Shadow Chaser (21 page)

I shuddered. To be eaten by a walking corpse brought back to life by the chaotic magic of the ogres that was still floating about above our world. What a terrible death!

Behind the grille it was quiet and dark. Not a single movement …

“If only my family knew how low I have fallen.” Eel suddenly laughed for no obvious reason. “First I joined the Wild Hearts, now I’m behind bars and about to become breakfast for a lump of half-rotten meat! If my father found out, he’d have a stroke.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked in exasperation.

The Garrakian looked at me and laughed bitterly.

“I became a Wild Heart about ten years ago, Harold. The Hearts were my new family, and the Lonely Giant was my new home. I renounced everything in my old life and I became someone for whom I used to have little respect, whom I basically despised. In Garrak we’re not very fond of those you call Wild Hearts. You know why.”

“Who doesn’t know? Once upon a time in the hoary old days of Vastar’s Bargain, the Wild Hearts crushed the Garrakian ‘Dragon.’”

“For the nineteen years of my previous life I bore a different name. I changed my ancestral name, the name that my ancestors bore with pride, for the nickname Eel—what could be more terrible than that for a nobleman?”

I tried not to breathe, tried not to interrupt Eel’s story in any way. According to Marmot, no one in the Wild Hearts knew who he used to be and what he did before he arrived at the Lonely Giant.

He had always kept his distance from the others, always been calm and cool, never talked much, and he was magnificently skilled with the twin blades of the nobility of Garrak. Eel was a mystery. Rock, Ice, Unapproachable, Tight-lip—those were the few nicknames that Kli-Kli had given the warrior.

It was rather surprising to find Eel pouring out his heart to me. He wasn’t in the habit of making sentimental confessions, and some of the Wild Hearts still thought he would take the secret of his appearance at the Lonely Giant with him to the grave.

“My father is a Tooth of the Dragon,” Eel went on. “Do you know what that means?”

A bemused nod was all I could manage. According to a centuries-old tradition, only a close relative of the king could become a Tooth of the Dragon, and that meant that Eel had royal blood flowing in his veins. He was no ordinary little nobleman, not even a duke. He was an archduke, directly in line to inherit the throne if the king’s line should suddenly come to an end.

“My father, Marled van Arglad Das, cousin of the king of Garrak, is already the sixth Tooth of the Dragon in our family. A great honor, thief! The highest honor that can possibly be bestowed on a noble of our kingdom.”

I’ve heard that more than once before. All a Garrakian nobleman needs from life is the supreme glory of preserving the honor of his family line, the ancient traditions of the nobility, and other similar nonsense that I really don’t understand all that well. The noblemen of Garrak are total crackpots when it comes to the words “honor” and “loyalty to the king.”

“I’m the eldest son in the family, so I was due to become a Dragon’s Tooth, too. I was due…” Eel ground his teeth together.

“What stopped you?” I asked cautiously.

He looked at me, and I could see an entire lake of ancient pain splashing about in his eyes.

“What stopped me?” he repeated thoughtfully. He was obviously not there with me, but somewhere very far away, in the past. “Youth, overconfidence, and, I suppose, arrogance … In those days I thought I could take everything from life. The eldest son of a Tooth of the Dragon, the king’s nephew—I had a fine military career waiting for me … I did everything that I wanted to do. I thought I was number one, the best at everything, and many other people thought the same. And anyone who held a different opinion went to his grave after a duel. I was untouchable and far too reckless. The favorite of the nobility, of the women … I! I! I! That ‘I’ was what ruined me in the end.…”

“What happened?”

“That’s not important. It all happened many years ago. I made a mistake, disgraced myself, my father, my family, and my king. And disgrace can only be erased by death. So I died. Ulis van Arglad Das ceased to exist, and Eel took his place.… It was probably the best thing for everybody…”

He snorted.

“That night I died and preserved the honor of my line. No one ever found out that when the moment came, I couldn’t plunge the dagger into my own throat and I remained alive. Nobody, not even my father, and especially not the king, although I think that my younger brother has his suspicions.… I left the country.… No ancestral name, and no way of ever going back to Garrak. I had nothing left, apart from my weapons and the ability to use them. I went to the far side of the Northern Lands and became a Wild Heart. I became that for which I, the first warrior of the Dragon of Garrak, had previously had little love or respect. Here no one asked about my past and … but I’ve become very talkative today,” the Garrakian said, pulling himself up short. “I’m sorry for dumping all of this on you.”

“Forget it.”

“And you forget about this conversation. I should never have started it.”

“But you did start it, after all.”

He paused for a moment.

“I told you because I want to ask you to do something for me,” Eel muttered, and looked up at the ceiling. “If I happen to die, and you survive, give my ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ to my younger brother. He has far more right than I do to carry the ancestral blades of the line of van Arglad Das.”

“I don’t think I’ll be able to do that,” I said after a pause. “The two of us are in the same boat, and we’ll be eaten together.”

“Just promise me,” Eel said.

“All right, I promise.”

“Thank you. I won’t forget this.”

Of course you won’t forget it, I thought. It would be rather hard to forget anything in the amount of time that pitiless Sagra has measured out for us.

Someone twittered behind the grille separating us from the next cell. Eel and I both turned our heads toward the strange sound at the same moment.

“Did you hear that?” I asked the warrior in a voice that was somehow too loud.

“Yes,” he answered morosely. “That’s even worse than hungry corpses.”

Worse than hungry corpses? Hmm! The Nameless One’s followers couldn’t really have stuck a h’san’kor in there, could they?

“Couldn’t you just tell me and not make me even more nervous than I already am?” I asked.

“Look!”

Eel somehow managed to hook an overturned bowl with the toe of his boot and smash it into the grille, sending a shower of fragments flying into the air.

The sparrowlike twittering changed to a menacing hiss, and four creatures threw themselves against the grille from out of the darkness with all the fury and hatred of hungry demons. One of the vile beasts tried to bite through the iron bars, and the mind-numbing grating sound ran round the cell, bringing my skin up in goose bumps. I turned cold and started praying to Sagot that the barrier would withstand those teeth.

The bars held, but there were notches left in them. Those teeth were famous throughout the whole of Siala. They effortlessly reduced the old bones of dead men in graveyards to dust.

“Gkhols, may Sagot save us!” I screeched. “That bastard has tamed gkhols!”

Eel didn’t say anything to me, he was studying the beasts that had come dashing to the bars.

Several long, weary, and rather unpleasant minutes passed. We observed them, and they observed us. The gkhols’ interest, unlike ours, was strictly gastronomic.

Not many city dwellers, coming upon a gkhol somewhere in an open field, would realize just who the spirits of evil had put in their path. They are quite rare now, and can only be found in the most desolate spots in Siala: in old abandoned graveyards and burial sites. They are scavengers and corpse-eaters who prefer human flesh, preferably after it has been lying in the open air for a week or two, but they don’t disdain other carrion. Gkhols, especially solitary gkhols, are cowardly, and so they’re not terribly dangerous for a full-grown man, unless he happens to be stupid enough to fall asleep beside an old burial chamber. But a solitary gkhol will easily kill a child, even a ten-year-old.

The situation changes drastically when the corpse-eaters gather together into a herd after going hungry for a long time. When they are in a state of rabid hunger, the beasts simply go berserk. Every child knows the story of the two knights who set out for some war or other and ran into a dozen gkhols who hadn’t eaten for a year. As you might expect, all that was left of the knights was their armor, and even that had been thoroughly chewed.

So what could two bound prisoners expect? Gkhols who hadn’t had a bite to eat for three weeks wouldn’t leave a single scrap of us behind.

One of the vile creatures had taken a grip on the bars with its little hands and was gazing fixedly at us, and thick, sticky spittle started dribbling out of its mouth.

How come they had managed not to eat each other in there?

The gkhol cast a carnivorous glance at me, leaned his head over to one side, and twittered derisively. He reminded me of a fledgling of some exotic kind of bird. Although, in fact, that idiotic chirping is the only thing that gkhols and birds have in common. Gkhols actually look like very unhappy and fairly harmless creatures, even if they do have a few odd features here and there.

They are small, no larger than a newborn child, with smooth, ash-gray skin, huge bloodred eyes like saucers, a disproportionately large head and small body with a protruding belly, short crooked little legs, long thin arms, and wide-spaced yellow teeth. People who have never seen them before and don’t know what it is they’ve run into are likely to feel sorry for them, or laugh, but certainly not feel afraid.

And that has been the death of many bold fools who have turned their back on such an apparently harmless creature when it was hungry.

“Eat!” one of them said suddenly, looking straight at us. “Eat-eat-eat! Eat! Aha! Eat!”

Like ogres, gkhols carry a few shreds of brain in their heads. The ogres, the only race from the Dark Age to have survived into our times, have degenerated from the most powerful race in Siala, the creators of the first new magic in the world—shamanism and Kronk-a-Mor—into stupid and extremely ferocious monsters. The gkhols, on the contrary, have grown cleverer and cleverer from century to century. But too slowly, fortunately.

They can remember and repeat single words just as well as parrots, and they are a lot more intelligent than the monkeys that can sometimes be found in the show booths on Market Square.

“Eat!” the gkhol said to us one last time, and then disappeared into the darkness.

Two others followed the little talker’s example, leaving the fourth to stand guard at the metal grille. The gkhol grabbed hold of it with his little hands, tugged at it a few times, and then hissed in disappointment.

“Just look at the little lad’s claws,” I said rather nervously.

How could I not be nervous, knowing that any moment Purple Nose could pull that lever and raise the barrier that was the only thing standing between us and a meeting with the gods?

“We ought to get some sleep, Harold.”

I looked at Eel as if he was insane.

“No, I’m absolutely serious. Sleep, there’s nothing we can do.”

“Go to sleep, with neighbors like that? No, thank you!”

“Whatever you say.” He closed his eyes.

This is a guy with nerves of steel. He could probably get to sleep with the Nameless One himself standing behind him.

I took another look at the gkhol standing on guard beside the grille. Demons of darkness! How much of that vile sticky saliva does he have inside him?

Noticing that I was looking at him, for some reason the gkhol started getting nervous, and he twittered. One of his friends immediately appeared out of the darkness to make sure that breakfast was not about to cut and run. Once he was certain everything was under control, he went back into his lair.

“Valder,” I thought, trying to summon the archmagician, “Valder, are you there?”

No answer.

As far as I knew from my dream about the magician’s former life, he really hated these vile creatures, but apparently this time the archmagician had no intention of interfering. A pity; I would have been delighted to see what a dry-roasted gkhol looked like. They’re much more likeable that way than when they’re still moist and alive.

I made a face at the gkhol sentry. He mirrored my efforts and made a face back at me, and I must say that the corpse-eater’s effort was a lot better, and a lot more frightening.

*   *   *

A little more than four hours had gone by since I first made the acquaintance of the charming family of corpse-eaters, and Eel had still not condescended to wake up.

Meanwhile the gkhols had already changed their sentries twice. They deliberately stayed where I could see them, staring with those red eyes, sometimes hissing menacingly, twittering and drooling, checking the metal grille to see if it was edible, and generally making me more nervous than the detachment of corrupt guards who once caught me in a certain count’s treasure house at an inappropriate moment.

Basically, the gkhols amused themselves until they got bored, and then the sentry withdrew into the darkness, but I could still feel the hungry gaze of those ravenous eyes on me.