Алексей Пехов - Shadow Prowler

“Noth-thing surprising about that,” Hallas grumbled. “It was b-built by gn-gnomes.”

“Come on, you joker, pull the other one,” Lamplighter said dismissively.

“I’m not p-pulling your leg. Th-this is our work. I can smell it. Deler, you t-tell him.”

“Of course it’s yours,” the dwarf agreed amicably. “But you’d do better to keep quiet and get warm. You can’t even keep your teeth together.”

“Why makes you so concerned for my health?”

“If you die, I’ll have to dig your grave.”

Hallas wrapped himself more tightly in the cloak and didn’t answer.

Despite the rain, mist started rising from the ground. The transparent white wisps trailed across the earth, insinuating themselves between the stalks of grass, enveloping the hooves of the horses. But as soon as a wind sprang up, the mist dispersed and retreated for a while.

Markauz rode up to us and reined in his horse.

“Hey, Tomcat! Are you sure about those dangers? You didn’t get anything confused at all?”

“That’s right!” said Loudmouth, supporting Alistan. “The storm passed over ages ago. We’ve been getting soaked for the last four hours, and we still haven’t had any particular problems from the sky.”

“Well, thanks be to Sagra, let’s hope we don’t have any for another hundred years,” Uncle drawled.

“I can’t understand what’s going on myself,” Tomcat replied, sounding bewildered. “I felt it before, but now I don’t. There’s nothing. I’m beginning to think I must have imagined it.”

“What about Miralissa and Egrassa?” Mumr asked Alistan cautiously.

“No, they don’t know anything.”

“So it’s passed us by then,” Loudmouth said with a sigh of relief.

“Don’t go building your hopes up too high,” said Kli-Kli, putting on a sour face. “It’ll pass us by all right, then turn round and hit us really hard!”

“You’ll jinx us, saying things like that, you green dummy!” Honeycomb rebuked the goblin angrily. “You should just say it’ll pass us by, and not think bad thoughts.”

“Well, of course, I’m an optimist by nature, but traveling with Harold tends to introduce too much pessimism into my character.”

Kli-Kli cast a significant glance in my direction. I replied in kind with a look that promised the goblin a wonderful life if he didn’t shut up. The jester merely giggled.

A goblin’s eyesight is about ten times keener than a man’s. What looked to me like a gray shadow barely visible through the rain and the mist was an unexpected discovery to Kli-Kli. He cried out in surprise, whooped to his horse, and raced off to overtake the elves.

There was something rustling and crunching under the horses’ hooves, something in the grass that had grown over the road, as if the horses were treading on a crust of frozen snow. I leaned down from my saddle, but I couldn’t see anything except the tall green stems.

Little Bee’s hoof came down on the end of some kind of stick, and as the horse stood on it I again heard the sound that had caught my attention. After another ten yards there was another stick. This time I could make it out quite clearly. Black, blacker than an I’ilya willow, irregular and lumpy. It was a fragment of a human shinbone.

I turned cold. The horses were walking over bones. We were trampling the remains of dead strangers. I heard that crunching and scraping first on one side, then on the other.

“May I kiss a frying pan,” Lamplighter swore. “There was a battle here!”

Kli-Kli came back, and his little face was darker than the cloud that had been chasing us in the morning.

“And what a battle it was, my friend Lamplighter. The battle of Hargan’s Brigade.”

“That’s impossible,” Marmot objected. “In five hundred years bones sink deep into the earth. They would have disappeared completely, they couldn’t just be lying here as if was only two years since the battle happened.”

“I don’t like it here,” Loudmouth said slowly.

“The bones are as fragile as Nizin porcelain,” Kli-Kli muttered. “And you’re wrong when you say the remains aren’t from the time of that battle, Marmot. The ravine that I told you about is just up ahead.”

But the goblin didn’t need to tell us, we could already see for ourselves the obstacle that had appeared in front of us. A deep gap in the body of the earth—the ravine was overgrown with tall grass, as high as a man’s chest, with a stream swollen by the rain and babbling loudly—it must have been a truly formidable barrier for the attackers during the storming of the brigade’s fortifications.

The light mist in the hollow of the ravine thickened, acquiring density and form and almost hiding the bottom. The walls were no longer quite as steep and abrupt as they had been before. In five hundred years the snow and the plants had smoothed them out.

I didn’t even realize that everyone had fallen silent. No one said a single word. We simply stared through the increasing rain at the far side of the ravine, from where centuries ago hordes of orcs had come flooding across to confront four hundred men.

“There must be a lot of bones down below,” said Honeycomb, breaking the silence. “You can see why a road like this was abandoned.”

“Where there are old bones, there are gkhols,” said Lamplighter, setting his hand on the hilt of his bidenhander.

“They’re too old. Do you hear the way they crunch under the horses’ hooves? There haven’t been any gkhols here for a long time.”

“It’s grisly,” Tomcat muttered.

“What is?” asked Lamplighter, jumping down to the ground.

“I mean it’s grisly, them just lying there like that. Not buried. Imagine your remains not lying in the ground, but out in the open for centuries.”

“It’s a bit too soon for you to be thinking about dying. Better watch out in case Sagra hears you,” said Lamplighter, trying to joke.

The joke was a failure.

“Dead men everywhere! It’s wrong to be walking over the bones of soldiers. . . . Tomcat’s right, this place has the whiff of death, there’s something unnatural about it.” Arnkh tossed away the grass stalk that he had been clasping in his teeth for the best part of an hour.

“Who told you the bones were human?” asked Ell, getting down off his horse. He rummaged in the mud and then tossed something black across to Arnkh. “Look at that.”

Arnkh caught the object and started turning it over in his hands, then flung it indifferently into the ravine. I just had time to notice that it was a lower jaw with unnaturally large and long canine teeth. Just like the ones Ell or any elf had. Or any orc.

“Orcs?” Arnkh asked with a curious glance at Miralissa’s k’lissang.

“Who else?” said the elf, and his golden eyes glittered. “There are some human bones, too, but a negligible number compared to the orcs. The Firstborn were mown down in large numbers here.”

“Yes, they took a real lashing.”

“There were more than just arrows here.” Tomcat nodded to indicate signs that only he could spot. “There was magic at work, too. The walls of the ravine have been melted by heat. You see? Someone turned the place into an oven.”

“Hey, Dancer in the Shadows!” Kli-Kli had come across to me. “What are you thinking about?”

“I thought I asked you not to call me that,” I growled at the goblin, but the little shit didn’t bat an eyelid.

Only now he wasn’t looking at me, but at the road.

“Harold,” Kli-Kli said in a very grave tone of voice, “as Loudmouth says, we’re up the backside now. All the way up. They’ve outflanked us!”

And so saying, the goblin went dashing back, yelling as if a giant had stepped on his favorite little bell on his cap. I went dashing after the jester, afraid that he might have lost his mind. Those green creatures are very hard to understand, especially when they’re in such a panicky state.