked up a couple of thousand feet of altitude, and that night was chilly, maybe even in the low forties. I put several extra branches on the fire and brewed fresh coffee to carry the warmth inside. My danger sense was absolutely quiet. For the moment at least, we were probably safe.
"You know, there's one benefit about coming this way," I told Lesh when we started riding again. "We're far enough south that it's not so bad going on field rations. The food will last that much longer."
Lesh grunted. "I'd still like a good Basil breakfast."
"Well, so would I, but it could be worse."
"And will be soon, like as not," Lesh said. It was an easy prophecy.
But our first days in the Titans were glorious. I quickly wished that I had found time to make the journey when there was no deadly threat hurrying me along. The lower reaches of the mountains were mostly gentle. We rode basically east, but along a curved and climbing path, edging gradually farther south. From one mountain to the next we rode through heather and scrub trees, sometimes through vast fields of wild berries that were ripe and tasted something like strawberries, but not as tart. The path we followed wasn't the best-defined route I had ever seen, but animals both wild and domestic had climbed it. People used it. We found the remains of campfires in several places, ages of fires built in the same premium locations.
The view looking back out of the mountains was even more spectacular than the view coming toward them. All of Varay and Dorthin lay spread out below us, endless miles of green and brown, distant plumes of smoke, more distant fluffs of clouds, blue sky, and sunlight. The sun felt particularly hot on bare skin, but the mountain breeze remained quite comfortable all day. The chain mail and leather padding weren't nearly the burden they had been down in the flatlands.
We couldn't travel very fast even though the path wasn't particularly dangerous, and each afternoon we camped at spots where others had camped before us, many times.
Each day took us higher, farther south, deeper into the mountains. By the third afternoon like that, we had high peaks on both sides and we were riding above a steep-walled valley that might have seemed at home in Switzerland. Where sunlight hit the patches of grass and wild flowers, the colors were brilliant-greens and yellows and golds, fewer blues and reds. Once we saw a shepherd and his sheep, sixty animals or so, on the opposite slope, north of us. On a straight line, they were probably only a quarter mile away, but we would have had to travel at least three miles, most of it on foot and nearly vertical, to get to them. The shepherd watched us carefully but didn't return our greeting.
"We must be almost south of Carsol by now," Lesh said when we made camp that night at our highest point yet. Carsol was the chief city of Dorthin.
"But the mountains aren't part of any kingdom," I said.
"As far as folks normally go, they are," Lesh corrected me. "When we get back into the high parts, then nobody owns them."
"Tomorrow," Xayber's son said. It was a way of getting our attention. "If memory serves, you'll see what real mountains are like then. There'll be a high pass. This path will continue on below it, leaving the narrowest of tracks up to a high pasture. The horses won't be able to go any farther than that. There's grass and water for them there. You'll have to block this end of the pass enough to keep them from wandering over the edge. Then you'll have to walk on to the shrine of the Great Earth Mother."
He certainly had our attention. It was the most information he had ever given out at one time.
"How far do we have to go then?" I asked.
"That depends on how long you can survive up there," the elf said. "Once you go beyond that high pass, the defenders of the shrine will know that you are coming. And none may enter without their permission."