“How?”
“While running through the valley of Nepsas, below Mount Aereera, he saw a wide cleft in the rocks. He crawled in. There was a deep passage through the ground there, and many hundreds of the People followed him to escape the wrath of the Eye.
“The Eye pressed against the doors of the cleft, but the stone was so hard, it could not melt it. It tried so hard and so long that it wore out its anger at having been pulled down from the sky. The unseen fire faded away, leaving a cool and calmer Eye hovering over the mouth of the cave.
“‘Since you seek the world’s protection, go forth and find it,’ said the Eye. The crack in the ground deepened. Rufus and the People in the cleft went down and down, then up and up. It took so long for them to find the up from the down that babies were born along the way, and the babies of babies. I, myself, was born in the cleft. I have the mark of it, see?”
The Longwalker parted the seams of his dusty robe, revealing a large, angular scar on his chest. It could have been made by anything, and the kender chief did not elaborate on how he got it.
“One day while we were climbing up, the Eye spoke through the hollow core of the world and said, ‘You have taken a long walk, my children. Let the first one out into the new day lead you into the light.’
“I was the first of the People to see the sky of today. I am the Longwalker. I led the people out of the down and into the up.” He paused as if finished.
Balif was listening raptly, a fist pressed against his lips. “This happened in your lifetime? How long ago?” he murmured.
Serius tugged a tuft of weathered hair. “When this was long and glossy.” Kender didn’t observe calendars. Assuming the Longwalker was a spry age for a kender-seventy-five or eighty-it sounded as if the wanderfolk had arrived in the past forty years or so.
“We were not the same folk when we came out of the up as when we went into the down,” the Longwalker continued. “The people of the land around the circle were bigger and less handsome-not as big as you elder folk, I guess.”
“Who else would your ancestors be?” Lofotan said. “Not humans!”
Treskan said a single word. Mathi did not understand it, and she repeated it more loudly than the scribe intended. “Gnomes? What are gnomes?” she said. “The parent race of the wanderfolk?” Balif said thoughtfully
“Maybe. Don’t know.” The Longwalker sat down. “The stories say we were bigger, and passing through the down made us better sized.”
Treskan wrote wildly. His stylus flew across the sheet, leaving a slanting trail of ink scratches that Mathi could not fathom. He seemed awfully excited about hearing a silly traveler’s tale.
“So we have come to this land in search of breath and space. It’s a good land. We’ll stay.” Smiling, the kender chief qualified his last statement by saying, “With the help of our friend the famous general.”
“Is that story true?” demanded Lofotan.
Serius Bagfull grinned. “How could it be?”
With that, Treskan snapped his stylus in two. He stared helplessly at the broken instrument. How would he write his chronicle?
“Hey, boss.”
Rufe appeared like a mirage beside him. Treskan lost his composure. After frantically recording the entire fantastic story related by the Longwalker, only to hear it pronounced untrue, he had broken his last writing instrument. He cursed loudly, but less elegantly than the departed Artyrith.
“Easy, boss.”
“What are you playing at?”
“Found your whatsit,” Rufe said.
“Wonderful! Where is it?”
“Not here. In the nomad camp where I saw it.”
Anger rose and fell on the scribe’s face like a fever. He resisted an urge to take Rufe by the throat and shake him. “How do I get it back?” he asked slowly.
“Come with me. I’ll get it for you. You come too,” he said to Mathi.
“Me?” said Mathi. “You don’t need me. It’s not my trinket.”
“He’s clumsy and blind in the dark. You see like a cat. You come, or I don’t go,” Rufe said flatly.
Mathi looked to Balif, seated comfortably between the Longwalker and Lofotan. To be polite, it was Balif’s turn to tell a story, so he had launched into the tale of Karada, the woman who led the nomads out of fear and obscurity to their current state of power. The general was a fine storyteller. No one would willingly leave that spot for some time.
Treskan sadly pocketed the pieces of his writing instrument. He begged Mathi to accompany them.
It was a fool’s errand and a good way to get killed. Still, she had made a pact with Treskan, and he had kept his part faithfully. Perhaps she could leave word for her brethren along the way. They had to know about Balif’s unfolding curse.
“Lead on,” she told Rufe.
Treskan embraced her, and he was dissuaded from kissing her only by threat of violence.
CHAPTER 14
Together Mathi and Treskan got their horses from the picket. Mathi prepared to saddle hers, but Rufe insisted they not take the time. A rough blanket and a rawhide halter would do, he said. The kender sat in front of her, and together the trio trotted off into the twilight. On the way Rufe explained his plan to get the talisman back. Upon hearing it Mathi hauled back on the reins and stopped.
“That’s the maddest thing I ever heard!”
“Oh, I’ve heard plenty of madder things,” Rufe replied cheerfully. “Trust me, boss. I know how this goes. Do it my way and all will be well.” Treskan was speechless with astonishment.
I must be mad to even contemplate this, Mathi thought. Putting my fate in the hands of this kender, this criminal gang of one … when that phrase came to mind, she brightened. Rufe was a gang of one. He had reduced the garrison of Free Winds to impotence all by himself. Maybe there was some crazy logic to his scheme after all.
They rode many miles under cloud-swept skies, galloping then walking, galloping then walking. After three repetitions of that pattern, Rufe grabbed the reins from Mathi.
“Now we walk, quiet as can be,” he whispered.
They had left the woods long before, dashing across the windy, open grassland northeast of the forest. It was a high, flat plateau, higher than the Tanjan valley or the old forest. The glow of many campfires dotted the horizon. Rufe, Treskan, and Mathi got down and started for the distant nomad camp, leading their ponies by their halters.
Though he had called for quiet, Rufe chattered on about humans and elves, ways to confound either, and what worked with one group but not the other. Humans, he said, were always fooled by boldness. If they thought it was impossible to walk out of a gate unseen, then the way to confound them was to walk out that very gate. He had walked in and out of the nomad camp unmolested simply by skipping along and singing off key. The nomads who saw him took him for a human child and did not bother him.
Elves, on the other hand, readily succumbed to subtlety. With their greater senses, they believed they could not be surprised by stealth, so Rufe always resorted to stealth to deceive elves. At Free Winds Rufe came and went from the fortress at will by clinging to the backs of the guards, often hidden under their cloaks. By such simple methods, he reduced Dolanath to hysteria and had his run of the place.
Mathi listened with half an ear. The rest of her was alive to her surroundings. She was no scout trained to creep up on hostile camps, so she relied on her native skills long buried beneath a shell of elflike flesh. The shell was slowly eroding, and the night took on new dimensions as she walked. Sounds and smells were stronger than ever. Subtle changes in cloud colors meant things to her she had forgotten. Every step, every breath, every beat of her heart held meaning. Mathi had lost those sensations, but they were creeping back. She wondered if they would bring her to life or reduce her to madness.
Listening to the kender’s lecture, Treskan asked, “Have you always been a thief?”