“Don’t look. Shut your eyes and keep them shut.”
Toby instantly clamped his hands over face. “What is it?” he hissed.
“A battlefield,” said Max, searching for words. “A graveyard … a massacre. Thousands dead.”
“Humans?”
“Some,” said Max, sweeping the field with his spyglass. “Mostly vyes … ogres and ettins … some of those riders that overtook us on the road. A few banners are Aamon’s, but most belong to Prusias. It seems things aren’t going so well for the King of Blys. Most of the casualties are his.”
Some movement caught Max’s eye and he trained his glass on a shallow depression near the edge of a thick wood. Scavengers were there, humans dressed in rags robbing the bodies of the dead. Most kept to the fringe of the forest, stripping the fallen of their armor and weapons and tossing the spoils into great sacks that they dragged away. They were a wretched-looking lot, and Max wondered if they would attack the goblin wagon. At least they’d largely cleared the road of bodies, Max thought. Reaching back, he rapped on the wagon’s front shutters.
“What is it?” mumbled David, sounding sleepy.
“Come take a look.”
A minute later, David stood by the nervous, champing mules and gazed down at the valley with a sad, contemplative expression. He pointed to a distant billow of black smoke rising from hills beyond the forest.
“I’d guess that’s coming from the brayma’s palace,” he reflected. “Prusias may have bitten off more than he can chew with Aamon.”
“Let’s get going,” said Max, twisting about to scan their surroundings. “It doesn’t do any good to sit up here for all to see.”
They descended the slope, passing the first body some hundred yards from the summit. Max tried to keep his eyes straight ahead, but it was impossible not to stare at the mounds of mangled vyes and men, arrow-riddled ogres in bronze breastplates, and two-headed ettins, all half submerged in cloudy pools of river water. The crows screamed at the wagon as they passed, a shrill chorus that drove the mules into a braying panic. Gripping the reins, Max held them to the road’s center as the wagon lurched and bumped along.
The living disturbed him as much as the dead. While the fallen were an appalling spectacle, the scavengers moved like hungry phantoms among them, dark shapes that stole about the battlefield, crouching over corpses and digging through the scattered wreckage of tents, chariots, and palanquins. Many of the combatants had dressed splendidly for battle—brilliant silk pennons, embossed shields, and magnificent armor of enameled plate. But the stark realities of war had stripped them of their glory; these trappings had been trampled and churned into the raw earth until they were as muddy and tattered as their owners.
I guess we know why it was so quiet.
Shaking the reins, Max urged the mules to a quicker pace as several scavengers came too close for comfort. He studied them as the wagon hurried ahead, men and women with hollow, ghoulish faces. They stared at the wagon, dully registering its occupants before resuming their work with knives and fingers and teeth.
“Can I look now?” whispered Toby.
“No.”
Max did not allow the smee to open his eyes for another twenty minutes, not until the last of the bodies were in their wake. He could now make out the source of smoke and saw David had been correct. Rising from a distant hilltop crowned with charred trees was a burning castle, its bailey, towers, and parapets little more than a brittle armature as it vomited plumes of black smoke into the lilac sky.
That night they camped away from the road, hiding the wagon behind a copse of alders and willows that lined an icy stream. While Toby strapped feedbags to the mules, Max looked in on David.
He found his roommate sitting in the back, propped against a cushion and scratching a nib ever so carefully on a sheet of spypaper.
“Just a minute,” he muttered. “I’m almost finished.” Blowing on the ink, he held the page up to the lantern so that its warmth would hasten the drying.
“Are you writing Sir Alistair?” asked Max.
“Ms. Richter. She left us a third sheet whose twin she keeps. I updated her on our progress and told her about the battlefield.”
“Any word on Cooper?”
“No. I think if there was news—good or bad—she’d have written.”
Max nodded and tried to smile, but his spirits were low. The horrors of the battlefield lingered in his mind. Rubbing his temples, he stared at the lantern’s golden light.
“What if there is no Piter’s Folly?” he wondered aloud. “What if it’s just a burned-out hulk like that castle?”
David shrugged. “Then we’ll gather whatever information we can and continue the search for Madam Petra. If we can’t find her, we’ll go home. War doesn’t come with guarantees; we just have to do our best and hope that it’s enough. Get some rest, Max. You’re worn out. I’ll keep watch with Toby.”
Max was dead asleep in a warm nest of blankets when a thunderclap shook him awake. Bolting upright, he blinked stupidly out the window as he got his bearings. He’d been asleep for much longer than he’d intended, for they were on the move again and climbing uphill. Wind howled outside, bombarding the wagon with an icy mixture of sleet and rain. Pushing aside a cask of phosphoroil, Max peered through the small shutter that was just behind the driver’s seat. David and Toby were hunched low, each disguised as goblins, as the smee drove the mules through the storm.
“Where are we?” Max yelled, struggling to be heard above the wind.
David turned to him, his eyes frosted slits. “Close!” he shouted back. “Ten, maybe fifteen miles. We should be there by dawn.”
“Do you want me to drive?”
“I want you to brew some coffee!”
By morning, the weather had calmed. When Toby brought the wagon to a stop, Max climbed out and gazed around. The rain had dwindled to a steady drizzle, but the storm’s fury was evident in every icy pool and battered branch. Max caught the smell of cooking fires on the wind, its aroma a welcome comfort after so many days on the road. Piter’s Folly was just ahead. Through his glass, Max caught glimpses of the town amid the fogbanks below.
Once David renewed Max’s illusion, the three squeezed next to one another on the driver’s bench and eased the wagon downhill. Training his glass on the settlement, Max made out more details as the morning mists retreated.
Piter’s Folly was built upon a wooded isle in the midst of an enormous gray lake. Apparently, the settlement had outgrown these limits, for many other buildings had been constructed upon platforms and rafts that radiated out from the isle like the spokes of a wheel. Smoke trickled from makeshift chimneys, and Max even heard the lowing calls of cattle carry across the still morning. His heart beat excitedly. The town seemed relatively unscathed by the war, and there still appeared to be thousands of people living here. Since Astaroth’s rise to power, Max had not seen such a large settlement of free humans beyond Rowan’s borders. He had often wondered whether any existed.
Once they reached level ground, a lane diverged from the road and curved toward the shoreline. Arriving at the water’s edge, they discovered a heavy bell suspended from a pole near the end of a short pier. Stretching out, Toby rang the bell with all his might. Its notes echoed eerily across the lake, drowning out the loons and the lapping waves upon the pebbled sand. Moments later, there was an answering call from out in the gray mist.
“A ferryman will come,” explained Toby, settling back under his blanket. “Remember, don’t act too friendly. The humans need the goblins, but they don’t like them much. I’ll do the talking.”