Into the Heart of Evil (21 page)

Manebrow turned back to Durik, who was holding
Firepaw’s muzzle against his shoulder and rubbing his fur.  “What happened?” he
asked again, the pitch of his voice rising as he struggled for answers.

“When I awoke after being hit by the boar, I came
over and found you trapped under the dead boar,” Durik calmly started.  “I got
the wolves and we pulled it off of you, and that’s when I saw that your leg was
broken, shattered really.  It was swollen and bruised horribly.”

Manebrow’s eyes showed a clear lack of
understanding.  “My leg was broken,” he repeated, almost as if he were asking. 

Durik nodded.  “You kept asking for water.  You
screamed loudly when I felt the break.  I am sure it was a splintered break.  I
was sure you would never walk again, if you even survived.”

Manebrow’s hands were now on his hips.  “But I am
alive!” he stated emphatically, as if straining to squeeze this strange event
into his limited understanding of the world and how it was supposed to work.

“Yes.” Durik nodded his agreement, which only
increased Manebrow’s consternation.  “As I was feeling the break, another of
the visions I mentioned to you came over me.  I saw armored beings, probably
orcs, getting ready to enter a structure I was in.”

“Visions?” Manebrow asked.  “I thought you were
talking about visions like in your imagination or something, not visions like
something putting stuff in your head!” he exclaimed as he pointed to his
forehead.

“Though I saw no one near me, a voice told me to
be calm and then it seemed to examine my whole life up to this point as if it
were judging whether or not I was worthy.  It was so powerful…” Durik paused
for a moment as the memory of it echoed through his heart.  “As the vision
began to fade, I saw that my hands were glowing.  It just felt natural to put
them on your leg,” Durik explained.  “Then your leg just straightened out and
healed.  Oh, and the gash the boar put in my leg healed too,” he muttered as he
opened the slit in the leg of his wolfskin outfit and looked at where the wound
had been.

“That’s it?” Manebrow asked, not knowing what to
think.  “Just ‘then your leg straightened out and healed’ and nothing more?” 
He stood staring at his leader.

After a few moments of silent thought, Durik shook
his head.  “I wish I knew what the source of this power was, but I don’t.  All
I know is that it felt… right.”

Manebrow raised one of his signature eyebrows as
he looked at Durik.  “Some greater power is putting voices in your mind,
showing you visions, and giving you power to heal people.”

“Yes, that pretty well sums it up, I would say,”
Durik answered, nodding slightly.

With hands still on his hips, Manebrow chewed his
lip and turned around to look back at the impression in the dirt made by his
formerly broken leg.  He thought for a moment, then thought for a moment more. 
Finally, he shook his head and walked over to the dead boar.  Grabbing the
handle of his axe, he jerked it free of the boar’s skull and wiped it clean on
the fur of the massive beast.  He then tied the ripped leg of his wolfskin
outfit behind his thigh and looked around to see if he’d dropped anything. 
Grabbing his wolf by the reins, he walked up to Durik.

“Well, sire, whatever power it is that’s watching
over us, let’s just hope that it continues,” he said, then turned back toward
the trail they had come from, muttering under his breath.

Durik patted Firepaw one last time on the snout,
then gathering his gear he followed the grizzled, veteran warrior who was his
second in command.

Ardan was one of the more skilled trackers from
the Metal Smithies Warrior Group.  His skill came not so much from his nose, as
was mostly the case with the Deep Guard, but from his ability to read the land
like an open book.  As he passed through the countryside, the land revealed its
secrets to him, like a trusted friend.  Now that the moon had finally come out,
he had been able to follow the trail left by the passing of so many before him
at a jog, still looking for clues to ensure he didn’t miss anything.

After some time, he’d led his team to the game
trail that Arbelk had mentioned.  Reading the trail, he saw the heavy booted
footprints of orc warriors, the lighter bare feet of kobolds and, stranger than
everything else, the small footprints of a kobold whelp.  This only served to
confirm what Manebrow had thought, that Lord Karthan’s sons were the target of
this attack.

Standing, he turned to the rest of the team. 
“Warriors, there’s no time to lose.  Follow me.”  With that, he turned and
started to run down the trail, unbuttoning the front of his wolfskin outfit as
he went.  Behind him, the rustling of belts and the slapping of swords against
thighs competed with the thumping of feet.  In the rear of the party, Terrim
urged the packdogs along, slapping them on their flanks and speaking soft words
of encouragement.

Though it was long into the night and their bodies
were fatigued from such a long march, they continued this way until the urgency
of the situation had finally driven them to the same place where Gorgon’s team
had first sighted the orcs.  Ardan immediately noticed that several persons had
gone off the path and into the woods.  He stopped his team and analyzed the
footprints in the soft earth.  After a moment of analyzing them, he was sure
they were kobold footprints.  Looking at the path again, he saw other kobold
footprints, including the whelp’s footprints.

Ardan stood. “Here the path diverges,” he said to
his team.  “We follow Gorgon’s team, and we’ll see if this mystery becomes
clearer to us.”

Turning back to the trail, he carefully followed
the trail over several small hills through the woods, then past where Trallik
had seen the orcs previously and deeper into the woods toward the strange hills
in the distance.  He was reassured by the fact that the two kobold trails now
had intersected again.  He was even more reassured by the fact that the orcs’
trail had disappeared.

Jerrig was alone outside the entrance to the cave,
watching the moon make the shadows on the barren ground of these unnatural
valleys seem to come to life.  As he sat there, wishing it were either darker
or lighter, darker so his heat vision would work or lighter so he could see
clearly, he felt perhaps the most vulnerable and alone he had ever felt in his
life.  He wondered at how life twisted and turned.  One moment they were
tracking orcs as a team, the next moment he was standing on a lonely, windswept
trail high above a barren valley, looking out over the tops of the trees in the
nearby forest on this clear moonlit night, wishing he was anywhere but where he
was.

Jerrig leaned on his javelins and looked out over
the valley.  After several moments, his eyes started to droop and, after a few
more moments, his head began to nod.  Then, as if from a dream, Jerrig was
shaken from his slumber by a scream from far down inside the cave.  Shaking his
head and breathing deeply to fight off the sleep, Jerrig stood up and looked
around.  At first, he wondered if it had been a dream, or more likely a
nightmare.  All seemed to be as it had been.  But then again he heard yelling,
like that of a young kobold, coming from deep inside.  Jerrig instantly thought
of Trallik and wondered if he was all right.

Listening for another moment, Jerrig began to hear
a noise, like a rockslide, only slower, coming from the valley below.  Confused
by all these noises, he looked down the side of the hill into the valley.  To
his great surprise, it looked as if the entire floor of the valley was
flooded.  As he studied the scene in front of him, he began to make out
individual shapes.  Down in the valley, a flood of six-legged creatures that
looked like giant ants were traveling in one single-minded flow down the path
that Trallik and Jerrig had come up from the forest.

Afraid that he might be seen, Jerrig scrambled
backwards almost stumbling over his own tail as he tried to quickly get into
the cave entrance.  Pausing inside, Jerrig pondered what he should do.  Outside
the cave there was a flood of giant ants; deeper in the cave were unknown
dangers.  The thought occurred to him that perhaps it would be safer to stay
where he was… but he was beginning to get rather worried about Trallik. 
Fighting his natural fears, he slowly steeled himself for whatever was to
come.  Eventually his courage overcame his fears and Jerrig began down the
passageway into the heart of the hill.

D
urik
walked with his head down through the woods.  In one hand he held the tip of
his spear while he led Firepaw by the reins with the other.  In front of him, a
path made by the passage of several feet meandered through the woods, made only
more obvious and readable by the clover it cut its way through.  Behind
Firepaw, Manebrow led his wolf along, watching the forest around them carefully
while Durik was focused on the trail.  It had become strangely quiet, as if a
storm was gathering, yet from time to time, as they passed between pines or in
a clearing, they had seen the starry sky, and there was not a cloud in it.

Soon, the pair of kobolds had followed the trail
until it reached an older part of the forest, where tall cedar trees had lived
for many generations.  The ground cover there was short, and they could see for
quite some distance under the boughs of the old trees.

As they walked, Manebrow saw something hot through
the trees and called softly to Durik. The pair of them found the nearest group
of bushes and hid behind them.  Looking out from behind the bushes, they saw a
pair of kobolds not far from them through the trees, one of them leading a
wolf.  As the pair of kobolds approached, they could see from their heat
patterns that one of them was female, and that she was crying.  Durik nodded to
Manebrow and the two of them led their wolves out from behind the bushes.  The
two kobolds instantly stopped, preparing to flee if need be.

Durik called out, “Hail, Kiria and companion!  Who
is that?  Arbelk, is that you?”

The male kobold smiled broadly from under the
wolf-skin suit’s hood.  “Yeah, it’s me,” he answered calmly.

“It’s about time you two showed up.  I was getting
worried about you,” Durik said as they approached.

In contrast to Arbelk, Kiria was overjoyed to see
the two of them.  Running up to Durik, she wrapped her arms around him and
buried her head against his chest.  “Oh, thank you for coming to find me.  I’m
so sorry.  I’ve ruined everything.”

Durik, surprised by this outpouring of emotion,
held her out at arm’s length.  The sweet smell of her was intoxicating, which
was not what he needed to deal with right now.  “I’m glad to see that you’re
both all right,” he said as she pulled back.  “As for if you’ve ruined
anything, I don’t think so.  Not yet, anyway.  Hopefully Gorgon and the rest of
his team are on their way to find your brothers as we speak.”

Turning to Arbelk, Durik asked, “Tell me, what of
the others?  Have you any word?  Isn’t this Gorgon’s wolf?  Where’s Kiria’s
wolf?”

Arbelk nodded. “I was sent back by Gorgon to find
out your orders, but along the way I encountered Ardan’s team.  He sent me
after you two, since Trallik said there were orcs on the path and Ardan felt he
should follow after Gorgon’s team with all haste, in case they met up with the
orcs and were overpowered.  So, I came after you two and ended up finding Kiria
instead.”

“And it’s a good thing that he did!” Kiria
exclaimed.

Manebrow spoke, “Well, many things have happened
since we saw each other earlier this night.”

Arbelk nodded his head. “You can say that again. 
Manebrow. Dur— I mean sire, I’ve got something you’re going to want to see. 
And it has to do in part with your question about Kiria’s wolf.”  With that, he
turned around and motioned for the two of them to follow him. 

Moments later, the four of them stood looking at
the corpse of Arloch lying in a puddle of his own blood, an expression of
surprise still frozen in his lifeless eyes.  A short distance from him, Kiria’s
wolf Starshine lay dead, killed by another arrow.

It was difficult for Kiria to be here, looking at
the face of her attacker, but as she conquered her emotions, she slowly
explained what had happened, starting from how she had fallen asleep waiting
for someone to find her, through her abrupt awakening and the death of her
wolf, to what Arloch had said and how Arbelk had saved her life.

As Kiria talked, Firepaw walked away from the
kobolds toward where Starshine lay and nuzzled the motionless body of his
friend.  In his eyes was a deep sorrow, and as he sat there in the woods next
to the lifeless body of his friend he howled a long, deep, sorrowful howl,
which seemed to echo under the boughs of the deep cedar woods.  Coming to his
side, Manebrow’s and Gorgon’s wolves joined him and for the next while the air
was filled with their sorrow.

Throughout Kiria’s recounting of events, Durik
stood expressionless, giving no hint to his inner thoughts.  Finally, after
pondering what Kiria had said about Arloch, the traitor and would-be assassin,
he turned to Manebrow.  “If there’s one, most likely there’re two.  We need to
get back to the others before things get out of control.”

He put his hand on Arbelk’s shoulder. “You have
proven your worth this night, my friend.  Now, you know that no good deed goes
unpunished.  So, because of your vigilance, until we feel comfortable that
there are no more traitors in our midst, you’re to watch after Kiria.”

Arbelk nodded.  Looking over the scene again,
Durik gave the command to gather what was salvageable before leaving to meet up
with the group.

Manebrow and Arbelk took the tack, saddle, and
saddlebags off of Starshine’s still form while Durik stripped Arloch of his
weapons and backpack.  There would be no burial for either of them.  Arloch had
played the part of a traitor, and there was no time to dig a hole for
Starshine.  In as caring a manner as Durik could, he led Firepaw away from
Starshine’s cooling body.  Manebrow and Arbelk followed suit with their wolves. 
For now, the living had to see after the living.  There would be time later to
attend to the dead.

Gorgon, Troka, and Keryak had begun to get a feel
for this place.  At first, they’d not seen anything as they searched the
desolate hills and the barren draws in between them.  Then, as a refreshing
breeze blew clean air into their faces several hills from where they had
started, there was a large gap between two of the hills.  Gorgon, refreshed by
the breeze and curious about what was inside the interior of this hill mass,
led the small group through the gap.  Immediately they found themselves in a
small valley in the middle of a ring of hills.  Around the base of the valley
several small holes, not even large enough for a kobold to crawl into, had been
dug into the sides of the hills.  In some places, the holes were so close they
resembled a bee hive’s honeycomb.  After the lush vegetation of the deep
forests they’d been traveling through, the feel of this place was surreal.

They all had their bows out with arrows at the
ready when a chittering sound quickly arose from somewhere within the valley. 
The acoustics of the valley made it impossible to determine where the sound
came from, and the three warriors instinctively formed a protective circle, each
one facing a different direction.

The chittering sound grew quickly until it seemed
as if the entire valley was alive.  Gorgon, turning to the other two, yelled
over the sound, “Let’s get out of here!”  The other two nodded in earnest
agreement and the three of them ran as fast as they could out of the little
valley, tails waving behind them.

As they ran, Keryak looked behind them.  Streaming
out of the honeycomb of holes throughout the valley came what looked to be
scores of giant ants.  They were lifting their heads as if signaling to each
other, or perhaps testing the air.  Their short, sturdy mandibles were opening
and closing.  In their jaws a plate vibrated, causing an incessant buzzing
chitter.

Keryak yelled to the others, “I think they can
smell us!”

Gorgon stopped at the hump in the gap, just before
the descent down into the woods, and looked at the ants.  They were about the
size of small dogs, probably an arm’s length in height and half again as long,
and were swarming along the path behind them at an incredible speed.  At this
pace, he was sure they would outrun them in a matter of moments.  The other two
stopped briefly, looking at him.  Gorgon then looked out into the trees.  As if
a sign from the Fates, a stiff breeze blew into their faces, turning them back
toward the valley and the gathering ant horde.

“I don’t think running will be much use,” he
yelled.  “I think this is it.  Time to do or die!”

Keryak stuck his spear in the ground next to him
and brought his bow up.  Drawing the string back to his ear, he fired an arrow,
knocking one ant off its feet and over onto its back.  “Time to make it
happen!” he yelled.

Gorgon and Troka, seeing that they wouldn’t have
time to get a shot off, slung their bows and drew warhammer and broadsword,
standing an arm’s length apart across the path, ready to receive the charge of
the ants.

And charge they did.  Gorgon, swinging his hammer
as fast as he could, was smashing their carapace-covered bodies like tin on an
anvil.  Troka, in turn, swung first with both hands downward to cut off a head,
then brought the sword back up and down in a thrust through a torso.  Keryak,
behind the other two, fired his bow as fast as he could, killing those who
tried climbing on the walls of the gap to get behind them.

So it went for what seemed like an eternity. 
Their three instruments of war; sword, hammer, and bow, each played their part
in the symphony of destruction.  Then, as the main body of the ant army arrived
en masse, the symphony began to grow disjointed.  It was obvious from the sweat
on their brows and the worried looks on their faces that the trio couldn’t keep
this up for too long.  But still they strove on, always one misstep away from a
gruesome death.

Keryak was out of arrows now and, taking up his
spear, ran from side to side, sticking ants and throwing their still twitching
bodies toward their companions in an attempt to stem the tide.  But for all his
efforts, the flood of ants that was now beginning to pour around both sides was
too much for him and he called for the others to begin retreating.  Gorgon,
seeing the danger before Troka, grabbed Troka by the harness of his crossed
shoulder belts, prompting him to start backing up. 

Having a moment to rest as the group of ants that
he was running back to attack stumbled and rolled down toward Gorgon’s feet,
Keryak looked about.  Standing strangely still in the midst of the surging mass
of its compatriots was a rather large ant, about the size of a large wolf.  It
stood on four legs, lifting its torso, front legs and head above the fray in an
almost humanoid fashion.  As he watched, it seemed to Keryak as if the movement
of its antennae and the direction it pointed its head was in someway connected
to the surging pattern of the great ants.

Having a sudden burst of inspiration, or perhaps
desperation, Keryak grabbed an arrow from the quiver on Troka’s back.  Throwing
his spear at the nearest ant, he picked up his bow and, nocking the arrow, drew
the string back to his ear.  Carefully he timed his shot.  As Troka’s arms and
torso came down in another swing, Keryak fired over his head at the ant
commander.

The arrow struck the ant commander dead center in
its torso.  Swinging its head and antennae wildly, its torso reeled back in
agony.  Keryak grabbed another arrow from Troka’s quiver and fired again from
between his two fellow warriors.  This arrow struck the ant commander in its
head.  As it drove home, the ant commander stopped writhing and stood
motionless for a moment before dropping lifeless to the ground.

All around the trio of warriors the ants stopped
attacking.  Some of them milled about in confusion.  A couple of them attacked
randomly, being quickly dispatched by the now unpressed warriors.  The
chittering died almost immediately and except for the scurrying of many, many
feet, the night was silent again.  Almost as one, the ants started to retreat
toward their holes.  The three warriors stood silently for a minute, catching
their breath as they watched them go.

Gorgon turned with a smile to the other two.  “Well,
that’ll be a story for our posterity.”

Troka nodded as he leaned on his blood-stained
broadsword to catch his breath. “Aye, I don’t think we’ll soon forget what we
did here tonight.  It was a pleasure to serve with you two.”

Without a word more, the now-blooded new kobold
warriors started cleaning their weapons, collecting their arrows and checking
to ensure that they had all of their equipment.  As the three of them walked
back down the path, scores of ants’ bodies lay smashed, cut, and skewered behind
them.