Philip Athans - Realms of Mystery

Obviously, he could only regain his comrades’ trust by revealing the true killer, and it occurred to him that he might now be in a better position to do precisely that. The foe was adept at concealing itself from whatever guards the adventurers posted. But perhaps a hidden observer, lurking just outside the camp, someone of whose presence it was unaware, would be able to spot it.

It seemed a promising plan. To try it, all he had to do was make it through the day.

His extremities grew numb, and his breath crackled in his nose. Occasionally he trudged past a hollow in the ground or in the escarpment beside the trail. He’d feel sorely tempted to huddle there to escape the freezing wind, but he didn’t dare let his friends get too far ahead. Instead, he imagined dancing hearth fires, steamy saunas, drafts of mulled red wine searing his throat and kindling a glow in his belly, and a feather bed heaped with eiderdowns with a warming pan tucked underneath.

It didn’t seem to help much. He promised himself that if by some miracle he survived this nightmare, he’d flee to sunny Chessenta where winter was a myth, and never wander north again.

By mid afternoon, the cold had reduced him to a miserable, shambling somnolence, his consciousness wavering in and out of focus. Once he roused to find himself plodding down the wrong side of the path, a mere inch from a prodigious drop. The danger jolted him back to full awareness, and that was when he heard the guttural orcish voices whispering from somewhere back up the trail. Thank Corellon he had sharp ears, and that sound carried well in the mountains.

It would be suicide to confront the creatures here, where there was no room to maneuver. Halladon ran, and though he tried to do so quietly, he heard the orcs immediately break into a run as well. They were hunting him.

After a switchback turn the way widened out into a promontory supporting a stand of stunted spruces. Panting, his heart pounding, Halladon hid behind one of the trees and prepared to cast one of the two spells left in his memory.

Three ores trotted into view. They wore ragged garments crudely dyed with ugly, clashing colors-muddy mauves, garish oranges, and mustard yellows. Deep cowls shadowed their swinish faces, protecting their bloodshot eyes against the hated daylight; had the sun been shining, they likely wouldn’t have ventured from their lair at all. Even from across the bluff, Halladon caught the sour stink of their blemishedolive flesh. Grateful that he hadn’t attracted the notice of a full-sized war party, he let them trot as close as he dared, then took hold of his piece of moss and whispered the incantation.

On the far side of the ores, white light flowered amid the branches of an evergreen. On a brighter day, they might not even have noticed, but on this gray, overcast afternoon the shimmer caught their eyes. Exclaiming in surprise, they pivoted toward the glow.

Halladon rattled off his final spell. Two slivers of azure radiance streaked from his fingertips and buried themselves in the closest ore’s back. The creature collapsed. Halladon sprang to his feet and charged. The remaining orcs began to blunder back around. The nearer one, a pot-bellied specimen with a necklace of mummified ears, caught sight of the half-elf rushing at it and its piggy eyes widened. It tried to swing its spear point into line, but was an instant too slow. Halladon thrust his dirk into the creature’s chest.

Knowing he had no chance of taking the last orc by surprise, the adventurer yanked his weapon free and whirled to face it. The creature, a hulking brute with delicately wrought bands of gold-perhaps plunder from some massacred caravan-gleaming on its corded, simian arms, threw its spear. Halladon dodged it by a hair. The orc whipped out a scimitar and rushed him.

The half-elf had to overcome the advantage of his foe’s longer, heavier blade, and he knew he’d only get one chance to do it. He retreated several steps while the scimitar, whizzing through the air, missed him by inches. When he’d taken the measure of the orc’s attacks-the creature favored a high, horizontal, potentially beheading cut-he faked another step backward, crouched suddenly below the arc of his adversary’s stroke, and drove his dirk into its belly.

With a grunt, the orc doubled over. Halladon stabbed it again, this time in the heart. The brute dropped.

Halladon could scarcely believe he’d single-handedly bested all three of his attackers. Corellon grant that no other creature wanted to pick a fight.

In any case, there was no time to stand and savor his victory, not when Moanda, Kovost, and Gybik were getting farther away by the second. Halladon bent over the third orc, then hesitated. In normal circumstances, he would have deemed it a shabby, churlish deed to rob the dead, but it would be even more dishonorable to allow himself to freeze to death when his friends needed his help to escape a killer. Hoping it wasn’t verminous, he appropriated the orc’s malodorous but warm-looking fleece-lined leather cloak, and then the creature’s curved, brass-hilted scimitar.

Shivering, envying his friends their little fire, Halladon surveyed the camp from behind a granite boulder. Gybik and Moanda lay shrouded in their blankets, with only Kovost-who’d wrapped himself in Halladon’s bearskin mantle-standing guard. Perhaps the adventurers believed that now that they’d chased their companion away, they were no longer in any extraordinary danger. Or perhaps they’d decided that with only three of them remaining, double watches simply weren’t feasible anymore.

The sun had set several hours ago, and by now Halladon had begun to suspect that the killer intended to stay away tonight. The half-elf’s stomach was already hollow and achy with hunger, and he wondered grimly how he’d feel after another day without food. Perhaps he should have searched the orc corpses for provender, although the notion of eating the kind of rations such creatures typically carried was almost enough to quell his appetite for the nonce.

Gybik shifted beneath his covers, and the motion drew Halladon’s eye. No shadowy ghost or assassin was crouching over the thief, and the half-elf was already looking away again, into the darkness beyond the wavering yellow firelight, when it struck him that there was something subtly wrong about the way Gybik had moved. When he peered at the thief more closely, he realized what it was. The small man hadn’t just rolled over, changing position in his sleep. He’d raised his head ever so slightly, as if looking about.

It almost certainly meant nothing. Why shouldn’t Gybik wake for a moment, glance around to make sure nothing was amiss, and then drift off again? But the motion had seemed sly, stealthy, as if the thief was peeking at his companions, making sure that Moanda was unconscious and Kovost’s back was turned. And thus Halladon continued to watch him.

Even so, in the darkness, he almost missed what happened next. A shape crawled from under Gybik’s blankets. At first the half-elf thought it was a rat, and then, from the length and number of its limbs, some sort of enormous insect. Only when it scuttled away across the ground did he discern that it was a human hand, Gybik’s hand, apparently, detached from his wrist.

I finally understand you, Osher, thought Halladon in amazement.

As the hand scurried noiselessly along, it changed. The skin darkened, and the fingers lengthened until they resembled a spider’s legs. Kovost glanced casually around, and the hand instantly flattened itself against the ground. When the dwarf turned away again, it scuttled on to Moanda and crouched by her neck. Its nails lengthened into claws. The one on the index finger was particularly long and narrow, like a knitting needle, or a mosquito’s proboscis.