Anthology - The Realms of the Elves

Daried nodded once and left, shrugging off the weight of the human gazes on his back.

The warmth of the day did not diminish noticeably when the sun set. The long, hot afternoon simply faded into a humid, clinging night. The moon was only a thin crescent in the southeast, and the stars were faint and few. If there had been no moonlight at all, it might have been difficult for Daried, but as it was, he could easily follow the trail left by the marauders who had pillaged and burned Harvald's old house. They were driving most of the farmstead's livestock with them and moving slowly, as one might expect of a band of raiders burdened with loot.

They think that no one dares to chase them, Daried decided. They are that stupid, or that arrogant. Perhaps they figured that no village in this empty corner of the Dale would be able to muster enough skilled warriors to challenge thirty-five or forty seasoned mercenaries. That was Daried's guess as to the size of the warband. It could be larger, if there were other bands who had split off to roam in different directions before he had picked up their trail.

He'd found the farmstead half-burned, as Earek had told him. The walls of the old fieldstone house survived, but the roof was mostly gone, and the various outbuildings were all burned. An astonishing array of mundane possessions-pots and kettles, stools and chairs, chests and cabinets-had been dragged out of the house and strewn around. Three fresh-dug graves lay a short distance from the house. He didn't know who else beside Harvald's son had died there, but there had been no one at the burned manor to ask.

A quick divination spell had confirmed his suspicion: the Morvaeril moonblade was no longer there, carried off by the marauders who had pillaged the place. Without a moment's hesitation, Daried had set off in pursuit.

Humans were unlikely to travel all night long, and the raiders were not moving quickly in any event. Elves, on the other hand, traveled swiftly indeed by night or day and could go for days with minimal rest. Even with their head start, he thought he might be able to overtake the marauders before they reached the Sembian encampment in Battledale. It was his only chance to regain the Morvaeril moonblade.

Besides, dealing with murderous scum such as the marauders he pursued was one of the reasons Vesilde Gaerth had posted Daried and his small company to Glen in the first place. Corellon only knew what other acts of violence and robbery they had already committed elsewhere in the Dale, or would commit given the chance.

Daried trotted southward throughout the night, following the swath the mercenaries left behind. Instead of making straight for Battledale, the mercenaries seemed to have veered west for a few miles, skirting the forest border as they made their way south. No doubt they hadn't yet had their fill of blood and loot, and hoped for more opportunities for mayhem before turning homeward. On two occasions he passed lonely farmsteads, sacked by the marauders he followed. Whatever the reason, each detour the murderers took gave Daried more time to catch them before they rejoined the Sembian army.

At daybreak he allowed himself an hour of rest, eating a little bread and dried fruit he carried in a pouch by his belt. Then he roused himself and pushed on. In the mid-morning the marauders' trail finally turned eastward and disappeared into the shadows of Cormanthor.

Beneath the trees the day was still quite warm; not a breath of wind stirred the branches. The raiders' path followed an old track in the woods-not an elfroad, for it would have taken elven woodcraft to find and follow one of Cormanthyr's hidden highways. This was a woodcutter's foot-track, for Daried passed a number of old stumps, (zees cut down years ago. He paused to examine the first few he found, and discovered that the old woodcutter had gone out of his way to take only dead or dying trees. At least some humans took elven teachings to heart, though elves wouldn't have scarred the forest so much with their harvesting of wood.

A little more than ten miles from the place where the marauder's trail entered the forest, Daried came to the Ashaba. And there, in the middle of the forest, he found abridge. it was not a human-built bridge, of course. Instead, it was one of the old elven crossings, a set of submerged and semi-submerged boulders that had been surreptitiously arranged to form an easy path across the river. The riverbed itself was arranged to accommodate flooding by spreading the water out across a wide, shallow gravel bank instead of drowning the crossing altogether. Long ago spells of illusion had concealed parts of the span, so that anyone who came across it without knowing its secret would have seen no crossing there. But those spells had failed with time, and the whole pathway was there for anyone to see. Even forest-blind humans couldn't miss it-and in fact they hadn't, because the marauders' trail led over the old crossing.

The bladesinger halted in amazement. There were supposed to be no easy crossings of the great forest river between Ashabenford and the Pool of Yeven. His company was keeping watch twelve miles upstream, ignorant of a perfectly serviceable crossing that at least some of the Sembian sellswords knew about and made use of. The Sembian army hardly needed to improvise a crossing near Glen, when this one would serve almost as well. It was farther from Ashabenford, of course, but it also had a fine path leading right into the western portions of Mistledale.

Daried thought for a moment. He and his archers could hold the bridge against a small company of human sellswords, but if a few hundred human warriors went that way, they could do little more than slow the attack. But there was a chance at least that the leaders of the Sembian army did not know of the crossing. The mercenaries in Sembia's service might not have reported the crossing to their employers-not before they had an opportunity to do some pillaging first.

After all, if the Sembians had known about the crossing, why would they not have attacked already?

"That is tenuous reasoning, Daried," he told himself.

But if there was even the slightest chance that he could keep knowledge of the crossing from finding its way back to the Sembian commanders, he had to try. And it also meant that he could continue his pursuit of the marauders, didn't it?

Striding easily from boulder to boulder, he hurried across the hidden bridge and picked up the path on the east bank of the Ashaba. He redoubled his pace and ran through the long, warm hours of the afternoon, gliding through the tree-gloom and brush like a silent green shadow. Sweat glistened on his brow, and his eyes ached from lack of rest, but he refused to slack his pace. Only the soft thudding of his footfalls on the forest loam and the light creaking of his armor betrayed his haste.

He slowed only when he heard the sounds of human voices ahead of him on the trail.

Carefully, Daried raised the hood of his cloak and drew it closer around his shoulders despite the heat of the day.

Its dappled gray-green hue and concealing enchantments would make him much more difficult to see. Then he closed in on his quarry.

The mercenaries had halted near a dark, still forest pool, setting their camp for the night. They were big, dirty men, dressed in hauberks of heavy mail and leather. Sweat soaked their brows and dripped from their faces, staining their arming coats and tunics. They were crude, callous, and slovenly, but Daried did not miss the care with which they set their sentries or the alertness of those who remained on watch. They might have been mercenaries of the lowest sort, but that also meant that they were professional fighters, and they knew enough to be careful of Cormanthor's watchful silence.

In an hour of watching, he counted thirty-one of them. He also earmarked the leader of the rough band, a tall, thin fellow with a badly pocked face and a scalp shaven down to short stubble. Most of the mercenaries satisfied themselves with arranging simple lean-tos or rigging open-sided awnings of canvas to keep off any rain, but the leader had a tent, in which he kept most of the band's loot. Several fierce war-hounds prowled about the camp, and in a small hollow nearby the mercenaries created a small corral for the cows, pigs, and horses they'd carried off from the Dalesfolk. The air reeked of dung, sweat, and woodsmoke.