Shadow Chaser (36 page)

I didn’t tell Bass about what the elfess had decided. I don’t think he would have been too delighted by the news.

At five in the evening of the second day we reached the Iselina.

I caught sight of the glittering ribbon of the river when we were still in the forest—the sun was glinting off the water, and the reflections shone straight into my eyes between the trees. And the sight when we emerged into open space simply took my breath away.

Our group was standing on a low elevation, with the broad band of the river laid out in front of us. During our journey I had seen plenty of streams and rivers, both great and small. But none of them bore any comparison to the Iselina.

I was looking at the mother of all the northern rivers. Huge, wide, and deep, it began somewhere far off, where the streams flowing from the Mountains of the Dwarves came together to form a mighty hissing torrent that flowed on through the Forests of Zagraba and emptied into the Sea of Storms, away to the southeast.

We could see a large village on the road ahead. Not far from it the mighty ramparts of a castle towered up into the air.

“Marmot,” I said to the Wild Heart. “What settlement is that?”

The warrior gave me a rather strange look and replied: “Boltnik.”

“
That
Boltnik?”

“Yes.”

Everyone remembers the bloodbath at Boltnik that swallowed up a quarter of our army during the Spring War. The men were standing on the bank of the Iselina, waiting for the orcs’ storm troopers to start crossing. At the time no one knew that fifty leagues farther upstream, the Firstborn had broken through the human rearguard and driven the men back to Ranneng. Then they attacked those who were waiting for them at Boltnik from the rear.

The enemy from Zagraba pinned the men back against the river, and the far bank was black with the teeming hordes of orcish bowmen. Almost no one managed to escape from this encirclement; only a tiny number got away by water or broke out of the ring. When this happened, men realized that the elves had chosen the name of this river well—Iselina means “Black River.” But during those terrible days, the river was not black, it was red with the blood of men and the Firstborn.

Alistan did not lead our group into the village; we avoided it, leaving the white houses with red tiled roofs on our right. Nobody really wanted to go into a place haunted by ghosts.

Eel and Arnkh were the only ones who went to the village, to find out about the ferry to the other side of the river, while we stayed in a small spinney right beside the water, slightly downstream from Boltnik.

The air by the river had a fresh smell of damp grass. The riverbank was overgrown with sedge and reeds, and weeping willows hung their silver-green leaves right down to the surface of the water.

A pair of gadflies, which Kli-Kli called “buzzers,” immediately began circling round the horses, and the goblin started hunting them.

From here the opposite bank looked very far away. I wouldn’t have bet that I could swim all the way across. The trees on that side looked tiny, only half the size of my little finger.

“What are you gazing at, Harold? Never seen a river before?” said Hallas, squatting down beside me and lighting up his pipe.

“Not one as big as this.”

“If you ask me, it’s best not to see any. A river means a boat. And I hate boats!”

“If you haven’t already realized, our gnome here is afraid of traveling on water,” explained Honeycomb, who was standing close by.

“Gnomes aren’t afraid of anything! It’s just that boats aren’t for gnomes!”

“Mattocks are for gnomes,” Deler snorted. “Don’t get nervous, Lucky! You’ll get across without suffering too much. In any case, it’s not a canoe, it’s a ferry.”

“In other words, just a big boat!” Hallas said morosely, blowing out a ring of smoke.

“He gets seasick,” Honeycomb chuckled.

Hallas started puffing away even harder, peering gloomily at the watery expanse.

“Seasickness isn’t the worst thing! I don’t know how to swim,” Kli-Kli informed us with insufferable pride.

“You mean not at all?” asked Hallas, looking at the jester.

“I mean I can swim like an ax! But I’m not at all afraid.”

“Piffling pokers, I told you, gnomes aren’t afraid of anything!” Hallas said, as Eel and Arnkh came back.

“We can’t leave yet, milord,” said Arnkh, his bald patch gleaming with sweat. “It’s some kind of town holiday today. Nobody’s working, both ferries are standing idle, everybody’s drunk. We won’t be able to move on from this bank until tomorrow morning.”

“Ah, darkness!” our commander swore.

We moved closer to the ferries, in order to be the first to cross to the far side in the morning. The two massive wooden structures with huge drums, onto which the thick chains were wound, stood about a quarter of a league from Boltnik. They were about a hundred yards apart from each other, and owned by completely different people.

We found one of the ferrymen. The old man was sitting in his house on the bank of the river, and he absolutely refused to take us across, even for all the gold in Siala.

“The workers are celebrating, who’s going to haul the chain? They’ll come back tonight, sleep it off, and then why wouldn’t they take fine gentlemen like yourselves across and first thing in the morning?” he croaked.

“Careful, granddad, or we’ll go to your competitor!”

“Off you go, gentlemen, I’m not keeping you here, am I? Only there’s no point, I swear by all the gods. It’s the same thing there. Nothing works until morning. It’s our holiday.”

But the stubborn old-timer was only too delighted to let Markauz, Miralissa, and Egrassa use his house. The ferryman narrowed his eyes contentedly at the sound of money jingling in his pockets as he tramped off to the town.

“This is plain stupid,” said Bass. “How do they feed their families? Apart from being so far from the town, he has a competitor right beside him.”

“Think again,” Uncle said with a chuckle. “The ferries constantly carry goods across for the Border Kingdom, and they move soldiers from one bank to the other. The army pays well.…”

“The nearest ford is forty leagues to the north of here, Boltnik is the last large settlement in these parts,” said Arnkh. “On the other bank there are only small scattered villages and noblemen’s castles.”

We didn’t get any soft beds, and we had to spend the night on the riverbank. The Wild Hearts took this calmly—they had spent nights in the snowy tundra of the Desolate Lands, where only a fire and a blanket keep a sleeping man from freezing to death, so what was wrong with a night out in the fresh air beside some river or other? But Bass moaned miserably: “Not only do you drag me off to some mysterious place, you make me feed the mosquitoes on the way! Ah, darkness!” He smacked himself on the forehead, flattening several of the little bloodsuckers at one go.

Snoop was right about that—the air was simply buzzing with them. The little monsters showed up just before evening and launched into a spectacular feast. Every now and then there were curses and deafening slaps. Mosquitoes were dispatched to the light by the dozen, but that evidently did nothing to deter their hungry comrades. And there was no wind to blow the tiny bloodsuckers away from the river.

Kli-Kli suggested a remarkable goblin shamanic spell that he said would wipe out every mosquito for ten leagues around, but, remembering his conjuring with the pieces of string that destroyed the house of the Nameless One’s followers, we told the fool what he could do with his wonderful idea.

The bloodsuckers carried on feasting. What made me most furious was they kept trying to get into my ears and my mouth, buzzing repulsively all the time. Finally, even Ell couldn’t stand it anymore and he went to Miralissa for help. When he came back, he tossed some powder into the fire we’d made with logs borrowed from the ferryman’s woodpile, and the air around us was filled with a spicy, herbal smell. The mosquitoes started dying by the hundreds, and our suffering was over in literally just a few minutes.

It was getting dark, and the water in the river began to look like a black mirror, with the clouds drifting across the sky reflected in it. A few moments later the setting sun cast its final rays on the smooth surface of the water, and it lit up like molten bronze.

There was a splashing sound in the reeds nearby.

“That’s the fish jumping, there must be a pike hunting small fry,” Uncle said with a sigh.

“I could just do with some fish soup,” said Arnkh, smacking his lips dreamily. “I’m sick of Hallas’s garbage.”

“Don’t eat it if you don’t want to!” the gnome snapped in reply.

“Don’t take offense, Lucky. You probably fancy a bite of fish yourself,” Arnkh replied good-naturedly, lowering his feet into the river water. “Ooh! As warm as milk fresh from the cow!”

“Never mind what I might fancy a bite of. Where do we get it from, that’s the question.”

“Let’s just catch a whole lot of fish!” said Kli-Kli, struck by a brilliant idea. “I’ve never gone fishing in my whole life!”

“And where will you get the tackle?”

“Ah, the tackle’s no problem. We’ll take some rope, a couple of nails, some bait, and throw it out as far as we can. Maybe some fool will bite,” said Uncle, stroking his beard.

“Let’s do it! Come on!” Kli-Kli said, and started jigging about on the spot.

“All right. But while I make the tackle, you can find the bait.”

“Straightaway! I’ll do that in a moment!” the delighted goblin shouted, running off to start searching.

“A perfect child,” Bass chuckled, sitting down beside me. “They won’t get anywhere, with tackle like that you can’t catch anything but frogs.”

“Don’t you be so hasty. When I was little I used to pull out bream like thi-i-is with this kind of tackle!” said Uncle, spreading his hands wide.

“That’s enough blathering, come over to the fire, the food’s ready,” Hallas called to us.

We had almost emptied the pot when His Majesty’s jester appeared beside the campfire.

“Get rid of that!” growled Marmot, moving as far away from the goblin as he could. “It stinks!”

“Of course it stinks,” Kli-Kli said gleefully, holding a dead cat out in front of him.

“Where did you find it?”

“In the ditch beside the road; a wagon ran over it. A long time ago. It’s even got worms in its eyes, look!”

“Don’t ruin our appetites,” said Mumr, pushing his plate away.

“So shall I just throw it away, then? You said yourselves, we need some bait,” the little green urchin said, blinking in confusion.

“But not a dead cat! Use your head, Kli-Kli!”

“Wait, Lamplighter,” said Uncle, licking his spoon. “Not risking anything, are we?”

“Only our stomachs,” put in Hallas, trying not to look at the poor creature’s mangy little corpse. “Tell him, Deler.”

“Hallas is right,” the dwarf confirmed.

“Don’t despair, Kli-Kli, we’ll have your bait on a hook in a moment.”

“Hooray! Thanks, Uncle!” Kli-Kli exclaimed, almost dropping the cat in our pot of gruel.

This sacrilegious treatment of Hallas’s cooking almost gave him a stroke, and the goblin hastily cleared off to the riverbank and waited for the sergeant there. I decided to take a look at how this strange kind of fishing would go and got up from the “table” to join the fishermen.

Without the slightest sign of squeamishness, Uncle took hold of the dead cat by the tail, attached it to his homemade tackle, twirled it round like a sling, and flung it into the river. There was a loud splash and circles ran out across the water.

“Now what? Now there’ll be a bite, right?” asked the goblin, jumping up and down in his impatience.

“Maybe now, maybe in a little while. Here, you take the rope, wind it round your hand, and when you feel a tug, you tug on it, too,” Uncle said gravely, handing Kli-Kli the tackle.

The goblin sat down on the bank and watched the calm, smooth surface of the water in which the first stars were already reflected.

“Listen, Uncle,” I whispered quietly to the sergeant as we walked back to the campfire, leaving Kli-Kli on his own. “I can understand Kli-Kli. But you ought to know how hard it is to catch anything with a half-rotten cat.”

Uncle chuckled. “Yes, I do know.”

“Then why…”

“Kli-Kli’s just like a child. Goblins mature a lot later than we people do. Let him relax and get a bit of rest. The gods only know what an effort it costs him to be a jester all the time. Over there on the other side of the river is the Borderland, and none of us will have any time for rest there.”

“Is it that bad?”

“Well, of course, the Borderland isn’t the Desolate Lands, but orcs can appear at the most unexpected moments. The Firstborn regularly send punitive squads into our lands, and we’ll have to keep our wits about us, otherwise we won’t stay alive for long. We’ve already lost two men.… Curses! What sort of sergeant am I, if I wasn’t able to keep them safe?”

“A good sergeant, Uncle. You’re not to blame for the deaths of Tomcat and Loudmouth.” That was the only answer I could give him.

“Forget it,” he sighed. “I’m too old for expeditions like this. I should have collected the money I’ve earned and settled down in my own little tavern ages ago. And when we get this job finished, that’s just what I’ll do.”