Steven Brust - Taltos

Time for one deep breath, which I let out slowly.

I don’t think I’ll ever again see so many corpses in one place. I don’t especially want to, either, And they were all in different and interesting stages of decomposition. I’ll forego the details, if you don’t mind. I’d seen bodies before, and sheer number and variety makes them no more pleasant to look at.

I should mention one odd thing, though: there was no odor of decay. In fact, as I thought about it, I realized that the only smell I could detect was faint and sulfurous and seemed to come from the river, which was now fast and white-capped. The river also provided the only sounds I could hear as it sloshed its way over greyish rocks and up onto sandy banks, doing carvings in slate.

I felt Loiosh shivering inside of my cloak.

“You okay?”

“I’ll live, boss.”

I sat up and looked at Morrolan; he seemed even more exhausted than I. He was also very wet, as I was, and he was shivering as much as I, which I took a perverse pleasure in noting.

Presently he caught me looking at him. I suppose he guessed some of my thoughts, because he scowled at me. He sat up and I noticed his hands twitching as another scowl crossed his features. “Sorcery doesn’t work here,” he remarked. His voice sounded a bit odd, as if he was speaking through a very thin glass. Not really distant, yet not really close either. He said, “It would be nice to dry off.”

“Not much wind, either,” I said. “I guess we stay wet for a while.” My voice sounded the same way, which I liked even less. I still felt cold, but it was warmer here than in the river.

“Let us proceed,” said Morrolan.

“After you,” I said.

We worked our way to our respective feet and looked around. The river behind us, corpses to the sides, and mists ahead.

“This place is weird, boss.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“Have you noticed that the corpses don’t stink? “

“Yeah.”

“Maybe it’s the soul that gives off the stink, and since these guys don’t have any soul, there isn’t any smell.”

I didn’t ask Loiosh if he was serious, because I didn’t want to know. Morrolan touched the hilt of his sword and checked to be sure the staff was still with him, reminding me of why we were here. He nodded to a direction off to his right. I girded my loins, so to speak, and we set off.

I sat in my favorite slouch-chair at home and considered how I was going to kill Kynn. What I wanted to do was just walk up and nail him, wherever he was; whoever was around. As I’ve said, this is not, in general, a bad policy. The trouble was that he knew there was a war going on, so he was being careful not to be alone.

I don’t know how I got so fixed on Gruff s as the place to nail him, and in thinking about the whole thing later I decided that had been a mistake and made sure to avoid such preconceptions. I knew I could take him in a public setting if I wanted to, because when I was a kid I’d seen someone assassinated in a public place—my father’s restaurant. That was how I first met Kiera, too, but never mind that now.

I chewed the whole thing over for a while, until Loiosh said, “Look, boss, if it’s just a distraction you want, I can help.”

I said, “Like hell you can.”

We were walking through swirling fog, which was merely annoying until I realized that there was no perceptible air movement to cause the fog to swirl. I pointed this out to Morrolan, who said, “Shut up.”

I smiled, then smiled a little more as the end of a bare tree branch smacked him in the face. He deepened his scowl and we kept walking, albeit more slowly. Fog was the only thing to look at except the ground, which was soft and sandy and looked as if it couldn’t contain growing things. As I’d reached this conclusion, a sudden shadow appeared before us which turned out to be a tree, as bare as the first.

“Boss, why are the trees bare in the summer?”

“You’re asking me? Besides, if it were summer, it wouldn’t be this chilly.”

“Right.”

More and more trees appeared as if they were sprouting in front of us, and we moved around them, keeping more or less to a single direction. Morrolan stopped shortly thereafter and studied what seemed to be a path running off diagonally to our left. His jaw worked and he said, “I don’t think so. Let’s keep going.”

We did, and I said, “How can you tell?”

“The book.”

“What book?”

“I was given a book to guide me through the Paths. Sethra helped, too.”

“Who gave you the book?”

“It’s a family inheritance.”

“I see. How accurate is it?”

“We will find out, won’t we? You may have been better off without me, for then Sethra would have been able to tell you of safer paths.”

“Why couldn’t she have told you the safer paths?”

“I am Dragaeran. I’m not allowed to know.”

“Oh. Who makes up all these rules, anyway?”

He gave me one of his looks of disdain and no other answer. We came to another path leading off at a slightly different angle.

Morrolan said, “Let’s try this one.”

I said, “You’ve memorized this book?”

He said, “Let us hope so.”

The fog was thinner now, and I asked Morrolan if that was a good sign. He shrugged.

A bit later I said, “I take it there’s a good reason for not bringing the book along.”

He said, “It’s not permitted.”

“This whole trip isn’t permitted, as I understand it.”

“So why make things worse?”

I chewed that over and said, “Do you have any idea what’s going to happen?”

“We will appear before the Lords of Judgment and ask them to restore my cousin.”

“Do we have any good reasons why they should?”

“Our nerve for asking.”

“Oh.”

Shortly thereafter we came to a flat greyish stone set into the middle of the path. It was irregularly shaped, maybe two feet wide, four feet long, and sticking up about six inches out of the ground. Morrolan stopped and studied it for a moment, chewing his lip. I gave him silence to think for a while, then said, “Want to tell me about it?”

“It indicates a choice. Depending on which way we go around it, we will be taking a different way.”

“What if we walk directly over it?”

He gave me a withering look and no other answer. Then he sighed and passed around the right side of it. I followed. The path continued among the naked trees, with no difference that I could detect.

Shortly thereafter we heard wolves howling. I looked at Morrolan. He shrugged. “I’d rather deal with an external threat than an internal one at this point.”

I decided not to ask what he meant. Loiosh shifted nervously on my shoulder. I said, “I’m getting the impression that these things have been set up deliberately, like a test or something.”

He said, “Me, too.”

“You don’t know?”

“No.”

More howling, and, “Loiosh, can you tell how far away that was?”

“Around here, boss? Ten feet or ten miles. Everything is weird. I’d feel better if I could smell something. This is scary.”

“Feel like flying around for a look?”

“No. I’d get lost.”

“Are vou sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

I caught a flicker of movement to my right and, as the adrenaline hit me, I realized that Morrolan had his sword out and that I did, too. Then there were greyish shapes appearing out of the mist and flying through the air at us, and there was a horrible moment of desperate action and it was over. I hadn’t touched anything, and nothing had touched me.

Morrolan sighed and nodded. “They couldn’t reach us,” he said. “I’d hoped that was the case.”

I sheathed my blade and wiped the sweat from my hands. I said, “If that’s the worst we have to fear, I’ll be fine.” Loiosh came back out of my cloak.