The Hero of Varay (23 page)

But what could I say?

I surveyed the village, looked around. A couple of times I had to close my eyes for a moment. Finally, I dismounted and greeted the few residents I recognized.

“How many were killed?” I asked.

“Nigh on thirty, lord, including my master,” one of the boys who worked for the innkeeper said. Tearstains streaked his dirty face, and new tears started.

“And the injured?”

The boy shrugged. A woman came forward.

“Not many, lord. Those as was bad hurt ha’ died already.” That was the way of things where medical attention was hard to come by.

“The magistrate?” I asked.

“Him and all his family died,” the woman said. “And my man and babes.” She turned and walked away, but without tears. She was beyond them.

Maybe this disaster couldn’t compare with the tragedy of the
Coral Lady
and the Tampa Bay area, but these people had never heard of those. This was their home,
their
disaster. It was as real as any disaster could be, as devastating, as total, as important to them.

It was important to me too. These were my people.

I took a slow walk through the remains of Nushur, accompanied by Lesh and Jordro, the man Kardeen had sent along. There didn’t seem to be much food left in Nushur. The raiders had carried off much of what they hadn’t destroyed. As I talked to the survivors, I learned most of the story. The trolls came through the village on foot, throwing torches, swinging their long knives and battle-axes at random. They hardly stopped, just long enough to grab whatever was handy, and then they kept moving due south, apparently aiming directly for the Titan Mountains.

“You need anything more before you start back?” I asked Jordro when we got back to the horses.

He shook his head. “We’ll have to bring food as quick as we can. And the faster I start, the faster they’ll fill their bellies.”

“And anything else the baron can think of,” I said. “They’ve really been wiped out.”

“Just hope the trolls keep going south toward the mountains. There aren’t many folks living south of here.”

“We’ll try to prod them along, as long as we can stay on the track,” I said. “Just make sure that the rest follow as soon as possible.”

“You won’t have much of a track to follow,” Jordro said. “Trolls won’t leave much evidence of their passing.”

“What about this elf on horseback?”

“Believe him when you see him, lord,” Jordro advised. He spoke softly and looked around to make sure no villagers were close. “Anything happens out here in the countryside, someone’s sure to yell ‘elf’ every time.”

I glanced at our elf in his birdcage. “And sometimes they’re right,” I said.

“I’ll start back now,” Jordro said. “The sooner off, the sooner help arrives.”

A few villagers got agitated when Jordro galloped back toward Basil, so I explained that he was going to get relief supplies, especially food, lined up. I also told the villagers that more soldiers were coming, and that I was heading south on the trail of the trolls. It seemed to ease a few anxieties, but most of the survivors were in shock yet from the attack.

I had to be careful in my phrasing. I didn’t want to make promises I might have to break. There was a limit to how much time I could devote to the pursuit, especially if the trolls changed direction and headed drastically away from the course I had to follow to accomplish my original mission.

“Trolls can move fast when they’ve a mind to, lord,” Lesh said as we rode out of Nushur. “With a day and a half lead, it may be too much for us to catch ‘em, horses and all.”

“I’ll be satisfied if they keep heading south,” I said. “If we catch them, that’s a bonus.” A Hero has to make sounds like that, I suppose. If we caught them, we’d have a fight on our hands, and I never looked forward to battle with anything but distaste.

“Folks back there was say in’ there was a hundred of ‘em,” Lesh said. “Mayhap not. Scared folks in the night may count three for one, but they must still be a fair number to dare attack a town, even a village so small as Nushur.”

“It’s not normal, lord,” Harkane said. “Trolls don’t attack towns less they got someone pushing hard.” He glanced at our elf, who stayed out of the conversation.

Bad as it was, Nushur’s tragedy could have been worse. The food shortages would only be temporary. The trolls hadn’t burned the fields, and the coming harvest would see plenty of food for the village. The livestock had been run off, but some of the animals might return, and even if they didn’t, meat would be available as soon as the villagers got up the nerve to go into the forest to hunt. Game was plentiful in Precarra. And Baron Kardeen would certainly see to replacing the lost livestock. Once the villagers got to work, they could get the houses rebuilt in just a few days. Only the more substantial buildings, the manor and the inn, would take longer. But those buildings were less important. They wouldn’t be needed until Nushur had a new magistrate and innkeeper.

The dead couldn’t be replaced so easily, and they certainly wouldn’t be forgotten in Nushur, but life would go on. Probably. That might depend on whether or not I succeeded in my primary mission.

    The forest trolls didn’t leave much of a trail, but there were signs enough. Not far south of Nushur they had stopped to butcher a couple of the cows they had driven off. They hadn’t bothered with a cooking fire, but bones had been dumped over the next several miles as they were chewed clean. I couldn’t get any real idea of the size of the raiding party, but enough feet had passed over the same summer-scorched grass to leave marks. Where the ground was soft, near the frequent pitiful creeks, there were occasional bare footprints visible—splayed troll feet.

And we saw marks of a single shod horse overlying troll prints in a couple of places. It looked as if there
was
a rider with them, driving them along.

Then we found the body of a troll who had apparently been killed by an arrow through the neck, though we didn’t find the arrow. Trolls don’t use bows normally, and I thought that an elf would be more likely to use his sword if one of his troops had to be executed. The long claymores, like the two I carried, seemed to be
de rigueur
among elf warriors.

“Some elves do use bows,” Lesh reminded me. “That party we raided in Fairy, you recall?”

I nodded, but I still wasn’t completely satisfied.

Not long after we found the body, we made camp for the night, moving well off to the side of the trolls’ track. We set up in a clearing next to a creek. My danger sense was quiet except for the tiny tickling of distant peril that I had felt since arriving in Nushur. Our supper was the most perishable of the food we had brought from Basil. We ate, rested for a couple of hours, then rode on slowly, taking advantage of a moon that was just past the full
… two
moons just past the full. A couple of hours before dawn, we stopped again to get a little sleep.

I almost missed the second dead troll. If I hadn’t moved well away from our campsite to relieve myself, I might not have spotted the body rolled off against the edge of a bramble patch. With the aid of a flashlight, I saw that this troll had died the same way as the first. There were matching puncture wounds on the chest and back, the kind of holes an arrow would make. But, once more, there was no arrow. I showed the body to the others at dawn, before we started riding again. Huge brown eyes stared sightlessly out of the porcine face. Large canine teeth protruded in front of bluish lips.

“Takes a powerful bowman to put an arrow through chest and back like that,” Lesh said, pushing the body over with his boot.

“Or a long spike of some kind?” I made it a question.

Lesh shrugged. “Never heard of no weapon like that.”

We mounted up and started riding, following the trail and keeping watch for any more bodies. One troll corpse was interesting trivia. Two made it a real mystery.

By noon, the forest started to thin out. Occasional patches of rocky ground intruded on the greenery. Lesh said that we were getting close to the wild southeastern quarter of Varay, a region inhabited mostly by shepherds, grape farmers, and miners.

“Forest trolls can’t go much further,” Lesh said. “They’re like to trespass on other tribes soon.”

But the trail did go on, bending a trifle to the west, staying in the forest. The trail seemed to be getting fresher—meaning that we were gaining on the trolls—but none of us had enough tracking experience to know how
much
closer. My danger sense wasn’t shouting alerts yet, though.

Conversation was limited to the most essential information while we rode, observations about the trail, the condition of our horses, suggestions for breaks, that sort of thing. Normally, we did a fair amount of talking on the road. We spent so much time together that I knew Lesh, Harkane, and Timon better than I had ever known my own parents. But we didn’t do much talking on this trip. Our elf inhibited the talk more than the trolls that were somewhere up ahead. At least our elf wasn’t overly talkative either.

We found three more dead trolls that day, each killed the same way, at widely separated spots.

“Someone else is tracking them,” I decided, and Lesh nodded. “Someone a lot closer than we are.”

“Someone from Nushur, like as not,” Lesh said.

It was possible. The Nushurites were peasants in the classical sense, people of the land, but it wasn’t too farfetched to think that one of them had found the gumption, or the hatred, to track the trolls and kill whenever he could do it safely. A village hunter would be a good shot with a bow, and he might be thrifty enough to recover his arrows so he could use them again.

Each time we found another dead troll, my danger sense got a little more active. By late afternoon, I was convinced that we were getting fairly close to the raiders.

“We may be only a couple of hours behind them now,” I told my companions. The last troll seemed that freshly dead. I didn’t want to overtake the trolls at night, so I decided to make camp before dusk and stay put for the entire night. That might let us catch up with the trolls the next day, before they ran out of forest.

“They turn one way or t’other soon,” Lesh said. “Mayhap they even turn back on their own trail after whoever’s killing them.”

“They might not know what’s going on,” I suggested, “if the bowman’s content to pick off stragglers … maybe trolls who stop to take a leak.”

“I reckon even trolls got to stop for that now and again,” Lesh allowed.

We rode on a little farther. I wanted to be choosy about our campsite, find a place that would offer a little protection. An isolated copse on a slight rise with plenty of open space around it would have been perfect, offering concealment for us but letting us spot any trolls coming in while they were still far enough away for us to put a few arrows into them. Harkane and Timon had both developed into fair archers. Timon didn’t have his full strength yet, but within the range of his lighter bow, he was an ace.

We had to make do with what we could find, though. I spotted a little glen off the track we had been following. There was no clear killing zone around the nook, but it was fairly well concealed from any angle but one. There were two exits, so we couldn’t be bottled up easily and there was spring water coming out of a slab of rock to gather in a small pool below it.

While the others unloaded the horses and made camp, I climbed the rock above the spring to get a look around. I found a place in some scrub brush and turned slowly through a full circle, letting my senses reach out as far as they could. It was summer and we were in the south of Varay. There was a rich country smell to the air, a light breeze that felt wonderful after a day of hot riding. As I turned, my feeling for danger ebbed and flowed. We were close enough to the trolls that I could follow them just on the strength of the danger signal—like a radio direction finder. They were southeast of us, which meant that they had curved off to the left again. They were close, but not
too
close.

The Titan Mountains were closer than they had been too. They were a line across the south, individual peaks clearly visible in the foreground, higher ranges behind nearer lower ranges, ranked off into invisibility. The grefcns of mountainside trees blended away into a more distant violet. Clouds capped the higher peaks and swam in between, cuddling the mountains, obscuring them.

There wasn’t a dragon in sight. The way things had been happening lately, that was almost a surprise.

It was beautiful country. Varay has a pastoral attraction that can only be weakly imitated by any place back in the “real” world. A lot of the buffer zone is like that.

When I climbed back down to our camp, Lesh had one of his smokeless fires going and he was heating water for coffee and warming our food—real food; we hadn’t started on the packaged camping rations yet. The horses were on a picket line with room to graze and a chance to get at drinking water. The pack frames were still on our extra horses, but their loads had been taken off and arranged on a flat rock away from the water. The elf’s head was perched there as well, and he was scowling.

“What’s your gripe now?” I asked.

“You’re wasting time.”

“Not so much,” I said. “And since I don’t know exactly where we’re going or how long it will take to get there, I can’t decide if it’s too much. Some things have to be done immediately.”

“You’re risking everything.”

“You did your own share of stalling back at Basil. You haven’t given me much incentive to hurry, not if it ends with me going to your father’s lair.”

He shut his eyes then, his way of ending the conversation.

Xayber’s son hadn’t said anything that I hadn’t told myself at least hourly since we left Basil, following this diversion rather than jumping straight over to Thyme. Some good was coming out of it, though. The elf was showing his worry about the possibilities again. Farther along the road, I might be able to pull some advantage out of that. If I saved all of the realms of existence, I wanted to be around to enjoy them with Joy.

We ate and settled in for the night. I took the first watch, a habit. While I was on watch, I walked around the perimeter of our camp, irregularly, not like walking a fixed post. The Varayan night was no stranger to me any longer. I knew most of the dangers it might pose. I could recognize the normal sounds, the brief, soft noises of predators and prey acting out their life-and-death rituals. And after Lesh relieved me, I got right to sleep, thinking about Joy, missing her already.