“But why me?” protested the smee. “I’m perfectly comfortable in the other wagon.”
“Because Kolbyt can tell you all about the Great Piter Lady,” explained Skeedle. “At Piter’s Folly, you’ll have to take his shape and pretend to be him. There’s just one thing.…”
“What?” inquired the marmot suspiciously.
“Well,” said Skeedle, glancing at his cousin, “Kolbyt wants you to change shape now.”
“Into what, pray tell?”
“A hag,” blurted Skeedle, flushing green. “A big one.”
The smee looked from one goblin to the other, utterly appalled and speechless.
“I am a spy, sir!” he finally declared. “An espionage agent par excellence, a master of ruse de guerre. My duties most certainly do not include taking the guise of some gargantuan hag so that your depraved relations can paw at me.”
“He promises not to touch,” said Skeedle. “But it’s a long trip to Piter’s Folly; Kolbyt just wants something pretty to look at along the way. He gets lonely.”
Outraged, the smee turned to Max and David for support. The boys merely shrugged.
“First a steed, now an escort,” grumbled Toby. “This trip will never make my memoirs.…”
Before their eyes, the smee swelled into a squat hag with greasy gray skin, a tuft of auburn frizz, and a fleecy orange robe. After appraising her, Kolbyt grunted to his cousin.
“He says you look very nice,” translated Skeedle. “But perhaps a little larger. He says—”
Toby exploded. “I know perfectly well what he said!”
Panting, the smee ballooned so that his flesh expanded like rising dough. When a fourth chin appeared, Kolbyt grunted his approval. Beaming, the goblin proudly ushered the enormous, petrified hag to his wagon and helped her up into the driver’s seat.
They resumed their journey to Piter’s Folly, Max now luxuriating in the compartment of Skeedle’s wagon. As expected, the smee had devoured almost all of the chocolate, but Max found that several treats remained and kicked off his boots to savor a cherry tart and survey the scenery through the small windows. Finishing his snack, he smacked away the remaining crumbs and burrowed beneath a blanket for a well-deserved nap.
The next morning, they veered the wagons onto the smaller road known as the Ravenswood Spur. While the main highway curved away south, the new road wound north and east toward the Carpathians. Day after day, the wagons clattered toward the looming gray mountains, stopping only to rest the mules or for the goblins to snatch a few hours’ sleep.
There were no human travelers on the road, but they did encounter several goblins—a small caravan of surly Blackhorns and a solitary Highboot whom Kolbyt would most certainly have robbed had they not forbidden it. The skies were growing ever heavier, ever darker as they headed northeast and began to climb again into hilly terrain.
Past a windswept hillock, Max saw the first evidence of Prusias’s war. It came in the form of a caravan that had been driven off the road and into a pond of brackish water. At first Max thought it was the water’s steam rising into the chill morning, but it was smoke still trickling from the charred crumble of wagons that had been incinerated down to the shallow water-line. Among the grisly spectacle, Max saw the twisted forms of burned horses and several others that were vaguely man-shaped. As Skeedle halted the mules, Max got out to scan the road as it climbed up into the mountains, winding amid the jutting clefts until it disappeared in the mist. Glancing about, he saw no evidence of the attackers; no hoof marks or even boot prints were pressed into the frosted soil. Several ravens hopped about the wreckage, eyeing Max suspiciously as he walked about the water’s edge. When he stepped into the icy shallows, they cawed and flapped heavily away.
Kolbyt bellowed something in his guttural speech. Max turned to see the goblin swaddled in wolf pelts next to Toby, whose plump, haggish face looked cold and miserable.
“He says we should move on,” reported Toby. “We’re too exposed out here—better that we get up into the mountains.”
Max nodded and took one last look at a scorched carcass before heading back inside the wagon.
David glanced up from his solitaire game. “What was it?” he asked.
“Four, maybe five wagons. All burned to a crisp and piled atop one another in a bog. No sign of survivors. No sign of the attackers, either.”
“I imagine we’ll see many such things before we get to Piter’s Folly,” remarked David, ducking to avoid hitting his head on the roof as the wagon bounced over a rut.
“I wish we were already there,” Max muttered. “I’ve been thinking about Walpurgisnacht. Your grandfather magicked us back to Rowan in an instant—without any tunnels or the observatory’s help. How did he do that?”
David smiled and lay down a final card.
“Because he’s Elias Bram. My grandfather’s capable of many things that are beyond my power. People like to make comparisons between us, but in truth there is no comparison.”
“Well, why couldn’t he have brought us to Piter’s Folly?” Max wondered, calculating that they had at least another week of hard travel through dangerous country. “It would have been so much faster.”
“You sound like Ms. Richter.” David smiled. “She’d like nothing better than to hand the Archmage a list of miracles to perform. But Prusias and the Workshop aren’t his priorities, much less some smuggler in a backwater like Piter’s Folly. Imperfect as it is, my tunnel has still gotten us where we are almost a month faster than Ormenheid could and two months faster than an ordinary ship. Let’s be satisfied with that and do our jobs so the Archmage can do his.”
“And what is that?” asked Max.
“Hunting Astaroth,” replied David, pushing aside the cards and pouring Max some coffee. “Not such an easy task—the Demon might not even be in this dimension, much less this world.”
“You still call him ‘the Demon,’ ” Max noted. “Even after what your grandfather said.”
“If that’s what Astaroth’s pretending to be, then that’s what I’ll call him,” replied David. “Knowing what something wants to be is very telling. Astaroth aspires to be the ‘Great God’ and he’s masqueraded as a demon to achieve this goal. Whatever his true origins, it’s clear that he really has become a demon in some respects. After all, he can be summoned against his will, and he must obey Solomon’s circles if they’re properly inscribed. Until I know what he truly is, he’ll always be ‘the Demon.’ ”
Sipping his coffee, Max considered this and gazed out one of the portholes. The marshy land was gone, the hardscrabble terrain growing hillier as the wagons climbed higher into the mountains. He spied a withered hawthorn clinging to life among the rocky soil. There was something vaguely unsettling about the tree, the way its limbs twitched and waved while its neighbors were still. Max shifted to keep it within view, half expecting to glimpse Astaroth peering back at him from behind its black trunk. As the wagon rumbled onward, the tree was lost from view, but Max’s worries remained. He brooded upon the Demon’s white, masklike face, a face that rarely blinked and always smiled.
As they crossed the Carpathians, Max asked several times if Skeedle would like a rest, but the goblin declined. He sat low in the driver’s seat, his hat scrunched down upon his knobby head while he clutched the reins in his calloused hands. Max was puzzled by the goblin’s taciturn mood. Given the road’s sinister reputation, Max thought they’d enjoyed tremendous luck. They’d encountered hardly any travelers, much less the bandits or armies that Alistair had warned of. They’d passed several burned out farmhouses and homesteads but seen no trace of anything on a larger scale. If war had begun in earnest, it had not trodden heavily on the region.