Alexey Pehov - Shadow Prowler

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.”

“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.