Alexey Pehov - Shadow Prowler

“Shouldn’t you be asleep? Where are your nannies?” the king asked his son. I sensed an unusual tenderness in his voice.

“Rotten beasts!” That was all the prince had to say about his governesses.

“I’ll take him,” Kli-Kli intervened. “You come with me, Stalkosha, come on. I’ll give you a toy.”

“A toy?” The king’s eldest son bounced up onto his feet and stomped after the jester, who had already slipped out through the door.

There was an awkward silence in the room.

“Please accept my apologies.”

“Come now, Your Majesty.” The elfess’s yellow eyes flashed in understanding. “You are not to blame.”

“Then who is, if not me? The gods?” There was a clear note of bitterness in the king’s voice.

No one answered him.

I could understand the man. When, for no particular reason, a healthy twenty-year-old heir is suddenly transformed into an idiot with the reason of a four-year-old child and all your hopes are dashed, it must be appalling. And frightening. As appalling and frightening as being an orphan alone in the streets. Stalkosha, at least, had people who cared for him. Some of us weren’t so lucky. But our king had always had the reputation of a strong man. After all, he had survived even that. And if he hadn’t completely recovered, at least he never showed his grief. There were rumors that the young prince had been damaged by magic. But what kind of dark wizardry it was and who had worked it, the rumormongers never got a chance to say. The king’s sandmen shut the talkative lads’ mouths by dispatching them forever to the Gray Stones-or perhaps to even more distant places.

“So, it’s a prophecy about you, Harold,” said Stalkon, finally breaking the heavy silence.

“I very much doubt that, Your Majesty.” I really didn’t believe in the goblin’s tall stories. “An unfortunate coincidence and nothing more.”

“It can hardly be about our dearest thief,” said milord Alistan, supporting me. “Thieves don’t end up in prophecies. The best a thief can hope for is to end up in the Gray Stones.”

Artsivus also paid little attention to the goblin’s fairy tale. The Order is very old-fashioned in this regard, and it pays no attention to any prophecies at all unless they were created by magicians from the tower.

“Lady Miralissa, can you tell us what this Selena mentioned in the poem is?”

“Selena? That’s ancient orcish, the first language of this world, unless you count ogric. But a very strange dialect. If one uses a bit of imagination, it could simply be a play on words. In the old language ‘sellarzhyn’ is ‘moon’ and ‘ena’ is ‘purple.’ A purple moon? It’s the first time I’ve come across the word. It is not mentioned in our Annals of the Crown.”

“So there’s a purple moon in Hrad Spein,” Kli-Kli giggled as he returned to the room. Somehow he seemed to find this fact extremely amusing.

“That is only my provisional translation,” Miralissa said with a barely noticeable frown. “We need to do some work on the documents before we can understand exactly what is what.”

“And the work will be done, do not doubt it. Harold!” said Artsivus, turning to me. “You don’t object if I take this document, do you?”

I shrugged indifferently. Why not? I remember verse pretty well, so he could take it; maybe the Order would dig something up.

“That’s excellent,” Artsivus said delightedly, handing the rest of the papers to the goblin so that he could pass them on to me.

Kli-Kli gave a humorus curtsey in the finest tradition of the ladies at court, crossed his legs, and sat down, holding up the papers. I put them away in my bag, paying no attention to the fool, which didn’t seem to upset him very much. In any case, he pulled a face that only I could see and went back to the carpet.

“I have another two questions. What are the halls of the Slumbering Whisper and the Slumbering Echo?”

“I don’t know, Harold. In Zagraba we have legends about many terrible things to be found in the Palaces of Bones, but I have never paid any attention to them. And I have never heard anything about such halls in Hrad Spein.”

“And what are the Kaiyu?”

“More precisely the blind servants of Kaiyu,” the elfess corrected me. “That is yet another tale that has lived on for over a thousand years. It came into being at the time when we began fighting the orcs in the Palaces of Bone. In order to protect the graves of the elfin lords against defilement, our shamans summoned creatures from distant worlds, so that they would guard the peace of our dead forever. This is a very, very old legend. No one has been down to those levels for hundreds of years, and our records about Kaiyu contradict each other.”

“You are setting out tomorrow morning,” said the king. “Lady Miralissa and her companions will lead the expedition through the Forests of Zagraba. Alistan, you are in command. Try not to be detained anywhere and to get back as quickly as possible. As soon as spring comes and the snow in the pass melts, the Nameless One will set out from the Desolate Lands.”

“My king, perhaps we ought to send several thousand troops to the Lonely Giant as reinforcements?”

“Pointless. The Wild Hearts will not be able to hold out in any case. And the regular army will only get in their way. The Lonely Giant is merely a small dam, and it will burst under the combined pressure of the Desolate Lands. The border has always held only because of the bravery of the Wild Hearts and the aggressors’ inability to unite. Sending the army there, Alistan, would mean risking the very life of the kingdom. You understand that yourself. We’ll send a hundred Beaver Caps and the Jolly Gallows-Birds from two ships. They will help the Wild Hearts to hold out for as long as possible. A week, two at the most, so that I’ll have time to prepare the counterattack. Closer to winter we’ll have to send another thousand soldiers.”

“My father and the other heads of houses intend to send about three hundred archers to help you,” said Miralissa.

“Yes?” The king was not the only one delighted by this news. “Please convey my gratitude to your father, milady.”

I chuckled. It might seem to many that three hundred archers are a mere drop in the ocean… Well now, that’s true, just as long as they’re not elves. But three hundred elfin archers can reap the enemy in a deadly harvest. It was more than eight hundred years since Filand fell out over something or other with the light elves of I’alyala, but everyone still remembered how less than thirty elves had routed the heavy cavalry of the Filanders. Hitting the joints in the armor and the eye slots in the helmets, firing twenty arrows a minute, the handful of elves forced four select legions of cavalry, four hundred men, to retreat. Or rather, only two hundred men actually managed to retreat. The same number were left lying on the ground.

“We shall pass through Valiostr, cut across the Iselina, and enter the forests from the side of the Border Kingdom,” Miralissa said.

“Those are dangerous parts,” Markauz said with a frown of disapproval. “That’s orc territory.”

“But that is where our nearest entrance to the Palaces of Bone lies; we would have to travel through the Forests of Zagraba for another three weeks to reach the other entrance,” said Miralissa, adjusting a strand of ash-gray hair that had come loose from her tall hairstyle. “So we shall have to take the risk, just as the previous expeditions did.”

Alistan Markauz said nothing, but it would have been obvious to a hedgehog that he was not very pleased at the prospect of making his way to Hrad Spein through the forest of the orcs. Neither was I. My preference would have been to stay at home and drink wine.