The Crow (56 page)

He was too tired to risk any magery, apart from when he had to renew his disguise. With practice he had become better at the spell, and he blessed his foresight in not changing his appearance radically, but it was still draining, time-consuming, and risky. To satisfy his hunger, he employed some older skills than magery, honed when he had been a famished orphan, and stole food from other snouts while they were sleeping. The thefts were noticed and caused several violent quarrels, but no one suspected the simpleton Slasher.

During their march across Den Raven, Hem had more of a chance to search among the snouts for Zelika. It was fruitless: he could not find her anywhere. Perhaps, he thought, she had changed out of all recognition, which was always possible; or maybe she had been left behind, or killed in the Glandugir Hills. The latter possibilities frightened him so much that, despite the danger of doing so, he attempted again to feel for her, as he had in Sjug'hakar Im. This time it was much more difficult, but he sensed again the same spark, opaque with sorcery and fear, but still present. She was somewhere among the snouts, but he still couldn't work out where. He dared not try again.

He took as much note as he could of what he saw, storing it in his memory for later. For the most part the snouts journeyed past huge farms, tilled or harvested by long rows of dark-clad laborers. Sometimes Hem saw that they worked with shackles around their ankles, and were guarded by dogsoldiers; others were not chained, but were supervised by men with whips. They passed long, low huts where the laborers lived, which looked exactly like the huts in Sjug'hakar Im. Den Raven really was, as Saliman had said, a giant prison.

One morning they walked through a small town, marching down the center of its main street. Hem cast furtive glances as they passed through. He had seen poverty in Edinur, but this was on another scale. The houses were mean and poor, little more than hovels holding each other up, patched with scavenged bits of wood or planks or stone. The street stank of middens, and was pitted with deep ruts filled with icy water. Ragged children peered at them from behind tumbledown fences or mossy water butts, their eyes wide with fear; Hem noticed with a pang that he saw none older than about nine years. Someone had placed a flowering geranium in a pot by a doorway, incongruously bright in the squalor around it, and Hem saw that a fence a little farther on had once been painted with a picture of a white horse running free over green grass. The painting had been scrubbed out, but its outline still remained, like a ghostly flag of rebellion. But little else there spoke of cheer or hope.

In the center of the town were two grand buildings, rising several levels behind high stone walls on large grounds. They were in shocking contrast to the miserable poverty of the rest of the town, and Hem stared at them in amazement: even the gateposts were gilded. For all their air of luxury, he thought the buildings ugly, and he didn't like the look of the carvings of weird beasts that crouched on top of the walls. Indeed, they were ensorcelled vigilances, squatting malignantly above the prosperity that breathed out of the houses.

He suddenly remembered what Saliman had told him about Den Raven, long ago, in Turbansk:
The Eyes control all supplies; they live well enough, but the people fare poorly, and are given only enough to ensure they live. Those who win favor with the Hulls, of course, can do much better; some, the Grin, live in an obscene luxury and are themselves petty tyrants. They are useful to the Nameless One, and so he suffers them to flourish... nothing there is grown or made for pleasure or beauty, and even the leisures of the Grin are stamped with foulness and cruelty...

Perhaps these houses belonged to Grins. It seemed unlikely they would be owned by Hulls; Hulls weren't interested in opulence.

After that, Hem was glad that the Hulls seemed to avoid towns and villages. He found them more depressing than the countryside, which was depressing enough.

In a few days the landscape changed. There were trees, for a start, and stands of forest, although to Hem's relief they did not go near them; even from a distance he could feel an illness within them, like the Glandugir Hills. He wondered what had happened to this land, that it could be patched by such wrongness. At night, where the forests were, the sky would glow a dull, eerie red.

Now they were marching steadily upward, and to the north Hem could see a ridge of mountains, jagged in the haze. They changed color under the light: sometimes they were red, sometimes purple. Sometimes, on days of heavy cloud, they vanished altogether. Hem remembered his dream of the Iron Tower: it must stand in the shadow of those very mountains. They were getting close.

The roads became busier, and were lined with dusty trees. The main routes were wide, and sometimes paved with stone, like Bard roads. On occasion the snouts were herded off the road, where they had to wait while ranks of dogsoldiers mounted on irzuk and other soldiers marched past them. If they encountered farmers or townspeople on the road, the snouts always took precedence; then they would march arrogantly, with a swagger, sneering at the unsoldierly folk who scrambled to get out of their way. They passed several temporary camps, dun rows of hide tents pitched over what had previously been farmland, and towns and villages were now very frequent, although the Hulls avoided most of them.

The snouts took a keen interest in the ranks they encountered, and gossiped freely about their supposed destinations. Some said knowledgeably that they went toward the Kulkilhirien in the west – the desert place by the Kulkil Pass where the Nameless One gathered his armies before sending them on campaign. Hem, who thought this was likely, supposed they would be readying to march on Annar or Car Amdridh. But others were marching in the opposite direction, and he wondered what that meant. He had gathered a number of pebbles that he stored in his right pocket, and each time he saw a rank, he transferred a single pebble to his left; in this way he was able to keep track of their numbers. There were many thousands.

Hem wondered often where Saliman and Soron were; perhaps they had even passed each other unknowingly on the road.

On the fifth day they encountered some more snouts, also going north to Dagra, and on the sixth two more ranks, as their routes converged. The groups would greet each other with yells and whoops, and after that they marched together, swelling their number to more than five thousand. Hem cursed this chance: his efforts to track down Zelika were getting nowhere, and he was running out of time. Even though the Sjug'hakar Im snouts kept together, it made his task much more difficult. He had taken to wandering about idly in the evening, under the pretext of gathering firewood or some other task, casting about for the sense of Zelika; but so far he had found nothing.

He couldn't mindtouch with Ire as often as he would have liked; they managed to speak only once after their initial conversation. But once or twice a day he glimpsed out of the corner of his eye a scruffy bird with mottled gray plumage: either standing like a lump on a fencepost, watching the snouts march past, or searching by the roadside for worms and beetles. He knew that Ire was showing himself to reassure Hem he was alive, and when he saw him, Hem's heart always lifted, no matter how despondent he felt. It was comforting to know he had an ally in this hostile land. Sometimes, if he caught his eye, Ire would bob his head in recognition. Mixed with Hem's pleasure at seeing Ire was a terrible fear that a Hull might notice him. On the other hand, Ire was cunning enough to stay out of sight most of the time; and if you didn't look too closely, in his dyed grayish plumage he looked rather like the large meenah, birds that were very common in Den Raven.

It occurred to Hem also that perhaps the Hulls were preoccupied with something other than watching for unkempt birds that might be spies. Even the snouts detected a growing anxiety among their captains as they neared Dagra. It was whispered that the Spider had been seen arguing with the other Hulls, and two Hulls had requisitioned horses and now scouted ahead of the main party. When they returned, the Hulls would gather in a huddle, seemingly debating their route.

Hem sniffed the air uneasily: it was heavy with a vague menace, which grew stronger the closer they came to Dagra. It was more than the mountains now looming ahead of them, brooding and grim under a cloudy skyline; or that sometimes he could see through swathes of winding vapors the Iron Tower, a dark finger of warning against the blood-colored crags of the Osidh Dagra. The very ground seemed tense and watchful. He was filled with foreboding.

Despite the Hulls' precautions, the snouts walked into serious trouble a day out of Dagra. Fortunately for Hem, the Sjug'hakar Im snouts were marching at the back of the column, and escaped the worst. The first Hem knew of it was confused shouting farther ahead; the snouts around him craned their necks, straining to see what was happening, as the dogsoldiers marching alongside the Blood Block suddenly ran forward.

The snouts began to look panicky; then there was a call to order, which Hem felt like a whiplash inside his head, and their faces went blank. With the suddenness that Hem could never get used to, the snouts instantly calmed and gripped their weapons, awaiting orders from the Hulls. It seemed that they were not yet needed. Hem loosened his shortsword in its scabbard, praying that the Blood Block would not need to fight.

He was too tired, and he lacked the frenzied energy that sorcery gave the other snouts. He wished he knew what was going on in front, but it was impossible to see past the others.

He could tell by the noise that the fighting was drawing nearer; then a snout suddenly burst through the rows in front of Hem, tumbling over and over on the road, clearly dead, followed by a giant man who carried a spiked, bloodied club. His naked torso and shaved head were painted in zigzags of red and white; now smeared with blood, his beard was plaited in many strands twined with small bones, and his teeth were sharpened. He wore a horned helmet, iron gauntlets, and a skirt of iron links.

Hem almost turned and ran: but before he could move even a step, the other snouts attacked the giant, who was swinging his club with lethal effect. The snouts flung themselves at him, snarling, biting, kicking, and hacking, and the giant was dragged down by their weight, sinking to the ground. Once he was down, the snouts made short work of him.

Hem suddenly found that he was slashing wildly at the body with the rest of the snouts. Shocked, he stepped back, wiping away the blood that had spattered his face, spitting the taste of it from his mouth. He suddenly felt deeply soiled. For a moment, in the heat of battle, he had lost control: he had become one of
them.
Even in the Glandugir Hills, in the nastiest battles, he had fought only to survive, and had quietly stepped away from any extra savagery. How long before he was boasting about his collection of severed ears, like Reaver? The thought made him go cold with disgust.

He would have to escape the snouts soon, or he would end up as braintwisted as they were.

The snouts were released from sorcery and milled about in excitement, boasting about their hits and how many they had killed. Hem listened with more than his usual contempt. A score or so of snouts had been killed, and another score injured, including Reaver, who had caught the edge of a blow on his arm. It had ripped the muscle, but Hem saw that the wound was not disabling; after it had been pressed shut by a Hull, Reaver went around the snouts, showing his wound to anyone who would look. To hear him talk, thought Hem, you would think he had killed the giant on his own.

All the same, whatever he felt about it, Hem was glad the snouts had won; if they had lost, he would be dead. As a fighting force the snouts were fearsome. He thought he understood why the Nameless One was so interested in them.

The survivors were ordered to gather the corpses off the road and cast them into a ditch. Hem saw a pile of dry bones that he knew must have been a Hull, and he counted fifty of the giant men. There had been none like them at Turbansk – at least, not where he could see them.

He was helping three others drag one of the giants to a pit when he saw the Spider not far away, talking intently to another Hull. He decided that an attempt at eavesdropping was worth the risk, as there was a lot of noise and confusion to cover him, and cautiously he opened his listening.

To his amazement the Hulls used the Speech, but it was altered in ways he did not understand. Hem did not realize until that moment how deeply the Speech was part of him; to hear it in a Hull's mouth was monstrous, as if his own inner soul was somehow Hullish. He repressed a strong desire to retch.

"...can't be true," the Spider was saying.

"Imank is here, I tell you," said the other. "Jagfra tells me that his presence hovers over Dagra. And these are part of his Iguk bloodguard: they are unmistakable. You know that."

The Spider paused, as if it were thinking.

"Why set them here?" it said at last. "Why challenge us?"

"Imank does not wish the Master to have anymore strength in his hand at present," said the other Hull. "Sixteen ranks of curs is not a small consideration; you saw how they defeated the Iguk. I think not all is well in Dagra."

Hem could feel the Spider's doubt. "We should have heard, if the Master were truly threatened," it said at last. "Surely Imank is not strong enough to return without being summoned?"

"Of course he was summoned," hissed the other Hull impatiently. "The Master seeks to rein him in. And Imank seizes his chance. The time is
now."

The Spider suddenly looked up suspiciously, sniffing, and Hem at once stopped listening and turned his face away.

The conversation he had overheard had only whetted his curiosity. Now he thought he understood the sense of threat that filled the air as they neared Dagra: the Nameless One had called Imank, the Black Captain, back to his side, and if the Hull was right, Imank planned to overthrow him.

The snouts were marching straight into the eye of the storm.