Herbie Brennan - The Faeman Quest

Corin lowered his voice. ‘Perhaps the invasion has started.’

Pyrgus stared at him in sudden shock. It said a lot for his naivete that the thought had never occurred to him. But now Corin had expressed it, Pyrgus realised, with a sweeping chill, it was the most obvious explanation. ‘Do you really think so?’

‘I don’t know,’ Corin said. From his face he was as shocked and worried as Pyrgus himself. ‘But I think we should find out.’

‘How do we do that?’

‘We go down there and look at the tracks.’

‘Manticores aren’t easy to track.’ Pyrgus frowned. He’d had a hard enough time following the one that escaped from him and she wasn’t on open ground where there were no broken bushes to give a clue.

‘Not single manticores, no,’ Corin agreed. ‘Those pads don’t leave much of a mark. But a herd’s different, especially a big one; and especially if it’s moving quickly. They extend their claws and that chews up the ground. If we go down there, we’ll soon know where they went – which direction, anyway.’

There was something else worrying Pyrgus. ‘I don’t suppose you’d know if the Table of Seven have viewglobe cameras set up on the plain?’

‘Bound to,’ Corin said. ‘Their military would want to keep an eye on the herd. And the border, of course. Are you worried about being seen?’

‘A bit.’ Actually he was less worried about being seen by the Haleklind military than he was about being seen by Blue, who thought he was on a diplomatic mission to Kremlin Karcist. When he had planned on moving the herd, he knew the manticores themselves would shield him, and in any case he was unlikely to be spotted among a mass of milling beasts and men. But if he went down on to an empty plain, he would stand out like a sore thumb. Blue would know at once what he was up to, of course. They’d been so close since childhood that she could practically read his mind. At which point she’d go ballistic.

Corin, who was quick on the uptake, said, ‘Is this that you don’t want the men seen, or you don’t want to be recognised personally?’

‘Recognised personally – it’s a complication I really don’t need. It doesn’t matter who sees a party of men wandering about, not now: not in an empty field. But I’d rather -’ He broke off to ask, ‘What are you doing?’

Corin was holding a spell cone under his nose. ‘Easily fixed,’ he said.

Pyrgus drew back suspiciously. ‘Where did you get that?’

Corin grinned. ‘I may not like the Government, but I’m still a Haleklinder – we carry spells for every occasion. This one’s a NewFace ^ ®. The kids use them a lot at dances – they make you look handsome.’

‘I’m handsome already,’ Pyrgus grinned back.

‘Matter of opinion,’ Corin told him. ‘But in any case they change your whole appearance: your own mother won’t recognise you. The best thing about it though is that when you get fed up with looking different, all you have to do is rub your face vigorously and the effect dissipates.’

‘Crack the cone!’ said Pyrgus briskly.

Corin proved right about the tracks. Once they went down to the plain, it was obvious a manticore herd had grazed there; and recently. It was a little less obvious where they’d gone – parts of the plain were so churned up they looked as if they’d been ploughed – but fortunately one of Corin’s men had experience as a tracker.

‘They moved into the forest,’ he said.

‘That’s not possible,’ Corin said at once. ‘Plains manticores dislike the forest and vice versa.’

The man shrugged. ‘Only telling you what the tracks show.’

Pyrgus felt a cautious flooding of relief. If the manticores went into the forest, it meant there’d been no invasion yet. But like Corin he was still unsure about this information. He turned to Corin and asked, frowning, ‘Where would they go in the forest? Where does the forest lead to?’ He didn’t seem to be making himself clear, so he added, ‘I mean, if you go right the way through the forest, where do you come out?’ His grasp of Haleklind geography was abysmal, but the thought occurred that there might be better living conditions for the manticores on the other side. The beasts were nomadic to some extent and could simply have taken off in search of better pastures. Plains manticores might not like to live in a forest, but they might be prepared to pass through one. Against that, if the Table of Seven was planning on using them as a weapon, had moved them to the border and had cameras tracking them, it seemed very unlikely they’d simply have been allowed to wander off. Or if they had wandered, wouldn’t their military minders be appearing soon to bring them back?

Corin looked at him thoughtfully for a moment. ‘The forest has a long stretch northwards and it eventually extends right into the Realm if you go south, but if you move directly across you reach the grounds of Kremlin Karcist eventually.’

‘That’s where I’m supposed to be,’ Pyrgus muttered thoughtfully. His mind was running at full speed. Wherever they might be, the manticores were no longer massing by the border, so the mission he’d set himself was accomplished, even though he’d had nothing to do with it. Which meant he could now get on with his official mission. If he reached the Table of Seven quickly, he could start his search for Mella at the place where she was last seen and at the same time find out if there was any diplomatic leeway in the current threatening situation. He was actually more optimistic than he had been when he started out. He kept thinking about the missing herd, finding it difficult to imagine anyone other than the Haleklind military might have moved them. And if the military had moved them, that marked a change in the situation, just possibly a change for the better. He came to a decision and turned to Corin.

‘Old friend, I want to thank you for your help.’

‘Can’t say we did much,’ Corin shrugged.

‘You were here for me – that’s what counts. And however it happened, the manticores are out of danger for the moment. So now I need to make official contact with the Table of Seven.’

Corin glanced at him quickly. ‘You’re not thinking of hiking through the forest, are you?’

‘Shouldn’t I be?’

‘Not on your own, you shouldn’t. First of all, knowing you, you’d probably get lost. Secondly, the forest manticores are by far the most dangerous breed of the whole species. Dangerous and unpredictable.’

‘Yes, but if you leave them alone, they’ll leave -’ Pyrgus began to protest.

Corin cut across him. ‘Get real, Pyrgus. I know you’re an animal-lover, but they can still kill you. We’ll come with you.’

Pyrgus looked at Corin, looked at the men ranged in military ranks behind him. ‘Will you? Would you? Will you really?’

Corin glanced across his shoulder. ‘What do you say, men?’

And the men raised their torches in salute and shouted, ‘Yes!’

The march through the forest was uneventful – so much so that Corin began to worry. ‘With a party this size we should have hit at least one security spell by now,’ he told Pyrgus eventually. ‘This forest edges the grounds of Kremlin Karcist. There’s no way they’d let it go unprotected – open invitation.’

‘Maybe they rely on the forest manticores to keep people out,’ Pyrgus suggested.

‘Have you seen any manticores?’

‘Actually no,’ Pyrgus said. ‘But I thought it was just the sounds of a big party that was keeping them away.’

‘Then a fat lot of protection they’d be, would they?’ Corin said. ‘But I happen to know there were magical protections in this area. At least there used to be. Some of them set to stop large groups as well. One or two people you can leave to the manticores, but a group the size of ours should set off alarm bells all over the place. I’ve been using a detector since we moved into the trees and there’s not a sign of anything. It’s as if…’ He hesitated. ‘If I didn’t know the Companions better, I’d say it’s as if somebody switched them off.’