When he turned to look, he found Shifter staring at him, the big moor cat’s face only inches from his own, the luminous eyes fixed on him as if he were the strangest thing the cat had ever seen.
Kinson swallowed the lump in his throat. He could feel the heat of the cat’s breath on his face. When had it come awake? How had it gotten so close without him noticing? Kinson held the cat’s gaze a moment longer, took a deep breath, and turned away.
“I don’t suppose you would want to come with us?” Bremen was asking their host. “A journey of a few days, just long enough to see the talisman forged?”
Cogline snorted and shook his head. “Take your games playing elsewhere, Bremen. I give you the forging process and my best wishes. If you can make use of either, well and good. But I belong here.”
He had scribbled something on a piece of old parchment, and now he passed it to the Druid. “The best that science can offer,” he muttered. “Take it.”
Bremen did, stuffing it into his robes.
Cogline straightened, then looked at Kinson and Mareth in turn.
“Watch out for this old man,” he warned. There was dismay in his eyes, as if he had suddenly discovered something that displeased him. “He needs more looking after than he realizes. You, Tracker, have his ear. Make sure he listens when he needs to. You, girl—what is your name? Mareth? You have more than his ear, don’t you?”
No one spoke. Kinson’s eyes shifted to Mareth. There was no expression on her face, but she had gone suddenly pale.
Cogline studied her bleakly. “Doesn’t matter. Just keep him safe from himself. Keep him well.”
He stopped abruptly, as if deciding he had said too much. He mumbled something they could not hear, then rose to his feet, a loose jumble of bones and skin, a rumpled caricature of himself.
“Spend the night, and then be on your way,” he muttered wearily.
He looked them over carefully, as if expecting to find something he had missed previously, as if thinking perhaps they might be other than who they claimed. Then he turned and moved away.
Good night, they called after him. But he did not respond. He walked resolutely away from them and did not look back.
Chapter Nineteen
Clouds skimmed the edges of the quarter-moon, casting strange shadows that raced across the surface of the earth like night birds ahead of the advancing Dwarves. It was the slow, deep hour before sunrise, when death is closest and dreams hold sway in men’s sleep. The air was warm and still, and the night hushed. There was a sense of everything slowing, of time losing half a tick in its clockwork progression, of life drifting momentarily from its inexorable pathway so that death, for a few precious moments, might be further delayed.
The Dwarves had slipped from the trees of the Anar in a wave of dark forms that seemed to flow like a river. They were several thousand strong, come down through the Wolfsktaag out of the Pass of Jade a dozen miles north of where the army of the Warlock Lord was encamped. It was two days since the army had passed south of Storlock, and while the Dwarves had watched its progress closely, they had determined to wait until now to attack.
They eased their way down the line of the trees to where the Rabb dropped away in a long, low swale close to a small river called the Nunne. It was there that the Northland army, unwisely, had chosen to make its camp. To be sure, there was water and grass and space to sprawl out, but it gave away the high ground to an attacker and exposed two flanks of the army to an enfilading strike. The army had set watch, but any watch was easily dispatched, and even the presence of the roving Skull Bearers was no deterrent to men in a desperate situation.
Risca gave them cover when they were close enough that cover mattered. He sent images of himself south below the Nunne to distract the winged hunters, and when the clouds masked moon and stars completely, the Dwarves went in. They crept swiftly across the last mile separating their strike force from the sleeping army, killed the sentries before they could sound an alarm, took the high ground north and east above the river, and attacked. Stretched out across the ridge of the high ground for half a mile in either direction, they used longbows and slings, and they raked the Trolls and Gnomes and monsters of darkness with volley after volley. The army came awake, men screaming and cursing, racing to put on their armor and to take up their weapons, falling wounded and dead in midstride. A cavalry assault was mounted in the midst of the confusion, a doomed counterattack that was cut to pieces as it charged up the incline from the maelstrom of the camp.
One of the Skull Bearers circled out of the dark and swept down on the Dwarves in retaliation, claws and teeth exposed, a silent stalker. But Risca was expecting this, his attention given over to preparing for it, and when the Skull Bearer appeared, he let it come almost to the earth before he struck at it with his Druid fire and flung it away, burned and shrieking.
The strike was swift and measured. The damage inflicted was largely superficial and of no lasting consequence to an army of this size, so the Dwarves did not linger. Their primary purpose was to cause disruption and to draw the enemy away from its intended line of march. In that, the Dwarves were successful. They fled back into the trees, taking the most direct route, then turned north again for the Pass of Jade. The enemy was quick to give pursuit. A large force was mounted and gave chase, the size of the Dwarf party having not yet been determined. By sunrise, the pursuers were closing on the Dwarves as they neared the mouth of the Pass of Jade.
Everything was going exactly as Risca had planned.
“There,” said Geften softly, pointing into the trees fronting the pass.
Below, the last of the Dwarf strike force was filing through the pass and dispersing into the rocks above, taking up positions next to the men already in place, four thousand strong. Behind them, less than a mile away, the first movements of their pursuers could be detected in the still, deep shadows of the predawn forest. Even as he watched, Risca could see the movement widen and spread, like a ripple from a stone thrown into the center of a still pond. It was a sizable force that had come after them, much too large for them to defeat in a direct engagement, even though a large part of the Dwarf army was assembled here.
“How long?” he asked Geften in response.
The Tracker shrugged, a small movement, spare like all his gestures, like the man himself, unobtrusive and restrained. Coarse, unruly gray hair topped an oddly elongated head. “An hour if they stop to debate the wisdom of coming into the pass without a plan.”
Risca nodded. “They’ll stop. They’ve been burned twice now.”
He smiled at the older man, a gnarled veteran of the Gnome border wars. “Keep an eye on them. I’ll tell the king.”
He abandoned his position and moved back into the rocks, climbing from where Geften monitored their pursuers’ progress.
Risca felt a wild excitement course through him, fueled by the knowledge that a second battle lay just ahead. The strike at the Northland camp had only whetted his appetite. He breathed the morning air and felt strong and ready. He had waited all his life for this, he supposed. All those years shut away at Paranor, practicing his warrior skills, his fighting tactics, his weapons mastery.
All for this, for a chance to stand against an enemy that would challenge him as nothing at Paranor ever could. It made him feel alive in a way he could not ignore, and even the desperation of their circumstances did not lessen the rush of excitement he felt.