Алексей Пехов - Shadow Prowler

“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.”